"Having fun with this, are you?"
"......"
"Sure, fun. How could watching me squirm not be entertaining to you."
As if to squeeze his windpipe in payback for how breathless he’d been made to feel by Inwoo’s provocation, Rao tightened his grip and twisted the shirt collar harder; his eyes gleamed with fear and a kind of frenzy.
"But listen, Choi Inwoo. Whether by accident or on purpose—if Seo Ihyeon finds out because of you and everything blows up... you won’t be laughing then. Hm?"
He flung Inwoo away, letting go of his collar like tossing something aside, and lurched back to the table, staggering; Rao drank straight from the bottle.
"I heard about the New York branch."
"......"
Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, Rao looked over his shoulder at Inwoo, a man who looked ready to do anything.
"For someone who said he’d lay everything out to Mr. Ihyeon after Chicago, the event you’ve prepared is... quite grand, isn’t it?"
Watching Rao’s brows writhe and draw tight, Inwoo gave a thin snort.
"I’m not treated like Shushu, but I’m a Phantom artist too. And I’m friends with Chief Han, if not as chummy as you and she are. Or was this supposed to be some special secret?"
How Inwoo had found out didn’t matter. Rao tilted the bottle back to his lips and swallowed more.
Inwoo tugged a thick stack of napkins from the holder in the middle of the table and spread them roughly over the spilled wine.
"People are worried you’re pushing the New York opening too fast, asking if something’s wrong... I think I know why. Which is why I’m worried about someone else, not you."
Rao clamped a hand around the bottle’s neck and set the empty down hard with a smack, snorting as if the notion that anyone but him could worry about Ihyeon was laughable.
"A suicide attempt was brought into the hospital."
"......"
Rao shot him a glance. Inwoo slumped into a ❀ Nоvеlігht ❀ (Don’t copy, read here) chair and dragged his hands down his face several times.
"We’re a so-called general hospital that punts any remotely risky patient to a bigger center—cowardly and complacent. But she was in such critical condition we didn’t have that luxury."
The tone wasn’t the earlier sneer meant to needle him. Rao turned fully. Flushed and keyed up, Inwoo looked... unstable.
"She drank pesticide."
"......"
"It wasn’t one of the super-lethal ones—more the household gardening kind—and her mother found her quickly and got her to us, so we saved her life... but it’s been a while since I had that prickling, ‘I am a doctor’ experience."
Trying to shake off the vertigo of the memory, Inwoo forced his mouth into a smile, but his eyes were wet with fear.
"Acephate isn’t a deadly extreme toxin compared to other ag chemicals, but the problem was how much she drank. We put more than 3,000 cc of lavage fluid into her stomach. She shook all over as her body temperature dropped from the wash."
The veins stood bluish on the back of Rao’s hand around the bottle. Whatever had brought Inwoo here today, it wasn’t simply to unload the shock of the ‘big incident’ at the hospital while Rao was away.
"She was twenty-four. Baek Yuni’s and Kwon Juhan’s age. Too young to be getting married, I’d have said, but the wedding was in a month."
"......"
"To another beta man."
Rao’s brow cinched; a blue spark leapt in his eyes. He dropped the bottle, raked a hand through his hair, then tore it up into a mess and shouted at Inwoo.
"Fuck, so what!"
His voice wasn’t loud; it sounded hauled inward and swallowed—but it was unmistakably a scream.
Rao met Inwoo’s stare head-on, eyes hot enough to burn through them.
"Young to be getting married... but far too late to have manifested as an alpha."
"......"
Even standing still, Rao’s breath came unevenly; his broad shoulders rose and fell.
With a crooked lift at one corner of his mouth, Inwoo smiled in contempt.
"You really don’t know what can happen."
"It has nothing to do with us."
Turning on the back he was trying to ignore, Inwoo sprang up and flung his resentment.
"Do you know how I felt looking at that patient? Why the hell should my breath catch because of the garbage you did!"
Rao walked into the dark kitchen without turning on the light, yanked a can of beer from the fridge, and chugged more than half on the spot like a man in painful thirst. He slammed the can down on the island worktop and braced both hands on the edge, head bowed.
"Drag him to a place where he has no ties, and confess there. That way the odds of being thrown away felt... lower?"
Standing at the table, Inwoo scrunched his face, working to keep his voice level. Rao turned his head and swept his lower lip with his tongue.
"You’re opening a gallery in New York, pouring in a fortune and hurting the Phantom family, all for him—and you’re going to toss it all and leave me? You trying to saddle Mr. Ihyeon with that good-and-proper sense of responsibility?"
"......"
"Whatever your reason for taking him to New York, it looks to me like you have zero intention of keeping the promise you made me. And if that happens, the one who believed you and abetted this farce—me—ends up the bastard, doesn’t he?"
Rao listened to the reproach and attack without a word, then finished the rest of the beer. He crushed the can flat in his fist and spoke.
"I don’t care what you think. Whether you’re a bastard or trash to Seo Ihyeon matters even less."
At Inwoo’s dry laugh, Rao’s gaze went ice-sharp—and then came a raw confession laid bare enough to taste blood.
"Yeah. Getting Seo Ihyeon out of here with me as fast as possible—that’s the only thing in my head right now. Somewhere he has no one but me—or rather, where I’ve thrown everything else away and I have nothing left but Seo Ihyeon—I’m going to beg for forgiveness and cling to him, as wretchedly and miserably as possible."
"......"
"What other tools do I have left to try? What’s the ‘clean, ethical’ way to patch this now that we’ve come this far?"
Rao, firing the words in a fast volley, suddenly clamped his mouth shut. He stared at the crushed, flattened can for a long moment, then shoved it into the trash with a low curse.
"The right and aboveboard right to be by his side—that license was pretty much something I threw away with my own hand the night Seo Ihyeon waited for me out front of this house."
Talking about the ‘that night’ Inwoo couldn’t know and didn’t, Rao no longer seemed aware he was speaking to anyone. It sounded like resignation that abandoned himself, or an excuse aimed at an absent Ihyeon.
Watching Rao’s large silhouette stand there in the kitchen’s murk, Inwoo began to walk, slow, into the dim. He stepped through the wide-open folding doorway that divided dining room and kitchen, into the shadow beyond.
Facing Rao across the worktop, Inwoo braced his hands on the marble edge and leaned forward.
"Even if Seo Ihyeon goes a hundred percent omega in the end, he knows nothing about alpha and omega. Knowing it in theory is useless."
His tone had settled, as if he’d decided to stop prodding Rao’s nerves; if anything, it was soft now, coaxing.
"The Ghost’s instinct pulled me hard toward you, the alpha’s instinct pushed me to become one with you... you can say all that—and he still won’t understand. He can’t accept it. Even if his body changes to omega, he’s lived a lifetime as a beta, and his mind is still beta. You’ve lived twenty years as an alpha and you still don’t know a beta can never grasp the strength of pheromones?"
Rao, in profile and silent until now, turned and glared at him.
Maybe Inwoo wasn’t wrong.
Even if many alphas and omegas have moved into the upper strata, the world still runs on betas. Things are a little different in relatively open fields like art and entertainment, but unless you’re a Golden whose pheromones can be controlled—so that betas can perceive you as ‘almost like a beta’—alphas and omegas have an extremely low rate of entry into politics. That’s true in any society.
Movies, dramas, and ads amplify only the romantic aspect of pheromones. Even in companies owned by alphas or omegas, marketing inevitably targets the purchasing power of the beta majority.
Alphas and omegas who can’t control their sexual impulses. Less-evolved creatures who use pheromones to indulge in animal, promiscuous sex. Risk factors, practically legal drug carriers...
Outside romance films, that’s still the level of image alphas and omegas have among ordinary betas. Rao had lived in that world too, and he knew well how close to impossible it was to make a beta grasp the real force and function of pheromones—neither the pure romance nor the menace.
But for the same reason, Inwoo could not understand the Ghost’s powerful instinct that pulled him toward his own "diamond dust," Ihyeon. As for what Marcus had said—that if he were also drawn by the man’s human charm and loved him mentally, it would be all the harder to shake—Choi Inwoo would understand that even less.
Betas, regular alphas and omegas—even the most near-perfect Golden. No one can understand.
A presence that slips like a specter through the thick, solid bulwark he’d built as a Golden...
Something no high science can prevent—just as no one can halt the turn of seasons that flips summer to fall, or the sun at night’s end, or the blaze of dusk at day’s close... a thing you cannot ignore and cannot resist.
Bending over the worktop, propping both arms, Rao scrubbed a hand down his face and spoke, heavy with fatigue.
"Seo Ihyeon isn’t just a beta."
"Then what is he."
"......"
Rao shut his mouth. But his eyes, fixed across the counter on Inwoo, said it: not that he didn’t know—he just wasn’t going to answer.
"Get him in for precise testing—see how far it’s progressed. If he’s really only twenty percent Changed, you can still stop it. You can stop now and go back like nothing happened."
Rao let out a shaky laugh through his nose. Folding his arms and propping himself on the counter, he looked up at Inwoo at a slant.
"Go back? To where."
His eyes looked washed out with exhaustion. The deep set of them pinched as if under blazing noon sun. Meeting those muddy irises, their blue life evaporated and gray ash drifting, Inwoo spoke low.
"You said with your own mouth that showing self-control beside Seo Ihyeon is impossible. So probably... back to before you met Mr. Ihyeon."
Rao straightened from the counter and, backing away, stepped out of the faint spill of light from the dining room and into deeper dark, shaking his head—barely.
■ ■ ■
Some years ago, a young artist set off a hot stir in the domestic art world. In his mid-twenties (by the Korean counting, just entering his late twenties), he made a glittering debut by signing an exclusive with a well-established gallery at the cutting edge of contemporary art in New York.
His body of work, which put his identity as a gay beta man front and center as its theme, was so raw that an art scene long inured to most intensities of sexuality dusted off a word it hadn’t used in some time: "bold."
Having debuted successfully in New York, it was only natural that love calls flooded in from his home country. But at the time he refused every invitation to exhibit from domestic galleries.
On the surface, the reason given was a schedule too packed to adjust, with other shows planned for the near term. But the stance radiated a different message: having already made it in New York, a wasteland like Seoul, a backwater like Korea, had nothing to call him back.
For this issue’s "Editor’s Foreword," I actually had the deadline handled with more leeway than usual. But a few days ago, through a reliable source, I heard that the very same artist from years back is now shopping for a gallery in Seoul for a solo exhibition. And so, on the brink of printing, I decided to rewrite this foreword.
I don’t know how he rinsed off the foam of his own arrogance and acquired the humility to return to a "wasteland like Seoul," but so long as the galleries he once snubbed remain active—and so long as they remember that past—his domestic landing is likely to face considerable headwinds. At the very least, a show at one of the influential big galleries he wants now, and once refused, will not be happening.
I’ve been in the trade long enough not to be shocked that an artist’s charm or craft doesn’t necessarily align with character. Still, like everything else in this world, art is a collaboration forged by people meeting people. I rewrite this foreword in the hope that he—and all artists in this country—will take that truth to heart.
It may also be that I’m mean-spirited enough to feel a touch of glee, not bitterness, at the news of a haughty artist bowing his head and looking for a place to stretch his legs now that he’s fallen.
Work with nothing to say beyond sex? Thrown out of New York as he was, perhaps that’s why it no longer looks "bold" or feels "raw." In any case—good luck to him.
■ ■ ■
