She stroked from his wrist up that long arm, its strength in abeyance. Tears dampened her eyes as she imagined him as daffodils—such a funny image for his athletically geeky carefulness and controlled masculinity—and yet it suited him somehow. Stubborn, persistent, determined to get through the snow. She didn’t try to do anything about the tears—not wipe them away, not hold them back—and they dried after a moment without falling, while her hand traced over his collarbone.
He really had such a beautiful form to him. It just worked for her. Not bulky, just defined and strong and lovely. She liked the bones of him. She liked that lean over-thought athleticism.
But she always had. Her fingers trailed down his torso, over too-defined ribs—he was not eating—loving that resilient texture of him. From the very first—when she had seen his attraction to her and the way he handled it with such care, such a determination to get her right—she had wanted to get her hands on him. He’d driven her just a tiny bit crazy with how carefully he had courted her, but she had liked it, too. It had made her want to grab him and get past that careful restraint of his. Made her long to sink her hands into him. See what he felt like. Both her hands curved around his ribs in that remembered need. In that still urgent need.
She flexed her hands gently, trying not to wake him as she stole a little of that warm resilience again. The ability to do that felt so good. It released tension all down her spine, and the hairs on her body shivered with it.
He was so beautiful. The heat of him felt as if it could soak right through to her heart. Melt it. Tears sprang up again at the thought, but maybe that was just the melting ice.
God, she hadn’t realized how much ice she had inside her. She had forgotten how very, very cold everything had grown, so used to that cold that it had begun to seem just the way the world was: a severe and ugly place best suited for hibernation.
Her lips trembled upward at the corners as she traced over his hip. She still did not know if she wanted to wake up again, to come down out of those snowy clouds and be a human being again.
But he was beautiful. She could not touch him if she stayed up in the winter clouds. She could not feel that warmth at her fingertips.
Kurt’s lashes lifted slowly, for an instant his eyes wary, as if he, too, was afraid of shifting from a dream into nightmare. But then he smiled at her like a deliberate choice, like those daffodils pushing their heads up through the snow, and after a moment, he touched her cheek.
The moment reminded her of the morning after their wedding, when she had wakened to find him gazing at her like that, faces so close, and he had smiled, a slow blush climbing up his cheeks so that anyone would have thought he was some teenage bridegroom who had just made love for the first time.
“You don’t think this will just make everything harder?” she asked low.
“No,” he said quietly and fiercely. “Not trying would have been harder. Spending another Christmas like last one would have been harder.”
She took a deep breath, struggling with it. Because it felt harder to her. Far, far harder than what she had been doing these past few months, trying to float above the surface of her grief and loss and just somehow find a way forward.
“But—” Watching her, he sighed and for a moment looked so tired. His hand curved around her cheek. “I can’t speak for you.”
“Kurt.” She turned her face into his hand, hiding in its shelter. “You’ve, ah—” Her throat clogged. “You’ve always been worth me doing something hard. It just—I couldn’t, I couldn’t—”
His fingertips shifted gently on her forehead, his thumb against her temple. “I figured out that you couldn’t. It took me a while. Until the day you walked out and I didn’t chase after you, I guess. I wanted to chase after you so badly.”
Her mouth twisted against the heel of his palm. “I’m sorry. Did it take you a long time to get over it?”
A short silence. And then, so carefully the air could have been crystal and any word would shatter it into shards that pierced their hearts: “The babies?”
He hadn’t had trouble over the babies, that old lash of anger twitched her. Nothing like hers. Of course he had gotten over them. Her babies. “Me leaving.”
Another silence. She breathed in the scent of his palm. “Get over isn’t the right phrase.”
“Move on,” she said carefully. Her throat felt full of fog, and when she spoke each word seemed to puff that wintry whiteness over him. “You—know.”