Heaven's Ballroom

by Aiden Bates

  I could see it in his eyes that he’d disappointed every Omega who’d ever swiped right on him, which lead me to believe he probably lied about his dick size on his profile to boot.

  “Blake, just let it go,” Anders Carlton sighs from behind me. Anders, he was pretty as a picture. Honey blond, cornflower blue eyes, long, lean and elegant looking. Most handsome Omega I’d ever laid eyes on—and that was before I saw him dance. He attracted assholes like this the same way bug zappers attracted mosquitoes in the Iowa summer heat—only, this was New York, which meant most of the bloodsuckers either congregated on Wall Street, or there at Heaven’s Ballroom on a Saturday night. “He’s obviously drunk. What’re you gonna do, hit him?”

  “Oh, you wish you could hit me,” the world’s most unfortunate ginger Alpha declared, squaring up his shoulders like he knew how to fight—which he didn’t—and wasn’t afraid to start one—which I could see in his beady little eyes that he very much was.

  “Buddy, if I hit you, I’d feel bad about it,” I told him honestly. My daddies always told me not to beat up on kids who were smaller than me. Always punch up, they said—which would be difficult to manage, seeing as I had a good seven inches on this guy. I cast a glance over my shoulder at Anders, feeling a little bad over the tired annoyance written all over that handsome scowl of his. “How do you want me to handle this, then? Haul him outside?”

  Anders shrugged. “Might as well. We’re closing for the night anyway. Just…call him a cab, I guess, then we can—”

  What Anders reckoned we could do after, I’d never know. Go get a slice of pizza at Deano’s down the block, maybe. Hotwire this drunk shithead’s car and take it for a joy ride down Broadway. Go back to our respective homes, crack open a beer and let it wash away the bad taste this fucker had left in our mouths after an already long night. It had been a hellhole of a shift, with me on my toes and on the move for nearly every minute from the opening number right up until curtain call. I’d already tossed out twelve trust-fund Alphas cut from the exact same overpriced cloth as Ginger here. Making it a baker’s dozen would have only been an appropriate bookend for the disaster of an evening.

  As soon as it was over, I was having words with Foster and Noah. We were never doing a repeat of this kind of night again.

  But then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the nitwit take a swing at me. Real idiot of a sucker-punch, the kind that men like him only threw when their opponent’s back was turned. Didn’t know what he’d planned on doing if he’d actually managed to make contact with my face—I’d taken harder hits from better men and barely even blinked. In fact, he was lucky I leaned back in time for him to miss. If he’d actually hit me, he would’ve wound up in the ER at Bellevue with a broken thumb, seeing as no one had ever taught him not to curl it beneath his fingers when he aimed for someone with a steel plate in their jaw.

  “Can I hit him now?” I asked Anders, eyeing the poor bastard as he threw himself off balance and stumbled across the dance floor.

  Anders sighed. “Just get him out of here. I’m too tired to deal with this shit.”

  I shrugged, then grabbed the man by the scruff of his Armani just in time to save him from scuffing up the knees of his fancy slacks on the floor. “All right, bud. Come on, then. Time to go home.”

  He wasn’t happy about that, of course. Called me every name in the book as I hauled him out toward the front door, and even a few that he seemed to make up on the spot. I’d never been called a slut-dicked bitch hammer before, but I was happy enough to have earned the title by the time I got him out onto the street.

  “You can’t fucking throw me out like this,” Ginger-minge slurred, his poor little feet struggling to hold him up once I’d let go of his jacket. “Do you even know who the fuck I am?”

  “Nope,” I said, stepping out toward the edge of the sidewalk to hail him a cab. Didn’t have to do that, really, but I was a nice, polite country boy at heart. Could hardly trust him not to hop in whatever Ferrari he’d driven to the club that night once I’d left him to his own devices. “Don’t care to, neither.”

  “Oh, I’m gonna love seeing the look on your boss’ face when he finds out…”

  I caught a glimmer in the man’s eyes that I knew all too well. It was the same look a captured enemy got when he was about to try and bolt; the same look my pit bull, Pancakes, lit up with just before she made a grab for a piece of bacon balanced precariously on the edge of a plate. It was a look that, above all else, broadcasted one thing and one thing alone, loud and clear:

  I’m about to do something very, very stupid just now, and it’s up to you to stop me.

  The man rushed me just as the cab pulled up alongside us, giving me just enough time to open the door for him. In his little squirrel-sized brain, I figured he probably imagined that he’d knock my knees out from under me. I’d played wide receiver back in high school—I’d seen that hunched-over pre-tackle stance before. Unfortunately for him, I hadn’t really slowed down at all since my Friday Night Lights days, whereas he—well, he was drunker than a fruit fly in a bottle of moonshine. I side-stepped him just in time to send him diving into the cab’s backseat, skittering across the vinyl and slamming his face into the opposite door.

  “That’s the thing about the things you love, buddy,” I told him, a slow, easy smile on my lips as I peered in at him through the door. “If you’re not careful, love hurts.”

  I shut the door on him before he could recover enough to get any more dumb ideas, slapping the roof of the cab twice to send it on its way into the night.

  Dumb idea didn’t even begin to describe how ridiculous it had been to open the Ballroom up for an amateur night that Saturday. Back when Foster had made the decision to change the vibe of the club from high-end stripteases to theatrical, sensual burlesque, it’d been the best thing that could’ve happened for the place. No more lap dances with handsy customers. No more dollar bills flying all over the place, with some cheap sleazeball throwing quarters like he thought our dancers in their G-strings were some kind of sexy, magical wishing well. Putting a little distance between the performers and the audience had been safer for our Angels while giving our clients fewer chances to do the kinds of things that left them bleeding out the noses in the backs of NYC cabs. The fact that we’d backpedaled on it for one night of debauchery had only opened us up for a perfect kind of shitstorm.

  That was the thing about giving horny upper class Alphas an inch, see. Entitled pricks had never been told no once in their lives—so who could even act surprised when they decided to start grabbing at the dancers’ crotches, trying to take seven inches or more? I knew that Foster was having a hell of a time keeping a full line-up of hot, talented Omegas, especially seeing as our best dancers had a bad tendency of running off with wealthy Alphas to settle down into happy family lives—but on a business level, that was all the more reason to keep dancers like Anders out of the line of fire, as far as I was concerned. Just because he was handsome, young and scantily clad didn’t mean he deserved to be cornered at the bar and grabbed at, which was where I’d found him just before the Alpha who’d done it had started taking swings at me.

  Begged the question of why Anders even stuck around at the Ballroom at all, if that was the kind of nonsense he had to deal with every time Foster got it in his head that maybe the club needed to be a little high-contact again. The dancers that they’d gotten up on the stage for amateur night hadn’t even been all that impressive—and so of course, Anders, with his long legs and charming smile, had managed to draw all the wrong kind of attention that night.

  Wasn’t fair to him at all, really. He’d been through a lot since he’d started at the Ballroom. Didn’t seem right, to keep putting him into situations where he’d only be in danger all over again—and I promptly marched up to Foster’s office so I could tell him so.

  “You’re right, Blake.” Foster let out a heavy sigh, rubbing his temples before staring up at me from his desk. He had more stacks of paper and fi
le folders piled up in front of him than I would’ve known what to do with. The bags beneath his eyes told me that he’d had just as rough of a night up in his office as we’d had down on the floor. “It was a bad idea. Won’t happen again.”

  “Yeah? Well…well, good, then.” I crossed my arms over my chest, somewhat surprised. I’d come up expecting an argument. Had prepared for one. It would’ve been all, How fuckin’ dare you, and You should know better—but Foster looked as apologetic as I’d ever seen a man in a suit look, so I dropped it then and there. “You, uh…you get your paperwork sorted out all right?”

  “Almost. It’s…ugh. Kind of a mess, to be honest.” He sighed again, shuffling forms from one pile to another. “We were doing pretty well for ourselves back when we were the only people doing Almega burlesque in Manhattan, but now that the Backdoor has cleaned up their image…”

  I scoffed at the mere mention of Wesley Harmon’s disaster of a club. “Those nimrods can’t hold a candle to this place, Foster. You know that.”

  “I thought I did…but they are. We’ve had a twenty percent drop in ticket sales ever since they had their grand reopening. I’m not saying that tonight was a good idea, obviously…” Foster shook his head. “But it got attendance up, at least.”

  “At a price, though,” I pointed out. “Alphas were out there trying to grab Anders’ cock right up until closing tonight.”

  “Shit,” Foster swore. “I’m sorry, Blake. That’s fucked—and it’s not going to happen again.”

  “Tell that to Anders. I’m not the one everyone’s playing find the sausage with when you send the dancers out to work the room.”

  Foster glanced down at his paperwork, then back up at me. “Tell him for me? I really would, but…” He gestured to his desk, and I nodded with a grunt.

  Someone needed to make sure Anders was okay, at least—and handsome as he was, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to talking to him again.

  2

  Anders

  Wipe off the glitter. Cut the lights. It was only when I was backstage like this, showering down in the locker room and feeling the ache in my muscles from a long night, when I began to question why I was really here. Not here on this planet—I knew what I’d been born to do. Not even here in New York. I loved this city to my dying breath—smog, traffic, the way the sky never went completely dark even in the dead of night, all of it.

  But here at Heaven’s Ballroom instead of curled up in a nice house with a nice book, a nice husband at my side and a baby on the way?

  Sure. I wondered about that. I wondered that a lot.

  Out on stage, it was different. I’d taken my first tap dance class at age three. Fallen in love with the spotlights and the sound of my feet against the baseboards then and there. In high school, my mother directed my tastes towards ballet, which was like falling in love all over again. Other Omegas I’d grown up with had spent their sixteenth birthdays on mega yachts in the Caribbean, getting drunk on expensive vodka and doing body shots off of Alpha underwear models. I’d spent mine in St. Petersburg, starring in the Almega version of Swan Lake.

  Dancing had been more than just an addiction back then. It had been my entire life. Not just the way it felt when the audience showered me in white roses after the performance was over. Not just the shrill of wolf-whistles, the roar of the applause. I’d fallen deep into all of it back then, the same way other people fell into drugs or drinking or collecting Instagram followers. The meticulous dieting, exercise, and weigh-ins that kept me svelte and slender enough that my Alpha partners could hoist me up into the air like I weighed nothing more than a feather—because I barely did. The long hours, so intense and arduous that I was up before the sun and back home long after it had set.

  Then, at eighteen, I had a meltdown. Told Juilliard they could go fuck themselves. Told my slave-driver of a mother pretty much the same. I’d known then that I only had a few more years of ballet in me anyway. Before long, some other overprivileged, rail-thin Omega would’ve come along to take my place anyway. Would’ve ended up overqualified for any gig I could’ve gotten. Twenty-six and shifted off into side roles, then to the back of the chorus line—and even then, only if I hadn’t starved myself to death first.

  Back when I first got my job at Heaven’s, it had probably saved my life. Stripping demanded muscle mass. Bulking, lifting, putting on weight in a way that would’ve made my ballet instructor tear out the few wispy strands of hair he still had left. For the first time, I could eat a cheeseburger and not worry about my dance partner complaining about the strain I was putting on his back—because for the first time, I was lifting myself. Pole dancing. Chair dancing. Lap dances and striptease—they funded a room for me in the shittiest apartment I’d ever lived in, the first one I’d ever had away from my mother’s ever-watchful gaze.

  Dancing at the Ballroom had been my way out of that life, at so little cost and with so much to gain. For the first time, I had friends. Real ones. Friends that I could talk to about something other than how many calories were in the skin of a single grape. Even better, I’d had admirers. Important ones. I’d had half the Alphas on Manhattan eating out of my hand in that first year, and the other half wishing their Omegas would just divorce them already so they could get a chance to come see me up on stage.

  But all that attention…it wasn’t doing it for me anymore. Hadn’t been for a while. I’d spent so much of my teenage years trying to make myself so thin I could disappear by turning sideways—but I’d never imagined that gaining enough muscle to stand out from the crowd would be its own cross to bear.

  I turned off the shower, breathing in its steam before grabbing a towel and wrapping it around my waist. Funny, how I could feel so much more comfortable wandering around the locker room backstage in nothing more than a fluffy white piece of cloth than I did on the other side of the curtain fully clothed these days. It was hard to tell what was more of a problem: how fucking good I looked in a pair of tight breakaway pants, or the piece of shit Alphas who thought that those pants were an invitation to grab me in them. I could wash off the feeling of their hands on me, but no matter how hard I scrubbed at my skin beneath the hot water, I could never wash away the feeling that I wasn’t safe.

  Thanks to one Alpha in particular, I wasn’t sure that I’d ever feel safe again.

  “Hey,” a gruff voice called out as I toyed with the lock on my locker. I’d started bringing my own after the last incident. Flowers, chocolates, bottles of champagne sent backstage for me from my adoring fans? That had been fine. Once upon a time, my pulse had been sent into an ecstatic gallop at seeing a pretty little wrapped box with my name on it—because I’d been a vapid idiot back then. Finding out that sometimes those presents contained death threats? Less fine. By a long shot.

  I looked up from my lock, expecting to see one of the amateur dancers hoping to get some stage tips from me. Alphas weren’t allowed backstage anymore—also a precaution of my insistence—but it wasn’t unusual to see one of the new Omegas lurking around, hoping for a little advice.

  To my surprise, though, a broad-shouldered figure lumbered forward, clad in a tight black t-shirt and a worn-out pair of jeans. I laughed as I saw the way he was covering his eyes with one hand, looking down at his combat boots to keep from running into something.

  Blake. The exception to backstage Alphas that justified the rule. The Ballroom’s most veteran bouncer was too polite to even risk a glance at a dancer in a way they didn’t want—and as handsome as he was, everyone wanted.

  Even, admittedly, sometimes me.

  “You can knock off the blind man’s bluff shit, Blake. It’s just me back here,” I called out to him, producing a slow, steady smile on his lips.

  “Yeah,” he said, lowering his hand from his eyes. “Just trying to be a gentleman anyway.”

  “You know how I feel about gentlemen,” I teased. Blake had known me back in my slutty, hedonistic days. Different boyfriend every night. Wild, hard-partying and
free. “What’ve you got there?”

  Blake glanced down at his free arm, which was laden with a massive bouquet of orchids and another of red roses. Tucked up around them were a number of packages—a blue one from Tiffany’s and another from Godiva.

  “Gifts from your admirers, per usual.” Blake shuffled forward, dumping them onto one of the locker room benches. “Wasn’t sure if you’d want them tonight or not.”

  I rolled my eyes, turning back to my lock and popping it open. “Can’t you foist them off on one of the amateur dancers? They’d appreciate it more.”

  “Would, if they hadn’t all gone off for drinks with audience members already. Hell, I don’t think half of them even wanted to dance, really. Just wanted to meet a nice, wealthy Alpha who’d take them out for a night on the town.”

  “Nice, wealthy Alphas?” I laughed bitterly. “Not sure we had any of those in here tonight.”

  “Not nice ones, maybe. Wealthy, though…” Blake sat next to the pile of gifts, brushing the bow on the Tiffany’s box away with his thumb before pulling it open. “Wealthy enough, looks like.”

  “Cuff links or engagement ring?” I asked, not even bothering to look. It was a little game Blake and I played most nights—if it was from Tiffany’s, it was usually one or the other.

  Blake chuckled, holding the box up for me to glance at while he read the card. “To the lovely Omega with the blue eyes. If you like a little silver at your cuffs, I have some other cuffs I’d love to use on you…”

  “Ugh.” I stuck my tongue out, making a disgusted face. “Why are Alphas all such pigs? Present company excluded, of course.”