Club awkward number close

[Calendar]

Hello! First time posting! Had an interesting situation and could use some advice.

Thursday night I was out at the clubs around town, I got in really good with a particular club that was running an 80s night that night, new the bartenders, the head of security, even the owners grand daughters haha. But the bar was dead for a good couple of hours so I bailed until later to see if it was going to heat up. Well after going to a couple of other bars, meeting a couple of sets with some, but minimal success I returned to the bar, and ran into my friend. At this point we were 2 of about five people in the whole club. But a couple of attractive women walked in and started talking to the dj, so I excused myself and went to meet them. After a few minutes I brought them back to our booth for some better conversation, I forgot to establish a target so I had a difficult time working the set, but it still made for good conversation and a little dhv for later. Well eventually my friend's friends came in and one of them was an absolutely beautiful woman, we hit it off right away. Here's the unfortunate part, the other friend was her ex-boyfriend. HURRAY!
Well I opened and established rapport with the man quickly and asked how long they had been together, seeing that wasn't the case, only prodded enough to scoot him off for lookin too interested in her, but not enough to offend him. Then I started to work with her, and things went very well, escalating to some pretty good kino. Here's the jip, no matter how good I got in with the boyfriend, we weren't able to shake him. I had a friend who offered to help and distract him but that guy only stood behind the set and made it look awkward. Eventually I just double number closed both of them and said I'd hit them up sometime. I know I wasn't able to establish a good enough connection to actually invite her anywhere by phone. Is there anything I could have done to shake that guy off enough to move to comfort? It seems as soon as he felt my conversation with the girl was escalating he would try to drag her away, should I have just been more forceful and gotten her to stay, I didn't want to look needy and ask her to.
Noob problems haha
thanks!
-C

[Alacrity]

When he goes to the bathroom you isolate. I've seen this plenty of times.

Short of convincing her to scrape him off herself there probably wasn't a whole lot to be done here.

I had a girl who yelled at a guy in the bar, "youre not my boyfriend." but I didn't even know what was going on at the time


Sometimes it's tough in the field and you perservered just fine.