“You—you sold the house,” she said slowly. “I thought you had accepted that we were—through.” Her breath hitched. She was trying very hard not to cry.
Oh, fuck, had he gotten that wrong, too? Sometimes he just wanted to break something. That damned glass window over there could be a start. Bash it and bash it into shards of glass everywhere that hurt everyone half as much as she had hurt him. “I couldn’t live there anymore, Kai. Not afte—I couldn’t. And maintaining three separate residences would have been a bit of a financial stretch for us. Mother said you weren’t doing much work there for a while, so I knew you could use the money from the sale.” Actually, being his mother, Anne had said, in cool, clipped tones, And what work she is doing is quite inferior; if she doesn’t pull herself together soon, I’m going to have to stop using her. But no need to share that. Kai had pulled herself together after a few months, where work was concerned, anyway. His mother had restored her quite chary seal of approval. “And—I didn’t think you would ever want to go back there again.”
Besides, what the fuck was he supposed to do with the baby room? Paint it over? Leave it for her to make peace with? Stand there and stare at it every night himself without even anybody to hold on to and help him bear it? In the end he had just sold the house and given all the baby things to charity, and then he had read in those damn grief and miscarriage books that he probably wasn’t supposed to have done that either.
“Oh.” She stood there staring at him, her eyebrows drawn together and her lips parted, as if he had just tumbled her whole world around. They had tumbled each other’s worlds around quite a few times since they had met, and he sure as hell hoped this tumble would be better than the last.
Because some of their tumbles had been bright, giddy tumbles, like wrestling in the summer grass and finding a pretty, laughing woman sitting astride you suddenly, trying to hold your arms down. But that last tumble had been more like falling off a Himalayan mountain face when you were about twenty thousand feet up, falling and falling with no hope of survival, and landing at last only to look up and see the avalanche bearing down next.
And he didn’t want to think about that. God, no. He so wanted this next tumble to be a different kind. Maybe not laughter-in-the-grass, maybe he couldn’t hope for that, but something warmer and softer than that avalanche, please God. Rolling over her on a rug by the fire, gentle and quiet. How about that? With a Christmas tree nearby, the room lit only by its lights and the flames. Would she let him put up a Christmas tree? If it wouldn’t make her cry, that kind of tumble would work for him.
“That smells really good,” he tried again. Because—her feeding of him had always been a beautiful, warm moment in their lives. It was the kind of thing a man might fall back on, in a crisis.
She blinked. “You must be hungry,” she realized, with considerable relief. As if it was something she could fall back on, too.
And so, for the first time in a year and a half, she fed him. She sat down across from him and ate with him, too, a nice, rich, filling broccoli soup that was so much more vegetables than he had bothered to cook for himself the past year, and as such made him feel like—hell, like somebody cared if he lived healthily—and a sandwich, and, oh, God, cookies, her cookies.
So that was nice. So nice. In its wary, cautious, please-don’t-break-me way. Quiet, because she seemed afraid to talk and so was he, but really, really nice. So nice that his throat clogged with it, and he had to concentrate on how to breathe. He kept discovering he was running out of oxygen because he had been afraid too deep a breath might shatter everything.
But it didn’t shatter. In fact, every time he breathed, the two of them together seemed to get a little warmer, a little more real. After they ate, he found the hot chocolate she had forgotten, still heating on the stove, and poured them two cups, drawing her down on the couch to watch the snow in the night.
She tried to stir when he settled his arm over her shoulders. “Kurt, I don’t think this is a good idea.”
Oh, because you think I think it’s a good idea? It’s suicidal. But he said, “I don’t mean to be rude, Kai, but it’s way the fuck better than your last one.”
Which was probably the wrong thing to say on his part, too, but she shut up, and they sipped hot chocolate and watched the snow. He hadn’t really meant to shut her up; he was pretty sure he would like for her to talk to him, if she was in a place where she could talk without screaming again. But—her body felt so damn warm against his. Why risk it moving away?
He let it soak into him, the warmth of her, the scent of her hair, like rain at last on parched earth. Oh, thank God, thank God, thank God . . .
And underneath the relief, the soul of a grown man who wanted to curl himself into a fetal ball in a dark place and whimper as torturers grabbed at him and hauled him away: Oh, God, please don’t let it hurt as much as last time.
Chapter Five