by Karina Bliss
Chapter Five
Kai woke happy and feeling loved, and she hadn’t in a long time. Contented, yes, she had managed that. Able to stand on her own two feet. Able to live alone, be alone, be strong—all those things, she had reached, slowly, starting maybe last spring, or maybe even the grieving process over the winter had been part of it.
But happy—loved—she had kind of forgotten she could feel that way. She knew she didn’t deserve to feel that way, and so now—to wake up warm on a couch, with a chest shifting under her face and an arm wrapped around her—it made tears fill her eyes. Warm tears, the tears she had tried so hard to freeze. Those tears blurred the snow still lazily, gently falling through the window as the sky lightened, as if the snow wasn’t quite ready to yield itself to sun just yet.
The tears spilled over, running silently down her cheeks and plopping onto his shirt. She hadn’t thought he was awake, but one hand came up to stroke her hair. He didn’t speak, and neither did she.
Finally she had to sniffle so badly that she pulled herself off the couch and went in search of a tissue. His hand fell away from her departing back reluctantly, but he didn’t try to catch hold of her. She stood in front of the bathroom sink staring at herself and that made her cry again, for this person in the mirror who used to have so much and who had destroyed all of it. She sat on the closed toilet with her head in her hands and cried and cried.
She had worked so hard to be done with tears like this. And yet their onslaught was almost comforting. Oh, there you are. I’ve missed you. I guess we’re not done with each other after all. She had had to learn how to do things like that, once the pregnancies started failing—learn how to cry inconsolably, learn how to be angry, learn how to recover. She had done a shit hell job of all of them, she supposed, and she was sorry, she was so sorry, but that, too, she had had to learn how to deal with—her guilt and regret and that great grief that was her marriage. That was him.
When she finally cleaned herself up—matter-of-factly, used to this—and came back downstairs, Kurt was asleep again, curled into the back of the couch with the blanket pulled over his head like a willful child, refusing to wake up. It surprised her. Kurt had always woken too easily, bordering on insomniac, as if he found it too troubling to lay his carefulness and control aside and had to pick them back up again as fast as possible. He had always been the first one out of bed in the morning.
She gazed at the long form under the blanket and finally shook her head and went into the kitchen. But there, instead of the Greek yogurt that she usually ate for breakfast these days, for efficient, palatable nourishment, she paused, and rolled her shoulders—and then she smiled suddenly, her whole heart lifting with pleasure at this morning, as she started to pull out ingredients.
As if the tears or maybe the touch of Kurt’s lips had washed away some ugly, jagged splinter blocking her heart.
She made waffles and sprinkled them with powdered sugar, blushing a little bit as she sifted it over the golden waffle. One of the strawberries she cut in half looked exactly like a heart, and she set it in the center of Kurt’s waffle, sifting a little more powdered sugar over it—and then blushed again and whisked the heart away, looking up to find him standing in the archway watching her. Behind him, the sun was starting to break through clouds and limned him in a softly diffused light.
“That smells really good,” he said, heartfelt, just as he had the night before, and she felt her face brighten into something it hadn’t felt in a long time—laughter.
“Poor man, has no one been feeding you?” she teased, and then caught herself, on the edge of the teasing, because there were so many parts to that which weren’t funny at all. She didn’t have the right to laugh with him anymore.
But his eyes snagged on her face for a long moment, and he came forward to the island so that the nimbus around him softened and she could see his smile. Not the smile he had when she made him laugh, but the smile he had always had when she just made him happy. When he was just glad to look at her. “No,” he said quietly.
Tears threatened again abruptly. How could he smile at her? It made her so sad to think of him going for a year and a half without anyone feeding him. Damn it, he deserved so much better than what he had gotten. And she just couldn’t give that better anymore.
She bent her head and stared at the golden waffle, under the weight of what she had done to that happiness. “I’m sorry,” she whispered to the spot in the middle of the waffle where the little strawberry heart had been.
He reached across the wide island, a stretch even for him, and closed his hand around hers. His wedding band glowed simple and strong. “I’m glad. I always hoped you would feel sorry one day.”
Her mouth twisted. That was—fair, she supposed, that he would want her to regret it. What was she supposed to make of this touch, of this strange, snow-kissed togetherness after all this time? The pieces of them had been shattered and scattered so completely, how was she supposed to put them back together again? Why would he let her even try?
Her try? She was afraid to even leave a heart strawberry in the middle of his waffle.
He was the one trying. She wasn’t even sure what he was trying to do exactly, except perhaps reach a point of forgiveness. And if so, she had been right: forgiveness really hurt.
But she could stand hurt, couldn’t she? She had proven that.
Maybe she should stand a few things again, for his sake.
So, on a sudden burst of determination, she sliced up more strawberries into fine hearts to layer all over his waffle, a whole mad field of hearts, and sprinkled it with sugar—and added whipped cream, hell, why not?—and stuck one last strawberry-heart in the mad Seussian mountain of cream, as if the Grinch’s heart had popped out of him when it grew three sizes too big—and slid it across to him.
He had sat on a stool at the edge of the island by then, watching her, and when the plate slid to a stop in front of him, he actually grinned.
Grinned. She hadn’t seen him grin in—what, two years? He hadn’t grinned during the last six months of their marriage.
“You know, you had me at the waffle,” he told her, and the urge to grin back at him struggled with the fear that she didn’t have the right to. What had she been doing, savoring happiness this morning while he slept? When had she gotten the nerve to feel happy?
He picked up the strawberry heart tucked on top of the cream and pressed a kiss to it, his eyes closing. Then he ate it in one hungry snatch, like a wolf might down a scrap before anyone else could wrench it from him.
She found herself blushing, a tendency that was new. She had never really blushed much with him, simply because from the very first, he had always made her feel so sure and happy. She had destroyed that surety, though, willfully and wantonly, and it had taken some doing. He had been as sure for her as any man could possibly be.
Her eyes prickled again, and she focused on her own waffle, no fancy strawberries on it, just a dusting of powdered sugar. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught his finger tracing around the edge of his plate. When he brought it to his mouth and sucked the sugar off it, she blushed all over.
And peeked to find him watching her, transfixed, finger still in his mouth.
He stretched across the island to pull her plate to the stool right beside him and then, as she came after it, ridiculously shy, he took one of his own strawberry hearts and placed it neatly in the center of her waffle. That stopped her dead just before she climbed onto the stool, tears threatening again.
He kissed her, hoisting her up onto the stool himself, and slipped her a fork. His hand rested a moment over hers, that warmth that only yesterday she had never thought to feel again. “This tastes so damn good, Kai,” he said softly. “You have no idea.”
“You haven’t even tasted the waffle yet.” His manners bound him to wait until they both were served.
He grinned again. “You had me at the strawberry,” he said this time and touched a bit of whipped cream to her nos
e. An unheard-of silliness from Kurt. It was more like something she would once have done.
He swooped in and kissed the cream off her nose and sat back to dig into his waffle. The amount of happiness suddenly shimmering off him was too much for her to process. Didn’t he remember that their happiness was all gone?
He closed his eyes on the first bite of waffle in pure bliss and opened them to catch her staring. He smiled.
It had once seemed so normal, to construct happiness out of flour, butter, eggs, and strawberries and to bake it into something golden and sweet for a morning. Now it seemed incredible—such a fragile joy in the face of all the great destructive grief that could tear through that moment and destroy it.
At one point, grief and anger had pushed her so far over the edge that she would have destroyed this moment herself, on the grounds that all that happiness and hope was false. But now—it wasn’t really that she believed in those flowers sprouting out of the snow, as she used to. But she knew better than to stomp on them and grind them into the mud just so nothing else could grind them first.
So they ate their waffles, every bite an unbelievable burst of golden flavor. She couldn’t remember the last time she had tasted. He cleaned every last crumb from his plate. She ate around her little strawberry heart, until it stood bereft on an island of powdered gold. It felt too wrong for her to eat that heart, like giving the prince’s heart to the wicked witch instead of to the happy, singing princess.
Kurt’s fork speared through heart and waffle both, and he slipped the whole bite into her mouth. Then, while she was still trying to convince herself it was okay for her to chew it, he rose briskly, taking their plates to the sink. Over the running water, he asked, “Would you like to go for a walk?”
Even when Kurt did the cooking—grilling out, maybe—he tended to wash the dishes automatically at the end of the meal. His compulsive mother had probably never allowed dirty dishes to lie around, so probably nurture had something to do with it, but his childhood household had had staff. He wouldn’t have ever had to wash a dish himself, growing up. So Kai had always thought another element besides environmentally-induced obsessive-compulsiveness must contribute to how voluntarily he did any household chores that needed doing: he had an ingrained need to take care of the good things in his life, and her cooking for him was one of the good things.
“In the snow?” she asked.
His half-smile was careful, watchful. “That’s right.”
She had walked so much in the snow up here. But if she added him to the excursion—she was a little afraid of snow, still. Because, well—she had just wanted so damn badly to have their own child with whom to play in it by now. Back in the good old days, she had even imagined that by this age they would have two or three kids; they would talk about it, God, as if this was in their control: “Three might be a lot. We would have to get a bigger house.” “Three seems like an odd number. I think it should be either two or four, so one of them doesn’t feel left out.” “Ha, if you want four, you get pregnant.” That retort had been back early in the first pregnancy, when she just thought it was going to be all vicious nausea but eventually with a happy ending. Or a happy beginning. Whatever you wanted to call it. “Well, don’t you want at least one of each, a little girl and a little boy? I hope the little girl will look just like you.” Stupid conversations like that.
By the third attempt, she would have been desperately happy with just one. And then, and then—she just couldn’t stand to try, not ever again. God, the first baby would have been four this Christmas, if she had lived to be born. Her third baby had actually been due on Christmas Day. Her little miracle baby, she had thought at it in her belly, all through that spring, and tried to believe in the magic of the third try so hard.
Her nostrils stung, the way they did sometimes when everyone else thought she should be over it by now. It had been part of the reason that she had had to get so far away from everyone else.
She took a breath and sighed it out. “Yes, all right. Let’s go for a walk.”
Chapter Six
Kurt focused on the hot water running over the plates, grateful for it. He had never understood it when he discovered that their friends’ couples fought over such stupid things as doing dishes or mowing the grass or making sure someone’s tank was filled with gas. They were all such easy things to get right.
It turned out they didn’t count for much, when the going got tough, but it used to be, when he wasn’t ever entirely sure how he had managed to convince this much sunshine to enter his life, that he found them very reassuring. Little things to keep that sunshine happy. Look at this plate, for example: it had just held the most delicious waffles and hearts for him, and now, instead of leaving it some ugly mess no one would ever want to deal with later, he was cleaning it right up, fresh and shiny and ready for a new start.
When you had a woman who was willing to cook for you, and laugh and tease you while she did it, you didn’t really want to leave any barriers lying around the kitchen that would discourage her from getting in that cheerful, cooking mood again the next evening or even sometimes spontaneously for breakfast. Up until things went so wrong, he had been kind of quietly, contentedly smug about how well this philosophy worked compared to those of his idiot friends.
But then, of course, all of those friends still had their wives, and even kids, now, and complained about them, too. Told him he should be glad, that he didn’t know how much trouble he had escaped.
The fucking bastards.
He drew a breath, easing his fingers on the plate before he cracked it, and set it to dry. “I’ll go get my snow boots from the car.” He had put snow gear into the back as he always did when driving in winter weather, just in case. Like the dishes, it used to profoundly reassure him when he was packing up Kai’s snow gear, too, and a big box of energy bars, in case they got stranded—doing everything in his power to keep his wife and their world together protected and happy. Packing up just his own snow gear felt—shitty. Really, really shitty.
“All right,” she said, smiling at him tentatively as he left. He was probably pushing this too soon, getting everything wrong again, but God, he did not want to spend another Christmas Day like last one. Just this grinding agony of minute after minute of a day to get through. Knowing she was by herself and that her agony must be even worse. And that there was nothing he could do to help; everything he did only made her misery more unbearable.
He knew why men killed themselves when they lost their families.
He just hadn’t had that option, last Christmas. He knew he had to hold through and get his family back.
He hadn’t even been able to drink himself into oblivion, because—well, for one thing he didn’t even know how to get drunk. He’d done it once as a college student and not liked the experience at all. Kai had often tried to tease him into drinking an extra glass of wine, but he had always worried about what he might do if he lost control—what if it was something she would find ridiculous or offensive?
But that Christmas Day, he would have been happy to test out getting drunk again, except—what if she called? What if she just couldn’t make it through that Christmas Day and needed him? He had to be able to drive.
God.
Anything would be better than that Christmas Day again.
Except, maybe, failing to make things right this time, too. What if he hit a point when he had to give up all hope?
No, don’t think like that. She had smiled. She had made waffles. She had put hearts on them, which was the kind of sweet, silly thing she used to do for him. He’d had to start acting silly himself, because otherwise all the emotions that rushed up in him might have come out as, God forbid, tears. He’d cried for her once—all those words she was wielding back then breaking him like a damn rack. It had actually seemed to work—she’d softened, as if the tears had shocked through to her heart and she’d remembered that hers sometimes beat for him, too. She’d wrapped her arms around him and whispered she
was sorry, she was sorry, she didn’t mean it, she was so sorry—and they had made love. It had been so sweet, and he had been so glad, that things might finally work out, that she finally understood he did care—
And she had left him the very next day. Crying herself. “I just can’t. I just can’t do it anymore.”
“But—Kai, why? I thought—didn’t we—”
“I just can’t.”
God.
He pulled his snow pants and snow boots on, sitting on the edge of the bumper, zipped his ski jacket up to his chin and pulled on his gloves—nice, thick armor everywhere—and went back into the house to pull her out into this snow. Hoping it wasn’t the wrong thing to do.
The way she walked on the snow at first, anyone would have thought she was a kitten seeing snow for the first time. Which broke his heart a little, but his heart was so used to being broken by then. She was the one who had taught him to play in the snow, before he quite understood that adults were allowed to. He still remembered how she’d done it, the sideways evil laughing look as she tested a handful of snow before she lobbed it straight at him. She had lousy aim, and he’d just smiled at her when it bounced off his shoulder, shaking his head indulgently as he kept walking. The next one had hit him square on the back, sliding harmlessly off his jacket. So she had run up to him and kissed him, and God knew, he should have expected what was coming, but it was their first snow together, and he had just sunk delightedly into his kiss, until a cold handful of snow went straight down his collar and he yelped.
After which, what was a man supposed to do? He’d had to get her. And it had been so much fun. He had felt like a kid again, until he caught her at last and rolled her under him in the snow, when he’d realized—no, it wasn’t childish. No, he was an adult, his body at that moment felt very, very adult, and this was how his adult life could be, with her. Happy. Thrilled. Aroused. Zinging with energy and fun. Forever.
