Offensive Behavior (Sidelined #1)

by Ainslie Paton

  He called the florist, organized to re-home the flowers. He rode to the office. That had to be where Owen was. He no longer had a building pass and given it was a Sunday, there was no lobby reception he could bribe his way through. But unless they’d changed the security coding he could still find a way in.

  Hand to the keypad, he paused. Technically this was breaking in to a workplace he was no longer part of. If he did this, it meant he’d learned nothing from last night’s gate-crashing.

  He sent Owen a text telling him he was outside the office and wanted to talk.

  Five minutes later the double glass doors opened and Owen, wearing the effects of poor sleep and the weight of his decision in red-rimmed eyes and an unshaven jaw, stepped out. “I figured you’d show up.”

  “You know I’m going to fix this.”

  Owen crossed his arms. He wore an old Plus t-shirt, the same one Reid had with the words Better Together stamped on it. “We’re missing Ziggurat deadlines. You’ve been gone no time and already the wheels are falling off. I’ve sent Kuch my resignation.”

  “Call it back.” He said it, knew it to be one of the truest things that’d ever come out of his mouth.

  “No point, Reid.” Owen wasn’t angry, he wasn’t even tense, he was accepting. “It’s done. We can hate the circumstances, weather the headlines, but the outcome, having you back, is what Plus needs.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  Owen laughed.

  He rephrased. “I’m wrong.”

  Owen stopped laughing.

  “I’m wrong about so many things. But first off, Plus. You were right to terminate me. I’m not the guy to run Plus now and you are. I’m the scared weird loner who mentally got stuck at eighteen and knows how to set a vision but can only whip people toward it. You’re the likeable guy who knows how to inspire and lead every day, not just the critical ones, and with Sarina and Dev, you don’t need me anymore, but I made it so you thought you did. Call it back.”

  “You mean that?” Owen scrubbed his face with both hands. “You’re serious?”

  “I did the wrong thing last night for what I thought were the right reasons. I didn’t think I had anything to live for but Plus. It’s time for me to let go, get out of the way, learn to be your cheer squad and let you guys do what needs to be done.”

  “What changed?”

  Sarina’s tears, Dev’s confession. A use for more than one kitchen stool. A girl who danced on a pole, who had her own wings, despite not stretching them fully, who eased into his life and filled up the empty spaces. He might not be able to keep Zarley, but she’d shown him the kind of life he needed to grow up to fill.

  “I met a woman.”

  “Zarley.” Owen gripped the back of Reid’s neck. “You should’ve had more women in your life.” Had Owen guessed how few? Reid had kidded himself they were similar men, dedicated to their work, no distractions. But Owen choose to keep relationships casual, because he’d lost the love of his life, and it’s only now Reid understood how different that made them.

  “I didn’t know how.”

  Owen gave his neck a quick squeeze. “They change you.” He took his hand away, steepled his fingers and rubbed the place on his ring finger where a wedding ring would’ve once sat before the accident that killed Lacey. “The good ones make you want to be a better person.”

  Reid had teared up last night in Zarley’s arms, and his eyes burned now. “I’m going to lose her,” like he’d lost Plus, “like I lost the three of you, because I don’t know how to be with people.”

  “There’s a reason they say you shouldn’t hire friends and family. It’s the same reason we lost funding opportunities. When you insisted the four of us were a job lot, it turned some of those money taps off. The smart money wanted you, they could hire plenty of me, a dozen Sarinas, and Dev wasn’t the powerhouse he is now.”

  “They were wrong.” He said it unconsciously and Owen had the grace to laugh. “We made Plus, the four of us. It couldn’t have happened any other way and you know I’m—”

  “Right,” they finished together.

  “Call it back,” Reid said.

  Owen smiled. “I didn’t press send. I got your text. Figured if I didn’t come down, you’d hack your way in and then I’d have to have you arrested for breaking and entering. You won’t lose Zarley if you let her see you.”

  Only weeks ago he wouldn’t have understood what that meant. But it’s what Dev had been talking about. He sucked at friendship because he didn’t think he had anything to offer that wasn’t business. The two things so mixed together in his head they were indistinguishable, until spending time with Zarley had shown him there was another way.

  Not alone. Better. Together.

  “Have I lost you?” He heard a car glide into the spot adjacent to where they stood. Whoever was pulling a weekend shift deserved an apology. They’d get one.

  “You haven’t lost me either, except I need to not see you for a while and then we need to renegotiate, set some boundaries, see if we can become friends again,” Owen looked back at the building, “without all this.”

  That was more than fair. Reid looked down at his scuffed bike boots. “Sarina. I made her cry, and this morning forgot about her allergies and sent a truckload of flowers.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself, Reid. That’s not the only time you’ve made me cry. It’s the only time I let you see it.”

  “Oh shit.” It was Sarina’s crappy car in the lot. It was Sarina leaning in to kiss Owen on the cheek. He’d made her cry before last night. How could he not know that?

  “And Dev is the only one of you who remembers it’s lilies I’m allergic to. Send as many roses as you want.”

  He closed his eyes, mortified, so he had no warning when Sarina kissed him on the cheek. His hand went there. “What was that for?”

  She stood a little apart. “For all the times I wanted a better life for you. For all the times I wanted to kiss you on the cheek like I can Owen and Dev and Kuch and not have you get weird about it. You’re one of my oldest friends, even if you have no idea what that means. But I can’t do the cheek thing because you—”

  He put his hands up. Surrender. “I get it. I get it.”

  “Do you?”

  He sighed. “I’m weird. Oh Christ. I’ll try not to be so weird in the future.”

  She let out an exasperated sight. “You don’t get it. Be as weird as you want. We dig the weird. I get to have a cool life because of the way you’re wired, but you can do better, Reid.”

  “Did you come here to chew me out?” Because he couldn’t take much more of this.

  “Nope, I came here to make sure he’s okay,” she smiled at Owen, “because that’s my job, and it’s what a friend would do. I don’t have any trouble confusing the two things.”

  “I can do better.”

  “Yeah you can. And if you don’t Zarley will find you out and leave you, and I like her. I’d like to have Zarley as a friend.”

  His eyes were leaking again. “Dev will never forgive me.” He could tell by the way Sarina nodded there was no reprieve for him with Dev. “Right.” He wished he’d brought sunglasses. “I still have to fix this.”

  Sarina face palmed. “Oh Reid, you’ve done enough.”

  He looked into her eyes. “Trust me.”

  Her lips compressed and she looked away.

  “I get that I have to earn it again. Get Ziggurat back on track ’cause that’s your mess and this one last time, trust me to clean up mine.”

  Owen had a coughing fit that turned into a laughing fit as Sarina pumped him on the back. She laughed too. What was so funny? He had to do a bunch of interviews with journalists and admit he was under the influence of the orbit of rash and obnoxious or otherwise off his nut, and he regretted everything he’d said, he was a sore loser, and needed to grow up, that Owen and the Plus team had things under control and Ziggurat would deliver as expected.

  And then he had to go home and hope Zarley didn
’t greet him with an empty apartment and a tick in the box of that reduced him to a bad memory.

  TWENTY-TWO

  It was lunchtime, if you considered 2.30 p.m. a good time to eat lunch, when Reid came home. He hadn’t shaved, he looked exhausted and there was something about the way he stood back and didn’t greet her that made Zarley’s heart spontaneously dismount. He really thought she’d clear out.

  “Hi.” He was fidgety like Cara got when she was having a bad pain day. A hand to his hair, he patted his pocket, shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Sorry to run out on you. Are you okay?”

  She walked toward him. “I’ve caught up on schoolwork. I’ve gossiped with Cara. I made us lunch. I had a bath, all on my own, swam some laps in it.” He didn’t smile. He wouldn’t look at her. She could virtually see the headache he had in the press of two wrinkles over his nose. She stood still. “I voted for kink, Reid.”

  All the air came out of him in a rush. He took two steps to close the gap between them and knocked her off her feet in his haste to get his arms around her. He staggered and she let out a yip, but he had her, they weren’t going anywhere.

  “You thought I’d leave.”

  “I still think you should, Flygirl. I’m not ready for you. You should send me out to practice on someone else.”

  Nothing in the tone of his note or the way he was holding her, feet off the ground, suggested he believed that, but she had to ask. “You want to be with someone else?”

  “Fuck no.” He bent his knees and lowered her to the ground. “Last night.” His voice hitched, he buried his face in her neck, whatever he was going to say was lost, instead she got, “Run away with me.”

  She ruffled his hair and laughed, trying to give him light for the darkness he carried.

  He straightened up. “I’m serious. I have to get out of town for a while. I have to be uncontactable. Not in the apartment, or I have to hole up here until it all dies down.”

  “You’d better tell me what you’ve been doing.”

  She served lunch and he told her about his morning. Not a play by play, not the details, the themes: winning and losing, friendship and business, trust and fear, ignorance and devotion and Indian grandmothers.

  He barely ate, he hadn’t slept. He’d spent the last few hours talking to journalists, explaining how he’d gotten it wrong. And he still wasn’t done fixing things, and the more he talked the more he distanced himself.

  He sat at the kitchen counter, his head in his hands, and she felt his despair as spinning too fast, slipping from the pole, as attempting a move you’d not trained well enough for and getting hurt.

  A shove made him turn to her. She pulled his hands away from his face. “You’ll get there.” He didn’t trust it. She’d been in his shoes doubting, fearing, feeling she’d topped out, couldn’t spring higher, twist faster, land steadier.

  The day she performed badly in an Olympic trial event and expected to be thrown off the team, Costin had said one thing to give her back her confidence. The last day she saw him he used the same words, but they didn’t stick. She’d used them on Therese. She didn’t know if this would work for Reid, but it was all she had.

  “I believe in you.” Eyes unsteady, he frowned. She said it again. “I believe in you.”

  “Why?” It came out in a rush of breath, but his shoulders went slack.

  “Because you commit. Even if it’s only to wasting yourself every night.” His frown morphed into a confused look and she laughed. “Eck, bad example.”

  She brushed a hand over his forehead then ran her finger down the stubble on his jaw, how to explain it? He was a man of deep passion to the point of overbalancing, there was nothing halfhearted in what he did, from building his business to the way he was about sex. She touched her forehead to his. “You committed to me.”

  It was the right thing to say. Some of the tension in his chest eased, and his hands came to her hips. “Couldn’t help myself.”

  Couldn’t help herself kiss him. Couldn’t help herself climb into his lap or tug on his hair or flick into his mouth with her tongue. She’d rattled around the apartment thinking about him, missing him, worried for the things he’d have to do to change what he’d set in motion, the cost to his reputation, the toll on his relationships.

  She had his damage in her arms and like last night she wanted to make it better. She put all of that in her kiss and hoped he could feel it. But truly making it better meant allowing him the space he needed to get the job done.

  “When I failed to perfect a new sequence of moves, a new level of difficulty, Costin would order me to go in the corner.”

  Reid frowned. “Like a naughty child.”

  Not quite. “First time he said it I thought I was in trouble. It’s a little counterintuitive for a coach. He meant to stake out a space on my own and work at the problem until I understood what I needed to do to break through, no excuses, no distractions. When I’d worked out what I was getting wrong, then he could help me.”

  “And you understood this at sixteen.”

  She’d understood it at thirteen. And Reid did too, that’s where he was, in the corner, working his problem and the only way to help him was to get out of his way until he was ready to ask for support.

  She kissed him one last time and drew back. “I could do that all day.”

  “Suits me.”

  “I’ll wait for you to do what you need to do.”

  He didn’t let go for a good five minutes, just held her and looked into her eyes, but when he set her on her feet, he was energized. He went to the office. She heard him at his keyboard and on the phone, talking to Kuch and others. He wandered out to the kitchen with a headset on and she couldn’t help but hear he was talking to his mom, telling her he was fine, in a voice that sounded forced. He hung off the refrigerator door and almost took a slug of juice from the carton, before pouring a glass. Later, when he called, she went to help.

  “Would you read something for me?” He caught her hand and drew her onto his lap. “This is not how I wanted our day to play out.” Those words against her ear tickled in places he wasn’t touching that had no business delighting. It wasn’t her ideal day either, but it was the last week of college before a term break so she’d have a little spare time to make it up, and she no longer wanted to box their time into a corner as though it was a problem she was working out.

  “What am I reading?” There was a page of type on the screen. He’d been tapping away for a few hours.

  “An apology to the company.”

  “The whole company?” Woo, that was a big deal. Reid nodded, then pressed his forehead into her shoulder. She read the first couple of lines and clapped her hand over her mouth. “Can you say that?”

  “It’s the truth.”

  It was brutally honest. It wouldn’t stay a simple apology to Plus staff. It was too entertaining for that. The more she read, the more nervous she got, thinking about how these words would take on a life of their own and how that would affect Reid. She reached for his hand and held it. The more she read, the more she understood this would strip his professional reputation away entirely.

  “I don’t think you need to go this far.” It was career suicide. Was he too tired to see that?

  “Halfway good won’t get it done.”

  It was a rewind to the night he took the Lucky’s crew out for breakfast. They’d talked about pole dancing and stripping and owning what you did. That was the night they started this thing, and this was Reid to his core, this time, owning his failure.

  She read on, and when she got to the part where he wrote about someone new in his life he cared about, she closed her eyes. His words on screen were going to make her cry.

  “Is that someone me?”

  He turned her face from the screen. He was done with words. It was in the slope of his shoulders and the weight of his hand on her hip. In the pinched skin between his brows and the smudges under his eyes. He was done with this day and this issue and feeling
shitty. And yet once he sent those words into the world he was opening himself up for more criticism and attention.

  There was resignation on his lips when they kissed and a ragged hope in the way he held her that he hadn’t ruined them too. They ate, he put a movie on but neither of them paid much attention to it. Reid’s hands never left her. Spooning her, he played with her hair, held her so they fitted together.

  “Come away with me, Flygirl.”

  She understood why now. “Where would we go?”

  “Where would you like to go?

  Maybe they could drive out to LA or even head to Portland. If she missed a few days of school, it wouldn’t kill. Missing work was more of an issue. The only travel she’d done had been for competitions. She’d been to Moscow and Prague but had never been to Disneyland. “How about Vegas?” There’d be plenty of mischief to have there.

  He laughed, “I was thinking further afield.”

  She rolled over to face him. “Texas.” He thought she could fly; she’d show him how high.

  He smiled. “What’s in Texas that’s got you excited?”

  “The longest waterslide in the world. It’s got this sweet kicking ramp you can do aerials off. I’ve wanted to go for ages.” For Royal Flush in Texas she’d take a few days off work.

  “I was thinking Paris.”

  There was a Paris in Kentucky. She knew a gymnast who lived there. His family was into horses.

  Reid put a hand to her knee. “I was thinking you might like to visit Madame Amour.”

  Madame Amour was in Paris, France.

  She scrambled off the sofa. “Europe. You want to go to Europe.”

  “I want to get out of here.” He sat. She couldn’t stand still. “I want you to try out for the scholarship.”

  “No. What?” How did he know about that? Anyway it would be over. Some other dancer who’d passed the audition and gotten themselves to Paris to perform would’ve locked the scholarship prize money away by now. It was easier to dream of aerials in Texas than center stage at the most exclusive gentlemen’s club in the world.