Heaven's Ballroom

by Aiden Bates

  The Morningtons regret to inform you that they have been forced to cancel dinner to attend to a personal matter, the message read. Would you be willing to move the meeting to Wednesday night?

  Wednesday fucking night. I’d hoped I’d be able to take care of things promptly and be back to New York within twenty-four hours. Instead, I’d be here for the entire damn week with nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs. I’d done Disney World with my parents the summer when I was seven and they were trying to stave off the likelihood of a divorce; Hollywood had never interested me much, and getting around the city was too much of a hassle to really bother with venturing out of my neighborhood otherwise.

  You’d want to do it if Damon was here. The thought came to me out of nowhere, and I found myself glancing glumly at my phone once again. An email from Sterling reminding me once again not to fuck up my meeting, a message from my housekeeper to let me know she wouldn’t be around the apartment until I got back, but nothing from Damon.

  For not the first time since I’d boarded my plane out here, I found myself wondering what the hell I’d done wrong.

  I knew how it sounded, the mysterious business trip across the country that just happened to crop up the morning after we’d fucked. I was me, after all. A younger version of myself might’ve spun that exact same yarn if I found myself dealing with a one-night stand that had convinced himself that we could ever be something more than that. But I thought I’d made it clear to Damon—we were something more, dammit! In all my efforts to woo him, I’d actually managed to catch feelings for that graceful idiot and his perfect blue eyes.

  It had never happened before, and now, thanks to Malcolm fucking Hayward’s meddling in my accounts, it might’ve already been gone. Out the door and out of my life.

  “This sucks,” I informed Lady, who had already chosen an armchair to nap in for the duration of her stay.

  She only blinked at me sleepily before resting her head on her paws and closing her eyes. Not even a little reassuring bruff! from so-called man’s best friend was offered to soothe my frustration. Or, hell. My nerves.

  I ordered in for dinner. Pizza—not as good as the kind Damon and I had eaten on our first night. But I supposed it wouldn’t be—Californians didn’t seem capable of grasping what constituted as an appropriate pizza topping. Meat, cheese, vegetables—fine. But when every pizza on the menu had avocados on it—or worse, fucking shrimp—well, that was just asking for my wrath.

  I laid in bed for a while, picking the shellfish out of the toppings and tossing them to Lady so she could snack on them while I contemplated a scathing Yelp review. Younger Nathan would have done it, too. But this Nathan—the Nathan that stared forlornly at his phone waiting for an Omega that he’d only met a few weeks ago to give him a call—this Nathan’s heart just wasn’t into it.

  I turned to social media instead, searching Damon’s name on Instagram. If I couldn’t talk to him, scrolling through his photos would have to do. He didn’t have many posted—for a professional dancer, he obviously didn’t give two shits about his social media presence—but from what I gathered, he spent a lot of time at work and a lot of time at the gym. His last post was from months ago, a picture of the ugliest, most disagreeable orange cat I’d ever seen. Beneath the photo of its squashed face and unruly fur, he’d posted a simple caption: a frowny face.

  Nathan of the past wouldn’t have thought anything of it. But then again, Nathan of the past didn’t scroll through the Instagram feeds of the Omegas he slept with, wishing that they were in bed beside him instead of all the way back in New York.

  With nothing else to do with my time, I dug a little deeper. Six months ago, I learned, Damon had begun a relationship with some meathead-looking Alpha named Andrew. There were a few pictures here and there of the two of them together with the ugly cat—her name, to my amusement, was Cleo Catra, and ugly as she was, she held herself with just as much regality as her namesake—but they dropped off abruptly, and Damon’s Instagram posts had shortly followed.

  Weird. First he’d lost his ugly boyfriend, then he’d lost his ugly cat. Damon Bishop, as fate would have it, had the world’s shittiest luck.

  I told myself I wouldn’t dig deeper. I resisted the urge for what felt like hours and probably added up to all of twenty minutes. But when I reached the end of Damon’s feed—a picture of himself from a few years ago with Cleo Catra on the day he’d first adopted her, and another of him with his dads and five pretty, blue-eyed younger sisters—I found myself unable to stop snooping.

  I missed him, I rationalized. He wasn’t returning my texts and it felt like something was wrong. If I thought that would make me feel any better as I clicked onto his ex’s profile, well, I was wrong. But what I saw on Andrew’s feed once it loaded surprised me so much, the guilt melted away like butter in a pan.

  There was Cleo Catra, alive and well. The last picture of her was posted just a few hours earlier, in fact.

  That motherfucker had stolen Damon’s cat.

  It pissed me off more than it should have. Maybe because I was an animal lover myself, I guessed. If someone took off with Lady, I’d have gone full Liam Neeson on their asses. Kevlar, throwing knives, mad karate skills. The works.

  When I saw the location tag on Andrew’s profile, my grip tightened around my phone with rogue ambition. The idiot had his address listed in his profile information. Apparently, he was trying to operate a start-up to sell weed-infused cat-shaped lollipops outside of his apartment just a short ten-minute drive from where I was now. Cleo Catra, I learned, was the face of said start-up.

  The prick tagged Damon in every post of her. Like he was taunting him with her new life as the official mascot for High On Pussy Pops. God—even this guy’s company name was horrible.

  I had half a mind to get a cab to his address just then. Break into his stupid shop. Steal Damon’s ugly cat right back.

  But that would be crazy, of course. That would be something that an insane man would do. Damon wasn’t even talking to me presently, for some unknown reason. I didn’t exactly like the idea of him being pissed at me, then discovering from his shitty ex that I’d broken into private property for an impromptu cat burglary.

  “Bad idea, Garnet,” I mumbled to myself, closing out of the app. “And stop talking to yourself while you’re at it—you even sound like a crazy person.”

  I knew what I should’ve done. Turned my phone off, grabbed a shower, taken Lady for a jog, another shower for good measure, then sleep. Followed by another day of the same: shower, jog, shower, jog, sleep some more, wake up, repeat. I could get through a week like that. It’d be infuriating, but I could’ve done it.

  It just wasn’t what I wanted to do. What I wanted to do was fly back to New York, show up at Damon’s apartment with a boombox over my head and the song from Flashdance blaring from its speakers. Shout at him, “Why won’t you talk to me, you asshole? What the fuck did I do wrong?” until he finally got tired of hearing “She’s a Maniac” played on repeat and came down and forgave me for whatever dumbshit thing I did to piss him off in the first place. Six months down the road, maybe, I’d take him to dinner and pull out a ring. We’d make babies together. Move out to my parents’ country estate and turn it into a shelter for aging corgis and ugly stray cats.

  That sounded crazy too, sure. But I was spitballing at this point. I’d never given a shit about anyone before—not anyone I’d slept with. Never this much.

  I settled for another text—the long kind. The kind that, no matter how hard I tried to end it, it just seemed to keep stretching on and on into infinity.

  The kind that maybe, just maybe, might make him want to text me back.

  Damon, it read, if I pissed you off, I’m sorry. If I did something to hurt you, I’m even sorrier. I should’ve gone with you to pick up the morning-after pill, and I’m sorry I made you do it alone. I should’ve bought condoms. And coffee. And this ice cream I’ve been meaning to make you try. It’s cilantro lime flavored, which is
weird, I know, but I think you’d like it. I think you’d look cute eating it, trying to lap it all up before it melted down onto your fingertips, and you’d look even cuter sucking them clean.

  I’m an asshole, okay? I don’t know how I’ve been an asshole, but I’m totally willing to own it. And maybe you’re just busy. Maybe you left your phone on the subway or it got stolen by some guy trying to steal your tip money after your shift. If it’s about the business trip, then I’m sorry about that too. I know it sounds made-up, but it’s real. I swear. I’ll bring something good from Los Angeles back for you. Your cat, maybe. Do you want me to steal your cat, Damon? Because dammit, if you want me to, I’ll steal your cat.

  Talk to me, okay? Just a hey. A hi. A “what’s up” or a “how you doin’?” Just, y’know. To let me know you’re still alive and stuff. I miss the way you look when you fall asleep, like there’s not a single thing wrong with the world for just a little while, and I miss the way you look when you wake up—like the whole planet’s caught fire while you were lost in your dreams. I wish you were here by my side right now.

  I paused, rolling my thumbs around in their sockets. I’d typed so fucking much, they were starting to ache. And it gave me time to think up one final line—the message would already have to send over ten or eleven texts, I had no doubt, but it was this line that scared me to my fucking bones when I tried to put it into words.

  I think I’m in love with you, Mr. Bishop. If I tell you so, will you say it back?

  I sent it before I could think better of it. In the time it’d taken to write, the sun had sunk so low on the horizon, it had turned the palm trees outside my window into black outlines on a backdrop of tropical orange and pink.

  I snapped a picture of it with my phone, considering sending it along with the text. But I’d already blown up Damon’s phone enough for one day, I decided. I posted it to my own Instagram instead. A sudden pop of color to the boring black and white gala pictures and cups of coffee next to paperwork on my desk.

  I added a caption before I uploaded: Wish you were here. The only person I meant to read it didn’t even follow me. Hell, he wasn’t even responding to my texts.

  But it felt good to say it anyway. To put it out into the world like that.

  For once, I felt something for someone, and for once, I fucking meant it.

  However things ended between Damon and I, I was grateful for him. There weren’t many men like me who could admit to something so real as that.

  16

  Damon

  I rang up to the penthouse from the door of Nathan’s building a dozen times before the doorman finally took pity on me and came out to see what I wanted.

  “Nathan Garnet? Hard to say.” He scratched the stiff bristles of slate gray hair on his wizened jawline and shrugged.

  “Did he leave…I don’t know. A message for me or anything? For Damon Bishop?”

  There was a sympathetic look in the doorman’s eyes as he peered up at my face from behind his desk. Like he’d had to do this to plenty of other Omegas just like me plenty of times before. “Son, you know how these Wall Street men are. They come and go as they please. Cleaning lady hasn’t been here in the last day or so. Maybe he’s out of the city?”

  Incredible. Nathan had managed to get me into bed with him, then he’d managed to flee the city undetected. I’d been ghosted before, sure, but this was a whole new level, even for my unlucky ass.

  “Thanks,” I told the doorman, slumping away back into the chilly breeze.

  Wind funneled down the streets of New York like the sidewalks and alleyways were just one huge network of ventilation shafts. If you listened close, you could practically hear the city breathing. The winds carried lost society sections of newspapers, plastic bags and the scent of garbage trucks on its wings—the latter of which was turning my stomach something fierce that day. Nerves, probably, I decided.

  Leave it to Nathan Garnet to make me feel so bad about myself, I had to duck into an alleyway to puke up my breakfast.

  It wasn’t just that he’d disappeared without word, or that I had no way to contact him. It was that he’d fucked me, then he’d fallen off the face of the earth. He’d led me to believe that he was completely different from the kind of Alpha I’d assumed he was from the beginning—then, as soon as he had me hook, line, and sinker, he left me flopping on the grass like a fish out of water, gasping and drowning in the cool morning air.

  The rest of the week went by in vomit and glitter. I threw up in the bathroom backstage at the Ballroom just before my Flashdance set, rinsed my mouth out with Listerine and ran out to give my performance for all the hungry Alphas out in the crowd. I threw up on Carlos’ shoes when he came back to let me know that one of my regulars wanted a lap dance, resulting in Noah taking me off the private dance roster and me buying Carlos a new pair of dress shoes.

  Anders was having an equally bad time of things, though he was better at not showing it. The police hadn’t been interested in tracking down the man who’d been at our apartment all night, beating down the door. As blasé as Anders was playing things, I could still tell he was shaken by the prospect of it happening again. At work, I caught him constantly looking over his shoulder like he was worried he was being watched. At night, we started sleeping in the living room together, him on the couch, me with my feet kicked up on the coffee table as I reclined in the armchair, my baseball bat resting across my lap.

  “Not to be weird or anything, Damon…but maybe you should pee on this,” Anders said one morning, shouldering into the bathroom as I prayed to the porcelain throne and tossing me a foil-wrapped object. “I don’t want to scare you or anything…but you and Nathan at least used protection, right?”

  I wiped my mouth on the back of my hand and looked up at him, eyes watering. “He said he was fresh out of condoms,” I croaked.

  Anders cringed. “Of course he did. Don’t freak out but…you do know what puking every morning is a symptom of, right?”

  “It’s not just every morning,” I pointed out. “It’s every time I eat…every time I smell something a little bit too strong…”

  “Heightened sense of smell, sensitivity to food…” Anders shook his head. “Pee on the stick, man. Then get the hell out of the bathroom—I need a shower before my shift.”

  I came out of the bathroom five minutes later with a racing pulse and two thin blue lines.

  “It’s positive,” I said, suddenly feeling smaller than dirt. “I…I think I’m pregnant.”

  “No shit, sweetie.” Anders patted the couch next to him and I slumped over to sit down. My head was spinning—not just with nausea anymore, but with the realization of my predicament throwing my brain for a loop as well. “Still nothing from Nathan?”

  “My phone’s still out for repairs.” I rested my elbows on my knees, slouching forward. “But even if I could tell him—I don’t know that I should.”

  “Why not?”

  I laughed, even though none of this was funny. Gallows humor, I guess. “He’s disappeared without warning, Anders. Fucked me, knocked me up and left the city. Do you really think he’s going to care that I’ve got his baby in my womb?”

  “He might. You said he’s old money, right? Families like that tend to take progeny pretty seriously. Line of inheritance and all.”

  “Unless the baby is an unwanted bastard from some classless stripper,” I pointed out.

  “You’re not a stripper.” Anders swatted me gently on the shoulder. “You’re a dancer—and you’re not classless, idiot. Come on—you go to class all the time.”

  I forced a smile at Anders’ joke. “That would be funnier if I wasn’t about to lose my scholarship.”

  “Maybe you won’t. It’s been a week, right? Still no word from the evil redhead on your board?”

  “Still no word from anyone, feels like.” I sighed. “At least your stalker is gone.”

  “Ugh. Hardly.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “He’s reared his ugly head again?
You should’ve told me.”

  “No, no. It’s more like…he doesn’t have to be here to be here anymore, you know? Like, he’s always on my mind. Like a black cloud hanging over my head, raining on every damn parade I try to march in. But let’s not talk about that right now—do you want to talk about your…y’know, instead?”

  I felt Anders’ gaze fall on my stomach, still so flat and smooth despite the life that was apparently stirring within it.

  “Go take your shower,” I suggested. “I might need some…I don’t know. Some time alone. To think and stuff.”

  “Have your time alone—just remember that you don’t have to deal with this alone. Whether Nathan’s around or not, you’ve still got me and the other guys at the Ballroom, okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said quietly, nodding. “Thanks.”

  When I went into my room to lay down this time, at least it was clean. My books, I’d piled up on my desk like a monument to the education I was still so sure I was about to lose. My clothes and costumes, I’d either hung up or put into the hamper by the door. In a way, it was the only control I had over anything right now. I’d thought maybe if my room was in order, maybe the rest of my life would follow suit—but as it turned out, all it meant was I could see the ugly shag carpet on my floor.

  Anders didn’t know it, but I knew exactly what he meant when he was talking about his stalker. He doesn’t have to be here to be here—that was Nathan in a nutshell for me in that moment. Wherever he was and whatever he was doing, he was on my mind.

  Whether I was thinking of him fondly or hating his guts…I still hadn’t entirely decided.

  I cuddled deeper into my pillows, holding one against my chest like it was Nathan there in my bed instead of a lumpy ball of fluff stuffed into a white pillowcase. At some point, I must have drifted off. When I opened my eyes again, Anders was in the doorway, knocking gently on the frame.

  “I know you wanted time alone,” he started, holding his phone in his hand like it was a knife. “But I…well, I was worrying about you, and I did some snooping. Do you want to see?”