Only You

christmas day

"Hey," I nudge Cate's arm, and she stirs awake. She looks up through the window at the town we've driven into, then gives me a sleepy smile. "Merry Christmas," I say.

"Merry Christmas," she replies. "Where are we?"

I park the car in front of the hotel. "Maine. This town's called Bath."

"It's a lovely place to wake up to," she says, yawning. 

I smile, a slow warmth spreading through me. The slow, vague tone of Cate's voice when she's just woken up...nothing could be as lovely as that. 

It's so early in the morning, the sky is still a drowsy dark blue. There's almost no one around, and the twinkling lights of the stores look rather lonely as they wait for someone to come along. The snow on the streets looks like a newly woven blanket, and I laugh as Cate deliberately steps around in it, like a little kid. 

"Why spoil it? It's so pretty," I say in mock sadness. 

"Pretty things are meant to be spoiled. I've spoiled you, haven't I?" She throws me a naughty smile. 

The hotel lobby is vast, silent, with the soft and comforting sense of an endless future and a stretching past, with the ghosts of whispering footsteps belonging to people who have walked in and out of this lobby countless times. I check us into a room, and in the elevator going up Cate leans casually on my shoulder and I feel for a second that we are the only two people in this capsule of a world we've created. 

"You need to let me drive through the night sometime, before you collapse," Cate says. 

"I like night driving."

Our room has a picturesque view of the little snow covered town below, and I think suddenly of the snow globe I'd knocked over that night we left. Had my parents found it on the floor, broken and bleeding out its fake snowflakes onto the carpet? It was a snow globe that I'd gotten at a store back in New York City, something Arden had bought me, as if we were tourists. I shake my mind free of those memories. 

"Cate, have you ever been to Rome?" I ask out of the blue. 

"No. I've never even been to Italy," she says as she drapes her coat over the radiator. Her tone makes me burst out laughing. "What's so funny?" she asks, smiling. 

"I don't know. Everything."

Cate crosses the room and catches me in her arms. I feel her fingertips dig into my back through my sweater. "Have you been to Rome?" she asks. 

"No," I say. "Let's go there together someday."

"Someday," she echoes dreamily, and she sounds so doubtless of it. 

"Or London, or Paris. We'll fly everywhere."

Cate releases me, and stares at me for a second, an unintelligible look in her blue eyes. I stare back, at the graceful wings of her blonde eyebrows, at the swoop of her cheekbones, at the supple red lips now curved into a smile. I've seen her everywhere, I've had her every moment of the days, and yet still her beauty strikes me as if I'm meeting her for the very first time, with nothing between us. 

"How 'bout a shower, to warm us up?" she says, breaking the pause. "This place is a bitch to heat."

The shower turns on with a loud hiss and Cate swears for my amusement, fiddling with the handle until the water's hot enough. 

I step under it first, and Cate comes in after, drawing the curtain and kissing me in the same motion. Happiness is like a brilliant arrow shooting me through, curving in an endless arc through time and space, beyond where human thought could follow. 

"Behold," Cate says, grabbing the showerhead and pointing it at me, "the wrath of Poseidon!"

"Not the Trident!" I shriek, trying to grab it from her hand. "Have mercy on a poor mortal!"

She coils the shower rope around her arm like a snake, and pretends to shoot water from her hand. I'm giggling so hard I can hardly breathe. The room fills with sweet-smelling steam and looking up at Cate, with her face shining with laughter and her golden hair foamy with half-lathered shampoo, I wonder how I ever lived without her. 

We open each other's presents in a café, eating brunch. Cate's gift to me is an exquisite leather notebook, with an elaborately designed butterfly embossed in the cover and a clasp to hold it shut. It's the loveliest notebook I've ever seen. I promise her to write only the best of poems in it, and they'll all be written for her. 

Cate gives a happy exclamation when she unwraps her angel. "Oh, she's adorable!  I'm going to have her with me always. With such a beautiful angel to defend me, I can't lose."

I laugh. "Don't read the poem just yet," I tell her. "I want you to read that tonight, when we're alone."

"Like a lullaby?"

"Yes," I say. "To sing us to sleep."

"And the angel to watch over us."

"What'll you name her?" I ask.

She answers without hesitation, "I'm naming her after you, Jude."