She kissed his shoulder and then just lay there against him, stroking his chest. Sometimes maybe that was all there was left to do, accept that two people could love each other and yet their minds and hearts not always work the same. They fell asleep that way, waking to full darkness and the scent of dinner.
There was something peculiarly and profoundly lovely about sitting in the firelight with bowls of stew before them, eating together. “Is it Christmas Eve?” she asked suddenly.
He nodded.
Her mouth twisted. “I was—trying not to keep track, this year.” In her vision of the way her life should have gone, that third baby was supposed to have been born at midnight, her little miracle baby, and a great star would shine in the heavens and all the world would be made right.
He reached across and touched her hand.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she said suddenly. And, with a quiet wonder: “It’s a—it’s a good Christmas.”
“Oh, God, it’s so much better than last year,” he said, heartfelt, taking both her hands. His eyes searched her face, and his voice went very low and careful: “Kai, I know how happy you made me. But have you ever thought that maybe it’s taking you so long to recover because—I might have helped make you happy, too?”
“Kurt.” She could only stare at him. It hurt her so deeply that she might have left him thinking so little of himself. “Of course that’s part of why it’s taking me so long to be happy again. Because I destroyed us, too, the one thing that could have kept on being as beautiful as it was from the very first moment it was conceived. You were why I was so happy. You didn’t know that?”
He shook his head, slowly but very firmly. “I know you said that sometimes, Kai, but you were always happy. Before, I mean. The first moment I met you, you were happy.”
“You were there, weren’t you?” she pointed out simply.
His gaze was incredulous. “Kai. There is no way you looked across that garden and lit with happiness because of me. That’s not—I don’t hit people that way. I’ve met your family. You’re just happy people. You like to laugh and play and—I got lucky. Well, I put a lot of effort into making sure I was the man who got that lucky, but you know what I mean.”
He had gotten lucky. To find her. Wasn’t that the craziest thing for him to think? “I don’t think you know what I mean. Yes, I was always a laughing, fun-loving person. Compared to yours, my family looks like a non-stop swing dance, I guess.” She had spoken to her family less and less with each miscarriage and barely at all in the past year. They hadn’t known what to do with that much grief, and she hadn’t known what to do with their need for her to get over it again and just laugh with them. And get back with Kurt and be the sweetheart couple in which they had so delighted before. “But you were the reason I was . . . happy.” She pressed her fist to her heart, trying to show something deeper. “And yes, you did hit me that way. You made my whole body kick awake the first moment I looked up and saw you watching me, and I liked it. And then, when you were courting me—”
He winced a little in embarrassment at the word courtship, the way he always did, and a little grin came up out of somewhere inside her, surprising her again by how readily it wanted to spark out, just like her laughter used to. Some moments, he made her feel as if she might one day become a fully happy person once again, given enough time. Given him.
“You were so hot,” she said and had to rub her hands over her face as it surged through her, the memory of how helplessly attracted she had felt, the way every cell in her body seemed to pull toward him like filings to a super magnet, and how she had loved every minute of it. Never an instant’s fear, never even a second of trepidation at the possible consequences of giving him all her heart. He had always seemed like such a sure, strong, perfect person to receive all her life.
That old fearless heart was changed now, had learned fear, and yet—here he was. Still there for her. Still taking care. “Really hot,” she whispered.
His own grin showed, a surprised kick of pleasure. She used to be able to make him blush by telling him how hot he was, streaking color across those beautiful cheekbones, his whole face growing severe in the struggle to get the blush to die down. She had adored it.
“You still are, you know,” she told him, and—it was so hard to tell with the firelight, but was that the blush? He wasn’t trying to fight it, if so, because his face hadn’t taken on that adorable blush-fighting sternness, but was instead more vulnerable, more open—hopeful.
His hands pulled on hers, not so hard as to force, but more like a yearning for her. “Kai. Come back to me. Let’s work on being happy again. Together. Not alone. I think we’re so much more likely to actually reach that happiness again, if we do it together.”