Confession

· Lukewarm Water ·

The operational status report meeting was one of the tasks he most wanted to avoid. In a small-to-midsize general hospital with around 150 beds, there weren't many incidents that could significantly disrupt operations. About ten years ago it had been upgraded to a general hospital after meeting the minimum qualifications, but the obstetrics and gynecology department — which had built its reputation since his maternal great-grandfather's time — remained the hospital's primary source of income.

Although it had an operating room, an emergency room, and even a funeral hall, patients requiring critical life-or-death surgeries rarely showed up, and the hospital's own policy was to transfer uncertain cases to larger facilities. Operations ran smoothly, free of complicated problems.

There was a degree of internal politics — nothing as cutthroat as in a large general hospital, but present all the same. As the son of the director and vice director, he could afford to keep a comfortable distance from all of it.

His parents had wanted nothing more than for their troublesome second son to behave. They had accepted his terms without argument — no more than thirty-five hours a week, no high-risk surgeries — and hired him on those conditions.

Becoming a doctor in the first place had never been his choice. The arrangement he and his parents had quietly settled into was this: he would hold an internal medicine specialist title, take a clinic in the family hospital where his siblings all held positions, and show up. Minimum responsibility and maximum freedom.

It was the life he had wanted, and he had no complaints. Yet sometime after he turned thirty, he had begun to feel something missing. Not having complaints didn't equal satisfaction, and he was cultivated enough to feel a dim, occasional sense of accountability toward himself — about humanity, about the meaning of a finite life — whether he liked it or not.

As soon as the department heads started talking about a golf tour in Chiang Mai, he excused himself with a prior engagement and slipped out first.

He felt he should take off his gown and maybe find someone to spend the night with after a long dry spell. The frustration wasn't only sexual, but he thought he should at least resolve what could be resolved.

"Doctor, there's a visitor waiting inside."

A nurse called out to him urgently from the internal medicine desk across from his consultation room, stopping him just as he was reaching for the door handle.

"A visitor?"

"Your friend — the one who runs a gallery."

"Him?"

He raised his voice and scowled as though he'd heard an enemy had arrived. The nurse's expression clouded at his reaction.

"I was sure he was your friend, so I told him to wait... Did I do something wrong?"

He held up a file and shook his head.

"No. No, it's fine. Something just occurred to me. Please mark me as having already left for the day. Don't worry about me — just carry on."

He entered his consultation room with a lighter expression than before, tinged even with curiosity. A large presence, entirely incongruous with the modest seven-pyeong room, stood with its back to him near the window.

"Anyone would think this was your room."

"……."

The tall man — navy Italian linen suit, broad shoulders, a relatively lean waist, hands shoved into his trouser pockets — didn't move a muscle.

"What urgent business dragged you all the way to the hospital? Weren't you supposed to be too deep in newlywed bliss to keep your wits about you?"

He tossed a file onto his desk, shrugged off his gown, and grinned at the man's back.

Although they'd met outside a couple of times and he had stopped by briefly, this was probably the first time the man had come to the hospital specifically to see him. The nurse who'd remembered the acquaintance after only seeing him once or twice was almost impressive — but then again, it was the kind of face you couldn't forget even from a single passing glance.

Whatever had made this solid man so urgent that he'd bypassed the usual procedure of making contact and arranging a time — the thought made his mouth twitch with quiet amusement. "What, it has to be poked before it reacts."

Only after he had taken off his gown and hung it in the built-in cabinet on one wall did the man's back finally produce a voice.

"You…"

"……."

"Have you ever been bound to an Omega as an Alpha?"

"What?"

"Probably not. You've never had a sustained relationship with an Omega."

The voice wasn't accusing him. It was dry — the voice of someone searching for hope in a place where none existed. This wasn't the reason he'd anticipated for the man's urgent visit.

"What are you talking about? Is this the main point, the preface — what is it?"

He crossed his arms, leaning one shoulder against the cabinet, and furrowed his brow. The man was stubbornly fixed on the utterly ordinary view outside the window, with nothing in it worth looking at.

"Imagine the other person's pheromones completely overriding your judgment, your choices, your very will. No matter how hard you struggle, you can't remain yourself. You exist and act only as that Omega's Alpha. You've never been exposed to anything like that, have you?"

The moment the man finished speaking, he fiercely narrowed his eyes, walked over, and grabbed the solid shoulder.

"Already sick of Yeehyeon-ssi?"

The face now turned toward him wore an expression different from anything he recognized, but he wasn't inclined to make allowances for it.

"Weren't you serious? Calling it dangerous was just a good excuse — I thought you were so smitten with Yeehyeon-ssi you wanted to keep him tucked away in your house. And now here's the great Liu Weikun sitting around talking about pheromones because he got his nose pierced by some Omega? You're insane — "

The man's eyes twisted with contempt. His distorted mouth extinguished the teasing.

"I'm talking about Seo Yeehyeon."

He released his grip on the man's shoulder and narrowed his eyes.

"What do you mean by that?"

The man grabbed his wrist, pulled his hand away, and spoke quickly.

"This won't end quickly. Let's talk at your place."

His voice was a compressed knot of impatience and exhaustion, as if he lacked the energy or time for a drawn-out exchange. He hadn't even checked whether there were prior engagements. The atmosphere made it plain that this took precedence over everything else.

They drove to his house in their respective cars. He turned the man's words over during the entire drive, but even after arriving home he couldn't begin to guess what he was about to hear.

His prediction had been accurate enough — if circumstances were such that the man would show up at the hospital unannounced, it almost certainly involved Yeehyeon, who had become his only preoccupation lately. But the talk the man had begun in the consultation room was entirely a riddle.

Have you ever been bound to an Omega as an Alpha?

It was a question he never thought he'd hear from a man who coldly despised the reproductive instincts of Alphas and Omegas, whose pheromone control was nearly perfect. If it was related to Seo Yeehyeon — a Beta — that made it all the more bewildering.

What weighed on him most was the man's atmosphere: unusually grave in a way he had never seen before. This was not someone to make a serious face over nothing. His second prediction — that the man was simply caught up in sweet, incongruous worries over someone ten years younger — had been completely, spectacularly wrong.

The man had arrived first. Turning the corner after exiting the elevator, he found him leaning blankly against the wall beside the entrance, like a specter. Though clearly sober, he looked disheveled as if drunk, and that killed whatever joke he'd been ready to make. Tsk. He clicked his tongue, entered the passcode, and opened the door.

This was only the second time the man had visited since he moved in that spring. They were the closest of friends, yet the man almost never came to his place.

He sat him down at the dining table in front of the stark kitchen, which bore almost no signs of habitation — like a model home. He offered a drink; the man nodded and asked if he could smoke.

His appearance called for something strong, so he poured whiskey over ice. The man, who usually showed little reaction to alcohol, took out a cigarette the moment a dish was offered as an ashtray and lit it as though he'd been waiting.

The cigarette burned halfway down. Half the whiskey in the on-the-rocks glasses was emptied. The man said nothing.

"Speak, you bastard. Did you kill someone?"

Out of frustration, he opened his mouth first. The man let out a dry, hollow laugh and slowly opened and closed the hand he'd let rest limply on the table. It was the laugh of someone for whom it might not be so different from having killed someone — so he tightened his grip on his glass.

"Pheromones. Things like that."

The voice sounded as if every human emotion had been burned away, leaving only the inner framework behind.

"They felt like proof of being a less-evolved beast. From the moment my manifestation began and I felt their effects, I hated it. The shame and humiliation of my body not being under my control — of being driven by what was happening within my own flesh."

He remembered the man from their school days. He had been exceptional. Coming from a family with wealth, honor, and legitimacy that rivaled anyone's among the Alpha and Omega children gathered at H.M.I.S. — the school for the children of the wealthiest magnates in the East — and assessed upon manifestation with over a ninety percent chance of developing into a Golden Alpha, the man had no reason to feel inferior as an Alpha. Yet for reasons entirely unlike those of his peers, he had been desperate to become a Golden.

Some factions had viewed him with suspicion and called him someone who looked down on non-Golden Alphas and Omegas, but the man back then hadn't cared a thing about the opinions of his trivial peers.

Strictly speaking, the man hadn't wanted to become a Golden Alpha; he simply wanted to escape the dominion of pheromones. He was one of the few school friends who had understood him to that extent.

"The attraction between Alphas and Omegas, the Alpha's instinct to protect and possess an Omega — living like a beast with reproduction as its top priority. Everything related to pheromones was dreadful."

There had been a time when he couldn't understand the man's insistence on being so perfect against pheromones. Unless one couldn't afford high-grade suppressants, being born an Alpha or Omega — especially one with Golden potential — was an advantageous condition.

Unless the man was somehow at a disadvantage, he had often shaken his head, thinking he lived unnecessarily hard. Why would someone at the pinnacle as an Alpha reject his given circumstances so stubbornly?

But perhaps, deep down, he had felt a twinge of inferiority toward the man's attitude. He himself had never had that level of passion for anything. Had never wanted anything that intensely, hated anything that intensely, or pushed his abilities to their maximum.

He had been assessed at a forty percent chance of developing into a Golden Alpha — a figure with real potential depending on effort — but he had never felt the necessity to push that far.

Ultimately he had stopped at an ambiguous middle ground: capable of minor pheromone control, neither Golden nor a Regular Alpha completely dependent on suppressants.

There were likely various reasons behind the habit of compromising at a moderate level in everything. He could guess at them. But at this age, he couldn't whine about his circumstances. He also lacked the drive or energy to examine himself from the root.

While calling the man's restraint an unnecessary burden — as though he were carrying some solemn duty — he might actually have quietly admired that intensity, so sharply contrasting with his own life. Probably so.

"I thought the attraction, interest, and sexual desire evoked by pheromones were all disgusting and unpleasant. And in practice, I never found anyone's pheromones the least bit tempting. But…"

The man, who had been speaking slowly while looking at a fixed point on the table, suddenly widened his eyes as though he'd discovered something astonishing on the plain white surface and shook his head.

"In the end, I was just an Alpha too. At least — to one person."

The man raised his head. In his tired face, only the blue eyes shone with an animalistic hunger. It was a brilliance that made his earlier powerless, desolate appearance seem false.

"Explain it so I can understand. What does this have to do with Yeehyeon-ssi?"

Ignoring him, the man took out a new cigarette and lit it. He drew so deeply his cheeks hollowed, then exhaled a long stream of smoke and asked:

"Have you ever heard of a Ghost?"

Through the smoke, the man's eyes had changed color again, appearing utterly vacant. Unlike the stronger blue tint of moments before, this gaze — emphasizing an ashen melancholy — struck him as truly ghostlike. He waited for the main point that was clearly coming.

Unbelievable stories followed.

A friend he had grown up alongside for years sat in his house as a stranger. But before he could even fully accept this new identity, the shock of what the man had actually done completely overwhelmed the initial shock.

"You're joking, right?"

The shock was so profound it felt unreal, which was why his voice held not a trace of doubt. It was almost cheerful. But the man's set expression was not joking.

"A Ghost? Hey — isn't that going a bit far back? Ghost is something even Wikipedia covers in about three lines before moving on, a dried-up legend — no, something that couldn't even be verified as having existed in the past, surfacing only in the oral traditions of European royalty. There probably aren't many Alphas or Omegas left who even know the term. Liu Weikun, you're special enough already without dragging in legends like that."

"……."

The man's eyes, watching from across the table, showed no wavering. He knew. He knew this wasn't the kind of person to make something like that up.

"If everything you just said isn't a joke and it's all true — then you are completely out of your mind."

He changed his tone to something cold and sharp, poured whiskey without adding ice, drank it down as though it were cold water, slammed the glass on the table with a loud crack, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

"Alright. You're a Ghost. Like releasing the safety on a pistol and pulling the trigger, you can induce a chemical reaction during knotting through trained control and turn a Beta into an Omega — let's say that's true. Since the mechanics of Alpha-Omega pheromone interaction haven't been scientifically established anyway, insisting such a change is impossible would be equally absurd."

The more he spoke, the colder his head grew — but separately, anger surged inside him. He didn't even have the luxury to examine whether he had the right to be angry at the person before him.

"But you said you were trained. You went to the States for two years as a kid for exactly that reason. So why did you release that safety for Yeehyeon-ssi?"

When he pressed with the taunt, an immediate answer came.

"I never failed. Not once. Not until now. Not with anyone. I never even lost control over knotting itself, let alone progressed to Changing. Since Changing can only be attempted while knotted, there was never any risk of attempting it outside that state."

"You couldn't control either the knotting or the Changing — with Seo Yeehyeon!"

He shouted and ran a hand through his hair in agitation.

He wished he knew how to smoke at times like these. He had done everything forbidden as a kid, yet for some inexplicable reason had never touched cigarettes. Still, life had moments where you wanted to numb yourself, soil yourself, and do yourself harm with something as potent as hard liquor.

"I thought it was a mistake. That something had just gone wrong for a moment."

Avoiding eye contact, the man spoke as if making an excuse, and he slammed his fist on the table, raising his voice.

"So you slept with him two, three more times to confirm that? Knowing it might lead to Changing — whatever that means?"

The man's gaze, which had been fixed on a point on the table, snapped sharply toward him.

"You think I would sleep with someone for that reason alone? I don't have that much curiosity about other people or their pheromones."

"I thought I knew you to some extent — your patterns, if not your essence — but listening to you today, I have no idea who you are."

"……."

The man closed his mouth and drank. His face conceded there was no room for excuses. But he wanted the man to offer something — just enough to satisfy him, or at least to settle the anger.

As though he couldn't continue the conversation without it, the man lit a new cigarette before finally opening his mouth in a slightly calmer tone.

"When we first met. Back then, it was just a strange feeling — nothing precise enough to identify as pheromones. I briefly wondered whether he might be a Golden Omega suppressing them, but I didn't think about it too deeply. Looking back, that wasn't it either. At some point it shifted from a strange sensation to genuine pheromone emission. What's more — not only was he unaware of the pheromones he was releasing himself, but he was clearly detecting mine without realizing at all that they were pheromones."

"You released pheromones? You?"

"……."

The more he listened, the more he felt pushed toward confusion. The man postponed answering. Instead, as though suddenly aware he'd stopped smoking while telling the story, he brought the cigarette to his lips and drew deep. Then he spoke as if something were crumbling in him.

"Yes. Several times."

The cigarette in the hand now rubbing his forehead and face as if grinding them was dangerously close to setting his hair on fire.

After a moment of sorting through his memories, he shook his head decisively.

"No — this doesn't make sense. Yeehyeon-ssi never detected my pheromones at all."

"……."

The man's fierce eyes demanded an explanation, but he had no intention of being intimidated.

"Why? Did you think you were the only Alpha who could release pheromones to Seo Yeehyeon? You aren't the only Alpha in the world."

He brought his glass to his lips, recalling the evening he had met Yeehyeon alone at the rooftop bar and answered his questions about Alphas, Omegas, and pheromones.

A belated thought followed: perhaps at that time, Yeehyeon had already sensed something unusual in his relationship with the man and was asking from that place. Back then, he had only assumed it was a natural curiosity about Alphas arising from being attracted to Liu Weikun.

"Even if I'm not the only one who can release them to him — the only one whose pheromones can actually affect him… that's me, isn't it?"

Reading the conclusion forming on his face, the man sneered — and that face looked pleased. Though trying to suppress it, he couldn't fully hide the joy of possession that surfaced at the possibility that his pheromones might be the only ones capable of truly affecting Yeehyeon.

Increasingly unable to recognize the man before him, he shrugged and clicked his tongue in a dry laugh.

"That's right. Unfortunately. If his pheromones had reacted to mine back then and something had happened between me and Yeehyeon-ssi — he wouldn't have ended up tangled with someone like you."

A cold blue gaze pierced him sharply.

"I'd prefer if you held back the provocative comments for now."

He turned away from those eyes — filled with an unstable sense of crisis and aggression he hadn't even seen in the man's boyhood — and reached for his drink. The man's story continued.

"Whether Seo Yeehyeon thinks of himself as a Beta or some rare mutation, it's none of my business anyway, and I'm not the type to be curious about others to that degree."

"……."

"But I couldn't ignore him. I was watching his every move, I was curious, I wanted to know, I wanted to dig into it — I couldn't help but reach out and touch. If he hadn't been a Ghost or something like that from the beginning — "

Having gotten that far, the man shook his head and took another drag. Though he'd only taken two or three puffs, the cigarette had already burned noticeably short on its own.

"There's more than one or two things I don't understand. So then — when exactly did you first sense Yeehyeon-ssi's pheromones?"

The man let out a short, derisive snort and ground out his cigarette.

"I suppose you've forgotten — but I said from the very beginning that Seo Yeehyeon was an Omega."

"But you said he wasn't an Omega. You said he's turning into one because of you. So how could you have sensed his pheromones before that? Then what is Seo Yeehyeon? What is he?"

The man lightly clenched the hand he'd been resting on the table.

"I've asked him that too. More than once. 'What are you?' Though it was more like talking to myself than actually asking him. He doesn't know himself. He still only knows he's a Beta. And the professor in Boston who has watched over me since I was a child — even he knows nothing about a being like Yeehyeon."

Holding his glass, the man slowly turned it in his hand, biting and releasing his lower lip hard.

"But now — whatever Seo Yeehyeon actually is — it doesn't matter. That's not why I came here."

He said it rapidly, almost muttering, then drained the remaining liquor in his glass in one swallow. Watching him, he clicked his tongue.

"You've dragged things to this point — whether it matters or not isn't yours to decide."

"……."

"Most people whose secondary gender manifests after they become adults can't accept the physical changes and fall apart. If a man manifests as an Omega, or a woman as an Alpha, the psychological shock is even greater. There are people who never adapt and take their own lives. It isn't a rare story, as you know. But this — it wasn't his own body manifesting on its own. It was done to him by someone else."

He couldn't finish the sentence and rubbed his face roughly with both hands.

Having accepted the reality of his friend's secret and the absurdity of what he'd done, the prospect of informing Yeehyeon of the truth now felt like a wall he had no idea how to scale. The man had come to him precisely for that. There was no other reason to suddenly share a secret he'd kept all this time.

"I won't let it come to that. He's not — that fragile."

The man said it while pulling yet another cigarette from the pack.

"If he's not fragile, if he has the mental fortitude to endure and overcome it — does that mean it's all right to do that to someone like that? No matter how I think about it, this is absolutely not like you. Where is Liu Weikun — the one who despised pheromones and all that goes with them more than anything in this world?"

"You've never loved anyone as an Alpha. You wouldn't understand."

He doubted his own hearing. It was as if a sudden brake had been applied and his center of gravity had lurched forward, threatening to send him stumbling. That word choice was as shocking as everything else the man had told him today.

"……."

"……."

He opened his mouth and lost his words. The man, having become conscious of the word he'd unconsciously chosen — love — averted his eyes for whatever reason. But he made no move to correct or retract what he'd said.

Like an oblivious, uninvited guest, one of the two phones the man had placed on the table vibrated. Both of them glanced down. The man stood and picked it up.

"Just a moment."

He didn't move far enough to be out of earshot — only to the far side of the sofa directly in his line of sight — before answering.

"Yes, it's me."

An utterly mundane and peaceful voice, completely at odds with the man who had just been wearing an expression as though he wanted to tear his own hair out. Conversely, he frowned and stared at the man's back in disbelief.

"No, it's fine. Go ahead. It was a bit stuffy, so I stepped outside for a moment. I'm eating here. Did you have dinner? …You didn't leave any? …Good. I'm glad the changed diet seems to be helping. I might be a bit later. I'll message you when I'm on my way."

The person on the other end was Yeehyeon, and the man had apparently told him it was a dinner appointment with a client. He spoke without a hitch, his voice even tinged with laughter.

It was unbelievable. Every note of that conversation was the atmosphere of a man deeply engrossed with a lover. He had never once imagined Liu Weikun's romantic life taking this form. Between the shocks of the last few hours, he felt like he'd aged ten years at once. He downed the rest of his glass in one go.

When the man returned to the table, he wore the same dark, gloomy expression as before. As soon as he sat down he moistened his lips with whiskey, with the face of someone who genuinely couldn't understand the meaning of the silent stare being directed at him.

"Ha — are you two different people?"

"There's no need to cause unnecessary worry."

"Who's the one who made this mess? And now you're talking about worrying Yeehyeon-ssi?"

"……."

"Do you think keeping it hidden now resolves anything? Playing with someone else's life as you please — "

At the accusation, the man hunched his upper body as if feeling actual pain in his stomach or chest and furrowed his brow hard.

"Don't — don't talk to me like that."

"Then how would you like me to talk to you?"

Even knowing this kind of blame led nowhere but exhaustion, he knew no other outlet for the shock of the moment. So he couldn't stop.

The man pressed his lips together and exhaled a slow, deep breath. He brought a new cigarette to his lips, then moved it back to his hand, his mouth twitching as though deciding whether certain words could be said.

"We are serious with each other."

The sentence, spoken on an exhale, sounded like a sigh.

He didn't need the man to declare it so gravely — he already knew. He had sensed the man's unusual interest in Yeehyeon from the very beginning and had anticipated that Yeehyeon might be able to break through the walls the man had built around himself and draw out his full attention. He simply hadn't expected that seriousness to flow in this direction.

"Changing someone's body without their knowledge is what you call seriousness? And then, later, offering a pitiful excuse — that your pheromones wanted to bond with him as an Alpha and Omega? That your precious Alpha nature desired Seo Yeehyeon?"

"……."

Strictly speaking, he wasn't Yeehyeon's family or longtime friend — but the man, narrowing his brow and setting his jaw, did not push back against the emotional accusation. He closed his mouth and endured, as if wanting to punish himself through the rebuke.

Seeing him weaker than usual only stoked the anger further, and he pressed harder.

"Why? Why didn't you just wait until he was one hundred percent Omega and even pregnant before you said anything? Huh?"

"……."

The man turned his chin toward his shoulder, tilting his gaze further sideways, and swept his hair back. Sensing the meaning behind that reaction, he clicked his tongue and gripped the neck of the heavy brown liquor bottle.

"So you have thought about it. You're truly insane."

He tilted the bottle, filled his empty glass, and swallowed three or four long gulps. He couldn't even feel the heat of the undiluted whiskey going down.

"So. What do you want from me? Isn't this the wrong time to be telling me all this?"

"……."

This was a man who had lived keeping even his closest friend in the dark about what he was. There was no way he had come now simply to confess, or to ease the guilt of turning his 'serious partner' into an Omega through conversation.

The man couldn't bring himself to speak as the cigarette burned all the way to the filter. He drank two more glasses of whiskey, but only the edges of his eyes reddened slightly — he didn't seem to be drawing any strength from the alcohol.

Stubbing out the cigarette that looked like it wouldn't produce smoke even if drawn, the man spoke in a tight, urgent voice.

"The Changing symptoms have started appearing. He's been feeling unwell."

"He…?"

Ha. He had nothing left to say, so he simply kept shaking his head. The sight of this man readily acknowledging a relationship to someone else, without the slightest aversion to it, was foreign. He never spoke about his purely physical partners one way or another.

"Usually it's loss of appetite, heartburn, abdominal discomfort — and depending on the person, nausea or vomiting. A few weeks ago those symptoms started. He's barely been eating."

"Of course his stomach hurts — his insides are changing!"

"It's imprecise, but I'd estimate somewhere around ten to twenty percent changed so far. He thinks it's mild gastritis. But since there's no sign of improvement, he said he's going to see a doctor."

At the voice, drained and trailing off, he leaned his upper body back in his chair.

"You… this… no, it couldn't be."

The man's tired blue eyes sent a plea toward him. He shook his head firmly, refusing it.

"Don't tell me you want me to take part in this madness too."

A brief flash of blue lit the man's eyes, which had seemed like faded, lifeless ash.

"You knew from the beginning that I was interested in him. You knew it and kept encouraging it."

Perhaps the desperation of a person backed into a corner was now drawing out aggression. The man hadn't seemed fully himself since sitting down at this table.

"Didn't you want things to work out between him and me? Weren't you entertained by the idea of a fairy-tale ending — where a miserable wretch who knew nothing of love finally opened his eyes to true feeling?"

"Yes, I was a little entertained. So what? Even if I pushed you like you say — did you only become serious because of me? If I had stayed quiet, would none of this have happened?"

Seeming to realize this was pointless, the man rubbed his face with a large palm and drew back the hostility. He propped his elbows on the table, gripping the hair he'd swept to the crown of his head — that jet-black hair that didn't match his blue eyes.

"Help me. There's no one else — no one I can ask."

"Tell Yeehyeon-ssi everything. If you do that, you won't need anyone's help, and it's something you'll have to do eventually no matter how long you try to avoid it."

Faced with the most rational, and therefore perhaps most irresponsible, answer, the man released his grip on his hair and bit his lower lip.

Then, like a severe addict, he reached for another cigarette. It was the first time he had seen the man smoke this continuously. But after lighting it, he spent more time holding it in his hand than bringing the filter to his lips. He simply needed something — anything — to cling to.

Watching the thin bluish smoke curl from the cigarette in his hand, the man's lips were dry and cracked.

"I knew I had to tell him. I knew this wasn't something that could be cleaned up later, that I needed to stop. But at the same time there's a part of me that wants to make him a little more of an Omega still. If we become more deeply entangled through our pheromones, it will be harder for him to refuse me. The probability of him accepting me even after I confess will increase by that much. There's a cowardly part of me relying on pheromones — trying to keep him at my side through the very method I used to despise most — and because I couldn't ignore the sweetness of that voice, I've come this far."

As if remembering something, he drew deep from the cigarette and flicked off the lengthening ash before continuing.

"Whatever Seo Yeehyeon actually is, the fact that he emits pheromones that stimulate mine makes him functionally the equivalent of a superior Golden Omega compared to me. I can't resist those pheromones, and I can't control my own. You, who have never been exposed to pheromones of that intensity, wouldn't understand. Convincing a Beta of their real effects is probably as impossible as the theory itself. I felt an immense gap between encountering it in theory and actually experiencing it firsthand. Even though he isn't an Omega I've had a long connection with — the overwhelming sensation of being subjugated to him, the impulse for my entire life to rearrange itself around him and for all my energy to be spent on him — I guarantee you, no Alpha can refuse that."

His voice carried the conviction that if he couldn't do it, no Alpha could. He might have been right. He was the most exceptional Alpha.

But even having lived as an Alpha himself, he couldn't readily accept that. He tightened his grip on his glass and shook his head.

"Even if it meant physically removing yourself, you should have separated yourself from Yeehyeon-ssi in that situation."

"……."

"In the end, you only dragged it out and made things worse — because you were afraid he might refuse to become an Omega and push you away."

The man made no further attempt at defense. He simply looked at him with a haggard face and deeply shadowed eyes.

"I'm not here to confess to you or to ask for your understanding. I came to ask for your help — so that his shock can be lessened even a little. So that he can at least hear an explanation through me, and not find out in the worst possible way."

Everything essential, everything he absolutely needed to know, had already been laid bare. Even so, he couldn't respond to the man's final statement. Countless questions still churned chaotically in his head.

If this is this shocking to me — a thorough third party, entirely removed from the situation — what must it be like for Yeehyeon?

His upper body jerked as though struck hard across the spine. Without thinking, he looked at the man across from him. Anxiety flickered in the man's blue eyes as well. But the fear the man himself was directly living would be on an incomparably different level. As deep as the bond he must have built with Yeehyeon, as intense as his desire for him — that fear was undoubtedly pressing down on him without pause.

Before he knew it, the liquor bottle was nearly empty. Despite having drunk a large amount in a short time, he couldn't hope for the looseness that should have come with intoxication. He felt only the deep fatigue brought on by extreme sensitivity, and he closed his eyes.

"Go home. I have nothing more to say to you today."

He had no intention of seeing him out, and the man seemed to expect none.

The man stood, picked up his cigarettes and phone, and didn't immediately leave the table. He turned halfway back. His large silhouette fell over the stark white surface.

"Beta and Alpha. I thought that might be the most ideal kind of relationship for a bastard like me. Even without pheromones in the picture — he shook me, stimulated me, captivated me. But it didn't work out. When my pheromones respond to his pheromones wanting me, I willingly give myself over to the joy of bonding with him through everything I have — mind, body, pheromones. It makes me feel sorry for Alphas who were born Alphas and never got to know something like that."

He trailed off, rubbing his chin with a thoughtful look. His voice had gone rough as though he'd been shouting for hours. His naturally husky voice was rawer than usual. Whether from the alcohol or the emotions — or both — his bloodshot eyes were no less harsh. The face of a man confessing his love looked like the face of someone who had had the fruits of that love stripped away before he could even reach them.

"Take what I said earlier as a — status report from a friend, separate from this request."

A status report from a friend, right. It was a plea disguised as a statement — meaning: he matters this much to me, so please grant what I'm asking.

He turned away and tilted his glass, and the man, catching his breath in pauses, spoke in a parched voice.

"When I get back from Chicago — I'll tell him everything. Until then, just help me buy a little time. Please."

"……."

"I'm leaving."

He only twisted his lips and drank, offering no reply to the farewell.

Watching the man's back as he walked toward the hallway leading to the front door, a sudden surge of heat rose in him. It resembled anger, and it bordered on contempt — but if he had to name the emotion it most closely resembled, it would be jealousy.

Toward what, toward whom, was unclear. It was simply a scorching jealousy, so intense it made him want to throw himself in and take it for his own.