Offensive Behavior

“You’re so damn slow. Clothes off, Reid.”

He let go the bottom of the chair and flexed his stiff fingers. She watched him lose his shirt, her eyes going all heavy-lidded. Then he stood and advanced on her. She bolted, like she’d done earlier. He didn’t chase her, he didn’t need to, he had her, at least for now, at least as long as he could keep her interested.

She wasn’t near the table where he expected her. She was laid out over it, completely naked, her hands stretched above her head, one knee raised and her back arched. The vision knocked a Neanderthal grunt out of him. It was better than he’d imagined because the Zarley in his head wasn’t trembling as if she wanted him as much as he wanted her. The Zarley in his head didn’t squirm when she heard how gone he was, didn’t whimper when he ran a hand slowly from her instep to her collarbone over skin so warm and soft it affected his breathing. That Zarley didn’t smell like sex and she didn’t look at him like this was more than something she was doing for her own amusement, to educate him.

When he’d sat at this table in the furniture showroom, the Zarley he’d conjured in his head was a pale, cardboard cutout, the product of a weak imagination. But that Zarley had gotten him stone hard in the store, had him mumble to the shop assistant that he needed a moment to himself, had made it so he couldn’t go near the table; could barely look at it once it was delivered, without being affected. This Zarley, fuck, this flesh and bone and muscle and moaning woman laid out for him was reordering the way logic worked in his brain. An entirely new algorithm for his life.

She was beyond obsession now. She was the sacred temple at the top of the ziggurat. She was the complex algorithm that sorted good from bad. All the independent bricks he’d built his life on crumbled to silt as he put his lips to her belly and closed his hand over her breast.

When her breath snagged, when she grasped his hair and dragged his head up so their lips met, he stopped trying to calculate this, there was no wisdom in it. It was a kind of insanity to want something so much, to be given it so freely and to fear its loss before he’d even experienced the moment.

She was all those things, the past he hadn’t lived in his body, the present he feared was as much a lucky charm as a curse, and the future he’d failed to anticipate.

“Please,” she said, between kisses that drained him of any ambition that wasn’t to be inside her. “Reid,” she said, and he put his self-belief in her hands and willed her to do whatever she wanted with it. “I need,” she said, as she flexed her hips into his hand. And he needed too, the wonder and challenge of her, the strength and yield of her, the silken skinned, thready-voiced, wet, rippling lock of her.

He got rid of his jeans. He took her ankles and slid her to the edge of the table where it fell like a solid waterfall of glass to the floor.

“We’re going to make a mess,” she moaned, her foot to his shoulder. She glistened from where he’d played his fingers.

It would be art, design, architecture, music. He lowered his mouth to her pussy. It would be hot chaos and cool awe.

“I love this table. Oh, God. Reid. Don’t stop.”

Not till she was incapable of words. Not till her writhing, her gasping, the flood of her juices told him she was beyond thought and reason, driven all the way into the tight corner of pleasure so screamingly deep she was flying again. And when she was, he threw her higher. He caught her body up and flipped her, draped her over the table’s smooth curved end and held her hips tilted up to him.

“Now. Fuck me now.”

She was revelation when he drove into her, absolution when she bucked greedily against him, and divinity when she shook through another release, her inner muscles clamping down on him, bowing his back, liquefying his neck, forcing a stream of curses from his mouth, and sending him rocketing into a paradise of sensation with Zarley as his wings.

EIGHTEEN

It was Reid’s plan, but Zarley agreed to it, as much for him as for Cara, because although Cara loved her brother, and new baby nephew, the loss of her job, her sewing machine and their apartment had hit her hard.

They’d been allowed in to the apartment, but there wasn’t much worth scavenging, and since there was an arson investigation pending they weren’t getting the place back any time soon. There was talk of compensation from the building owner, but it wouldn’t be quick to come. Everything was sooty, wet and smelled appalling. Zarley’s books were sodden, falling apart when she tried to pick them up. They rescued some kitchen stuff, knickknacks and clothing that might eventually not smell of smoke, and they hauled Cara’s sewing machine out, only to find it wouldn’t start when they cleaned it up and plugged it in at Kathryn’s place.

Reid did the hauling and a trailer-load of resenting because Zarley refused to stay with him. She’d made her peace with Kathryn’s borrowed air-mattress and Reid was sucking it up, none too gracefully.

It should’ve annoyed her, the peremptory way he was after less than three weeks of knowing her offstage, but after an initial debate about her reasons for not wanting to stay with him, which were admittedly limp: he had space, it clearly wasn’t an imposition, his place was within easy distance of both college and Lucky’s—he’d clenched his jaw and backed off.

He even refrained from teasing her for the argument that living with him was a quick way to kill their thing, because he didn’t buy it and neither did she.

Their thing was hot and strong and about to go glamor.

He was taking her to a formal function for Plus’ tenth anniversary. It was a genuine red carpet-ish moment and Cara was making her a dress. Reid had offered to buy Cara a sewing machine, but Cara picked up a second-hand one and hit him up for fabric instead. He had no idea what he’d agreed to, the fabric she wanted was eighty-five dollars a yard and she needed five yards to make a Hollywood-style gown that Zarley was dying to wear.

She’d never worn an article of clothing that could be described as a gown before. Not so quietly she wondered if she could pull it off, but Cara was thoroughly into it and it was a more interesting project than apartment hunting, and Zarley refused to put pressure on Cara about that.

Cara needed a job before they could commit to rent, so they’d entered a suspended sentence of homelessness, alleviated by the requirement for a truly red carpet-worthy dress of which portfolio-style photos could be taken to help Cara

attract more customers, and Zarley’s continued fascination with Reid.

She tried and failed to sell herself on the concept that the thing with Reid was all about the transcendent sex. The high she got from the coach, student basis of their relationship. But that was a load of old bull. Reid still played the first timer, got overexcited and all out went for her like she was the last stop for pleasure on a long desolate sexless highway to hell. But she wasn’t much better. He frayed her control, tested her body’s limits and blasted all her expectations of getting off into a new dimension.

It wasn’t just the sex. He was like double-sided tape. Smart but naive, funny and moody, awesome and fearsome, solitary and reaching out, and it didn’t matter which side she turned the tape, she was stuck on him.

She was supposed to be at study group. But Saturday night’s event was a long way from hump day and she’d had three dress fittings, but no sex for a whole thirty-nine hours. She might not make it to the Cinderella stage. She sent Reid that full-frontal pic. No warning, just a sext in the middle of Wednesday afternoon.

He called. “Where are you?” He had the gruff, barely holding it together tone that made the hair on the back of her neck stand up.