Afterward, both were very quiet. He handed her another towel as he dried himself, little married familiarities in the bathroom that seemed natural only in the way a great ballet was natural, such perfect, floating gracefulness in the dancers leaping around each other, and yet the slightest stumble revealed how many years of practice and work it had taken to reach that harmony.
Outside the snow had finally started to fall, soft, great flakes like feathers, insanely large and beautiful. She stepped out onto the deck outside the bathroom and stood looking up at them as they floated down onto her face to cling and melt. Kurt stood in the doorway for a moment watching her. Then he withdrew into the house.
When she found him again, he was standing looking down at the granite island, still a mess of sugar smudges from her body. She stopped in the archway, flushing. He studied her over that messy counter and then left the kitchen area for the couch that faced the window. His head disappeared from view, as if he had stretched out, and after a moment of trying to ignore the island, she finally cleaned it off, scrubbing at sugar, and then set about slicing onions and pulling broccoli out of the freezer, setting a simple soup going. A thread of pleasure twined through all the gestures, at the thought of him eating it. She had always liked to feed him.
Did they really have to talk? Could they not just move around each other in a silent truce until the roads cleared? Reluctantly, she left the pot simmering and came into the main living area, only to discover him fast asleep on the couch.
She had discovered that long body just that way any number of times during their lives together, fallen asleep in front of a film or on a lazy Sunday afternoon after a hard game. Kurt wasn’t a man who allowed himself much laziness. He was far more likely to mow the grass after a hard game than kick back and relax. She had been the one to teach him that she loved him still when he took a break. Sometimes, when she stopped to caress his sleep-softened face or pull a cover over him if it was chilly, his eyes would open, and he would smile, slow and sleepy and happy, and pull her down on top of him.
Oh, God.
Well, he had warned her. He had warned her of what might happen if they got near a hot shower together. She had known from the start that it might be more than she could handle.
But God, he was so gorgeous. She supposed he wasn’t gorgeous to everyone—she had had one friend who was always falling for dramatic, black-haired Latin lovers, and another who always went for the muscled blond—but he always had been so utterly perfect to her. She loved those high cheekbones of his, the slight hollow to his cheeks that made him so photogenic, the so-average light brown hair that combined with his reserve and a heritage of excessive perfectionism to make him never realize exactly how cute he was. She loved the way his face was so lean and controlled; even in his sleep it seemed controlled, just a trick of his bone structure. And she loved that his lashes were so long, this secret hint at a world of sensitivity and passion under that reserve. She’d been so lucky that no fun-loving girl had ever thought to take him on a hike before she did.
She’d always known it was luck. That it was her sense of fun that had drawn him, and that there were a million other fun-loving girls out there, and it was just her good fortune that she had met him first.
The lamp at his head glowed over his body. He shifted slightly in his sleep, light catching on the finger of a hand loosely folded across his chest, and shock ran through her. He was wearing his wedding ring. There, a band of plain white gold on his finger, just like always. His hands, up until then, had been in his pockets, or locked around each other—or cupping her breasts—and she hadn’t seen it. Or she surely had, but the ring was such a familiar part of his hand that she hadn’t even noticed it before.
She had locked her own wedding rings away last spring, when the sun had started to come out after the long winter and she had slowly woken to the realization that in her grief she had destroyed the one beautiful thing in her life that she did have the power to cherish and protect, and that unlike all her other losses, she was the only one who had taken that power away from herself. She had bowed over the locked jewelry case and wept and wept.