You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology(99)

Emotion swept over her and she had to speak before it could take her, before she could drown in it. “Have you been out here all this time?” All the time she had wept, all her time in the shower, out here, in that thin shirt? “You’re hypothermic,” she decided, although what did she know? When she had taken that first aid class the first pregnancy—the way she had signed up for birthing classes right off the bat, and started painting the room, and called every single friend and member of their family as soon as the blue line showed up on her pregnancy test, in thrilled delight at the happy future stretching out before them—she had been focused on things like what to do if a baby choked. But—an hour or more outside, in this cold? And he wasn’t shivering? “Kurt, come inside. You can’t drive until you’ve at least had a hot shower.”

“If I get near a hot shower in your company, I don’t know what I might do,” he told his fists, a driven, desperate voice.

Ah. Everything inside her just yanked at the thought of what he might do, in terror and longing.

“Just come inside.” She pulled at him. Whatever he did, she would have to handle it. Whatever he did—God, hadn’t she handled worse?

Hadn’t she done worse? In the end, that had been the very hardest thing to handle of all, as she pulled herself slowly into peace again, the fact that she had destroyed them in her grief and rage and a shutting-off-of-hope so intense and so crazy that only a long time later, when her hormones started to rebalance, had she realized she must have been in the equivalent of a severe postpartum depression.

He’d told her, of course. He’d tried and tried to make her go get help. She had hated him so damn much every time he said, It’s not that bad, Kai, it’s okay, we’ve still got you and me, you’re just not seeing that in the end this is just a minor thing.

A minor thing.

A minor thing.

He’d tried to recoup, tried to explain that he wasn’t trying to diminish her grief—her grief—that minor wasn’t what he really meant, that he was just trying to say that sticking together was more important than anything else, but she just couldn’t get past it—her grief and her rage. She couldn’t get past anything he did or said or tried. She hated him for all of it.

Honey, I think there’s something wrong with you.

And she had screamed, I know there’s something wrong with me! Why is it me? Why is it me? Maybe it’s you! Maybe it’s your damn sperm that don’t work!

No, Kai, I meant—honey, I know you’re sad. But this isn’t like you. I think you need help.

I’m sad? You don’t even f*cking care, do you? You’re not sad!

Kai. Kai, please. Listen to yourself.

And she would slap her hands over her ears and run off crying, slamming doors, locking them.

He was so right. It hadn’t been like her. Hadn’t been like the woman he had married who always made him laugh, who used to make his face light up just by walking in the room, as if all his serious care dissolved into joy just to see her.

She had become another person and destroyed everything close to her in the transformation. As the closest and the most important, he had taken the greatest harm of all.

He scrubbed his face and looked at her over his fists warily, as if he wasn’t any more sure he could stand this than she was. She grabbed one of those fists, and his hand was cold as ice. “Kurt, come on.” She pulled him with all her strength, and he let her drag him through the house. The luxury style cabin featured a master bathroom with a great whirlpool bath, a view out over the valley, and a shower where she could turn on sprays all up and down the wall. His mother’s interior design was, of course, perfect. The quintessential luxury mountain look to which everyone should aspire.

Kai turned on the sprays, leaving Kurt to undress himself, but his fingers were too stiff, and he leaned back against the glass shower wall in defeat. Outside, through another of those great glass windows the cabin had in such plenty, the leaden afternoon was darkening further into night, and still only a few flakes of actual snow had fallen. Anger flicked suddenly through her, against Anne and her team to have been so pathetic as to let the threat of it scare them away and trap her and Kurt in this painful re-opening of wounds.

It would have been easier to undress a complete stranger and put him under the shower to save him from hypothermia than it was to strip her own former—well, in spirit former, despite the continued legal ties—husband. But she did it. Moving as fast as she could, while he stared down at her, motionless as more and more of his body was exposed. Yes, he was even harder, that rangy build of his pushed even more this past year until it left ripples of muscle on his abs. She could imagine him driving himself into utter physical exhaustion, evening after evening, rather than coming home to the house she had left empty.

The spray blasted against the shower wall behind him. She pushed at his jeans, her hands slipping inside them for purchase, grazing over his butt.

He was starting to shiver now, his skin icy to her touch. “Kurt, damn it. You should have come back inside. Or gotten in your car.”

“I was thinking,” he said. And God knew, he could think. He thought too much with that brilliant brain, sometimes, sank so deep into the problem about which he was thinking that he couldn’t get out.

She had always loved it. It had made her feel protective. As if she needed to take care of that brain of his, teach him the joys of sometimes just not thinking, of just wallowing in scents and tastes and textures and the laughter of the moment.