Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
PINEAPPLE
The first rule of arriving somewhere controversial is to never look like you’re the one causing the problem. But to always be one-hundred-percent the problem.
I step out of the car with my shoulders loose, my smile easy, and my suit pressed to the kind of perfection that makes publicists forgive almost anything until I open my mouth.
The driver closes the door behind me with one smooth motion, and the entire entrance to the Golden Plate Awards seems to inhale at once.
I feel it travel through the crowd before I even make it to the red carpet—the subtle stall in conversation, the redirect of cameras, the way a hundred opinions suddenly sharpen into appetite.
The overhead spotlights sweep across me, hot and white, then settle into a golden wash that catches on every inch of my jagged surface, casting shadows on all of my hard edges.
Somewhere off to my left, a gossip host actually makes a tiny delighted squeak, which is both undignified and incredibly flattering.
I watch her closely as her eyes roam over me, dropping to my midsection and lingering there with a look so hungry I can practically feel the drag of her tongue across my abs.
This is why I keep coming to things like this even when the invitations arrive late, passive-aggressive, or not at all.
The room always starts out so convinced of itself.
There’s already a favorite. There’s already a narrative.
There’s already a comfortable, pre-approved answer plated and waiting under a silver dome.
Then I walk in, and suddenly everyone remembers that flavor is supposed to make you feel something more complicated than reassurance.
A reporter with a lacquered berry mouth and a microphone shaped like a tiny spoon leans forward until security gives her a warning look. “Pineapple,” she says, smiling hard enough to suggest bloodlust beneath the lip gloss, “people are already asking whether this counts as gate-crashing.”
I give her the same smile I reserve for interviews, rivals, and anyone who thinks they’re about to get something over on me. “If they’re already asking, then I’m clearly exactly where I need to be.”
The cameras love that. A burst of flashes pops bright and fast enough to leave tiny starbursts in the air, and I angle my head just enough to make every shot look intentional.
My whole life in the public eye has been built on that balance, the polished edge over something a little more dangerous, the confidence to stand exactly where people don’t want me and make them wonder why they can’t look away.
The critics call me polarizing when they’re feeling diplomatic.
The tabloids call me shameless when they’re in one of their weekly moods.
If I’m being honest, the audience drags me back with a hunger I can feel from the stage.
I don’t blame them.
Sweetness that never misbehaves gets boring.
The reporter keeps pace with me as I move onto the carpet, her heels ticking against the glossy surface that follows just outside the velvet ropes, while every camera in range scrambles for a better angle.
“You’ve made a career out of being the thing respectable people call disgusting while they secretly ache to taste it,” she says.
“Don’t pretend that happened by accident. ”
I glance toward her, then past her, because the answer is yes, but it deserves better scenery than her hungry little smile.
The red carpet is packed with exactly the sort of foods who love a rule as long as it keeps them in the center of the plate.
Truffles in black velvet. Macarons pretending to be demure while showing far too much filling.
Celebrity proteins holding themselves like they expect someone to salt them before the end of the night.
The room smells like melted butter, flash powder, expensive alcohol, and the dry heat of stage lights cooking everyone to their best angles.
“Traditionalists don’t hate me because I taste bad,” I say. “They hate me because I taste too good in the wrong places. I’m sweetness with a bite and just enough of a bad decision to keep them craving what they swear they’d never put in their mouths.”
She hums like she’s pleased I’ve handed her a quote she can make look like a threat in print tomorrow morning. “And you enjoy being the part that makes a respectable slice taste like a filthy little mistake.”
I enjoy being the thing they can’t stop talking about after they’ve finished pretending to be offended, but that answer is too honest for a carpet already drowning in performance. “I enjoy being memorable.”
That, at least, is universally true.
My gaze reaches her a second before the rest of me does.
Pizza stands under the heat lamps as if they were invented specifically for her body, and for one vulgar, wholly inconvenient moment, all the noise around me flattens into something distant and decorative.
I’ve seen her before, of course. Everyone has.
She’s everywhere now, on billboards and in campaigns and staring out from glossy covers, and instead of dulling the obsession, it only sharpens it, feeding the part of me that aches to get my hands on her and strip all that polished public perfection down to something private, trembling, and mine.
None of it prepares me for the reality of her in person.
She glows.
The heat has gotten to her in all the ways heat gets to something beautiful and built to soften.
Her edges have relaxed into the kind of curve photographers chase for years and still fail to capture properly.
Her center carries warmth I can read even from where I’m standing, and the way she holds herself through it all tells me she’s used to being looked at while her core is reacting to heat—and maybe more than just the heat of the lights.
The room is eating her up with their eyes and calling it admiration.
She keeps smiling like she doesn’t notice how much of her they think they’re entitled to.
I slow without meaning to.
The reporter notices immediately, because of course she does. “Ah,” she says, following my line of sight with the precise enthusiasm of a woman who knows gossip when she smells it. “So there is something here tonight worth your attention.”
I don’t answer her right away because I’m busy watching Pizza shift her weight as another photographer calls for a turn.
The movement is subtle, controlled, practiced into something elegant, but I still catch the deeper truth of it.
The heat lamps are working on her. The warmth has pooled low and steady through her center, and the pressure of all this attention is softening her in ways she’s trying very hard to disguise as poise.
She’s the public darling because she makes this look easy.
She’s the industry standard because everybody already knows how to love her.
She’s safe enough to be adored in broad daylight and glossy enough to make people feel wild for wanting her anyway.
That should make her less interesting.
It doesn’t.
It makes me want to know what she looks like when she stops behaving. When the heat is too much for her to handle.
“That’s Pizza,” the reporter says, as if tradition should be enough to keep my appetite in line. “Surely you two are on opposite sides of the menu.”
My mouth curves before I let the answer land. “That depends. Are we talking about the public menu, or what people actually crave when no one’s watching?”
The reporter laughs harder than the line deserves, which tells me she’s already picturing tomorrow’s headlines.
Good. I’m not here for invisibility. I’m here because everything in this room was arranged to celebrate the familiar, and I’ve never trusted a room that comfortable with itself.
Pizza is the centerpiece of that comfort, the safe order, the beloved default, the one everyone reaches for when they want satisfaction without surprise.
I don’t look at her and think about consuming her.
That would be too simple, too ordinary, too much like giving in to the version of her they’ve all already agreed on.
I think about heat meeting sweetness in the wrong place at exactly the right time.
I think about sharpness dragged through comfort until comfort starts to crave it.
I think about one bold topping landing where the world insists it doesn’t belong, then making the whole damn dish impossible to forget.
The reporter is still there, hovering in my orbit with all the patience of a woman who knows better than to interrupt a good angle. “Do you ever worry the controversy overshadows the craft?” she asks.
That pulls my attention back to her for just long enough to answer properly.
“Only people with nothing real to offer hide behind the craft,” I tell her, and I keep my tone pleasant enough to sound conversational instead of surgical.
“The work matters. The reaction matters too. If a flavor makes the room this nervous, that usually means it hit something honest.”
She practically purrs at that. “And what is Pizza hitting for you?”
The answer arrives fully formed and far too fast.
Curiosity first.
Desire second.
Possibility spreading through both like syrup pooling inside a square on a belgian waffle mixing perfectly with the melted butter.
“She looks like someone who has spent a long time being exactly what everyone wants,” I say, and that much at least feels fair. “I’m interested in who she is when she gets tired of being that.”
The reporter blinks, surprised into silence for the first time since I stepped onto the carpet.
I leave her there with her little spoon mic and her rapidly multiplying theories, then keep walking, because there’s no point in pretending I’m not headed toward the center of the room now.
The crowd parts just enough to make it easy.
Plenty of them are pretending not to watch me approach her, which would be more convincing if they weren’t all suddenly terrible at blinking.
The closer I get, the more I can feel the tension around her.
It hangs in the air with the scent of champagne foam and caramelized sugar, thickened by the low electrical warmth of the lamps overhead.
Pizza turns her head just slightly, and for the first time I see her looking back at me instead of past me.
Her expression stays composed, but something in her center betrays her.
Heat still pools there, deep and rich, and the awareness of it makes my own body tighten with interest.
That’s what catches me and keeps me there, far more than the polish or the applause or the way she’s been packaged for the world like the final word on comfort dressed up in couture and good lighting.
Those things are easy to admire from a distance, and the whole damn world has already proven it knows how to do that.
What gets under my skin is the possibility of her unraveling in real time, of watching that perfect, untouchable composure shift beneath the weight of something she wants badly enough to stop pretending she doesn’t.
I want the moment her control slips just enough to show me what lives underneath all that poise.
I want the heat that rises when she stops performing for the critics and starts answering something rawer, stranger, and far more dangerous.
There’s something almost filthy about wanting that from a woman built to be everybody’s safest choice, and I don’t bother lying to myself about it.
The more the world insists on treating her like something classic, clean, and universally approved, the more I ache to be the reason she goes soft around the edges and hungry in places no one else has ever been allowed to see.
When she lifts her eyes and locks onto mine, I don’t look away.
I let her feel exactly how badly I want that shift, and I hold her gaze long enough to make it clear I’m not interested in the polished version of her the rest of them worship.
I want the one who might still come apart for me.
The room around us keeps moving, cameras flashing, voices rising, heels ticking over the carpet, but my attention narrows with a focus that feels almost luxurious in its certainty.
I don’t want to just eat her. I want to get under her skin and make her feel the difference between being loved by default and being wanted on purpose.
I want to stand close enough to alter the entire balance of her evening.
I want her to go home warmer than she arrived and irritated by how much she enjoyed it.
By the time I stop a few feet in front of her, I’ve already let my smile settle into something smooth enough to pass for composure, though there’s nothing clean about what’s moving underneath it.
She can feel that much. I see it in the way her gaze catches on mine and holds a beat too long, in the way the heat already living in her seems to rise under the lights instead of easing, in the faint softening at her edges that tells me she’s still carrying the aftermath of every look, every touch, every filthy little possibility she’s been trying not to name.
I like her like this far too much, polished for the room and still warm at the center, still tight with that effort to hold herself together while something deeper keeps asking what would happen if she stopped.
The whole world can have the glossy version of her if it needs a safe fantasy to worship, but I’m standing here aching for the shift beneath it, for the first real crack in that immaculate control, for the moment she looks at me and forgets to keep herself respectable.
When her eyes stay locked on mine, I know she feels the pull of it already, that sharp, dangerous contrast between what she’s supposed to want and what her body has started reaching for anyway, and that is exactly where it gets interesting for me, because flavor has never lived in safety.
It lives in tension, in sweetness dragged over heat, in the slow, indecent give that happens when something perfect finally lets itself want what it was never supposed to touch.