Offensive Behavior (Sidelined #1) (24 page)

Holy
fuck, what was this? “Dev, I didn’t—”

“Shut
up, Reid. You broke something in me. I’m done with you. And I’m ashamed to call
you my friend.”

“Dev,
I’m.” He wasn’t sorry for what he’d done but he didn’t know Dev would be
affected that way. Thought he’d understand, be the first one to backslap him. “I’m.
I didn’t . . .” But Dev was gone, making his way to the elevators, almost at a
run. Reid started after him but was waylaid by a white-faced and furious Kuch
on his way to the stage. Kuch headed straight toward him, then cut him at the
last moment in an obvious show of disrespect, but all Reid cared about was
getting to Dev before he left the hotel.

Sarina
got there first. She took Dev’s arm. She was crying, black smudges from her
makeup giving her Panda eyes.

“Leave
it alone, Reid. You’ve done enough damage,” she said.

“Dev,
please, let me explain.”

Dev
turned, his hand on elevator call button. “I don’t want your explanation. I’m
sure it makes perfect sense to you. I’m sure you’re convinced it was the right
thing to do, but it was still an asshole act so I don’t even want to hear your
voice. Tell Zarley it was nice to meet her.” The elevator pinged and the door
opened. Dev stepped in and Sarina followed. “Have a great life,” Dev said as
the door closed, and they were gone.

Fuck,
fuck, fuck. Reid pumped the call button and eyed the stairs. Should he try to
catch them, make them listen, but he’d left Zarley again. They’d come back,
they wouldn’t leave the function. Dev had never spoken to him like that and Reid
had never, not once, made Sarina cry.

He knew
they’d hate this, but didn’t think it would affect him. He felt this in his
body like it was poison slowly leaking into his vital organs.

He went
back to the table. He avoided eye contact with anyone. His brain was spinning
and he couldn’t get it to settle. Kuch was leading a round of toasts. He arrived
in time for everyone to stand, for a glass of champagne to be shoved in his
hand. He had to drink a toast to himself when he’d rather take a knife to his
throat.

Zarley
leaned in to his shoulder and whispered, “Something went wrong.”

He put
his empty glass down and snatched her hand. “Let me show you the sculptures.”

He
pulled her through the room, walking too fast, weaving in out of the tables, and
groups of people retaking their seats, keeping his eyes on the staircase to the
gallery where the exhibition was. He didn’t look left or right and no one dared
stop him. He took the stairs at a gallop, dragging on Zarley’s hand. She called
his name, tried to slow him up, but he needed to get out of the room, away from
all the eyes on him.

They
arrived on the gallery floor, surprising a couple necking, who laughingly
parted and moved downstairs. There was another group here, two women and a man.
Reid didn’t know them, didn’t care. He sent them a stare that made one of the
women put a hand to her throat.

Zarley held
onto his arm. “What happened?” She was still holding the skirt of her dress in
her other hand.

He’d
learned the true meaning of asshole. He’d learned it at the expense of the best
friends he’d ever had, the only true friends. He’d screwed his life up and
theirs. He’d never been so right and so wrong at the same time. Even if he got
Plus back into his control, he’d lost the best thing about it.

He
dragged Zarley across the other side of the gallery away from the sightseers. He
pulled her into his arms and spoke into her ear. “I fucked my life, my friends,
everything, I fucked everything up.”

She put
her hands to his chest. “You spoke well, it seemed fine to me. I don’t
understand.”

He
stepped away, shot a glance over his shoulder. The others had moved toward the
staircase. “You can’t understand, you can’t.” He was too loud. “I told that
whole room I had no faith in Owen or Kuch, in any of them.” He stopped and
tried to rein his temper in, to find a way to explain it to her. “I stood in
front of my whole company and told them they were C-grade without me. That’s
what I did. Just like I did to you. I proved how entitled and arrogant, how
much of an unchecked asshole I am.” He was shouting. He took another step away
from Zarley and noticed the other group had gone.

“Getting
canned taught me nothing. It’s my fucking ego. Because I don’t like to lose,
because I’m always right, and I couldn’t see it as a setback.” His head was
going to explode. “Fuck.”

She
stared at him with big wide eyes. She was so beautiful, so miraculously in his
life when he’d needed someone beside him, and he’d fucked it up with her too.

“You
should leave. You’re fucking wasting your time with me. I’ll call the car for
you.”

She put
her hands up and walked to him. “Reid, take a breath.”

“It was
great, our thing. I had no idea it could be like that. Best thing that ever
happened to me was you.”

He took
her hands and yanked her into his body. He kissed her, hard. He expected her to
push him away. He’d have welcomed a slap. She held onto his shoulders and
kissed him back.

All the
rage he felt, all the savage hatred of the small man he’d revealed himself to
be, bubbled up and poured out of him, turned his arms to a steel cage around
her, his lips into weapons assaulting her skin. “Go, Flygirl. Run before I hurt
you worse.”

“I’m
not leaving you.”

“I’m
not in control. I want to fuck you right here. Let them see me fuck you, like I
fucked with them.”

She
would scream rape, she’d blacken his eye before it happened. She’d fly away and
he’d be alone again.

She put
her hands in his hair and pulled his head down, looked him in the eye and said,
“Now you know failure.” His knees buckled, but she held on to him. “I won’t
leave you. This is the reason I’m here. I want you. Do it.”

He
crashed into her mouth, hands in her hair, pulling at it to release it from the
pins holding it. He backed her into an archway. He palmed the strap of the
dress off her shoulder and pulled it down, down, till her breast popped free,
and his mouth went there, tongue flicking, sucking tight, forcing a moan from
her. Anyone could look up and see them, come up the stairs and catch them. Let
them. He gathered her dress in his arms, drawing it up her legs. She was naked
underneath it and he hadn’t guessed. He was self-destructing and she was pulling
at his shirt, undoing his belt, she was exploding apart with him.

He
found her wet, and she rocked into his fingers as beneath them the band started
up. People would be dancing. He didn’t dance so Dev would’ve asked Zarley to,
would’ve teased Reid about it, later, would’ve put his hands on her gently, and
made her laugh. Owen would’ve cut in, would’ve charmed her and Reid would’ve
hated it, burned for it. But that’s what she deserved, someone like Dev or
Owen, someone smoother, gentler and experienced. Someone with enough emotional
intelligence to understand his effect on others, and never, never hurt the ones
he loved.

Zarley
would leave him and his failure would be complete, but he would have her now,
this one last time. He hitched her leg to his hip, she curved against him and
he entered her on a single thrust with a shout he couldn’t contain and
lightning strikes inside his eyes.

TWENTY

Reid was a storm of destructive emotion and Zarley was the land he
broke over. She gathered all his panic, shame, guilt, and the sharp pain of his
sudden awareness and took them into her body so he couldn’t use them to hurt
himself. Because she was strong, and in this, he was freshly scored, and
lashing out with misdirected fury. He was already wounded and she understood
the shock of engineering your own downfall and what it meant to become
unanchored because of it.

If she could save Reid from himself she
would.

There’d
been no one to save her.

He
battered into her and she absorbed his energy and grounded him, letting him
pour his angst into her, both of them climaxing fast and sharp. He came back to
himself then, but with remorse that made him unable to meet her eyes, even
while his hands sought to soothe her.

They
put themselves back together. There was a restroom on this floor and Zarley was
able to repair her hair and makeup enough to allow them to leave without
calling attention to themselves, but it turned out there was an elevator on
this floor. They could take it to street level and avoid going back into the
ballroom. She tried to take Reid’s hand when they stepped inside it, but he
brushed her off and then made a sound of distress and grabbed for it, holding too
tight.

“I
don’t know what to say about what I just did to you.”

“Nothing
that I didn’t want, Reid.”

“It
was—”

“A
little wild.”

“I was
unhinged and I took it out on you. That’s not acceptable.”

“To
whom?”

The
elevator door opened and he put his hand over it to hold it while she stepped
out. The car was waiting. “I’ll take you back to Kathryn’s.”

She
stopped and turned to him, put her hand to his face. “I’m staying with you.”

“I
could’ve hurt you.”

“You
didn’t. You didn’t break a stitch in this dress.”

The
driver opened the door for her and she settled inside. When Reid slid in the
other side, he stayed against the door, so she went to him, easing across the
seat, taking his hand and making him put his arm over her shoulder. She
snuggled into his side and he sighed, resting his cheek on her head.

“You’re
sure you want to stay with me.”

“One
hundred percent.”

He gave
the driver instructions to return to his place via a liquor store. This is what
he’d meant on the way here about not disappointing her. He’d wanted her to see
his triumph, instead she was witness to his darkest of hours.

“I
talked to Sarina while you were busy. I like her. She said she misses having
you around.”

Reid
brought his arm down and she sat straighter, giving him space. “I made her cry
tonight. Fuck. I made Sarina cry. I’ve made women at work cry, but never
Sarina. I broke her heart tonight. And Dev, the way he looked at me. Owen was
the first person in college not to treat me like a redneck hick. I thought when
they sided with Kuch to oust me I’d read too much into our friendship, that it
was over. I was wrong. But it’s over now. I’ve fucked it all up.”

“You
can fix it. You can apologize. Grovel.”

The car
came to a stop outside a bodega. Reid opened the car door.

“I’ve destabilized
the company. If I get back in Dev will quit, so will Owen. No amount of groveling
can fix that, can take away the fact I made Sarina cry. I made Dev hate me, and
Owen. God, I made Owen’s job impossible. If he was a different man, he’d put a
hit out on me.”

He got
out of the car and went into the store, returned with a clink of bottles and
another suggestion he take her back to Kathryn’s which she declined. They rode
the rest of the way to Reid’s apartment in silence and inside he made for the
terrace, shedding his coat and tie, rolling the sleeves of his dress shirt up,
a bottle in his hand.

He was
going to trash himself.

She
went to the bedroom and took the dress off. It didn’t have a mark on it. She
put her robe on and took her makeup off, brushed her hair out and then she went
to him.

“Come
to bed, Reid.”

He shook
his head. He had a grip on the balcony railing, using it to hold himself up. He
took slug from the bottle.

She
loosened the tie on her robe, let it hang open. “Flesh and bones beats booze.”

He
groaned. “I can’t touch you.”

“You
didn’t hurt me.”

He looked
out at the bay. The hand holding the bottle shook. She took it from him and he
didn’t resist.

“I
don’t trust myself not to take this out on you.”

She put
the bottle on the floor. He’d forgotten to furnish the deck. “You felt rage.” She
stepped onto his dress shoes, stood on her toes. “But you banked it.” She put
her hand over his heart. It’s why he was shaking now. A kind of shock at realizing
what he’d done, but not to her, to himself. “You would’ve stopped if I’d asked
you to.”

He
removed her hand. “You should’ve. I don’t know what that sex lesson was but I
don’t want a repeat of it. It scared me. It still scares me. I need time. I
need a drink, I need.” He stopped and shook his head. He wasn’t making eye
contact. He hadn’t since the gallery, his eyes flitting everywhere but never catching
on hers. She felt the absence as a gnaw of anxiety in her belly. “You should
sleep in the other room tonight.”

“If you
want me to. If you promise not to drink that whole bottle and the one in the
kitchen.”

He hung
his head. “I don’t understand how you can be here with me. I’m an overprivileged
asshole who never looked his own failings in the eye, playing at master of the
universe, and you knew that from the beginning.”

“How
important is Ziggurat?”

He
frowned, tried to wave the question off but answered anyway. “It’s critical. Company
revenues will halve in the next two to three years unless Plus is relaunched on
a more adaptive platform.”

She got
the point about the revenue. “What made you think Owen and the team can’t get
it right?”

He
explained. Half of it went over her head but the essence was that it was his
design and without him even the most talented team would have difficulty
pulling it off.

“You
believe everything you said, no bullshit.”

“None.”

“Then
you were fighting for what you believe in with the best weapons you had to
hand.”

He lifted
her off his shoes and set her a little away. He leaned on the railing and put
his head in his hands. “There’s no way to make what I did tonight right,
Zarley.”

“You’ll
find a way. I’m not saying it will be easy. But you wouldn’t have gotten here,”
she looked out at the bay, “if you didn’t know how to work smart.”

“Tell
me what to do? Because right now, all I can see is how I’ve ruined people’s
lives.”

She put
her hand to his back and smoothed it up to his neck, pushing her fingers into
his hair. “I can’t tell you what to do. This is not like Pleasing a Woman 101. You
need to sleep. You need to let this rest. In the morning it will be easier to
think it through.”

He
straightened to stand, dislodging her hand. “In the morning you’ll have worked
out this is more than the thing you signed up for.”

That’s
not how she felt. “What you said when we left Kathryn’s. To the bone and back. You
gummed my words up. I didn’t realize how much I wanted to hear something like
that from you. To know I mean more than arm candy, that I’m more than your
plaything.”

He
cupped her cheek. “So much more, Flygirl. From the beginning. But I’ve let you
down, I’ve hacked it up.”

She put
her hand over his held it to her cheek, let him feel her headshake. He was a
man who’d made a mistake and she was a woman trying to fix hers. They weren’t
so different.

He let
her lead him to bed. He washed up, undressed and lay beside her on his back,
but on the far edge of the mattress, body tense and eyes open in the dark. She
reached a hand toward him and he took it, threaded their fingers together.

“Have I
told you about comfort sex?” It was the sex she’d chased when she’d found
herself without gymnastics, without Dalton and without a clue how to rebuild
her life. “Sometimes it helps when you feel bad.”

He tightened
his grip, his elbow bent, drawing her to him. She shifted and their bodies met,
his arm wrapping her close, his forehead bent to hers. His breathing was
erratic and the sadness in him made him tentative, clumsy with his gentleness. He
wouldn’t let her have his mouth, but he held her face and kissed her cheeks,
her, jaw, her brows, the tip of her nose.

The sex
happened slowly, deliberately, with infinite care and exquisite tenderness. None
of the comfort sex Zarley had chased was like this. It was always quick and
thrilling but momentary and empty and over. None of it caught her up and made
her feel vulnerable at the same time as she felt strong and safe.

Reid’s
touch made her ache for him, made her deliciously hesitant with him, as if she
might startle him if she moved too suddenly. They pleased each other in a space
carved out from disappointment, in a cocoon of wordless passion, where her willingness
to give and Reid’s desire for relief collided in a shower of shivers and heart-stopping
quakes.

She provided
and he accepted; he offered and she received, kisses made from longing and
understanding, movements made from push and pull and lift and fill. Reid
couldn’t still the trembling of his body and his breath was snatched and
tattered. Zarley didn’t want to lose the flutter in her chest that told her
this was vital, this she had to keep. It was beyond comfort, it was raw and
revealing and drenched her senses in colors and feelings that made her body
sing to Reid’s, be mine, be only mine.

Afterward,
Reid’s face was wet and she gave him the privacy of that as they lay tangled
together in a comedown bittersweet with things felt and unsaid.

This
was complicated, but she could no more walk away from Reid now than she could
when she’d first come to his bed. Because this thing was made from the opposite
of mindless lust. It was choreographed with fragility and hope, from challenge
and difference and mutual admiration.

She
liked Reid for all his awkward grace and bullheadedness, for all his mental
quickness and physical dominance. She liked his honesty, tenacity and ambition
slammed alongside his willingness to learn from her. She liked his friends and
the fact they loved him enough to be hurt by him. She loved his body and how
he’d learned to use it to tune into hers.

She
liked this man and she wanted to keep him past the use-by date of a thing.

He
didn’t sleep; she let him think she did. Let him leave the bedroom and deal
with his demons his own way while she lay in the comfort of his bed and dealt
with hers.

In the
morning she expected to find him passed out on the sofa or brooding at his
desk. He wasn’t in the apartment. But he’d left a note.

Most
awesomest Flygirl

You
are a piece of magic like I never knew existed. I don’t know if I can hold on
to you. I don’t know if you want me to, but I’d like to try.

I’ve
got stuff to do to try to fix this mess I made, but when I get done with the groveling
I’m coming back to you to eat more dirt. I hope you’ll wait for me.

I
should be home by lunchtime.

If
you don’t want me to chase you to the ends of the earth to make things up to
you, leave me an answer.

Under
that he’d written
check one
and drawn three boxes. She had a choice
between: teach Reid about kinky sex, it was nice knowing you, or Reid who?

So not
sulking then.

Under
that he’d written.
PS: You never told me tender sex might make an asshole
like me want to weep, but in a good way.