Offensive Behavior

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.”