Heaven's Ballroom

by Aiden Bates

  Foster laughed, sipping at his whiskey and placing it back down on the bar. “There’s only one man I’d take my clothes off for these days, Noah—and he’s not going to come here to this club to watch me do it.”

  “Mysterious lover?”

  He waved the suggestion away. “I’ve been drinking. Forget that I said that. Speaking of, though—you going to drink that whiskey, or just sniff at it?”

  I dipped my nose into the glass then, doing just that. The smell of the alcohol was overwhelming—burning, dark, smoky and intense. But where I might have once welcomed it—it wouldn’t have been my first time drinking through an uncomfortable morning after a date—today, my heart wasn’t into it.

  “Have it,” I offered, sliding it back to him. “Guess I’m not in the mood.”

  “Now who’s having boyfriend problems?” Foster’s brow lowered in concern. “This isn’t about Harmon’s friend Ace, is it? I know breakups are hard, but…come on, Noah. It was never a real relationship in the first place, was it?”

  His words cut me down even harder than Ace’s coldness that morning. It was the thing that had gone unsaid between Ace and I, the thing that I hadn’t thought needed to be said. Last night, it had felt so natural. Before he’d told me about Harmon’s nefarious plans, we’d been using our mutual missions as an excuse to be close together. After it had all been revealed and we’d still ended up in bed together, I’d thought it had been the confirmation we needed that there was a potential for something more.

  And now…now, I didn’t know what to think.

  “We didn’t break up,” I argued, my brow lowering to match his. “And even if we had…”

  “What do you mean, we didn’t break up? Did you not get my texts?”

  I glanced down at my phone, still clenched in my hand. I remembered taking it out of my pocket at Ace’s apartment, but I’d been so worked up over how he’d treated me that I hadn’t remembered to check it like he’d told me to. When I glanced down at Foster’s messages, that coldness in my gut roared to life, washing over me like a wave and pulling me under.

  Dump him in the morning before you come into work. You’ve more than earned your raise.

  Suddenly, the day was making a little more sense. Ace’s coldness. The way he’d mentioned my phone. Buzzing all night, he’d said.

  Leave it to a private investigator to go through someone else’s texts.

  “Everything okay?” Foster posed the question in that obligatory way. He wasn’t just my boss—he was a friend. He already knew the answer. It was written all over the way the color had just drained from my face.

  “Yeah, fine,” I lied. “You’re right—never a real relationship in the first place. Let’s figure out a solution for the line-up before everyone else gets in. Think I could use the distraction right now.”

  Foster rose, cocking his head toward the stairs up to his office overlooking the club. “We have a few dancers that have been serving cocktails while they’ve learned the routines…think we could move one of them up?”

  “Actually,” I began, ruminating on the idea I’d had on my date with Ace last night—back when everything had been lovely, before it had all gone straight to hell in a handbasket. I couldn’t fix things with Ace—not after he’d violated my privacy like I suspected he had. But if I was going to take one thing away from that not-a-relationship… “Have you ever thought about burlesque?”

  “Burlesque?” Foster hummed, stepping aside to usher me up the stairs ahead of him. “Interesting. That…that could work. Tell me more.”

  13

  Ace

  It wasn’t like I’d never been through a breakup before. I knew how they were supposed to go. Alpha meets Omega. Alpha fucks Omega. Alpha fucks up. The whole world goes topsy-turvy for a while.

  Eventually, I’d always screw something up. Forget a three-month anniversary. Sunflowers on a birthday when he’d said a million times red roses were what he’d prefer. Sometimes it almost felt like I’d done it intentionally, even though on the surface I’d certainly never meant to. Every relationship eventually ended sometime—but usually it ended with him trashing my apartment, stealing my AC/DC albums to sell on EBay or getting wasted and holding a broken beer bottle to my cheek.

  Noah and I hadn’t technically broken up yet, but that begged the question: had we ever really been together in the first place? I’d been paid to do a job, he’d had some kind of incentive from his boss that had convinced him to pretend I was doing it. At first, the push and pull had all been too fun to deny, but before I knew it, I’d gotten lost in it—to the point that, before I’d seen that text on Noah’s phone, I’d been thinking that maybe it was time to call the private investigator thing quits. Call up one of my buddies on the NYPD and see if they had any use for a detective with a pseudo-criminal past, maybe. Join the volunteer fire department and finally take up the Eriksons on that job at the counter of their butcher shop. Something that didn’t involve lying, faking it or tricking anyone—at least, not anyone who didn’t already deserve it.

  That morning after we’d last seen each other should have been a fucking triumph. Breakfast in bed. Hot coffee on the nightstands, getting cold while I made love to Noah Layton all over again. I would have told him everything—for real, this time. That the Backdoor was trying to poach dancers from the Ballroom. That I’d thought I could seduce him into leaving the only group of people he’d seen as family—and that I’d ended up falling for his blue eyes and war stories and scar-marked chest instead. That maybe he couldn’t have a baby, but that I could give him a family anyway. Foster a couple of kids together someday. Little brick house and a white picket fence—the works.

  It might have scared him off just the same. For the first time in my life, it had hit me that I’d met someone who I could actually see myself building a life with—and maybe that would have been too scary for him. Maybe he would have turned white in fear or laughed in my idiot face for even suggesting it.

  But then at least I could have told him the other half of my plans: that I was giving Wesley Harmon his money back, and that he absolutely shouldn’t have listened to whatever bullshit I’d put into his head about turning the Ballroom into a burlesque club. If Noah cared about that place as much as I’d cared about him, the last thing I wanted was to see it go to ruin.

  Not that any of it mattered now. I might’ve been falling for Noah, but Noah sure as hell hadn’t fallen for me. That text had been the final nail in a coffin of our own making. In a different life, maybe things would have played out better, but in this life, we’d already made our bed. Now, whatever we’d built together would have to die in it. Too many games, too much hurt, too many lies.

  I think our work here is done. Dump him in the morning.

  I’d remember those words for the rest of my goddamn days.

  It was a cute little cafe, more upscale than I was used to now that my cover had really been blown. Grape vines and candlelight, the smell of garlic sautéed in oil and fine red wine. He’d texted me the night before with those awful, it’s over but I want to tell you in person words.

  We need to talk, he’d typed, and all I could write back was, Okay. Name a place. Name a time.

  “What are you drinking?” I asked as I slid into the chair across from him. The waiter had already given me a dirty look on the way in as soon as he’d seen my t-shirt and tattoos, the dark stubble of a beard that I wouldn’t allow to grow out and my ripped-knee jeans.

  “I’m not,” Noah confessed. “Seemed like the kind of conversation we needed to have sober.”

  I nodded, waving the waiter away. If he wasn’t drinking, then there was no point in me doing it either. At the last supper, they’d at least served wine; for Noah and I, water would have to do.

  “You look good,” I told him, because he did. The soft gold of his hair seemed brighter, shinier than normal. His skin, while a little green-looking beneath his eyes, seemed to rise and fall in such perfect angles and shadows that it would’ve bee
n a sin to try and attribute it to something so pedestrian as the candlelight. He even held himself differently—not like the cocky bastard he’d been when I first met him, but something more regal. He sat on his chair like a king on his throne, holding court over me and the rest of the restaurant with a cool confidence that made me feel like an asshole and a fool by comparison. He might as well have dressed me in motley and made me play jester to him.

  In a way, I supposed he already had.

  “So do you,” he lied, because I knew better than that. I’d cleaned up okay. Deodorant, fresh t-shirt, boots laced on my feet. But there was a difference between taking a shower twenty minutes before you left the house and getting a proper night’s sleep—something I hadn’t had in more than a week.

  “Do you normally bring people to fancy restaurants to break up with them?” I finally asked, filling in the silence in the only way I knew how. Direct. Abrupt.

  “Who says we’re breaking up?” Noah asked, raising an eyebrow and doing his best to pretend to look surprised.

  It was a cute act, but an unnecessary one. I knew what he was here for, and I knew how I was going to take it. He’d say I think we should see other people and I’d say All right. Have a good life. Not because I thought it was good or fine or okay, that we’d had a chance at something so special and we’d managed to play each other until we broke. But because I wasn’t going to be the kind of man who followed Noah around like a little lost puppy dog until he threw rocks at me and told me to scram!

  “Thought we knew each other better than that by now, Noah,” I said with a sigh. My hands, desperate for something to do other than clench into fists beneath the table, plucked at the napkin the silverware had come wrapped up in. “You know I read what Foster sent you. I know you were only fucking around with me until he told you that you were released from your duties.”

  “It’s not like that.” The way he was unable to meet my eyes told me otherwise. When his gaze finally flashed up at me, it simmered with rage. “Although, frankly, yeah—fuck you for going through my phone.”

  “Didn’t mean to,” I said with a shrug. “But while we’re trading blows, fuck you for making me think that we had something beyond whatever stupid games we were playing with each other just to turn around and dump me when your boss gave you the go-ahead.”

  “That’s not fair,” he protested. “You were only ever with me because you were being paid to be, you prick. Don’t act like this doesn’t go both ways.”

  “I’m not,” I said simply. “I’m just asking you not to beat around the bush about it. I know where we stand now. So do you. You’re not going to need to White Fang me. It didn’t have to be painful or melodramatic or drawn out.”

  “This isn’t a breakup,” he said again.

  I looked around the restaurant, then back at the basket of bread on the table that neither of us had bothered to touch. “Sure as hell looks like one.”

  “It’s not.”

  “Yeah, all right. If this isn’t a breakup, then I’ll eat my own ass. How about that?”

  He cracked a smile, then stifled it immediately. It broke my heart to watch him do it—even while we were fighting, it killed me to know I could still make him smile.

  “You’re not that flexible,” he quipped back at me, holding my gaze with his.

  “And you’re not that naive. We can read each other like teenage girls read Cosmo, Noah. We both know the score now. We both know that this is too fucking broken to keep trying to string it together, no matter what either of us want. Give us a little more credit than that.”

  He sighed, lowering his gaze to the menu before him. “Do you want to order something? Would that make you feel like this isn’t some kind of meet-up I’ve orchestrated so I could break your heart?”

  “Is a plate of Aglio e Olio really going to soften the blow at all?”

  He shrugged. “You look like you haven’t been eating.”

  “Or sleeping or anything else,” I confirmed. “And you look like you’re stalling. If you didn’t call me here to break up with me, then enlighten me. What game are we playing now?”

  “It’s not a fucking game, Ace!” He raised his voice enough, it made my cock twitch and my body suppress a shiver. I was suddenly aware of everyone else in the restaurant turning their attention to us, before Noah deflated and they went back to arguing over the wine list or splitting dessert.

  “It’s been a game this whole time, Noah,” I said softly, grabbing for his hand across the table then thinking better of it mid-reach. “And now…now it’s over, isn’t it? It’s okay. You don’t need to try to put a plate of fucking pasta between us to butter it up before it’s gone.”

  He pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingertips, releasing a breath long and slow. “Did it ever occur to you that Foster doesn’t own me, Ace? That just because he says, break it off, it doesn’t mean that I don’t want to ever see you again?”

  “Go on, then. Tell me what you called me here for. If not to break up with me, then for what?”

  His fists curled atop the table, and then—fuck me—my cock throbbed again at the hope that he’d raise his voice again. God, I wanted him angry. I wanted him furious at me, at both of us. I wanted him to lose his temper. Prove that he felt something more for me than just the sadness of what could have been. Prove he fucking cared about me. Prove me wrong.

  “I called you here because I wanted to see if we could salvage something from the fucking carnage of all this,” he said through gritted teeth. “That, sure, I’ve hurt you, and you’ve hurt me, and you’ve gone through my phone and I’ve broken your heart, but that there’s something between us despite all of it that we can pluck out of the wreckage and rebuild into something real.”

  “Yeah? And what’s the verdict?”

  He rose abruptly, a mix of anger and sadness and bittersweet victory in his eyes. “You’re right. We can’t. You’re too much of a prick to even consider it, and whatever we might’ve had is too far gone to save.”

  “You’re leaving then.” A pang of hurt shot through my heart as the realization set in. I’d been too hasty, too certain—and in that certainty, I’d only convinced Noah to do exactly what I’d expected he’d do all along.

  “Nothing left to stay for,” he said, looking away. “You should stick around though. Thought we might actually work things out. There’s a bottle of champagne on its way.”

  He tucked his hands in his pockets on his way out, not even bothering to cast a final glance over his shoulder before he was out the door. But sure enough, just a few minutes later, the waiter who hated me arrived with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot.

  “Where’d your friend go?” he asked, sneering down at me over the hook of his nose.

  I sighed, moving my champagne glass over to the table’s edge. “Just pop the cork and leave the bottle.”

  I drank it down to the last drop, knowing that I’d completed the cycle for good this time. Alpha meets Omega. Alpha fucks Omega. Alpha fucks up.

  I’d never be able to taste champagne again without the bubbles rolling over my tongue making me think of him.

  14

  Noah

  “I can’t believe I actually broke it off.” I blinked as I stared down at the stage from the inside-facing window of Foster’s office, surveying the potential replacement dancers bumping and grinding their way through a routine. “It’s been two weeks and it still doesn’t seem real.”

  “You might not be able to believe it, but I can,” Foster said, laying a sympathetic hand over my shoulder as he watched the dancers and yawning—they weren’t exactly our most inspiring set of auditions. “It looks like it’s doing you well, honestly. You were a little green-looking for the first few days after…”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, running my hand across my abs. “There’s this tightness in my stomach that just wouldn’t go away. Still hasn’t, actually—but I think I must be getting used to it.”

  “You look better rested now, too,” Foste
r pointed out. “No more dark circles under your eyes.”

  “There was a week there where it felt like I’d barely slept, yeah. And every dream I had… They weren’t even dreams, really? But now, shit. I think I slept twelve hours last night—and I could easily go sleep another twelve now.”

  “You’re welcome to the couch if you want it.” Foster cocked his head over toward the leather sofa against the door. “I’m sure we’ve got some kind of costume cape we could drape over you while you napped.”

  “Nah,” I said, echoing his yawn from earlier. “I’ve just been extra wiped lately, I guess. Unexpectedly dumping Ace…took a lot out of me, apparently.”

  “If you weren’t going to break up with him, why’d you take him to that fucking Italian place?” Foster chuckled as he watched my first yawn turn into a second. “It’s such a breakup spot. Someone on Yelp even called it, ‘The best place in New York to dump your partner in.’”

  “I was just pissed that he’d gone through my phone, I think. But then when I got there… Christ, he was so certain that I was going to break up with him that I actually ended up breaking up with him. I thought he’d apologize and we’d work things out!” I laughed at the sheer ridiculousness of it. I’d wanted to save whatever we had left once all the lies were finally peeled away. Not ruin it completely. Forever. For good. “And god, yeah, look at me now. Single, heartbroken, too fucking tired to even focus on which of these dancers sucks the least.”

  A laugh broke yet another of my yawns as one of the dancers attempted to tear off his breakaway pants, failed, and stumbled into the Omega next to him with his feet tangled up in the ankles of the pants. One by one, they toppled like dominos—no, these guys wouldn’t do at all. The Ballroom was supposed to be high-end—not a slapstick comedy routine.