“You’re the most beautiful thing that ever happened in my life,” Kai whispered suddenly, clutching at him as if he might melt out of her arms. His arm tightened under her bottom, driving himself deep, deep. “I don’t know what I did to deserve you.”
She’d thought giving him happiness and a family was what she was doing to deserve him. Once upon a time. And even then, he had always seemed so special to her, with that care and strength and intelligence and that way he had of looking at her across a room. She had always known that she couldn’t ever entirely deserve him, that partly she was just lucky. That partly she was just the happy girl who had been smart enough to take him on a hike.
Kurt kissed her deeply, shutting off all words, and she let them go, let all the thoughts in her go, let herself become just an animal, an animal. Let herself wallow in it mindlessly, wallow in making him an animal, too. Neither spoke again. Maybe you couldn’t speak your human language to another and do some of the things they did.
Kurt left her dozing eventually, still under the comforter, still out of time.
She didn’t know how long she stayed in the comforter-cave, in no hurry to wake or think or come out. But when she eventually did, she found the tree standing in the corner of the great living room, a careful distance far from the fire, and Kurt was at the granite island with half the supplies from his mother’s old craft room spread around him, making Christmas ornaments.
Incredible Christmas ornaments, too, the kind that appeared in his mother’s magazine and that no average person could get to look like Anne Winters’s. Not that Kurt had ever been average, no matter what he thought about himself. “I take it that it’s genetic?” Kai said, both amused and impressed. While she rarely applied her own ability for precision to crafts, preferring the work with food, she understood exactly what went into that level of perfect craftsmanship.
Kurt looked around and smiled at her, a small, warm smile. He was halfway through something elaborate with ribbons and glitter, and his hands were occupied. “No, but who do you think she kept testing those kid crafts of hers on when I was little? We both had a hard time of it when I was five and could never get any of her visions for kid crafts to actually work out beautifully, like I was supposed to. But by the time I was eight, I was the model crafting child.”
“You have hidden talents.” Kai came forward. Glitter streaked across one of his cheeks, little sparkles of white that caught the light every time he shifted his head. “I guess it makes sense, but I’ve never seen you do anything like this before.”
“I started rebelling against it all when I was about ten.” That would have also been the age when his father divorced his mother, unable to put up with her ever-increasing need for control, and moved to California. “And moved into sports and, you know, boy things—the kind of thing that drove her crazy. By the time you met me, we’d more or less found an even keel between us, but that didn’t mean I had to do crafts for her.” That glimmer of his wry smile that she loved so much, the way it was so restrained and yet all that brilliance and subtle humor of his showed through. “Just all her legal contracts.”
He finished tying the ribbon and set the ornament on a pan with a dozen others already made: snowflakes, some two-dimensional, some three-dimensional, their heavy card stock thickly covered in fine white and silver glitter. In his hands, per his mother’s training, the snowflakes became a very sophisticated, adult craft.
“You can pick the next ornaments,” he said. “Are we doing a two-color theme or a hodge-podge?”
They were going to do crafts together? That was so—sweet. So optimistic, so happy. She took a deep breath, trying to make sure she had enough room to let that sweetness come all the way into her soul. She couldn’t refuse him in this, not Kurt. Even to protect herself she couldn’t. “Have you ever done cinnamon dough ornaments? They’re my favorite. They scent the whole house. You can leave them this rustic brown with pretty ribbons, or your mom did an issue where she covered them with glitter. If we did that, we could do birds pecking through the snow, cardinals, bluebirds.”
He looked up at her suddenly. Their eyes held. “Kai, don’t do something sad,” he said softly.
She hadn’t thought about it, and now she did, her little bird feeders and . . . “Oh.” She took another deep breath as her heart tightened, and then she sighed it out. “Well, growly brown bears in the woods, and stars, and stockings, and holly. And—and maybe some birds. I can have some birds if I want them.”
He took her hands in his gluey, glittery fingers and pulled her between his thighs to kiss her. “I think I got glue in your hair,” he said, when they surfaced. “And you glitter now.”
She smiled at him, wondering if this was her Christmas miracle—that he still seemed so determined to love her. No matter what.