But deep down he was afraid Rao might tell him to go. Even if he decided not to go, he worried Rao would feel guilty about it. Burying an opportunity he’d earned by his own power just to stay at Rao’s side had been the mistake from the start.
He felt Rao’s heavy sigh on his forehead. In a voice forced soft but taut with tension, Rao shook his shoulders.
"It was something you blurted out in shock. You know I’m not really going to use that hundred million as a pretext to keep you from going. You know that."
"Looking back... I’ve taken too much, and I’m still taking it. I was shocked at how brazen that makes me sound.... Everything I am right now was made by you. From what I wear, eat, and sleep in... to drawing again and getting the past soothed... I’ve leaned on you for it all."
Because it was a special situation where he might be chased by dangerous people, because he was a kid with no social capacity, because Rao said it was fine, not a burden—he had accepted every offer too easily. He’d hesitated at times, but in the end it was he himself who chose to accept the kindness Rao argued him into.
After another long sigh, Rao planted his hands on his hips and paused.
"Relying on a lover, being comforted, being helped—what’s wrong with that? I’m the same. I was comforted because I had you, and if I could give you anything... that’s my happiness. Is that wrong?"
"I didn’t just get help. Handing off even the minimum rights and responsibilities over myself to someone else... is that love?"
"......"
As if searching for the reason behind his sudden confusion, Rao’s eyes flickered uneasily over Ihyeon’s face. Then he came close, stroked Ihyeon’s arm, and pleaded in a low voice.
"Didn’t you say you wouldn’t go? Hm? That you’d stay with me?"
I did. Back when I didn’t know you were turning me into an omega.
With just a few words he imagined smashing Rao’s world in an instant. His emotions had climbed so high he couldn’t even tell if the trembling in his body at the very thought was fury or excitement.
He hadn’t planned to bring up the chaining today. He meant to go east first, put physical time and distance in between, and sort out his feelings and position calmly. He’d only come here because he figured Rao wouldn’t accept a plan to see his father unless he said it to his face... but maybe it was impossible to keep all the chaos submerged while looking him in the eye.
"How many times have we knotted up to now?"
"......"
At the abrupt turn, Rao furrowed his brow and the bridge of his nose.
"Ten? Twenty? There were nights we did it two or three times... so fifty—no, maybe seventy?"
Staring straight into Rao’s eyes as his red tongue moistened his dry lips, Ihyeon closed his fist around a stone that would hit and draw blood.
"I was at Inwoo’s place last night."
"......"
Rao stepped back. Late evening blue shadowed his jaw; he scrubbed it wide with his palm and slowly shook his head, as if refusing the reality right in front of him.
"Today I went to the hospital with him."
Watching him frozen, unable to say a word, Ihyeon felt his urge to destroy Rao and make him hurt sweep roughshod over the wish to defend and believe him.
"...They said I’m pregnant."
Rao’s eyes flew wide; his mouth fell open without sound as he stumbled toward him. Ihyeon’s lip twisted into a cold smile, as if to mock him.
"Is this... the kind of situation you wanted?"
He watched Rao stop with a strange expression you couldn’t tell was relief that it wasn’t a pregnancy or disappointment that it wasn’t; Ihyeon’s mouth curled.
"Did you ever dream there’d be a day you’d have a child through me?"
"......"
"Is that why you... tried to make me an omega?"
"I don’t need a child. I never even thought that far!"
Rao shouted desperately. After the protest, he looked down from Ihyeon’s reddened, glaring eyes. As if he couldn’t believe what he had done himself, he licked his lips and raked his face hard several times. He swallowed, squeezed his eyes shut, then looked at Ihyeon again.
"Seo Ihyeon."
"......"
The hand he reached toward Ihyeon’s shoulder hesitated in the air.
"Ihyeon."
His voice was like that of someone standing under a collapsing sky. Like when he first heard "I love you" from Ihyeon.
Ihyeon turned his back to avoid the approaching hand.
"Don’t... call me that."
He forced his eyes wide to reject the wet pressure burning at the corners and strode around the table, turning to face Rao from the far side.
"They said it’s fifty percent progressed."
"No.... It can’t have gotten that far already. At most about thirty-five percent...."
"Thirty-five percent, fifty percent—what difference does that make!"
Since his mother’s accident—or maybe even earlier, since he was old enough to know better—this was the first time he’d hurled unfiltered emotion straight at someone. Shouting made his head swim. He raked his fingers through his now longer hair.
"I’m nothing right now. Neither beta nor omega... just...."
He forced down a dry swallow, and forced the next words even harder.
"A monster."
You don’t consciously feel the existence of sky and earth, air and sunlight at every moment; he’d never particularly thought about sex classification. For him, sex had been one of those fixed, unquestionable truths, like a mountain or a river. He knew some people manifested as alpha or omega in adulthood, but the odds were rare enough that he had boxed it off as a world unrelated to him and never even considered the possibility.
He had, briefly, imagined what his relationship with Rao would have been if he were an omega who could resonate by pheromones and conceive. But that was only a vague what-if, fully aware there was no chance of it—never a longing to become an omega. And even if he had wanted it, not like this.
You can ignore inner rot and go on living, but no one turns a blind eye to pain or illness in the body. Even a drop of blood beading on a finger cut by paper hurts; you put on ointment and a bandage.
Even someone with nothing in society still owned his body beyond question. When the identity of that body—and ownership of it—became unclear, the anxiety a human felt didn’t stop at a surface tremor.
"No one will be allowed to think of you that way. And even if they did, no one will say it in front of you. I won’t allow it."
Coming close to the table as he said it, Rao’s voice showed his words weren’t empty talk—he meant to carry them out as is. But Ihyeon felt no moving comfort in it. He gave a hollow laugh at the absurdity that the very man who had transformed him like this was the one saying it.
"Other people don’t matter. I already feel that way about myself."
Rao closed his eyes and pressed his hands together over his nose and lips like a prayer. He dragged his hands down, tugging his skin, and knit his brow hard, searching for words. But Ihyeon was first.
"Did you think if you told me in New York... the outcome would change?"
He held down the surge with all he had, but his voice still trembled shallowly.
"After you distanced yourself from everyone, warped Phantom in ways you didn’t want... and then, once you’d gone far away to a place where I don’t know a single person, you’d confess...."
"......"
"That then I’d have no choice but to accept this—accept you—was that the calculation?"
Biting his lower lip like a man enduring pain, Rao looked at Ihyeon across the table. Instead of coming closer, he edged to the very brink as if to shove the table forward and shook his head.
"That’s not it. I wanted it to stand as proof I’d staked my life on you...."
"Watching you ruin everything you’ve maintained because of me—how does that become proof of love to me?"
"......"
To any painter who aimed at "success," working in New York with solid gallery backing was an environment one would naturally yearn for. He had wondered, carefully and more than once, if Rao had bent his course and made sacrifices to create that environment for him, and he had even mustered the courage to ask.
Even with Rao’s answer—that it wasn’t so—something had never sat clean, perhaps because the root of his unease lay deeper than that. Back then, not knowing there was a secret, he couldn’t guess any other reason.
Should he have pushed harder? Instead of taking Rao’s explanation as given, should he have pressed until every doubt was stripped away?
Even if he had learned the truth that way, even if the timing had moved up, nothing would be different from now. And still he couldn’t stop replaying useless what-ifs.
He shook his head hard to fling off the poison filled up to the core of his body. He fixed his gaze on Rao—the one who, as Shushu said, seemed to have never failed and never to make foolish choices that would seed regret.
"Why did you do it?"
His voice came out low and husky.
"Was beta me not good enough? Was I lacking?"
"Absolutely not."
The answer came at once. Rao—the man who had always seemed to have an answer to everything, who seemed unable to meet a problem he couldn’t solve—now could offer no active defense for himself; he only met Ihyeon’s questions with the bare minimum of denial and affirmation.
"Alpha, omega, beta... or any unknown category—it doesn’t matter. It wasn’t that you were insufficient as you are now, or that I wanted you to be something else."
"Then why did you do it?"
As if Rao’s answer to this one question was the only hope of pulling things to a better place, Ihyeon’s voice now carried a plea instead of an interrogation.
Leaning on the table, feeling along its edge, he moved toward Rao. Like lovers new enough to still be awkward with touch, he hesitated near, brushing and releasing the fabric over Rao’s stomach and chest with a wavering hand.
"Say anything. That there was a reason you couldn’t help it... that you had no choice...."
He prayed the reason was hidden somewhere—one that would leave him no choice but to understand. That if Rao would only give that answer, all his confusion and anger and sorrow would subside, and all he’d need to do was love him again.
Rao’s lips parted as if to speak, then pressed shut again. Ihyeon clutched the shirt tight at Rao’s waist.
"You were going to stop—but I’m the one who kept asking to knot, every time—so you couldn’t help it... that it happened because I tempted you! Try even that kind of trashy self-defense!"
Rao, who had only swayed without resistance under Ihyeon’s shaking, caught his arms as if to gather him in. There was no will in his eyes; the focus had gone soft.
Like when they first knotted, like the day of the fender-bender when they joined their bodies, his eyes were «N.o.v.e.l.i.g.h.t» full to spilling with a clear sorrow so transparent you could see the bottom and still not know its depth. Bloodshot at the edges, he stared into a point in the air and sometimes his upper body tilted slightly; he looked almost drunk.
He drew breath, swelling his chest and shoulders, but even that didn’t come easy. His bleary eyes blinked slowly, searching for Ihyeon’s. By habit, he traced Ihyeon’s features—the places where he had kissed him countless times—like engraving them again as he looked down. Lips dry with fatigue parted and closed again as he tried to speak.
"...I love you."
The words were whispered low, like breath, in a voice scraped by a rusty nail. It felt like he had torn out the only truth left in him straight from his heart to show it—there was no flourish, no intent to plead sentiment.
Ihyeon looked at him a long time with eyes that held not resentment or confusion but something like the old gentleness, the pained concern. Then he slowly shook his head.
"That... isn’t an answer to my question."
He pressed a weak hand to Rao’s chest and turned away, his steps wavering. Rao held on to him from upper arm to elbow, from wrist to fingertips—refusing to let go until the very last—but in the end he lost Ihyeon as the distance opened.
Rao left his emptied hands hanging awkwardly in the air and tracked Ihyeon’s path with his eyes as he slung on the backpack from the chair and walked for the door.
His even teeth worried the rough crust of his lips; the moment Ihyeon’s hand closed on the doorknob, his teeth let go. Sweeping back the fringe grown long enough to sting the eyes, Rao loosened his neck.
"You remember we promised dinner with the Phantom family on Friday night, right? Be back in time. Don’t be late."
At the voice that sounded as if nothing had happened—as if he were forcing himself to chalk this excavation up to a lovers’ quarrel that would heal on its own after a few days—Ihyeon, the door half open, looked back.
Stripped of the early dazzle and the solid defenses that had seemed impossible to hurdle, Rao looked like an unknown actor left alone in a greenroom, the makeup sweaty and smeared. Even if you said he was the same man as back then, no one would believe it.
He pushed his hair back one more time and said.
