by Aiden Bates
With our drinks in hand, we tracked down Don at a quieter booth in the corner, raised up just enough that we could get a better look at the crowd. Typical Don, really—wherever he was, he never passed up an opportunity to survey his domain.
“Don, meet Kieran—my date.” I enjoyed the way that word felt on my lips date. Enjoyed the way it made Kieran cringe even more.
“Barely even his friend, I can assure you.” He stuck his hand out for Don to shake. “Nice to meet you, Don. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“And I haven’t heard nearly enough about you.” Don looked Kieran up and down approvingly—and thankfully, without a hint of wolfishness. If his date really had canceled, I was glad to know that Don didn’t seem intent on stealing mine.
I leaned back in my chair and sipped at my martini, letting its spiciness run over my tongue and set my mouth aflame. The last time I’d introduced Don to one of my dates, Don had spent the whole time shooting me judgmental looks while the poor Omega I’d brought with me had tried to talk his way into a threesome. But with Kieran, it didn’t feel like I even had to run interference. Kieran was eloquent, funny, charming and poised, and I saw Don nodding, leaning in, even smiling as they chatted about everything from the weather to life at the Ballroom.
“The owner of the Ballroom—Forrest or something—” Don smoothed out his paper napkin before placing his drink onto it.
“Foster,” Kieran corrected. “Foster Collins. Good guy. Great boss. You’d like him, actually. Reminds me of you a little bit.”
A smile twitched at the corner of Don’s mouth. “Suppose I might. Handsome man. He seeing anyone these days?”
“Oh, I’m sure he’s got some kind of secret relationship going on. Someone keeps sending rare bottles of wine up to his office. Everyone’s jealous, but no one can guess who it is.” The light caught Kieran’s eyes, making them sparkle like sea glass. “But I’m sure a man like you could compete with that kind of thing. If you’re interested in him, I could always set it up.”
Don’s phone buzzed, and immediately, he checked it. “Maybe someday, yeah. Look, I’m so sorry to meet up for such a short time just to run off right away, but my date’s just un-canceled on me. Do you mind if I…”
“Not at all,” I said, waving him off. “Good to see you, Don.”
As we shook hands, there was a glimmer in Don’s own eyes. Amusement, maybe, tinged with what felt a little like respect. “Keep this one around, huh? For the first time in my life, I’m actually impressed with your taste in men, Dunk.”
“I’m flattered,” Kieran said, claiming a handshake of his own. “Tell your date to behave himself.”
Don’s lips twitched again. “I’m sure he won’t. I’ll leave the tab open for you two. Stick around for a while—there’s a live band set to play in a few minutes. They’re supposed to be good.”
As Don left, I found myself gawking. Not in the way I’d normally gawk at a man like Kieran—handsome, intelligent-looking, muscular and strong as he was—but with an enchanted kind of awe. I watched as his eyebrows raised up, perfectly arched, then lowered in suspicion.
“I don’t know why, but I’ve got the weirdest feeling that he and Foster are already fucking.”
I blinked, drawn from the way I’d been staring for only a moment to consider the possibility. “Have you seen them together?”
“Nope.” Kieran ran his fingertips along his jaw like he was checking for nonexistent stubble. “But it’s the damnedest sensation…”
“I’ll tell you what the damnedest sensation is,” I said, grabbing Kieran’s hand and pulling it away from his chin. “Watching Don Sterling smile in a conversation with an Omega. How the hell did you charm my boss like that?”
Kieran smiled, smug, and shrugged slightly. “I’m a very charming man.”
“I’ll say.” I inclined my head toward the dance floor. “The band’s about to go on. Want to charm me over there?”
“Mm.” He ran his tongue across his lips and tipped back the rest of his drink. “Thought you’d never ask.”
9
Kieran
I’d spent a week without Duncan lurking around bringing me coffee or bursting into my yoga class. A blissful week alone. It was the kind of week that should have left me feeling nice and satisfied in my abilities to avoid falling in love with some hotshot Alpha who thought the world began and ended at the tip of his cock.
And yet, here I was. Somehow the best part of the last seven days wasn’t the solitude, the return to normal, the ability to go into work without seeing a wolfish grin staring back at me from the audience. It was feeling the warmth of his fingers wrapped around mine as he pulled me out onto the dance floor of a pretentious speakeasy full of pretentious people drinking pretentious drinks to pretentious jazz.
If I wasn’t so happy, I probably would have just gone and thrown myself in the East River already.
“You want another drink?”
I looked up at him, only having to raise my chin slightly to meet his gaze. The lights of the club were catching in the dark waves of his hair, turning the blank canvas red, then yellow, then green like traffic lights on water. His eyes were darker still, shining ebony mirrors so deep I could practically see myself in them.
“Of what? Elderberry-infused vodka?” I laughed. “I don’t think I could bear it. Go on and get one if you want, though. I imagine a man like you has a hard time letting loose sober.”
“You keep saying that, you know.” He tugged me forward unexpectedly, sending me stumbling into him. “A man like me, a man like me.”
“I have to,” I countered, relishing the way his hand felt as it slid across my lower back. “How else can I keep giving you chances to prove me wrong?”
“A man like you can’t be used to being wrong so often.” He pressed his hips to mine, teasing my body into a slow, rocking motion even though the music hadn’t started yet. “Is that why you don’t like me?”
“Maybe I don’t like you because you’re an arrogant prick,” I suggested. The word felt delicious on my lips, the way they rolled inward between my teeth then pouted out, the sharp stab of it: prick.
“I don’t need to get drunk to dance with you.” The band lumbered onto the stage, plucking strings experimentally as Duncan’s fingertips ran across the edge of my belt at the base of my spine. He grinned proudly as a cliché came to mind: “I was born loose, sweetheart.”
“The only thing loose about you is your morals.”
“Is that why I have you wound so tight?”
I blinked as he pressed his fingers into the muscles of my lower back, testing them in little circles. Christ—I was tense, tense as the crowd as they waited for the band to pick up into their first song. His hand on my body, his fingers curled around mine, the heat of his breath on my cheek every time he exhaled a laugh. I was bracing for impact already. Impact of what, I couldn’t quite tell yet.
I eased my shoulders back, eyelids heavy as the band finally slid into something slow and dirty. “There’s only one thing tight about me, Duncan.”
A flash of his incisors. “I can imagine.”
“Good. Imagining is all you’re going to get.” I matched his grin. “I’m not in love with you yet.”
A guitar wailed from the stage, high and painfully sweet. Duncan stole the opportunity to pull me closer still, and against my better judgment, I let him. My fingers dragged along the back of his neck, his hot skin rough and prickling beneath my touch. The song sounded like sex, the guitar’s note arching over it like an orgasm.
“That’s the key word, isn’t it?” His lips were at my ear now, so close that the humidity of his breath felt like its own kind of kiss. “Yet.”
Fuck. I could’ve handled it if he’d been drunk, all roaming hands and needy one-liners. Drunks, I could deal with. They knew how to use alcohol to excuse away whatever bullshit inhibitions they’d been mulling over all day, only to throw out the window once they’d thrown back a shot. But sober like this, th
e burn of a single martini already fading away into oblivion?
He was clever sober. Teasing the tension between us the same way the band’s guitarist was working his weapon’s vibrato. Like some kind of half-dreamed vision, I could see the two of us abusing the bar tab Duncan’s boss had left open for us. Tangling fingers together, wrestling tongues, nipping at necks and earlobes and lips until we stumbled out into the alleyway to come together like a car crash.
Drunk, neither of us would’ve had an excuse.
Sober?
Sober, and I was grinding my molars down to dust just to keep from giving in anyway.
“Music’s good,” Duncan purred in a voice so sultry, it could’ve melted me into a puddle on the floor.
“True.”
“You move better to it than I thought you would.”
“As a dancer, I can’t imagine why.”
“Think you’d move even better to it back at my place?”
I caught the glimmer in his eyes as I pulled away, that sense of knowing. Oh, he was good. Better than I’d given him credit for. The yoga, the coffee, the cocktails and the conversation—it was all still building to this moment of proof he was expecting to fall down over us any moment, like a long-needed rain after a summer drought.
Proof of his prowess. Of how handsome and charming and wealthy and capable he was. Proof that he could get anyone he wanted—even someone like me.
For a moment, I considered it. To say otherwise would’ve been a lie. Like I didn’t know that the second we stepped through the door of his penthouse that night, we’d be off like a rocket into the night. Clothing torn off and thrown in a whirlwind across his floor. His mattress at my back, my thighs squeezing tight around his hips, our every motion pressing the both of us forward in a mutual need that neither of us could deny.
We were fucking great together with our clothes on. With our clothes off? I knew good and well that only the greatest kind of fucking would ensue. But for the exact same reason that I wanted him, I knew that I couldn’t have him at all.
Taking Duncan Rourke to bed wouldn’t just mean admitting defeat. I’d lose more than just a bet if we consummated whatever it was that we had here and now. How long had it been since I’d gone out with someone and genuinely enjoyed myself this much? How long would it be until I found something this tangible, this engaging, this deliciously intense again?
“Is that what you want?” I asked, leaning into him.
Our lips hovered near, not even an inch between them. Like the moment before a bomb went off. The second before the train went off the tracks and exploded into a blaze of twisted metal and heat.
“What I want isn’t what matters right now.” He turned my hand over in his, watching the way our fingers moved against each other before he returned his gaze to mine, capturing me with the flecks of light in his eyes.
“Then what does?” I found myself asking. They were just words at this point, though. Like a hostage negotiator buying time.
“Kieran.” He said my name softly, the roughness beneath it temporarily pushed back for the sake of clarity. I felt the music fade away, even though it must have been louder than ever. He’d caught me up in our own little bubble of reality, the rest of the world moving at full speed while we danced in slow motion. “You know that I want you.”
“I do.”
“And I know that you want me back.”
I closed my eyes, smiling as I cursed my former self. Of course he knew that—I’d told him as much that first night.
“So,” Duncan said, his thumb caressing the back of my hand. “Tell me what you want.”
“I—” I opened my mouth, ready to give him some pithy one-liner, and realized that I didn’t have the words. I wanted him. I didn’t want him. I wanted this feeling to last forever, and I knew the second we let it, we’d fuck and it would end. “I guess I don’t know right now.”
He smirked. “Do you want me to decide for you?”
And there it was. I saw it for what exactly what it was: an out. He couldn’t have presented it any better if he’d served it up for me on a silver platter. It was like being hungry but not knowing what or where to eat. I had the need, and he was offering to make the choice.
It would’ve been easier, I realized, if I had been drunk. It was easy to cave to something so devilishly desirable like that with enough drinks under your belt. Sober, it was a different kind of surrender. Drunk meant excuses. Clarity came with responsibility.
“Decide, then.” Sober, and I caved anyway. Like the bottom of a cardboard box that had been left out in the rain.
I could hear my own heartbeat as I waited for his answer. Even as I did, every thump in my chest was rushing blood to my core, to my cock as it throbbed, pressed tight against his thigh through my chinos. To my fingertips on his skin, digging into his back as I closed my eyes and waited to hear our fate.
“Mm. Then, no.”
My eyes shot open, looking up at him with confusion.
“No?” I blurted.
He chuckled, raising my knuckles to his lips. I could feel his smile in his kiss, smug but tender. Amused.
“No,” he repeated. “Now you can disagree with me. You can say we should, and I’ll take it back. We’ll dance until the martinis are good and worn off, then I’ll drive you home and I’ll ravish you in the way you’ve been craving since you first saw an Alpha’s bare chest and realized how bad you wanted to sink your teeth into it. But.”
“But?”
He hummed, still moving his hips slowly against mine despite the way I could hear the music, distant but clear, had picked up the tempo to something roaring and frenzied. “But I think I’ve had as good of a night as I’ve had in a long time. I think you’re feeling a little weak for me right now, which I can’t blame you for.”
I huffed, looking away from him as I felt my cheeks flush pink. “Weak for a man like you? Never.”
“For a man like me,” he repeated. “Of course not. So I’m thinking, maybe I ought to take control here. Get you home. Get you to bed. Let you lie there with that hard, perfect cock of yours twitching with need of me when you finally peel out of those tight pants. Let you think about how much you want me, and how much you’d like to ask me to fuck you directly next time.”
I sucked my lip between my teeth, biting down on it. “And if there isn’t a next time? If I’m never this weak for you again?”
He laughed. “Then I’ll spend the rest of my life pissed at myself for not taking this opportunity, won’t I?”
As my lip slipped out from between my teeth, I found myself smiling up at him with the most genuine smile I’d felt in a long time. “Thank you, Duncan.”
“No need to thank me.” He shifted his arm behind me, pulling me even tighter against him as he rested his forehead to mine. “Just dance with me for a little while.”
And as the music rushed back in around us, hot and hard and erratic as music had ever been, we moved slow and steady as ever, chest to chest, cheek to cheek. His thigh between my legs. My hand in his.
10
Duncan
I left Kieran on the doorstep of his apartment, knowing that both of us were hungry for a kiss goodnight that never came. I left him hard and grateful, desperate for me and, I thought, thankful that I hadn’t taken advantage of his moment of weakness, too.
And then, halfway home, I realized what a fucking idiot I was, and nearly turned the car around to march up to his front door so I could ravish him. If the notion had hit me a block sooner, I might have done it, too.
I wanted Kieran Drake more than any Omega I’d ever wanted in my entire life—and I could’ve had him, too. Worse, I couldn’t even pretend that it was just me being noble, taking him home like that when both of us so clearly wanted to fuck each other’s brains out across the expanse of his bedroom. Sure, in the moment, it had sounded like the gentlemanly thing to do, but in his absence it was beginning to come full circle.
The whole way home, I knew that he’d be sl
ipping out of those gorgeous clothes of his so he could stroke his cock to the thought of what my lips might feel like if I wrapped them around him. The whole way home, I knew that I’d be rushing up to my own penthouse to do the exact same.
It had been the right choice for us in the moment, sure. I was proud of myself for being able to make that distinction. Didn’t stop me from wishing for the heat of his tongue lapping at my balls while his greedy fist pumped away at my cock like some kind of machine. Compared to that, my pride was a poor consolation prize—but for the night, it would have to be enough.
Back in bed, with my slacks around my ankles and my own cock in my fist instead, the sensation only deepened. I wanted him. He wanted me. And we hadn’t acted on it, and I never did that. The question was, why? I stroked myself half to death before I had any answers, and when they came, they were the kind that I had to mull over in a hot shower while I rinsed what felt like a liter of my own cum off my chest.
The first answer was obvious: not fucking him tonight would only make him want me more. But the second possibility was just as terrible as it was delicious.
Because if we’d given in tonight, what we had might’ve been over. No stupid bet to hold us together. A lifetime of meaningless, sex-focused relationships forcing us apart.
I decided, for that reason, that I wouldn’t message him first. I shot him a short text to make sure he’d gotten up to his place okay, and when I read his response—Of course, signed with a little x and nothing more—I knew I had to leave it at that. If he was going to lose to me, he’d have to lose on his terms.
Whatever happened after, I didn’t even want to consider yet.
A week of pure fucking torture followed. I became the kind of man whose fingers twitched every time my phone buzzed. The kind of man who found himself walking down the street toward the Ballroom where I knew he worked without even realizing it, only to catch myself nearly showing up at his workplace and forcing myself to turn around in the middle of the sidewalk.
