The eyes looking into mine held the ecstasy of a man in love—beyond a doubt. Whether it was a bodily ecstasy or a mental one, at this moment his gaze made me feel, literally, that he was head-over-heels for me.
“It feels so sticky and warm and snug, sealed with no gaps... For the first time since my secondary sex characteristics showed up at twelve, I’m glad I was born an Alpha. Right now.”
He was clearly in a state of extreme arousal, but it didn’t sound like the giddy lip service people babble in the heat of sex. He wasn’t the kind of man to run his mouth like that anyway.
I’m a Beta; maybe he could feel a man’s pleasure having sex with me, but it seemed hard for him to get an Alpha’s satisfaction... Yet I knew he wasn’t someone who enjoyed pheromone-driven sex, which made those words sound to me like the best kind of confession.
“Hh... hk. Hhp!”
Just when I thought his thrusts might be easing, they picked up speed. He dropped his hips a touch lower and drove up from beneath to increase the rebound; I wrapped my arms tight around his neck so our chests pressed together. There was no dignity in a position where I bent my knees and spread my legs while clinging to him and only my hips bobbed, but dignity had been excluded from the sex he taught me from the very beginning.
His thrusts, rock-solid and fast as he sprang me on and off, were almost a howl. As if he were flinging something inside himself into me—like he couldn’t stand it otherwise—he was relentless, fast, and fierce.
“I feel that, but you don’t, right. For you this is...”
The voice muttering that wasn’t the voice of a man steeped in pleasure thinking, “It feels so good I’m finally glad I was born an Alpha.”
I loosened my arms and looked at his face. The eyes looking at me seemed to be torn between pleasure and pain. I traced his face with my fingertips and, though he hadn’t asked, let my saliva run into his mouth.
“Don’t say things like that... I like it too... Can’t you tell?”
I don’t know what “normal” sex is. I don’t even have anything of my own to compare to him. What mattered was that sex with him didn’t make me shrink into shame; it gave me satisfaction and release.
“I’m sorry.”
He pressed his forehead to mine and murmured sorry, more than once.
Then he sucked my lips and tongue hard. We tangled mindlessly until I couldn’t tell whose was what, sharing spit. With his rich, sexual scent, it felt like every hole in my body—starting with my nose—was flaring open.
His rocking got rougher, and with no support to brace his strength, he rummaged around the room with me in his arms like a robot vacuum that’d lost its sense of direction.
[thud]
Only when my back hit the wall did he stop moving forward. He pressed me into it with his whole body like he meant to imprint me there, kissed deep, and thrust deep. I felt the undrying pour of his Cowper’s fluid leak out and run in streams below where we were joined.
“Uhh, mm. Mmm....”
I raked his back and flailed my calves in the air. He was knotting, pounding and ramming like he’d bruise my mucosa. The instant I felt the pounding, hearty pulse of the knot, I thrashed and spilled white semen into the black lace.
He soothed me, rocking me up and down, and in a hoarse voice I begged him to let me go. Even the restriction that kept me from shaking my limbs to my heart’s content and thrashing like a madman turned, in the end, into pleasure.
The lace squeezing my cock felt stifling, so I tugged one end of the ribbon myself. With one side undone, the underwear couldn’t drop to the floor because our lower bodies were pressed so tight; it rubbed between his groin and mine and made my nerves even sharper.
It was the longest knot we’d ever had—long enough that I came twice while he was still knotted. Before his cock shrank enough to slip free inside me, he had to lay me back on the bench.
Laid limp, I felt his mouth and tongue hot on my temples as he licked, and I knew I was trembling all over, crying from the pleasure.
“It’s okay, I’m right here. Don’t cry... don’t cry. I’ll do better.”
The light kisses raining down on my lips and his earnest whisper sounded warped and far away, like a voice heard from outside while underwater.
I think he said something similar the first time we knotted. That it was okay because he was here. Maybe I misheard through the pleasure of a knot that tightened around my neck again and again until I almost couldn’t breathe, but the words “I’ll do better” hadn’t been there back then.
Even now he’s so good—so good I’m sorry I haven’t given him anything back—so how much better does he mean he’ll be?
After that vague thought, I heard my name—repeated like a devout prayer.
Seo Ihyeon, Seo Ihyeon....
He held my hand, kissed the back of it again and again, and called me. I preferred that a lot more than apologies.
Even as he soothed me so earnestly, he still didn’t try to pull out. I looked at him and, mustering all I had left, gave a faint smile to say it was okay. He looked at me like he’d hurt me, regretful, but I wasn’t in pain—I was at the peak of pleasure. He had nothing to apologize for.
■ Concern ■
He was in the study.
The terrace doors to the garden were wide open, and a river breeze blew in from the Han, but it was high summer with August just ahead. The air in the room, filled with strong sunlight pouring in along with the wind, was close and heavy.
“You said you’d buy me a delicious lunch and this is where you called me? So we’re talking delivery at ★ 𝐍𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 ★ best.”
Leaning on the open doorframe of the study, she complained playfully with a smile. The man sitting at the desk, staring blankly out at the garden, turned his head and gave a sheepish laugh.
“If you’re here, I have to eat lunch alone. I called you so you’d eat with me.”
He was wearing sunglasses. It was indoors, but the light reached all the way to the entrance where she stood, so the sunglasses didn’t look out of place.
“It’s sandwiches. That okay?”
On the sofa table in front of the desk sat a plastic bag with a logo and a paper carrier with iced coffee. It was the logo of her favorite sandwich shop.
Whether he’d used a delivery app or had a driver do it, it looked like he’d picked them up right before she arrived; despite the room’s temperature, the ice in the coffee hadn’t melted at all.
“If it’s sandwiches from here, that’s different.”
Pleased, she took a seat on the sofa and sipped the cold coffee first.
Lately, he sometimes went to work here instead of the gallery. That had never happened before, but it wasn’t a time when his not showing up at the office caused trouble, so she didn’t lodge any complaints. Yuni and Juhan actually welcomed it, saying the new hires felt less stiff with him gone.
After urging her to start eating first, he sat, rolling the chair wheels to and fro like a kid; he didn’t look very hungry.
“From the brochures I sent over last time, you seemed interested in the Renaissance show. I don’t think contemporary art grabs you much. Going far is hard, but talk to the office so they’ll keep tabs on classical shows within a four-hour flight. New hires should be able to handle that level of research.”
With a bite of sandwich stuffed with lobster meat still fresh in her mouth, she stared wide-eyed to make sure she’d heard right.
“You mean you’ll let me go see shows even if they’re abroad?”
“Of course. You don’t show much interest in installation or experiential art. And we can’t just sit around waiting for the shows you want to happen in Korea.”
He answered like it was the obvious measure and there was no other way. She stared at him in silence long enough that he finally caught her gaze and looked back.
“...What.”
“Nothing, it’s nothing.”
She shook her head; behind the sunglasses, he knit his brow.
“What, what is it.”
“It’s just... seems like you’re not paying much attention to the other artists lately.”
“Manager Han is taking good care of them. And I’m primarily in charge of VIP clients anyway.”
“Well... that’s true.”
Even so, the question was why he was personally and particularly attentive to just one artist; but he looked disinclined to explain, whatever the reason. From years of experience, she knew it was pointless to pry into his mind before he was ready.
As far as she knew, he treated people he had no interest in like they were invisible—utterly ignored, and without much effort at that—and he didn’t bother to hide a cruel level of hostility toward people he disliked.
Clients and artists were exceptions, but sometimes the habit extended even to them. He would compromise for business, but being endlessly spineless for business wasn’t his way. He had his lines.
Because he’d feigned disinterest from the beginning even as he showed it, it wasn’t news to her that he had a slightly special interest in Ihyeon—whether as a person who paints, or on a more personal level.
“Seo Ihyeon.”
“......”
She had barely taken a second bite before his name came up again.
“When Manager Han taught him before, did the talent show even back then?”
It seemed the real reason he’d called her here today wasn’t the cute one about not wanting to eat lunch alone. She drank some coffee, chewed and gulped down the sandwich fast, and answered.
“Exceptionally. Normally he’s mild and quiet, and he doesn’t throw tantrums for his age, but with painting he was full of desire and persistence—and he knew how to enjoy those things. And he was a huge practice fiend. He himself thought of it more as play than practice.”
Listening to her reminisce with pleasure, he stood, picked up a few notebooks neatly stacked on the one orderly corner of his messy desk, and strolled slowly over to sit opposite her. A scent of cologne wafted from him.
On both his father’s and mother’s sides, the families were traditionally wealthy; and around the time he was born, his mother had already been stepping onto the world stage as a painter. A high-class stylishness particular to the upper crust had seeped into him naturally, and his taste was distinctive yet refined; but he wasn’t the type to finish getting ready to go out by spraying on fragrance. He avoided releasing pheromones to an extreme degree, and he hadn’t been very interested in adorning himself with scent.
Whether he realized it or not, he’d certainly been doing “things he didn’t do” lately.
“After I moved to my place, these are the ‘practice’ sketches Seo Ihyeon made. Take a look.”
From here on, even she didn’t know the story of Ihyeon. She was interested in what twenty-two-year-old Ihyeon had drawn.
She set down the sandwich, wiped her hands with a tissue, and picked up a drawing notebook, pressing down the thrum of tension and anticipation that, for once, woke her heart.
There were four or five notebooks, each with more than thirty pages filled, and each page was packed with painstaking drawings.
What she held wasn’t an easy magic trick spun by inborn talent. They were the fruits of honest time given day by day to painting without lying, moving his hand, devoting paper.
“When I parted with Ihyeon, he’d just turned twelve, and even then he had frightening technique for his age—but not like this...”
Even if he’d put the brush down right after the award for Alienation, the math still said Ihyeon had kept drawing for nearly five more years after they separated. Given the diligence she knew he had, five more years could plausibly bring him to the level of the sketches she was seeing now.
“Seo Ihyeon stopping drawing—this wasn’t just drifting away from it naturally over time, was it?”
She slowly turned the pages and then lifted her gaze to look at him across from her.
“...What do you mean.”
Without touching his sandwich or coffee, he asked her pardon, lit a cigarette, bent forward with his elbows on his thighs, and drew the first drag in deep.
“In the drawings he did before—I only saw Alienation, but—there was tremendous energy there. Whatever kind of temperament he had day to day... at least when he painted, he could be completely free... There was a boldness that had no hesitation about revealing himself, like he was guaranteed a perfect secret where no one was watching him, like no one would ever find out. You don’t get that kind of drawing by luck. And it isn’t something you gain just by practicing technique. Suki Kim found that in Alienation, which is why she strongly recommended him for the Special Award.”
With his elbows on his thighs, he rubbed his forehead with the hand holding the cigarette and pointed at the notebooks spread open on the table.
“These sketches.”
“......”
“They’ve got astonishing, top-tier technique and a distinct flair—so much so you couldn’t possibly call them the work of someone who took years off... but they don’t contain his point of view at all.”
“......”
She couldn’t help but agree.
Some sketches were so precise they might as well have been photographs; some croquis were filled with unpredictably fresh expressiveness. But in Ihyeon’s drawings, the voice of the person drawing—what had once sent chills through her—was excluded.
