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"No, of course not," she rushes to say. "I'm just…" She huffs out an adorable breath. "I don't know what I'm thinking. You made me feel so good. I guess I just assumed you had a lot of practice."
"Ah," I say, understanding. "No. I've been married to my job for most of my life. I've lived like a nomad since I finished college. It didn't leave a lot of time for dating, and no one ever interested me enough before now to make me want to change that. But I know how to make you feel good, baby girl. Your body tells me exactly what I need to know."
"It does?"
I smile at her tone. She's so fucking innocent.
"Mmhmm." I run my hand down her arm in demonstration, trailing my fingers across the side of her breast. She shivers almost immediately, melting against me. "See? When you like something, your whole body lights up. When you don't, you tense."
"Oh." She falls quiet again. The silence is comfortable though, easy. She isn't someone who needs to fill every moment with noise to escape her thoughts. Instead, she settles into them, completely at ease with herself and the moment. Silence isn't foreign to her. It's a familiar, appreciated friend.
I'm the same way. There's beauty in solitude and comfort in silence. I have no demons haunting me, no regrets plaguing me. My whole life, I've gone where I wanted, did what I wanted. I may have been rigid and unyielding, but I wasn't a bastard, blowing through life like a hurricane. I focused on my job, my art, and that was always enough for me. I didn't need the thrill of the chase, of drugs, or alcohol, or any of that shit. So long as I had my camera, I was content.
But I find myself eager to fill the silence now, to know every thought Trinity has, no matter how fleeting or small. I want to know her in every way it's possible to know someone else, and I want her to know me the same way. We won't have secrets from one another. Whatever she wants to know, I'll tell her. Happily.
"I can't believe Georgia never mentioned that you were her uncle," she says a few moments later.
"That's Georgia." I smile. "When she decided to model, I offered to help her. She told me I wasn't allowed to tell anyone that we were related."
Trinity laughs quietly, her body shifting against mine. "I won't tell her you broke her rule if you don't."
"She really likes you."
"Yeah?" I hear the smile in her voice, the affection. "I like her too. She's a lot of fun to be around, and she's absolutely gorgeous. She told you about me?"
"She talked about you."
"Oh. It's kind of funny," she says, running her finger through a pile of bubbles.
"What is?"
"That she doesn't want anyone to know her uncle is the photographer virtually every model aspires to work with. It wasn't like that for me. My brother plays hockey."
"He does a little bit more than that. His team has won the Cup four times in the last eight years." Most teams are fortunate to win once in a decade. Winning four in eight years is a helluva feat, especially for a team that's considered new by most anyone's standards.
"You're a fan?"
"Of hockey? Yes. Of the Predators? Afraid not, lamb. I'm a Chicago fan," I say.
"Booooo."
I chuckle at her loyalty. "I gotta support the home team."
"You're from Chicago?"
"Born and raised."
"Huh," she says like she's surprised. "I guess I just assumed that your family lived here in New York since that's where Georgia grew up."
"Marnie attended school at Juilliard and never left," I explain. "Ty followed behind her not long later. I spend more time here than anywhere else, but Chicago has always been home to me."
"That's how I feel about Nashville. I've been in Los Angeles for a while, but the south is just in my blood," she says and then laughs quietly. "But that's not where I was going with this conversation. I was trying to say that it's funny to me that Georgia wanted to do this completely on her own. I was the exact opposite. When I first decided to pursue modeling, it was because I was tired of seeing size zero models. I was at a photo shoot with Gray one day, and of course the models posing with him were all tiny, which is not his type. When I mentioned it, the photographer laughed at the thought of posing this hockey star with a bigger woman."
"Prick," I mutter, running my hand up and down her back again. Fuck men who think big women aren't beautiful. In my experience, they're usually assholes unworthy of any woman, let alone a goddess like the one in my arms.
"That's what Gray said!"
I'm liking her brother more and more by the minute.
