“The host of tonight’s party, Mr. Liu here, was saying he plans to open a branch in New York, so that’s what everyone was talking about.”
Most of the people gathered seemed to be at least acquainted with the blond man.
“Is that so? I’m very interested in that sort of thing myself….”
“But I doubt he’ll need any investment. It seems he has no reason to need help with funding.”
At someone’s explanation, the man scratched his cheek and cast a searching gaze toward him.
“Hmm. A shame. I thought there’d be a lot of interesting things happening at that gallery….”
The head curator of the Art Institute of Chicago, whom I had visited this afternoon (impressive with his handsomely grown beard and scholarly-looking glasses), stepped forward to introduce the blond man to him.
The man, who had come from Miami to attend the VIP opening at the invitation of the gallery hosting Shushu’s exhibition, was said to be the son of a famous collector. That collector was renowned for having bought a piece from a now-famous artist for twenty thousand dollars during their unknown days, only to sell it ten years later for a ten-million-dollar profit. Now, the son himself was also one of the most famous collectors in the American South.
“Collector, my ass. He’s just a speculator.”
He pressed his lips close to my ear and whispered in Korean. With his smiling face, no one could have guessed the content of his words. If it had been Yuni-noona or Juhan-hyung, they would have expertly played along and chuckled with him, but my heart pounded for no reason, and I glanced furtively at the man across from us.
My eyes met the man’s. He raised a glass filled with a cocktail as vibrant as his hair and gave us a faint smile. Unable to even muster an awkward smile in return, I subtly averted my gaze.
From the moment the blond man arrived, the atmosphere of the gathering began to be swayed by him. While everyone else was enjoying their drinks enough to get into high spirits, the man was rather excessively drunk. And it seemed that in any culture, it was difficult for ten sober people to handle one drunk one.
“The Betas don’t seem to want to admit it, but isn’t it true that Alphas and Omegas are far more prominent in the art world? Especially in the art world, even Alphas can’t match the delicacy and creativity of Omegas, you know?”
The man proudly boasted that his investment know-how involved checking the artist’s appearance beforehand.
“Among Omegas, there are sometimes people with a particularly mystical aura, and I make it a point to collect the works of such artists. How should I put it… those kinds of Omegas are bound to reach the top someday.”
Chuckling with his shoulders shaking and his eyes crinkling as if he found something immensely amusing, the man added.
“Whether by their skill in painting, or by seducing some old geezers with power in the art scene with their charms as an Omega.”
“Omega this, Omega that… It’s a bit uncomfortable to hear.”
Finding it difficult to listen any longer, he stepped in to stop the man. His tone was polite, but the heavy pauses between his words sufficiently conveyed his displeasure.
The man, who had been leaning almost halfway over the table, shot upright, his eyes gleaming. It was as if he had been waiting for him to react.
“Ah, were you uncomfortable? Don’t misunderstand. I have no intention of disparaging them at all.”
The people were now watching the man with the sentiment of an audience enduring the villain’s continuing evil deeds on screen just to confirm their final demise. The man himself was like a single, unpleasant show.
“On the contrary… I’m a bit old-fashioned in this regard, so I’m of the belief that Alphas should, of course, end up with Omegas. The pleasure in bed… well, it’s incomparable to Betas. Just between us, a night with an Omega in heat, high on pheromones… ah… in that moment, it’s so fucking good you feel like you could give up your life if they asked. It makes you feel sorry for the men born as Betas, you know?”
Everyone present had their faces stiffen with discomfort, but the man paid it no mind. He was so rude and flippant it was as if he were deliberately trying his best to make the atmosphere frigid.
Morae, Siljang-nim, Inwoo-hyung. And even A-wi. How sensible the Alphas I had met until now had been.
The fact that this hideous man before my eyes was also a facet of the world I had lived in ignorance of, whether I acknowledged it or not, sent a chill through me, like feeling the scales of a snake slithering over my naked body.
The man was particularly targeting him within the group, and he seemed to have no intention of passively resolving the situation by turning his back on this challenge. He tilted his own glass and cast a cold gaze at the man.
As the man received a refilled glass from a waiter, he spilled about half of the alcohol on the hall floor and the front of his flashy jacket. Then he laughed out loud by himself and licked the alcohol that had run down his fingers.
“I thought Mr. Liu, who openly reveals that Shushu is a Golden Omega while using his beautiful appearance for promotion, would have something in common with me…. Ah, what an excellent strategy. The work of such a beautiful Golden Omega, I bought five pieces today without a second thought.”
At the man’s story that he had reserved Shushu’s works today, his eyebrows and lips twitched.
“But. It didn’t end with Shushu, did it…?”
The man, leaning his elbow on the table, drew out the end of his sentence and cast a brief glance in my direction.
This time, I felt his entire body stiffen. The eyes looking down at the man no longer maintained the cold distance of watching a villain on a screen, unrelated to reality. And yet, the man, like someone goading another to kill him because he couldn’t bring himself to end his own life, didn’t know when to stop.
“I don’t care about current fame or anything like that. For the work of an Omega like this… I think I could reserve all the pieces he’ll paint for the next two or three years. When they’re this attractive… what does it matter if it’s just a single line drawn on a blank canvas.”
“……!”
A large palm grabbed the man’s face as it was subtly leaning toward me.
After the thwack of the impact on his face, the sharp sound of the glass in the man’s hand hitting the hall floor and shattering followed.
Everyone nearby was startled and reflexively took a step back. I, too, felt my shoulders stiffen at the sudden event right in front of me. He pushed my lower stomach back, as if to tell me to step away, his eyes fixed on the man.
It was instantaneous.
He struck the man below his right shoulder and on his side. The attack seemed to have deliberately avoided precise vital points, but that alone was enough to make the man crumple to the floor. The range of motion wasn’t even large. His movements were so concise that one might have thought the man was exaggerating the pain.
Screams, groans, and murmurs followed. The man hadn’t shed a single drop of blood, but he was writhing on the floor, curled up and clutching his abdomen. Unable to even scream, he let out strange moans and continued to curl his body tighter.
Jane and Connor immediately ran over and began to manage the situation.
Even after cutting down his opponent, he was heaving his shoulders and gasping for breath, not in a normal state. His tightly clenched fists seemed like a restraint to keep from lunging in for another attack.
It was strange to see him unable to control himself like this. I couldn’t even rashly approach him. The person I had known until now was someone at the pinnacle of reason and tact, someone who seemed capable of handling such a situation far more skillfully.
Two burly employees, summoned by Connor, rushed over and escorted the man out of the hall as if taking him into custody. Connor followed behind them. A few of the people who had been in the group approached Jane and spoke to her about the situation. Jane nodded and apologized to them on his behalf.
“No, not at all. Honestly, everyone was just putting up with it because he’s a big-spending client, but no one here would blame Mr. Liu. How could he just stand by and listen when his own artists are being treated like prostitutes that can be bought with money?”
After hearing their explanation, Jane’s gaze shifted in turn to him, still breathing heavily, and to me, standing behind his back.
Jane gently persuaded him that it would be best to go to a private room and rest for a moment. He, who until then had seemed to be concentrating all his nerves on stopping his own rampage, slowly turned to look at me.
And without a word, he reached out and took my hand. I didn’t know what to say, so I just held on tightly to the hand he had offered first.
Jane, asking the returned Connor to handle the situation in the hall, led him and me to a room down the corridor. It was a small reception room furnished with a comfortable sofa and a table for tea.
He and Jane sat side by side on the three-person sofa, and as Jane suggested, I took a seat in the armchair opposite them. He didn’t want to let go of my hand, but Jane persuaded him that this was for the best right now.
“Yeehyeon-ssi is here, in the same room, right in front of you. It’s okay. You’re not in danger. It’s okay.”
She offered him whiskey without ice and a cigarette. I was worried if it was okay to offer alcohol to someone in an agitated state, but by the time he had finished one glass of whiskey and a cigarette, his eyes had almost returned to normal.
Hooo… Letting out a long breath as his shoulders slumped, he shook his head and opened his mouth.
“I’m sorry. To cause such a disturbance at Jane’s house….”
“I heard everything. Causing a disturbance in my house is less unforgivable than spouting such vulgar nonsense in my house, so don’t apologize.”
She said firmly as she poured warm water from an electric kettle at a small bar set up in one corner into a cup.
“Even if I hadn’t heard any explanation, I know very well you wouldn’t have done that without a reason.”
Adding that, she patted his back a couple of times, then looked back and forth between him and me with a deliberate gaze.
“Yeehyeon-ssi, he’s the Omega you’re interacting with, isn’t he?”
“…….”
Though cautious, she was asking with conviction.
Instead of answering, he raised his head and looked at me. It was a gaze whose meaning was difficult to grasp. It seemed like a simple stare with no meaning, and also like a deep plea trying to convey complex emotions.
“Wasn’t it your protective instinct for the Omega you’re interacting with that was triggered?”
Otherwise, no matter how much he was insulted by a subpar human being, there was no way that he, with his strong self-control, would have tried to resolve the situation by resorting to violence. She seemed to be convinced of it.
“…It wasn’t?”
“…….”
Doubt crept into her conviction.
Still without an answer, he stared at me blankly for a while. The empty gaze, as if he had been robbed of everything and lost the will to resist, seemed to be telling me to answer for him. Whether I was an Omega, a Beta, or something else.
In Hong Kong. After the first insertion and knotting, when he had repeatedly apologized while scraping the semen out of me like a man who had lost his mind. His eyes then overlapped with these. To the point that the large, solid man momentarily felt like a hopelessly powerless and fragile boy… a certain clear sadness seemed to transparently illuminate the bottom of his soul.
But even the bottom I looked into was transparent. It was different from there being nothing. It was transparent, so it couldn’t be seen.
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