God, he is handsome.
I think it the instant he says "obviously" for the second time with that infuriating, self-satisfied calm. Like he already knows exactly how much real estate he's occupying in my head and has simply decided to be gracious about it.
Finally, I made a very mature, very composed decision to stop looking at his face and look at the dance floor instead.
"You're doing it again," he says.
"I'm watching people dance."
"You're deciding whether to be happy I'm here."
"I've decided." I take a sip of water. "I'm neutral."
"That is the least convincing thing you've said to me in weeks."
Infuriating.
He is genuinely, specifically, personally infuriating in a way I haven't felt since I lived with a man who also thought he could read me.
I'm about to say something that will definitely win this exchange when a woman materializes at the bar to my left. Leaning over the counter, arm raised, trying to flag someone down.
She's tall, dark-haired, wearing a dress that sits just off the shoulder in a way that looks accidental and took forty-five minutes. She misses the bartender entirely and catches Beckett instead.
"Sorry, is someone covering this section?" she asks him. Directed at him. Only at him. Her voice is warm and a little breathless, which typically makes men lean in to hear better.
"Not sure," he says. "I'm not drinking much tonight."
She tilts toward him like a plant tilts toward a window — automatic, cheerful, helpless to the pull of it. "Why not?"
"Better things to pay attention to." His eyes flick briefly to me, which she doesn't catch because she's already laughing and tucking her hair back like it's 2008 and that still works.
It works. I hate that it works.
I keep my eyes forward and take a long, neutral sip of my sparkling water. The sting behind my sternum is something I will be examining at a much later date when I have the privacy to be embarrassed about it properly.
The bartender appears. The woman orders, receives, pays, and lingers an extra beat — her hand resting on the bar six inches from Beckett's, close enough to be a suggestion — before the crowd absorbs her back.
He turns to me like none of that happened, which is arguably the most annoying response available.
"The music's good," he says.
"Congratulations?"
His mouth does the thing. The almost-smile that he deploys when I'm being difficult and he finds it genuinely funny rather than exhausting. Then he pushes off the bar and his hand comes up between us, open and unhurried. "Dance with me."
Here is the thing about saying ‘no’ to Beckett Morrow: I want to see what he does with it.
He came from a dinner with two families and a woman his father selected, and he is standing in a nightclub offering me his hand, and I want to know — with more urgency than I'm comfortable admitting — whether the offer is exclusive or convenient.
So I say, "No."
And he says, "Okay."
Just like that. He drops his hand and turns. In the time it takes me to process the absence of any argument whatsoever, he has crossed to the edge of the dance floor and offered the same hand to the woman in the opinionated dress.
She takes it.
Of course she does.
They find a spot in the center of the floor — and I would like to state for the record that it is absolutely possible this is a coincidence — in the exact sightline from where I'm standing.
His hand settles at her waist, low and easy. She leans into him, tipping her chin up to say something near his jaw, and they move while I stand at the bar holding my water glass like a woman who is fine.
I am not fine.
I watch him and tell myself I am merely observing, which is what you tell yourself when the truth is too annoying to say out loud.
He moves unhurried, comfortable in his own body, zero performance in it. He's not showing off for her. He's not showing off for me.
He's just… dancing.
And she looks comfortable. That's the part that gets under my skin — not that she's beautiful, not that his hand is on her waist, but that she looks completely, effortlessly comfortable in a place I turned down.
I note every point of contact between them and feel the specific, targeted misery of someone who said no and immediately regretted the answer.
He looks up directly at me. He finds my eyes across the floor while his hand is still on her waist, and his thumb moves. A small, slow arc at her hip. The message is so clear it doesn't need language: ‘this could be you.’
Heat moves up the back of my neck and pools at my jaw. My grip on the water glass tightens until my knuckles ache, and the worst part — the genuinely humiliating part — is that it's not anger. Brief, irrational, honest thoughts.
I hate her.
I have nobody to blame but myself and I am choosing to blame her anyway.
The music shifts. The tempo drops by half, the bass softening into something with a slower pull, and the crowd reforms around it. Beckett steps back from the woman without ceremony — no prolonged goodbye, no exchange of numbers that I can see — and walks back to the bar. To me.
Oh, for the love of… no. No. I am not giving him the satisfaction.
He stops in front of me, warm from the dancing, heat radiating off his skin in the small gap between us. His collar has opened another half-inch and his hair is slightly less perfect than it was, and I am doing so well.
"This one," he says.
The music is slow and the floor is right there and my body has already made up its mind. It made up its mind somewhere around the fourth minute of watching his thumb on someone else's waist. I'm just the last to know.
I put down the water glass.
I know exactly what I'm doing and I'm doing it anyway. Which is either growth or catastrophe and I genuinely cannot tell the difference right now.
His hand finds the small of my back and my entire spine locks up immediately. Shoulders rigid, chest pulled inward, every muscle running its standard threat assessment.
Then Beckett leans in. His breath moves through my hair. His thumb traces one slow line across my lower back, barely a pressure, and something in my chest that has been pulled very tight for a very long time simply… lets go.
My shoulders drop, then drop even more. The stiffness leaves in stages, each one surprising me, and I stop trying to reverse them. I let myself lean forward until my cheek is near his collarbone and I can feel, through his shirt, the steady unhurried evidence of his heartbeat.
His heartbeat is steady against my cheek and I am so completely screwed.
When I scan the room, Sloan is near the far wall with the man from earlier, her head thrown back mid-laugh, completely, blessedly elsewhere.
No one is watching. There is no one to name what I'm doing or ask me to justify it or remind me I have excellent reasons to know better.
Beckett's mouth finds the curve of my ear again, and his voice drops below the music. "Shall we go somewhere quiet?"