his fists and slowly walked back over to me, his expression tortured and just plain sad.
I watched silently as he lifted the chair and set it back up before sitting in it and facing me. He took both of my hands and brought them up to his face. He kissed each palm, each wrist, the middle of my inner forearms where some of the worst burn marks were, the indent at my elbows, then he snuffled against my chest and pressed his lips to the skin over where my heart beat a thousand times a minute.
“I’m sorry I scared you,” he murmured against my skin. “I wasn’t prepared for what you shared or how it would make me feel. I won’t make that same mistake twice. You can count on that.”
I wrapped my arms around him and let him hug me, comforting him as much as I was comforting myself.
He held me for a while and then eased back, grabbed his beer, and emptied the entire thing in one go.
I chuckled and sipped at my own, picking up a cooling piece of my awesome pizza.
“Enough about me…”
“Never enough about you. I want to know everything there is to know.”
I smiled. “Well, that would take a long time.”
“I’m counting on it taking forever.”
“Smooth talker,” I teased even though butterflies were going bat-shit crazy in my stomach. “What about your upbringing? Parents, siblings?”
“Two brothers. My folks live in Naperville. Dad’s a history teacher at one of the high schools there. Mom runs a daycare out of their home. With no kids in the house to raise, she got bored. Decided she wanted babies around her and none of her three boys ponied up any grandchildren. She sought out to get herself some.”
I grinned. “Mama Kerri watches Rory who turns four in a couple weeks actually. Though she only does it three days a week. If it was up to her, she’d have all of us married and popping out grandbabies as fast as she could snap her fingers.”
He nodded and shoveled in a bite of his pizza. He wiped his mouth while chewing. “I think that’s what happens when you hit fifty plus. You either want the freedom to travel and enjoy the empty nest or you want to fill it back up with other people’s children.”
“Do you, uh, want kids someday?”
He nodded. “Yeah, a couple would be cool. Part of why I don’t want to rush what we’ve got. I see potential there, Addy. Potential for more than just a few months of some fun.”
“I want kids too.”
“How does that work with the modeling gig?” he asked.
“Honestly, you only get so long to model regularly before you’re aged out or your body changes too much with babies. Unless you’re a freak and your body just bounces back with no extra weight or stretch marks. I hate those women,” I grumbled.
Killian laughed. “I’ll bet.”
“My plan is pretty set. I’m going to model as much as a I can for the next four years until I hit thirty and then I was thinking about opening up my own agency. I’ve learned a lot in this business, and I’ve been through the ringer, being a plus-sized model for one, being successful in the biz for two. Those things are not mutually exclusive, so I know that I’ve got something special. Still, I feel like I could help plus-sized women, heck all women do their thing in this industry. And Blessing and I have talked a lot about teaming up. She designs, I find the models, train them, work the shoots with her, and we hire an exceptional person to do the marketing of our business. It would take a lot of hard work and time, but it feels right.”
“That’s awesome, Addy. Knowing what you want to do, having goals and plans and a timeline. The only question I have is where does a man in your life fit into all that?”
I looked down at my pizza and played with the crust feeling a little shy all of a sudden, not having planned to share so much about my future plans with this man.
“Not sure. Guess I’d have to find me the strong, supportive type. A man that wouldn’t want me to put my dreams on hold to be what he needs. Not that I wouldn’t be supportive of his desires in return.”
“And what if that man wanted you just the way you are? Beautiful. Independent. Driven. Goal-oriented. Just wanted you to come home to