Chapter 16
By the time Allison steps onto that stage, I already know I’m fucked.
Not in some vague, abstract, dramatic way. Not in the kind of way a man says it when he knows he’s about to have a bad night and still has enough distance from the problem to laugh about it later.
No.
I mean I’m actually, truly, catastrophically fucked.
Because I’m standing in the back of Ambrosia with a beer I haven’t touched in fifteen minutes, a death grip on the neck of the bottle, and every instinct I’ve got is already wound too tight before the first beat of the song even drops.
And then she walks out.
The room reacts first.
It’s subtle at the start. A shift in the noise.
The kind of low male murmur that means every idiot in a fifty-foot radius just registered something worth looking at.
Heads turn. Conversations pause. Men straighten in their seats and lean in like they’ve all suddenly been struck by the same collective loss of common sense.
I don’t move. I don’t breathe right either, if I’m being honest.
Because there she is.
Allie.
In a skirt that should not be legal, in heels that make her legs look endless, with her hair down and her shoulders back and her chin tipped up just enough to tell me she’s nervous and refusing to let anybody see it.
Then her eyes find mine.
And the whole room can go to hell.
That’s the worst part.
Not the outfit. Not the stage. Not the fact that there are thirty men in this room who suddenly think they’ve got the right to watch her move.
It’s that she’s looking at me.
Only me.
And I know immediately this isn’t random.
This isn’t some reckless little stunt she got talked into because Shaina and Kya are bad influences and nobody in this club knows how to leave well enough alone.
This is intentional. This is aimed. This is Allison stepping into the one room in town where men get to stare without apology and making damn sure I’m the one she’s dancing for.
The first low notes of “Pony” hit, and I nearly black out on principle alone.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
Of all the songs in the world, she picked this one.
Blaze, standing a few feet to my right, lets out a quiet, disbelieving laugh under his breath. “Well,” he says, “that seems personal.”
I don’t answer him.
Because if I open my mouth right now, something deeply unhelpful is going to come out.
The lights catch on her skin as she starts moving, slow and deliberate, and the room gets quieter in the way only a room full of men can get when they’ve all suddenly forgotten how to behave like they’ve got mothers.
My jaw locks so hard it hurts.
Every man in here is looking at her.
At her legs. At the line of her waist. At the way she rolls her hips with the beat like she’s not even trying and still somehow making it look like the most dangerous thing I’ve ever seen.
A man two tables over whistles.
My hand tightens around the beer bottle so hard I hear the glass creak.
Blaze glances over. “You break that and I’m not helping you explain why.”
“Then don’t.”
He studies me for one second too long, then wisely looks back toward the stage instead of poking the very obvious bear standing next to him.
Because he sees it.
Anybody with eyes can see it.
I am one wrong move away from committing a felony in a room full of witnesses.
Allie turns slowly, looking over her shoulder at me like she’s got every second of this under control. And maybe she does.
That’s part of the problem too.
She doesn’t look scared. She doesn’t look embarrassed. She doesn’t look like she’s up there trying to prove she can do something outrageous and survive it. She looks powerful.
Intentional.
Like she walked onto that stage knowing exactly what she was doing and exactly who she was doing it to. And if I weren’t already losing my mind, that might’ve been the thing that pushed me over.
Because this isn’t humiliating for her.
It should be, maybe, in some uglier version of the world.
But it isn’t.
That’s not what I’m seeing. I’m seeing a woman who’s done being overlooked. A woman who’s looked me dead in the eye and decided if I won’t acknowledge what’s standing in front of me, she’ll make it impossible not to.
And Christ, she’s succeeding.
The room around me starts fading in weird little pieces. The bartender calling out an order. The sound of a chair scraping back. Some idiot near the front laughing too loud. It all turns into background noise because I can’t focus on anything except her.
The song rolls lower, rougher.
I’m just a bachelor…
And Allie moves with it, one hand sliding slowly up her side, head tipped just slightly, mouth parted enough to make me want to throw a chair through a window.
This is not fine.
This is not remotely fucking fine.
A guy near the stage leans forward in his seat, elbows on his knees, staring at her like he’s already imagining shit that will get him killed if I could hear it.
Another whistles again.
Somebody mutters, “Jesus Christ.”
Yeah. That makes two of us.
My body’s a war zone. That’s the cleanest way to put it.
One half of me is pure violence. A live wire of fury and possessiveness and ugly, primitive instinct that wants to grab every man in this room by the throat and remind them, one by one, that they don’t get to look at her like that.
The other half is just as dangerous.
Because I know her.
I know the shape of her laugh and the sound of her footsteps in the clubhouse hallway and the way she says my name when she’s angry and the exact shade her cheeks go when she’s trying not to blush.
And now I know this too.
The way she looks under stage lights. The way she holds eye contact when she wants to challenge someone. The way she can own a room without ever once looking like she’s asking for permission.
That knowledge settles into me like a wound.
Because it’s mine now. Because I can’t unknow it. Because once a man sees a woman he’s already been trying not to want do something like this and aim it straight at him, there is no universe where he walks away unaffected.
There’s no universe where he walks away sane.
She lifts her hands to the hem of her top.
The whole room inhales.
So do I.
And for one brief, ugly second, I want to start a fight just to give myself something else to do with my body.
She doesn’t look at the crowd. Doesn’t play to them. Doesn’t smile for them. She looks at me.
Only me.
That somehow makes it worse.
Because if she were doing this for the room, I could shove it into some easier category. I could tell myself this is just a stunt. Just a performance. Just a reckless little moment that’ll blow over. But she’s not doing it for the room.
She’s doing it to me.
And there is something uniquely brutal about a woman you’ve spent years denying standing under hot lights and forcing you to acknowledge exactly what you’ve been pretending not to see.
The top comes off.
The room loses its mind. Noise spikes all at once. Cheers. Shouts. A whistle so loud and shrill I actually turn my head toward the sound with murder in my chest before I force myself to stop.
Because if I start swinging now, I’m not stopping until there’s blood on the floor and Logan is dragging me out by the back of my cut.
“Jimmy,” Blaze says quietly.
A warning.
I don’t look at him. Because if I do, he’ll see too much. Maybe he already has.
Allie drops the top to the stage like it weighs nothing, and all I can think is that every man in here is breathing the same air as her and I hate every single one of them for it.
Her body shifts with the beat again, smooth and deliberate, and the line of her waist under the lights is enough to make my pulse slam once, hard and ugly, against the base of my throat.
I should leave.
That thought comes out of nowhere and makes immediate, brutal sense. I should leave right now. Walk out. Get on my bike. Go put twenty miles between me and this room before I do something I can’t take back.
That would be the smart move. That would be the only move for a man who still wants to pretend he’s got this under control.
Instead, I stay exactly where I am.
Because she told me not to watch if I didn’t like it. And like hell I’m giving her that. Like hell I’m walking away from this and letting the room have her attention without me there to absorb every second of it.
Maybe that makes me a masochist. Maybe it just makes me stupid. Either way, I’m rooted to the floor.
The song keeps building.
So does whatever’s happening inside my chest.
Her hand finds the pole and she turns, one slow, controlled sweep of movement that sends another wave of reaction through the room.
A man behind me mutters, “Fuck.”
My fist clenches so tight I feel my knuckles pop. Because that’s the thing no one tells you about jealousy when it’s this bad.
It’s not one clean emotion. It’s not just anger. It’s humiliation.
Possessiveness. Need. Protectiveness. Resentment. Lust. Rage.
All of it layered on top of each other until it becomes something animal and mean and almost impossible to reason with. And maybe I’d be handling it better if she wasn’t still looking at me like this.
That’s the part undoing me the fastest.
If she smiled at the crowd, if she played into the room, if she let this be general, maybe I could survive it with a little dignity left. But every time her eyes come back to mine, it’s like she’s saying it without saying it.
Look at me now. Tell me you don’t see me now.
Her hand slides to the waistband of her skirt.
No. Absolutely not.
The room feels like it tilts.
She pauses there, just for a second, and I know enough about women and stages and anticipation to realize she’s controlling the room on purpose. She knows what she’s doing.
Christ, she knows exactly what she’s doing. And I am not prepared for how hard that realization hits. Because I’m not looking at some reckless little sister figure who wandered into something too big for her.
I’m looking at a woman who knew this would destroy me and did it anyway.