Offensive Behavior (Sidelined #1) Read online

  Lizabeth laughed. “Now that I get.”

  “I don’t. Why?” said Kathryn. Tonight she was dressed in a white corset with red lacing, red panties with ruffles and her flashing light platform Pleasers. “Is this about what happened last night? Because that was stupid, Zarley, you should’ve come back inside and called the cops on that guy.”

  “We should insist Lou lets us leave by the front door so we come straight out on the street like the customers. The alley’s not safe,” said Melinda.

  “For real you brought a guy down?” said Kathryn.

  It wasn’t the first time. And tonight Zarley was going to bring every guy out there to his knees without a single touch.

  Because she could.

  “Is booth dude out there?” She didn’t want to share the fact she knew his name, that he was one of the dickheads she wanted to feel the pain of wanting what you couldn’t have. They’d only tease her, try and make something more of it.

  “He’s out there,” said Melinda. “You’ve got a thing for him.”

  “We all have a thing for him,” said Lizabeth. “He’s ten thousand times better looking than the average Lucky’s loser and he tips four times as much.”

  “I don’t have a thing for him,” said Melinda.

  “Yeah, yeah we know, Gerry, who respectfully supports your occasional trick turning,” said Kathryn.

  Melinda gave a shriek of protest. “You shut your face. He doesn’t know about that. Sometimes I just get, I just. Shit.” She stormed out, a vision of aggression in neon green Lycra.

  “The devil made me do that,” said Kathryn with a mock contrite look on her face.

  “Hope she doesn’t fall on her head,” said Lizabeth, she leaned into the mirror to touch up her eye makeup, “but that girl thinks she’s better than us.”

  “Maybe she is better than us. She has a profession that’s not dependent on a pole, and a husband,” said Zarley.

  “Yeah well, if that’s what success looks like, call me patient zero of the zombie apocalypse,” said Lizabeth.

  Zarley looked at her own reflection. There was a chance this dress wouldn’t stay in place and she’d flash her tits. She still had time for a very quick change. “You don’t mean that.”

  “Tonight I do.” Lizabeth gave a wolf call. “Tonight we ride so fuckheads in alleys don’t get to win.”

  “Clown,” Kathryn snorted.

  Lizabeth howled again. Melinda’s song started up. Zarley adjusted the dress one more time. She could secure it with magic tape or take the risk. Leaving work at night shouldn’t have to be a risk. Kathryn was trying to out-howl Lizabeth. Lou would send someone in any minute to see if they were killing each other.

  Fuck the risk. If she flashed her tits there wasn’t a soul here other than Lou who’d think that was a bad thing. And Lou only cared because he didn’t want the extra hassle that running a topless bar brought.

  On her way to the stage, she passed Melinda with a smile she hoped made the unpleasantness in the dressing room feel less like terminal dislike and more like ordinary sisterhood. There was a red wash over the stage tonight. It suited her mood. She stepped into the light and heard the whoops that went up from those closest to the stage. She was unaccountably nervous. They never whooped for her. They never saw so much skin either.

  Tonight Jessie, Ariana and Nicki were her sisters too. She used the introduction to “Bang” to bend over and pretend to fiddle with the buckle on her sky-high heels, but it wasn’t about the buckle, it was about legs and ass. This was a move Cinnamon and Lavinia, and Jasmina before them, had perfected. It was a direct provocation, simple and devastating. She’d never done this on stage. She’d always been about the strength and grace. Never gone out to sell sex. Never made eye contact and she’d certainly never looked in Reid’s direction. But tonight he had a name and tonight she was looking.

  She straightened, flicking hair her over her shoulder and arching her back, sending her ass out and her chest high as she stalked around the pole, long loose strides and rolling hips. Reid was in his regular booth and he was alone. She blew a kiss in his direction and leaned her back against the pole, hands gripping overhead.

  Watch me be unsafe, asshole.

  She lifted her legs, opening them wide and rolling her back on the pole until she was inverted. It was a shoulder V-mount variation all her own. It was a quick glimpse of a heavenly destination no loser who’d accost a woman in alley would ever get close to. And then she stopped thinking and let herself dance, at one point looking down to see money littering the stage.

  Why had she bothered to try to be different? To pretend this was another way to be a gymnast and get paid for it. She was such a fool, the music, the red light washes, the beery smell and the masculine grunts were so far from the sprung floor stadiums and the respectful silences, skills grading and moderate applause she was used to. And if a little more skin and hair tossing, a little more provocation captured more tips then what was the point in holding back?

  Artistry made no difference to the meathead in the alley, she might as well take all their car payments and grocery money and get out debt free sooner rather than later.

  She finished her first number of the set and went straight into her second, INXS’ “Need You Tonight” with its glorious plunking guitar riff. An old song for a new mood. She’d popped her sex act cherry tonight in a way that starting here two years ago hadn’t done. Tonight she accepted that this was about the skin and not the skill, knowing she could use that till she had what she needed, and like Jasmina, move on to better times.

  She got more tips that night than the four nights before it combined. That sucked in a good way.

  She was last to leave the dressing room again because she stopped to rearrange her costumes, taking stock of the sexier ones, the ones more like fetish wear than fun and games, and packing what needed washing to take home.

  Lou had agreed to letting the staff leave Lucky’s through the front door. She had a feeling that rule wouldn’t stick, but it meant she didn’t spare a thought for meeting trouble and she was mentally running a bath and adding the bubbles when she saw him.

  Reid. Sitting on the pavement with his long legs out in front, head slumped forward, his back against the window of the Liquor Barn next door.

  Not her problem. Not. She had sleep on her agenda, not drunk men.

  He looked utterly useless. So don’t look. Watch for a cab instead. There was usually a good steady flow of them. She looked back, he’d lifted his head, but his eyes were closed. He was pale and sweating. His shirt was wet and so was the front of his jeans. Was he so drunk he’d pissed himself?

  She took half a dozen quick strides across the pavement and kicked the sole of his boot. He grunted but didn’t stir. He smelled bad, but not of urine or spirits.

  “Get up, Reid. You can’t stay here.” He mumbled something she didn’t care to interpret. The palm of one of his hands was torn and bleeding. He’d had a fall. She looked at the sky. He wasn’t her problem, then she kicked him again. “Get up.”

  His eyes opened but he had trouble fixing on her. “Not drunk.”

  “That’s what all the good drunks say. You need to get home.”

  He approximated a nod and she looked at him more carefully. He was sweating profusely and it wasn’t a warm night.

  “Dizzy.”

  She snorted. “You mean legless.”

  “Sick.”

  She took a deep breath. That’s what she could smell, he’d barfed and tried to clean himself up. “Did you eat from the menu tonight?” One of the kitchen hands had been vomiting and got sent home.

  He rolled his head on the window. “Yeah.”

  “Shit, you’ve got food poisoning.”

  He grunted assent.

  “Can you get up? I’ll put you in a cab.”

  She left him trying to get his limbs organized and waved a cab down. The driver looked at her, looked at Reid, shook his head and drove off.

  “Hey!”
she yelled after him. But then another driver pulled over and Reid had made it upright. She took his arm and led him to the curb and pushed him into the backseat, where he seemed to pass out.

  “You’re coming too or he’s out,” said the driver.

  “I’m only the Good Samaritan. I don’t know him.”

  “Well I’m an Arab infidel, and my tea-leaf reader is in the shop for repairs. I don’t know where he lives and he’s cramping my style.”

  She leaned in and shoved Reid till he rolled on one hip and she could get his wallet out of his back pocket. On another occasion she might’ve noticed he had a very nice ass.

  “In or you’re both out,” said the driver.

  “Aarrgh.” She wedged herself into the seat beside Reid and read out the address on his driver’s license. He had a couple of fifties and hundred dollar bills in his wallet, more than enough for this cab. She’d drop him off and continue on home, call herself a superhero for saving someone’s butt after all.

  His place was only a five-minute ride away. Total swank job. A South Beach warehouse conversion, all steel and glass and nothing like she expected from a man who seemed as if he’d left good times behind. But for all its imposing grandeur and probable view of the bay, dropping him at the hospital might’ve been a better idea.

  The driver shifted eyes up in the mirror. “He your boyfriend?”

  “Nope. Don’t know him from Adam.”

  The driver sighed. “I’ll help you get him to his door.”

  “You are a Good Samaritan.”

  “No, I want my backseat available and there’s no way you, tiny person, can get him home alone by yourself.”

  “I’m fine,” Reid said, and flung his door open, getting his feet to the ground but not making it upright.

  Zarley gave the driver a fifty and there was no pretense there’d be any change, though the fair wasn’t a quarter of that amount.

  Together they managed to get Reid out of the cab and moving to the security door, where he mumbled a code that got them inside after much fumbling about.

  “You going to leave him like this?” the driver said while they rode the lift, Reid propped between them, a mass of shakes, as though he was freezing cold.

  “I’m fine,” Reid said.

  “And my mother still loves me,” said the driver.

  Yes, she was going to leave him. Maybe he had a wife, though no ring, or a roommate. There was a door buzzer and they pressed it and that roused Reid further. He placed his hand on a sensor pad on the wall and the door opened.

  The driver backed off and he’d called the lift back and disappeared inside it before Zarley had a chance to stop him.

  Reid staggered inside the apartment, an overhead light turning on automatically as he moved passed it. She could’ve left him then, but there was obviously no one else home so she followed him inside. She’d get the name of the guy who was with him last night and call him to come around.

  Holy shit, this place. She could see the moonlit bay and the bridge out the huge floor-to-ceiling windows. Reid made it to an ugly sofa in front of a truly enormous wall-mounted TV; that along with a games console were the only things in the vast room.

  Maybe he’d just moved in.

  Probably she should get him a glass of water.

  She took a quick tour. The place was huge and echoey, barely furnished. Some kind of stone floor. There was a single kitchen stool in the too clean to have ever been cooked in kitchen, and a monster-sized bed in the master bedroom. Another room was full of boxes, half of them sealed, and a glass-topped desk covered in a mess of paper on which two different computers hummed. There was a home gym that was seriously the bomb. All it lacked was a pole.

  She moved back into the living room, feeling like she should tiptoe for no good reason. She’d forgotten the water.

  He made her jump when he spoke. “You can go. I’m fine.”

  She waited to see if that was all he’d say, and it was. “Normally that would be followed by thank you.”

  “Thank you,” he mumbled, then he tried to stand and ended up on his knees on the floor.

  She went to him as he struggled to get his feet back under him. “I need to call your friend from last night.”

  He looked at her with unfocused eyes and recognition bloomed. “Lux.”

  “That’s me.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Thanks for that. Look, I can’t leave you alone because I’m a total sap. Tell me who to call.” She’d taken his phone when she got his wallet in the cab. She waggled it in his direction while putting his wallet on the cabinet that housed the games console.

  “No one.”

  “Someone.”

  “Too much trouble. Go.”

  “I’m not leaving you alone, you could, I don’t know, die.” Could you die from food poisoning? It would be just her thing that from Lucky’s brand you could.

  “Dying is too good for me.”

  She clapped her hands on her legs. “At last, something we can agree on.”

  “Get out.”

  “Wow. Neither furnishing nor manners maketh the man.”

  He got himself back to the seat of the sofa. “I’m offensive.”

  “No argument from me.”

  “I’m a jerk.”

  “I’d have said asshole, but who cares what I think, right?”

  “Why are you still here?”

  She forced a hard breath out. “I have no idea.”

  “Your dress was all,” he waved a hand in front of his torso, “slashed.”

  “Yep.”

  “Different tonight.”

  “The new Lux.” She knelt and got him to lift his foot. Pulled his boot off, then his sock.

  “What are you doing?”

  She started on the other foot. “Having my way with you.”

  He stood so fast he almost kneed her in the face.

  “Slow down, bucko, you’re not that steady and you stink and while I’m putting you to bed I have no desire to touch you more than I absolutely have to.”

  He groaned and virtually slithered back onto the sofa. “Room spinning.”

  She finished taking his boot and sock off then stood and took his hands and hauled him upright, inserting herself under his arm. “Where’s your bathroom?”

  “No.”

  Yes. She got him that far and he refused further help, closing her out. She heard nothing and then the choking, gagging sound of him upchucking followed by the flush of the toilet, then the shower water running.

  “I’m staying right here and if you don’t answer when I call you, I’m coming in. You could drown. Do you hear me?”

  Nothing.

  “Reid.”

  A masculine rumble. He was still alive at least.

  She thumped on the door for emphasis. “Five minutes.”

  She waited two and called. “Reid,” and got no answer. But the shower had stopped. “Reid. Answer me or I’m coming in.” Jesus, was she going to have to see him naked? She opened the door. Whoa, look at the size of that tub. You could have a party in there.

  There was a second entrance, this was an en suite. She could see Reid in the bedroom beyond, flaked out face down on the bed wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt. He hadn’t bothered to dry himself so the clothing stuck to him in places, including that nice ass and his very broad back.

  She could leave him now, he was safe and clean and if she left his phone in reach he could call for help.

  She bent down to place his phone on the floor on the side of the bed where his alarm clock sat and nearly left the planet when he spoke.

  “Thank you.”

  His voice was clogged up. “You’re welcome.” He was also shivering. “You need to get under the covers.” He saw the wisdom of that and shifted and she managed to get him under the quilt. “Your phone is here.” She pointed to the floor. A bedside table would’ve been an asset. “You can call someone to check in on you.”

  “I let them all down.”

&
nbsp; He still shivered. She put her knee on the bed, reached over and felt his forehead. “You’re burning up.”

  He grunted a response and then sat abruptly, shoved her back and vomited on the floor.

  He flopped back on the bed with a choked groan, his arm draped over his eyes. “You’re still here.”

  He’d only missed her boots because she jumped away. It smelled vile. “Don’t worry, I’ll fix it.”

  “No, fuck, just go.”

  “Yeah, make me,” she shot back, on her way to look for cleanup gear.

  By the time she found what she needed and returned, bringing a glass and a bottle of water he was asleep, snoring lightly. He was deathly pale and he had to be dehydrated and that could make you sick all by itself. What was she supposed to do with him? If she got sick she had Cara, and worst case she’d call home.

  She cleaned up, coming and going from the room, and he didn’t wake. Did he have a girlfriend, parents? Should she worry that much, or was this just a hideous forty-eight hour thing?

  She sat on the bedroom floor and fiddled with his phone trying to get past the lock screen. He certainly didn’t use password as his code. She couldn’t get either of his computers to wake, but was amused to notice that all of his computer cables were meticulously tidy and clipped with Darth Vader and Storm Trooper Lego figures.

  She went back to the bedroom and stood at the foot of his bed and watched him sleep. Creepy, even under these circumstances. He was curled on his side, with his knees up as if his stomach hurt, and the covers pulled up around his neck as if he was still cold. She should’ve thought to check his hand for gravel, bathe it in antiseptic. She should’ve called Melinda and asked for advice on what to do with him.

  It was nearly four in the morning and she was tired beyond sense and there was no one she could reasonably call. She went back to the living room and took her shoes off, set the alarm on her phone for seven and crashed on his big ugly sofa. If he was sick again she’d hear him and if he was no better, she’d insist he call someone.

  When her alarm peeped she woke to a wild sense of where the hell am I? She had a stiff neck from no pillow and she was starving. He had home-cooked Indian food in his refrigerator but she couldn’t fathom curried anything for breakfast. She padded into his room. He slept soundly, but he’d obviously woken at some point because he’d drunk a good deal of the water she’d left. He wasn’t so pale under his beard scruff. He’d live. She was done here.