I had seen Baek Ihyeok sneer often enough, but this was the first time he had shown anything that qualified as actual laughter. Seeing it, even the bewilderment that had surged up a moment ago subsided, and I went strangely calm instead.
Oh no. He must be so angry he’s gone insane.
I couldn’t even guess how furious he was. Probably he felt he was being disrespected. Kyle looked thrown as well, his expression less than pleasant.
“What? What are you laughing at?”
When Kyle said it, as though he couldn’t bear to watch any longer, Baek Ihyeok drew a deep breath, let it out in a whoo, and lifted his head. Traces of laughter still clung around his mouth.
“The very best offer you can make is swapping?”
He took a step toward Kyle and accepted the champagne glass. When he drew slow circles with it, as though weighing something, the champagne sloshed shallowly.
“Say I accept that proposal. All right. Then what do I gain from it? Honestly, you must know at least this much, that the display matter isn’t a thing to be discussed with me.”
“Don’t you know what swapping is? It means there’d be plenty for you to enjoy there too.”
The hand on my shoulder abruptly touched my face. I flinched and looked down at it, but Baek Ihyeok, unconcerned, stroked my cheek and then took my chin gently. My chin was forced up and our eyes met. He let out a small laugh.
“Whatever partner you brought, there’s no chance they’d be superior to the dominant omega I have.”
Something must have gone wrong with my head too. Every single thing coming out of his mouth was obnoxious, and every nerve I had was fixed on the smile hanging at the edge of his lips.
The well tailored black suit and the hair swept naturally back suited that cold impression rather well. Those eyes that always looked at me as if from above weren’t the least bit flat, despite having no crease. Was it the depth of the sockets? I forgot to breathe and drank him in.
The lips that never moved more than strictly necessary loosened, subtly.
“Because like you, I get hard just from looking at his face.”
What? I had been absorbed in his face and came abruptly back to myself.
“An omega like this isn’t exactly common, is he?”
“What are you even saying...”
“You follow, don’t you? I subscribe to the view that I don’t make deals with no gain in them.”
But nobody was listening to a word I said. Somehow Baek Ihyeok seemed more on edge than usual.
“Still, I find eating the same flavor gets old.”
The lunatic. Does he think I’m food?
“However dull a life you lead, you’re hardly going to spend the whole of it screwing nothing but this one omega.”
“Excuse me. You do know I’m standing right here?”
“I’ll use him nicely and give him back clean. That works, doesn’t it?”
“...”
That damned word. Omega, omega. My ears were going to grow calluses. In the end I shut my mouth along with the surge of hot temper rising in me. Saying more when nobody was listening would only make a fool of me.
And then champagne came pouring onto the floor in a rush.
“No. It doesn’t work.”
Baek Ihyeok was holding the glass upside down. Irregular stains printed themselves across the expensive carpet. Then the empty glass simply dropped, and a sharp shattering rang out. Glass fragments lay scattered across the floor in pieces. Before I could even think about what he was doing, he gripped my shoulder hard.
“I’m not a cripple.”
Baek Ihyeok wiped the sole of his shoe roughly against the carpet.
“Why would I share what’s mine with a bastard like you?”
The tone couldn’t have been more unbothered, and yet it felt like Baek Ihyeok would do anything at all if one more word came out wrong. Kyle was either accustomed to being spoken to that way or pretending to be fine, because all he did was raise his eyebrows.
But even in that vicious atmosphere the hand touching me was on my mind. The cheek and the chin his hand had just brushed kept tingling too, so while watching the war of nerves between the two of them, I quietly shook out my cheek. My head hurt a little as well, from the stress, presumably.
“You go ahead and finish what you were about to do in here.”
After glancing briefly at Kyle’s waistband, Baek Ihyeok turned us halfway around.
“You’re really going to leave like that? You’ll regret it.”
Kyle spoke from behind us as though grabbing at him, but there was no hesitation in Baek Ihyeok’s stride. When I went to look back, he put a hand up beside my face. Thanks to which, even when I turned my head, all I could see were the lines of a huge palm. I looked at the palm, then slid my eyes upward.
“Is it all right to leave like this?”
I didn’t know how BN and Novus were connected, so it worried me. Kyle did appear to hold an important contract extension, in any case. Baek Ihyeok cut a look at me and spoke evenly. His answer wasn’t directed at me.
“Talk to the Vice President about the contract. And you said an offer had come in from somewhere else?”
He looked back over his shoulder.
“Have a good hard think about which one is better, with that head everyone says is so good for business. If you don’t want to be thrown out, that’s the least you can do.”
“Hey, you fuck...”
The door closed along with Kyle’s curse, and faintly, from beyond it, came the sound of something breaking.
“Bill him for everything that’s damaged.”
“Yes.”
Having given the instruction to Secretary Choi, who had been waiting in front of the door, Baek Ihyeok took me out of the corridor. I wanted to ask where we were going, but his mood looked thoroughly bad, so I kept my mouth obediently shut and spent the time chewing back through my memory for anything I had done that he could hold against me.
Nothing violating the contract, nothing violating the special terms...
“What was that nonsense about him having no intention of jerking off to you?”
“Ah, sorry?”
The question came in out of nowhere and I echoed it back without thinking, then, unnerved by the way he looked at me without speaking, spat the words out fast.
“Ah, that. He kept sexually harassing me, saying he wanted to jerk off looking at me. So I told him if that’s how it was he should go ahead and actually do it in front of me.”
“...”
For some reason the gaze pinned to my face stung. I realized in that moment that I had made a mistake and rolled my lips in between my teeth. Then, half a beat late, I added,
“I said it knowing he couldn’t. The louder someone is to your face, the more it’s all polish and nothing inside when you crack it open. You know how it is?”
Only then did the gaze come off me. There couldn’t possibly have been any actual pain in it, and my face felt like it stung anyway, so I discreetly rubbed my cheek.
I go to all that trouble explaining and he says nothing. I glanced up, but Baek Ihyeok was looking straight ahead and walking on. What is he thinking about? I kept stealing looks at him through the silence as we went. On another level, I felt grateful to him for arriving right on cue like a prince on a white horse. Perhaps that was why he looked better to me than usual.
“But how did you turn up at exactly the right moment? You said it was an important meeting.”
“There’s no chance I can’t do something a Carver can.”
He answered flatly and then looked at me as if from a height.
“You bothered me with all that staring just to ask that?”
That one line somehow flattened my pride. My thanks retreated entirely and defiance popped out in its place.
“No? I was looking because you’re handsome.”
Baek Ihyeok stopped walking. I smiled brightly on purpose as I said it.
“I said I looked because you’re handsome. Honestly, Ihyeok, the way you wear a suit... oof.”
I fired off a thumbs up and his brows drew together. Seeing him look thrown felt like ten years of built up indigestion clearing at once. A small revenge disguised as a compliment, and quite a satisfying one.
Baek Ihyeok said nothing. The silence that had dropped so suddenly broke when the corridor ended and a wide space like a lounge opened up.
“Where are we going, though?”
“The lounge. It’ll be over soon, so just stay with me.”
“And there’s nothing for me to do?”
For all the effort I had put into dragging my lost enthusiasm back up, he answered curtly and without a shred of care.
“Your job is to do nothing.”
If he just softened how he says things his impression would improve enormously. Whatever rose tint had very nearly settled over my eyes vanished so completely I couldn’t tell it had ever been there.
Cold as he was about it, Baek Ihyeok looked after me the entire time he was talking with the executives. Going out of his way to seat me beside him like this was probably to avoid another nuisance cropping up, but I didn’t mind being looked after.
The only problem was that as time went on, the hand wrapped around my shoulder felt uniquely hot. My breathing seemed to be shortening too, somehow, and I had to consciously exhale several times over the course of the reception. Just in case, I paid attention to pheromones, but neither Baek Ihyeok nor any of the other alphas showed any sign of noticing anything.
I hadn’t drunk enough to be tipsy, so I wondered whether it was simply body aches coming on. Recalling the heat suppressant I had taken two days ago, I drank water again and again.
Once I was in the car my body sagged further. Socializing was already something I hadn’t done in a long time, and then there was the lunatic on top of it. I must have overdone it.
“Ah... my head.”
Even the woody air freshener in the car, which I had thought was pleasantly subtle, was doing nothing now but making my head throb. Am I actually coming down with something?
I was in the middle of feeling thoroughly wretched when Baek Ihyeok got in beside me. From the faint smell of cigarettes he had evidently been outside smoking. That smell made my head hurt more, so I opened the window, and a characteristically charmless line came flying at me immediately.
“Close it.”
“...My head hurts a bit.”
“Don’t make me say it twice.”
He really is very good at making a person not want to say anything twice.
Whirr. I put the window back up. Thankfully the car’s internal system ventilated it, and the bitter smell disappeared soon enough.
I fixed my eyes out the window, a little discontented. I had been grateful, and honestly rather moved, that he came when I was about to be steamrollered by Kyle... And then with just the two of us left, his attitude went cold again, and the fact that we were a contractual relationship for other people’s benefit, nothing more and nothing less, came home to me through my skin.
It was an obvious fact. Ours had been a relationship begun by contract from the very start, and I was being paid for it.
And yet, strangely, I felt slighted. Since our bodies had gotten involved, my feelings seemed to have gotten more involved as well. Being with Baek Ihyeok was comfortable, and at times...
‘Because like you, I get hard just from looking at his face.’
I chewed at my lips and rubbed at my chest. As if I had gone insane, that one line of his circled around inside my ears, and Baek Ihyeok’s lips, curving into that smile aimed at me, filled my vision as though they had been branded there. I put strength into my eyes to pull myself together, and his lips went on tormenting me all the same.
