The pole is cold beneath my palm, its gleaming metal cutting painfully against my overheated skin.
The music starts slow—a deep, pulsing rhythm that seeps into my bones and forces them to listen before my mind can protest. I tell myself to breathe, to detach, to do what I know I can do. My body knows what to do. It always has, even if it's not something I've ever done before. Dancing has always come naturally to me, like a second breath, like a language I never had to learn because it was always there, inside me, waiting only for the right music.
The problem isn't the dance. The problem is where I'm dancing. This pole is right in front of him.
I feel him before I see him, like pressure in the air, like a gravitational force pulling my thoughts in a single direction, even though he isn't even looking at me. He's standing slightly turned away from the stage, broad shoulders tense, jaw clenched, caught in a heated conversation with the man from earlier. His gestures are sharp, cutting; his voice low, but loaded with anger.
He's focused. Absent. And I should be grateful for that.
And yet something inside me fractures.
I've endured years of dirty looks, of hands that wanted too much, of smiles that saw nothing in me but a body. I survived by shrinking on the inside while, on the outside, I played the role they demanded. But now… now it's different.
I don't want him to see me like this. I don't want him to see me at all.
For the first time in my life, I don't want to be a spectacle. I don't want to be desire. I don't want to be a polished illusion under artificial lights. I want to be a person. Someone who exists beyond skin and movement.
But the music doesn't stop for existential crises.
My body begins to move—slow, controlled, every gesture calculated, every arch of my back, every slide of my hip exactly as choreographed. The dance is designed to incite, to promise without giving, to suggest without revealing. It is an art of restraint, a seduction measured in precise doses.
And I execute it perfectly.
I feel the stares. All of them. Like a wave crashing into me from every direction—heavy, insistent. The attention I've avoided for years wraps around me now without mercy. The room seems to close in, the air to thicken, every breath to grow heavier.
I tell myself not to look at him. I tell myself it doesn't matter. But inevitably, my gaze drifts.
And then I see him.
Duca isn't talking to anyone anymore. His body is fully turned now, his attention slicing through the room like a blade. His eyes are fixed on me. Only me. He doesn't even blink.
They're angry. No—more than that. His eyes are burning.
His jaw is locked, the veins in his neck standing out, his hand gripping his glass as if he wants to crush it. There is no desire in his gaze. There is something far more dangerous. Something primal. Brutal. As if my presence there challenges him, irritates him, destabilizes him.
And, inexplicably, it gives me power. For the first time, I am not the one exposed. He is.
My movements grow more fluid, more confident. I move closer to the pole, circle it slowly, arch my back, lift my gaze at the exact moment I know he lifts his. It's a silent game between us, an unspoken challenge.
I dance for him, and I know he understands.
Then everything shatters.
The woman on his lap rises abruptly, her body pressing against his without a trace of restraint. She wraps an arm around his neck, and before I can even process the image, she licks his jaw—slow, ostentatious.
Duca's reaction is violent. Sudden. Impossible to ignore. A movement that slices through the air and drains the room of sound, making the entire club fall silent for a fraction of a second as he shoves the woman away—the woman who, until then, had been coiled around his body like a poisonous vine, too tight, too present, too much.
Only then does he seem to truly register her existence, as if his anger has burned away everything secondary, leaving behind nothing but raw, unfiltered instinct. He rises abruptly, the chair screeching against the floor under the force of the movement, jaw clenched, gaze dark.
The shock hits me full force, and for an infinitesimally small moment my body forgets what it knows how to do. My hand slips from the pole at the exact moment it should have tightened—half a second, enough to lose control, to lose balance, to lose everything.
I slip and fall, the impact with the floor tearing the air from my lungs. The physical pain is almost irrelevant compared to the one collapsing in my chest—heavy, humiliating, overwhelming.
I remain motionless, the light burning my skin like a cruel exposure. The looks around me, which only moments ago had devoured me, turn now into low whispers, unspoken judgments, into shame.
Shame paralyzes me completely. It clings to me like a second skin, making me want only one thing: to disappear.
I hear him stand up. I feel his presence drawing closer before I see his silhouette, and when he says my name—his voice cutting through the noise in my head—I'm unable to respond.
I get up and run. Instinctively. Desperately.
I run down the hallway, I run from the looks, from the music, from him, from myself, until I lock myself in the bathroom and collapse beside the sink, tears pouring uncontrollably, furious at life, at fate, at the fact that no matter how hard I try to escape, my past always finds a way to catch up with me.
Time passes without my being able to measure it, and when the crying finally fades, I realize just how quiet it is around me—a heavy silence, unnatural for a bar that usually never sleeps, as if the world itself has stopped specifically for me.
When I step out, the hallway is completely empty. No music. No people. No noise. And the only presence that matters is him.
Duca is leaning against the wall, arms crossed, his posture seemingly relaxed but far too controlled to be real. When he sees me, he lifts his gaze and smiles slowly—calm, dangerous—as if he had known from the very first moment that I would come out.
"Are you planning to run from me all night?" he says quietly, his voice low, free of reproach, yet loaded with something hard to define—an unsettling blend of tension and control that makes my skin tighten.