Hongjoong stares at me for a long moment, and then he laughs. It’s not a mocking laugh, it’s disbelieving, almost pained, like he’s just realized the scope of a mistake he didn’t know he’d made. He runs a hand through his hair, the blonde strands falling messily across his forehead, and shakes his head.
“I only said those things because I knew how much omega stereotypes bothered you,” he says. “You went out of your way to reject every typical omega expectation. You were proud of it, outspoken about it, you hated when anyone reduced you to your designation.” He meets my eyes, his expression is painfully earnest now. “I was afraid that if I made a move, it would come across as just another alpha trying to exert some fucked up biological claim on you. That you’d think I only saw you as an omega to conquer.” He swallows. “I thought you’d be disgusted. Or insulted. And I didn’t want to risk our friendship by making you think I was just another knothead who couldn’t see past your designation.”
I just stare at him. My mind is cycling backward through years of memories, every interaction, every loaded silence, every time Hongjoong threw his arm around my shoulders and I leanedinto it and told myself it meant nothing, every time he looked at me a second too long and I convinced myself I was imagining it. All of it rearranging under this new light into a picture that’s so obvious in hindsight I want to scream.
Hongjoong laughs again, more self-conscious this time, rubbing the back of his neck. “Those omegas I dated back then,” he says. “The small, pretty, delicate ones.” He looks at me sideways. “I dated them specifically because of you.”
My brow furrows. “What?”
“I went for anyone who was the complete opposite of you on purpose,” he says. “Because I didn’t want anyone to be a stand-in for you. I didn’t want to project what I felt onto someone who just happened to remind me of the person I actually wanted.”
The full realization of it settles over me like something heavy being lowered onto my shoulders, and with it comes a tangle of emotions so dense and contradictory that my head spins. Bitterness at the years we wasted. Sadness for the teenagers we were, circling each other with clenched fists and closed mouths, two idiots who wanted the same thing and were both too afraid to reach for it. The sharp frustration of knowing that if either one of us had just opened our mouths, just once, everything could have been different. My whole life could have been different. Sungyoon could have had a father. I could have had Hongjoong.
And underneath all of that, coiling sick and cold in the pit of my stomach, the terrible knowledge of what this means. What it changes. And what it doesn’t change at all, because the secret I’m keeping makes all of it so much worse. Because if Hongjoong wanted me back then, if he felt the same way I did, then what happened on that classroom floor wasn’t just a rut-addled accident. It was two people who wanted each other, finally colliding.
Hongjoong’s expression goes quiet, the playfulness draining away. “I thought I did something wrong,” he says, lower. “Whenyou disappeared without a word after graduation. I always wondered what I’d done to drive you away.”
I shake my head firmly, my chest constricting. “It was nothing like that,” I say heavily. “It wasn’t about you, Hongjoong. It’s not important and you shouldn’t worry about it.”
He watches me for a moment, his sharp brown eyes searching my face. I can see the questions he wants to ask lined up behind his teeth. But he takes it in stride the way he always does, the way Hongjoong has always been able to read when I’ve hit a wall and there’s no point pushing further. He exhales through his nose, and the corner of his mouth lifts.
“Well,” he says. “We’re making up for lost time now, aren’t we?”
He reaches for me and pulls me down against his chest, his arm wrapping around my shoulders, so I let myself be held. My cheek presses against his bare skin, warm and solid, and I can hear his heartbeat under my ear, steady and strong. His fingers card through my hair, slow and idle, and his other hand rests on the curve of my waist.
I close my eyes and let my body go slack against him, but my mind won’t stop running. It turns over everything he just told me.
Hongjoong’s breathing is evening out beneath me, his chest rising and falling in a slower rhythm, his fingers still moving through my hair but with less purpose now, drifting toward sleep. I press my face harder against his chest and breathe him in, and the guilt sits in my stomach like something I swallowed that won’t dissolve, thinking through the morning I misunderstood so badly I messed up all three of our lives.
Then
I wake up to cold linoleum pressing against my hip and the stale taste of sleep thick on my tongue, and for a few disoriented seconds I have no idea where I am. Dust drifts through pale morning light that’s slanting in through windows I don’t recognize, and the air is warm and close and smells musky and layered. It clings to my skin and fills my lungs with every breath. Then my eyes focus on the rows of desks above me, the chalkboard on the far wall, the scattered pile of clothing underneath my bare body, and everything from last night comes flooding back in a rush so vivid my pulse kicks hard against my ribs.
I turn my head slowly. Hongjoong is asleep beside me on the floor, maybe a foot away, his face slack and peaceful in a way I’ve never seen it when he’s awake. His hair is a disaster, black strands fanned out against the crumpled fabric of his school jacket that he’s using as a makeshift pillow. His mouth is slightly parted, his breathing deep and even. He’s still naked. One arm is stretched out across the gap between us, his fingers resting near my shoulder like he was reaching for me in his sleep, and the sight of it has my heart stuttering.
I just lie there and stare at his face. I can’t believe last night actually happened. Even with the evidence of it written across every inch of my body, the soreness between my legs, the dried fluids on my thighs, the deep ache in muscles I didn’t know I had, some part of my brain keeps insisting it must have been a dream. But it wasn’t. Hongjoong kissed me on this floor andI kissed him back and then I let him do everything else, and I wanted it, wanted him, with a desperation that terrifies me now in the sober light of morning. His rut pheromones have faded to a low residual hum in the air, no longer the overwhelming flood that turned my bones to liquid last night, but I can still smell them on my own skin, soaked into my pores, and my body responds to the scent with a pull toward the sleeping alpha beside me that feels as natural as breathing.
I don’t know what I’m going to say to him when he wakes up. My emotions are too tangled to sort through right now, tenderness and terror braided together with a bright and aching warmth that sits right behind my sternum. a feeling I’ve been carrying for years and have never once allowed myself to look at directly. I’m afraid to acknowledge it even now.
I sit up carefully, moving slowly so I don’t wake him, and the moment I shift my weight the bite wound on my collarbone throbs. Sharp and insistent, like a second pulse. I lift my hand and touch it with fingers that won’t stop trembling, feeling the raised edges where the skin broke, the swollen ring of bruising that’s already darkening around the puncture marks. Hongjoong’s teeth. Hongjoong’s bite. I press my fingertips against it and a shiver runs through my whole body from the way the contact sends a warm current outward from the wound, spreading down through my chest and settling deep in my gut.
I know what this is. I can feel the truth of it in my body, in the way my omega biology has already started shifting around this new anchor point, redesignating itself with a speed that scares me. The instinctive pull toward Hongjoong is stronger now than it was even last night, a gravitational tug that makes the idea of standing up and walking away from him feel wrong, like trying to move against a current. Every cell in my body wants to curl back against his chest and press my face into his throat and stay there. I have to clench my jaw and force myself not to.
I wince hard as I get to my feet, my legs shaking under me, my lower back throbbing with a deep bruised ache. Hongjoong was too far gone into his rut to be gentle or slow and I was completely unprepared. It was my first time. The reality of that is a different hit. I have to close my eyes for a second, breathing through the wave of vulnerability that comes with it. My whole body feels tender and sensitized, my hole raw and sore in a way that makes every step send a dull spike of discomfort up my spine, and there’s a sticky warmth between my thighs that I’m trying very hard not to think about. It’s not entirely unpleasant, all of it, but it’s deeply overwhelming. I don’t know how to mentally deal with any of it.
I find my clothes scattered across the floor in a trail that shows the progression of last night, my shirt near the door, my pants kicked under a desk, my underwear balled up somewhere. I pull everything on one piece at a time, moving gingerly, tucking my shirt collar up high to cover the bite mark. I look down at Hongjoong one more time before I leave. His chest rises and falls in that same steady rhythm, his face slack and untroubled, and I think his rut must have burned itself out because his pheromones are barely detectable now, just a faint warm undertone in the stale classroom air. He needs the rest. I decide not to wake him.
The boys’ restroom down the hall is exactly as grim as every school bathroom, flickering fluorescent light and cracked tile and a row of sinks with mirrors spotted with age. I lock the door behind me and strip down in front of the nearest sink, peeling my clothes off for the second time this morning, and the moment I shift my stance a thick rush of cum slides out of my hole and down my inner thighs, warm and viscous. I gasp, my face flooding with heat so fierce my ears burn, and I grab the edge of the sink with both hands, squeezing my eyes shut as more of it drips out of me, pooling between my feet on the tilefloor. There’s so much of it. Hongjoong came inside me more than once last night and my body held all of it, and now gravity is doing its work and I can feel every slow trickle as it leaves me, the sensation equally intimate and mortifying.
I clean myself up as best I can with wet paper towels, wiping the dried fluids from my skin with careful strokes, dabbing gingerly around the bite mark on my collarbone. My reflection in the spotted mirror looks completely trashed. My lips are swollen and reddened, my neck is marked with bruises and the faint scrape of teeth in places I didn’t even feel last night, and my eyes are too bright, glassy with exhaustion and a strange wild energy. I splash cold water on my face until the flush recedes, then dress again and button my collar all the way up.
The school is silent around me as I make my way to the vending machines near the front entrance, my footsteps echoing off the empty walls. No sign of our friends anywhere, either they went home after the rooftop party or they’re still passed out up there. I don’t have the headspace to worry about them right now. I feed coins into the machine and press buttons mechanically, watching cans and bottles drop one by one, grabbing a couple of rice snack bars from the adjacent machine because Hongjoong always complains he’s starving when he wakes up.
My mind won’t stop spinning while I gather everything into my arms. I keep circling the same questions without landing on answers. What does this mean for us now? We’re both supposed to leave for college in different cities in a few weeks, Hongjoong accepted into a prestigious university across the city that his family’s money and connections secured for him, me headed to a public university on a partial scholarship that I fought tooth and nail for. If Hongjoong decides to claim me officially, will he expect me to drop everything and follow him? Will his parents even allow it? They’ve never been unkind to me, but they are standard high-born people. I doubt they’ll be very pleasedabout Hongjoong bonding a no-name omega from the group of scoundrels they always complain about him getting into trouble with. And what if Hongjoong decides not to go to school at all, throws away his future to stay with me out of some misplaced sense of obligation? The thought makes me feel sick. Or worse, what if he regrets it? What if it was just the rut talking, the hormones, and when he wakes up clear-headed he looks at me and feels nothing but awkwardness and pity?
I hear footsteps and look up as I’m halfway back to the classroom, arms full of drinks and snacks.
Hongjoong is striding toward me down the hallway, awake but disheveled, his hair wild and sticking up on one side, his clothes pulled on haphazardly with his shirt buttoned wrong and his belt hanging unbuckled from the loops of his pants. He looks like he dressed in a hurry and a panic, and when he spots me his whole body visibly loosens with relief.
