The scent flowed into his mouth.
Each time his tongue moved, the pheromones thickened as if rewarding him. He licked the fingers frantically.
Meanwhile, his other hand never rested, dragging over his own center. A wet, sticky sound spread low through the room.
“Ngh, mn...”
When he pushed the fingers deep into his mouth and sucked them in all at once, the back of his throat clenched and jolted at the stimulation.
The sensation of pheromones pouring directly past his throat felt good, but in the end a dry heave surged up, and he pulled his neck back and spat the hand out.
“Haa...”
Instead, he licked the palm as though it were a piece of candy. Each time he ran his tongue along a finger, it caught on the knuckles.
Every time it did, the pheromones somehow seemed to feel thicker, so he licked every nook and crevice with stubborn persistence.
Suddenly the area brightened.
A pair of navy-blue eyes, the light at their back, was looking straight down at him. In one hand was the blanket that had been covering his body.
“What are you doing? Keep going.”
The screen was gone.
Even with his whole body laid bare for all the world to see, his body had forgotten shame and still craved nothing but pleasure.
As he blankly stared at the hand he had been licking for so long, the man spoke.
“Once. Do it once and I’ll give it to you.”
He couldn’t tell what it meant.
But soon the pheromones spilled faintly over his body.
His waist grew hot like a brazier stuffed full of firewood. Instinctively his hand moved, chasing that heat.
The climax came quickly.
“...!”
He came with his eyelids squeezed shut.
The weakness blurred his vision. His shoulders sagged, and his consciousness sank into a haze.
A hand touched his forehead.
“Already...”
It brushed back his fallen bangs as though tickling them.
“It’s a problem if you lose consciousness.”
Baek Seolheon swept Baek Geonho’s bangs aside.
The black hair winding around his fingers was soft.
“Can you hear me, hyung?”
“...”
Beneath the hair that had been ruined with sweat, the clouded eyes stared blankly into empty air.
He had already been drunk on pheromones and lost consciousness.
“Not even knowing it might be poison instead of candy...”
Knowing full well that no conversation would get through, Baek Seolheon still murmured low.
“So careless.”
Just as he muttered it with an expressionless face, Baek Geonho suddenly pushed himself upright.
Then he seized Baek Seolheon’s arm and dragged him roughly toward the bed. It was a strength shockingly fierce for someone who, moments ago, had been sprawled out limp.
He could have braced himself, using the difference in their builds, but Baek Seolheon let the pulling grip drag him over and lay himself down on the bed without resistance.
Baek Seolheon looked up indifferently at Baek Geonho, who had climbed on top of him.
“Even after I forced the imprint back together, the instinct stayed.”
Black energy still coiled around Baek Geonho’s neck.
Collared, he opened his mouth like a dog and lowered his head.
Seolheon thought he might bare his teeth and bite, but all he did was lick, ticklishly.
Baek Geonho had grabbed Baek Seolheon’s hand and was sticking out his tongue, licking it up over and over. He doggedly went after only the spots where the pheromones had pooled most thickly.
At the sight, Baek Seolheon laughed.
“...Haha.”
A laugh he couldn’t hold back slipped out.
“Hahaha...”
Had Baek Geonho been conscious, it was a laugh so clear it would have made his eyes go wide.
After laughing for a long while, Baek Seolheon patted Baek Geonho’s cheek with his free hand.
“That’s all? That’s what an alpha with nothing but instinct left does?”
Baek Geonho still seemed to hear nothing, only moving his tongue.
“Fairly proactive, though.”
In that moment, Baek Seolheon abruptly grabbed Baek Geonho’s shoulder and pressed down.
In an instant their positions flipped, and now it was Baek Geonho pinned beneath Baek Seolheon.
Had the alpha’s instinct sensed danger? Laid down facing away from the headboard, Baek Geonho squirmed his whole body, trying to escape.
Baek Seolheon pressed his forearm hard against Geonho’s chest. At the same time, he let a little pheromone seep from his whole body.
“Ugh...!”
Baek Geonho’s body went rigid at once. He couldn’t move, like prey with its nape clamped in jaws.
Baek Seolheon cupped Baek Geonho’s cheek with his free hand and brought his face close.
“Did you do it like this with Lee Youngwoo too?”
“...”
“Did you just lick like a dog like this? Without even thinking of doing anything?”
There was no answer.
He had lost his reason to the rut and the pheromones.
“Or that person, the one you called noona?”
Still, Baek Seolheon didn’t stop.
“Did you really go all the way?”
Baek Seolheon recalled it again.
Mina. A beta woman. Such a being he had never known, not before, not now.
That long, harsh world. He had combed through even those records he never wanted to recall a second time.
But there had not been so much as a speck of such a person.
“...In the six years I wasn’t there, what did you do?”
Baek Seolheon’s gaze settled into something cold.
“Looks like you put this broken body to good use, somehow?”
Geonho seemed to give up on escaping Baek Seolheon’s hold and went slack.
Instead, he moved his arm.
“Ngh, mm...”
Baek Geonho gripped his own and shook it desperately.
He looked far more pressed to relieve his immediate need.
And even then, the gaze fixed on the forearm and hand pinning his chest clung heavy with longing.
“My pheromones. You want to swallow them that badly?”
Baek Seolheon raised the corner of his mouth again as he spoke.
“Then show me a demonstration first.”
“Ha, ngh...!”
“I’ll give you something that can’t even compare to your hand.”
Just as Baek Geonho was about to reach his third climax, Baek Seolheon twisted both of his arms together in one hand and pinned them behind his back.
Then with the other hand he gripped him.
“Hngh!”
Both hands restrained, Baek Geonho let out a groan-laced scream.
“Move.”
“Ah...!”
“The way you did it with that beta. Try moving.”
At the strong grip clamped around such a sensitive place, Baek Geonho’s body shuddered.
He tugged his arms this way and that as if to pull his hands free, but the body bound from behind, as though embraced, stayed still as stone.
“Move.”
All Baek Geonho could do was rock his hips.
“Ngh, ugh...”
He pushed his hips forward and back, chasing pleasure.
Now and then he ground them in a circle.
Each time Baek Geonho moved, his pelvis kept colliding against Baek Seolheon’s lower body.
“Ha, hngh...!”
That stimulation transmitted straight through to his own center too, but he kept a composed face as if nothing were happening, his eyes taking in only Baek Geonho.
“If you’re this useless, would that woman have even been satisfied?”
Baek Seolheon pressed his lips close to Baek Geonho’s ear and spoke low.
“The beta. It’s a lie, isn’t it?”
The hand gripping him began to move with no end in sight.
“Hngh!”
“It’s a lie.”
From the start the pace was fast, the strokes rough.
At the suddenly surging stimulation, Baek Geonho’s shoulders trembled finely.
“As clumsy as this, what could you do, and with whom?”
“S-stop...!”
“Stop? Why?”
For the first time, Baek Geonho opened his mouth.
When Baek Seolheon asked back at the voice that burst out so frantically, Baek Geonho turned his face to the side.
The hazy gray-white eyes were wet with moisture.
“I’m scared...”
The moment he glimpsed that profile, half-revealed, Baek Seolheon’s hand stopped.
For a while he silently gazed into Baek Geonho’s eyes, then without warning he resumed his strokes.
“Ah!”
“Earlier too, all you did was fidget like it was a hand game.”
“Ahh, ngh, ah!”
“Scared? From just this?”
“Ah, hngh, ngh!”
“So clumsy.”
...Yes. Unlike someone.
As Baek Seolheon added that, his own face had somewhere along the way flushed as hot as Baek Geonho’s.
The navy-blue eyes shone vivid, as if set alight.
“Far too clumsy. You.”
Baek Seolheon clenched the cock in his grip tight and let his pheromones bloom up.
Drip, drop.
The sound of a heavy fluid falling onto the bedsheet.
Baek Geonho couldn’t even manage a proper groan, only trembling his hips as if convulsing.
Baek Seolheon slowly let Baek Geonho go.
Raising his upper body, he looked down at his own hand. Whitish semen clung to it thick.
When he slowly rubbed his fingers together, the fluid stretched long like a spiderweb.
Baek Seolheon stared at it, lost in it.
From it wafted Baek Geonho’s scent and pheromones, thick enough to fill the whole house.
“...And yet it’s this vivid.”
Baek Seolheon’s gaze turned again to Baek Geonho.
The body that had stilled for a moment in its weakness still lay limp, but like an alpha going through a rut, the revived pheromones began to swell again like waves.
Baek Seolheon slid his own fingers between Baek Geonho’s, lacing them together, and lifted them, drawing them right up before his nose.
And he drew in a deep breath.
“Such a wonderful scent, too...”
A scent richer than ever, denser even than the moment he’d gone berserk.
Like the instant a long-aged liquor’s stopper is twisted free, the scent he had pressed down bloomed up all at once.
There was reward in having finally flung open the stopper he’d forced shut.
It wasn’t the way he’d intended, but as he breathed in his fill of that scent ripened to its very peak, the urge grew harder and harder to suppress.
“And it’s giving off a scent I don’t want to give to anyone...”
What he had left to rot, hoping it would fester away, had instead become a shackle closing in on Baek Seolheon himself.
He didn’t know what had made this man into a different being.
But he was clearly different.
There was no trace of that sharp stench that had called to mind a pool of blood.
With even a little thought, that ‘Baek Geonho’ left no trace anywhere on this body.
“From the very beginning... he was different.”
The one he’d overlaid was only himself; Baek Geonho had been a different person from the start.
He might have traced the same footsteps, but the result he’d finally arrived at was clearly different.
And yet Baek Seolheon had turned away from it to the very end.
『Going to be fooled again?』
Every time he held hope, without fail that voice would come.
Baek Seolheon let out a small laugh.
“Frightened off in advance... by a hallucination like this.”
He was a coward, plain and simple.
And on top of that, a stupid coward.
[Just die, Baek Geonho!]
Afraid of Baek Wooheon’s anguished, screaming cry.
[You already had so much. You, hyung...]
Afraid of that weeping that had carried not even the sound of breath.
[One. One. One...]
Afraid that I, too, would be preserved forever, taxidermied inside that same weeping.
And so, like a fool, he turned away.
“When I could have known this easily...”
Baek Seolheon braced both arms as if to cage Baek Geonho in again and looked down at him.
...Baek Wooheon.
Had he ever smelled such an enrapturing scent?
It’s all right, I’ll be here with you.
Had he ever felt such a sense of peace?
Whatever you are, I like you.
Had he ever received love that asked for nothing in return?
Because he’s a different person.
No.
It’s a scent only I have smelled.
A thing only I have lived through.
A feeling only I have felt.
There wasn’t the slightest room for Baek Wooheon to intrude.
『Going to get fooled again?』
“...Shut up.”
Baek Wooheon is different from me.
Just as I am different from Baek Wooheon, this man is a different person.
And just as this man is a different person, I am different from Baek Wooheon.
That was why, only before this man, did I finally become whole.
“...”
Just then, Baek Geonho, who had been blank, tilted his head slightly.
Drops of water were falling onto Baek Geonho’s cheek.
Baek Geonho looked up at Baek Seolheon, then slowly reached out a hand.
“...Hyung?”
Baek Geonho’s hand grazed past Baek Seolheon’s wet cheek.
Then he wound both arms around his neck.
As if to pull him into an embrace, he pressed their bodies together.
Baek Geonho had no consciousness.
A body with nothing but instinct left had merely moved, chasing pheromones.
And yet.
“...Ngh.”
At the warm heat he felt from that body, and the soft fragrance,
Baek Seolheon’s expression finally crumbled.
“Geonho, hyung...”
Baek Seolheon pulled Baek Geonho into a fierce embrace.
And with his head bowed, he trembled his shoulders, holding his breath.
“Baek Geonho...”
It felt as though he had wandered lost for a very long time.
