Have you ever had the feeling that heaven and earth were splitting wide open all at once?
“...Huh?”
That was exactly what happened to me just now.
There was that weightless lurch, the kind you get when a rollercoaster tips over the crest and plunges straight down, and then...
[“Mmph! Mmmph!”
Phwah! The instant he ripped the duct tape off the mouth it had been sealing, the brat’s eyes flashed with pure venom. A squalling shriek went up across the old wharf.
“Why the hell are you doing this?!”
“...”
“You think my mom and dad will let this slide once they find out? Kang Taeseo, don’t do something you’ll regret!”
Taeseo looked down at the thrashing Hanbyeol with flat, feelingless eyes.
Surely the kid hadn’t been this kind of creature from the very start. How had they ended up here?
Throwing out pointless questions like that dredged up thoughts of the old days, whether he wanted them or not.
Gyeon Raewon. You were always right about everything. But this time you were wrong.
They had already come far too far to turn back.
He shut his eyes and took a deep breath. The salt tang of the sea flooded his lungs.
...It was time to see the end of this bad blood that had dragged on for so long.]
Some scene that made absolutely no sense had surfaced in my head. More precisely, it had been laid out for me like an open page of a book.
“...”
What was that?
Bewilderment came rolling in, and Hanbyeol did nothing but blink and blink. He had entirely forgotten that he’d just flung ‘a certain door’ wide open.
“Ugh.”
Only the sharp scent stabbing at the tip of his nose brought him back to himself.
Ahead of him, a gleaming, high-end room done out with an antique coat stand and a safe, a bed and a two-seater sofa, and a huge TV.
Behind him, a long corridor lined with doors identical in design to the one he’d just opened.
...In other words, a hotel.
Right. I heard Kang Taeseo was in his rut cycle, so I popped the lock with a master key.
It was the payoff from a whole lot of hard sweet-talking aimed at one of the guy’s secretarial team. If it could earn him even a sliver of Taeseo’s attention, he’d manufacture a point of contact by any means necessary.
And yet.
...Weird. Why am I suddenly not feeling it?
It was like being underwater and then abruptly hauled up above the surface.
Come to think of it, his vision was swimming and his body was burning up, so he was clearly in bad shape. Above all, a shrill alarm bell was clanging away in his skull, telling him he should not be standing here right now.
And so Hanbyeol, who had been listening to the water running in the bathroom only a few steps away, started backing out instead.
Well... fine. Today isn’t my only shot.
Shut the door before this turns into a whole thing, and just go home and get some proper rest. Muttering it under his breath, he carried himself out of the room, face scrunching up hard.
“Do they always use air freshener this strong in here? It’s not like somebody knocked over a diffuser. My nose hurts so much I can’t even breathe, what the...”
His stomach was churning, and he was just about to yank the door shut.
Bang!
“...”
“...”
By a hair’s breadth, the bathroom door had opened first.
Just like that, with the half-shut door between them, his eyes met those of a half-naked Taeseo. Hanbyeol hurriedly dropped his gaze.
That was because Taeseo was glaring at him viciously enough to fire lasers out of his eyes and bore a hole clean through his face.
“S-so, um.”
“Ha.”
“No, look...”
The guy gave off a savage air as he closed in until he was practically nose to nose, heat pouring off his body in waves. And as if to prove he was mid-rut, his lower half was standing at proud, triumphant attention.
...Huh?
Thrown off, Hanbyeol sucked in a thin breath.
Normally even a single contemptuous look from Kang Taeseo was enough of a thrill to raise the hairs down his spine and leave him feeling like he was strolling along on clouds.
He’d been rabid for one glimpse of a vein standing out on that forearm, one bob of that throat, so now that the man was stripped bare he should have been well past happy, drunk on sheer rapture.
Astonishingly, he felt nothing whatsoever.
Under that stare still clinging stubbornly to him, Hanbyeol scratched the back of his head and mumbled.
“Taeseo. I think I’m pretty badly sick today.”
“...”
“Feels like I need to rest, so I’m gonna head out. You’ll manage on your own, right?”
With a dumbfounded Taeseo standing right in front of him, Hanbyeol shrugged, bold as brass.
It wasn’t as if his whims were anything new.
And besides, I haven’t actually done anything yet.
Which made it as good as nothing having happened at all.
Stalking, background checks, breaking and entering. Even when he’d pulled far worse than this, his love might get annoyed, might get angry, but he never reacted beyond that.
Hanbyeol smiled shamelessly and kept talking.
“Get some rest, then. Though obviously, if you call some other guy in for a good time, I won’t let it slide. You know that, right? I trust you to handle yourself prop—urk!”
Just as he turned his back to slip out of the room.
Taeseo abruptly seized Hanbyeol by the collar and dragged him back inside. Pinned flat against the wall under that glare, Hanbyeol let out a heavy sigh.
“Taeseo. I said I’m sick, didn’t I? Even if you’re some knockoff animal that goes into heat over pheromones or whatever, you’re still a person.”
Or what, you’ve been running around with lowborn trash, so you’ve decided to turn vulgar right along with them?
At that quiet mutter, the man’s whole face twisted and he let out a disbelieving laugh.
“If anyone here is an animal, it’s you.”
“Huh?”
“Digging into my private business so you could get a piece of me, picking my lock and walking right in.”
“...”
“And now you turn up doused in omega pheromones from God knows where, putting on a show.”
If this wasn’t a ‘real’ animal, then what was? The words came out ground between his teeth, dead certain, and Hanbyeol blew up and shouted.
“N-no, I didn’t!”
Granted, he had sweet-talked Kang Taeseo’s secretary into giving up the hotel, and he had popped the lock with a master key.
And granted, just as the guy said, he’d fully intended to use the chance to get in bed with him!
Omega pheromones, though!
He was genuinely, sincerely wronged here.
He was perfectly confident he could have Taeseo utterly spellbound without leaning on some third-rate mating gimmick like that.
Pheromones, big deal. Weren’t they basically the same as catching a whiff of spicy stir-fried pork when you’re starving?
If it was a love you could only win by relying on something like that, then it wasn’t true love at all.
What do you take me for?! Hanbyeol let out a screech.
“It’s a misunderstanding!”
“Then.”
“I’ve never done anything like that! I take omega-3, sure, but omega pheromones? Of all the ridiculous...!”
And.
“Just get off me for a second! I’m not faking it, I swear. My s-stomach really doesn’t feel... urk!”
F\ck, something keeps brushing against me down there.*
The nausea surged up mid-sentence, and Hanbyeol broke off, turned his head and dry-heaved. It wasn’t just his stomach rebelling, either. The sharp scent that had been stabbing at his nose since earlier was now strong enough to make his head throb.
What on earth is this smell?
A harsh woody scent, like someone had smashed a whole bottle of cologne and gone swimming in it.
The closer he got to Taeseo, the thicker the smell that filled the room became, several times over. He couldn’t say for certain, but it didn’t feel like it was coming from a diffuser.
When he stopped breathing without meaning to, a flustered Taeseo let go of his collar, practically flinging it away. Hanbyeol’s legs folded under him at once, strengthless.
“F*ck, what are you faking now...”
Grrrk. The sound of teeth grinding.
The instant Hanbyeol slumped down in the doorway of the hotel room, Taeseo backed off two or three paces and opened his mouth.
“Get out.”
“Hnngh, h-huh?”
“I said get lost!”
The moment he snarled it out.
Gush!
“...?”
Something burst and spilled out behind him. He could feel it.
A faint wildflower scent and the crisp smell of green apple drifted past his nose. For some reason, breathing turned into hard work.
H-holy crap. What is this?
Heat rushed up through his body, and somewhere deep in his belly there was a prickling, tickling itch.
He shivered at the sensation, which was beyond describing. But he wasn’t the only one something strange was happening to. Taeseo, who had been clamping a hand over his nose, stopped, his eyes clouding over, and fell against him with a dazed look on his face. Then he buried his nose in the nape of Hanbyeol’s neck.
“Hk, ah...!”
Breathing in hard, he bit down lightly on the nape of his neck, testing it, feeling it out.
Hell yes, jackpot!
“...?”
No, wait, not that.
This wasn’t the plan, but if the big event was going down anyway, then thank you very much.
Hanbyeol, whose mouth was already twitching up into a grin on reflex, was just laying a hand on Taeseo’s back when he went rigid. It was the instant right after the hand that had popped the button on his pants started groping along his inner thigh.
“T-Taeseo.”
“...”
“Taeseo?”
It felt exactly like having bugs crawling all over him. At the skin-crawling sensation he reflexively grabbed those solidly muscled shoulders and pushed back a little.
Hanbyeol grunted and strained, wrestling with a Taeseo who wouldn’t budge an inch. It was a truly bizarre business.
Right. Something is seriously wrong with me right now.
There’s no way I’d feel like this when Kang Taeseo is the one coming at me first.
I must be sick, I’m definitely—
“...”
Hold on.
...Don’t tell me I’ve fallen out of love with him?
Even while he was thinking it, the hands roaming his body showed no sign of stopping. When one of them slipped in under his clothes and stroked the small of his back, he jerked and shouted.
“No, w-wait, hold on...!”
“...”
“Don’t, ah!”
“...”
“...I said don’t!”
CRACK!
It happened while he was thrashing with everything he had in him.
His hand scrabbled around, and the second it closed on something he swung it as hard as he possibly could. Clubbed across the back of the skull with the solid hardwood coat stand, the bastard went down face-first on the floor without so much as a yelp, out cold.
“...”
I’m f\cked.*
However much he’d clung and pestered and made a nuisance of himself to Taeseo until now, he’d never once been a threat to his physical safety.
What if this is the thing that makes him really hate me? The future suddenly looked terrifying, but he could feel his own condition getting worse by the second, and there was no room left to think about it.
Working off the last scrap of conscience he had, Hanbyeol just barely managed to pull a shower robe out of the closet and spread it wide over Taeseo’s collapsed body. Then he went straight out of the hotel room and shut the door behind him.
A-anywhere, fast...
Out in the corridor, Hanbyeol looked frantically around. His vision was going white at the edges. Making it all the way to the lobby in this state was out of the question.
Anywhere would do. He just had to get inside somewhere and call the front desk.
“...! Ah!”
Luckily, at the end of the hall he found a room with its door standing open. Hanbyeol went straight in and snatched up the phone sitting in the bedroom.
Even then, the hand holding the receiver shook and shook.
Front desk
“Good evening, sir. CN Hotel front desk. How may I help you?”
“...”
But.
“What the—”
This room, it seemed, already had an occupant.
Just as he was about to speak, a startled voice came from above him, along with a large shadow falling across his head. Half-sprawled on the floor, with a man’s legs at his eye level, Hanbyeol put on the most harmless smile of his entire life despite his blurring vision and crinkled the corners of his eyes.
Smiling for someone who wasn’t Taeseo didn’t sit well with him at all, but still.
“H-hello there?”
He was clearly f*cked twice over now, but his vision was dimming like someone slowly turning down the lights, so there wasn’t much he could do. His voice shook as pitifully as a newborn goat’s.
He was deeply sorry for barging into a stranger’s room the first time they ever met, but.
“C-could I get a hospital, please...”
...And while we’re at it, please don’t call the cops either!
Hanbyeol is punning: 오메가 쓰리 (omega-3 supplements) versus 오메가 페로몬 (omega pheromones).
