“I don’t want it to stop being fun.”
“Until it does.” Maybe she needed to teach him to be more closed up, like most men she knew. Like her own father. This putting it all out there stuff was oddly harder to deal with than strained silences. It was easy to shut the door on the silences without a backward glance.
“We come from very different worlds. The apartment I share with my friend, Cara, is a walk-up. It’s tiny. The kitchen is a galley. There’s a Korean restaurant beneath us so it always smells of kimchi. The fire brigade has been called to Se Jong’s three times this month. I catch the bus or the trolley or I walk. But there’s real sugar in our sugar bowl.”
“You’re saying different doesn’t work.”
“I’m an exotic dancer and if you’re not a drug dealer then you’re some trust fund douchebag who doesn’t know how to order a decorator service.”
He laughed, a gruff sound that came accompanied with a stomach gurgle. “Stay and let me feed you. I’ll tell you my story.”
“Tell me about this. She put her hand over the tattoo on his pec. Script decorated with scrolls and curlicues, a short-sided cross, stumpy like a plus sign, that had wings, flowers and a red heartbeat center, with the words twisted into the design: It’s your road and yours alone, others may walk it with you, but no one can walk it for you.
His stomach growled again. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know, but we need to eat.” He uncurled himself from her and sat. “You take the en suite. I’ll use the other bathroom. Meet you in the kitchen.”
Washed, dried, except for her hair, teeth cleaned again, a text sent to Cara who might think she was dead, and dressed in yoga pants and a t-shirt, but barefoot, she met Reid in the kitchen. He was dressed too, in the same sweats and t-shirt he’d had on earlier.
He totally checked her out.
“What?” She knew what. The fact he wanted them naked again together was in his eyes, but she wanted to hear him say it.
“What else do you carry in that bag?”
She laughed, he didn’t like being predictable. Textbooks, her laptop, a burned-out hairdryer which she kept forgetting to ditch, a costume that needed washing, her robe, spare underwear, tape, Band-Aids, Biofreeze, butt glue, pole wax, makeup, hairspray, toothbrush, hairbrush, condoms, apartment keys, headache tablets and mints, and that was off the top of her head. She’d lived out of a sports bag most of her life and the habit sure came in handy at times like this.
She took the stool. “I like to travel prepared.”
“I like that about you.”
“Right now you like everything about me and I’m going to bask in that a while.”
He grinned. There were plates on the counter, forks. The microwave pinged. “There’s so much to like about you, it’s hard to know where to start.” He turned away and took a container out of the microwave and put another one in. Had he not learned the rule that men made women work for approval?
“You know you’re supposed to be playing hard to get, making me sweat for compliments and worry about whether you’re really interested in me or I’m just a warm body.”
He turned to face her, a hand to his head in a gesture of exasperation. “Why the fuck would I do that?”
It’s what most of the men she’d hung out with did. And every coach, even Costin. You got the approval when you got things right and not before. “It’s what people do.”
“Did I tell you I’m no good with people? I don’t do the things they do.”
She could see that. Not only his choosing to be alone and apart, he had that unnerving laser focus, direct manner and commanding nature, that confronting honesty. And he could be grumpy, sulky and moody, though he was none of those things now. He’d also lost that uncomfortable nervous edge he’d had when they were last in the kitchen together.
“Are you religious?” Was that part of the reason he’d stayed a virgin?
“Hell, no. My mom is. The town I came from is God-fearing. Never knew my father. There’s no trust fund. There was no money. I went to college on a scholarship and a church fundraiser paid my first year’s living expenses. After that I worked as a laborer in the summers, bricklaying, roofing, doing odd jobs on building sites.”
Hah, that accounted for the ease with which he’d picked her up and tossed her around and why he didn’t have a soft office body.
The microwave pinged. He began plating food, his back to her. “I started a software company in college and it took off. I hired friends, Owen, Dev and Sarina, and we worked our asses off and got proper funding and started to make money.” He put a plate in front of her. Rice and vegetable dhal. It smelled delicious. “It paid for this apartment and a new house for Mom and, you know,” he didn’t break eye contact where a more modest man might’ve. “I’m comfortably well-off.”
“But you’re unemployed.” She picked up her fork.
“I’m loaded.”
And froze with it halfway to her mouth. “But you took your pity party to Lucky’s.”
He picked up his own plate and fork. “Your point?”
“You could’ve been somewhere high-end. You were slumming it with us. No, wait. Are you loaded enough not to need another job sometime soon?”
“Yep. Eat.” He took a forkful of food.
“Holy shit.” Some of the kids she’d trained with came from exceptionally well-off families, but Reid was young. “You’re not even thirty. Are you some freaky techno whiz kid?”
“Yes. Eat, Zarley.”
“Holy shit.” She picked up her fork and shoveled food into her mouth because a fucking millionaire had microwaved it for her.
“But I need to work. I don’t know what to do when I’m not working. It never occurred to me I could go furniture shopping or get a girlfriend.”
“A girlfriend.” He needed a girl who’d love him for his honesty and not take advantage of him for his wealth. “This food is awesome. When I’m done with your sex education, you’ll be able to snap your fingers and potential girlfriends will knock themselves out trying to get to you, especially when they know you can nuke food like a boss.”
“What if I’ve got a certain girlfriend already picked out?”
“Reid.”
Laser-focus eyes. No confusion in them. None. “Zarley.” And damn her foolish heart, she liked it. The dhal was mild but her temperature spiked anyway.
“How did you lose your job?”
He poured water for them both. “I was crap with people.”
“How do you lose your job for that?” Crap with people seemed to be a prerequisite for some jobs.
“My turn.”
“How can what I already know about you be worse than knowing how you lost your job? I’ve seen you paralytic drunk and vomiting.” She’d seen him so strung out on desire he was barely functioning and that was an incredible turn-on.
He groaned and put his empty plate down. “It’s my turn. A gymnast. That explains a lot.”
“What exactly does it explain? Apart from the fact you can be damn pushy.”
He straight up ignored that. “Your phenomenal body. Muscle tone, strength, the way you move, graceful, sensual, powerful. You’re the total athlete. Retiring must have been difficult. What happened to you?”
She smoothed a hand over her chest. “I grew tits and hips. I had to get used to a whole new body after being a plank for so long.”
“I love your hips and your tits.”
“And yet they’re not big enough for the exotic dance world. Not that I’m doing anything about it, so there’s that standing in the way of me being a proper stripper.”
His eyes narrowed. “I’m an asshole for riding you—all of you, about that.”
He was an asshole for making her talk about this stuff. “No, it’s the truth. All of us dance at Lucky’s because we’re too scared to apply to a better club, not willing to embrace the sex industry any further than we already do. We’re half pregnant, like you said.”
“Go back to when yo
u retired. What were you doing while you were growing tits and hips?”
“I was lost. I lived gymnastics and a chance at a gold medal from the age of five. When it didn’t happen I didn’t know what to do with myself. I’m still working it out.”
He clacked his teeth together, glass stalled halfway to his mouth. “You were Olympic standard?”
“I made the team.”
“That would mean you went to—”
She shook her head and chased a few cold grains of rice around her plate with her fork. “I didn’t go. I don’t want to talk about this. Your turn.”
“Were you injured? That has to be the huge risk.”
“Your turn. It’s enough to know I didn’t get to go.”
“Why didn’t you go? If it wasn’t an injury, what—?”
She stood up, the stool squeaking on the floor. “Lunch was great. Want to fuck?”
“Zarley.”
“Come on, you know that’s what you want.”
“I know we have fucking great sexual chemistry.” He scrubbed his face with both hands and exhaled in frustration. “But I’m trying to learn this people thing and you’re annoyed because I got in your face about dancing and the end of your sporting career.”
“You don’t approve of my dancing.”
“I never said that. I wonder why you’re not a coach or an official in the gymnastics world.”
“That wasn’t an option.”
“Why not?”
“Fuck off, Reid.”
“I made you angry?”
“That’s a question? No kidding, you’re not good at people.”
“I’ve put you off our thing, haven’t I?”
“We have a sex thing and I’m not ready for it to be a thing where you judge me, or railroad me, refused to listen to me or talk over me to get what you—”
“I am.”
He interrupted her. Unbelievable. “That kind of stuff was my life. Every coach I had. I don’t need it, or want it, anymore and certainly not from a man I’m having a thing with.”
“I want us to be more than a thing.”
She sighed. “You’re high on the sex, in love with the sex, and I’m the sex. That’s great, but it’s not more. You admitted you were confused. I can be your first. Your hot wild time, but I can’t be your girlfriend.”
“Why not?”
Why not, why not? God, she liked him enough, even when he was being an arrogant ass. She’d mastered arrogant ass in her teens, every coach, every official, the occasional host family parent, and maybe their backgrounds weren’t so far apart. But he lived in a very different world and had complication stamped on his forehead, and what exactly did they have after she’d finished his sexual initiation?
He came out from behind the counter. “I was sacked because I was a disruptive influence.” He stood in front of her, his tension clear in the line of his shoulders. “I stressed people out. I was a morale problem. The reason we had trouble keeping staff.” He didn’t break eye contact and he looked at her, daring her to. “I was disrespectful and overly aggressive and constantly humiliated and belittled people. It wasn’t intentional, but that’s how it was. There was a sexual harassment suit against me.”
He sighed, one hand flapping at his side in a helpless gesture. “I can’t do the people stuff, Zarley. Is it any wonder I stayed away from women? And you’d think, given the uber-smart guy status, I’d have learned.” He tapped his chest, over his tattoo. “I was given enough chances.” His throat worked, his jaw was tight. This was his humiliation. “I was sacked because I was slowly grinding the business I founded and loved my whole adult life into the ground.”
She stepped forward so she could stand toe to toe with him, because that’s what the truth deserved. He wasn’t such a stranger anymore.
He was the oddest mix of arrogance and uncertainty. A go it alone guy who was desperate to connect and smart enough to see his own ineptitude was screwing him over, but not confident enough to fix things. He was living two thirds of his tattoo and none the wiser.
“I got pregnant at eighteen. I had a boyfriend, Dalton. We’d been lovers secretly since we were sixteen. I thought we’d be together for the rest of our lives. We were careful and I was on birth control and I’d rarely ovulated anyway, so it shouldn’t have happened. I was booted off the team during the trials in disgrace.” She pushed her hands through her damp hair, it was full of tangles she hadn’t properly brushed out, like her life.
“Then I miscarried. My whole town was banking on me being an Olympic champion. Every year there was a fundraiser to help pay for my coaching until I went pro and got sponsors. I should’ve been a medal contender, a golden girl, instead I was a failure, a pregnant slut and a disappointment to everyone in my world.”
He reached for her. “Jesus Christ, Zarley.” He didn’t try to maul her or smother her. He went for her hands and simply folded them in his, his eyes never leaving hers.
“I don’t talk to my parents, my brother. I don’t go home. I haven’t been home for five years. Dalton joined the army. His father pushed him into it. He lost his foot in an accident during a training operation. And as far as everyone is concerned that’s on me too, because he should never have joined up.” Reid didn’t flinch. He didn’t shift. He didn’t waver his eye contact or let go her hands, not even when she was blinking away tears.
“Dalton got bitter and I got stupid. I had no idea how to live without the rigors of training and there was no place for me in the gymnastics world. I had no other skills and no way of getting a scholarship or paying for college without asking my parents, and I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. I worked as a cashier, a shelf stocker. I delivered singing telegrams. I drank and did drugs. I had a lot of sex with a lot of men, and lived up to my potential as a loser.”
She took a ragged breath. These were all of her secret pains and she gave them to Reid because he’d given her his. “And then twelve months ago I stopped doing all that. No more random hook-ups, no more drink, no more drugs. I enrolled in business at SF State. If I can hold it all together for a couple of years I might get to make something of my life. I got the job at Lucky’s because it pays better than the other crappy jobs, and I can attend school during the day. I bummed around for four years, Reid, and I still don’t have it all together. I can be the girl you have spectacular sex with, but I’m not the girl you want to have more with.”
He jerked her hands so she was forced to bump against him. He had a severe look on his face, as though he might start yelling. “I’m buying that second stool.”
“Did you listen to anything I said? You looked like you listened but—” He stopped her mouth with a kiss. It was hard and pinched and wondrous in its intensity.
“We’re having a thing and it’s bigger than this weekend. That’s what I heard,” he said. “Now take me to bed and let’s do the one where we break something.”
THIRTEEN
They did the one where they fell on each other, kissed till they were breathless and crawled all over each other’s bodies finding ways with hands and lips and tongues, to fill the room with their moans and whimpers, to fill the voids in their lives with hope and pleasure.
Reid couldn’t tell who was leading and who was following, only that he didn’t want it ever to end, not this day in his bed, or this thing with Zarley.
What she’d gone through topped his drama, what she still had to do to find her place in the world was so much harder than it would be for him. She was starting at the bottom with the kimchi smells, student loans and the need for bus fare. He felt fiercely protective of her, in awe of her bravery and desperately uncertain about what she might need from him, what he had to give.
He didn’t know being a boyfriend from reading a wireframe.
She engineered their first orgasms; he gave her the second, asking and receiving instructions on how to use his tongue, what to do with his fingers, intent on topping the class and ruining the teacher.
She taught him to vary t
he pace and the pressure, to curl his fingers, stroke and tug, to suck and blow and nibble, and she thrashed beneath him until she came shaking and sobbing the tears she’d tried earlier to blink away. He couldn’t do people but he knew that’s what was happening to her, grief, regret, release, and when she curled into his embrace he held her, his chest tight with other emotions he couldn’t name and fear he’d do or say something stupid to send her away.
And that included being insensitive and doing nothing.
“I’m glad you told me.”
“Why?”
Stomped. Reid rested his hand over Zarley’s sacrum, thumb to the dimple. Why was he glad? Glad she’d told him about the way her life derailed, how was that a thing to be glad about? “It’s important to you.” That was a dodge and he knew it. She didn’t respond. “I’m not glad it happened to you. It was a shitty way to end your career and your affair and Jesus, did you want a baby?”
She was silent a long time. Long enough for him to assume he’d have been better off asking for another lesson than pretending he knew what to say.
“I didn’t know I was pregnant, but I was sick all the time and the team doctor did a bunch of blood tests and that’s how I learned it, with my coach, Costin, in the room. They thought it was glandular fever. Costin had no choice but to boot me off the team. He’d gone out on a limb to keep me because I was the oldest and there was pressure to let a younger gymnast go instead of me. I’d have been five months pregnant when the games started. I think he was even more disappointed in me than my family. It hurt his career. And it was impossible to keep it secret. When the Olympic team loses a medal hope everyone wants to know why and no one was kind. Not to me, not to Costin, or Dalton. We didn’t want a baby, not then, but we’d have loved it.”
He smoothed his hand over her hip, spreading his fingers on her belly. It was hard to imagine what she’d look like pregnant, her stomach was concave. Her life had been cratered by the life she’d carried. He had to know. “Dalton. Is he still around?”
“I loved Dalton. I’ll always love him. But we’re not in each other’s lives anymore. We tried again. I’d moved here to live with Cara. He’d been medically discharged. We both had new bodies and we thought we could be together again, but it was different, too much,” she sighed and it had an ancient sound to it. “Too much had changed. Neither of us were who we had been.”
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