The doctor’s face was hard to read. Troubled, a little pitying, and somehow, underneath all of it, on the verge of laughing.
Dohyeon had never been a patient man. Coming to the hospital today hadn’t even been his idea, so there was no chance of him taking any of this gracefully. The longer the doctor stalled, the deeper the crease between his brows. Eventually he gave up waiting and cut in.
“What is it? What do the results say?”
“Hmm...”
Professor Kim let the question sit there. Instead of answering he studied Dohyeon’s face a little longer. When their eyes met, Dohyeon frowned, puzzled, and swept back the hair that had fallen loose across his forehead. Nobody could carry that off so effortlessly without the bone structure for it.
Professor Kim’s gaze traveled slowly over that face. Sharp eyes, wide open, the crease of the double lids clean enough to make the whole face read as striking. Narrow nostrils, and a nose that rose straight without a single awkward angle. Lips neither too red nor dry and colorless. Good to look at. A jawline lean and still unmistakably masculine. The textbook version of a refined, handsome man.
Or, put another way, the face of an ideal alpha.
“What, have I got some terminal illness?”
Listening to that tone, Professor Kim clicked his tongue inwardly. What Dohyeon was about to hear might go down harder than a death sentence with a date attached.
How could he soften the shock, the despair, even a little? Turning that over, he spent a while longer choosing his words with enormous care, and at last he spoke.
“Congratulations. You now have a body capable of conceiving life.”
“...”
“...”
“...?”
For all the care that had gone into them, the words did not land well. One look at the way Dohyeon’s eyes screwed up in raw disbelief was enough to tell Professor Kim he had failed. Badly.
The blessing of conceiving life. A lovely phrase. Truly a lovely phrase... and one with absolutely nothing to do with Dohyeon. The scowl that absurdity had pulled onto his face slowly smoothed out again, and not because he was accepting anything. He couldn’t begin to understand what he had just been told. He had simply gone blank.
“...What?”
His expression said the words refused to make sense no matter how many times he chewed them over. Professor Kim cleared his throat, uncomfortable. A cough wasn’t going to get him out of this. Dohyeon came back at him, dogged.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Ahem. To conceive means to become pregnant.”
“No, I...”
At the doctor’s genteel delivery Dohyeon laughed, incredulous. The kind of laugh that said he hadn’t asked because he didn’t know the word. He still hadn’t grasped the situation, let alone accepted it. Then again, nodding along to something this far out of the blue would have been the stranger reaction. To his ears it probably registered as pure nonsense.
And yet something was creeping in underneath. That restless look on his face gave it away. He was afraid, presumably, that the doctor’s words weren’t a tasteless joke after all.
Professor Kim had been stalling to avoid Dohyeon’s reaction, but at this rate they would never get to a conclusion at all. He let out a long, awkward sigh and said it plainly.
“What I am saying is... you have become an omega.”
“...”
What did I just hear? Dohyeon’s mouth fell open. The tension drained out of his brows, and the face that always looked so sure of itself went soft and shapeless, like melting ice cream.
What went wrong, and where did it start? Is this a dream?
And with that thought, memories flickered past him the way a life is supposed to flash by.
“...please. Please, don’t do this!”
“Let go of me...”
What is this? Whose voice is that?
“There’s no... need to... is there. Even without this... Please, don’t...”
Who’s begging me like that...
“Jeong Dohyeon!”
Whatever he had been holding on to inside the dream got no further. An irritated voice had barged in and broken his nap. Still stretched out on the couch, Dohyeon lifted nothing but his eyelids and slid his gaze sideways. His manager Byeongsik had come crashing through the door.
He had clearly run hard enough to leave his eyebrows behind, so something urgent must have happened. It did nothing for Dohyeon’s interest. Nothing worse than a dream getting cut off. Ruins the whole day. Idle thoughts like that, and a long, luxurious yawn.
“What is this? Is it true?”
Byeongsik shoved his phone right up in front of Dohyeon’s face. Dohyeon pushed it away, annoyed, and only looked once the yawn had run its course.
[EXCLUSIVE] Was Bad Boy Maker’s Jeong Dohyeon really in love with “Sua,” not “Yunhui”? A midnight rendezvous with Kim Somin
Dohyeon read the headline in silence, then snorted and stretched. Not a trace of surprise. Perfectly unbothered. No apology, no explanation, no defense. As far as Byeongsik was concerned, a reaction like that amounted to a confession. He thumped his own chest in frustration.
“Hey. Dohyeon. The BBM finale airs tonight! What is this, right before the finale? If you’re going to see someone, see them quietly. How are the viewers supposed to stay in it now?”
Bad Boy Maker. The drama Dohyeon had wrapped filming on not long ago. Despite the childish title, it had dominated its time slot.
Yunhui was the female lead’s name. Sua was the supporting character, your standard villainess slot. And in the phone shaking in Byeongsik’s hand was a photo of Dohyeon and Kim Somin, the actress who played Sua, caught at an exquisitely incriminating angle.
“I never said I was seeing her.”
“So what, you weren’t seeing her, it was just a one night thing? That’s worse, you little...!”
“No, I’m telling you, I didn’t even do that with her...”
Byeongsik had been smacking his shoulder, and he froze mid swing. He drew back, suspicious.
“Seriously?”
“Have I ever lied about this kind of thing?”
“No. No, you haven’t. Being too honest is the whole problem.”
Byeongsik shook his head, apparently thinking back. Dohyeon trailed scandals wherever he went, and not once had he insisted a true one was false. The problem was that he had admitted to nearly all of them.
Regardless of the truth of it, he said a correction had already been requested. Still, denying a fact and the thing genuinely not being one were two different animals. Byeongsik picked up his phone to tell the CEO it really wasn’t true.
“Yes. Yes, sir. He says it really isn’t true. Yes, I’m fairly certain. Yes. Yes. Understood. Thank you, sir.”
Dohyeon watched him bow and scrape into the phone, and the second the call ended he spoke. In the most casual voice imaginable.
“Not her, but I did see Yunhui for a bit.”
“Wh-what? Yunhui, meaning... Lee Hyeonju, who played Yunhui?”
Dohyeon nodded, unruffled. Byeongsik grabbed the back of his neck and wheezed like he might keel over.
“You little bastard...”
“What’s the problem? Nobody found out about that one, and even if they had, it wouldn’t break anyone’s immersion.”
That shameless smile pulled an even deeper sigh out of Byeongsik. He grumbled for a while, glanced at Dohyeon’s face, then let it out like an afterthought.
“What are you going to do without me, huh? I try to leave you behind and my feet won’t even move, you brat.”
“Where’s this coming from? Hyung, are you going somewhere?”
Byeongsik sighed again, deep enough to sink the floor. This wasn’t how I meant to bring it up... he thought, and started anyway.
“That’s right, you little punk. Hyung handed in his resignation.”
The composure Dohyeon had held on to all this time finally cracked. He read in Byeongsik’s face that it wasn’t a joke, and asked seriously.
“Why? What, did you get a terminal diagnosis or something?”
“...That’s right. You wore me down to the bone, so I wrote it. What about it!”
“Ah, quit bullshitting.”
Dohyeon snorted at the yelp and waved a hand. His face said he firmly believed there was no way it was actually his fault.
...And in fact it wasn’t. Though the part about being worn down to the bone was half sincere. Byeongsik dropped the pointless talk, hung his head, and confessed.
“Well, the terminal part is right, actually. The problem is it isn’t me. My mother’s the one who’s sick.”
Dohyeon’s face went still. However rotten Jeong Dohyeon’s temperament was said to be, someone else’s parent could still sober him up.
“...Is it bad?”
“She’s at that age, you know. They say there’s no telling when or how it’ll go, so I should be with her.”
Dohyeon sat with that a moment, then nodded, apparently having decided something.
“Then there’s nothing to be done. I’ll tell the CEO to put you down as on leave for now and make sure your pay doesn’t stop.”
“Hey, no, you can’t do that.”
Byeongsik waved him off, but Dohyeon didn’t look like he was listening. There was no bending that stubbornness anyway. For all the talk about his rotten character, about him being trash, Dohyeon treated the people around him rather well. Which only made things worse. You would find him insufferable and get attached to him anyway. Byeongsik patted his shoulder.
“I lined up a capable guy as your next manager. The CEO says he’s a fan of yours, so he’ll accommodate you just fine.”
“I’ll pass on the fan part. I’d rather he had thick nerves.”
“Why, already planning to torment your next manager? Good grief...”
Byeongsik clicked his tongue, then put on a deliberately serious face.
“Don’t go causing more trouble just because I’m not around. It’s time you came to your senses too.”
Dohyeon snorted again. Light as anything, as though none of the advice had sunk in even slightly.
“My senses are perfectly fine.”
Still, for the sake of Byeongsik, who was troubled enough already, he did give him a nod.
That was all it amounted to. That was the weight those words carried for Dohyeon. Right up until Byeongsik’s last day, he never gave a single real thought to the manager who was supposed to be coming.
