“These are pretty,” I say, carrying his wok over to the island.
“I bought them today. You need me to grab that?” he asks.
“I’m good.” I set it down on a trivet that I’d found while he was prepping.
“Philanthropy is nice, in theory, and I do give plenty of money to charity, but I like to build things. Grow things.”
“So, your next venture could be both,” I tease. “Wells and community gardens in underdeveloped countries?”
“Pot plants,” he shrugs. “Sweat shop.”
I laugh. “Blood diamonds. That kinda thing.”
He barks out a laugh.
“Farmer Killian,” I muse. “Don’t you think that has a nice ring to it?”
He chuckles. Light is dancing in his green eyes.
“Maybe nicer than Overlord Killian. Wait, no… I like the Overlord idea better.”
“Ha!” I laugh hard. “I’m a little tipsy, sorry.” I sit at the table. “For real, though, when I was a little girl I wanted to marry a rancher with horses and chickens and grow vegetables and sell them from a little stand at the end of our driveway, chickens running around all over the place.”
He serves me and then himself. I watch as he does.
“Don’t be sorry for feelin’ the wine I’m supplying. You’re cute when you’re tipsy.”
“For now. Until I get all rowdy and stuff,” I warn.
He laughs. “So, chickens, eh? Babies runnin’ around, too?”
“Dunno. I think so. Maybe,” I say with a shrug.
“You against that idea now?”
“Nope. I’m not against anything if I’m with the right person.”
“Sounds like it could be a nice life,” he says, looking down at the wok.
“Dinner looks good. Let’s hope it tastes good and all my wine drinking didn’t muck it all up.”
“If it’s bad, I cooked it,” Killian says.
“Well, I directed you…”
“True,” he says. “Let’s find out if we fucked it up.”
Using his chopsticks, he plucks up a piece of chicken and holds it out for me to taste. Our eyes meet as the chicken moves closer.
My lips part and I manage to semi-daintily (I think; I hope) accept the bite, the whole time sure I’m going to fumble. Somehow I don’t.
I nod and smile with my mouth closed as I chew.
He picks up more chicken between the chopsticks and pops it in his mouth.
“Mm,” he reacts and sticks his thumb up. “We make a good team. Boss me around the kitchen anytime, Dimples.”
I smile again and then I sip my wine and dig into the food.
“So, tell me about your family,” I invite after I swallow my next bite.
He stares at his food and digs around before lifting up some noodles and a sugar snap pea.
And suddenly it feels like a wall has gone up between us. Maybe his family is a sore subject.
It’s about to be too long of awkward silence when he puts me out of my misery. “It’s just me and my younger brother. How about you?”
There’s a dark look on his face that tells me he doesn’t want me to continue along that line of questioning and the air feels heavy.
“Um, I have a younger brother, too, Cody. He’s in high school. My parents live about twenty minutes from here. Dad’s got a little auto shop and Mom is an accountant. Ordinary working-class family.” I shrug.
“You close with them?”
“I haven’t been the past two years because of Ray and how things were with him, but they’re good parents. I had a good childhood.”
I take another bite of food.
“He got in the way of a lot, didn’t he?”
Before I can answer, he speaks instead. “We’re having a nice meal here, so I won’t ask you questions about your relationship with him because not only do I not want to ruin your meal, but I also don’t wanna feel like I need to walk away from this meal to go find him and beat his fuckin’ face to a pulp, but I gotta say it surprises me you spent three years with him.”
The anger vibrating off him has me trembling suddenly.
And my appetite is just… gone.
“Sorry,” he waves. “So much for me not ruining your meal. I apologize.”
“It’s okay. I have a lot of stuff to work through. In the beginning, it was like … awesome. He was great. But he changed. Or… it was an act and he eventually stopped acting. I … I let him gaslight and manipulate me. You know what I mean?”
He nods. “I get it.”
“I don’t know how it happened. It’s like he methodically changed me. And not in a good way. First, it was like a love story. He was too good to be true. So sweet and kind and doting. Right in there with talking about the future, about the amazing life we were gonna have. But it wore off when he started with these…moods. And everything with him was always going wrong and it took me a bit to come out of denial, to realize he was the problem, you know? Then he dragged me down. I got to where I’d try to be a chameleon so I wouldn’t draw any attention to the flaws in my relationship with him and it was easier to withdraw, I guess. I fiercely defended him in the beginning when people started to tell me they saw things they didn’t like about him. How he couldn’t hold a job, how he screwed up with financial stuff. I always fixed it. Fixed whatever he broke. In the beginning, he was so sweet to me and we would have these long talks where we’d build castles in the sky and I believed we’d do it, too. I believed he had a string of bad luck, until it got too hard to believe that someone would just keep having that much bad luck, that there was just always excuses, too. Excuses for why he spent money outside the budget. Excuses for why we couldn’t go to my cousin’s wedding or my parents’ for Easter or why he didn’t want me hanging out with my friends, and just… constantly breaking things and hoping I’d fix them. And the moods got worse until he just got… like… permanently grouchy, probably because I started running out of ways to fix his problems.” I take a big breath. “In the early days, he was always trying to defend himself for things he thought people were saying and it got my back up with people who hadn’t even done or said anything wrong. He’d tell me they’d try to tell me I was too good for him, that he was afraid I’d believe it. And I was all, ‘fuck them’ and I was mad at them when they didn’t even do anything wrong because he’d get in my ear about people and plant these seeds. And then when they did start to say something at first I was so defensive because it was like he knew and would say things to me that they were thinking because he knew they were right. Only, I didn’t know that back then. He’d get in front of it and put my back up with everyone. He hid it well for a while and slowly, I backed away from everybody in my life because of him. I didn’t wanna hear it from them. And I hate that I let him do that. It was how he felt about himself that projected all over everything, and I … I just feel really stupid that I let it happen.”
“Stupid? You shouldn’t feel that way.”
“I cared about him. In the beginning, I loved him. He fooled me into thinking he was a good guy with a long string of bad luck. Maybe he was a good guy, or trying to be a good guy. He had a lot of insecurities. His family life really messed him up, I think.”