He lets out a slow breath through his nose that I feel warm against the crown of my head, and I can tell he wants to push it further, can feel the questions building in the way his jaw works against my hair. But he lets it go, and I’m grateful enough that I feel like exhaling in relief.
“What’s your son like?” he asks instead.
I hesitate. Describing Sungyoon to Hongjoong feels like walking across a frozen lake, each step a calculated risk. But Hongjoong can’t possibly know from a description alone. There’s no way to connect a handful of personality traits to a face he’s never seen, to a boy he doesn’t know exists in relation to him.
“He’s smart,” I say, and I can hear the warmth bleeding into my own voice despite my efforts to keep it neutral. “Confident. Sporty kid, does well in school, has lots of friends.” I pause, a smile tugging at the corner of my mouth. “He’s far better behaved than I ever was, which honestly isn’t saying much, but still. And he’s witty as hell, always has some comeback ready that makes me want to ground him and laugh at the same time.” The smile wins out and I let it stay. “He’s a good kid. He’ll have his pick of colleges in a few years.”
“You sound like a proud father,” Hongjoong says, a soft warmth in his voice that catches me off guard. “It’s rather cute.”
I snort. “Well, I am a proud father.”
Hongjoong hums, the sound vibrating through his chest and into my spine. “That’s good,” he says after a moment. “At the very least you have something to show for all the life we’ve lived apart.” A pause, and then quieter: “I wish I could say the same.”
I tilt my head back to look up at him, frowning. “What do you mean? Your face is on the side of buses. You have your own fortune separate from your family’s money. How is that nothing to show for it?”
Hongjoong sighs heavily. “Success is awfully lonely, though,” he says. “I still see some of our friends from school, but I haven’t had a real relationship in years.” He shifts beneath me, adjusting his arm around my waist, and his voice drops lower. “Actually, until you walked into my hotel room I was starting to think I might be impotent.”
I go very still.
“Every encounter I had with other omegas ended the same way,” he continues, I can hear him frowning. “Disappointing sex, couldn’t knot, didn’t matter how pretty they were or how willing. And worse than that, they smelled wrong. Off. Something about their scent made my stomach turn and killed any arousal I had to start with.” He pauses. “At first I thought it was a fluke, maybe stress or overtraining or something physical. But it kept happening, year after year, omega after omega, and eventually I started thinking maybe my nose and my dick were both broken.”
He bends down and presses his nose to the curve of my throat, right over my scent gland, and inhales deep. The sound he makes is low and content, almost a purr, his lips brushing my skin as he exhales warm against my pulse.
“But I guess not,” he murmurs. “Because you smell incredible. The way an omega should smell.”
I say nothing.
Because I know exactly why.
I know that the reason no other omega’s scent works for him, the reason he can’t knot anyone else, the reason every encounter has left him frustrated and unsatisfied and convinced something was fundamentally wrong with him, is because his biology already made its choice and has been rejecting every substitute since. He’s been suffering for years because of something I did, something I let happen, something I ran away from instead of facing.
The guilt twists in my gut and I stare at the ceiling of the office, at the recessed lighting and the neat rows of acoustic tiles, and I wonder if I should tell him. If it would be the right thing to do. He deserves to know. He deserves to understand why his body has been working against him for a decade and a half.
But would it do us any good? Telling him now could unravel everything. The contract, the rebuilt connection we’re carefully stitching together on top of old foundations, all of it. If he foundout that I’ve known this entire time, that I’ve been keeping it from him deliberately, he might not just be angry. He might be done. And if Hongjoong walked away, not just from whatever fragile thing is growing between us but from the contract too, leaving me with nothing, then I’d be putting Sungyoon’s future on the line. The tuition fund that’s finally starting to look like an actual fund. The bills that are paid up for the first time in years. The college savings that might actually get my son into the school he deserves. All of it riding on me keeping my mouth shut.
So I say nothing, and I hate myself for it.
Hongjoong walks me down to my car later, both of us dressed and looking almost presentable despite the state of the office we left behind. I buttoned my shirt wrong on the first try and had to redo it while Hongjoong watched with undisguised amusement, and my hair is a lost cause, flattened on one side from being pressed into the couch cushion for the better part of two hours. Hongjoong looks annoyingly put-together by comparison, his hair finger-combed back into something resembling its usual style, his jacket zipped up over the wrinkled t-shirt beneath.
The parking garage is quiet and dim, our footsteps echoing off the concrete as we cross to where my car sits under the fluorescent lights looking even more pathetic than usual next to the row of sleek company vehicles parked along the opposite wall. Before I can reach for the door handle Hongjoong catches my arm and turns me around, then presses two items into my hand.
I look down. A small black credit card, matte finish. And a white keycard with the logo of Hongjoong’s apartment building embossed in silver.
“The card is for you to get whatever you need,” Hongjoong says, nodding at the credit card. “No limit. Groceries, clothes, stuff for your kid, whatever.” He taps the keycard. “And that’sfor the lock on my apartment so you can come and go without having to buzz in every time.”
I turn both cards over in my fingers, feeling what they represent. “Hongjoong—”
“You should really just move in,” he adds, like it’s the most reasonable suggestion in the world. “At least for the duration of the contract. It would make things easier, you wouldn’t have to drive across the city every time I call, and I wouldn’t have to wait forty minutes for you to show up.”
“I have a son,” I remind him.
Hongjoong shrugs. “I have an extra bedroom. Your son would be welcome too.”
I consider it for exactly half a second. The image forms in my mind, Sungyoon sitting at Hongjoong’s dining table doing homework while Hongjoong pours himself coffee in the kitchen, Alto and Rennard weaving between their legs. Sungyoon looking up from his textbook with that face, those features, that dimple pressing into his left cheek as he smirks at something, and Hongjoong standing three feet away with the exact same dimple in the exact same cheek, looking back at him. The thought sends ice through my veins.
“It’s not practical,” I say, and I wave the suggestion off with what I hope reads as casual dismissal rather than barely controlled panic.
Hongjoong takes it in stride, shrugging again like it was just an idea, no big deal. “Offer stands,” he says.
