Although it was late evening and completely dark outside, the moment I stepped into the hall, a dazzlingly bright light poured down. It was a golden light that made everyone in the venue stand out splendidly.
“Wow… this is the best party I’ve ever been to. Just how rich is the gallery you used to work for, Boss? My jaw is on the floor.”
The interior, centered around the first-floor hall, was equipped with several makeshift bars, a grand piano where jazz was being played live, a magnificently installed DJ booth that was still empty, and a perfect mix of table and couch seating. It wasn’t just my Noona; my Hyung and I also stared with wide eyes.
“I’m going to go find the manager. I’ll follow him around and make sure to hand out all my business cards today. You never know. If I hand out enough, maybe someone will check out my blog or social media and recognize my talent.”
Noona, who had packed her clutch, decorated with glittering black sequins, full of business cards, pushed up her gold-rimmed glasses that dangled from a chain and disappeared toward the center of the hall. Juhan, headed to the second floor, saying he was going to seduce a timid Alpha who couldn’t adapt to the scene and burn up his last night in Hong Kong.
And just like that, it was just him and me.
“Um… let’s go together. It won’t be an interesting time, but.”
He shrugged, his hands shoved into his pants pockets. I thought about my own lacking English skills and dry personality, which would only make a boring time even more boring, and shook my head.
“I’ll just have a drink at the bar. It’s my first time in a place like this, so I think it’ll be fun just to sit and people-watch. Please don’t worry about me.”
“I went to the trouble of inviting all our gallery staff, so don’t be like that. At least you, Seo Yeehyeon, should go and show your face to the gallery side. You can leave after we’ve paid our respects.”
Seeing his slightly troubled expression, I couldn’t refuse any further.
His old colleagues were gathered at the most central of the first-floor tables. He introduced me as a staff member he was working with in Seoul, and the group of six or seven men and women all welcomed me with polite smiles. Every one of them was dressed in a way that was both glamorous and sophisticated, and it went without saying that they looked accustomed to this kind of setting.
“He’s still very young. So please, refrain from any mean jokes.”
“Whoa… to hear the great Liu Weikun say that and be so protective makes me want to tease him even more.”
Before we sat down, he placed a hand on my back and gave them a look as if asking them to go easy on me, and everyone burst into light laughter at someone’s joke.
There were times like this when the ten-year age gap between us would suddenly hit me. It wasn’t that he usually acted foolishly, but perhaps because of his fundamentally unauthoritative air, even if he was chilly at times, or perhaps because of his ageless beauty, it was usually hard to feel that ten-year difference.
For some reason, his introduction asking them to go easy on me because I was very young wasn’t entirely unpleasant today.
“How is it, working with Weikun? It’s not easy, is it?”
At the question from his former colleague, who was now a top-tier dealer, I smiled at him in the seat next to me instead of answering. The atmosphere suggested that everyone was well aware of his working style, and the person who asked didn’t seem to expect a specific answer.
“Ah… that temper of his wouldn’t have gone anywhere. People used to cry and quit because of him back in the day, too. Tell me. He still says whatever comes to mind without a filter, right?”
The one who made the jarring comment in the otherwise smooth atmosphere was the man sitting to my left.
The blond man, who was dressed more casually than the others at the table and had a free-spirited air, was smiling, but his words were full of thorns meant to prick him. The corners of his smirking mouth were twisted stiffly.
“Uh… please be good to me.”
I leaned my upper body back slightly without realizing it as I answered the hostility that was thinly veiled by a very shallow smile. The man didn’t seem to have any intention of backing down.
“Come on, when else can you openly bad-mouth your boss? It’s fine. I went through a lot of rough stuff when we worked together, too. There’s no one here who doesn’t know about Liu Weikun’s temper.”
Whether he was unaware of the awkwardly stiffening mood at the table or just pretending not to know in order to achieve his goal, a strange sort of desperation was visible on the face of the man who was hell-bent on cutting him down under the guise of a joke.
“No, really… he’s very kind.”
The early version of him, who had prioritized those precious to him and made me feel alienated, who had sometimes drawn out an unfamiliar rebelliousness from me, had already faded within me. The fact that I had felt unnecessarily hurt by his words and actions was a problem mixed not only with his attitude but also with my own feelings for him.
“Kind? Whoa… kind? Did you all hear that? He says Liu Weikun is kind to his staff.”
The man, who until then had been leaning back so loosely it seemed he might slide right off his chair, straightened his posture and shouted to the others at the table. The party had probably only been going on for about an hour, but the smell of alcohol wafted strongly every time the man’s clothes fluttered.
Someone told the man to calm down in a nice way, but he didn’t seem to have any intention of doing so.
“Kind, you say? To what extent? Kind? Or sweet?”
“Stop it. I asked you not to be mean.”
Unable to watch the man’s persistent questions any longer, he stepped in himself.
“This is being mean at a party? You’re too overprotective. This isn’t the Liu Weikun I knew. Since when did you care so much about your staff?”
He didn’t have to respond to every little thing, he whispered to me in a low voice in Korean. Along with an apology.
“Ah, or maybe he’s not just a staff member?”
The man, who had been reaching for his glass, bent his back at an exaggerated angle to peer into my face. His pale green eyes, the whites shot with red, were filled with a fierce emotion.
“It has to be, right? Liu Weikun being kind to his staff? Do people change that easily? I guess you’re not just working on paintings at the gallery, but other things as well?”
A kind of desperation was mixed into the man’s provocations as he relentlessly pushed and prodded him with an almost passionate fervor.
If my intuition wasn’t wrong, it seemed the man wanted him to look at him, even in this way, and wanted to draw out a reaction about himself from him. It was a psychology that was difficult for me to understand, but the world wasn’t only filled with emotions that could be explained with clear logic.
“Even so, you can’t blame Kun, can you? Anyone can see he’s overflowing with charm. It must be harder not to make a move on him when you work together every day. But he really does look young. Kun, what’s the deal? He’s not a minor, is he?”
The Asian man who had briefly called him over at the VIP preview changed the subject to steer the mood, and as the blond man entered a momentary lull, the topic at the table shifted to the plastic surgery procedures for a youthful appearance that were currently popular in Hong Kong. It didn’t seem like a subject that I, or he for that matter, would have any interest in.
Letting out a sigh of relief, I raised my glass to wet my throat with a little champagne when the blond man spoke to me again.
“I’m sorry if what I said made you uncomfortable. I meant it as a joke, but Weikun has always been a bit puritanical about these things.”
His voice was a notch lower, as if he had calmed down from a moment ago.
“Not at all. It’s fine.”
“Is this your first time in Hong Kong?”
“Yes.”
With him at my back, I turned my shoulders slightly toward the man out of courtesy as I answered.
“You probably didn’t get to do much sightseeing because of the fair.”
The man, who rested his chin on the table as he spoke, had a generally disheveled appearance, but a closer look revealed a delicate face. Above all, his blond hair was beautiful, glittering even in its messy state. It was my first time seeing this kind of blond hair up close, so it was a little fascinating. It might be an unfitting description for this situation where the man was being a nuisance to those around him, but the thin, slightly pale blond hair, without much of a yellow tint, suited his nervous and selfish vibe well.
“You haven’t been to Victoria Peak yet, have you? The night view you see while driving along the hillside at this hour is truly romantic.”
The man’s eyes suddenly lit up as he looked straight at me.
“How about we sneak out right now and go see it?”
The suggestion was quite unexpected, as I had thought the man’s real interest lay strictly elsewhere—behind my back, so to speak.
The man placed a hand on my shoulder, leaned his upper body in deeply, and brought his lips close to my ear.
“You look incredibly bored, too.”
“……”
Before I could react, a hand stretched out over my shoulder and pushed the man back into his seat.
“Don’t do anything stupid. He’s a Beta.”
And in the next moment, my body was gently pulled back. When I turned, he was glaring at the man with a grim expression. The effort he had been making until just a moment ago to suppress his displeasure as much as possible had completely vanished from his face.
Only after hearing his words did I realize the man had been releasing pheromones. Just like with In-woo, I hadn’t felt a thing.
The man held up both hands as if to prove his innocence and leaned his upper body back.
“It’s not like I thought he was an Omega. As you know, it’s not something I can control.”
While pretending to take a defensive stance, the man was grinning from ear to ear.
“If you can’t even control it from leaking out onto a Beta, why don’t you take some medication?”
His voice, grabbing my arm and pulling me toward him, warning the man with me between them, was taut, the syllables breaking off sharply.
“Ah, right. To you, an Alpha who isn’t a Golden is just a disease that needs medication, isn’t it? Not everyone is lucky enough to be a Golden Alpha like you.”
“Lucky?”
“……”
His voice, catching on the grating word, cracked sharply, and the man, as if sensing he had crossed a line, shut his mouth and avoided his gaze.
He took a sip of champagne, set it down, and rose from his chair.
“We should get going. I’m sorry we seem to have just disturbed the atmosphere.”
Following him, I also awkwardly rose from my seat.
“Why, is the smell of cheap pheromones that disgusting?”
The man, until the very end, was desperate to get some kind of extreme reaction out of him. Unlike his sharp, stabbing words, his eyes, looking up at him from his seat, wavered chaotically with a light of resentment and pleading.
Suddenly, I remembered my past self, who had wondered what it would feel like to be ‘specially’ hated by him. Among the people who had surrounded him at the Phantom exhibition, there must have been those who wanted to be ‘special’ to him, even if it was by being hated.
Perhaps what the man wanted from him now was that kind of twisted expectation. It was just a vague guess, based on limited information and a not-so-confident sense of things.
“Still pretending to be all noble by yourself. Are the pheromones of non-Goldens so disgusting that you have to bring around a boring Beta?”
Knowing that he reacted sensitively to pheromones and had a puritanical attitude about them, the man was digging into that part and that part alone. I wondered if he had ever been severely reprimanded by him in the past because of his pheromones, but no matter how I looked at it, the man’s attitude didn’t seem to be rooted in hatred or revenge.
He, who had been walking around the chair while buttoning his unfastened jacket, finally stopped and looked back at the man. His downward gaze held no temperature, not even coldness; it was lukewarm.
He let out a light scoff.
“So you’re an Alpha, is that it? A pathetic excuse for one who doesn’t have the confidence to seduce a one-night stand without pheromones?”
If, by any chance, my intuition was correct, I felt I would never be able to understand what kind of satisfaction the man could possibly get from drawing out such a reaction from the person he yearned for. I turned my gaze away from the man, who looked up at him with a face as if he’d been butchered, despite having been the one to provoke it.
“Even for an Alpha, a Beta is better than a train wreck like you. Even without the modifier of Alpha or whatever, I think anyone in this room would choose him over you, don’t you?”
“……”
“So don’t you ever let those cheap pheromones of yours leak onto him again.”
Without a tremor, but as if chewing and spitting out the words, he finished speaking, then pulled my back and turned us around. The side profile of his hardened jaw seemed to regret bringing me to this place.
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