Heaven's Ballroom

by Aiden Bates

  As the words hit me, I blinked in stunned silence.

  “You’re what, now?”

  “Pregnant,” he said again. Enunciated it like it was a death sentence. “I’m pregnant, Max, and it’s yours.”

  I laughed. Didn’t mean to, but it came out anyway. Dismissive. Harsh. Cruel enough, it made Riley hang his head in shame.

  Being pregnant was nothing to be ashamed of, of course. He was an Omega. He was handsome, and young, and I was sure he had no shortage of offers for sex. He’d been a virgin when I met him—I was sure of it—but the look in his eyes when he’d straddled me was one I’d seen in many an Omega’s eyes before. Virgin, but desperate to be rid of it. Hungry to be touched and none too concerned about who was doing the touching.

  It was the second claim that threw me. The second claim that I knew couldn’t be true.

  “I don’t need you laughing at me,” Riley said, tossing the napkin off his lap and rising to leave.

  I caught him by his wrist before he could. “I’m not laughing at you. Honestly. I’m just surprised. You can’t really think I’d believe that, can you? That it’s mine?”

  “We had unprotected sex, Max. You came inside me.”

  “Which you said was fine!” The word came out louder than I’d intended it to, attracting the attention of our waiter and nearby diners alike. Worse—it made Riley flinch. I didn’t give two fucks about what all the suits dining around us thought. But for Riley’s sake, I made a point of lowering my voice. “I thought you meant you were on birth control. You do know how babies are made, don’t you?”

  “I don’t have a Harvard education, Max, but yes—my high school did manage to cover that,” he spat at me.

  “I don’t have a Harvard education either—Riley, wait!” His wrist slipped through my fingers before I could tighten them. Instead, I stood, tossing the waiter a crisp hundred from my wallet and followed him out the door.

  He wasn’t dressed for the cold. I realized it the moment we were out on the street. His jacket was made of some thin material ill-suited for weather. It wasn’t going to get any warmer, no matter how low he hunched into it.

  “Riley, stop.” I shrugged off my own overcoat instinctively and jogged to catch up to him, draping it over his shoulders the same way I’d done that first night. But this time, I wrapped my arm around him, holding it into place so he wouldn’t shrug it off. “I’m not trying to be an asshole here, okay?”

  “Then what are you doing, Max? Because the asshole thing—it’s coming in loud and clear.” He shifted away from me, but with my arm around his waist, he couldn’t get far.

  “I just want to understand,” I told him. “You’re pregnant—I get that. But why the hell do you think it’s mine?”

  He looked over to me, glaring daggers. “You do know how babies are made, don’t you?”

  If the situation hadn’t been so tense, I might have laughed. There was that wit of his. Spitfire. He threw my own words back at me like a knife.

  “If you weren’t on birth control, why did you tell me that you were?”

  “I didn’t.” He stared at the cracks in the sidewalk beneath our feet intensely. “I was…I wasn’t thinking straight that night, Max. It was a bad night for me, and I made a bad decision—”

  “Glad to know you enjoyed it so much. And how many other bad decisions did you make after that, huh?”

  Another glare. “Are you calling me a slut?”

  “Maybe I wouldn’t be, if you’d bothered to call me at all. You had my number. Obviously, you didn’t lose it.”

  “I needed time to think.”

  “And how much of that thinking did you do on your back?” I regretted the words as soon as they came out of my mouth, which didn’t mean fuck all, since I had no way of shoving them back in. I’d never been good at thinking before I spoke, and I was worse at it when I was riled up.

  Riled up didn’t even feel like it cut it at that moment. I was confused. Unfocused. My head was spinning with possibilities, none of them the kind that brought a smile to my face. Either Riley was pregnant, and it really was my fault—or Riley was pregnant, and it was some other asshole who’d sired a child on the only man I’d had a single damn feeling for since I caught my ex in bed with another man.

  Either way, I’d said the worst possible thing at the worst possible time. Riley shoved away from me, marching forward at double speed. His damned dancer’s legs were carrying him faster than I could keep up with. I had to settle for a jog to end up back at his side.

  “Max—fuck! Just go away, okay? It was a mistake to fuck you that night, and it was a mistake to tell you about the consequences of it just now.”

  “I’m not going away.” I wracked my brain for a good reason not to listen to him. “You have my jacket.”

  “Take it back, then.”

  “You’d be cold.”

  “And I’d still be pregnant with your baby—but if you don’t believe me, there’s nothing I can do about that either.”

  Shit. I was losing him—maybe I’d even lost him already. I was good at numbers, not people. Maybe that was why all my boyfriends always ended up fucking around on me in the end.

  “Are you keeping it?” I asked, trying my best to soften my voice.

  “What do you care?”

  “Here’s a thought—maybe I give a damn about you. Have you considered that?”

  He laughed. “Please, Max. You barely know me.”

  “Maybe I’d like to.”

  “Maybe I should just take a paternity test, huh?” Riley stopped abruptly, throwing his arms out in frustration. This time, it was him who was raising his voice. “Would that appease you, or would it just give you another reason to call me a slut again?”

  He turned and walked away again, somehow even faster than before. Left me standing there on the sidewalk, unsure of whether to follow him or just pick my jaw up off the ground so I could eat my own words.

  I opted for the latter, jogging after him again with determination.

  “Well, it’s a start!”

  7

  Riley

  “Stop following me.” It was the third time I’d said it since I started the long trudge home. Something told me it wouldn’t be the last.

  “I’m walking you home,” Max insisted. Then— “Dammit, Riley. Do you have to move so fast?”

  “You didn’t have an objection to it when I was straddling your lap in the front seat of your car that night.”

  “I had several objections to it, in fact,” he countered. “You just made a particularly strong case to ignore them.”

  I laughed, then wished I hadn’t. If he was going to remember me for anything, I didn’t want it to be for my tendency to laugh bitterly at his half-baked witticisms.

  “Good to know you regret it too, then.”

  He grabbed my arm. God, he was strong. “I didn’t say that. I don’t regret it. I’d never. But Riley…you were a virgin. You were my dancer. You could’ve gotten in trouble with your work, you could’ve gotten—”

  “Pregnant?” Another bitter laugh. I was full of those these days, it seemed. “Yeah. Neither of us thought that one through, apparently.”

  “I was going to say you could’ve gotten hurt.” He moved his arm around me again, like he was protecting me from some kind of invisible evil only he could see. “I’m not good with relationships, Riley.”

  “Can’t imagine why.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I get it. I’m an asshole.” Max looked around suddenly, coming to a stop and pulling me around to a halt with him. “Christ. Where are we?”

  “South Bronx.” I scoffed. “City boy doesn’t even know his own city.”

  “I’m not a city boy,” he corrected, guiding me around an unmarked but nonetheless wide-open manhole. “Born and raised on a little farm just outside of Detroit. Came to New York on a job offer that happened to stick, is all. I’ve never been up this far.”

  “Don’t suppose you’d need to.” South Bronx wasn’t ex
actly where people of his caliber spent their time. Detroit natives or otherwise.

  “Don’t understand why you have to either. You live here?” He pulled me a little closer as we passed a man sitting on a stoop, casually weighing a hammer in his hand with a strange look in his eye like he was trying to figure out what he wanted to hit with it.

  “Not all of us can afford luxury penthouses on Eighth Street, Max.”

  “Seventh, actually.” Max blinked. “Not that it matters. Aren’t they paying you at the Ballroom?”

  “Better than any other club in the city.” I rolled my eyes. For a self-proclaimed country boy, he sure didn’t understand how the other half lived. “But it’s rent in New York. What do you expect?”

  It annoyed me, I realized. Not just the way Max could turn his nose up at my neighborhood, but the fact that he was still here at all. I’d gone out on a limb when I’d invited him out to lunch. An even longer limb when I’d blurted out my big news. I’m pregnant—there weren’t any more damning words in the English language. It was up there with It’s not you, it’s me and We need to talk.

  I didn’t know what I’d expected when I told him, but I certainly hadn’t expected for him to imply I was a slut then follow me home.

  We made the rest of the walk in silence. His fingertips didn’t leave my waist the entire time. South Bronx wasn’t exactly the safest of the boroughs, but even I could admit that Max’s protectiveness felt a little like overkill.

  Or at least, it did until we turned the corner down my street and I saw the staggering form standing below my window, the stench of cheap wine so thick on his breath that it carried over to us on the wind.

  “Riley!” Kevin slurred, stumbling forward then veering sharply left. “I know you’re up there, Riley! Come down, dammit! I just wanna…hic! Just wanna talk!”

  I let out an exasperated breath of air and buried my face in my hands. Thankfully, Kevin hadn’t yet realized that I wasn’t up in my room pining for him—I was down on the street with another man, barely ten feet away.

  “One of your friends?” Max asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “My ex,” I groaned quietly. “Christ—I told him to stop coming around here. He’s about as good at following instructions as he is at staying faithful.”

  “Cheated on you, huh?” Max paused. “I know a thing or two about how that feels.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, I’m sure you do.” Like hell he did—Max Griffin was the kind of man who broke hearts, not the other way around.

  “So what’s the plan?” Max glanced around to see if anyone was watching Kevin’s public breakdown there on the sidewalk. If he expected there to be an audience, he’d be sorely mistaken. Crazier shit than a drunk ex coming around at three in the afternoon had happened on my block. For my neighbors and I, this was just a Tuesday.

  I shrugged. “Going in, I guess. Thanks for lunch.”

  I pulled away, but Max only tugged me back to his side again.

  “You can’t be serious,” he hissed. “What if he gets violent?”

  “Then I get violent back.”

  Max glanced at my stomach. “Riley…you have a baby on the way…”

  “Not your baby, though.” My voice sounded as bitter as the bile I’d been spewing in the toilet every morning for the last week. Morning sickness was a real bitch. “Or have you changed your mind about that?”

  Max grabbed me by the other arm, turning me to face him. “If I say yes, will you come with me?”

  I scoffed. “To where?”

  “My apartment.” He said it plainly. Like it was ridiculous that I’d had to ask. “Even if you only want to stay for a couple of days…”

  I narrowed my eyes. Was he really trying to white knight me right now? After the stunt he’d pulled at lunch? Incredible.

  “I don’t know what you think I am, Max—but I’m sure as hell not some poor little project that you need to scoop up out of the Bronx and into your glamorous life. Yes, I’m having a baby—and yes, it’s yours. I hadn’t fucked anyone before you, and I haven’t fucked anyone after, either. It’s only been you.” I cleared my throat and raked my fingers through my hair. “But you’re not Richard Gere. This isn’t Pretty Woman. I don’t need you to save me. What I need is for you to—”

  I was cut off by a drunken roar and the shattering of glass. Kevin had thrown his bottle of wine—still half full and heavy—up at my window, shattering the bottle and the windowpane alike. The remnants of the cheap merlot he’d been drinking streamed down the jagged glass like blood.

  “I’ll fucking kill you if you don’t fucking talk to me, Riley!” Kevin screamed up at the broken window. “I’ll break down your fucking door and I’ll—”

  “Come on,” Max said abruptly, turning heel and dragging me back around the corner. “I’m getting us a cab. You’re coming home with me.”

  “Fuck if I am,” I protested—but even as the words left my lips, I could hear the tremble in my voice.

  Kill me. That’s what he’d said, clear as the view into my apartment through the window he’d just broken. Kevin had lied to me. Cheated on me. Wasted more than a year of my life. And now that he’d lost me, he was throwing wine bottles at my shitty apartment building and making death threats.

  It scared me. He scared me—shitless, witless, and raw.

  By the time I gathered my wits about me again, Max had already hailed a cab.

  “Garment District,” he told the driver as he slid into the back seat, pulling me along with him.

  As he reached around me to pull the door closed, I found myself nestled beneath his arm. It was strange how safe that made me feel. Here was this man who’d taken my virginity, knocked me up, denied it—and now, he was saving me from an awkward encounter with my drunk ex. Maybe even a dangerous one.

  “Thank you,” I murmured, breathing in the soft spice of his cologne.

  “Wasn’t going to leave you there,” he said, pulling his phone from his pocket. “I’m texting my boss to let him know I’m knocking off early. You need anything before we get back to my place?”

  I looked down at what I was wearing. “Not unless you’re intending to make fancy dinner plans for us, I guess.”

  “I was thinking we’d order some Chinese. I’ll send my assistant back there tomorrow to grab some clothes for you, if you like.”

  A wave of guilt hit me. Max’s initial reservations about the parentage of the baby currently growing in my belly had somehow turned heel and shifted into unflinching generosity—generosity that I probably didn’t deserve. For all I knew, I was ruining his life by springing this baby thing on him—but when I’d scheduled lunch with him earlier, all I’d been able to think of was how he’d been ruining mine.

  “I’m only staying for a few days,” I warned him. “I don’t want you thinking I’m freeloading.”

  “I don’t.”

  “And I don’t want you thinking you have any claim to this baby, either.” I ran my hands protectively over my stomach, feeling for something that I knew couldn’t have been any bigger than a kidney bean.

  “It’s my baby, isn’t it?”

  “I told you it was.”

  “Then maybe I’ll be able to change your mind,” he said softly.

  His thumb ran down my shoulder, stroking idly, and tiredly, I worked my way a little closer to him. Pressed my cheek against his chest. I could hear his heartbeat through his suit jacket, strong and clear.

  “Thank you,” I murmured again. And meant it—whether he thought he was deserving of it or not.

  8

  Max

  I paced in front of the pharmacy shelf, blinking at the sheer number of options before me. Prenatal vitamins. How many goddamn types of prenatal vitamins could one store have?

  From the looks of it, about twenty.

  “Can I help you?” an Omega in a thick pair of glasses and a pharmacist’s coat came up behind me, apparently seeing my plight.

  “I’m totally lost,” I admitted, shaking
my head.

  “Oh? Well, the condoms are just over here, if you’d like to follow me…”

  “Bit too late for condoms.” I nodded at the vitamin shelf before me. “I’m gonna be a dad.”

  The Omega rubbed the back of his neck apologetically. “Congrats. In that case…hmm. Is your husband experiencing any nausea? Morning sickness?”

  I blinked. Riley had told me next to nothing about how he’d felt so far—and I’d been too busy being a reactive asshole to ask. I’d left him up in my apartment to take a shower and get acquainted with the place. He had no idea I was even here. “Honestly, I’m not sure.”

  The Omega quirked an eyebrow at that, but didn’t comment on it. “It’s a common side effect of pregnancy. You’ll want something with B6 in it, just in case.” He pointed out three contenders out of the twenty—a cheap one, a mid-priced one, and one with such a hefty price tag, it must have given babies superpowers or something. “But they’ve all got folic acid in them—helps prevent birth defects. Beyond that, there’s not a whole lot of difference to them. Just a price point, really.”

  The Omega gave me a little smile and left me to my decision-making. It shouldn’t have been so hard for me—decision-making was one of my fortes. I could pick out three stocks to invest in any day of the week that would net Hayward Financial a cool million by the end of the year, but apparently, pregnancy vitamins were beyond me.

  Me. A father. The thought of it was still doing my head in. Stocks, sales and dollar signs, I could handle. Diapering, swaddling and burping, though? I’d never been faced with anything more intimidating in my life.

  Shaking my head, I grabbed four of each brand and headed for the checkout. Maybe Riley would have a preference. He hadn’t had much of a choice about getting knocked up in the first place—I might as well let him have one in which vitamins he’d be popping over breakfast tomorrow morning.

  “Couldn’t decide, huh?” The pharmacist laughed when I piled the goods up on the counter. “Your husband must be a lucky man.”