"Ihyeon, you’re an Alpha, right?"
It was the kind of tone that asks in passing even though the answer is certain. Inwoo was so sure that it took me a moment to answer.
"...I’m not."
At my answer, the smile vanished from Inwoo’s face, and Phantom’s representative was amused. He laughed with a sound like air leaking, then drank his wine with the most cheerful look I’d seen on him.
And as if to say look at that, he said this:
"I told you he wouldn’t be."
Had the two of them been talking about me? First whether I was an art major, and then whether I was an Alpha?
"That’s odd... Even if you’re suppressing hormones, there’s no way I’d fail to recognize an Omega.... Then, Ihyeon, are you maybe something a notch above a Golden Omega — a diamond Omega or whatever? The kind no one could ever guess is an Omega unless you wanted them to?"
When Yuni snorted, "There’s no such thing as a diamond Omega," Inwoo snapped, "Can’t you tell a joke from the real thing."
Since I wasn’t an Alpha, it seemed I should correct the certainty in Inwoo’s voice that I must be an Omega.
"Um... I’m not... an Omega either."
"......."
This time their expressions were even more rigid than when I’d said I wasn’t an Alpha. Even the representative, who had been leaning back with a relaxed winner’s smile and rocking the chair’s front legs, stopped and turned to look at me.
Inwoo narrowed his eyes and asked,
"Then you’re a Beta?"
"Yes...."
Inwoo and the representative looked at each other. The next moment the representative turned his head back to me with eyes full of suspicion and wariness, like he was staring at some unidentified lifeform. A look that said such a thing couldn’t exist on earth.
"Are you sure?"
I wanted to ask him back. On what basis he’d been so convinced I was an Omega.
My middle-school test result said Beta, and since then I’d never had a heat cycle that could be mistaken for estrus, nor gone into rut from being triggered by an Omega’s pheromones.
I had never once felt the need to be retested; I was clearly a Beta. Part of the majority of this world. A presence as common as water, air, or dust. One of those.
Beta Yuni and Beta Juhan accepted me as a Beta without any particular verification. As far as I knew, the representative and Inwoo were Alphas. Inwoo had thought I was an Alpha, and the representative — a Golden Alpha — had been certain I was an Omega.
And now, with the face of someone who’d just suffered a setback, he drank his wine, his profile still seeming unable to accept that I wasn’t an Omega.
"Putting me aside, the fact you were wrong — what happened, Golden Alpha? Huh? Losing your touch? Pheromones have to circulate to function, don’t they? So maybe release some pheromones, get near some Omega pheromones too. Or what, are you aiming to become a Beta altogether?"
Poking him with an elbow, Inwoo teased, and the representative twisted one corner of his mouth to show his displeasure.
"I’ve never lacked for partners even without pheromones."
"Hm... Whether you got help from pheromones or not, only the ones who’ve been your partners would know that."
"Don’t lump me in with those other Alpha bastards who spray it around indiscriminately."
He tightened his eyelids like he was genuinely offended.
Juhan’s explanation came back to me — that Golden Alphas can regulate opening their pheromones on their own.
"That’s a kind of obsession, you know? Over-controlling your pheromones is exactly why this happened. This isn’t some monkey falling out of a tree. Who is Lau Weikun? He’s the Omega spotter more accurate than genetic analysis, isn’t he? Ah... some Golden Alpha dignity this is."
He tried to hush Inwoo, telling him not to blow up nothing into something, but it was the most unsettled face I’d ever seen on him.
Why was the fact that I was a Beta, not an Omega — the fact that he’d mistaken a Beta for an Omega — such a shock to him?
Was it only, as Inwoo said, because it °• N 𝑜 v 𝑒 l i g h t •° put a blemish on his record of picking out Omegas more accurately than lab results?
I didn’t know why, but if I’d wanted to throw him off, stating the plain fact that I was a Beta seemed to have been more effective than tossing out some absurd lie like declaring I was gay. Maybe he’d been uneasy about me moving into the teacher’s home because he’d mistaken me for an Omega.
Either way, I was the cause of the furrow in his brow and the way he was knocking back wine at speed.
Maybe because of all the drinking, I felt like I was bobbing on waves. To hide the heat that wouldn’t settle, I needed more wine.
"Ah, I’m sorry."
My guard slipped, and I bumped someone’s leg under the table. I immediately drew my foot back under the chair and apologized to Phantom’s representative.
He turned to me, his face still fierce, and then Inwoo tapped the far edge of the table from across.
"Ihyeon, that was... my foot."
With a steady look, Inwoo brought his wineglass to his lips. Then he took us in, the representative and me, back and forth. Very slowly.
"I’m sorry."
I offered another apology to Inwoo, not sure whether I was apologizing for stepping on his foot or for mistaking who it belonged to.
Just from how I’d reacted a moment ago, Inwoo could probably tell who I’d been paying attention to, and my throat went dry. The only thing to do was drink more wine.
The drinking went on past two in the morning. Five of us emptied six or seven bottles of wine, and I alone had a little more than one bottle. Everyone was tipsy, and Inwoo, Yuni, and Juhan were more giddy than usual.
"Boss, I loooove you."
"I don’t. Why are you clinging? Get off."
Even as he pushed away Juhan’s face when Juhan hugged him and puckered up, Phantom’s representative was smiling. He didn’t show his drunkenness by flushing or getting chatty, but you could tell he’d loosened up in a good mood.
I was the same — lightheaded from my first time drinking wine. As I blinked slowly, staring at my toes with that floaty, unfocused feeling, a hand caught my wrist and gave it a light shake, and I lifted my head.
"Ihyeon, where do you live? I’ll take you home."
It was Inwoo.
"No no, the teacher can take us. The representative is taking Ihyeon."
"Hmm... why can’t it be the other way around?"
Wagging a finger side to side at him, Yuni narrowed her eyes while rubbing her jaw. His playful look made me snort a laugh.
"If you lay a hand on your own chest and think for a second, you’ll have the answer. Come on. The driver’s here!"
As if he’d had an energy drink, Juhan was bursting with pep. He hooked Inwoo by the wrist and sprinted toward the car parked on the roadside.
"Boss, take good care of Ihyeon!"
They waved noisily and drove off in Inwoo’s car, and the street that had been loud a moment ago fell quiet in an instant. Only then did I notice most of the shops around us had already closed and there wasn’t a single passerby on the street.
Like Inwoo, the representative had already called a chauffeur service. He checked his wristwatch and said,
"To Manager Han’s place, right?"
"I’m not that... drunk. I can take a taxi."
He looked down at me without a word. With his hands in his trouser pockets and his head tilted just slightly, that gaze was heavy, and mine slid downward in turn.
Below the rolled-up shirt cuff was a solid wrist; below that, trousers in a fine, natural drape and high-quality leather loafers.
I wasn’t drunk to the point I couldn’t hold myself up. I’d rocked my upper body forward and back and lost balance for a moment, that was all. But he seemed to have judged I was in no state to gauge my own level of intoxication.
He moved in quickly, caught my arm as I wobbled, and with a faint sigh, drew me in.
"Let’s go."
He gave the driver’s seat to the chauffeur and sat beside me in the back. We didn’t talk on the way home. The whole of it was him asking permission to smoke and my answer.
The mild breeze coming in through the window I’d cracked to clear my head felt good. My hair tickled my face as it flipped around, and I snorted with a small laugh; he looked over at me, and I kept laughing even seeing him look. I just felt like laughing. It felt silly, and that made me laugh again. He probably thought I was a bit ridiculous.
I wondered why he wasn’t dropping me at the apartment entrance and was going down to the underground garage instead, but then he got out of the car with me and sent the driver away.
"Mind if I come up for a minute?"
"......."
"There’s something I need to pick up from Manager Han’s."
If that was the case, I had no reason to say no. I lived there, but it wasn’t exactly my place.
To keep my loosening mind from slipping, I gripped my bag strap tight in the elevator.
He got off ahead of me and keyed in the door code like it was his own home. Then he slipped on the guest slippers and went straight to the kitchen, humming under his breath as he took out an ion drink and sipped it.
He glanced my way as I stood blankly by the table, lifted the bottle he was drinking from, and raised his eyebrows like he was asking if I wanted some — even though he was drinking straight from the bottle. I’d thought he’d be fussy about personal hygiene, but apparently not always.
I wanted cold water more than an ion drink, so I filled a glass to the brim from the purifier. Since he’d set his ion drink on the table and sat down, I stayed in the living room instead of going to my room to change and shower, and sat across from him.
"Manager Han will probably come home pretty drunk tonight. Among the people today, there’s a group that gets along. Take good care of him in the morning."
"Yes, I will."
The teacher smoked too, and there were always ashtrays on the coffee table and on the dining table. He asked if he could smoke, I nodded, and then I got up and opened the kitchen window.
"Seo Ihyeon, how tall are you?"
