54
Jo Junghyun shook his head while keeping it lowered. His mouth was so dry it was difficult to swallow. His throat seemed a bit choked up, so he coughed softly.
“It’s not about other people… it’s about me responding to pheromones.”
“…”
Jo Junghyun swallowed once and continued. It felt like someone was strangling him.
“Back then, after getting the omega pheromone injection, my mind hated it so much… but my body… it was different. Responding to alpha pheromones… not just your pheromones but any alpha pheromones, even artificially created ones, gave me chills. I wondered if it didn’t matter who the other person was. I thought maybe I was just deluding myself into thinking I liked someone because I was intoxicated by pheromones.”
His mind was in such disarray that it was momentarily difficult to think about what he was saying. He couldn’t figure out what to say next. Feeling as if a hazy fog had settled in his mind, Jo Junghyun opened and closed his lips several times.
It felt like he should say something, but he couldn’t find his bearings on what to say.
Slowly blinking his eyes, Jo Junghyun raised his head and met Ji Seunghyeok’s gaze as the latter was looking at him. After staring at him for a moment, Jo Junghyun opened his lips.
“Are you okay with this? Doesn’t it bother you?”
His voice trembled at the end.
He really hadn’t intended to cry, but tears spilled out on their own.
‘Alphas and omegas act superior, but in the end, they can’t even overcome one desire. They’re no different from beasts.’
The old man’s sneering words weren’t wrong at all.
At that time, Jo Junghyun was, as the old man said, a beast in heat. No, he was even worse than a beast.
Throughout his life, he never thought there would come a day when he would feel his alpha or omega traits like this. Even when his parents—no, his adoptive parents—sold him off, Jo Junghyun had never had such pessimistic thoughts about being an omega.
Jo Junghyun tried to blink his eyes rapidly to get rid of the tears, but it had the opposite effect of pushing out the quickly welling tears. As tears dropped down, he hurriedly rubbed his eyes to wipe them. But they continued to flow as if a dam had burst.
Constantly wiping away tears with his hands, Jo Junghyun exhaled a trembling breath and continued.
“Haven’t you ever thought that you might be mistaking your emotions because of pheromones? That if you weren’t an alpha and I wasn’t an omega, we wouldn’t have become lovers like this. That if I hadn’t gone into heat cycle… we wouldn’t have ended up like this.”
This was a question he’d wanted to ask Ji Seunghyeok before but couldn’t bring himself to. He never expected to ask it in such a terrible way. Like a foolish beast trying to avoid what was right in front of him, Jo Junghyun squeezed his eyes shut.
There was no answer from Ji Seunghyeok.
He sat down on the bed with a soft sigh. The mattress rippled once under the man’s weight.
Ji Seunghyeok squeezed Jo Junghyun’s hand once and began to speak.
“Junghyun.”
“Yes…?”
“‘If you weren’t an omega and I wasn’t an alpha,’ you say.”
Jo Junghyun stared blankly at Ji Seunghyeok who had finished his short sentence.
“Then how about this assumption? If I weren’t a loan shark and you weren’t a debtor’s child. If either of us were a woman instead of a man.”
Ji Seunghyeok paused his words for a moment.
“…If you weren’t you and I weren’t me. Do you think we would still have this relationship?”
At Ji Seunghyeok’s words, Jo Junghyun found it difficult to organize his thoughts. Since he had never considered it from this angle, he couldn’t answer quickly.
“Let me change the question. Do you like me because I’m a loan shark?”
“N-no! That’s not it. It doesn’t matter. I would have liked you no matter what you did. …Oh. Ah…”
Jo Junghyun, who had been quickly refuting, realized that the answer to his own question was in his words. Ji Seunghyeok smiled at him.
“Thank you. But if I hadn’t been in the loan business, we probably wouldn’t have met in the first place.”
“Ah…”
“I love the entire being that is Jo Junghyun, including everything that makes you who you are. ‘What if this weren’t the case,’ ‘what if that weren’t the case’—such assumptions aren’t necessary. It’s because of all those countless conditions overlapping that we were able to meet and ended up like this. Don’t you think that’s more fateful?”
Ji Seunghyeok’s voice had now completely changed to something like a whisper. Jo Junghyun listened quietly to him as if entranced.
It was certainly as he said. None of the things that made up Ji Seunghyeok could be separated from him. The moment any one part of him is deleted, it would no longer be Ji Seunghyeok.
And the same applied to Jo Junghyun himself.
Ji Seunghyeok looked at Jo Junghyun’s face and continued.
“Betas also have something similar to pheromones. Hormones. If someone falls in love suddenly due to the effects of those hormones, do you think that’s not love?”
“…No, that’s not it, but…”
“In the end, pheromones or hormones are just causes. They may be the beginning, but they can’t sustain the emotion. Look at now. Is the excitement you felt back then still continuing?”
Jo Junghyun quickly shook his head. Whatever excitement he had felt then, all that remained now was disgust.
Somehow, he seemed to understand what the other was trying to say.
“Even without your heat cycle, we would have ended up like this. The heat cycle just accelerated the timing a bit.”
Ji Seunghyeok spoke as if driving in a nail, and Jo Junghyun quietly listened, sniffling through his nose that was also congested from crying.
Ji Seunghyeok patted Jo Junghyun’s hand lightly.
“That’s how it is.”
“…Is that how it is.”
Jo Junghyun repeated Ji Seunghyeok’s words exactly like a voice recorder.
As he listened to Ji Seunghyeok, his own concerns seemed so pointless. The problem that had floated around in his mind and tormented him disappeared so easily.
Having gotten his answer, he felt embarrassed for having become so serious and obsessed over it.
Ji Seunghyeok wrapped one arm around Jo Junghyun’s shoulder, carefully pulling him into his arms. Jo Junghyun slightly grabbed Ji Seunghyeok’s collar after the latter gently pressed his lips to the corner of his eye once, his cheek once, and his forehead once.
Jo Junghyun slowly inhaled and then slowly exhaled.
“It was like a tail.”
“A tail?”
Ji Seunghyeok asked back at the somewhat unexpected metaphor.
“Yes. Animals don’t find the tails attached to their bodies strange, do they? …Is, is that a weird thing to say?”
“No, it’s not that. I just thought it was a cute metaphor. I imagined a squirrel wondering why it has a tail, thinking it strange.”
Ji Seunghyeok seemed to quickly understand what Jo Junghyun was saying. When he mentioned the squirrel, Jo Junghyun tried to imagine it too and laughed softly.
Jo Junghyun, who had been hugging Ji Seunghyeok for a while, began nodding off repeatedly, perhaps due to overexerting his not fully recovered body. Seeing this, Ji Seunghyeok told him to lie down on the bed and sleep comfortably. Jo Junghyun was stubborn about not wanting to be apart from him, but it was beyond his control to fight off the approaching drowsiness.
He had said something about wanting him to stay by his side, but he wasn’t sure if it had been properly communicated.
He only felt that the warmth of the hand he was holding brought him peace.
* * *
Ji Seunghyeok looked down at the sleeping Jo Junghyun.
Jo Junghyun’s shoulders that had trembled trying to hold back sobs, his contorted lips, and the tears that had flowed down his cheeks where the bruise was clearly visible. It was a strange thing that just recalling the memory could make his mood so turbulent. It was like anger was boiling inside him, and also a feeling of sorrow—he couldn’t define it in one word.
Jo Junghyun was breathing evenly, sleeping soundly.
Ji Seunghyeok looked down at that face quietly, as if seeing it for the first time.
‘Haven’t you ever thought that you might be mistaking your emotions because of pheromones?’
‘If I hadn’t gone into heat cycle… we wouldn’t have ended up like this.’
Ji Seunghyeok recalled past events as he listened to Jo Junghyun’s words.
There was one thing that was being misunderstood.
Jo Junghyun thought that Ji Seunghyeok had been swept away by his heat cycle pheromones, but that wasn’t it.
Ji Seunghyeok was the first to cast a lure on Jo Junghyun.
He had never revealed this fact to Jo Junghyun, but he had never felt even a single point of regret or guilt.
It was only natural to utilize what one had. He didn’t have some chosen people’s consciousness that he was a special person, but neither was he so stupid as to exclude what he possessed while talking about having the same starting line and such nonsense.
Yet Jo Junghyun asked questions like what if he had mistaken pheromones for love.
That clumsy fastidiousness and such naivety that it bordered on awkwardness was incredibly lovable, but the anger was hard to suppress because there was a cause that made him think that way. Ji Seunghyeok clenched his molars tightly as he recalled Jo Junghyun who had been gripped with fear upon sensing his pheromones, pleading with him to stop.
He very carefully caressed Jo Junghyun’s eye area, which had reddened from tears.
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
