Offensive Behavior

“I like everything I see and everything I can’t know about what you had to do to have this ability.”

She grinned, hands to her hips. “Good answer.”

“I want to touch you.”

“I know you do.”

“Can I touch you?”

“Not yet.”

“You want me to burn up.”

“I won’t let you turn to ash.”

She was the one exerting herself, but his hands trembled.

“Listen. Watch.”

He became aware of the music again, a new voice, but a heavier beat, a song about having a road and walking it alone. She pointed at him, touched her chest acknowledging his Rumi tatt, and from no preparation at all turned a somersault, making him gasp. The song had lyrics about being incomplete, still working on a masterpiece, but Zarley was perfect.

She danced, but not like a striptease, she was a ballerina, a wisp of wind, a leaf falling from a tree. She was the tide and the fall of night and loneliness of a kid whose unshakeable obsessions: dinosaurs, mechanics, star systems, explosions, made him the odd one out, made him turn inward and hide the parts of him others thought were weird.

Zarley could make emotions with her body that were bigger than the place in his heart reserved for feelings. She stretched that creaky hollow until the back of his eyes stung. She filled him up with longing and with fear. Now he knew she existed, he didn’t want to be without her and he had nothing she needed because the only win she valued was one she designed and achieved for herself.

She told him to watch but she didn’t dance for him so much as for herself, testing her body, loving what she could make it do. And what astonished him most was that she gave this so freely to him.

When the song ended she stood in front of him, her skin shone with perspiration. He crawled forward and knelt at her feet. It wasn’t quite her fantasy but it shared the same theme. He adored her and he wante

d her to know it. He passed his hand from her ankle to the back of her knee and up her thigh. He rested his forehead on her hip.

She pushed her fingers through his hair. “Don’t ever try to fake me out again.”

He kissed her stomach. “Never.” He pressed his lips to the triangle of pink cotton covering her and she laughed softly. Bringing his other hand to the back of her knee he folded her to his lap and pushed his face into her neck. Her skin was hot and his head swirled with so much feeling, he didn’t know what to do with it; shout, rage, break something. Cry.

She found his lips. She held his face and took the ache away with her kisses, with her hands under his shirt and her legs wrapped around his waist. The music was still in her limbs and it spilled out all over him, firing nerve endings, sharpening his senses. Each kiss was deeper, more full and hungry than the next. Each time she rolled her hips against his he lost his breath, until he was panting with the need of her.

“Do what you want to me, baby? I’m all yours.”

He got them off the floor in one move. She stayed wrapped around him like a bear cub and he took her to bed, to explore her, to worship her, to be inside her, to be outside himself.

Afterward he slept badly, waking often in the dark to check Zarley was still beside him, dreaming she’d brought him on stage at Lucky’s and laughed at him. In the dream he’d gotten sick again and she’d left him in the alley in disgust. That woke him and it was light enough to see she was gone, but the place she’d lain in was still warm and he could hear her voice. He pulled sweats on and went in search, finding her in the far corner of the empty dining room.

She leaned against the wall, watching the bay. She wore those pink panties under her untied black robe. She stood with one leg bent resting on the ball of her foot and the robe framed her body, showing him the plump curve of both breasts and her flat belly.

“I have to go,” she said into her cell when she saw him. It was a message for whoever she was talking to. And for him.

He stood where he was, in the other room. He had nothing to do today and nowhere to be and she had a life to go back to that didn’t include him. He had to try not to be irrationally furious about that.

“That was Cara.” Her voice was a husky melt of morning and their late night twisting up the sheets, making each other call out.

“You don’t have to tell me your business.”

That came out brutally hard, with all the anxiety he felt about letting her go, and she pulled her robe around her body and looked away. “Don’t do that, Reid. We had an amazing time.”

“And now it’s over.”

She turned her head back and snapped her eyes to his. “I didn’t say that.”