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 nose. 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.