He watched her laugh with Sarina, lean over Cara to rub her shoulders and accept a thank you hug from Owen. He could watch her all night, which is how he was able to read her lips when she asked Ro what time her license ran out. He’d have thought it meant something combined with the earlier comment, but then Ro only had a half hour on her deputy for the day clock and Zarley disappeared. He was ridiculous and still a little hungry but surrounded by friends on what was one of the happiest nights of their lives, he didn’t have a single concern.
He didn’t have his wits about him either when Zarley came back because she’d changed into a different dress. It was a creamy color, a rich sheen to it like the inside of an oyster shell. It had a neckline that swooped between her breasts, an upside-down heart. From the back, hell, it almost had no back, there was fabric perched low, hugging her stunning ass in the same heart-shaped line, before it fell straight to the floor. It was a look that could knock a guy senseless.
Everyone else fell silent as she stopped in front of him. He had a vague sensation he was behind the curve.
“Do you like it?”
He motioned for her to turn around and she did, letting him put a hand to her bare back. He had no idea how this dress stayed on her body. “You look beautiful.” If she wore this as a work uniform it would piss him off.
“Cara made it originally for me to wear here, but it came out too much somehow.” That was a relief. “I thought it would make an amazing wedding dress.” Not a church-ready look, that was for sure.
“I thought it would make a great wedding dress for me.”
He braced against the bar and looked at Cara, who grinned back. Dev was mucking about with his camera. Ro said, “Oh fuck, hurry up.”
“Flygirl, what’s going on?”
“Marry me.”
He moved, took her by the shoulders and hustled her away from the bar so they could do this with a bit more privacy. “Baby, you don’t need to do this. I fucked up not consulting you on the loft idea. I fucked up putting pressure on you about getting hitched. It’s been a big night and we’ve all got wedding fever.”
Her hands went to her hips. “Oh really?”
He tucked his hands through her elbows and around her back. “Yeah, really. Despite the fact I fuck up, I want for you what you want.”
“That makes it easy then.”
“It does.” He kissed her forehead. “Let’s escort the happy couples out and go home.”
“I want to go home as your wife.”
He flattened a hand on her bare back and slid it down to cup her heart-shaped ass. “No you don’t.”
She pushed against his chest, arching her torso away. “Are you telling me what I want?”
“I’m confused.” He scrubbed a hand through his hair, hoping it might wake his brain.
“You didn’t fuck up tonight about the loft.”
“I didn’t?”
“You surprised me. It’s incredibly thoughtful, even if you should’ve consulted me.”
Now that’s more like it. “I’ll know next time.”
She rolled her eyes. “No you won’t. I love you anyway. And Ro only has twenty minutes left on her license. Marry me.”
“Zarley, baby, you don’t—”
“And counting.”
“Why?” Fucking weddings, they screwed with you. Made you want things you didn’t need.
“Because it’s what you want.”
“That’s not enough of a reason. And if I’m being truthful, I wanted it most because you bring out the caveman in me and marriage makes it a pain for you to dump my ass. But I’m over it. You were right.” And wasn’t that a big deal to admit. “We’re already married in every way,” he’d have to work on the legal front, “that counts.”
“I’m never going to dump you.”
“You heard what I just said. We don’t need a wedding.”
“Yes we do. Because I’m not over it and I know you’re only saying you are for me. It dawned on me tonight that I connected my wedding with Dalton, and the dreams of a sixteen-year-old who was going to be an Olympic gold medal winner. It was going to be the whole princess fantasy. But I’m not that naive kid, and I didn’t think I deserved a wedding with you.”
He slapped a hand against his forehead. “That’s the—”
She gave him a shove. “Don’t tell me that’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard me say.”
He shut his mouth, because that’s exactly what he was going to do.
“I was punishing myself for no good reason. Punishing you too. Dressing it up like it didn’t matter to me. Trying to be a woman who doesn’t need the fantasy. But tonight I realized it’s not a fantasy. A wedding doesn’t need a church or twelve months of planning to be real. We can make it legal later. I saw two couples start a marriage on nothing but friends, family and love, and that’s the kind of wedding I want. Just you and me, our closest friends, and our moms, in my bar tonight.”
“Our moms?” He looked over Zarley’s head and there they were, standing together, four shiny eyes. “I wish I’d brought the goddamn rings.”
She laughed. “I bought the rings. The underwear drawer, really, Reid, the most obvious place in the world.”
He laughed. “You knew you were going to do this tonight.”
“No. But I wanted to be prepared for anything. I thought maybe I’d make you happy if I agreed to an engagement.”
“You make me happy whatever you do, Flygirl.”
“Oh my God, you guys. I have fifteen minutes,” Ro called.
“Marry me, Reid.”
“I thought you’d never ask.” He took Zarley’s face in his hands and wasted an entire minute kissing her before turning to Ro. “Can you handle the fastest shotgun wedding in the West?”
Owen said, “Yippie ki yay,” and everyone moved. A small table appeared, a bunch of flowers and a lit candle on it. Cara shoved more flowers from a table setting wrapped in a bar towel into Zarley’s hands.
Mom brought his suit coat and helped him put his cufflinks back on. She had a bad case of the sniffles. “Be happy,” she said, as they hugged.
“Ten minutes,” said Ro and they clustered around her. Dev and Owen on his right. Cara and Sarina on Zarley’s.
Vi had Dev’s camera. “I didn’t know you had this kind of romance in you, Back Booth,” she said.
“Learned it from the woman I love.”
“I have to ask, are you sure?” said Ro.
And that’s all it took for him to take Zarley’s hand and promise to fuck up in ways that showed he loved her for the rest of his life, and for her to promise to always forgive him for fucking up. They said other things too, about being truthful and trusting, about listening to and respecting each other, and then Dev handed him the ring and he put it on Zarley’s finger and kissed the shit out of her while Ro said the incantation that bound them forever in a way that would make it that much harder to quit on.
Sarina chose now to cry, making Dev look bewildered. Vi opened champagne and Cara cheered. Owen looked ready to raise a toast, but said, “Oh crap, we can’t all be on honeymoon together.”
Zarley tightened her grip on his hand. “We can’t go anywhere right now.”
“We’ll owe you vacation time,” said Owen. He looked at Vi, who nodded her agreement, and none of it mattered to Reid because he’d married the woman who made him a better man, who owned him body, brain, blue whale heart and soul.
“Everyone out.”
Zarley leaned into him. “There’s no hurry.”
“I just got married. I have a wife. A wife who is the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen, wearing a dress that should be banned in all fifty states. It’s been a long day and fucking weddings, and you all need to go home and sleep or consummate, because I have a date to christen an antique bar,” he dragged Zarley into his arms, “and I intend to keep it.”
A Sidelined Origins Story
RUNNING INTERFERENCE
Food. Need food. That was the mantra
in Reid’s head after a six-hour coding jag. His right hand ached across the knuckles, but that was more about how hard he’d hit the bag last night than the keyboard. Should take better care of his hands. Needed them. Running, lifting, kickboxing would be safer. Food. Need food.
He stepped out into the day and shut his eyes as the sun blinded him. When was the last time he’d stood in the sun? Months. Before the semester began. He’d been toting roof tiles, trying to pay attention to what he was doing so he didn’t step off a beam and go through the insulation, land in some unlucky householder’s kitchen covered in plaster dust and itchy fibers.
It smelled good out here. Air that wasn’t tainted by the odor of stale coffee, rotting fruit peel and a pile of laundry that needed doing. That didn’t smell of two students working in a small room with no window, not designed as a workspace.
“Hey man, you going to move?”
He shifted to let a group of students get through the door and tipped his face up to the sun, feeling it prickle on his skin and filter though his body, forcing a groan out of his mouth. He should get more sunshine. It was affordable, a quick fix for aches and pains, and a spirit lifter. Not that his spirit was low. This was where he was meant to be.
His stomach growled. Food. He’d come out for food, because he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten, there was no more of the curry Dev made and he’d started to feel light-headed.
Now he felt hot and light-headed.
Where was Dev anyway? He’d been there, on the other side of Reid’s desk and then when Reid next looked up, he simply wasn’t. He hadn’t heard him go.
A girl brushed his arm as she went past. That’s when he realized he was standing on the walkway like an idiot while the rest of Stanford navigated around him. But that’s because his head wasn’t here, it was back in his room, trying to figure out why that code hadn’t done what he’d wanted it to do. His stomach, however, was most definitely standing in the sunshine and rumbling.
Twenty minutes. That’s all he should need. Find food. Eat food. Go back to his room and get that fucking code to work. At some point, he had to hand in an assignment because he still needed to graduate, in case he couldn’t crack the unicorn idea and crash out of school to do a Gates/Zuckerberg.
So far the unicorn code cracking had been a giant stinking ball of shit. There was a job search somewhere in his future and it was dumb to resent that. Having a decent job in the IT industry meant he’d never have to go back home and work as a roofer, do odd laboring jobs again. He still resented it. He didn’t want a job. He wanted to moon walk, do something no one else had done before.
He just wasn’t sure how he was going to get anyone to believe he was capable of being anything more than a crack programmer, an ace engineer.
Except Dev.
Dev already had him fitted for moon boots.
And there was something disturbing about how that made him feel. Like it might legitimately be possible to be something more than the weird, awkward loner whose study was part-funded by a church scholarship, who forgot to eat, and stood numbly in the sunshine making people walk around him.
One foot in front of the other, heat on the back of his neck. He should’ve shaved, probably. Needed a haircut. Needed a new logic that . . .
“Watch where you’re going.”
“Huh?”
“Lughead.”
Short people. They were a hazard. They had no idea how easy they were to walk into.
It was the short people who alerted him to Dev. He’d have walked past otherwise. He almost did anyway. Dev was talking to a chick, lots of hair and big sunglasses. They sat on the lawn and whatever Dev was saying made her laugh. Dev was good at that, making people feel at ease. He was a kind of savant. It was no effort at all for him to make other people smile, laugh, want to spend time with him. That Dev wanted to spend time with Reid was one of life’s mysteries, but he’d come to accept it like he accepted alien life existed without proof. It had an internal logic he trusted.
Reid squinted at them. If he went back the way he’d come, he could avoid them. He’d see Dev later and he didn’t want to interrupt. Maybe Dev was trying to score. He should watch, it might be instructive. Hah.
Nope. Total distraction.
He swung around to go back the way he’d come. He had enough to worry about without some chick messing with his head. Once, he’d let that happen once. That had been instructive. And sex, half his class were out of their heads chasing tail and getting laid. Someone was always crying in the corridors, smack-talking in the gym. Who needed the hassle of that?
“Reid.” Dev was on his feet, calling across the lawn. Anyone else, he’d keep walking, but he couldn’t do that to Dev. There was a possibility he might actually starve without Dev bringing him food on the regular.
He lifted his hand, a half-hearted wave. “Check you later.”
“Sandwich.” Dev lifted a paper bag and waggled it.
He was so hungry his stomach was stuck to his ribs and he could taste bile. Will socialize for food. He picked his way across the lawn to Dev.
“Sarina Gallo, this is my lab partner, Reid McGrath.”
Sarina smiled up at him. She patted the grass beside her. “Sit. You’re blocking the sun.”
He sat. Dev handed him the paper bag. He scarfed the sandwich while Sarina asked him questions to which he alternatively nodded and shook his head until she said, “When was the last time you ate?”
He shrugged. Dev said, “When was the last time you slept?”
“Sleep is for pussies,” he mumbled, but the food, the sun; he could sleep, right here on the lawn. “I’m close.” Too close to stop now.
“He’s written this algorithm,” Dev said, “It’s genius.” Reid tuned out, letting the sun and the calories trickle thought his body as Dev explained what they were trying to build.
“Your own start-up. Impressive,” Sarina slid her glasses off. “I should get a photo with you both so I can say I knew you before you were rich and famous.”
“Only the code so far,” said Dev.
Not even. The code didn’t work, and Reid wasn’t naive enough to think the code alone was a business.
“But it’s a start. Reid has a vision.”
He had a headache. He should get a pair of cheap sunglasses if he was going to sit around in the sun wasting time. He didn’t so much have a vision, he had an obsession and he couldn’t think past it to achieve basic health and hygiene. He looked around the lawn: groups laughing, dude with a guitar, a couple making out. A different experience to the one he was living. Did he want to sit on the lawn trying to look cool with an instrument or argue about which superhero was primo, like the two losers to his left? Not a fucking chance.
“So, out with it,” Sarina said.
She didn’t really want to know, no one outside the lab did, but Dev was grinning at him so maybe this was part of the mating ritual he didn’t grok, and he didn’t want to fail Dev, so he told Sarina he wanted to revolutionize the way people worked in teams, make it more efficient, logical, create time-saving tools and mechanisms to allow for creativity, for handing work off and allowing deep collaboration, and the surprising thing is she took her sunglasses off and her eyes didn’t glaze over.
“That’s it,” he said, knowing he struggled to find the right words to express himself clearly and probably sounded insane using words like revolutionize. “Don’t expect you to get it.”
“He doesn’t mean to be rude. He’s nutrient deficient,” said Dev.
Sarina laughed and put her glasses back on. Reid squinted at her. Mostly people didn’t laugh at him. Mostly they avoided him. He needed to get back. He had work to do. He didn’t have the luxury of sitting around in the sun like a loser.
“I know your type,” she said.
“Type? Are you one of those social science majors who think we’re all motivated by the same core values or character traits or some crap?”
“What if I am?”
“You’re going to put a label on me and expect me to behave like a textbook cutout. It’s bullshit.”
“Reid,” Dev hissed. “Play nice with the other students.”
“Vague experimentation and subjectivity. Never made anything happen. Waste of time.”
“I’m sorry, he’s so, he’s so . . . he can’t do people,” said Dev.
Sarina looked at Dev. “You don’t have to apologize for him, but it’s cute you want to.”
If Dev could see his face—pink, and nothing to do with the sun. “I’m out.” Reid got to his feet. He could eat again, but he’d rather be working.
“Won’t surprise me if you do it,” she said.
“Do what?” He’d almost forgotten her existence. Dev looked at her as if she was the reason there was a sun.
“Break things. Make new stuff happen.”
“Why would you say that?” He’d been rude to her and she didn’t care.
“Because I’m one of those social science waste of time majors and you have a way about you that makes me think you’re part bulldozer.”
“Usually that’s a complaint.”
“You’re not trying to dig the usual hole.”
“I have to go.” He turned to pick a path across the crowded lawn. What were all these people doing out here in the middle of the day? Didn’t they have classes to attend?
“I’m keeping Dev.”
He swung back around. Dev had never worn a smile so freaking enormous. “What does that mean?”
“He tripped over me. He’s smart and funny and I like him.”
Dev batted his big cow eyes at her. “You do?” Fricking hell, now he’d be useless. There’d be time wasted. There’d be crying and smack talk.
Shotgun Wedding (Sidelined #4) Page 13
