Hongjoong climbs in behind me, his long legs bracketing mine, and pulls me back against his chest. For once his hands don’t wander. He just washes me, cupping water in his palms and letting it run down my shoulders, using a soft cloth to clean the dried cum and slick from my skin and between my legs. He rinses my hair, working his fingers through it to get the sweat out, tilting my head back so the water doesn’t run into my eyes. He lets me soak and float in the heat until my stiff muscles go loose and pliant, until the spasm in my lower back is nothingbut a distant memory and my limbs feel heavy and warm and boneless.
I lean back against his chest and say nothing, my eyes closed, allowing myself this. I don’t know what to do with it, the tenderness. It’s new, not an experience I’ve ever encountered in my professional life. Clients fuck you and pay you and sometimes they’re rough and sometimes they’re not, but none of them have ever drawn me a bath afterward and washed me and cared.
After the bath Hongjoong helps dry me off, wrapping a towel around my shoulders and rubbing me down before steering me back to the bedroom with a hand on the small of my back. He tells me to lie on my stomach and I do, settling face down on the fresh sheets he must have changed while I was soaking because these ones are clean and cool against my skin.
I’m expecting something sexual. I brace for it out of habit, my body tensing in anticipation of hands that will grip and spread and take, that’s what alphas do when they put you face down on a bed. But Hongjoong just retrieves a bottle of oil from the nightstand drawer, pours some into his palm, and rubs his hands together to warm it.
“Where’s the worst of it?” he asks.
I turn my head on the pillow to look at him. He’s sitting beside me on the bed, shirtless, his dyed blonde hair still damp from the bath and pushed back from his face, the tattoo on his ribs stark in the low light from the bedside lamp. He looks serious, focused, waiting for my answer.
“Lower back,” I say after a beat. “And my hips.”
He nods and starts working his hands into the knotted muscle along my spine, his thumbs digging into the tight spots on either side of my lumbar with firm steady pressure. He finds the first knot and presses into it and I grunt, my fingers curling in the sheets.
“You’re treating me like an invalid,” I grumble, even as the pressure sends a wave of relief radiating outward from the spot he’s working. “I’m not one of those delicate omegas who needs to be handled like glass, you know.”
“I know,” he says mildly, and digs his thumb harder into the knot.
“Your hands are too rough.”
“Noted.” He doesn’t change a thing.
“You’re pressing too hard on that side.”
He eases up fractionally, shifts his angle, and hits a spot just above my left hip that makes my entire body go slack against the mattress. A sound comes out of me that I will deny making to my grave, something that has absolutely no business existing outside of a sexual context.
“...That spot’s actually incredible,” I admit grudgingly.
Hongjoong snorts behind me and keeps working, his oiled hands moving in slow firm passes along the patchwork of tension in my back, finding each knot and coaxing it loose with uncharacteristic patience. He works down to my hips, his thumbs pressing into the tight flexors on either side, I can feel the old aches releasing under his hands one by one, years of accumulated damage that no amount of cheap pain patches and over-the-counter pills have ever been able to touch.
My complaints trail off into silence. My eyes grow heavy. I wouldn’t say it aloud, couldn’t bring myself to give him the satisfaction, but Hongjoong’s hands on me like this, firm but careful, knowing exactly where the pain lives and working it out with an intense, non-sexual focus, is more comforting than anything I’ve felt in years. Maybe ever. I can’t remember the last time someone touched me just to make me feel better. I can’t remember the last time someone touched me and didn’t want something from my body in return.
I’m drifting, hovering in that warm space between waking and sleep, when Hongjoong’s hands slow and he tells me to get under the covers. He pulls the blankets back and I hear him say, “We’ll just sleep this time. I promise.”
I roll over onto my back, eyes half-closed, and start to settle into the pillows and suddenly Hongjoong goes still beside me. The quality of his silence changes, sharpening into an alert and focused air that cuts through my drowsiness.
“What is that?”
His voice has changed. The warmth is gone, replaced by a flat, hard edge that makes my stomach drop before I even understand why. I blink, follow the line of his gaze to where it’s fixed on my body, and freeze.
He’s looking at my collarbone. At the raised scar sitting right where my neck meets my shoulder, the tissue slightly puckered and silvered with age but unmistakable in its shape. A bonding bite. The mark of a completed claim, which is exactly why it never fully healed the way a normal wound would, the bond sealed into the scar tissue itself, permanent and damning.
I mentally curse myself. I normally cover it with makeup before I come here, a careful layer of concealer and setting powder that hides the raised edges well enough to pass casual inspection. But the bath washed it off and I forgot. I was too relaxed, too comfortable, too stupid.
I fumble for an excuse, my mouth opening and closing, but the look in Hongjoong’s eyes tells me that any lie I could come up with right now would be transparent and insulting to both of us. He knows what a bonding scar looks like. Every alpha does.
“It’s in the past,” I say quietly instead.
Hongjoong’s eyes are blazing when they meet mine. His jaw is clenched so tight that a muscle jumps in his cheek, and his hands have gone very still on the sheets between us, fingers curled butnot quite fisted, like he’s holding himself in check through sheer force of will.
“That bastard did bond you,” he says in a low, dangerous voice.
I look down at my hands in my lap. “Hongjoong. Drop it. It doesn’t matter.”
He lifts his gaze to the ceiling, his chest expanding with a slow, controlled breath that I can hear him pulling through his nose, and I watch his throat work as he swallows whatever he wants to say. The silence stretches between us, taut and charged, and I can feel his pheromones shifting, the warm, relaxed scent from earlier souring with anger that he’s trying very hard to contain.
“Fine,” he says finally, in a tone that is clearly anything but fine.
