Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
PIZZA
The backstage hallway smells like hot pepper seasoning, expensive perfume, and the faint sugary scorch of overworked lighting rigs, which somehow feels more honest than the red carpet did.
Out there, everything is polished until it gleams. Every smile is lacquered on.
Every reaction is curated, plated, and garnished before it ever leaves your mouth.
Back here, the walls sweat a little under the heat, stagehands mutter things that would get them blacklisted if a microphone caught them, and the floor has just enough stick to it that my heels make soft little sounds every time I walk too fast.
I am walking too fast.
The problem is not the heat lamps.
That is the lie I tell myself while I move farther from the carpet, one hand pressed lightly against my middle like I can somehow steady what’s going on there if I apply enough pressure.
The warmth they stirred up should have faded by now.
It should have cooled once I got out from under all that golden light and all those hungry cameras and all those voices praising me for being exactly what they expected me to be.
Instead, the heat has followed me. It sits low and rich in my center, a slow, pulsing warmth that has nothing to do with performance anymore and everything to do with the fact that I can still feel him looking at me, even though I am no longer on that carpet and he is no longer in front of me.
At least, that’s what I think right up until his voice slides into the air behind me and proves I have not managed to leave him behind at all.
“You left quickly.”
I stop walking before I can decide whether I want to look rattled or offended. By the time I turn around, I’ve chosen offended.
Pineapple is leaning one shoulder against the wall like he has all the time in the world and every right to spend it on me.
In the softer backstage light, he loses the red-carpet gloss and gains something infinitely worse for my self-control, something darker, hotter, and much more private, like he’s no longer the scandal everyone came to gawk at and has become the bad decision I can already feel myself making.
“I needed air,” I say, which would be more convincing if the hallway didn’t feel hotter than the red carpet right now.
His gaze drops just long enough to make me aware of every inch of myself in a way I absolutely did not authorize. “You picked the wrong place for that.”
“I wasn’t asking for commentary.”
“No,” he says, and that little hint of amusement in his voice makes my center pulse hard enough to irritate me. “You were leaving dramatically, which is much hotter.”
I fold my arms across myself before I can do something embarrassing like touch my throat or smooth my dress or check whether the heat has made me glossier than I intended. “Do you always follow women backstage after insulting them in public, or am I getting the premium package tonight?”
He pushes off the wall and comes a step closer. Not enough to crowd me. Just enough to make the distance between us feel chosen.
“I didn’t insult you.”
“You called me boring.”
“I called the room boring,” he says, and there’s something annoyingly calm about the way he says it, like he’s already considered every angle. “You just happen to be what it revolves around.”
I should not feel that sentence in the apex of my thighs.
And yet.
Heat spikes through me again, quick and humiliating, spreading low and deep until the slick tension I’ve been pretending not to notice becomes impossible to ignore.
I shift my weight, which would have been subtle if he weren’t already watching me like he’s taking notes on every tiny surrender my body makes.
“I can’t be here with you,” I say, because I need at least one sentence between us that sounds sane, and because the second his name flashed above that carpet, half the room looked ready to file a complaint while the other half looked ready to book a table and watch the disaster unfold in high definition.
His mouth tips at one corner, smug in that controlled, ruinous way that makes me want to throw something at him and climb him in the same breath. “That sounds less like a refusal and more like a warning label.”
My pulse jumps, which irritates me on principle.
“I know exactly what I’d be signing up for,” I tell him, keeping my voice cool even while my body keeps betraying the performance. “A spectacle. A scandal. A life sentence spent explaining myself to people with bland palates and too much free time.”
He shifts closer, only a step, but it changes the air anyway. Backstage already feels overheated from the lights and bodies and too much perfume packed into too little space. He makes it worse. He has a way about him.
“You make that sound like my fault.”
“You walked into a room full of critics and turned it into foreplay,” I say. “Of course it’s your fault.”
That finally gets a real smile out of him, slow and wicked and far too pleased with himself. “I think you’re giving me too much credit.”
“I don’t think I’m giving you nearly enough. You step onto a carpet and respectable people start looking like they want to misbehave in expensive shoes. Then they see me looking back at you, and suddenly I’m the one they’re waiting to watch melt down in public.”
His gaze drifts over my face, then lower, taking in more than he has any right to notice and exactly enough to tell me he notices all of it anyway. There’s nothing hurried in that look. That’s what makes it so much worse. He looks at me like he has time to savor the effect he’s having.
“Melt down?” he says softly. “That’s not what this looks like from where I’m standing.”
My throat tightens. “No?”
“No.” He closes the distance by another inch, and now I can smell him beneath the expensive cologne and the lingering heat of the back hallway, something bright and warm and just sharp enough to make my mouth go dry. “You look like a woman trying very hard not to enjoy herself.”
I laugh once, but it comes out thinner than I’d like.
“Enjoy myself? Pineapple, you walked into an awards ceremony, hijacked the room, put my name next to yours in letters big enough to cause a national incident, and now you’re standing here acting like I should thank you for the blood pressure spike. ”
“I think,” he says, and now his voice has dropped into something richer, smoother, the kind of tone that sounds indecent even when the words behave themselves, “that if I had actually pushed you past your limits, you wouldn’t still be standing there arguing.
You’d be too busy admitting I was worth the scene. ”
I hate the way heat slides through me at that, slow and immediate and humiliatingly alive.
“You are impossible.”
“That,” he says, letting his eyes drag over me one more time with no attempt to hide the appetite in it, “has never stopped you from looking.”
My pulse trips over itself.
I laugh once, short and sharp, because if I don’t laugh I might say something far more incriminating. “You say that like it’s flattering.”
“I say it like it’s true.”
The honesty of it is somehow more dangerous than flirting would have been.
Nobody says things like that to me. They say I’m classic.
They say I’m timeless. They say I’m exactly what they’re in the mood for when they don’t want surprises.
They do not stand in a hot hallway, look me over like they can see through every layer of me I’ve spent years perfecting, and tell me I’m coming apart at the seams in a tone that sounds like temptation on a level ten.
“I’m not softening for you,” I say, and I almost believe it until another pulse rolls through my center and proves my body has entered into a separate contract without consulting management.
He notices. Of course he notices. “You don’t have to do it for me. You’re doing it because your body is smarter than your branding.”
That lands somewhere between a personal attack and foreplay.
My nipples tighten under the fabric of my dress. The warmth low inside me thickens into something syrupy and insistent, making the moistness between my thighs feel less theoretical and far more urgent than any respectable award nominee should be experiencing in a service corridor.
“You are unbelievably full of yourself.”
“I’m observant.”
“You’re invasive.”
“And you’re curious.”
I stare at him. He stares back. The air between us feels rich enough to take spoonfuls of.
“I am not curious,” I say.
He takes one more step, and now I can smell him clearly, all bright sweetness and dangerous confidence with something darker beneath it that makes me think of caramel cooked a breath too long, right at the edge where sugar becomes something dark and far harder to forget. “Then why are you still standing here?”
That is a deeply unfair question to ask a woman who is already trying not to melt into something far less respectable than the dress code requires.
Because he’s right.
I am still standing here.
I have not walked away. I have not called security.
I have not told him to choke on his own controversy and go bother someone else.
I’m rooted to the floor while my center warms and my edges feel less certain than they did ten minutes ago, and the worst part is that some shameless, molten little part of me wants to know what happens if I stay.
I swallow carefully. “Because I don’t make mistakes until I’m sure they’re worth regretting.”
His eyes darken with interest, and my entire body takes that personally.
“There you are,” he murmurs, and his voice slides over me like warm glaze. “I knew there had to be more under all that approval.”
The sentence should irritate me. Instead it goes straight to my pulsing center and settles there like it paid rent.
“I am not some safe thing for you to ruin because you like the way scandal looks on you.”