But slowly, over the summer, into the fall, she had found peace. Some kind of wholeness. Something. She had packed those tears down inside her and dulled them to some temperature below zero, so that they didn’t spurt up out of her and break her apart so easily anymore. She had not known exactly how she was going to be able to stand another Christmas, but she had been sure she would manage it somehow. Maybe by a sudden trip to Peru to climb to Machu Picchu. Maybe something like that.
She so did not know what to do with this. What good could come of cutting up their peace, for either of them? He had been hurt more than enough by her.
But after a moment, she pulled the throw on the back of the couch down over him and spread it out to cover him shoulders to toes. He barely shifted in his sleep, a faint smile flickering across his mouth as the luxurious softness settled over him. She wanted to kiss that smile, but she didn’t. She bit her lip and straightened.
A man with a four-wheel drive could still handle this snow easily, but she didn’t wake him up to send him on his way before it got worse. She went back into the kitchen and made hot chocolate.
While the soup simmered, she decided soup probably wasn’t enough food for a man who had had a brush with hypothermia, so she pulled out ingredients and put together elaborate panini, the way they had often liked to do, raiding the refrigerator to come up with something new and fun. He hadn’t had any experience of cooking spontaneously before he met her, and once he learned how much he could play with his food—that it was all a game and there wasn’t really anything he could get wrong—he had loved it. He’d come up with the craziest flavor pairings, some of them disastrously bad, but they had just laughed.
She set the sandwiches aside to press into panini last-minute, so they would be hot, and, as the snow continued to fall and he continued to sleep, did really the best thing a woman swirling lost and looking for grounding could possibly do in those circumstances: she made chocolate chip cookies.
*
So Kurt woke with a smile, as he hadn’t in so long he couldn’t remember. Scent twined around his nose and curled into his body on each breath, teasing the corners of his lips upward. He sat up smiling, convinced he was still dreaming. One of those good dreams out of which he never wanted to wake, where it was Christmas again but back before they had ever started the devastating idea of babies, and Kai was happy with him, just with him, that way she used to be, as if he made her world as right as she made his.
Oh, he liked this dream. This was a gorgeous version of it. Those great flakes falling outside the window turned the whole dream beautiful, and it smelled so good, like love, like Kai always used to make his life smell—something savory and simmering that had onions and herbs in it, and something sweet and buttery and—was that chocolate?—to go after it.
He had been making love in this dream, too. He could feel it, which was kind of funny, really—now his dreams were getting so optimistic that he could actually feel their after-effects in his muscles—and his brain tripped over the realization that he was thinking far too much for a man still asleep, and he blinked, confused, and then pressed his face into his arm against the soft, plush back of the couch, trying not to be awake for just a little longer.
But he could hear her moving around in the kitchen, sinking the reality of this moment into him further. Every little clink of spoon against dish or thump of knife against cutting board ran jaggedly across his nerve endings, lifting the hair on the back of his neck from how scary the warmth of the sounds were. He pressed his face harder into his arm, suffocating himself in the couch.
Oh, shit, what was she going to say to him and how much was it going to hurt?
Chapter Four
Kai had cleaned the counter of all that sugar, turning it back to gleaming slick black, and Kurt couldn’t decide how he felt about that. But he couldn’t decide how he felt about most things right now. His insides just clenched inside him in a tight knot, afraid to feel.
He slipped his hands into his pockets, stopping in the arch that defined the kitchen space as kitchen and not living room. She gave him a fleeting, shy half-smile and focused on pulling out the heavy cast iron panini press. His mother’s own brand, specially made for her in France in the enamel colors of her specifications and sold under her name by one of the major department stores. He wished Kai had chosen her own space to hide in, instead of one created by his mother, but he didn’t really know what to do about it. As he didn’t know what to do about pretty much anything anymore. Anyway, on the list of things he wished were different, his mother’s stamp on this place was so far down in importance.
Kai set the sandwiches she had made into the press, and his heart tightened still more as he watched her, his throat clogging. She used to cook for him all the time. It had been so different from her attention to every last grain of detail when she was setting up shots or trying to create something beautiful. When she cooked for him, it had been just this relaxed, happy cooking. As if she was trying to feed something beautiful that was already there, not invent it from scratch.