Now that I’d said it out loud, it sounded like an incredibly childish demand—no, a tantrum. When he gave Yuni a piggyback ride, when he was casually physical with his brother, I’d felt both envious and a surge of ugly emotions, but I never once thought of asking him to stop. Because I knew full well they were foolish feelings.
I looked down at the melting ice cream, then glanced at him, who remained silent.
“Just now… pretend you didn’t hear….”
He grabbed my wrist as I was about to put down my spoon. The grip wasn’t entirely playful.
“Are you going to make me the only childish one? Then is it okay for me to keep giving Baek Yuni piggyback rides whenever she’s drunk?”
Admit it. Don’t hide that ugly desire to possess the other person completely, to be conscious and wary of even his painting models and acquaintances, all while knowing it’s an unreasonable feeling. I looked at his face, which demanded that we be childish together, and slowly shook my head.
He let go of my wrist with a satisfied expression.
“How’s my face right now? Isn’t it hideous?”
A chuckle escaped me at his serious face as he put on an act, tracing his own cheek with his hand.
“It must be hideous. Isn’t this… the face of someone who’s so happy to be the object of a twenty-two-year-old’s jealousy that he’s desperately trying to stop his mouth from splitting into a grin?”
I stared blankly at the face he pushed close to mine, telling me to take a better look, then cupped his cheek with my palm. It was an act that required even more courage than my confession just moments before.
“You’re just… handsome.”
It was probably a compliment he’d heard so often he no longer felt anything, but he froze and stared at me, his expression like someone who had been called handsome for the first time in his life.
He looked slowly from my left eye to my right, then gently laid his hand over mine. It was mortifying, but for a moment, it felt as if we were cut off from all the surrounding noise and gazes. The illusion that only the two of us existed. Funnily enough, it was in that moment that I truly felt this was a date.
“The poolside and garden here are quite nice. Shall we take a little walk before we go home?”
No matter how pure and innocent a lamb he thought I was, I was also a tainted adult, enough to grasp the meaning of the look he was sending me and feel a light thrill of anticipation.
I met his eyes and nodded.
I could feel curious gazes from the next table, but they no longer bothered me. The fact that their conversation had suddenly quieted made it all the more obvious they were talking about us, and the words ‘alpha’ and ‘omega’ were occasionally mixed in.
Perhaps they saw him and me as an alpha and omega couple.
Regardless of one’s primary gender, alphas and omegas could legally marry. Although betas made up the overwhelming majority of society, Korea had deep-rooted emotional resistance to such things, so it had only been in the last ten to fifteen years that the legal system had been fully established. Currently, there was an active movement within the country to legally recognize not only unions between alphas and omegas, but all relationships capable of resulting in pregnancy.
Separate from legal permission or validity, public prejudice against same-sex unions still existed, but among the upper class, who valued the interests arising from marriage more than the heterosexual alignment of primary genders, unions between same-sex alphas and omegas were already common.
It was especially not a rare occurrence in marriages between chaebol families or celebrities, and despite the fact that homosexuality was still rejected in society, dramas and movies featuring same-sex alpha-omega couples were wildly popular, and it was commonplace for alphas or omegas with same-sex partners to be active as TV personalities.
The fact that the gazes from the next table held more curiosity than disgust was likely due to the influence of such images portrayed in the media. Perhaps one of them, as an omega, had taken a liking to him. Though it wasn’t just omegas who were attracted to him.
The only societies I had ever experienced were school and the military, and since both were groups that operated with secondary genders clearly disclosed, I had never been mistaken for an alpha or an omega. Looking back, it was only after I left my village and started working at Phantom that such misunderstandings began.
While I felt an awkward discomfort at their gazes, which seemed to mistake me for an omega and see me as his alpha’s partner, there was also a part of me that secretly used my imagination to picture myself with him as an omega.
The memory of a night in bed when I’d begged him to knot me, and for a fleeting moment, had felt a sense of anticipation for the changes that could occur in our relationship if I had a body capable of pregnancy, resurfaced, making me feel uneasy.
Such self-negation was not a pleasant experience, so I quickly cut off the fantasy and followed him to gather my things.
After paying, we left the restaurant and got on an escalator to go down one more floor. He had explained that the club on the floor below was a bit noisy, but tonight, it seemed to be more than just that.
As if someone was causing a ruckus, the sounds of screams and shouts from a place out of our view, voices warning them to stop, and the sound of someone requesting backup over a radio all mixed together chaotically, accompanied by an unusual tension.
The people on the escalator going up were also looking back at the source of the commotion, whispering among themselves.
As the escalator descended further, a small crowd gathered at the club’s entrance, which had no separate door, came into view. Through the gaps between the club staff and hotel security guards surrounding a bench placed against the wall, I could glimpse two or three men and women sprawled on it.
They were loudly spouting off in blunt terms about the legitimacy of their sexual arousal and their displeasure at having been interrupted. Words like pheromones, heat, and sex felt like jarring, out-of-place props someone had mistakenly placed inside the elegantly decorated hotel.
From the radio chatter, it seemed the hotel had decided to hand them over to the police and was just waiting for their arrival. They appeared to be struggling to restrain them and shut them up, but it didn’t look easy.
“Sometimes there are alphas or omegas who come to places like this without taking their suppressants. They think that drinking while in heat can substitute for the effects of drugs.”
He seemed to be trying his best to exclude his personal feelings, but he couldn’t hide his intense disgust.
When we were completely off the escalator, we could see them more clearly.
Burly security guards were stopping them as they tried to grope themselves and take off their clothes. One of the troublemakers even lunged at a guard, grinding his body against him and spewing obscene words with completely glazed-over eyes. Even when they were threatened, their mouths covered and shouted at, they were relentless.
I didn’t want to look, but my eyes were drawn that way.
They were definitely… different from the drunk betas I had seen.
There was none of the bewitching, dreamlike feeling that Juhan-hyung had used to describe Shushu, nor did they seem sublime. It was just… unsettling, as if I were being forced to watch someone else’s extremely private bedroom affairs up close.
He put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me in, as if to protect me from something harmful.
“This isn’t the mood for a quiet walk. Shall we just… walk home?”
He was trying to smile, but it seemed he was having a harder time enduring this situation than I was.
We immediately turned around and took the escalator back upstairs. The farther we got from the commotion below, the more my mood returned to its original state. There was no reason to let people who had nothing to do with us ruin the lingering warmth of the good time I’d had with him.
After sending the driver home first with the car, we began to walk slowly. It was a distance that would take ten minutes at a leisurely pace to get to his house.
The temperature was high, but a breeze blew from time to time.
This was probably the first time we had walked together since I returned from Hong Kong.
Whether it was because of the sweet buzz from the sake I’d tried for the first time, so different from beer, soju, or wine, or because of the awareness of walking with him, I was uncharacteristically giddy and kept chuckling to myself. He found me amusing and kept turning his head to check my face.
Once we passed the short shopping street right in front of the hotel, a mix of high-end tailor shops and old, humble hair salons, the atmosphere of the street changed completely. In the upscale residential area lined with large houses surrounded by high, long walls, cars passed by very rarely, and there wasn’t a single person in sight.
As we were passing a mansion with a wall made of rock-sized, light gray bricks, he lightly grabbed my arm, exposed below my short sleeve. His hand slowly stroked down my arm and gently found and took mine.
Walking on a night road holding his hand suddenly felt more unbelievable than his kisses or our sex, and I lifted our joined hands to shoulder height several times to confirm it with my own eyes.
He turned to look at me and chuckled, and feeling a floaty high, I became conscious of my own drunkenness and pushed his shoulder.
“Why… do you keep.. looking at me?”
He suddenly pulled my hand, leading me behind an SUV parked in a designated spot in front of the gray brick mansion.
Leaning his back against the wall, he put a finger to his lips as he embraced me. And before I could say a word, his lips met mine. It wasn’t a deep kiss, but a series of playful, shallow pecks that separated with a soft sound, and in between them, a laugh escaped me without my realizing.
“Uh… umm… why. Are you laughing like thaat.”
I was laughing even more, but in asking him the reason for his laughter, I was definitely drunk.
“What am I supposed to do when I keep laughing just because I’m with someone pretty? I don’t think it’s my fault.”
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