Offensive Behavior (Sidelined #1)

by Ainslie Paton

  Wasn’t it? If there wasn’t Plus between them would he have had Owen and Sarina in his life for a decade? How long would Dev want to cook for him now that there was no basis for their relationship? And with the contractual ban, with the fact they’d sided with Kuch on ousting him, didn’t that shoot the unicorns and rainbows version of friendship in the foot?

  She put a hand absently on his thigh. “You were the weird, loner kid, weren’t you?”

  He was the weird, quiet, too big-too-soon kid whose mother was Mighty Mouse, tiny and solitary and ferocious where it came to his needs, but struggling in a small town where being a single mom still had a stigma attached to it. He was the church fundraiser kid, with unpopular obsessions, strange enthusiasms and charity bin clothing, but a brain that didn’t quit, didn’t let anyone forget he was different, destined to do something bigger than the town on a road to somewhere. He remembered the hours his mom worked in the diner. The hours he spent alone. He didn’t have it bad. They weren’t unhappy memories.

  All he could do was nod.

  She put her hands on his chest, traced his tattoo, and leaned in. “I always liked the quiet, weird, loner ones.”

  But he wasn’t quiet anymore. He’d learned to speak up, to be loud, to insist on being heard, not to suffer fools and to champion his beliefs.

  He wanted to kiss her, put his hands on her. Show her he wasn’t all bad. He wanted her to understand him more. “Do you know what a ziggurat is?”

  “Sounds like it should be a nightclub for very sexy, highly compensated pole dancers.”

  If she understood him, he had a chance, remote but possible, of holding her interest keeping her close. “They were temples. The nightclubs of the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians.” That was stretching things. Ziggurats were holy places. “They were like the Egyptian pyramids, but not tombs, constructed from stone bricks in layers with access ramps and lots of security. Usually a town was built around them.”

  “You liked ziggurats when you were a kid.”

  “I like them now. They’re complex and advanced architecturally but that’s not the point. The point is when I designed Plus it was unique. But by the time I worked out how to fund it there were others who’d locked onto the same concept. We had to prove its value over and over again to secure financing to build and market it. Most of those other competitors struck out, and that was good for us. But because we’ve been so successful, there’s a raft of new ones, looking to take a chunk of our installed base. I had a plan to rebuild the business so it was unassailable technically for at least another few years. The rebuild project is called Ziggurat.”

  “You keep saying I and we and us.”

  “Because I’m going to get it back.” Her hands came away. At some point during his ramble she’d leaned in closer, but now she’d put distance between them. “Customers and stockholders have all been promised Ziggurat, but Plus will screw it up without me.”

  She didn’t look away but she wanted to, it was in the angle of her chin.

  “Then they’ll be punished. They’ll lose customers, the value of the company will fall, it will be open to a takeover.”

  Her eyes flickered over his face. “I never watched those Olympic games I missed. Couldn’t. I knew all the competitors, some were friends, but I couldn’t watch, it was too hard. It was everything I’d wanted and would never have. Thinking like this is making it much harder for yourself.”

  “You didn’t watch because you had no recourse. It’s not like you could get back in the squad. I can. I should’ve thought of it sooner, I can turn the media, the stockholders. I can get the company back and then Ziggurat won’t fail.”

  “Is that even possible?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re so sure.”

  “Yes.”

  “And it’s what you want?”

  “If you could’ve gotten back on the team. If the circumstances had been different, wouldn’t you have wanted that?”

  “Yes.” She whispered it. She closed her eyes and lowered her face. “I’d have done almost anything for the chance.”

  He dipped his head to watch her expression. “Then you get it.”

  She took a step away. Out of reach of his arms. “I think it’s different for you. There is only one US Olympic gymnastics team. There is only one, maybe two chances, a female gymnast can represent her country in an eight-year stretch.”

  “You think it was easy building Plus.” For Plus he’d put aside having a normal life.

  “I think you have more opportunities. You can go forward. You don’t need to go back to get what you want.”

  “They’ll get hurt in this.” Owen would lose his job. Sarina too. Dev would hate what happened when Ziggurat failed. Kuch’s reputation would be on the skids.

  “If they can keep up with you, then they have to be smart enough to see that might happen.”

  “You think I’m arrogant.”

  She smiled. “I think you’re still the weird, loner type. I think you could do with a dash of modesty.”

  He ground his teeth. “Modesty is pretending not to have skills, not to be good at whatever it is you’re good at. What’s the point in pretending?”

  “It’s not pretending,” she scoffed. “It’s not tooting your own horn. It’s not assuming you’re better than someone else and hogging the spotlight.”

  “But if you deserve the spotlight, then what’s the point not claiming it. Waste of everyone’s time.”

  “Spoken like a man who’s never truly looked failure in the eye.”

  He shook his head. That made no sense. That’s what he’d been talking about, hadn’t she listened to anything he’d said?

  “You didn’t fail, Reid. You had a setback.”

  “A setback.” His hands went to the top of his head, elbows flaring. “My career got shredded. I lost my company.” Maybe he’d lost every friend he’d had.

  “You lost your job.” She took another step away, but she didn’t pull her punches. “Every pundit out there predicts you’ll come back stronger. I lost my calling, the whole basis for my talent and training, and whatever chance there was of continuing to work in the field. You have an income from investments, money in the bank. Your home town is still proud of you.” She closed her eyes. “Mine thinks I’m a stupid, selfish slut and they don’t know I’m virtually a stripper.”

  If he opened his mouth it would be to shout. Not because she’d nailed him to the flag post of his own self-importance, but because she’d trash-talked her own life. He wrapped his hands around the bottom of the stool and gripped. She was right, this was a setback. She’d experienced the dead end of all of her hopes and dreams. He’d fix his mess, but Zarley couldn’t be allowed to denigrate herself like she’d done.

  She fiddled with her laptop. He breathed through his anger and when he could finally trust himself to talk without raising his voice, he said her name.

  She cut him a look. “I’m not the kind of friend you were thinking about having. Maybe we should stick to fucking.”

  “I want that.”

  She said, “Huh.” As if everything was clear now.

  “I want the fucking but I want the friendship too. Exactly as you gave it to me, right between the eyes, so there’s a chance I can get it in my head. I’m too used to being alone. He tapped his chest. “Sometimes alone is shit. But there’s something we have to get straight.”

  She gave him an oh yeah look, turned fully to face him with a hand jammed on her hip.

  “You don’t put yourself down in front of me. Ever. You don’t think of yourself as a slut or as selfish or as stupid. You are none of those things. Never were. Never will be.”

  She blinked and then laughed. “You’re supposed to be annoyed with me for calling you on your bullshit entitled asshole attitude.”

  He was, but under the uncomfortable itch of the burn it’d generated, he’d loved it. “I don’t usually do what I’m supposed to do.”

  “I noticed.” She smiled and
it took his anxiety down about thirty thousand feet.

  “Are we done poking at each other’s sore spots for the day?”

  “I think we’ve only just started. I haven’t said anything about you being a bully, about you being moody and grumpy and socially awkward.”

  He gave her the oh yeah look back and kinked a finger at her.

  “I don’t do assholes.”

  “I get that, loud and clear. Bring it.”

  She laughed again, shaking her head. “And render you incapable of what I really want.”

  “What do you really want?”

  “It’s time to test the new furniture out. Are you a man of your word? I seem to remember a promise to do dirty things to me over your new dining table.”

  Where was the line between anger and affection, hard words and lust, and they just scrubbed it out. “I seem to remember there’s a full-frontal pic of you I need to see.”

  She reefed her t-shirt over her head. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Jesus Christ, he wanted her so badly he might not have the strength to make it last longer than getting her naked.

  “I’m not sure you get this sex thing yet.” She started on her jeans, popping the stud, rolling the zipper down. “Actual flesh and bone beats image every time.”

  She wriggled, shoved the jeans down her legs and stepped out of them. Her panties were blue. The color of the blood that pumped three times as fast as it should through him was blue too, so hot it was the heat center of a flame.

  He still craved a drink, but it was the liquid sweet of her skin he wanted on his tongue, her pleasure moans he wanted in his throat. “You’re so damn beautiful.”

  “You’re so damn slow. Clothes off, Reid.”

  He let go the bottom of the chair and flexed his stiff fingers. She watched him lose his shirt, her eyes going all heavy-lidded. Then he stood and advanced on her. She bolted, like she’d done earlier. He didn’t chase her, he didn’t need to, he had her, at least for now, at least as long as he could keep her interested.

  She wasn’t near the table where he expected her. She was laid out over it, completely naked, her hands stretched above her head, one knee raised and her back arched. The vision knocked a Neanderthal grunt out of him. It was better than he’d imagined because the Zarley in his head wasn’t trembling as if she wanted him as much as he wanted her. The Zarley in his head didn’t squirm when she heard how gone he was, didn’t whimper when he ran a hand slowly from her instep to her collarbone over skin so warm and soft it affected his breathing. That Zarley didn’t smell like sex and she didn’t look at him like this was more than something she was doing for her own amusement, to educate him.

  When he’d sat at this table in the furniture showroom, the Zarley he’d conjured in his head was a pale, cardboard cutout, the product of a weak imagination. But that Zarley had gotten him stone hard in the store, had him mumble to the shop assistant that he needed a moment to himself, had made it so he couldn’t go near the table; could barely look at it once it was delivered, without being affected. This Zarley, fuck, this flesh and bone and muscle and moaning woman laid out for him was reordering the way logic worked in his brain. An entirely new algorithm for his life.

  She was beyond obsession now. She was the sacred temple at the top of the ziggurat. She was the complex algorithm that sorted good from bad. All the independent bricks he’d built his life on crumbled to silt as he put his lips to her belly and closed his hand over her breast.

  When her breath snagged, when she grasped his hair and dragged his head up so their lips met, he stopped trying to calculate this, there was no wisdom in it. It was a kind of insanity to want something so much, to be given it so freely and to fear its loss before he’d even experienced the moment.

  She was all those things, the past he hadn’t lived in his body, the present he feared was as much a lucky charm as a curse, and the future he’d failed to anticipate.

  “Please,” she said, between kisses that drained him of any ambition that wasn’t to be inside her. “Reid,” she said, and he put his self-belief in her hands and willed her to do whatever she wanted with it. “I need,” she said, as she flexed her hips into his hand. And he needed too, the wonder and challenge of her, the strength and yield of her, the silken skinned, thready-voiced, wet, rippling lock of her.

  He got rid of his jeans. He took her ankles and slid her to the edge of the table where it fell like a solid waterfall of glass to the floor.

  “We’re going to make a mess,” she moaned, her foot to his shoulder. She glistened from where he’d played his fingers.

  It would be art, design, architecture, music. He lowered his mouth to her pussy. It would be hot chaos and cool awe.

  “I love this table. Oh, God. Reid. Don’t stop.”

  Not till she was incapable of words. Not till her writhing, her gasping, the flood of her juices told him she was beyond thought and reason, driven all the way into the tight corner of pleasure so screamingly deep she was flying again. And when she was, he threw her higher. He caught her body up and flipped her, draped her over the table’s smooth curved end and held her hips tilted up to him.

  “Now. Fuck me now.”

  She was revelation when he drove into her, absolution when she bucked greedily against him, and divinity when she shook through another release, her inner muscles clamping down on him, bowing his back, liquefying his neck, forcing a stream of curses from his mouth, and sending him rocketing into a paradise of sensation with Zarley as his wings.

  EIGHTEEN

  It was Reid’s plan, but Zarley agreed to it, as much for him as for Cara, because although Cara loved her brother, and new baby nephew, the loss of her job, her sewing machine and their apartment had hit her hard.

  They’d been allowed in to the apartment, but there wasn’t much worth scavenging, and since there was an arson investigation pending they weren’t getting the place back any time soon. There was talk of compensation from the building owner, but it wouldn’t be quick to come. Everything was sooty, wet and smelled appalling. Zarley’s books were sodden, falling apart when she tried to pick them up. They rescued some kitchen stuff, knickknacks and clothing that might eventually not smell of smoke, and they hauled Cara’s sewing machine out, only to find it wouldn’t start when they cleaned it up and plugged it in at Kathryn’s place.

  Reid did the hauling and a trailer-load of resenting because Zarley refused to stay with him. She’d made her peace with Kathryn’s borrowed air-mattress and Reid was sucking it up, none too gracefully.

  It should’ve annoyed her, the peremptory way he was after less than three weeks of knowing her offstage, but after an initial debate about her reasons for not wanting to stay with him, which were admittedly limp: he had space, it clearly wasn’t an imposition, his place was within easy distance of both college and Lucky’s—he’d clenched his jaw and backed off.

  He even refrained from teasing her for the argument that living with him was a quick way to kill their thing, because he didn’t buy it and neither did she.

  Their thing was hot and strong and about to go glamor.

  He was taking her to a formal function for Plus’ tenth anniversary. It was a genuine red carpet-ish moment and Cara was making her a dress. Reid had offered to buy Cara a sewing machine, but Cara picked up a second-hand one and hit him up for fabric instead. He had no idea what he’d agreed to, the fabric she wanted was eighty-five dollars a yard and she needed five yards to make a Hollywood-style gown that Zarley was dying to wear.

  She’d never worn an article of clothing that could be described as a gown before. Not so quietly she wondered if she could pull it off, but Cara was thoroughly into it and it was a more interesting project than apartment hunting, and Zarley refused to put pressure on Cara about that.

  Cara needed a job before they could commit to rent, so they’d entered a suspended sentence of homelessness, alleviated by the requirement for a truly red carpet-worthy dress of which portfolio-style photos could be taken to help Cara
attract more customers, and Zarley’s continued fascination with Reid.

  She tried and failed to sell herself on the concept that the thing with Reid was all about the transcendent sex. The high she got from the coach, student basis of their relationship. But that was a load of old bull. Reid still played the first timer, got overexcited and all out went for her like she was the last stop for pleasure on a long desolate sexless highway to hell. But she wasn’t much better. He frayed her control, tested her body’s limits and blasted all her expectations of getting off into a new dimension.

  It wasn’t just the sex. He was like double-sided tape. Smart but naive, funny and moody, awesome and fearsome, solitary and reaching out, and it didn’t matter which side she turned the tape, she was stuck on him.

  She was supposed to be at study group. But Saturday night’s event was a long way from hump day and she’d had three dress fittings, but no sex for a whole thirty-nine hours. She might not make it to the Cinderella stage. She sent Reid that full-frontal pic. No warning, just a sext in the middle of Wednesday afternoon.

  He called. “Where are you?” He had the gruff, barely holding it together tone that made the hair on the back of her neck stand up.

  “I could be at your place in thirty minutes.”

  “Too long. I’m coming to get you.”

  She laughed. “I’m at Kathryn’s and I can walk to—”

  “I’ll be there in ten.”

  “Reid, I.” She laughed. He’d hung up.

  She met him in the street. He hadn’t bothered with his helmet. It was still clipped on the back of the bike with hers. His hair was damp and full of wind, and his shirt buttoned oddly. He made her heart turn flick flacks in her chest. The look he gave her was indecent, as if she was standing there naked, fingering herself. She wore a flirty summer dress that’d survived a good scrubbing, a pair of now off-white Keds, and her hair was piled on her head in a messy bun.

  “Not bike ready,” he barked.

  Bike ready meant jeans and sleeves, appropriate footwear. “I was walking, remember.”