■ Lukewarm Water ■
The operations status briefing was one of the tasks he most wanted to avoid. In a midsize general hospital with around one hundred fifty beds, there were rarely incidents that could throw operations into real flux. They had met the minimum criteria and been upgraded to a general hospital about ten years ago, but obstetrics and gynecology—the department that had built trust since his great-grandfather’s day—was still the hospital’s main source of revenue.
They did have operating rooms, an emergency department, even a funeral hall, but patients needing life-or-death procedures didn’t come in, and the hospital’s own policy was to transfer any case they weren’t confident about to a bigger facility, so they ran smoothly without difficult problems.
There was a certain amount of internal politicking—not as cutthroat as at the big general hospitals—but as the director’s and deputy director’s son, he could keep one step removed from even that.
As long as their troublesome second son behaved himself, his parents had nothing more to ask for; they hired him while agreeing to demands like never working more than thirty-five hours a week and not taking on risky surgeries.
Becoming a doctor in the first place hadn’t been his idea. With the title of internist, opening a consulting room in the family hospital where his siblings all held posts too, and showing up to work—that level of compromise suited both him and his parents.
The least responsibility and the most freedom.
It was the ➤ NоvеⅠight ➤ (Read more on our source) life he’d wanted; he had no complaints, and yet after thirty he felt something missing. Having no complaints didn’t equal satisfaction, and he had at least enough culture to feel answerable now and then for questions about being human and the meaning of a finite life—whether he wanted to or not.
The moment the section chiefs started talking, after the meeting, about a golf tour to Chiang Mai in Thailand, he excused himself on the pretext of another appointment and slipped out first.
He should hurry and ditch his white coat and go find a partner for the night for the first time in a while. Frustration wasn’t confined to sex, but he might as well resolve whatever could be resolved first.
“Doc, there’s a visitor waiting inside for you.”
A nurse at the internal medicine desk across from his exam room called to him urgently and caught him. He stopped with his hand halfway to the doorknob.
“A visitor?”
“Your friend—the one who runs the gallery.”
“Him?”
He scrunched his face and raised his voice as if someone had told him an enemy had shown up. The nurse’s expression darkened at his reaction.
“I was sure he was your friend, so I asked him to wait... Did I do something wrong?”
He shook his head and lifted the file folder in his hand.
“No, no. It’s fine. I think I get it. Count me as off for the day. Don’t mind me going out—just get on with your work.”
He went into his consulting room with a face that had lightened from his initial mood, even shading toward interest. A presence far too large for a room of barely seven pyeong stood with his back to the window.
“If someone walked in, they’d think this was your office.”
“......”
Tall, in a navy Italian linen suit that emphasized broad shoulders and a relatively lean waist, one hand in his trouser pocket, the man didn’t move.
“What could be so urgent you chased me down to the hospital, huh? I thought you were too drunk on newlywed fun to have your head on straight.”
He tossed the paperwork on the desk, shrugged off his coat, and grinned at the man’s back.
They’d dropped by once or twice when they were out together, but this was probably the first time the man had come to the hospital specifically to see him. Come to think of it, the nurse’s memory was impressive—she’d only ever seen the man once or twice in passing and still recognized him as his acquaintance... Though to be fair, it was a face that was hard to forget even if you only glimpsed it.
Anyway, what on earth could make this rock-solid man so urgent that he’d skip the basic step of contacting him to set a time? The corners of his mouth kept twitching with amusement. “Hey, react when I poke you.”
Only then did the man—still nailed in place—let his back speak, after he’d stowed the coat in the built-in cabinet along one wall.
“You ever... as an alpha, gotten shackled to an omega?”
“What?”
“No, of course not. You’ve never had a sustained relationship with a single omega.”
The man’s voice wasn’t blaming him. It was just dry, like someone looking for hope where there isn’t any. This wasn’t the reason he’d expected for the man’s urgent visit.
“What are you even talking about. Is that your thesis, or your opening?”
He folded his arms, leaned one shoulder against the cabinet, and knit his brow. The man kept his gaze fixed with stubborn patience on the utterly ordinary view out the window—nothing to look at at all.
“An effect where your partner’s pheromones dominate over your judgment, your choices, your will. No matter how you thrash, you can’t be yourself—you only exist and act as that omega’s alpha. You’ve... never been exposed to that, right.”
The second the man finished, he scowled and strode over, grabbing that hard shoulder.
“Already bored with Ihyeon?”
The face looking back at him wore an expression unlike the one he knew, but he had no desire to make allowances.
“Weren’t you serious? All that talk about danger was a good excuse. I thought you were so gone for Ihyeon you wanted to keep him planted in your house and run circles around him. And now the great Lau Weikun is sitting here leashed by some random omega, moaning about pheromones? You crazy—”
The man’s gaze twisted with contempt. His warped mouth snuffed out the flare of temper.
“I’m talking about that Seo Ihyeon.”
He loosened his grip on the man’s shoulder and narrowed his eyes.
“What is that supposed to mean.”
The man peeled his hand off his shoulder by the wrist and spoke quickly.
“This won’t be short. I’ll tell you at your place.”
His voice was the concentrate of impatience and fatigue, like he didn’t have the strength or time for a war of attrition. He didn’t even check if there were prior appointments. It was the air of a matter that had to take precedence over anything else.
They each drove their own cars to his place. The whole way he turned the man’s words over, but even after they arrived he had no idea what he was about to hear.
Given it was serious enough for the man to show up at the hospital without a word first, it had to be about Ihyeon—that much of his prediction hit. But everything the man had said in the consulting room was a riddle.
Have you, as an alpha, ever been shackled to an omega.
From a man who coldly despised the alpha-omega reproductive instinct more than anyone, a man with near-perfect control over pheromones—he’d thought he would go his whole life without hearing that question. All the more if the question was about Seo Ihyeon, a beta.
More than anything, the man’s gravity—unlike anything he’d seen—stuck in his mind. He wasn’t the type to put on weight for nothing. His second guess—that he’d fallen for someone ten years younger and was tied up in syrupy worries that didn’t suit him—had missed the mark by a mile.
The man had arrived first. When he stepped off the elevator and turned the corner, the man was leaning blankly against the wall by the door like a wraith. He was clearly sober, but looked as disheveled as if drunk; he wasn’t in the mood for the usual jokes. Tsk. He clicked his tongue, punched the passcode, and opened the door.
Since he’d moved this spring, it was only the second time the man had come by. They were each other’s closest friend, you could say, but the man almost never came to his place.
He sat him at the dining table in front of the kitchen that was as bare as a model home, with almost no trace of living. He asked if he wanted a drink; the man nodded and asked if he could smoke.
He looked like he needed something strong, so he brought whiskey and ice. The man barely reacted to the alcohol, but when he set out a plate as a makeshift ashtray, the man pulled out a cigarette like he’d been waiting for it.
By the time that cigarette had burned halfway down and the whiskey they’d poured on the rocks was half gone, the man still hadn’t spoken.
“Say something, you lunatic. Did you kill someone on the way here?”
He broke first, exasperated. The man let out a parched laugh and slowly clenched and unclenched the hands that had been lying limp on the table. It was a laugh that made you think maybe this wasn’t far off from having killed someone, and he tightened his grip on his glass.
“Pheromones.”
His voice sounded like he’d burned away every human feeling until only the inner frame remained.
“They felt like proof we’re beasts that haven’t finished evolving. From the first sign of manifestation, the moment I felt them working, I hated it. The idea that my body wasn’t under my control—that processes in the body could push me around—was shameful and humiliating.”
He remembered the man as a boy, of course. He’d been unusual. At H.M.I.S., where the alpha-omega children of the richest families in the East gathered, he was second to none in birthright, wealth, and prestige. The moment his manifestation started, he was rated at over a ninety-percent chance of developing into a golden alpha. He had no need to feel inferior as an alpha—and yet, for reasons totally unlike other alphas his age, he was desperate to become a golden.
Some people hedged against him, saying he looked down on non-golden alphas and omegas, but back then he hadn’t cared in the slightest what trivial peers thought of him.
If you wanted to be precise, it wasn’t that he wanted to become a golden alpha; he wanted to free himself from pheromonal rule. He was one of the few friends from school days who understood at least that much about him.
“The attraction between alpha and omega, the alpha’s instinct to protect and claim an omega—every pheromone-related thing was disgusting because it was beastlike, life with reproduction as the first priority. I thought everything pheromones stirred—attraction, interest, sex drive—was nothing but vile and unpleasant, and in truth, no one’s pheromones had ever felt tempting to me, but...”
Staring at a point on the tabletop, he spoke slowly, then shook his head, eyes widening as if he’d found something astonishing on the blank white surface.
“In the end I was only an alpha too. At least... when it comes to one person.”
He lifted his head and looked at him; in that tired face, his blue eyes alone flashed with an animal hunger. The emptied, listless look of a man who’d lost everything seemed false now in the radiance.
“Make it make sense. What does that have to do with Ihyeon.”
Half listening, he pulled out another cigarette and lit it.
Drawing so deep his cheeks hollowed, he exhaled a long stream of smoke and asked:
“Ever heard of... Ghost?”
Through the smoke, the man’s eyes looked like they’d shifted, as if hollow. Unlike the sharper blue from moments ago, a sooty gloom stood out; he thought those eyes themselves looked ghostly and braced for the main story to begin.
What followed was hard to believe.
A friend he’d grown up with for years was sitting in his home as a stranger. But before he could even absorb that new identity, the shock of what the man had done buried that first shock entirely.
“You’re joking, right?”
It was so shocking it didn’t feel real; his voice held not a shred of doubt, almost merry with it. But the man’s set face wasn’t joking.
“Ghost? Come on—that’s taking it way too far. Ghosts are ancient history. Even Wikipedia gives it like three lines and moves on; it’s something that shows up in oral tales from European royal houses, a lineage that’s dried up—if it ever even truly existed. There aren’t many alphas or omegas left who even know the term. Lau Weikun, you’re plenty special without dragging in legends.”
“......”
The man’s eyes across the table had no ripple. He knew. He knew. This wasn’t someone who would make up a story like this and run his mouth.
“If everything you just said isn’t a joke and it’s all true... then you’re completely out of your mind.”
He shifted his tone to something cold as he spat it out, poured whiskey without even adding ice, knocked it back like cold water, set the glass down with a bang, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
