Offensive Behavior (Sidelined #1)

by Ainslie Paton

  “What?”

  Owen said, “He’ll do.”

  “Peace out. Whatever it is you’re thinking, I’m not your man. Owen, I’ll sit on your family for you but you don’t want me back inside Plus. Dev will come up with a way to get you out of the Ziggy hole. You can get—”

  “Don’t make me come over there and beat you,” Owen said.

  Reid thumped his head back on the wall behind him twice. “Not funny.”

  “You, we want you back and you don’t have a clue why and that’s the best part,” said Sarina. “Also, we need you back. You’re probably the only one who understands how Ziggy is supposed to work. Want. Need, it’s a pretty compelling argument, don’t you think?”

  He shook his head. That latter part made sense, but the rest of what she said, horror story from central casting and he didn’t want to be the first to die. Again.

  “You didn’t need to change. You needed to wise up. You needed to grow some emotional intelligence and get a clue about how you impacted people. You needed to understand you can lift the spirits of a whole room or make everyone in it want to slash their wrists,” she said.

  “Occasionally at precisely the same time. I don’t get what you’re saying.”

  “Shut up and listen.”

  He threw his hands up. “See.”

  She laughed. “The cult of Reid McGrath is alive and well. That thing you wrote, inadvisable in two hundred million different ways, but it worked. If you’d looked at your messages you’d know how the press treated it as if you were some New Age guru who’d seen the light.”

  Reid winced. Owen said, “I made that face too, every time I saw the media roundup.”

  “You’re way more likeable when you admit to flaws,” said Sarina.

  “Wouldn’t go as far as likeable,” said Owen. “I’d give him tolerable.”

  Not so long ago Reid would have insisted being likeable had nothing to do with business, that it was irrelevant at best, a hindrance at worst. Likeable didn’t get you up mountains or out of danger quickly. Being an asshole was better for getting people to do things they never thought possible, but now he wasn’t so sure. Perhaps less asshole and more coach was a better approach. Perhaps trying to understand what each person needed most to do their best, like Zarley’s Costin, was the secret.

  “My inner asshole still needs rehab.”

  Owen groaned and Sarina grinned at him. “Admitting it is a good first step. Tell me you haven’t learned something from all this, from losing Plus and finding Zarley.”

  Giraffe heart explosion. Blood and viscera all over the room. He’d learned two hundred million different things from trying to escape into a bottle; from pole dancers and fast women who tried to pick him up in bars, from the wisdom of multiple stools, to joining the mile-high club and finding a comrade in the dark; from disappointing the people he loved the most, and facing the fact he was a half-formed man who had a long way to go to be whole, but had found the incredible woman who would stand by him while he worked it all out.

  But getting Plus back, that was outside the realm of any magic Zarley had and any expectation he’d factored for.

  “I can’t do it.”

  “You can. We’ll help,” said Sarina.

  “I’m not helping, not till I can piss standing up,” said Owen.

  Could he do this without fucking it up? Zarley had wanted rules and then only came up with two, that he couldn’t buy her and she needed him to need her. “I need a rule.”

  “The no asshole rule is still in effect,” said Sarina.

  He smiled for the first time since seeing Owen, pale and bruised and scarily packed in his hospital bed as if he was never getting free of the drips and wires and cages.

  “It needs a modifier.” It needed Zarley’s rule. “You can’t buy me.”

  Sarina clapped her hand on her knee. “Bargain. My best hire ever. You’re going to work for free.”

  He’d consider it. Strike a deal where he only earned a payment if Ziggurat launched on time with no major bugs or loss of customers. “You can’t buy my way out of trouble. I need to be held fully accountable for any misery I make.” He pointed at Sarina. “You can’t come along behind me and mop up the tears. Dev can’t quietly talk folk I’m evil to off the ledge. I can’t learn to be less of an asshole if you protect me from the damage I cause.”

  Sarina looked at Owen. “You sure you want him back?”

  Owen blinked with heavy lids, then pinned Reid’s eyes with his. “Pretty damn sure I’m not going to remember any of this. Go back to work Reid, and don’t ever let Zarley go.”

  When he left Owen’s room and met Zarley in the waiting room, Reid’s giraffe heart was back inside his chest, and pounding an entirely different rhythm, to an old favorite tune with a sultry pole-dance beat.

  THIRTY

  Zarley woke with a start and glanced at the clock. 4 a.m., was he kidding?

  Reid slipped into the bed beside her. “Sorry, Flygirl, was trying not to wake you.”

  His voice was froggy with exhaustion and she was well and truly awake. “It’s almost morning.”

  “Hmm, need a few hours.”

  He’d called at ten, told her not to wait up. It’d been this way since they got back, but never this late. He worked and worked and rarely came home to do anything but sit in his office and work or crash into bed, where they inevitably made each other feel good before Reid slept like someone pulled the plug on him.

  Cara joked that if she didn’t see Reid in passing at Plus where she worked in the customer team, Zarley could well have killed him and disposed of the body in an acid bath. The occasional random men’s t-shirt left over a chair or an empty juice carton on the kitchen counter were merely placed there strategically to cover her tracks.

  Cara’s main concern about living with them hadn’t come to pass. Cara wasn’t the third wheel, Reid was.

  And sometimes Zarley was.

  “You can’t keep working like this.”

  Other gymnasts had said, you can’t keep training this hard, but she had.

  “Hmm.” He was almost asleep, but roused himself enough to find her hand to hold.

  It felt mean to be angry with him, but she was. Not for waking her, and not for anything he’d done or said. He’d made it easy for her and Cara to take over his home, set it up the way they were most comfortable, stock his cupboards with food and throw out the chipped plates and cracked cups for new ones. It was almost as if this apartment was theirs and Reid was the other roommate.

  And that’s not how she’d thought it would go. Not that there’d been much time to think, the accident had cut their stay in Paris short, and Reid had gone from the airport to the hospital where he’d spent the next two days and then started back at Plus in his old job as CEO.

  She’d expected him to work hard, but not like this. He worked like he was purpose-built to handle complex problems at the speed of light. He worked like obsession was for beginners and full-scale commitment was the new black. He didn’t seem to tire abnormally or get overly grumpy, and he didn’t lose interest in her, he simply transformed into a man whose most intense relationship was with his work.

  And she pined for him.

  He worked like he was in love with the work and that was the most disturbing thing of all. Because she should’ve known that. He’d hacked his life around work. And he’d taken it to the extreme when he’d lost Plus. It’s what his drunken nights at Lucky’s were about. It’s what the empty apartment and the fridge full of pre-prepared food meant. It’s why he had cracked unmatched tableware, and homemade vintage t-shirts alongside his fully equipped office and gym.

  Everything around him existed to facilitate the ease with which he worked. Anything that didn’t was peripheral. Who needed nice dinnerware or a dining table when you were never around to use them? Who needed a fancy car when you wanted the quickest ride to work or a second stool when you barely used one?

  All of which left her scrambling, because m
aybe she was peripheral too.

  Like she’d once thought Reid would be for her.

  And that’s what made her angry. Maybe what they had together was the equivalent of a holiday romance. Extraordinary but unreal, and hard to keep hold of when the day to day took over.

  Or maybe it was because he was getting on with his life and hers had stalled.

  Zarley watched Reid dream, his eyeballs moving under his closed lids, and knew she was done with sleep. In her dream she had a job and a lock on what she’d do with her degree. She’d been unlucky so far looking for work. Lizabeth, who was waitressing and hated it, tried to set up her up with a job but it fell through. She’d applied at the other bars in town that had dancers, only to be told there was a waiting list because no girl liked student debt. Her Madame Amour experience had earned her nothing except curiosity.

  That was the difference between her and Reid now. When they’d met, he’d been waiting to work out his next move, and now it was her turn. There was no reason to feel panicky about that. The famous Madame Amour didn’t always know what she wanted to do either.

  But waiting wasn’t something Zarley was good at. Waiting with no particular purpose set against it was worse. It made her feel dependent on Reid in a way she knew wasn’t healthy. He refused money for rent and used a fancy app to pay utilities so she never saw a bill. Cara insisted on buying their food and Reid had always had a cleaner. Zarley hadn’t felt so redundant since leaving gymnastics. And that thought scared her. That’s when she’d filled her life with distractions to avoid dealing with the future.

  The upside was it made school easy. Without work it was a breeze to get through her course load.

  In another ten minutes the alarm would sound. Surely Reid could have a little longer. She’d wake him at 6.30. She sat to reach across him to turn it off and his eyes opened.

  “Oh, baby, go back to sleep.”

  He blinked and yawned. “Nah, whole team is coming back in early. Need to be there. If I get moving now I have time for breakfast with you.” He yawned again. “Be my date?”

  She wasn’t angry with Reid; she was annoyed with herself. “Love to have breakfast with you. Is that when you’ll tell me you’re not killing yourself and it won’t always be like this?”

  He yawned again. “Want me to lie?”

  Her face must’ve have shown no, not ever. He took her by the shoulders and pulled her to his chest. “I’m not killing myself. We have another month or two of deadline crunches to fix the problems and then it will ease off. But Owen is going to be out for at least another few months.”

  “You don’t have to make excuses.”

  “I’m not. This is how it is, how it has to be, and how I like it.”

  And wasn’t that a pinprick to her balloon.

  Being right wasn’t as much fun as it was cracked up to be.

  “This time around I have a better handle on my temper. I haven’t called anyone an idiot yet or implied they bought their quals from a Russian dating website. I’ve only yelled once and I apologized straight off. Back in the day if I yelled at someone, I’d sulk for a week afterward. Meant I was often sulking. Apologizing is better, even if I was right about the work, it’s never okay to take it out on the person.”

  Yeah, see previous thought.

  “Are you happy, Flygirl?”

  The question caught her off guard and her hesitation made him frown. The alarm went off and he rolled to shut it off. She wasn’t living above a Korean restaurant. She wasn’t shutting herself off from life outside college. She lived with a man she loved and being jobless was a temporary thing and so was Reid’s current fanaticism.

  He’d been terrified of going back to Plus, not because of the work he’d need to do, or facing people he’d humiliated himself in front of, but because he didn’t trust he wouldn’t make the same mistakes of judgment he’d always made. Knowing he was doing better made her happy.

  When he turned back around she launched herself at him. “I’m happy. I’d be happier if I knew what I was doing for work, if I didn’t feel like I was being kept by my rich boyfriend.”

  “But I want to keep you. Forever and ever.”

  Hard to stay angry at anything.

  “You’ll find a job, but it wouldn’t be so bad if you focused on school and what you want to do after.” After was a haze of impossible dreams, inspired by a French woman who made success from wild creativity, business nous and surgical precision.

  “I’ll get fat and lazy.”

  He laughed and slapped her rump, then his thumb moved to its favorite resting place in the dimple of her sacrum. “You know what I think about that.”

  He wouldn’t kiss her because he’d tumbled into bed without showering and needed a shave and a toothbrush. But he wanted to. “Come get ready with me.”

  By which he meant, let’s waste a lot of water while we have some fun.

  She gave him a head start and when she went to him, he’d shaved. He stood under the shower water, his arms braced on the tiles, head down so the spray pelted his neck and broad shoulders.

  The first time they’d showered together she’d given herself a head start then rocked his world. He’d been a workload of jitters and awkward expectations he’d embarrass himself, and she’d been high on having him in her care. He still made her feel high, but they were equals in the pleasure stakes, knowing exactly what to do to please and surprise each other.

  She stepped into the water, wrapping herself around his back. “Maybe one day I won’t adore seeing you like this.”

  “Wet, soapy and desperate?”

  She traced his spine with her index finger and he flexed under her hand. “The desperate part is the best bit.” She enjoyed his body. She loved his uncensored reactions. No one had taught him to be guarded physically, to try to be too cool. He’d shown her what he felt from that first night and that hadn’t changed.

  Smoothing her hand over his hip and across to an impressive start to the morning, she said, “Did I dream you came home at 4 a.m.? Do I dare take advantage of your weakened state on two hours sleep to do unspeakably depraved things to you? Will you do ravishingly bad things to me?”

  He turned his head to look at her, narrowed eyes, wicked lips. “Yes, and yes please.”

  She put her teeth to his shoulder blade and wrapped her hand around him, making him groan, then scooted under his arm to face him. “I miss you.”

  She hadn’t meant to say that. She tried to cover it by pulling on his neck for a kiss, which he gave in to. She was being silly, as if she was the one who’d not had enough sleep.

  “I’m right here, Flygirl, and I’m not going anywhere.”

  Except to work where he’d spend the best of himself, leaving her with this. But this, the sex, was good so she pushed the thought aside as she slid her body against his.

  They wasted a lot of water and there was no time for breakfast.

  It was another week before they ate a meal together.

  And a month before Zarley got the news about Lou. She meant to tell Reid but as she’d found work in a sports warehouse and was back to juggling college and her retail shifts, and he was still working crazy hours, their time together was precious. They didn’t often use it for talking. Not with words anyway.

  She kept meaning to tell him, but he had a string of presentations to give which had him on the road traveling for weeks and even though she wanted his advice, he was tense about facing stockholders for the first time since his flame-out without Owen or Kuch at his side. She didn’t want to distract him. Besides she had Cara.

  Until Cara decided to move out.

  “It’s not that I don’t love Reid’s place. It’s not that I don’t love he’s never there and you are. But I’m living with a couple and you do a lot of coupling, and that’s not my idea of a good time.” Cara said that as she inspected the oven in their old, entirely renovated apartment above what was now a craft supply store. No more Kimchi. The possibility of random glitter. “And wi
th the rent break I don’t even need to share.”

  The idea of Cara moving out shouldn’t have depressed Zarley but it did. Cara was moving on with her life too.

  “You should do it, Zar.”

  Cara meant talk to Vi about her idea for Lucky’s. It made her gut churn. “It’s okay telling you my bright ideas. Different talking to anyone else.” And Vi would be better off selling her inheritance from Lou to a developer. That’s what the financial advisor and the lawyer told her. And real estate developers had come knocking, waving big fat promises. Who’d have guessed Lou owned not only the property Lucky’s was in, but the two buildings beside it. Vi was now a wealthy woman and Zarley had been happy to help her work through what that meant.

  “How’s it different? What did Reid say?”

  “Do you like the color they used on the walls?”

  “You didn’t tell him.”

  “He’s busy. You know that.”

  “It’s not like my little cubicle is anywhere near his.”

  Still, Cara saw more of Reid than Zarley did and when all three of them were home, it was Cara and Reid who talked up a storm, arguing about people and events, laughing at things Zarley had no part in. The company limbo contest, the double order mix-up of pizza on Pizza Friday that got eaten to the last anchovy. The time Reid told Doug, the head of sales, his waitress mother could do a better job of creating a pricing strategy than Doug, and then had to apologize, even though the whole sales team agreed, and someone asked when Mrs. McGrath might be available.

  Cara tried out the new windows. They opened smoothly instead of grinding open inch by inch. “It’s not like what you were afraid of has happened?”

  “What was I afraid of, little Miss Thinks She’s So Clever?”

  “That he’d be an asshole.”

  He wasn’t, it was worse. He broke one of her rules. “I don’t think he needs a girlfriend.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s not like he was a serial dater before me. He was a loner.” That’s as close as she’d come to explaining Reid. “His passion was Plus and now he’s got it back.”