He tucked her hair behind her ear and squeezed her shoulder, without comment. Just—compassion. It made her feel so strange—as if he, too, had come to a place of peace over the past year, a place where he didn’t try to fix her back into the person he had loved anymore, he just . . . loved her.
But how could that be? She wasn’t very lovable now, was she? Wasn’t fun, still cried too much, might ruin any laughing moment by suddenly getting struck with the grief of it. And she couldn’t stand to force herself or fake herself, to pretend to laugh when she didn’t feel like laughing. It was one of the reasons she had lost most of her friends and couldn’t even stand to see her family anymore.
But she did want to get a Christmas tree with him. She did. She did want to try again.
She put on her jacket and her boots.
The fog still clung a little, in wisps, to the snow, and teased through the trees like some winter dance of veils, luring the traveler in. The tramp of their boots on the snow cut through it, and Kurt’s bare hand closed warm and strong around hers, burying both their hands in his pocket as he dragged the fresh-cut tree behind him with his other arm. She let the grief at not being able to share this moment also with at least one of those three little kids—damn you, God, couldn’t you at least have let me keep one of them?—just ride there quietly, like one of those tendrils of fog. No point chasing it away, there was more where it came from and she would just find herself pursuing its will-o’-the-wisp farther and farther away from the chance of happiness she did have and which was holding her hand right now.
Yes, she had chased her grief well off the beaten path more than once already. She didn’t need to follow it now. She could concentrate on his hand. On this chance which he claimed was not her second one. On the two of them. They had been very, very happy once, just the two of them, before they had gotten that dream to make their happiness even bigger.
To spread it around. To pass it on.
Oh, God damn it, there was that grief again.
But she breathed it in, breathed it out, letting it drift around her, its wisps teasing as she focused on the feel of Kurt’s hand. That beautiful, strong hand, that she had never thought to feel holding hers again.
“You never even thought about moving on?” she asked, low.
He frowned. “No.” And after a few crunchy steps, very, very low indeed: “Did you?”
The tree dragged behind them in a soft shush. She let the sound of it slide over her a long time before she finally spoke. “I thought I had to. I thought I had ruined any other choice.”
His hand flexed on hers in his pocket, and six slow, steady steps measured out the pause before he spoke. “Kai, I’m sorry if selling the house made you think that. I just really couldn’t stand it anymore. It got so I would do anything, rather than come home.”
Her throat tightened as she imagined him again, imagined how much it must have hurt. She had been so focused on her other hurt that it had been a long time before she had also had to deal with the fact that she had lost him, too. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
He let go of the tree and picked her up, sandwiching her between him and the nearest pine, as he kissed her. Just kissed her. Tender and gentle but very thorough, taking his time. “I know you are, sweetheart,” he said softly, and kissed each of her eyelids closed, and kissed the tear away. “I know.” He kissed her again, longer this time, deeper, hunger rising up through his body, pressing into her. “God.” He lifted his mouth. “I could drag us into a cave and just be an animal with you for days, do you know that? Just—feel.”
“Me, too.” She squeezed herself up against him. A cave sounded beautiful. Nothing but darkness and bodies, their bodies, them.
“Unless you’ve discovered an actual cave around here that I never did, let’s quit hiking so damn far from the house,” he said.
But he must know perfectly well that they needed those hikes as much as the time in the cave.
At the house, he made his own cave out of her comforter, pulling it over them in the big bed, so that the only thing that existed was the heat of their bodies. Even when it got too hot, she didn’t want to come out from under it, and whenever he shrugged the comforter back to breathe cool air, she hid herself under him, pressing into his chest. And he came back to her, kissing her and kissing her, hands running all over her, a silent, intense love-making out of time, no beginning and no end, just the two of them. Just the two of them. The two of them filling their whole world, all that mattered, all that ever need matter.