As if sensing he had caught me in my agitation, he forced a smile and held my shoulders.
“It must have been a very long day. You should get some sleep. I actually have somewhere to be… I have to get ready and leave in a little while, but don’t mind me and sleep as much as you want.”
He got off the bed so I could lie down and arranged the covers for me. The fatigue must have been hitting him at last, as he pressed the inside of his wrist firmly against his eyelids several times.
I felt bad that we had been so intense with someone who had to be somewhere early in the morning, but apologizing now for initiating sex didn’t seem to fit the situation.
Outside the window, the sky was already brightening to a deep violet. It was still raining, but it had let up from how it had been in the middle of the night.
Wondering if he had any time to sleep at all, I asked him in an apologetic voice as he drew another layer of blackout curtains, but he just smiled as if to say it was fine and came closer, pressing my shoulder lightly to urge me to lie down.
“I’ll leave your phone here. I’ll call you, so make sure you pick up, even if you’re sleepy.”
He was probably talking about a call to discuss the progress of the matter I’d asked him about, and yet, his words telling me to be sure to pick up sounded like a small promise between lovers… and for a moment, rather than feeling happy, I was scared.
Have I always had this sentimental side to me? It was not a good sign.
Dating, love—I wasn’t ready for any of it, situationally or internally, to handle such things without issue.
The one with the rice cakes isn’t even thinking of giving any, yet here I was, going on about not being ready… The bitter and ridiculous taste of my own wishful thinking made me pull the covers up to my lips and nod.
It was hard to believe that it had only been a few hours since I’d been trembling in such terror from the moment I saw my great-uncle’s face at the front gate. It felt like if he said everything was okay, then everything would truly be okay.
That, perhaps, was a power as great as actually solving the problem itself. With that thought, I closed my flickering eyes.
○
GHOST
A specter, a phantom. An amount so minuscule as to be barely perceptible. Frightening, ghastly, atrocious. A being that certainly exists, that everyone claims to fear, yet is ‘alienated’ from our lives, drifting vaguely, sometimes amounting to nothing more than a curiosity.
The damp humidity of the monsoon rain that had poured all day settled heavily in the room.
Outside the window, a bluish dawn was slowly breaking, but the study, with the dense slats of its blinds tilted down, was still steeped in the gloom of night.
The man sat in a high-backed armchair, lost in thought, without having turned on any lights.
The hand holding a glass that was bulbous at the bottom was so still it seemed fixed in place. His face, elbow propped on the armrest and temple supported by his hand, was also frozen as if under hypnosis. Only the slow rise and fall of his bare, broad chest proved that he was a living creature and not a beautifully sculpted wax figure.
Shattering the air that was slowly solidifying around him, the man, who had been leaning deep into the backrest, suddenly sat up straight.
5:59 AM. It would be around 4 PM in Boston.
Having calculated the time difference, the man picked up the phone he had placed on the side table and had only been glaring at.
It might not connect. The person on the other end was not an idle man. But he was in luck. After a few rings, shorter than usual, he bridged the 14-hour time difference and reached a welcome voice.
A faint smile spread, if only temporarily, across the man’s face, which had been as rigid as a physical manifestation of the concept of expressionlessness.
A brief exchange of greetings and well-wishes followed, the kind shared between close friends, playful yet filled with deep affection and trust.
But he couldn’t drag it out. There was the matter of taking up the other person’s time, but more than that, he didn’t have the confidence to hold on to this problem any longer himself.
“Ha… I don’t know how to even begin….”
The man muttered to himself with a laugh like a puff of air, biting and releasing his lip with a troubled expression. Then, as if he had made up his mind, he spoke aloud.
“I went through a changing.”
Though he had steeled himself with difficulty, his voice was surprisingly calm. As if to process what he himself had just said, the man closed his mouth again.
The initial reaction from the other side was also silence.
“Of course there was a partner. You think I’d call it a changing if I’d just knotted and came by myself?”
The man closed his eyes, furrowing his brow and pressing on his temples as he retorted with some irritation to the person on the other end of the phone. Then, he immediately regretted his misplaced frustration and apologized politely.
“The first problem is… it wasn’t of my own will, nor did I have the other person’s consent.”
The man’s impassive face gradually crumbled as he continued to speak, until his expression became like a physical manifestation of the concept of pain. To numb the pain even slightly, the man picked up the glass he had set on the table and gulped down the strong single malt whisky.
“I couldn’t help it. It’s an impossible situation, but… I was completely dominated by pheromones, out of my mind, and when I came to my senses… I realized I had knotted while attempting a changing.”
As if recalling the dizzying haze of that moment, the man’s face seemed to turn white in the darkness.
“That’s why I told you it was an impossible situation.”
Unable to maintain his composure, the man’s voice quickly grew urgent.
“No, not an Omega. No, not an Omega, but… not a Beta either. That’s the second problem.”
Frustrated by his own rambling explanation, the man sighed and ran a hand over his face several times. Heeding the words from the other end, he took a deep breath and straightened his back, trying to explain the situation calmly.
After taking a few sips of whisky to fortify himself, he recalled the time not long after he had met him.
“I was sure he was an Omega, but he said he was one hundred percent Beta. I wondered if he was hiding the truth for some reason, but it gradually seemed that wasn’t the case. He clearly knew himself to be a Beta and said he had been classified as such. At first… I didn’t particularly sense any pheromones. I can distinguish any Omega, even if they don’t release their pheromones. But none of the Alphas around me detected him as an Omega. It was a little strange, but I just thought he must be an Omega who consistently takes suppressants. As you know, the chances of me failing to detect even an Omega who practically drowns themselves in suppressants are almost zero.”
He recalled the time they were drinking at a Spanish tavern, when Choi Inwoo had snidely asked if he was trying to become a Beta, given his near-aversion of using pheromones to seduce a sexual partner, let alone relying on their power while enjoying himself with one.
He fundamentally did not trust people he didn’t know well and made no effort to hide the fact that he was observing them with hostility. It was his way of making others treat him cautiously and avoid causing trouble. He had only treated him as an extension of his usual methods. It had been the same when Yuni brought Juhan, the same with everyone.
But it didn’t take long to conclude that the man, who had once learned to paint from a Manager Han, was not someone to be wary of.
His diligence, quietly fulfilling his role in his own space, was the first thing that caught his eye. The fingers sealing pamphlets into envelopes, the side profile with his head tilted slightly upward when hanging and taking down artwork in the exhibition hall… even simple movements were aesthetically pleasing enough to draw the eye.
From his facial features, the lines of his moving body, even his gaze and voice, he looked as if he were dripping with moisture, freshly washed. He seemed to still be hesitating at the boundary between boy and young man, holding back his growth.
He wasn’t particularly sociable and seemed to be shy around strangers, but he didn’t bare his teeth or guard himself against people. The way he placidly handled Choi Inwoo’s relentless advances was proof of that. The fact that he wasn’t intimidated or timid spoke of a clear conscience.
「Um… I’m not… an Omega.」
That face, speaking with difficulty, with transparent eyes that hid or fabricated nothing.
Not an Alpha, not an Omega, but a Beta, he had said. From that moment on, he was no longer just an object of observation and curiosity to the man, but a subtly unsettling, unknown territory.
“But he really seemed to be firmly convinced he was a Beta. Here, people who can get pregnant are exempt from mandatory military service. Only Alpha and Beta men have military duty. I clearly confirmed through documents that he was honorably discharged from active duty, which means his Omega presentation hadn’t occurred, at least not before enlistment. If he had presented in the military, a normal discharge would have been impossible, which leads to the conclusion that he hadn’t presented as an Omega even until recently.”
He remembered the steady gaze that had looked straight at him, saying he wouldn’t have hidden it even if he were an Omega. Those black eyes, like a concentration of the pure era that exists in everyone, not yet fully mature, but by no means hazy.
“I released a small amount of my pheromones to see his reaction. To me, he was without a doubt an Omega, but he claimed to be a Beta. I couldn’t believe it.”
He couldn’t even remember the last time he had released his pheromones. To think he had let them out just to confirm whether he was truly not an Omega. Looking back on it again and again, it was, so to speak, an uncharacteristic thing to do.
“The first few times, it felt like there was a wall, but he soon started to react. He began to respond to my pheromones with his own amicable ones. I figured he must be some more complex, lesser-known type of Omega. He detected my pheromones and reacted to them, and yet… he thought it was the smell of cologne.”
Even after that first uncharacteristic act, he had continued to release his pheromones. He could never forget that innocent, unsuspecting face in front of Shu shu’s artwork, leaning his head toward his shoulder, perceiving the pheromones as cologne.
It was the first time he had felt not displeasure, but a thrill, a jolt of stimulation, from the fact that someone could detect his pheromones.
The man shook his head slowly but without hesitation at the interpretation that came from the other end of the phone.
“No… he’s not the type to be cunning in that way. If he had been acting while knowing they were pheromones, there’s no way I wouldn’t have noticed. I wouldn’t fail to see through the act of someone ten years younger than me… would… I.”
Upon realizing that he had used pheromones to seduce that very partner, ten years his junior, and had sex with him three times to the point of losing his mind, the man fell silent for a moment, embarrassed with himself.
He could only hope that Choi Inwoo didn’t remember the time he had chided him, asking if he was really attracted to someone ten years younger. But it was true that younger men had never been his type. Let alone ten years younger—he had never even considered someone that age as a romantic partner, much less a sexual one.
“Anyway… a problem arose with him, and although it’s a method I by no means prefer… I used pheromones to have sex with him in order to calm him down. He reacted clearly. He responded to my pheromones with an intensity incomparable to before and released his own potent pheromones. I was certain then that he was indeed an Omega, but….”
Recalling the excitement and bewilderment of the moment his hand had fumbled between his legs, the man’s lips tightened.
“There was no slick. At all.”
A heavy, long silence pooled between the two of them. It was a story of things that were, literally, ‘impossible.’
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