"Isn't it about time you got a sense of my tastes?"
The representative spoke with a sigh, as if the conversation were a waste, shoving both hands into his pants pockets and adding one more line.
"A part-timer."
At last he answered what the man in the passenger seat had been curious about from the start—who I was. A part-timer.
It was a May afternoon so bright you truly needed sunglasses. Because they stood with the sun at their backs, I had to squint to face them.
"That so?"
The man in the passenger seat immediately broke into a broad smile and came over to shake my hand.
"Hello. Sorry about chatting in front of you when we’ve never met. I hadn’t heard Phantom hires part-timers—maybe I should work here part-time too."
"Hello. I’m just helping out briefly today."
While we exchanged an awkward handshake, the representative started for the main entrance. The passenger lightly set a hand on my back and guided me that way, eyeing the paper bag I was holding.
"Aw, too bad. What’s that? Heavy? I’ll carry it."
"Just a book."
I wasn’t trying to make a joke, but he threw his head back laughing.
We entered the gallery only five or six paces behind the representative, and the opening had already begun. Gentle music drifted through both floors, and a lively buzz rose from upstairs.
With a quick "See you later," the passenger hurried after the representative up the ivory staircase.
The two men—well built and dressed in excellent suits—made a picture as they climbed the marble stairs, but one was too cryptic and the other too simple. Not their essence—just the immediate impression.
And both of them lived in a world that had nothing to do with me.
I dropped the book in the office and rushed up to the second floor. Of the roughly fifty VIP clients who had RSVP’d, more than half seemed to have arrived already. As I’d been told, even at a glance they were an impressive crowd.
Around the just-arrived representative and the passenger, the greetings were a bit noisy. I could also see the teacher and Yuni, each handling a small cluster of people.
Juhan was minding the temporary desk.
"How did it go?"
"I put it in the chief’s bag in the office."
Juhan looked at me with eyes briefly widened, then nudged me with an elbow and smiled.
"Look at you. More meticulous than you seem."
I debated whether to take it as a compliment and settled for a vague smile.
We hadn’t moved into the formal program yet. People were more intent on spotting familiar faces and trading hellos than actually viewing the art. The liveliest energy clustered around the representative.
"We invited about fifty VIPs, and each of them can bring two or three guests. They could become new clients. It’s not even three-thirty yet and we’ve got... over thirty attendees, so today’s off to a solid start."
That was Juhan’s read as he skimmed the attendee list file.
In the hall right by the stairs, a long buffet table ran with its back to the railing that overlooked the first-floor lobby. On a floor-length tablecloth, simple finger foods and desserts were nicely set out with floral arrangements. Uniformed catering staff wove among the elegantly dressed guests, serving food and topping off champagne flutes.
The party felt more relaxed than stiff. On the temporary desk Juhan and I were manning, they’d even set out drinks and a few light snacks for us.
I grabbed a water bottle with an unfamiliar label first, to kill my thirst.
"The people here account for over seventy percent of our gallery’s revenue. And it’s not like they all have refined eyes and squeeze in a serene art break over tea during a packed day."
Chewing a bite-sized sandwich, Juhan leaned closer across the desk.
"See the one in the wide-brim hat? Just came in."
Following his gaze, I easily spotted a man coming up to the second floor with two people who looked like aides.
"He’s the magazine editor who wrote the book you bought."
He looked mid- to late-forties, on the short side, with a fleshy, fair face and an expressive look. He must have been fairly close with the representative; they exchanged French-style cheek kisses.
"Koon, congrats on the opening. Why are you so busy? I never see you."
Guiding the miffed man into the inner exhibition, the representative smiled gently. He was strikingly handsome, so naturally the smile was handsome too, but there was something stamped about it, almost mechanical. In any case, this place and this situation were work for him, so it wasn’t something to fault.
"It’s a fashion magazine called Monsieur A. It’s a subsidiary of a major conglomerate, and that company puts out more than ten titles. He’s not just any editor; he’s related to the group. If you measure it out, it’s something like distant in-law territory, but still—not someone you dismiss."
Juhan washed down his sandwich with a sip from the tall, narrow flute of champagne.
Because the guests were busy exchanging greetings and introducing new faces, the temporary desk was very quiet. Not one person came for a pamphlet.
"We focus less on art magazines and more on fashion, living, luxury. Honestly, the gallery scene here is saturated. You don’t need a license, and anyone with money can open one. If you count both big and small, the number is staggering. Tons of them shut down within a few years. On the surface we hang paintings and wax on about a painter’s unique style or a work’s message, so it looks highbrow, but competition is vicious. If you think, ‘We’ve got some money at home, let’s print a gallery owner card, looks classy,’ you’ll get steamrolled by people throwing themselves at it like life or death. And of course you can’t ignore the power of the big, established houses. The market’s small—there’s no gap to wedge into."
He paused there, thumped his chest as if his throat caught, and I slid my champagne over to him. With a grateful look he drained it, then grabbed a cookie and bit in.
Today his lip piercing and ear piercing were linked by a chain. It seemed like it would get in the way of eating and drinking, but he looked completely at ease—as if it were simply part of him.
"So our representative decided to pull in people who hadn’t been spending money on art."
By then I could roughly understand why the gallery’s main clients were people in fashion and entertainment.
"It’s basically a relationship market, not a ‘drop by whatever gallery has a piece you like and buy it’ thing. It’s extremely hard to poach clients who already have a gallery they deal with. So we targeted people with money who haven’t really bought art before."
Juhan made a circle with thumb and forefinger—the money sign.
"And as you can see, it’s a smash. We even moved to a building like this in Samcheong."
He shrugged lightly, as if it were nothing—or as if he were proud—and popped the rest of the cookie into his mouth.
To be honest, I’d suspected Phantom might be one of those galleries that started with the very ‘We’ve got money at home, let’s order a cool gallery owner card’ mindset Juhan had just described.
Not for any other reason, but the representative gave off the impression of someone born to a family rich enough that he never needed to strive for a rags-to-riches story, and even now—watching the way he dealt with clients—I sensed none of that unavoidable business obsequiousness that seeps out of desperation.
He wore a polite, kind service smile the whole time, and that was it.
If anything, the people around him were showing stronger goodwill toward him, and those who seemed less close were timing their approach to get a little nearer. The vibe was so obvious that even my dull eyes could see it.
Setting aside his prickly attitude toward me since yesterday, I apologized to him inwardly for the vague image I’d formed from the surface—“a pampered son who gets anything he wants with his parents’ money.”
I don’t think starting something on the foundation of your family’s wealth is inherently wrong, but it’s also true the value feels different from a success you stack purely with your own power.
Whether he had hauled Phantom up from the very bottom by himself or had some help from home—I couldn’t say. But it clearly wasn’t a sandcastle built easily with inherited capital and connections alone.
For the first time since I took my post at the desk, someone picked up a pamphlet. A woman whose oversized sunglasses covered half her face. On second look, the sunglasses weren’t huge—her face was small. I didn’t recognize her, but she might have been an actor or singer.
When she called out a name brightly and disappeared into the inner hall, Juhan told me she was a currently popular actress. I still hadn’t heard the name before.
"Anyway, because of that operating style, the art world treats our representative like a total heretic, a problem child—basically the devil. The blue-eyed Golden Alpha who mesmerizes people with pheromones and hawks paintings, dragging art’s dignity through the mud. One critic even spewed the garbage line that he’s a gigolo selling paintings with his body."
Picking up where he’d left off, Juhan raised a fist into the air as if he might grab that critic by the collar. His face said the outrage still burned.
But the representative at the center of the story simply smiled like a picture amid the crowd.
This place was a gallery that exhibited and sold works, but most people here seemed more interested in that man than in the art.
A middle-aged woman in a tweed two-piece slipped her arm lightly through his to show off their closeness, and envy tinged with jealousy flickered in people’s eyes. Their frank display of feeling was so direct it briefly reminded me of grade school, when we scrambled for even one more glance from the homeroom teacher.
As the hub around which those tangled desires spun, the representative adjusted the mood with a smooth, cheerful, winning manner—as if he knew nothing about the knots themselves.
Or perhaps he knew the strength and direction of those desires exactly, and it was the tangle itself he was orchestrating.
To nitpick that later smear—“a blue-eyed Golden Alpha who sells paintings by enthralling people with pheromones”—his eyes weren’t a simple blue. They looked sunburned, or as if he’d cried so much the pigment had thinned—a pale blue.
Not the dense, gemstone-bright blue that can feel lifeless, but something finer, more alive... like the foam of a wave as sand skates up under a board. Something that looked like it could break and vanish.
It was, in fact, a color that contrasted sharply with his almost arrogantly strong first impression.
"But our representative doesn’t open his pheromones. I don’t know what he does in private, but ordinarily not at all. His control is maxed out—Golden Omegas barely sense anything."
"Golden Alpha... you know what that is?"
"Not really."
"Not interested?"
Among the countless Betas, there aren’t many who have no ❖ Nоvеl𝚒ght ❖ (Exclusive on Nоvеl𝚒ght) interest in Alphas or Omegas—sometimes out of curiosity about that second sex, sometimes out of admiration for the beauty and talent they’re said to possess, and sometimes just a simple penchant for the unusual.
I also thought he was, frankly, a bit of a jerk, and yet because of that unusual presence, I wondered if he might be a Golden Alpha. So I answered that I wasn’t uninterested.
Yes. He was a Golden Alpha. It was almost boring how neatly it matched expectation. His exterior—big, strong, beautiful—could have made him the mascot of Golden Alphas.
But not opening his pheromones at all—that was new to me.
"Alphas and Omegas are, in the end, about reproductive capacity... not something to go into here. Anyway, the representative isn’t at the level where his pheromones just leak against his will or he reacts helplessly to others’. Plenty of Betas discriminate, calling Alphas and Omegas beasts who surrender their humanity to instinct, but at the Golden Alpha level they control even rut. So there’s no pretext to look down on him for that. And still they do. Eyes shut, ears closed. Keep chanting he’s selling pheromones. I mean—who’s the one with no dignity, really?"
The only Alpha in my life was Morae, and she wasn’t the type to go on about herself as an Alpha. I also wasn’t interested enough in Alphas and Omegas to go searching.
Stuff about Golden Alphas and the Phantom representative would be common knowledge in this industry anyway, so it was obvious most of Juhan’s chatter was time-killing small talk that wouldn’t matter even if a temporary part-timer like me heard it. And yet more than half of it was new to me.
"It’s impressive. Being a Golden Alpha isn’t just about being born that way—over half of it is training. In the end it means he’s been steadily training to handle instinct since adolescence to get to that level. He smiles like everything’s easy, but... that takes a brutal kind of will."
Saying that, Juhan drank his champagne and, over the tilted rim, kept his eyes fixed on the representative.
Following his gaze, I saw the man still steering the room as its center—skilled, and sweetly so.
As owner and host of the place where this party was being held, his smile spread evenly to everyone, yet it carried a different warmth than an ordinary smile—enough to mislead someone without immunity to it.
Trying to imagine that man, who’d shown me open hostility, pushing himself in solitude and repeating severe internal drills where no one could see—which he might—I found it difficult.
Right beside me, I heard the crisp snap of Juhan biting into another cookie.
"Thing is, I like that stuff. Becoming fucking ruthless to get what you want. Looking easy on the surface while, under the waterline, you grit your teeth and paddle like hell for the thing you crave."
Crunching a cookie with neat little bites, Juhan grinned.
Was it really like that?
Did he have that desperate thrashing under the surface too—teeth clenched, legs churning?
It was impossible to imagine from the way he looked now, brimming with that Golden Alpha ease like someone born owning everything from day one.
Even now he stood cocked at an angle, one knee loose, champagne in one hand, smiling. If I exaggerated a little, he looked like a born ruler.
I tried to picture him laboring under the surface, but what popped into my head instead was him pedaling one of those park duck boats. That didn’t suit him either—yet it was somehow easier to picture.
My imagination, now drifting, cut off when Yuni tottered up to the desk, nearly wobbling on her towering platform sandals.
"Here. Two pieces, sold out."
Face drawn with fatigue, she tossed a small notebook onto the desk. Juhan lit up and snatched it up.
"Already? You’re a killer. Want to swap?"
"Yeah. My lip’s about to twitch."
"Okay."
Like a benchwarmer bursting to get subbed in, Juhan charged out to the floor in Yuni’s place.
Judging by the twitch-at-the-mouth comment, Yuni had worked the clients till her smile cramped and closed two sales. I’d prepped captions with her last night, so I had a rough sense of the price range. Two high-ticket works gone in under an hour—she was, as Juhan said, the real deal.
