He gets hard just from looking at me? What is that supposed to mean? Does it mean I register as sexually appealing?
As the questions multiplied my mouth itched more and more. The further one thought led into the next, the more I felt the impulse to play the fool and ask just one of them. And of all of them the thing I most wanted to know was,
whether Baek Ihyeok also felt some undercurrent of lust every so often after having sex with me.
“What are you looking at?”
Of course, half of that impulse retreated the instant our eyes met. There was no chance a man with an expression that charmless was feeling any kind of stimulation on my account.
“What am I looking at? I’m looking at you.”
“Stop being irritating.”
“No, isn’t it a bit much to look like that and then tell people not to look? You could always be less handsome...”
Maybe it was the dizziness, but words came out that I wouldn’t ordinarily have said. Baek Ihyeok looked at me as though I were staging some childish little rebellion.
“And you look at me whenever you feel like it, so why am I not allowed to look at you?”
“Are you Party A?”
But that rebellious streak went flying off with one line from him.
“If you’re Party B, you crawl without being told.”
I stared quietly at those lips of his, which parted only as far as words required.
Why does Baek Ihyeok never say anything except things that are correct? That mouth had said obnoxious things, certainly, but had it ever once said something wrong? Then again, for someone as abrasive as Baek Ihyeok, is his tongue abrasive too? No, was it? When we kissed it was definitely warm and wet...
“Just conduct yourself properly.”
“Sorry?”
“And don’t go around leaking all over the place like an omega.”
I barely managed to pull my eyes off his lips. Baek Ihyeok had closed his and was now looking at me with irritation on his face. When I worked out what he was talking about, heat rose in me in a completely different sense from a moment ago.
“Surely you aren’t talking about what happened earlier?”
My expression got away from me and I hitched the corner of my mouth up clumsily. Though even that would have been trembling.
“I wasn’t leaking anything and Kyle still came over and started pawing at me.”
I was out of breath, and I hadn’t even said much. Instinctively I went looking for cool air and opened the window, and this time he didn’t say anything cutting.
“I even locked all the doors. What was I supposed to do about Kyle smashing through all of it to get in?”
“Kyle?”
Baek Ihyeok let out a low laugh. He tilted his head at an angle.
“...That man. I never once made eye contact with that man except when we greeted each other.”
I switched the way I referred to him immediately, and Baek Ihyeok still looked displeased. Presently he took his eyes off me and rested his head against the headrest.
“You’d do well to remember it.”
The low voice leaked out like a warning.
“My standard for adultery is fairly strict.”
Adultery, my ass.
The moment I lay down on the bed I threw an arm over my throbbing head. The conversation I had had with Baek Ihyeok in the car wandered around my ears like tinnitus.
However nearly a disgraceful incident had occurred, wasn’t bringing up adultery over my having said one name a bit much? And meeting Kyle had genuinely been an accident. How was I supposed to know a lunatic would break through a secondary latch to get in?
“He didn’t know either.”
But I couldn’t keep that thought going for long. My condition had been deteriorating rapidly since we got home.
Something was wrong with my body, and badly wrong. I had taken a fever reducer and something for the aches before coming to the bedroom, and there wasn’t the slightest sign of improvement. It hadn’t been anything like this when I was with Baek Ihyeok, and now that I was trying to get some sleep it kept getting worse somehow. It wasn’t a pheromone issue either, so it didn’t seem like a heat cycle.
The heat cycle, an omega’s mating period, comes around every six months on average. An alpha’s rut cycle is similar, though of course there are exceptions. Frequent mating periods could come around every three months, and infrequent ones as rarely as a year.
The problem was that I still didn’t know my own heat cycle. So whenever my body felt off I took a suppressant, and how much effect it was having was an unknown. Suppressants only postpone a heat, so eventually it has to break. Which meant I might have reached the limit of what a suppressant could hold back.
“Haa... this is killing me...”
I lay face down on the bed and drew deep breaths in and out, dozens of times over. But my breathing wouldn’t settle at all, and the headache tormented me past the point of being able to sleep.
Was it the reception, or did I just take on too much stress today? Is that why the aches came on? It felt like my hot breath was going to soak the duvet through. My lower belly ached as though it were clenching tight, and my forehead was slick with cold sweat. I appeared to have caught a truly vicious case of it. I did have a rough day, but I didn’t expect to suddenly get this ill.
After dozens of minutes of lying there panting like that, my throat began to sting and I got thirsty. Every time I swallowed, my throat hurt as though a drought had set in.
“Ugh... so thirsty.”
In the end I couldn’t bear the thirst and got unsteadily up off the bed to leave the bedroom. But taking even one step properly was hard. My vision was blurred from the vertigo and I couldn’t hold my center of gravity, so my body kept lurching. The sound of my own panting seemed unusually loud.
“Haa, so thirsty...”
Just one glass of water and.
Really. Truly. Just.
Just one glass of water and all this heat and this thirst would be resolved.
“Water...”
To get rid of this thirst, I absolutely have to drink water.
As though something had possessed me, I went up to the third floor in search of water. I fell once on the stairs and rolled down them, and even that couldn’t stop my ‘thirty thousand li in search of water.’ My vision went dark and bright and dark again.
Click.
“Just one mouthful...”
Presently I opened the door, and,
“Got to drink some water...”
I climbed onto the plush bed. And the moment I saw the man lying on it, I understood that I had arrived at the water I had been searching for so long. When I crawled up on top of him and lay across him, a fresh smell came off him, as if he had just washed, along with a soft note of musk.
“Haa, that smells good...”
I bent my head down close to his face to drink. And when the eyelids that had been so neatly closed lifted and pitch black eyes were revealed, a giddy little laugh came out of me. A heat that was hard to endure soaked the back of my neck warm.
“Ah... I’m just going to have some water. So warm...”
I burrowed into Baek Ihyeok’s chest and rubbed my lips against his throat. The alpha pheromones filling my lungs to the depths were bewitching. Without my noticing, I was licking his throat raw. I had no awareness that the behavior was abnormal.
There was only the thought, crashing in like a wave that couldn’t be stopped, that this alone wasn’t enough. Expensive pajama fabric wound softly under my palm. Beneath the cloth, a solid body shifted.
“Whoa... your body’s really good...”
Without noticing the drool running down my chin, I pressed my face to his chest. The thump, thump of his heart against my cheek felt wonderful. An optimism that whatever Baek Ihyeok said to me right now would be fine peaked in me. Though ideally he would say it while touching me a bit...
“Ha.”
As if our hearts had connected, the moment I thought it a low sigh came and a thick hand seized my hip. That small contact alone sent the heat already spread through my body vaulting. My pulse leapt frantically with a single breath.
“Hng, Ihyeoook...”
“You drive me out of my mind in more ways than one.”
I couldn’t really hear what he said. I simply clung flat against that firm body and rocked my hips, relying on his hand. I couldn’t hold still. I had to drink water, and I couldn’t for the life of me think how it was done.
“Um... haa... tastes good... But I’m still, I’m still thirsty...”
Wouldn’t Baek Ihyeok know how? A vague conviction came over me that a man this magnificent would be able to give me the water I wanted.
“Ihyeok... can’t you give me some water...?”
“...”
“Really, I think just one mouthful would do it...”
I rubbed myself, hard, against his body and buried my lips in his collarbone. I put my tongue to the broad shoulders I had always wanted to touch, and to the sharp line of his jaw, and to the prominent jut of his throat. There wasn’t a spot on him that wasn’t sweet. Every time I drew breath, more of him filled me.
When I lowered my head to look down, below the hand gripping my hip hard enough to break it I could see our bodies pressed together without a gap. When I shifted slightly, the soft pajama fabric slid and I felt something perfectly hard against me.
“Whoaaa...”
Something that was either a sigh or a gasp of wonder spilled out of my mouth.
“Wow, Ihyeok...”
Because it was tucked to the left, only a portion of it registered, and even that was enough to know the scale was monumental. I had known he was big, and feeling it afresh had me twitching, fretful. When I rocked my hips once, the grip on my hip tightened further.
In that instant I understood instinctively what I needed to do. I gladly took hold of his hand and twisted my hips.
“Ihyeok, this, let go of this.”
But the hand only stood its veins out further, with no sign of releasing me. Thanks to which I got more and more desperate, past desperate, until tears threatened.
“Let go of this, please, I have to do that, quickly, all right?”
I didn’t know what I was saying either. I was only certain that what I wanted was down there, and that Baek Ihyeok wanted the same thing I did. Blatant sexual pheromones egged me on.
Between men you can tell what someone wants just from looking at their lower half, and right now what was pressed tight against me was swollen and terribly hot. When the pheromones he had been holding in check began to leak out, my certainty hardened further. Slick running out of me behind soaked my underwear damp.
“Hng... this hand, please...”
“Whoo.”
Baek Ihyeok put an arm around my waist and sat up. The duvet slid down my back and the hard thing that had been against me met my own.
Not wanting to lose that feeling, I twitched my flushed body over and over and threw my arms around his waist. Moving my hips with clothing between us rubbed us together, and shallow as the stimulation was, it was more than enough to blind me right then.
“Hnng, Ihyeok, do it with me...”
