Chapter Text
There were twenty-six glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling above Beomgyu’s bed. Soobin counted. He counted them at least a dozen times, over and over, staring at them while Beomgyu talked into his neck about his midterm assignments. He counted Beomgyu’s vertebrae, too, working his thick fingertips up and down his bare spine methodically. Those were a little harder to count. He made out about twelve of them before Beomgyu squirmed, shaking his hand off.
“What are you doing back there?”
“Counting,” Soobin said.
“Counting?” Beomgyu pulled his head up, propping it up on his elbow. “Since when do you count?”
Soobin couldn’t look at the ceiling anymore, not with Beomgyu’s face so close, so lovely. He swallowed, staring at the omega’s lips. So, so lovely, like flower petals.
“Ouch,” he said. “Way to stereotype me.”
“So you’re not a dumb oaf?” Beomgyu cocked his head to the side. “A stupid, brutish alpha?” He nibbled his own lip.
“Don’t do that to me,” Soobin said.
“Do what?” Playing coy. Beomgyu knew his power too well.
“I can’t go again, baby. Not so soon.”
“Well, I can,” Beomgyu said. His thigh was slung across Soobin’s bare lap, and he wiggled it into Soobin’s soft cock. “And I have more condoms. Three left in the box. Fuck me like a bunny?”
“Beoms, oh my god. You’re gonna break me.”
Beomgyu laughed, tossing back his long hair. The motion stretched out the front of his elegant neck and Soobin seized the opportunity to grab it, lunging forward to nudge it with his nose. It already smelled like a garden in Beomgyu’s dorm room from all the slick that had poured out of him during the sex they’d just had, and that green, floral smell grew even stronger as Soobin nuzzled his scent gland.
Beomgyu yelped, grabbing Soobin’s head to rip it off his neck. “Fuck, hyung! Don’t tell me you can’t go again, and then—”
Soobin pulled away. “I need to tell you something.”
“What, that you’re literally just as bad as they say you all are? A horny monster, trying to devour me?”
“No. Something real.” Soobin backed off to sit up properly, and Beomgyu pulled away too, crinkling his brow. It made him look younger, like he was still the nineteen-year-old that Soobin pulled down a too-high book for in the library.
Soobin stamped the patch of wrinkles between Beomgyu’s eyebrows with his thumb and Beomgyu made a shocked face, pretending to have been knocked halfway over by the impact.
“Know your strength, alpha,” he said in a whiny voice. “Be gentle with me. I’m so fragile, remember?”
“Beomgyu-ya, really. Don’t rile me up, I can’t go again.”
Beomgyu pouted, and that was what did it. That was what made Soobin absolutely, completely sure. His round eyes, his sharp little chin, his squishy, full lips on top of his smooth, lanky body. The giggle he let out when he abandoned the pout, his exasperated voice as he said, “Fine, fine. I’ll stop with the torture. Spit it out.” Everything about him made Soobin sure, so sure.
Soobin took one last glance up at those twenty-six stars and let out his breath slowly to calm his jumpy, burning heart.
“I want to…if you want me to, I mean, if you’re interested, I’d like to… Okay. I, well. I love you, you know.”
“I do know,” Beomgyu said, amused. “That’s it?”
Soobin scrunched up his eyes. Start over. He reached out and Beomgyu slotted his hand into Soobin’s, settling the webs of their fingers together. Soobin’s hand felt so hot and clammy against Beomgyu’s cool, soft skin, and Soobin wondered if it was giving him away.
“This has been the best part of my life, being with you,” Soobin said. He opened his eyes in time to see Beomgyu start to pull a stupid expression, something dopey and teasing. “No, don’t tease me yet. Let me finish?”
Beomgyu nodded.
“You’re the best thing in my life, and I know it’s early, and I know we’re young. But if you want me, um. I, I was wondering if you’d like to…to mate with me.”
Beomgyu’s pretty lips fell open.
“I’m sorry if that was forward. I’m sorry. But I won’t stop wanting it, and you, and…well, we’re graduating this year, and with my grades, I’m sure I can get a good job, and make you happy, and I just…why wait, you know? I mean, if you want me too, of course.” Soobin knew he was rambling, that he was turning an unflattering shade of pink for an alpha, but he couldn’t stop. “And I asked your parents, and they said they thought it might be early but that I’m a good man and they know how much I love you and—“
“Soobin-hyung, stop,” Beomgyu said. “Holy shit, stop talking.”
Soobin took a breath. Beomgyu’s face was uncharacteristically impassive. His eyebrows were still arched upward in surprise, but Soobin couldn’t read him.
“What…what do you think?” Soobin finished lamely.
Beomgyu chewed his lower lip.
“The fact that you think I’ll need you to take care of me is frankly insulting,” he said.
Soobin’s stomach jolted, but Beomgyu was starting to smile.
“You don’t think I can pull my weight in this relationship, huh? Some kind of omega prejudice?”
“Baby, that’s not what I meant. I’m sorry, I—”
“Hyung, mate me literally right now,” Beomgyu said, breaking into a dazzling grin, his whisker dimples popping out. He yanked on Soobin’s hand, and Soobin toppled over on top of him, falling against him and knocking the wind out of his smaller chest. “God, mate me yesterday.”
“You…you sure?”
“So so so sure,” Beomgyu beamed, grabbing Soobin’s face in his hands and smacking kisses all over his face, breaking up his words. “So sure— so sure, I’ve been bitching—to Taehyunnie for weeks—about when you’d ask already.”
“It’s not…too early? It’s for life, you know.”
“Do you want me for life?”
Beomgyu smelled like rosemary. Soobin stroked over his round cheek with the back of his fingertips. His brown eyes looked pinkish in the glow of the string lights all around his dorm room.
“For life,” Soobin said. “You and me, for life. It’s all I want.”
“Then mate me,” Beomgyu said. “You’re all I want, hyung. You and me.”
Every day is a long day for Soobin, but Mondays are especially long.
“Bunny?” Beomgyu calls out at the sound of the front door latching.
“Who else?”
“Dunno. Could be Taehyun, or maybe you were late on the rent, and the landlord came around.”
“Taehyun’s on a trip, and the landlord would knock,” Soobin calls back, kicking off his shoes and stacking them neatly in the rack. It’s dark in the entryway, and he flips the switch. Nothing happens. “Is the bulb out in here?”
“I thought I heard a pop a few hours ago,” Beomgyu says, his voice louder and softer at the same time.
“No need to get up, princess,” Soobin says, but Beomgyu rounds the corner.
“Too late. Already up.”
It’s dark, but Soobin can still see the pink flush on Beomgyu’s cheekbones, the sweat plastering his black bangs to his forehead. He’s bundled up in a thick cardigan against the late-autumn chill creeping through the old windows, but Soobin knows his flush isn’t from overheating in his sweater.
“Oh, baby. Is it bad?”
“Not bad,” Beomgyu says, shuffling his feet. Lie. “Do you have the pills?”
“I could only get the generic version,” Soobin says apologetically, rifling in his jacket pocket for the pink bottle. “Not the brand name, but it was on sale.”
“That’ll work.” Beomgyu takes it, looking over the label, and Soobin can tell it’s no good. It’s the wrong dosage, or the wrong active ingredient, wrong wrong wrong. Beomgyu swallows, his neck bobbing in the shadow.
When he looks up at Soobin, he has his prettiest face on, big eyes and arched eyebrows. It doesn’t hide that Beomgyu is lying, but it’s easier to let him get away with it than to try to make it better. Beomgyu is sick of Soobin trying to make it better when he can’t.
“Takes the edge off?”
Beomgyu tucks the bottle into the pocket of his sweater, and the corners of his mouth tick up. His cheeks are thin, the slight hollows exaggerated when he smiles. “Takes the edge off,” he repeats. “Lowers the fever a few degrees.” He doesn’t open the bottle. There’s no point when it’s wrong. Soobin feels a cold that has nothing to do with the shitty windows and the barely-on heater, a frost in his chest that even Beomgyu’s heat can’t thaw.
“So. Dinner?” It’s kimchi jjigae again, from the smell. Beomgyu makes a good kimchi jjigae, but still.
“Kimchi jjigae,” Beomgyu says. “Again. Sorry.”
He reaches out his hand, and Soobin takes it. Soft, soft. He closes his eyes and brings it to his own lips, chapped from the cold outside. Four kisses, one for each knuckle.
“How long do you have today?” Beomgyu asks, and Soobin does another round. Four more kisses, and maybe another four after that, and maybe he won’t have to leave. But he does. It’s Monday.
“About an hour,” he says. “I’m so—”
“Don’t,” Beomgyu says. Soobin can hear the grit in his voice. “Don’t you dare say that word again. I should be thanking you.”
“But I am sorry,” Soobin insists, squeezing his little fingers. He twists Beomgyu’s hand, flipping his wrist skyward, and kisses the veins inside it. “Let me.”
Beomgyu thrusts his wrist up at Soobin’s nose. “You fucking better,” he says. “I’m needy.”
Soobin knows. Fuck, he knows, and Beomgyu’s just being playful, but it hurts. It’s like the words are thorny, ripping open his eardrums as they pass through them.
Beomgyu can tell. “Oh, bun,” he says. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t…hyung, scent me.”
His wrist is damp. The sweat helps spread his scent from the gland hidden there, and his body wants his scent to be everywhere right now. If it weren’t for the suppressants Soobin has to take for his factory job, he’d be salivating, fogged over by the thick aroma of Beomgyu’s pre-heat. As it is, Soobin can barely smell him unless he’s skin-to-skin, inhaling straight from the source, and even then it’s faint.
When they first met, Beomgyu smelled like fresh-picked rosemary.
Soobin breathes in and imagines it. It’s almost there if he tries hard enough. A hint of it, as if Beomgyu had misted his skin with rosemary perfume. He licks his wrist, and that helps. His tongue works better than his nose.
“Dinner first? Or is it…”
Beomgyu shifts his weight from his left foot to his right. “It’s bad,” he says, like an admission of guilt. “I was lying before. I’m sorry, I know it’s not a good time. ”
“Never, never apologize,” Soobin says, wrapping his rough hands around Beomgyu’s neck. His thumb falls over his mating bite. In his mind, it’s a canyon, a hollow in Beomgyu’s body that only he can fill, but when he shifts his hand up to Beomgyu’s jaw, all that’s left behind is wounded red skin. “You know what this meant. I’ll always help.”
“The pills will help,” Beomgyu insists. Soobin squishes his cheeks between his hands, and Beomgyu grabs onto his thick fingers, furrowing his brows. “Hey, don’t be cute when I’m trying to talk about—”
“Important topics? What’s more important than me taking care of you?”
“Soobin-hyung, just let me finish.”
“You said it was bad,” Soobin says. “You said it. I need to help.”
If he could smell him better, they wouldn’t be talking right now. He’d already have him up against the wall, alpha instincts seizing control of his body. He’d have made it better the moment he walked in the front door and smelled his omega in need, teetering on the edge of heat.
Beomgyu purses his lips, fuck, it’s adorable. Soobin may be muted, but he’s still an alpha. He closes his eyes and sinks into Beomgyu’s cushiony lips, so plush. Tastes like a garden, rosemary and mint and something sweet, and at least Soobin’s tongue still tastes properly on the pills.
Soobin is still in his work coat, and Beomgyu tugs at it, trying helplessly to free him from the sleeves. Useless, because Soobin won’t let go of his cheeks, walking him back into the apartment with his tongue still through his lips. It’s awkward to walk like this. His neck is crooked forward at a terrible angle to reach Beomgyu’s tipped-back head, but if he lets go of Beomgyu, the omega might make some excuse, some reason to keep taking care of Soobin instead of the other way around. Soobin can’t have that right now.
“Mmnf, Oo-in,” Beomgyu whines. Soobin shakes his head against his lips. He has to help, has to, has to. Beomgyu bangs feebly on his chest, squealing as Soobin walks him backward toward the bed. The one advantage of a one-room apartment: easy bed access.
“Babe, the food,” Beomgyu sputters as Soobin pulls back for air.
“Sex first,” Soobin insists, tipping him onto the mattress. He lands with a squeal and a dull thud; the springs are shot. Soobin dives onto him, but Beomgyu twists his head to the side, dodging his kiss.
“No, the burner, turn it off.”
Right. Soobin hauls himself off of Beomgyu’s body, darting to the kitchenette in three long strides. Lid on and burner off, he sprints back to his omega and tears off his coat before he lands on his body again. Take two.
Beomgyu drapes his hands across Soobin’s nape and clasps his legs around his thighs. It’s dim in this room too, only one side lamp turned on to save on the electric bill, but Beomgyu’s eyes are honey in the orange sunset filtering through the window.
“Talk to me,” Soobin murmurs, pressing a kiss to Beomgyu’s sweaty forehead. Burning up. Fuck, his heat is coming on strong. “Your day. Tell me about it.”
“Awful,” Beomgyu says. “It hurts too much to work. My fingers are too swollen.” He bites his lip, raising his jaw, begging for relief.
“I’ll make it go away,” Soobin promises. He bites the scent gland under Beomgyu’s jaw, and the omega gasps. His grip loosens around Soobin’s neck. “Do you want more?”
“Yes,” Beomgyu breathes. He closes his eyes, and he’s slipping under.
“You sure? All the way?”
“Yes, yes. Sure.”
He asks for this every time now. For Soobin to bite him, trigger that hazy, limp reflex. Turn him off and take care of him. Pliant and soft and submissive, and Soobin hates it, hates it so much. Take care of your omega, give him what he wants, lower the fever pause the pain fuck him bite him help him, but he wants to hear Beomgyu scream his name again, pull at his hair the way he does when he isn't in this bite-induced haze. Beomgyu wasn’t always this tired, this achy. They used to have more time.
Soobin bites him lower, harder, above the collarbone. Another puff of air escapes Beomgyu’s parted lips.
“More,” he whispers. He’s wearing a button-down shirt under his cardigan, and Soobin’s afraid to take them off when the heater is turned down like this, even with Beomgyu’s skyrocketing fever. Instead, he pries open the top button, and the next, as many as it takes to part the shirt, and pulls one of Beomgyu’s peach-pink nipples through his lips.
Another bite, around his nipple this time, and Beomgyu is gone, drifting. His teeth tap together, halfway through a word. He hisses as he tries to form it.
“Don’t say it,” Soobin says. He balls his fists into Beomgyu’s cardigan. “Don’t be sorry.”
Beomgyu’s wrists fall limp to the bed, and Soobin tucks his head under the cocoon of his shirt. He works his way over his torso with tongue and teeth and fingertips, letting his mind fill in the sounds. He kisses his navel and remembers the way Beomgyu squealed when he blew a raspberry on it the night he mated him. He opens the button of his pants with his teeth, god, that turns Beomgyu on so much. How the fuck do you do that, he used to say, squirming with arousal. Fuck, the zipper too? I’m dripping, shit, take them off, take them—
He peels Beomgyu’s pants down his skinny legs, trying not to think about the wet spot on the crotch of them. How long he was waiting for him to come home, long enough to soak slick through his panties, hot and itchy and needy.
Soobin parts his bare legs wide and Beomgyu sighs through his fog, his eyelashes fluttering open for a moment as his body opens up like a flower for his alpha. His labia are puffy, glistening with slick. Needy. Soobin squeezes them together with his fingers, closing them up over Beomgyu’s hole, and slick squelches between them.
“Love,” Beomgyu mouths, his arms flopped out to his sides. “Th—ank.”
It wasn't always like this. Soobin kneels on the bed to press a kiss to his swollen clit and Beomgyu barely moves, mind and body both limp. Soobin tucks his tongue between his folds, warm sweet soft tastes like a garden, and it doesn’t matter. There’s no point in it, when Beomgyu won’t buck against his face, ripping his hair out from the roots. He’s too peaceful to react much other than a soft breath of ahh passing through his parted lips.
It’s easy this way, more efficient. Beomgyu’s back aches from hunching over his work all day and Soobin has another job to go to in less than an hour and fuck, it’s been months since they’ve fucked properly outside of his heats. But this way gets the job done, when Beomgyu is sick and this is the treatment. And it’s not that it doesn’t feel good; when he comes back to earth, Beomgyu will be floaty, sated, pink tongue lolling through smiling lips. It’s just…it’s streamlined this way. Transactional.
Soobin traces a loop around Beomgyu’s tiny hole with his tongue, pretends for a moment that it’s all different. The omega’s inner thighs are clammy, sticky against Soobin’s cheeks, and Soobin spreads them even wider, splitting him by the ankles like a wishbone. So much slick has bubbled between his legs that it barely feels like he’s made a dent in it with his licks. On a different day, he’d tell him gonna lick you so much there’s no slick left and one day maybe he’ll really do it, even, but the jjigae is ready to eat, and he has a shift to leave for in forty-nine minutes.
He bends Beomgyu’s legs back toward the bed, and they go easily, like his joints are elastic. Soobin can’t deny that Beomgyu is built to be taken just like this, pliant and flexible, and he hates it. It’s ice in his heart, whenever he thinks about it.
Soobin gives up on the oral and unzips. He should probably undress for real, but he doesn’t bother. When he lines them up unceremoniously, his body falls into place; muscle memory, rote. He rubs his cock up on the folds of Beomgyu’s slit, grinding slick over his girth. He could draw this out, but the clock is ticking, and Beomgyu’s skin is burning with heat fever under his palms.
He fucks the first inch of his cock into Beomgyu’s cunt, and it parts for him easily, warm lips swallowing him up. Beomgyu hardly moves. Smiles a little, maybe, but his limp limbs have gone solid like a statue.
Soobin squishes another inch into him and Beomgyu is seamless, the friction of his entrance fading as Soobin plows through the slick. The clock is ticking, and Soobin has to get to the point.
He’s halfway in before Beomgyu really reacts. His back arches an inch, his pink palms turning to face the sky, and he moans.
“Bunny,” Beomgyu mouths, and Soobin exhales.
“Make you feel good in a moment, sweet,” he says. “Just a moment. I’ll knot you in a moment.”
I’ll never leave you wanting, he had told him. That’s what he told Beomgyu when he mated him, and Beomgyu giggled like it was a joke. How could I want anything if I have you?
How indeed? How could Beomgyu want more than this, than an hour with his mate, than the heater turned off, and the lights turned down, than a quick, half-asleep fuck to quell his pre-heat pain for a few measly hours?
The sex is quick. Soobin nails Beomgyu’s g-spot, slick squelching around his shaft as he squishes into it over and over. Beomgyu whimpers dreamily to the rhythm, his legs weak and weakening more in Soobin’s grasp, but in pre-heat it’s the knot that matters.
Soobin digs his toes into the mattress, gritting his teeth and concentrating on the bulge at the base of his cock, just barely swelling. It shouldn’t be a chore to knot his omega — Soobin is a perfectly healthy alpha in peak breeding years, but it’s a struggle to muster up the strength needed when there’s frost in his chest every time he inhales and smells nothing. He makes it work, though. He tunnels in, burrows his cock deep into the heat, and Beomgyu is downy soft, floral, rosy pink in his warm sweater. His omega, a whiff of rosemary that he’ll think of all night, trying to remember the notes of it on his delivery runs.
Instinct takes over, so tight, tighter. He wraps Beomgyu’s legs around his hips as his knot inflates, burying his face in Beomgyu’s cardigan. His groans are twice as loud as Beomgyu’s muted squeaks, and he feels his own heat spilling into Beomgyu’s body, the constricted space of his cunt full to the brim now. Beomgyu’s walls spasm around him, but Soobin doesn’t look at his face as he comes. If it’s lit up in pleasure, if it’s serene, he doesn’t want to know. Either way hurts.
He’s not in rut, and Beomgyu isn’t quite in heat, so it should only take fifteen minutes for the knot to deflate. By then Beomgyu will have floated back down, at least enough to stand on his own in the shower when Soobin cleans the cum out of him.
Forty-three minutes before he needs to leave for his delivery shift, job number three. Mondays are always long.
Lovely. Beomgyu is lovely, mussed-up hair to the soft soles of his feet. His skin pinks easily, flushing wherever Soobin sinks his fingertips. His fingers scrabble for purchase against Soobin’s arm, awkwardly leaning towards him to keep his clothes dry as he hoses down Beomgyu’s front with the shower head. His nails are crisp and shiny on Soobin’s clothes, perfect half-moons.
“Turn?” Soobin asks, and Beomgyu does.
Their eyes catch on each other’s in the mirror as he spins, and his skin looks even rosier against Soobin’s dark, heavy clothes. Beomgyu flushes like the contrast is indecent, his cheeks flaming hot.
“You’re beautiful today,” Soobin says.
“You always say that,” Beomgyu says. He paws at one of his eyes, still blinking the haze out of them.
“You always are.”
“I’m supposed to be. Whatever.”
“Not talking about omega beautiful,” Soobin says, keeping his eyes trained on Beomgyu’s face in the mirror. “Person beautiful.”
“Well, I am one, so.” Beomgyu bats the compliment away; he’s in one of those moods where everything’s an offense, and there’s no point correcting him. He spreads his legs and lets Soobin clean between them like he’s a baby. He pouts like one, too. “It’s too cold.”
He only complains when he’s feeling sleepy and childish, so Soobin tries not to let it hurt. There’s nothing he can do when there’s only so much money for the heating bill, and Beomgyu knows it.
“We’re saving the boiler money for your heat, love,” he says. “Remember?”
“Yeah, yeah. Sorry.” Beomgyu hangs his head, breaking their gaze, and holds his breath as Soobin fingers the cum out of him. Sometimes they make this part sexy, too, but tonight’s not the night. Twenty-two minutes before Soobin has to leave.
His fever is gone, at least. Soobin can feel his temperature when he combs a wet hand back through his scalp, tidying the knots tangled into the crown of it. When he kisses Beomgyu’s hair, turning the shower off, he inhales as deeply as he can. It’s faint, but it’s there. His omega’s scent. It thaws him just enough.
Soobin deals with serving the stew while Beomgyu dresses himself. Just as Soobin ladles out the second bowl, he emerges from the bathroom in Soobin’s oversized sweats and a red t-shirt with a geometric logo Soobin can’t quite make out.
“Where’d you get that?”
“Oh, this?” He picks at a pinch of the shirt, and Soobin sees the logo more clearly, a series of overlapping diamonds. “Taehyunnie left it that time he forgot his gym bag here, remember?”
“Shouldn’t we get it back to him?”
“I liked the color. It was a freebie from his job. He said I could keep it.” Beomgyu slides into a chair, tucking one of his legs under him.
“Good excuse,” Soobin says, setting down the bowls, and Beomgyu snorts.
“Not a subtle one, but I’m not complaining.” Taehyun has a mysterious habit of leaving things at their apartment when he visits and never needing them back, and none of them need to shatter the illusion that it’s not intentional.
Soobin opens the little box with all their pills and brings those over to the table, too. Beomgyu takes three every day, and an extra two around his heats. A slick regulator to control his over-production, two hormone regulators to dull the peaks of his pheromone outbursts, and then simple pain reducers to prepare for his intense heat cramps. None of them do much; they’re over-the-counter, not prescription. The ones Soobin brought home are a new brand, and they’re supposed to help slow the acceleration of his heat schedule and lessen his more extreme symptoms, but they’re wrong. Beomgyu can always tell when the new pills are wrong, and they’re always wrong. Nothing really helps.
And Soobin has just one, a big, green pill that hurts when it goes down sideways. He glares at it before he gulps it down, as if it’s all the pill’s fault.
They eat in silence for the first few bites, Soobin shoveling food into his empty stomach, Beomgyu slowly lifting tiny morsels to his pink lips after dutifully swallowing all his pills. He’s a delicate eater, and still looks woozy from the bite.
Maybe two minutes in, Soobin glances over at him to notice Beomgyu’s spoon paused in midair, his other hand disappearing under the table in the region of his stomach. Cramps, probably, from the scrunched-up look on his face.
“Are you going to be okay while I’m gone?” Soobin asks, pausing too.
“Fine,” Beomgyu grits. “I’m feeling better, hyung. It helped, really.”
“But the new pills won’t,” Soobin says. “You said the pills would get you through this heat without me, but they’re wrong, aren’t they?”
“Hyung. I’ll be fine.” Stubbornness isn’t supposed to be flattering in omegas, but Beomgyu is different.
“Don’t lie.” It’s not an order, though. Soobin almost never uses his command tone. Even the threat of it feels like a violation.
Beomgyu sighs. “It’s not a lie. I’ll be fine. Even though…the pills, yeah. They’re not gonna work.”
Soobin drops his spoon and leans back in his chair, hand back through his hair. “Baby, I’m sorry. So sorry, really. You won’t be fine, will you?”
Beomgyu rolls his eyes and shovels another spoonful of stew into his mouth.
“I’ll skip my shifts,” Soobin says. “This heat, I won’t go to the factory. You can make it through the mornings and evenings without—”
“Absolutely fucking not,” Beomgyu spits out, coughing on his bite of kimchi.
“It’s just four days, babe.”
“Yeah? So?”
“I can miss four days of pay.”
“You can’t, and you know it.” He’s right. “You might lose the job, and then you’d lose the others, too.”
Soobin sighs, staring into his bowl. Of course Beomgyu is right. The factory job is the most important one, and none of Soobin’s jobs are the kinds that give him days off for his mate’s heats. “I’ll skip the delivery shifts, then. Evening. You can make it ’til the evening, right?”
Beomgyu nods and grimaces through another cramp.
“Let me get you a hot water bottle,” Soobin says, starting to stand up, but Beomgyu grabs his hand on the tabletop, pinning him there.
“Eat,” he says. “I can do it myself.”
Sometimes it feels like a chess game to Soobin, each of them trying to out-maneuver the other into accepting the help. There’s too much guilt for both of them to relieve it at once, but neither wants to stop trying. Soobin will get enough wins during the heat. Beomgyu can win today.
Soobin eats with as much gusto as he can manage, trying to race through his bowl as Beomgyu putters around the kitchenette, putting the kettle on to heat the water. He walks delicately as if trying to not disrupt the equilibrium that Soobin just fucked into his body.
“It was cold out today,” Beomgyu says casually, and Soobin lets his spoon fall into his bowl with a clatter.
“You went out?”
“Yeah. I ran out of gold jump rings. Had to go to the supplier. Why?”
“Beomgyu.” Soobin spins around to send a glare at his back. It’s usually hard to muster up anger so close to Beomgyu’s heat, when all his alpha wants to do to him is nurture hug hold, but not when it’s about Beomgyu’s safety. He feels a spark of anger race through him that he forces back down before he starts an actual fight at the least convenient time.
“I took my knife,” Beomgyu defends himself.
“You’re gonna stab someone? Really?”
Beomgyu huffs grumpily. His back is to Soobin, but his face is probably twisted up all petulantly, one of Soobin’s favorite expressions. It can wear him down in an instant, but not now. It’s dangerous for Beomgyu to be out there so close to his heat, when his heats are the way they are. Not all alphas are muted like Soobin.
“Beomgyu, fucking wait for me next time,” Soobin says. “I’ll get you the damn jump rings.”
“Yeah? When?” Beomgyu spins around, arms crossed. “When do you have time to run errands for me, huh? You’re leaving in fifteen minutes.” Pouty, petulant lips, so kissable, and Soobin chews his own cheek. Mad, he’s supposed to be mad. His temper flickers, quelled by something heavier.
Soobin checks his watch. “Eighteen, and I’d find the time for you.”
“Well, I needed it today,” Beomgyu insists. “It’s a rush job, and the guy is willing to pay double. It’s a really nice necklace, actually. Lemme show you.” He toddles carefully over to the table, to the half of it that doubles as his workbench, where a velvet box sits neatly next to his jeweler’s tools. He opens it to show Soobin a chunky necklace with blue stones. It looks expensive, although it’s lacking its clasp, laying loose in the box.
They can’t afford for Beomgyu to rent studio space, so he runs his jewelry repair business from their apartment. His clients leave their broken goods in their mailbox when his pheromones are behaving too weirdly to risk interacting with strangers, and lately, that’s been…well, most of the time, Soobin figures.
Maybe looking at the necklace is supposed to convince Soobin that it was worth it for Beomgyu to venture out alone on the last day before his heat hits, the day when he’s both the sickest and the most tempting. It does look like the kind of thing that a rich person would own, someone willing to overpay for a simple repair. But he won’t cave.
“Don’t do it again. No job is worth it, okay? Please?”
Beomgyu humphs noncommittally, but this is really, really not a good time to start a fight.
“Made anything for yourself lately?”
Beomgyu sighs. “Hyung, no. My fingers are basically too swollen to do my actual work.”
Soobin finds one of his hands and Beomgyu lets him pull it close, holding his breath as Soobin rolls a knuckle between his thumb and forefinger. He inspects the pads of Beomgyu’s fingers, his most important tools. They don’t look swollen, honestly. They’re petite, the perfect size for fixing watches and repairing jewelry and mending whatever little trinkets get sent his way. Just enough work to pay for their groceries.
When he bends Beomgyu’s pinkie, it’s stiff.
“See?” Beomgyu says. “Swollen. I’m all bloaty.” He pulls Soobin’s hand to his stomach, and Soobin knows he always complains about getting bloated before his heat, but he still feels tiny to him. His omega, his own hand large enough to span his hip bones, sharp like broken shells.
Soobin tugs his hand away before his thoughts start racing again, towards a version of Beomgyu flat on the bed, Soobin’s hand splayed out across his bare skin rather than his clothes. He fingers one of the blue stones in the velvet box instead. Cold to the touch, like everything in this apartment. “Put it on for me, when it’s fixed. You’d look—”
“Beautiful in it,” Beomgyu finishes. “Eat your dinner, bunny.”
Soobin shuts up and eats his stew as Beomgyu inches carefully back to the kitchenette. A few moments later Soobin hears him filling up the hot water bottle, and when he sits back down he curls his belly around it, picking at his food. Soobin knows better than to urge him to eat more.
He dots at his mouth with his napkin and just watches Beomgyu for a moment. Honey eyes, pink tongue darting out to lick at the spoon. Narrow wrists, a bite mark around one of them from yesterday’s romp, when Soobin got too hungry with his scent gland.
Soobin swallows back all the things he wishes he had time to say.
“Baby. Don’t try and wait up for me tonight,” he says instead. “It’s so hard when I see you tired.” Hard for his alpha, even though Soobin loves coming home to Beomgyu’s barely-open eyes, his little voice saying I couldn’t sleep without you.
“I know. Alpha worries, right?” Beomgyu drags his spoon through his lips, puckering them.
“Right,” Soobin says, relieved.
Beomgyu pushes his half-full bowl away. “I get lonely, though,” he says simply, looking into it. “I love when you come home.”
Hold touch help fix need him—Soobin lunges across the table, crushing their lips together. Beomgyu squeals, but his hands fly up to Soobin’s collar, yanking him closer. One of their spoons goes flying to the ground from the impact of Soobin’s hips slamming into the edge of the table, and Beomgyu’s tongue is too hot on the seam of Soobin’s lips. The roof of his mouth is burning up when Soobin’s tongue collides with it. The heat fever is coming back, sooner than it should.
Soobin hesitates, pecking a kiss into Beomgyu’s cupid’s bow. He can’t leave him feverish like this. The knot didn’t help. He failed, and he can’t leave him like this, he can’t, he can’t.
“Go,” Beomgyu whispers. “Go to work. I’m fine, I’m fine.”
His delivery job isn’t too far: twenty minutes to a half-hour on the bus. It would be five minutes on the hyperloop, but the hyperloop is a hundred-thousand won to the bus’s fifteen-hundred, so that’s that.
It’s almost too on the nose, the way his bus stop sits nearly astride one of the shiny hyperloop stations. The haves and have-nots converging at one node, all with the same goal, just looking for a way to get from here to there. But then the business suits go up the stairs to the glassy station and the work pants stay at the bus stop, fanning out to their vastly different lives on two vastly different paths.
Taehyun took them on the hyperloop to his office once, right when he got the job at TuruTech. Soobin can remember the way all that glistening white fiberglass reflected light into Beomgyu’s eyes, his pale skin glowing supernaturally in the brightness of the train car. Prettiest thing he saw that day, even with the sparkling glass statues in the lobby of Taehyun’s office building.
The bus rattles into the stop, and Soobin shakes his thoughts off, lining up with all the other tired bodies to scan in. Beep, beep, beep. When it’s his turn to step into the bus, he scans his identification card in the reader, and it spits out a buzz instead.
A few curious eyes turn to look at him, and the bus driver blinks, startled by the change in rhythm. Exception flashes across the scanner, and Soobin is already ready, pointing at the green mark on his card.
“I’m controlled,” he says. The driver nods and waves him in, but it doesn’t stop a few of the passengers who heard the exchange from squeezing away from him in the crowded bus as he finds a spot to stand and hold on. A mother with a baby draped around her chest turns from him as if sheltering her child with her body, and Soobin just looks at the ground, burning up now. It’s the one thing about him that hasn’t been muted: the hot and cold, ice inside and flaming temper.
Soobin holds his breath until his heartbeat calms down. Another day on this damn bus. It’s not their fault, really. Most people hardly encounter one alpha a week; how can he expect them to not be afraid, hearing what they’ve heard about his subgender? That they’re primitive, bloodthirsty, governed by instinct instead of rationality? It doesn’t matter that he’s been tamped down, that he’s controlled. He’s been tamped down because he’s dangerous at his core, right?
And even Soobin himself is afraid of alphas, other alphas. Alphas who could hurt Beomgyu, who might not be able to resist his flare-ups. Fuck, they make Beomgyu irresistible, waves of need breaking through even Soobin’s muted senses. To an unmedicated alpha… Soobin doesn’t want to think about it, so Beomgyu has to stay home, for now. Until he’s controlled, too.
He closes his eyes as the bus jolts into motion, hanging onto the bar to keep from tipping into the fearful mother and giving her a panic attack. Thinks of Beomgyu, soft hair bright eyes smells like a garden. Beomgyu has never been afraid of him. Omegas just know, but no one listens to omegas.
The job is by Yonsei, late-night food deliveries to exhausted, overworked students. The pay is decent and the kids are pleasant enough at the end of each trip, thank you, sir, stay warm tonight. Sometimes there’s even an international student who tips.
Soobin treks the four blocks from his bus stop quickly enough to clock in four minutes early, enough time to lace up his reflective vest and make sure the electric bike the restaurant provides for him is fully charged. He slips his gloves on to prepare for the cold wind on his knuckles, ready to load up the heat-proof box on his bike. Five hours of work, four if it’s a slow night, and he can be home again with Beomgyu.
“Hey, help me with this?”
Soobin looks up from his hands, still wiggling his fingers into one of his gloves. There’s usually another delivery person on his shift, a quiet older man who he’s said all of four words to in the back room. But there’s a new guy working tonight, apparently, and he’s a chatty one.
“Just push the green button,” Soobin says. The man has clearly never worked an e-bike before, fumbling with the buttons. He’s small in comparison to Soobin, with a slight frame and gangly, too-long limbs. A beta, like most people.
“I thought I did,” the man says, pushing the wrong one. “Damn. They said this would be easy.”
Soobin strides forward, pulling his glove back off to grab the handlebar. “Here,” he says, turning it on for him. “Simple. And then this one is for the speed, and this one is the parking break.”
The man is quiet, and Soobin follows his gaze to where it rests on his own hand. His too-large alpha hand, the rough skin and the broad span between his knuckles.
Soobin pulls his hand back like he’s been burned, putting his glove back on, and the man gives his head a shake like he thinks he saw a ghost.
“Thanks,” he says. “Probably should get out there and get started, right?”
“Probably,” Soobin says stiffly, turning to his own bike to unplug the battery. He drags it over towards the door and the man just watches him.
“I thought you wanted to go get started,” Soobin says. Inside, he tries to grip his fiery heart in a strong fist. Control it.
“Yeah. I—yeah. Um, I should introduce myself, shouldn’t I? If we’re coworkers?”
“We’re not going to spend time together,” Soobin says. “We’ll be out on our bikes.”
“Even so. Lee Sungho,” the beta says, holding out his hand.
Soobin doesn’t care to meet him. He doesn’t tend to like meeting people. People don’t tend to like him. It’s too late to not accept the handshake, though.
“Choi Soobin,” he responds, shaking it. He doesn’t take his glove off.
“I guess we’ll be seeing each other for…three minutes every day, huh?” Sungho says, smiling and pulling his hand away. He’s young, young enough to be excited about a five-hour delivery shift in the cold. Soobin doesn’t smile back, fixing his scarf instead, so that no sliver of skin is exposed to the wind. He doesn’t have a lot of energy for this kind of small talk tonight.
“I’ve never had a job like this before. Actually, I’ve never really had a job, but my mother says it’s time to grow—“
Sungho goes silent and Soobin freezes. A glance down at the beta’s face is enough to figure out why. He’s staring at Soobin’s neck, at the flash of scarred skin that must have poked out while Soobin was adjusting his scarf. His mating bite.
“Holy fuck, you are one,” Sungho breathes, and his demeanor totally changes. He takes a step back, clutching the bike as if it’s a shield between them.
Soobin sighs. “Yeah. What of it?”
“How can you…you be here?”
“I’m on suppressants,” Soobin says, monotone. “I’m just like you.” Close enough, at least. Sungho doesn’t need to know about the way his question scorched his insides, heat that the beta will never feel.
Sungho swallows hard enough for it to be visible through his own scarf.
“Can you…smell me?” he says, and averts his eyes, embarrassed.
“No,” Soobin says shortly. “Not on the pills. Not unless you want me licking your neck.”
“Oh,” Sungho says. He’s a bit pink, and Soobin has to admire him for having the guts to just ask. Most betas gawk and whisper; few bother to unpack their curiosity. “And you have a mate?”
“Obviously. Why don’t you?”
It’s a childish retort. Even if Sungho wasn’t barely an adult, betas haven’t mated for decades. No need, when they can’t smell anymore, can’t sense pheromones the way alphas and omegas still do. No heats, no ruts, no knots. No need to mate, so they marry.
Soobin breathes in deeply, filling his chest with air, and Sungho shrinks backwards in his shadow. Another childish action, purely an intimidation tactic, but it feels like a tiny victory to make the beta feel so small. “Look, if I’d pounced on any Yonsei kids, they’d have fired me. You’re safe. They let me work here as long as I’m on the pills.”
Sungho nods too many times. “Yeah, of course. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you feel…”
Like an animal? “I get it,” Soobin says. “I get it a lot. Have a good shift, yeah?”
The beta probably nods again, but Soobin doesn’t stick around to watch. He wheels his bike out to load it up with the first batch of orders, and it’s out into the crisp night, across the campus with its changing leaves and dying ivy. It’s a five-hour shift that night, although a foreign kid tips him ten American dollars, so maybe his luck was even.
He doesn’t see Sungho when he wheels his bike in for the night. Another small blessing, his hot temper fading to a cool chill.
On the way back to the bus, he uses part of his pay to buy a lightbulb and a chocolate bar at the convenience store. Seventy-percent dark with caramel. Beomgyu says it helps with the cramps, and Soobin knows that’s bullshit. But it makes him smile, and that’s enough reason, isn’t it?
Soobin knows something is wrong before he opens the door. He can’t smell it, but he can feel it, a wary unsettledness creeping around his collar.
“Beoms?” he calls out, unlocking the door. It’s dark and cold, all the lights out, the heater off. He goes to flip the entryway light and realizes the lightbulb for it is in his hand. “Everything okay?”
Too late, he remembers he had told Beomgyu not to wait up, and now he might have woken him. Selfish and careless.
He tiptoes into the main room and his heart sinks. Beomgyu’s nesting already, curled up in a tiny, shadowy ball on one half of their worn loveseat. A pile of Soobin’s clothing surrounds him, draped over the couch back and balled into pillows. He’s wearing one of Soobin’s t-shirts, his knees tucked into the front of it, stretching it out. It makes him look pocket-sized.
Soobin’s mind whirrs through the calendar. Nesting wasn’t supposed to start for another twelve hours, at least, but then Beomgyu’s heats never listen to reason. Fuck, it’s going to be a harsh one.
He kicks off his shoes, hangs up his coat, and quietly places the bag with the lightbulb and chocolate on the table. It rustles, and Beomgyu stirs.
“How are you feeling?” Soobin whispers across the room.
“Mmm,” Beomgyu hums, cuddling deeper into the hoodie he’s using as a pillow.
“Anything hurts? Can I get you something?”
He sees Beomgyu’s eyes blink open in the dark and hurries towards him, falling to his knees next to the couch. His fever is raging again when Soobin combs his shaggy black hair back from his sweaty forehead.
“Did it start?”
“Almost,” Beomgyu whispers. He reaches a hand out from his bundle of t-shirt, and Soobin takes it with his other hand. It’s clammy.
“Do you need a knot?”
“Hungry.”
Of course he is. He barely ate his dinner, and Soobin feels white-hot pain at the realization that Beomgyu had been curled up here hungry and hurting for hours, trying to soothe himself with just Soobin’s scent.
“I’ll heat up the leftovers for you, okay?” Soobin says, kissing his sweaty forehead. “Rest. I’m here.”
It takes a few minutes for the leftover kimchi jjigae to heat up to lukewarm on the stovetop. Soobin uses the time to strip down to just his boxers, splashing cold water on his face in the dark bathroom to rinse the city smells out of his skin. When the stew is ready, Beomgyu lets himself be propped up against the armrest of the loveseat so that Soobin can feed him small spoonfuls of it. The omega leans over to turn on the lamp on the end table and his arm is shaking where it emerges from his cocoon.
“It’s coming a bit early,” Soobin observes quietly, and Beomgyu nods. “Not too early, though. That’s a good thing.”
“What, that my second heat in a month only came a few hours earlier than we thought it would? What’s good about that?” Beomgyu doesn’t have the strength to make it come out as snappy as he’d like. Soobin lowers the spoon and just looks at him, and Beomgyu sighs. “I…sorry. You’re right.”
“At least they’re on a schedule,” Soobin reminds him. “A fucked-up one, but still.”
Beomgyu allows him a small smile. “So I’m fucked-up in the most boring way possible.”
“Pretty much,” Soobin smiles back, feeding him another spoon. “Nice and boring. Much easier to regulate.”
“Really? So what’s your treatment plan, doctor?” Beomgyu drags his tongue over the spoon as it lingers in front of his lips.
A concoction of suppressants that they can’t afford is the answer, but that’s no fun. “I was thinking I knot you again,” Soobin says instead, raising his eyebrows. “Hm? A dose of alpha cock?”
“Lemme finish this first,” Beomgyu says, eyeing the bowl. “Still hungry.”
“No more tiny bites then. Open up.”
When the bowl is empty, Soobin leaves it on the end table to deal with in the morning, carrying Beomgyu to bed with the omega’s nose tucked into the sharp hinge of his jaw. He wishes Beomgyu were shirtless too; the skin-to-skin contact soothes them both, like tummy time for an infant. He can feel Beomgyu inhaling, drinking him in, and he keeps clinging onto Soobin’s neck when the two of them fall onto the bed. He’s latched onto Soobin’s scent gland like it’s a lifeline.
Beomgyu can still smell just fine, and that’s the problem. His omega is untamed, overactive. Hyperendocrine syndrome, the doctor at the free clinic said after the second time Beomgyu’s heat kicked in months ahead of schedule. Rare and lifelong. He gave them a long list of drugs to tamp Beomgyu’s pheromones down and keep him regular.
This kind of alpha-omega care isn’t standard in the public system. Do you or your mate have access to private insurance? Beomgyu shook his head, took the list home, and tucked it into his toolbox for safekeeping. It was the day after their graduation from Kookmin, and they cried together all night instead of celebrating.
Get him the pills, get him the pills. Soobin chants it to himself through every job application, but the real world is much less interested in hiring alphas for lofty architecture jobs than his professors had told him it would be, and he has a homebound, sick omega to keep warm. No time to sit around waiting for the perfect job opportunity. This is why you don’t mate early, Soobin-ah. He’s never regretted it, through delivery shifts and rushed dinners. He’ll get him the pills one day.
Taehyun managed to get Beomgyu his suppressants for a few months when he first started his job at the biometrics firm, and it was glorious. Days of Beomgyu happily blending in with the betas on the street, not a worry in the world about a hormone spike sending him into hot flashes in public as he went about his errands. Meeting clients in person the way he had always dreamed of, talking to his old metalworking professors about getting a real apprenticeship with a prestigious jeweler.
The insurance company wasn’t thrilled about the fraud when they found out that Taehyun didn’t actually have an unstable omega sister, and that was the end of that.
This is life now. Beomgyu works at home whenever he can, making do with whatever ineffective pills Soobin can scrounge up at the drugstore, and Soobin takes prescription suppressants instead, to tame himself enough for the rest of the world. The factory gives them to him for free, so they can have strong alpha laborers without worrying about the hormonal battles for power that supposedly happen whenever unregulated alphas congregate in large numbers. And on his pills, Soobin is an exception. Controlled, free to move through the world as a beta would. Muted.
“The right architecture firm would give you the suppressants too, you know,” Taehyun told him, gently, when Soobin used his shoulder to cry on for the millionth time at one of their occasional coffee dates. Taehyun never lets Soobin pay for his own tea. “Or they wouldn’t discriminate, and would just let you wear inhibitor patches, like the alphas do at my job. Not everyone believes that shit about you guys.”
“Basically everyone believes it, Taehyun-ah,” Soobin said. It hurts to think about a world where he could have a career and be an alpha, fully, for Beomgyu. Where he could drink in his scent and fully feel all that lust and need and care that the chemicals in his body try to suppress. It’s hard enough to imagine having even just one of those things when he has none of them. “You work in, like, a trendy, progressive company. It’s not like that in most places.”
“Well, I don’t believe it,” Taehyun said. “You’re not dangerous just because your dick is…”
“Don’t finish that—”
“…quirky,” Taehyun finished, and Soobin scrunched up his nose. Taehyun looked completely unbothered, taking a casual sip of his coffee.
“You’re different. You love us.”
“Everyone should love you.” Taehyun is honest to a fault about his feelings, even when he feels things that would make Soobin blush to say. “Look, I can stop sending you job listings if it upsets you, but I know one of them will work out one day. Your portfolio is so good.”
“What would you even know about that?”
Taehyun shrugged. He does scientific research for a living, so he's not a design expert. “Not much, but it’s gotta be good. It was good back when we worked together in school, I know that for a fact. And you wouldn’t half-ass your future.” Another painfully genuine statement. Soobin never feels like he deserves a friend like Taehyun.
“I couldn’t take the bus if I wasn’t on the suppressants,” Soobin said to avoid having to grapple with his emotions. “They don’t let alphas on with just inhibitor patches.”
“You wouldn’t need to take the bus,” Taehyun said. “You can take the hyperloop with just patches. They have an alpha car.” He reaches out to pat Soobin’s forearm, resting on the table. “One day, okay? We’ll make it happen for you. Oh, and I got something for Beomgyu. Dark chocolate, right?”
“Taehyun-ah…”
“Someone left a whole box in the break room. Just take it, hyung.”
The red shirt with Taehyun’s company’s logo is crumpled up on Beomgyu’s side of the bed, probably flung aside when Beomgyu’s fever set back in and he sought out clothing with Soobin’s scent. Soobin brushes it off onto the floor as Beomgyu squirms on the bed below him, chewing on his lip and eyeing Soobin’s bare chest.
Only five hours until he needs to be up for his morning janitorial shift in Yongsan. Life is a ticking clock, but Beomgyu’s body doesn’t care. It needs him.
“Do you want me to…”
“No,” Beomgyu says. “No, don’t bite me. Just…”
Soobin growls, his heart leaping. It’s like a heater is blasting at the cold in Soobin’s bones. He’s going to get to hear him tonight, finally, the way it should be, and blood is rushing hot to his crotch.
He peels off Beomgyu’s panties to find a pad soaked with the first wave of heat slick, thicker than usual and sweeter-smelling. His cunt is sticky and swollen, and a groan rips out of Soobin’s chest.
“Please, bunny,” Beomgyu whimpers, peering up at him from between his spread legs. He’s spread-eagled and wide-eyed on the bed, ripping off his shirt to reveal swollen nipples and red lines down his front from where he’d been clawing at his own skin in his sleep. The fever makes him itchy. “Help me?”
The two words that rile him up the most, and Beomgyu knows it. His heat hasn’t fully started, but it might as well have for how badly Soobin’s alpha needs to be inside him. He feels barbaric skipping the foreplay entirely, but Beomgyu’s cunt is more than ready to swallow him up.
“What do you need?” Soobin works his boxers down over his knees and hovers over him on one fist, slapping his cock up against Beomgyu’s crotch. Barbaric, truly, how badly he needs to fuck him when it’s only been hours since he last had him. It makes the human side of him feel ill sometimes, the way he looks at Beomgyu sick in bed and feels nothing but an all-consuming need to stretch him open. But it will help, his alpha knows it, and Soobin needs to help, needs to care fix hold help fuck knot—
“Rail me, oh my god, hyung,” Beomgyu whines. “Hurts, make it better.“
And you have a mate? Obviously. The defining feature of their lives, these past years. Being mated, getting through this together.
Soobin bends Beomgyu in half, dipping the head of his cock inside him.
“Ah, ahh,” the omega gasps, as if he hadn’t just been fucked hours ago.
“Big?”
“So much bigger like this,” Beomgyu whimpers, the words rounded into a kind of sob. Soobin lifts him by the hips, shifting his angle and Beomgyu nods frantically, tension dissipating from his face. “Feels, like…numb, when I’m under. Don’t feel the stretch as much.”
“I’ll never bite you again, if it makes my cock feel smaller,” Soobin says. It’s not really a joke, but Beomgyu giggles weakly.
“Fucking alpha ego. You know how much cock you have?”
“Every inch for you,” Soobin says mindlessly, a dumb line that Beomgyu will tease him for if he’s still lucid when they’re done. He can’t do it now, though, because Soobin pounds into him to cut him off, reducing him to incoherent moans. It’s the first time he’s been fucked fully present in ages.
“Louder, louder, babe,” Soobin grunts, hitting Beomgyu’s g-spot and making him wail. He doesn’t know when he’ll get to hear him like this again. It’ll be different when he’s in the thick of heat, desperate and animalistic. Soobin likes Beomgyu best like this, when his omega isn’t fully in control yet.
“Yah, hy—uung,” Beomgyu sobs. It’s so throaty, raw and delirious. He clutches onto his own thighs to pull his hole wider, and Soobin seizes the opportunity to slot in deeper. His knot is starting to catch already, Beomgyu’s entrance growing uncomfortably tight. “Hyung, d’you like it, you like it? Am I good?”
Fuck, it’s not enough to just hear him. Soobin needs to taste, smell. Why the fuck can’t he smell his omega? He drops onto Beomgyu’s body and digs into his neck, slobbering over his scent gland to wake up a hint of that fresh, green scent and sucking it in like oxygen.
“Hyung, slower, you’re so big,” Beomgyu begs. Just that hint of his scent is kicking Soobin into overdrive, and he jackhammers him instead, fucking like a rabbit. Beomgyu stops begging and just screams into Soobin’s hair. He’s a furnace underneath him, and he’s giving all his heat to Soobin, squeezing him around the neck with all his might and digging his heels into the small of his back.
“Fuck,” Soobin pants. He feels like he’s gonna overheat. “Beoms, fuck, say, say…tell me, fucking beg for it.”
“Knot,” Beomgyu whimpers. “Knot, hyung. Alpha.” He writhes pathetically, stuck on Soobin’s cock, and it’s that more than anything that puts Soobin over the edge. The contrast of their bodies, Beomgyu’s warmth around his swelling cock, his slender frame caged in by Soobin’s broad one.
The knot slots into place like a puzzle piece. Soobin’s gonna rip him, he’s bursting. It’s ridiculous that he’s bursting like this when he just fucked him six hours ago. He’s an animal.
“Goo…d,” Beomgyu sobs. “Good. Good.”
Soobin isn’t thinking, just gyrating the knot into Beomgyu’s pussy. He feels Beomgyu’s walls shivering through his shattering orgasm, and his chattering fades into incoherence. God, he missed the sound of Beomgyu’s voice during sex. A tear trickles down the crevice of Beomgyu’s sharp nose, and the tension inside Soobin loosens, a rubber band relaxing.
“Feel better?” Soobin nudges the tear track with his own nose.
“Better,” Beomgyu slurs. “Ahh— could you—”
Soobin twists his hips to rest the knot deeper in his body, the way Beomgyu likes it.
“Hyung, I could go again, again, just from—oh my—ahh, hyung—ngg…”
He could, and he does, mouth frozen in an O as Soobin thrusts the knot through the tightness of his opening over and over, cock grinding into his g-spot. Beomgyu twitches and seizes, soft gasps shooting right to Soobin’s core, and if he didn’t keep asking for it, Soobin would never bite him before sex again. This how it should be, throaty and full of desperate, clawing fingernails, their moans clashing chaotically.
Soobin thumbs Beomgyu’s lovely, soft lips, his own spit smeared across them. Cunt so wet and full, so cozy that Soobin would cum again, too, if the knot went down and he could fuck him properly a second time. But this is for Beomgyu, and by the time the knot deflates, his omega is asleep, exhausted and sated and fever-free. For now.
Soobin tucks Beomgyu under the pile of quilts and fetches a glass of water and the useless pills, leaving them on his nightstand in case he wakes up in a hot flash. It’s frigid in the apartment, and when he crawls back into bed, he winds himself tightly around Beomgyu’s body, skin-on-skin as much as possible. Soobin is his bed warmer until the fever returns, and Beomgyu seeks out his heat in his slumber, nuzzling into his chest.
Wetness trickles onto Soobin's thigh as Beomgyu cuddles into him under the blanket, almost straddling his leg. Soobin couldn't clean him without disturbing his sleep.
Beomgyu's hair smells like someone had sprayed down his pillow with a mist of a rosemary essential oil, faint but there. It tickles Soobin’s nose, but he doesn’t move. It’s a good tickle. It means he’s close, he’s safe.
It’ll be a long four days.
Beomgyu’s heat is as bad as they’d feared. Soobin thinks they’ve been getting worse. At the very least, they’ve been getting closer and closer together, at a rate that he tries not to worry about.
He knots Beomgyu again before his janitorial shift on the first morning, tucking him back into bed full and drowsy, but just as he pulls his shoes on, the omega flings himself out of bed in a panic and races for the bathroom. Beomgyu’s nausea isn’t always bad on the first day, but when it is, it’s not a good sign.
When Soobin leaves the apartment, twenty minutes late, Beomgyu’s already thrown up three times and begged for another knot, to be bitten and slipped into that safe, sleepy state. Soobin manages to put him back to bed cuddling an ice pack for his fever. He leaves Beomgyu a bowl of cereal and a mug of tea, laid out on the table in case his nausea abates enough to eat something when he comes out of his bite haze. The tea will go cold by the time he does, but Beomgyu says he still likes it that way, as long as Soobin made it. Smells like you.
He thinks about that mug of tea all morning, scrubbing floors at a post office. It’s another job he can only have on his suppressants. He can barely smell because of them, and yet Beomgyu can smell a trace of him lingering on the handle of a mug. Did he drink it? Is it cold yet? Is he comfortable, hungry, needy?
By the time Soobin makes it to his afternoon job at the factory, he feels like he’s been tortured on a rack for hours. His blood is creeping through his veins like concrete, weighing down every movement. He can’t catch his breath, and he feels like Beomgyu’s scent is haunting every inch of the surrounding air. Soobin never even smells him this much in their apartment, but right now, his body is hallucinating him everywhere. His alpha is screaming at him to get home, get home, get home.
Yeonjun covers for him so he can sneak out a half-hour early. The two of them have operated a machine arm on the assembly line of the appliance factory together for over a year, and somewhere around month two, Soobin accepted that they had crossed the line to friends from coworkers. Now, Yeonjun is his daily therapy session, and it’s not the first time he’s had to stamp Soobin’s time card for him during one of Beomgyu’s bad heats. Soobin doesn’t know how to thank him, though Yeonjun tells him that he never has to.
He should be relieved, but all he feels when he finally opens the door to their apartment is crippling guilt: guilt that he’s only home a half-hour early, not an hour, not three. Guilt that he left at all.
Beomgyu is naked, soaked in sweat and slick, huddled in the shower where he had been trying to cool his body off under the spray. He frantically tries to wipe his face, masking hours of tear tracks that have dripped over his thin cheeks. He’s barely lucid, but his first thought is still for Soobin.
“Don’t worry, don’t worry about me,” he babbles as Soobin scoops him up into his arms.
“You’re not okay,” Soobin chokes, and Beomgyu shudders. Soobin wraps his thin wrist in his hand, stroking over his pulse with one calloused thumb: it’s racing. He can only faintly smell him, even now.
“No, no. No, no, I’m not. Help me, please. Please?”
It’s an endless night. They barely eat, spending hours entwined, and yet Beomgyu isn’t satisfied. A long knotting is supposed to sate him, and Soobin knots him over and over and over, just like he’s supposed to. But it’s not enough.
The fourth and fifth knots each last for almost an hour, and even when they’re locked together like that, Beomgyu is restless underneath him. He keeps clawing at his own neck as if trying to tear open his scent glands — trying to spill out all the pheromones his body overproduces.
Soobin takes Beomgyu on his knees, on his back, standing against the wall. He fucks him in the shower and feeds him dinner while he’s propped up on his knot, head lolling backwards onto Soobin’s shoulder. When Beomgyu speaks, he only calls him alpha; when he opens his eyes, they snap onto Soobin’s chest with a crazed intensity. His omega is in rebellion inside him, and only an alpha will do.
At least Soobin doesn’t have to go back to work that evening. There’s no way he’s going to his delivery job for the rest of Beomgyu’s heat. If he loses the job, fuck it. He didn’t like that new beta, anyway. He’ll get another one.
Somehow, Soobin manages to leave him to go to work on the morning of day two. He tells himself not to feel guilty, that this is what Beomgyu wants, even as the heat-addled version of Beomgyu clutches his hand to his soft cheek and nuzzles it. Don’t leave me, alpha, don’t you want me? Soobin helps him take a triple-dose of the pills that don’t work and puts him back to bed in the temporary stupor they induce, dragging out their box of sex toys to help tide him over while Soobin is gone. Beomgyu wants him to go to work. He has to go to work.
There’s another alpha on the bus, a middle-aged woman whose ID card buzzes just like Soobin’s. As she grabs onto the bar next to him, she gives him a once-over that tells him that she knows. No matter how good their alpha suppressants are at cutting off their senses and urges, no alpha can miss the tang of an omega in heat that’s lingering all over him, especially not a tang as strong as Beomgyu’s. He might as well have pissed all over Soobin right before he left the apartment.
When Soobin falls asleep leaning on the bar, she wakes him up with a nudge of her toe. He hadn’t missed his stop yet, thank god.
“Thanks,” he mutters, averting his eyes.
“Go home early today,” she says under her breath. “You reek.”
Soobin can’t think of a single thing to say, so he just stares at the floor, at his too-large work boots surrounded by a sea of beta feet.
Day two is no better. Yeonjun can’t risk stamping his time card every day, so Soobin sticks it out for the full shift. It’s a mistake, though, because by the end of it Soobin is physically trembling, completely torn to shreds with anxiety. Beomgyu is no better when he gets home. Whimpering, wailing, burning up, and it’s right back into the routine of knotting knotting knotting. No break for dinner, no time to talk, just straight into fucking the sickness out of his omega.
Soobin is so exhausted, so depleted, that he falls asleep flat on his back with Beomgyu riding him. When he wakes up, it’s nearly morning, and Beomgyu is curled up on his chest in nothing but one of Soobin’s dress shirts. His face is wedged into Soobin’s neck, right against his bite scar.
“Did you sleep?” Beomgyu whispers as Soobin stirs. “I tried to let you sleep.”
He nuzzles his nose in deeper. He’s been scenting Soobin to keep himself calm, to give his alpha time to rest before he jumps him again. This is the most lucid that he’s been since the heat started.
“I did,” Soobin says groggily. “You don’t have to do that, Beoms. Keep me awake, I don’t mind.”
“Mmm. I don’t mind either. You smell good.”
Soobin wonders how much of his alpha scent has rubbed off on him. It can’t be much, even with hours being skin-to-skin. His pheromones are so weak, though Beomgyu’s hypersensitive body doesn’t seem to notice. Beomgyu smells him everywhere.
“Yeah? What do I smell like, baby?”
“Summertime,” Beomgyu says.
Soobin tries to roll Beomgyu’s head off of him to get a glimpse of the clock on the darkened wall, but Beomgyu digs his nose sharply under his jaw, locking in.
“You can’t leave me tomorrow,” Beomgyu whispers. He toys with one of Soobin’s nipples in the dark, pulling at the tiny hairs around it. The cold settles back into Soobin’s rib cage; a stubborn, constant chill.
“Baby, get some sleep,” Soobin says. He can’t see his lovely face in the dark.
“Can’t,” Beomgyu mumbles. “Can’t sleep. You’re gonna leave me again. Alpha’s leaving.”
“No—I won’t. Okay? I’ll stay tomorrow.”
“Lying liar. Alpha’s a liar.” Beomgyu squirms uncomfortably. He’s still astride Soobin’s cock, gone soft in his cunt, and Soobin feels the painful tug of his dried cum linking his pubic hair and Beomgyu’s skin. All this sex makes them truly filthy, but the grossness of that is so far down the ranking of Soobin’s worries that he barely even notices. Need a shower, he thinks dully. That’s what they saved all the hot water for.
“My stomach hurts,” Beomgyu says. “Can you make it go away?”
Soobin scrubs his own face with one of his hands. Beomgyu’s scalp butts up against his chin, his hair tangled against his damp lips.
“Yes,” Soobin grits out. “I’ll make it go away, princess. But I need you to get some sleep.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
Beomgyu presses up on his palms until he’s mostly upright, and Soobin smooths down his front, massaging his omega’s aching belly through the open front of his own dress shirt. It’s so plush under his fingertips.
“Knot me again, first,” Beomgyu whispers. “Alpha. More?”
Soobin knots him again, but it won’t be enough.
“Shit, Soobin-ah. You look half dead.”
“Thanks, hyung. Really helpful.”
“It’s not an insult,” Yeonjun says, grabbing Soobin’s shoulder to slow his pace as they walk up to the factory together. “It’s true. I’m worried about you.”
Soobin succumbs to Yeonjun’s grip on his shoulder and stops walking, spinning around to let the older man inspect his face more thoroughly.
“Yep. You’re half dead. Rough night?” Yeonjun hasn’t ever seen Beomgyu during his heats — Soobin would never tolerate another alpha getting anywhere near him then, even a regulated and trustworthy one like Yeonjun — but Soobin talks about them enough for him to get the full picture.
Yeonjun has a soft spot for Beomgyu. Soobin had invited him over for dinner on one of their rare days off, and Beomgyu had dressed the other alpha up in his jewelry and told him that he was pretty enough to be a model. He wasn’t lying — Yeonjun has a face like an omega, but no one thinks an alpha wants to hear that they’re pretty, and so no one had told him, until Beomgyu did. It had made Yeonjun flush so red that he might as well have been wearing makeup along with the jewelry.
Ever since then, Yeonjun finds reasons to follow Soobin home once every few weeks. He’s the only alpha who Soobin really ever trusts to be around his Beomgyu, now that he’s thinking about it.
“Rough doesn’t cover it,” Soobin says dispassionately. He’s worn out and stressed and his body is itching, itching, itching to get back home. It’s like an alarm is going off in his head, omega needs you omega needs you, and there’s no snooze button.
“So it’s day three now? You’re over halfway there! And then two whole weeks off before the next one. Chin up, tiger.”
“I feel like it’s weird that you have Beomgyu’s heat schedule memorized,” Soobin says, faking a glare, but Yeonjun just laughs.
“It’s not weird. It’s called caring for your friends,” he says. “Look, I can cover for you if you need to clock out early again.”
“I might,” Soobin admits grudgingly. “I know it’s risky, but I really might.”
“So it’s a bad bad one this time then, huh?”
“Bad bad one.” Soobin starts walking again, and Yeonjun falls in step, scurrying slightly to keep up with Soobin’s strides. Yeonjun is a bit smaller, a bit slighter, just the right shape and size to blend seamlessly into the world as a beta when he’s on his factory-provided pills. Unmated, too, so his neck doesn’t give him away like Soobin’s does.
“Did you apply for that aid program yet?”
“Yeah. Of course I applied. And it’s a year-long waiting list to get evaluated.”
Yeonjun shakes his head. ”You can’t keep this up, Soobin-ah. You’ve got so much anxiety bottled up, you’re gonna explode. And what’s he doing now, just…writhing around at home, soaking wet?”
Yeonjun isn’t very tactful about these things. It’s refreshing. The situation is exactly as bad as he says it is, and Soobin doesn’t want to have to beat around the bush.
“Pretty much,” Soobin says, pulling the factory door open and holding it for Yeonjun. “Yesterday was shit. He was waiting at the door for me when I got home, on his knees. Like, presenting already. He had been like that for hours, apparently, because his omega needed me to come home so badly.”
“Fuck,” Yeonjun says. “I’m not gonna pretend that isn’t hot. But…fuck.”
“Yeah. I mean, it sounds a lot hotter than it actually was. There was a lot of crying involved.”
“Fuck,” Yeonjun says again, quieter. “I’m sorry, Soobin-ah.”
“Not your fault,” Soobin says gruffly, but Yeonjun pats his shoulder, and he brushes his hand with his fingertips for a moment. Thank you. Yeonjun doesn’t have a mate, but he’s been with enough omegas casually to understand the way Soobin feels, the way he longs to hold, knot, scent and the pain of not being enough. The chill that’s smothered Soobin’s insides.
They take to the stairs, footsteps echoing up the metal column of space as they climb to the fourth floor where their unit is located. It’s quiet but for the off-beat rhythm of their steps, until Yeonjun speaks again on the second landing.
“Can I ask you something…personal?”
Yeonjun asks him lots of personal questions, and he doesn’t usually preface them with anything.
“Yeah, shoot,” Soobin says, still climbing.
“Have you ever thought about getting a roommate?”
Soobin pauses halfway to the third floor. “I live with Beomgyu,” he says.
“No, I mean another roommate,” Yeonjun says. Soobin can tell he’s choosing his words carefully.
“We live in a studio, hyung.”
“Soobin-ah. I’m talking about you and Beomgyu moving in, together, with someone else,” Yeonjun says patiently. “I feel like—"
“Why would we do that?” Soobin cuts him off. “We’re mated. That would be weird.”
“Would it? You could save on rent, for sure.”
“We can afford our place.” Only just, with Soobin working three jobs and Beomgyu picking up as much work as he can, but that counts. All of Beomgyu’s pills that barely work are expensive.
“Only when you’re living like this, Soobin-ah. You can’t keep living like this.” Yeonjun walks up to the landing, looking down at him now. “And…please don’t take this the wrong way. It’s not your fault. But it’s probably not great for Beomgyu to be alone so much during his heats, you know? Wouldn’t it be better for him to be with someone?”
Soobin can’t suppress his growl. Fuck, he hates it when his alpha does that.
“I don’t mean with someone like that,” Yeonjun says testily. “You really think I’m suggesting that? I just mean…someone around, to help keep an eye on him. If he’s really as sick as you say he is, it might help both of you for him to have a second pair of eyes on him, just in case…just in case. You know?”
“Absolutely not. You don’t get what his heats are like,” Soobin says. He walks up to the landing, taller than Yeonjun again, but somehow it still feels like the older man is looking down on him. “He can’t be around other people.”
“I do get it. I can fucking smell him all over you, and you know how bad my nose is,” Yeonjun says, crossing his arms. “They’re totally out of control. He must be sick as a fucking dog, if his heats are that strong.”
If Yeonjun’s trying to manipulate him, it’s working. Now Soobin just feels like shit.
“Maybe you could be around more during this heats if you had a roommate. Lower rent means you can work less, right? Better for his heat sickness. And maybe they’d be home when you’re not around, in case he needs to get help, if it gets really bad.”
Soobin just shakes his head. “Thanks, hyung,” he says. “Thanks for thinking of him, but I’ve got it.”
He starts walking again, and Yeonjun follows. He knows better than to push back too much against an alpha protecting his mate, but he doesn’t stop talking.
“I have a cousin,” he says. “Third cousin, I think. Maybe third-cousin-once-removed. An omega.”
“Good for you,” Soobin says.
Yeonjun grabs his hand, slowing his ascent again. “Just listen to me for half a second. God, you’re stubborn as a fucking ox.”
Soobin exhales. He’s too tired to handle this. “We’re about to be late,” he says, but he doesn’t pull away. He can listen to Yeonjun’s weird idea for another minute.
“My cousin’s roommate just got married and moved out,” Yeonjun says. “It's a two-bedroom, and one of them is open."
“And? You think we should move into it?”
Yeonjun shrugs. “He’s a nice guy,” he says. “An unmated omega, and you know how it can be for them. He’d feel safer with a roommate, and soon. A beta or a mated pair, to be safe.”
Soobin shifts on his feet. A male omega. They’re not that common, another reason why Beomgyu’s had such difficulty getting treatment. That would be even weirder, living with another male omega, when Beomgyu’s obviously well aware of Soobin’s preferences. Omegas get territorial about their mates just like alphas do.
“Nice guy? You can’t be that close with him. You didn’t even know how you’re related.”
“Yeah, we’re not close. Our families fell out of touch, but we used to play together as kids, before I presented.” Yeonjun lets go of Soobin’s hand, trusting that he won’t run away again. “Our mothers reconnected lately, and I heard all about Kai’s situation when I called my mom last week. My cousin, that is. Kai. I said I’d ask around, see if anyone’s looking.”
“We’re not looking,” Soobin says. “I can ask my friend Taehyun if he knows anyone who needs a roommate, if you want me to spread the word. You’ve met Taehyun, I think?”
“Yeah, the guy who works for Turu,” Yeonjun said. “Once. Yeah, ask him. Popular guy?”
“More popular than me,” Soobin snorts. “We’ve gotta clock in, hyung. Thanks for caring, okay?”
At one in the morning that night, Beomgyu finally says it. Usually they make it to the last day of his heat before he breaks, but this heat is a rough one.
They’ve already been at it for hours, and Beomgyu is back on his knees for Soobin, spreading his legs and showing off his dripping hole. His little round ass is up in the air, red with handprints and scratch marks. Soobin’s handiwork. He’s too numb to really appreciate it properly on day three of heat, though.
“Shake it,” Soobin says, and Beomgyu wiggles his ass at him provocatively. He’s so obedient during his heats. “Good boy. You ready?”
“Need it, alpha.” His voice is stifled, his mouth pressed into the bed. Soobin thumbs down the backs of his slim thighs, counting the fingerprint-shaped bruises. He’s spread those thighs more times than he can count in the last three days.
“You have it, love,” Soobin says, darting two fingers in and out of Beomgyu’s wet cunt. It’s greedy for him, and he lines his cock up.
Beomgyu gasps. “No, still need it.”
“Horny, horny.” The first thrust rips a whine out of Beomgyu’s throat. Here they go again.
“Need it, need you to. Need you to, alpha.”
A weight sinks down Soobin’s chest, straight to his core. He has to play along. It upsets Beomgyu more when he doesn’t admit that he wants it too.
“Need me to what?”
“Breed me.” Beomgyu says it so quietly that Soobin barely hears it. He scrunches his face up. Beomgyu’s hips are narrow under his hands, his waist even slimmer above them, and they’ll always be that way, won’t they?
“Louder,” Soobin growls. “What do you want?”
“Want you to breed me, breed me. Wanna be bred.”
Fuck, it’s the guiltiest kind of horny Soobin ever gets, but it’s so, so horny. He sinks down over Beomgyu’s back to rain kisses down his spine and thrusts deep with zero rhythm, no control. Beomgyu wails and arches into him, pounding a fist into the mattress.
“Pup me, fucking pup me,” he cries. “Fill me with your pups, alpha, alpha, mm… I need, need you to—”
“Bitch,” Soobin moans. “Bitch in heat, just for me to fuck, me to knock up, yeah? Say it.”
“Yes, yes. You to breed, you, ah—alpha…” Beomgyu is clenching, he’s shaking, he’s getting off on this as much as Soobin is. The fronts of Soobin’s thighs are soaked from the slick gushing out of him, and Soobin isn’t worrying about what comes after this anymore. He’s pupping his omega, finally, finally, filling his tiny cunt, pupping him, finally. It’ll stick this time. His alpha is good enough.
Soobin sinks his teeth into his shoulder when he knots him, whiting out. His omega, his omega, and they’ll have pups after this heat. He pupped him just like Beomgyu wanted, and he’s taking care of him, and he won’t be in pain anymore.
Soobin smothers Beomgyu in his strong arms as his brain clears afterwards, awkwardly twisting him around on the knot so he can hug him front-to-front. A safe, warm place for Beomgyu to cry.
“I’m…”
“You don’t have to say anything,” Soobin whispers. “Maybe one day.”
“It’s…what if it’s never?”
“I'll love you if it’s never.”
Beomgyu hides in Soobin’s chest, dripping tears until the knot goes down. And when it does, they’ll do it again, and he’ll beg for it again. He’ll beg for it the whole rest of his heat, now that the seal is broken.
Soobin distracts himself by staring at the ceiling, counting cracks in the yellowed paint. He can’t ever show how much it hurts him, too, to know it will be never. Any pregnancy that catches in Beomgyu’s womb will get swept away by the oncoming waves of his pheromone flare-ups, and they both know it. Soobin burns up when he thinks about it, but Beomgyu has enough of his own pain without Soobin’s burdens adding to them.
They don’t even want pups yet. They’re so young and so poor. But Beomgyu’s omega can’t help saying it, and it sets Soobin’s alpha off. Now he’s itching to see him like that, round and blossoming, carrying Soobin’s pups, and he never will.
He clutches Beomgyu’s head closer to his chest. It’s so cold in their apartment, but he can’t muster up the strength to carry Beomgyu over to the radiator and turn it up. The sink is leaking. The new lightbulb still sits on the table along with the untouched chocolate.
In the morning, he puts the chocolate bar on Beomgyu’s bedside table before he leaves. He’ll deal with the light later. He’s tired.
“Taking such good care of me,” Beomgyu whispers. His face is swollen, red where it had been resting on Soobin’s chest just minutes previously. “Is that what you’ll do when I’m pupped? Take care of me like this?”
“Yes,” Soobin says. His mouth is dry. “And when you’re not. Always, baby. You and me, right?”
“Would you still leave me today, if I were pupped?”
“Beomgyu-ya…” That isn’t fair.
Beomgyu curls up and hides his face. “I’m sorry. Sorry. Go now, before I say something dumber.”
“Your tea’s on the table, okay?”
“Go, bun. Just go.”
Yeonjun knows what happened from the look on Soobin’s face as they check the safety mechanism on their machinery that afternoon. Maybe Soobin shouldn’t tell him quite so many details about Beomgyu’s heats, but he needs to tell someone, and Yeonjun’s the only one who could possibly help. He can’t exactly talk to Taehyun about this particular problem. Taehyun doesn’t understand the urges, that it’s primal.
Most betas use artificial surrogates this days, and you could too, you know, Taehyun would say, and of course they know. Knowing never stops Beomgyu from begging during his heat, and it never stops Soobin from hurting. It’s not about that. It’s deeper.
“Leave early today, too,” Yeonjun says, giving him a once over. “Man, this really is a rough one. Did he start with the…”
“All night,” Soobin says. “And in the morning, too. He was still talking about it.”
Yeonjun shakes his head. “Smoke break?”
“Beoms wants me to quit,” Soobin says, but Yeonjun starts walking towards the door anyway. Smoking is the only way they can get five minutes of fresh air during their shift. Their supervisor’s a smoker too, so he gets it.
One of Yeonjun’s menthols in hand, Soobin leans back against the brick wall of the factory and watches as the smoke he exhales fades into his puff of cold breath.
“So, where are you taking him when it ends this time?” Yeonjun asks cheerfully. “What’s the post-heat date plan?”
“It’s finally too cold for picnics,” Soobin says glumly. “We’ll probably just go to the arcade. I still have a coupon.”
“Have me over,” Yeonjun says. “I’ll bring dinner.”
Soobin takes another drag. The menthol nips at his lungs, minty.
“Nothing fancy. It makes me feel shitty when you feed him.”
“You think I can afford fancy? I’ll make japchae or something.” The factory job is one of many for Yeonjun, too. The pills let him pick up freelance work DJ-ing in some of Hongdae’s edgier underground clubs without the promoters doing a double take at his alpha status. He splits a room in Sillim-dong with a college friend, and it’s not a much more luxurious life than the one Soobin and Beomgyu live, but his medical expenses are probably a tenth of theirs.
“Maybe he’s lonely.” Yeonjun’s voice goes softer when he switches back to the real topic. “If he keeps talking about it.”
“I know he’s lonely.” Soobin tilts his head back to rest it against the cold wall. He feels his beanie snaring on the rough brick. “That’s not why, though.”
“Maybe it is.” Soobin sees Yeonjun lift his own cigarette to his lips and blow a harsh cone of smoke straight into the air. It blends against the gray sky.
“Having more friends won’t get him pregnant.”
“Does he really want to be pregnant? Do you really think that’s what’s going on, Soobin-ah?”
Soobin closes his eyes so Yeonjun won’t see the fear in them.
“Think about what I said yesterday,” Yeonjun says. “Did you ask him about it?”
“Can’t really talk about shit like that during the heat.” Not like he would have brought it up, anyway, when they’re not doing it.
“Ask Beomgyu what he thinks when it’s over, then. I really think it would be good for him.”
Soobin sucks in too harsh of a drag. It stings going down.
Yeonjun drops the butt of his cigarette unceremoniously and grinds it heavily under his heel.
“It’s not about you,” he says, clapping his cold hands together. “It’s about you and him, getting through this. Okay?”
Beomgyu’s heat ends early on a Saturday morning. It’s merciful timing. The post office is closed on weekends, so Soobin has the morning off. Beomgyu is tender after his heat ends, and a morning cuddling in bed usually helps. Not as alpha and omega, but as Soobin and Beomgyu.
Soobin opens his eyes to an empty spot in the bed next to him, the pillow still sunken where the weight of Beomgyu’s head dented it. He can hear him at the table, puttering around with his tools. There’s a soft clink of metal on metal.
He stretches out, and a harsh ray of sunlight strikes him in the face. They always forget to close the curtains during heat. Their neighbors across the alley must hate them.
“Come back here,” he groans, rolling onto his stomach. “What time is it?”
“Seven-thirty,” Beomgyu says distractedly.
“Gimme another hour of Beomgyu,” Soobin demands. He sounds like a child, but Beomgyu likes getting to be the big man sometimes.
“Nope. I need to finish this today. I’m already a day late.”
“It’s fixing one clasp. That takes you ten minutes, max. Come onnnn.”
“I gotta finish it, bunny.”
Soobin buries his head in his pillow and lets out a low, deep whine. It’s not as effective as Beomgyu’s distress noises are on him, but the metallic noises stall anyway.
“Why do you have to be so fucking cute?” Beomgyu’s voice says. There’s the sound of a chair sliding against the creaky floor, and a moment later a tiny cannonball collides with Soobin’s back. All the air is knocked out of him in the best way, replaced with something better. Beomgyu is on top of him and he’s here, fully. He’s not sick anymore, not hazy and delirious. For now, at least.
“Get under here,” Soobin chokes out under Beomgyu’s weight, just heavy enough to be uncomfortable when his elbows are jammed into his back. “You need to be punished for that.”
“What, for calling you cute, when you are?”
Soobin rolls over as Beomgyu starts to climb back under the covers, a tight smile spreading across his pretty face. He’s just wearing one of Soobin’s t-shirts and a pair of cotton panties, and his feet are frigid as they slide against Soobin’s body.
“Yah! You’re an icicle.”
“Melt me, then.”
Soobin bundles him against his own naked body. “Punishment,” he says, sticking his tongue in Beomgyu’s ear. The omega squeals, and how the fuck is Soobin getting hard right now after all the sex he’s had in the last four days? He is, though, like he’s a fucking teenager. Beomgyu is just…well, he’s his mate. Everything he does turns Soobin on.
“Unjust,” Beomgyu gasps. “Gimme a fair trial. I have so much evidence.”
“Of what?”
“Your cuteness. Exhibit A, dimples.”
Soobin pouts.
“Exhibit B, pouting. No alpha should be able to pout like that.”
“Yeonjun-hyung could, with his lips.”
“Yeah, well.” Beomgyu boops Soobin on the nose with his own. “Yeonjun-hyung could pass for an omega. A monstrously tall, strong omega.”
“Doesn’t look like any omega I’ve seen,” Soobin says, stroking over Beomgyu’s wet ear with his thumb.
Beomgyu smirks. “You don’t see a lot of omegas, do you?”
“You like it that way.”
Beomgyu hums noncommittally. He’s staring at Soobin’s eyes, his own heavy eyelashes drooping drowsily. He shouldn’t have gotten up this morning, but Soobin understands his urge to provide. It makes Beomgyu feel worthless when he can’t bring in any income, and losing work time to his heat adds to his guilt.
Omegas. Yeonjun and omegas. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to say something. Yeonjun will, for sure, next time he comes over.
Soobin doesn’t really think it through. His mind is a sieve when he’s weary like this, and he’s terrible at hiding things from Beomgyu even on a good day. Might as well share it, before Yeonjun does.
“On the topic of Yeonjun and omegas,” Soobin says tentatively. “I gotta tell you something.”
“Did he meet someone?” Beomgyu asks eagerly. “It’d be about time, wouldn’t it? He’s such a catch, honestly.”
“I’d think you wanted him, the way you talk about him.” It’s an obvious joke, and Beomgyu sticks out his tongue. “No, something else he told me at work.”
“What?”
Soobin twists his lips to the side. How to share this without making it seem like it’s something he wants? Like he’s not satisfied the way it is, like he wants to live with another omega?
He settles on honesty. Just say what Yeonjun said, no editorializing.
“He said he thought we should get a roommate. One of his omega cousins, actually.”
“What? Why?” Beomgyu furrows his brows, an intense look washing over his face. Still cute, though, his lovely little lips parting, his tongue flicking out to dampen them.
“To save on rent, I think. So I could maybe quit one of the jobs, be around you more.”
Beomgyu is quiet, thinking.
“What are you thinking? I thought it was…kind of over the line, to be honest.”
“Why over the line?” Beomgyu’s face doesn’t change, but Soobin’s surprised by that.
“Really? I mean, suggesting we live with someone else…it feels risky, right? And I dunno if we need the help. We’re doing okay, you and me, aren’t we?” He waits, holding his breath.
Beomgyu pauses too long before he says, “Yeah. Yeah, we are.”
That chill is growing, inching up Soobin’s spine.
“Be honest, babe. Are we?”
“I mean…” Beomgyu trails his delicate finger down the broad plane of Soobin’s bare chest, over his nipple. “We’re doing our best.”
That’s not the same, is it?
“I do wish you could be here more,” Beomgyu says quietly. “But it’s not worth wishing it.”
Soobin leans in to kiss him. Beomgyu melts, lips soft and pliant, fingertips lifting to Soobin’s mating bite to trace its edges. Soobin wishes it too, but Beomgyu is right. The heat is over and it’s cold inside him, cold in their home.
Beomgyu’s eyes are closed when Soobin pulls away. A few of his eyelashes are clumped together, and Soobin strokes over them with his thumb, separating them.
“I wanna nap a little more,” Beomgyu exhales. “Maybe we think about it later.”
“I wasn’t saying we should do it,” Soobin says quickly. “I was just…just saying.”
“I know. You don’t have to worry about saying things, hyung.” Beomgyu pokes him blindly in the chest, hitting him square in the sternum. “Ball of nerves these days. It’s not sexy.”
“I’m so sexy,” Soobin says, scooping up his waist in his hands and rolling back in. “You thought so yesterday, didn’t you?”
Yesterday, Beomgyu had been begging to get knocked up, but neither of them says it.
“Nap,” Beomgyu says. “Nap time with my sexy-as-fuck mate, and then you’re gonna take me out. Spoil me.”
A chilly stroll around Olympic Park and an unseasonal ice cream cone isn’t really spoiling, but Beomgyu acts like it is. They go to the arcade afterwards and Beomgyu puts on his favorite voice, the childish little one that always gives Soobin an awkward semi.
“Oooh, hyperreality,” he says, squealing over a new VR game. “You can actually touch things in the game. And smell them. Can we?”
It’s not covered by the coupon, but Soobin pays for two games for him anyway, hovering on the sidelines as Beomgyu shrieks through some kind of jungle immersion game. He drinks in Beomgyu’s happy noises, the way his hair pokes up messily around the strap of the VR headset. His flannel swallows up his slight frame, the sleeves of it hanging too low on his hands. One of his shoelaces is untied, and Soobin makes a mental note to tie it for him as soon as he steps out of the gaming zone.
It’s one of the safest days of Beomgyu’s cycle for him to be out and about — he’s unlikely to have a pheromone flare when his heat has just ended. But Soobin is hypervigilant anyway, staring down anyone who looks large enough to potentially be an alpha. There aren’t many. He sees one man with a telltale inhibitor patch emerging from his turtleneck and leans closer to Beomgyu instinctively, getting an accidental punch to the jaw in response.
“Hyung! What the fuck, I almost fell out of a tree!”
“Are you playing as a goddamn monkey?” Soobin gasps, clutching his face.
“An orangutan. Different.”
Beomgyu wants to window shop afterwards, and Soobin still has two hours until his factory shift. They wait for the bus to Garosu-gil, Soobin clutching Beomgyu’s hand tightly as they wait in the crowded stop.
“I’m not getting abducted, hyung,” Beomgyu says, rolling his eyes when Soobin wraps an arm around his shoulders to hold him even closer. He doesn’t pull away, though. He can give this to Soobin. He grabs the hand resting on his shoulder and strokes his thumb over the scent gland in Soobin’s wrist, just under his jacket sleeve.
“Summertime,” Beomgyu says, twisting his nose to bury it against Soobin’s wrist.
Beomgyu’s card doesn’t buzz the way Soobin’s does when he boards the bus. No one’s afraid of omegas.
They don’t spend a lot of time in fancy shopping streets, and Soobin is jumpy the moment they step off the bus. He can tell he’s squeezing Beomgyu’s hand so tightly that it hurts.
“This way, I think,” Beomgyu says excitedly. He doesn’t mention the hand thing. “There’s a really cool jeweler on the next corner, and maybe…maybe I can try something on?”
“Anything,” Soobin grits out. He can control his anxiety for one hour. One hour. But he’s already gotten a few looks, and he knows Beomgyu will attract attention, too, with his perfect, entrancing face. Betas might not smell omegas, but they aren’t blind.
It’s not like it’s a real problem for them to get attention, but worry runs in Soobin’s veins by now.
Beomgyu leads him to a pedestrian-only street, somewhere he remembers exploring in college. Right away, Soobin can remember another reason they rarely come to places like this: the whirring cameras, perched high on buildings, scanning the crowds of shoppers. No one’s looking up at them but Soobin. They’re everywhere in Gangnam, so most people are probably used to them, but Soobin never goes to Gangnam.
And it’s only a minute or two before he sees the eyes watching him, the plainclothes cops subtly lifting phones to their mouths to radio his location down to the next one. The cameras have scanned his irises against the citizen database, no doubt, and the cops must know everything about him by now. They have to know he’s controlled, that he has no criminal record, no history of fighting. Keeping the peace is their job, though, and alphas threaten the peace. So they watch him, and Soobin tries to ignore it.
Beomgyu’s better at ignoring it. “They’re not hurting you,” he whispers, the first time one of the men gets a bit too close. “You’re allowed to be here.”
“They might question me,” Soobin mutters. He stares at the cop, wearing distinctively non-distinct clothing. They always stand out in all that black.
“And if they do, you’re on the pills,” Beomgyu says airily. “Ignore it.”
He pulls Soobin to a stop in the middle of the street, almost making him collide with a woman pushing a stroller.
“Look,” he says. “Show them how dangerous you are, okay?”
He seizes Soobin around the neck and tugs him down to his height, planting a wet, open-mouthed kiss on his cheek.
“Gimme one too,” Beomgyu grins, and Soobin can’t resist him. He grabs him around the waist, stooping to reach his lips, and gives it right back: embarrassingly sloppy, bending him backwards in his arms. Beomgyu’s never been afraid of him.
“So…dangerous,” Beomgyu gasps between kisses. “So wild. Take me...shopping, yeah?”
They find the jeweler he was thinking of, with a glowing display of glittering pieces in the window. Soobin can see why it had stuck in Beomgyu’s mind for years — the style is eclectic just like Beomgyu’s own creations, dainty metalwork adorned with stones in bold colors. Beomgyu gawks at a pair of silver earrings in an abstract shape that reminds Soobin of lightning bolts, and practically drools at something snake-like that apparently is meant to wrap around the upper arm.
“It’d look good on you,” Soobin says.
“You say that about everything,” Beomgyu responds lightly, although he chews back a smile.
“Want to go in? I’ve still got forty minutes before I need to get going.”
Beomgyu is already reaching for the door handle. Soobin takes another minute to look over the window display, to log Beomgyu’s favorites in his mind. The store is laughably pricy, and Beomgyu would murder him if he spent money on jewelry for him, when their budget is so tight and Beomgyu is a fucking jeweler. It doesn’t hurt to look, though. Maybe one day.
When he finally enters the store, Beomgyu is already up at the counter, chatting to the beta behind it.
“…So inspirational,” Soobin hears him saying. “One day, I want to make—”
“Wait,” comes a gruff voice, and an arm drops in front of him. Soobin stops, startled. There’s a security guard there, a man tucked into a niche next to the door. An alpha with a scarred, rugged face, unsurprisingly. Security is the one field where everyone wants to hire alphas.
“What’s your business here?” he says.
“Browsing,” Soobin says, and tries to take a step forward into the store.
The guard is big, even for an alpha. “Browsing for what?”
“Just taking a look around,” Soobin says, trying not to sound testy. “I’m here with my mate.” He tilts his chin at Beomgyu.
The guard barely gives Beomgyu a glance. “Wait outside,” he says.
“What?”
“There’s no need for you to be here. Wait outside.”
Soobin doesn’t move. Don’t get angry, don’t.
“I’m controlled,” he says. “Want to see my card?”
“Go outside, now,” the guard growls in a deep, ragged voice. A command tone.
It feels like Soobin’s alpha is straining against the chemicals, fighting its shackles. This isn’t the first time this has happened, and he can handle it. He can just wait outside. But it was a command. An alpha just tried to command him, and he’s blocking him from his omega, and Soobin can’t stand that.
“Don’t talk to me like that,” he shoots out, turning to face the guard. “What gives you the right?”
“The sign said no alphas. Or can you not read?”
Soobin spits out a laugh. That fucking stereotype, from another alpha? “Bullshit. My omega’s here, and I’m not—”
The guard grabs Soobin tightly around the collar, twisting his head back toward the door, and there’s a high-pitched scream from the beta behind the counter. He hears another yelp just behind him: Beomgyu’s.
Something inside him is yanking, yanking at those shackles. Beomgyu is far too close to the danger that this guard is creating, and fuck, now Soobin’s angry. His omega is here, right here, and this fucking alpha is getting in his way, putting him at risk.
Soobin growls, louder than the guard did. The rage is about to melt him.
“Soobin-hyung, baby, what’s—”
“Go, Beomgyu, get back,” Soobin grunts. The guard’s grip on his collar is painfully tight, and it’s hard to breathe. He can’t see the man’s face anymore, or Beomgyu’s, and that only inflames him more. “This motherfucker’s trying to—”
“Alpha starting trouble,” the guard says, and Soobin realizes in a panic that he’s talking into some kind of radio on his arm. Cops are everywhere on the street, and this guard calling for backup could turn very, very ugly.
“Fuck, I’m not,” Soobin yells. “Let me fucking go!”
He snaps his teeth. He fucking snaps his teeth at the alpha. He never marks his territory like that.
Beomgyu shrieks. “Hyung, no!”
“He’s aggressive,” the alpha says into the phone, his tone rising in intensity. “Send me backup.”
No, no no no. Soobin swipes at the alpha, trying to connect with his body, and in return a thick fist collides with his cheek, hard. Stars spin through his vision and his head knocks back, hitting the doorframe.
“Let go, let him go,” Beomgyu is wailing. “Please, we’ll leave, just—”
Suddenly, his collar is released, and Soobin staggers back into the doorframe. He shakes his head, trying to see through the wave of stinging pain.
Beomgyu is hugging the guard around the middle, and the alpha’s face is split open in surprise, his heavy, rugged features strangely calm. He drops his hand, lowering his mouth from the device strapped onto his arm, and he starts to lean in, leaning down as if to embrace Beomgyu.
“No,” Soobin roars. He can’t think. Scorching rage rips through him, and he wants to punch claw bite hurt—
“Go, let’s go,” Beomgyu sobs, tearing away from the alpha before the man can touch him more. He seizes Soobin’s hand and yanks him through the door, out onto the street. Soobin is numb, hardly aware that they’re outside now, that they’re sprinting conspicuously down the street. All he wants is to go back to that store and hurt that man, kick him, rip his hair out for touching his omega, for putting him in danger.
“Hyung, move! Faster, run—”
Run. Why? Fuck. The anger is fading, sliding back under the haze of his suppressants, and fuck, he almost fought that man, didn’t he? Why? He’s never…never been that kind of alpha, never thought of himself that way. Dangerous, dangerous. Beomgyu pulls him down the street, around the corner, back towards the bus stop, and he just lets himself be yanked to safety, not thinking about all the cops logging his suspicious movements. Just go, don’t look back. He’s dangerous, isn’t he? Is he?
“Stop thinking,” Beomgyu says, panting. They’re a block from the bus stop, and he’s slowing down. “Just…don’t overthink it.”
“Beomgyu-ya, I don’t…”
“Not now. Not yet.”
They’ve slowed to a walk now, both panting, catching their breath. His lungs are recovering, but Soobin’s mind is racing, racing through what just happened.
“Hyung,” Beomgyu says. “It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s over.”
“Never fucking do that again,” Soobin growls under his breath. “Jesus, Beomgyu. Never do that.”
“What did I do?”
“You could have been hurt,” Soobin says through gritted teeth. “Never, never touch another alpha like that.”
“Oh, and you had the situation under control, did you?” Beomgyu sounds slightly hysterical. “Hyung, you snapped at him, you almost had to fight him. You…you can’t do that, you can’t. You’d be in so much trouble, and I’d…”
“You’d what? You’d be safe. I would have dealt with it.” Soobin is trembling inside, no, no. Why did he do that? Why did he almost fight him?
Beomgyu stops walking. “I’m scared,” he says in a voice so quiet it’s almost a whisper. “That was so scary.”
“Oh, love.” Soobin rushes to hold him, and Beomgyu lets him, burying his face in his chest. “Love, no. I’d never let anyone hurt you. Don’t be scared.”
“You weren’t in control,” Beomgyu mumbles. “You were scaring me too.”
Soobin’s breath gets stuck somewhere halfway to his lungs.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispers to Beomgyu’s scalp.
Beomgyu just grips him around the waist. He doesn’t say anything for what feels like a full minute.
“I don’t need…this,” he says. “Don’t need you to worry about me so much. I’m fine.”
He’s not fine. He’s so vulnerable.
Soobin rubs his cheek into Beomgyu’s scalp. Smells like nothing.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers again. “Forgive me?”
Beomgyu nods. He wipes his eyes on Soobin’s coat as he pulls away, and Soobin’s heart throbs when he sees his face. Rosy like a doll’s, puffy under the eyes as if he’d just woken up. Soobin thumbs over his under-eyes, clutching his cheeks in his palms. All he wants is to make him happy, to help. He failed.
“You should get to work,” Beomgyu sniffs. “And I’ve got a necklace to fix.”
They’re silent on the bus. There’s not much to say.
The spot of the punch has bloomed into a massive bruise under Soobin’s right eye by the time he gets to the factory, and Yeonjun doesn’t beat around the bush.
“What the actual fuck?” he says the moment he sees him in the courtyard outside the factory.
“How bad is it?”
“Jesus Christ, Soobin-ah.”
Soobin turns from his shocked face, marching determinedly towards the building.
“That wasn’t from Beomgyu,” Yeonjun says, keeping up. “No way could he punch that hard.”
“Why would he punch me?” Soobin says, too derisively.
“Sex mishap, I dunno. Who was it?”
Soobin just shakes his head, balling his hands into fists and walking faster.
“Come on. Who?”
“It was an accident,” Soobin says. “It’s nothing.”
“Don’t treat me like an idiot,” Yeonjun says. His voice is tightening. “I’m trying to fucking help you. Stop pushing me away.”
“Fine. Help me, then!” Soobin practically yells, spinning around. Something flares in his neck, like he cricked it. A few other people in the courtyard give them startled looks.
“Whoa, overreaction,” Yeonjun says, hands flying up defensively. “Calm, calm.”
“I’m…” perfectly calm, Soobin wants to say, but his heckles are up, figuratively and literally. His shoulders are rigid, raised practically to his ears, and he’s on the verge of snapping again.
“I’m not the one who punched you,” Yeonjun says in a level voice. “Steady, alpha.”
Soobin can’t be doing this. He’s not like this. He doesn’t snap. That’s dangerous.
“Did you forget to take your pill?” It’s a condescending question that only Yeonjun could get away with asking, but Soobin can’t blame his mind for going there. He’s simmering in a way he shouldn’t be, and all the slow breathing in the world isn’t lowering his temperature.
“No,” Soobin says, tensing and loosening his fingers. “I’m…going through something. I don’t know. I kind of got into it with an alpha in Garosu-gil.”
“He got you good,” Yeonjun observes. “Out of practice?”
“You know I don’t fight.”
“Looks like you did, and badly,” Yeonjun says. Something about the wise-ass comment settles Soobin down a bit, bringing him back to earth. It’s just Yeonjun. Why is he so tense?
“He touched Beomgyu,” Soobin says, unhinging his jaw to loosen it. It’s aching from being locked so tightly between his sentences.
Yeonjun growls under his breath.
“Everything’s fine,” Soobin says quickly, trying to convince himself too. “His heat’s over, and I didn’t actually get into a fight, so we’re fine. It’s like you said. Two weeks off until the next one now, so things are fine.”
He turns to walk to the factory. Two weeks off, except those weeks won’t be easy, either. Beomgyu will have at least one flare-up, maybe two, pain so intense that he just curls up in a ball until it passes. His scent will spike, his pheromones blasting even more strongly than they do during his heat. Soobin just has to hope it happens when Beomgyu’s at home — even better, when Soobin’s around to rub his back and whisper in his ear that it’s almost over. To fuck him, if he’s not in too much pain to uncurl his body for Soobin’s cock. It usually helps, just like during his heats.
“It’s painful to see you like this, you know,” Yeonjun calls after his back.
“Like what?”
He hears the other alpha’s footsteps behind him and slows so he can catch up.
“At the end of your rope,” Yeonjun says. “Let me help, Soobin-ah. Stop trying to do this alone.”
Soobin is glad he doesn’t have to look him in the face. Why do his friends have to be so genuine? It punches him in the gut every time they see through him, punctures him so that the little pride he has left leaks out.
“Give me a cigarette,” Soobin says. “That helps.”
“Nuh uh. Beomgyu wants you to quit,” Yeonjun says brattily. “When can I come over this week?”
“Maybe Wednesday. I’ll ask Beomgyu.”
Soobin can tell that Yeonjun is watching him closely all through their shift. His sharp eyes keep flitting over to him instead of focusing on the controls of the machine arm he’s manning, watching Soobin rotate heavy metal sheets under the hydraulic press with an unnecessary intensity. It doesn’t help with the heat bubbling under Soobin’s surface. He’s fine, he’s fine. He doesn’t need Yeonjun to babysit him.
Their shift supervisor asks them to stay late, to help tackle an order of ultrasonic dishwashers that came in from a vendor in Busan. Soobin can’t say no to the overtime, and Beomgyu wouldn’t want him to. He sends him a quick voice message telling him he won’t be home for dinner — his phone is the cheap kind, and the video calling is broken.
Beomgyu sends one back: feed yourself before you get to the Yonsei job, or I’ll yell at you tonight. You’re skin and bones. His voice is light enough to lift Soobin’s mood as it floats out of his phone, and it makes Yeonjun smile, too.
“He sounds happy,” Yeonjun says. “Even after all that drama. You’ve got a good one.”
“He always is after his heat,” Soobin says, letting Beomgyu’s voice linger in his ears. He always is after their date, after their time together. Even the fight didn’t ruin that togetherness.
Why is he working overtime when he could be with Beomgyu? Soobin isn’t sure.
Soobin is barely on time for his delivery job, and the restaurant owner is livid about his four-day absence. It’s not unexpected. Maybe he wouldn’t have minded as much if Soobin had thought to call in, but the sudden onset of Beomgyu’s heat had totally wiped his mind of any other concerns.
“Call next time, so I can fire you sooner,” the owner hisses at him.
“You can’t fire me. I’m here now,” Soobin pleads. “I’ll make it up to you. I’ll — I’ll do a shift for free.”
“You missed work a few weeks ago too, didn’t you? What’s a fucking delivery boy for if he’s not here delivering?”
Soobin can’t argue with that.
“You’re all like this. All your needs, distracting you. I’m done hiring alphas.”
The door to the back room is cracked open, and Soobin glimpses a face pressed against it. Sungho, probably. Soobin’s neck prickles at the thought of the beta hearing those words, the age-old logic for why alphas are unreliable and unhirable. The logic behind why job discrimination on the basis of alpha status isn’t just legal, but widespread. Soobin’s heard it countless times, in countless rejection letters, countless firings. You’re a live wire, you’re a risk. We can’t take a chance on the likes of you.
It’s painful to realize the beta probably believes it. Soobin just proved it right, after all.
Soobin turns and walks out. There will be another delivery job, and another one after that. As long as he’s on the pills, he’ll find someone willing to take pity on him.
For now, all he feels is relief that he can go home to Beomgyu. The stress will set in later. One fewer job means even less money for the heating bill, and December is fast approaching.
Beomgyu is bundled up in bed when Soobin gets home, reading a book with just the side light on. It’s too early to go to sleep, but it’s too cold in the apartment to not be under the covers.
To say that he’s shocked about Soobin’s early arrival is an understatement.
“What do you mean, it’s no big deal?”
“I’ll get another one.”
“But it took you weeks to find this one. You know it’s not that easy.” Beomgyu casts the book aside, a romance novel with a cover depicting a glamorous omega tucked into the arms of a doting alpha. “Fuck. You didn’t call them?”
“I forgot,” Soobin says testily. “I was a little busy.”
“Don’t make this my fault.” Beomgyu glowers at him. “I feel like shit enough as it is without that.”
“I didn’t say it was your fault,” Soobin says, sinking onto the foot of the bed and rubbing a hand wearily over his face. “I just…”
Beomgyu jerks his feet away from him. “So whose fault is it then?”
“No one’s. It just happened. Shit happens.”
Beomgyu groans, flinging his head back against the headboard to regroup. His face is tense. It looks so much older than it used to, back when his cheeks were rounder.
“Look, baby. I’ll be home in the evenings for the next few days until I find another night job. Won’t that be nice?”
“Yeah, it’d be nice if you were home and the heat was on,” Beomgyu says to the ceiling. “You could have gone in on Thursday. I wasn’t that bad.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Soobin’s voice is raising. “Do you remember Thursday, Beomgyu-ya?”
“Yeah. You could have left me for a few hours, if it meant keeping your job.” Beomgyu crosses his arms. He’s refusing to look at him.
Soobin balls up his fists, pressing them into the bed. All his anger is only making him colder. He can’t muster up any fire in this apartment. “You told me I could miss the delivery shifts. You told me.”
“I didn’t mean get yourself fired! Fuck, I can take care of myself for one fucking evening!”
“Can you? Because Thursday was the worst day, babe. Thursday was when the breeding shit started, and you were an absolute—”
Beomgyu lets out a sharp, frustrated whine, loud enough to startle Soobin into silence. “Don’t fucking remind me,” he says, dropping his voice. “I don’t need you to tell me how bad that is.”
“Then you should know why I couldn’t leave you,” Soobin says through gritted teeth. “And if you think I’d have left you to get through that alone, you don’t know who you’re mated to.”
For a second, Beomgyu looks like he’s on the verge of a retort, something biting and harsh. Instead, he rolls over in bed, burying his face in the crook of his elbow.
“Oh…fuck, love. Don’t cry. I’m not… I’m not upset with you, baby.”
“I know,” Beomgyu sniffles. His back is heaving where Soobin rests his hand on it, racing to comfort him. “I know.”
Soobin cuddles into the side of his smaller body, clinging to him through the blanket, but Beomgyu doesn’t react. He just cries softly into his own arm, and Soobin is frozen solid inside. Fix it, fix it, he has to fix this for his omega. He can never fight with him for long. It goes against everything inside him.
“I’m sorry I lost the job. I’m so sorry, princess. I’ll go out and start looking tomorrow.”
“Not about…not about that,” Beomgyu cries. “Just…so hard. It’s so hard.”
The spine of the novel is poking awkwardly into Soobin’s leg. He rips it from under his body to toss it aside. Fated Lovers, it’s called, with a line of promo text under the title. All she wants is him…but will he be too much?
Soobin strokes Beomgyu’s lush, messy hair, combing through the knot always tangled into the crown of his head.
“Good book?” he asks, faking lightness.
“Terrible,” Beomgyu sniffs.
His breathing slows, and it grows quiet in the room. Something clangs in the alley under their window, a heavy object being thrown into a dumpster. The noise ricochets through the thin window and around the small room, breaking the silence.
“Hyung, don’t get mad,” Beomgyu whispers.
Soobin feels a spike of adrenaline. “About what?” he asks.
“Maybe we should…talk to Yeonjun-hyung.”
Soobin’s hand slows in Beomgyu’s hair.
“About his cousin?”
Beomgyu nods into the pillow.
“Why?”
Beomgyu flips onto his side, and Soobin’s hand flies to his face, as if his thumbs are magnetized to his tear tracks. He wipes them away before his brain can process the shine all over Beomgyu’s cheeks.
“Because we’re poor,” Beomgyu says. “And it would be cheaper. And I don’t want you to have to get a new job. I want you to stay.”
Soobin closes his eyes and presses his forehead to Beomgyu’s.
“You’re not mad, right? We don’t…we don’t have to if you don’t want to.” Beomgyu’s voice is tentative, and Soobin can tell that he’s worried.
“I’m not mad,” Soobin says. “I’m…”
What is he feeling? Beomgyu wants more than what he’s given him. He wants something Soobin hasn’t been able to give him. He wants Soobin, and Soobin hasn’t been there.
“I love you so much,” Beomgyu says. His fingertips dig into Soobin’s shoulder. “I love you so, so much. All I want is you, hyung. For life.”
“I know. For life,” Soobin whispers. His voice feels cold coming out.
“I want more of you. Maybe I can have it, if we do this.” It’s Beomgyu’s turn to take care of Soobin, and a finger traces over Soobin’s lips, over the pronounced peaks of his cupid’s bow. “It’s just moving. It’s not a step backwards, bunny.”
“No,” Soobin says faintly. “It’s not.”
“We don’t have to do it.” Beomgyu nuzzles the tip of his nose against Soobin’s, back and forth. “I just think we should find out more about it, maybe. Talk to Yeonjun-hyung about it. Maybe even see the apartment. Would that…would that be okay?”
Suddenly, Soobin smells him, somehow. It’s strong, too, like someone’s cooking something with fresh herbs in their kitchenette. He wonders if Beomgyu’s amping up his pheromones, releasing them so intentionally and heavily that they’re breaking through Soobin’s chemical fog even without him touching Beomgyu’s scent glands. Soobin can’t control his own pheromones like that anymore. He lost that control when he started taking the pills.
Whatever Beomgyu is doing is working. It’s soothing him the way Beomgyu used to soothe him with his pheromones back in college, when Soobin could get away with wearing inhibitor patches to class and tearing them off every night to sleep fully cocooned in Beomgyu’s scent.
“It’s okay,” Soobin admits. “We can think about it. If it’s what you want.”
“Just thinking about it,” Beomgyu says quickly. A pair of soft lips brush Soobin’s own, Beomgyu’s thumb tracing the corners of his mouth now. “We won’t do anything if it’s not right for us. Both of us.”
Too many of Soobin’s threads have unraveled to put up a fight. Too many days of debilitating exhaustion, too many eyes staring at his alpha body. Too many nights with the heat off. More of Beomgyu’s tears than he can count, and he said he would do anything to take care of him, didn’t he?
“I’ll talk to Yeonjun-hyung tomorrow if you kiss me again,” Soobin says, and Beomgyu’s tongue is on his own in an instant. Thank you.
Yeonjun arranges a meeting with his cousin for Monday evening.
“I’d come introduce you, but I’ve got a big set in Itaewon that night, and you know what I’m like before them,” he says apologetically at work.
“A useless wreck, I know,” Soobin responds, toying with the hem of his shirt awkwardly. “It’s cool. It’s probably best if we meet him on our own, anyway, to see how we all get along.”
Yeonjun doesn’t say anything about Soobin’s sudden change in heart, thankfully. He’s not sure how he feels about the whole thing, and he doesn’t want to have to figure it out.
“Kai’s a nice guy,” Yeonjun says again. “Neat, according to his mom. That’s all that really matters in a roommate.”
“What did you say he does again?” Soobin can’t remember.
Yeonjun furrows his brows. “I didn’t say,” he says. “Something with kids, maybe? I guess that’s your conversation starter.”
It’s nice, not having a night shift to rush off to. Beomgyu makes jjajangmyeon, Soobin’s favorite, and Soobin doesn’t complain that he’s turned the heat up two degrees while he was gone. Small kindnesses. It feels a bit tender between them after yesterday, but at least Beomgyu is smiling all through dinner, the sunset filtering across his face and turning his black hair amber. Soobin can sit and stare at him instead of rushing through his food, and it’s so, so nice.
“How many dishwashers did you defeat today?” Beomgyu asks, perched on the foot of countertop next to Soobin as he stoops over the sink, scrubbing their plates in Beomgyu’s too-small latex cleaning gloves.
“At least thirty,” Soobin says, smiling. “You should have seen me. Knocking ‘em out, one after another.”
“They don’t stand a chance against you and your welding gun,” Beomgyu hums, playing with a strand of his hair.
“I don’t weld, Beoms. I move heavy things and push buttons. You know that, fool.”
“You’d look sexy with a welding gun,” Beomgyu ponders. “Big biceps, and that scary mask. Badass.”
“You’re the one who welds,” Soobin reminds him, handing over a plate for him to dry.
“What, making earrings with my tiny soldering iron? You call that welding?”
Soobin drips soapy water on his thigh, and Beomgyu squirms.
“Did you hand off the necklace today?”
“Yep.” Beomgyu smiles, proud of himself, even though it was an easy job. A job’s still a job. “The payment went through, too, so we’re flush with cash. Maybe I’ll make something fancy for dinner tomorrow.”
Tomorrow. They’re meeting Kai tomorrow.
“Hey,” Beomgyu says. “You’re still interested, right? You’re not just saying it because I am?”
Soobin wipes his bangs off his forehead with his forearm to keep the soap out of his eyes. “I’m interested because you’re interested,” he says. “That has to be okay.”
Beomgyu twists up his lips, but nods. He watches as Soobin turns back to the dishes, staring conspicuously at the side of his face until Soobin looks back up at him.
“Something on my face?”
“I like you in the sunset,” Beomgyu says. “You’re so golden.”
Soobin tugs off the gloves and tucks himself between Beomgyu’s spread knees, almost pulling him off the countertop as he hugs him close to his chest. It makes him feel small, for once.
Beomgyu asks for Soobin to bite him again that night. Soobin doesn’t understand why. He’s not in pain, he’s not feverish, there’s nothing to hide from. But Soobin doesn’t ask for a reason. He just sinks his teeth deep into his scent glands and watches him drift, euphoric in his haze. Maybe it’s a habit for Beomgyu now. This is just how they fuck, just a thing they always do.
Soobin remembers Beomgyu’s moans the night before his heat, his ecstatic gibberish as he reached his peak, and buries his face in Beomgyu’s clit to stop remembering it.
He wants to treat him like he’s fully there tonight, make him cum so many times he feels each one of them in his belly when he floats back down to earth. He flips Beomgyu’s limp body onto his stomach and licks a line up to his ass, burrowing his tongue into it like it’s a special occasion. He loses track of time, lapping at his pucker until he can’t tell how much of the wetness all over Beomgyu’s cunt is spit or slick. Beomgyu only twitches and whines softly like a sleeping puppy, murmuring one little mm, yes that stops Soobin’s heart.
Soobin fucks two fingers into his g-spot so he can feel him tighten as he orgasms. Otherwise, he’d never know.
He doesn’t knot Beomgyu that night. He needs to really focus to pop one outside of heat or rut, and it’s not worth wasting the energy on it when Beomgyu isn’t sick. They have a big day ahead of them, after all.
Yeonjun’s cousin’s apartment is in a squat, unassuming building tucked down a narrow street a few blocks from Boramae Park. It’s quieter than their own street in Guro-gu, and the trees from the park peek out if you peer down it just right. Almost all the leaves are gone from them, but that’s expected; it’s November and ten degrees out.
“But I bet it’s beautiful in the spring,” Beomgyu says eagerly as they lean up against the building. “Those are cherry blossoms, you know.”
“The factory’s a bit of a long commute,” Soobin observes.
“It's not too bad. We’re not far from Yeonjun-hyung’s place, and he does it every day. Actually, not far from Taehyunnie's, either, in the other direction.”
“Sounds like you’ve already moved in,” Soobin says. It’s a joke, but when Beomgyu laughs, it doesn’t sound like he thinks it is.
There’s a beep and a muffled call of be right there! from the buzzer system, and Soobin swings the building door open. The lobby is as average as the outside was, simple metal paneling and an electronic package-management system.
“Would be nice if it had a doorman,” Soobin says.
“Oh, like we have one now?” Beomgyu replies. He’s tracing his hand over the paneling as if it were something special. Soobin leans back against it, hoping he looks cool.
The elevator door slides open and Soobin braces himself.
“Soobin and Beomgyu, right?” Yeonjun’s cousin says cheerfully.
“Yes, that’s us,” Beomgyu says, hand shooting out to shake his. “And you’re Kai, right?”
He’s nothing like what Soobin was expecting, nothing at all. If it weren’t for his face, he’d never have flagged him as an omega. He’s tall, almost as tall as Soobin, and much less slight in frame than most omegas Soobin has met. His shoulders are wide under his black turtleneck and the hand that reaches out to shake Beomgyu’s is large, with long, elegant fingers.
But he’s an omega. His face gives him away, and Soobin holds his breath while his alpha acclimates. He’s never truly been tempted by anyone else; Beomgyu’s blood runs in his veins, too, and the idea of cheating on his mate causes Soobin physical pain. But he’s still an alpha, and a hot-blooded young gay man, and laying his eyes on a pretty male omega for the first time always gives his heart a bit of a shock.
Fuck, and this one is pretty. Something is different about him. His eyes are sharp, lighter than Beomgyu’s and flanking a dainty nose. His lips are stretched wide in a smile, thinner than most omegas’ are, but somehow still plush and tempting. His jaw is sharp like a beta’s, defined and square. He’s delicate and beautiful and entrancing, just like he should be, but somehow he’s fiery to look at, instead of comforting and soft like Beomgyu.
Yeonjun is pretty for an alpha, but his cousin is gorgeous even for an omega.
“That’s me,” Kai says brightly in a crystal clear, high-pitched voice. Soobin feels one of his knees weaken. Definitely an omega.
Beomgyu’s studying Kai, too. Soobin can tell from the way his eyelashes flutter in profile, scanning Kai’s face from top to bottom. But if he’s worried about how hot their potential roommate is, he doesn’t show it. Beomgyu isn’t one to be threatened by other omegas. He’s stunning himself, after all, and he’s already got his alpha locked down and eating out of the palm of his hand.
Soobin lets out a long breath and reminds himself that he can do this. He has Beomgyu, beautiful, delicate Beomgyu, gossamer eyelashes and pouty lips. He can be a meek little alpha around this new omega. He’s not dangerous.
“I’m Beomgyu,” Beomgyu says. “And this is my mate, Soobin.” He gestures to Soobin with his free hand and adds, quickly, “And he’s controlled. On suppressants, so…”
Kai turns his eyes on Soobin, smiling and brown and lovely. Fuck. “Yeonjun-hyung said so,” he says. “No big deal, though. I’m not afraid of alphas.” He laughs, and it sounds like Beomgyu’s, kind of an ungraceful honk. Both of them have cutely unflattering laughs for omegas.
“Thanks,” Soobin says. His voice is all creaky, and Beomgyu raises an eyebrow. Kai doesn’t have a frame of reference, though, so he doesn’t notice. He reaches out his elegant hand, and Soobin shakes it. Smooth skin.
“Wanna see the apartment?” Kai says. “I cleaned up for you. I even organized all my plushies. Sorry if this sounds pathetic, but I really, really need a roommate.”
“Why?” Beomgyu asks curiously.
“I’m lonely,” Kai says, trying to bite back a smile and failing. It’s adorable. “So? Shall we?”
It’s a small elevator, and Soobin finds himself brushing up against Kai’s arm. He pulls back like he’s been burned, and Kai glances over at him, only noticing the motion once it’s complete. Beomgyu watches it and giggles.
Calm down, he mouths at Soobin.
“So it’s not a big apartment, but it has great light,” Kai says as the doors open on the fourth floor, the top one. “The kitchen is really nice, too. Do you cook?”
“Only because I have to,” Beomgyu says, following him eagerly down the hall. “This one eats like a pig.”
“I’m like that too,” Kai says. “Both things. Cook because I have to, eat like a pig. My mother says I’ve got an alpha stomach.”
Soobin snorts, and Kai smiles at him over his shoulder.
“Your bedroom would be the one with the good windows,” he says. “It’s a bit bigger, so that seems better for two people. But we could still split the rent evenly. I mean, it’s just easier that way, right? I’m so bad at math.”
There’s a reader next to the door, and Kai scans his fingerprint on it. Beomgyu gives Soobin an impressed look; their apartment still has an old-school, analog key.
The door swings open, and Beomgyu gasps.
Sure, it’s a modest apartment. The living room is cozy, with a low table tucked into one corner. The kitchen is generous, just like Kai said, but not enormous. Three doors branch right off of the room, probably the bedrooms and a bathroom, and there’s not much of an entryway.
But the wall facing them is all windows, a solid sheet of glass presenting them with the dazzlingly bright sunset, painted pink in the pollution of the city.
“Oh my god,” Beomgyu says quietly, and Soobin knows he’s gone. They’re moving in. It doesn’t matter how big the apartment is, if there’s a good space for him to work in, or what the utility costs are. It doesn’t even matter that the apartment is full of cozy, well-cared-for furniture, that it has beautiful high ceilings, or that the walls are painted a calming shade of sky blue. Beomgyu wants those windows, and this bright, airy space, and Soobin will give it to him even if it means living with this terrifyingly beautiful omega.
“It’s really not much,” Kai says apologetically, fumbling with the lock inside the door. “But Yeonjun told me what you’re paying now, and it’ll be less than that when we split up the rent. I got a discount on the rent because I dog-sit for the landlord sometimes, and the heat is super cheap because of all the sunlight.”
Beomgyu walks into the apartment, straight to the window.
“So pretty,” he says in a hushed voice. There isn’t even much of a view. There’s a building a few blocks away that blocks the skyline, but the sunset still filters in down the cavern of the street. It makes the apartment feel open and cheerful.
Soobin turns to look at Kai. His face is anxious, locked on to Soobin’s.
“Can I show you your room?” Kai says.
“I don’t know if you have to,” Soobin says. “I think we’re sold.”
Kai’s relief is tangible. He lets out a breath, his broad shoulders sinking down into his body, and suddenly Soobin…smells him. Oh god, he can smell him through his suppressants, and Kai smells like honey, something so sweet that Soobin can feel it in his tastebuds.
“What are you…” No, Soobin can’t ask him what he’s doing. He shouldn’t be able to smell him like this, not on his pills, not when he’s already mated, and it might scare Kai to hear it. He might think Soobin will hurt him, that he’ll want him in a way he shouldn’t. And Soobin won’t. He doesn’t.
But why can he smell him?
“What am I what?” Kai asks, smiling brightly, his stress gone.
“What are you…what do you do?”
“Oh, I’m a nanny,” Kai says. “I take care of an SNU professor’s kids. He overpays, and then I pick up babysitting hours here and there.” He shrugs. “I’m good with kids.”
Beomgyu is still at the window, staring out as if in a daze, and Soobin has no choice but to keep this conversation going to distract himself from his utter confusion at what just happened. That honey aroma is still in the air, although it’s fading. Kai must have let out his pheromones by accident in response to Soobin’s statement, when he felt a spark of happiness.
“Sounds fun,” Soobin says lamely.
Kai shrugs again. “More fun than taking care of my own kids would be, I guess,” he says. “I don’t have to pay their tuition.”
“You don’t…” It’s a stupid question, but Soobin’s already started it, and he already backed out of one awkward question today. “You don’t have any of your own, though?”
“Obviously not, if I live here alone, right?” Kai gives Soobin a fond look, as if he were a babysitting charge who just said something cute. “Nope, I’m not mated. Or really looking, honestly. I’m just out of college, and it feels early.” He hooks a finger over the neck of his turtleneck and tugs it down to show Soobin his neck. Creamy skin, unscarred, and fuck, fuck. Soobin feels a terrible urge to—no. To do nothing.
“What do you do?” Kai asks, and Soobin pauses. What does he do?
“I work a bunch of odd jobs,” he says, letting his eyes look anywhere but Kai.
“Yeah, but I mean, what do you do? What’s your thing?”
Kai says it so innocently. He has no idea how much it hurts.
“I’m an architect, I guess. I studied architecture, at least.”
“That’s so cool,” Kai says, bouncing with genuine enthusiasm. “Like what kind of stuff?”
“Um. Bio-enabled buildings. Like, integrating biotech elements into architecture. Kind of like your fingerprint lock, actually, but a bit…more.”
“So, so, so cool,” Kai says in a hushed voice. “Like, could it read my temperature, and adjust the heat?”
Soobin looks at him in surprise. “Kind of, actually. More focused on the design side, but my friend and I worked together on the technology blueprints during college. He works for Turu, so he’s good at the science side of things.”
“Wow,” Kai says, even more hushed. “Turu, wow. That place looks like a spaceship.”
Soobin swallows awkwardly. It’s weird to talk about this, when Taehyun landed where he landed, and Soobin’s still stuck in the mud. It’s been years since he’s had time to update his portfolio.
Beomgyu finally, mercifully spins around and walks back towards them. “It’s so lovely,” he says. “We’ll…well, we should look at the bedroom, and then we should talk about it, right?” He’s looking at Soobin with pleading eyes.
“Whatever you want,” Soobin says.
The bedroom is on the same wall as the windows in the living room and just as bright. Beomgyu is completely charmed, pointing out the corner where he could put a table for his work, pacing out the size of their bed to envision how it would fit in the room. It’s not large, but it’s enough.
“So?” Kai asks.
“I want it,” Beomgyu says breathily, turning his big eyes on Soobin and Kai in the doorway. Soobin feels a rush of burning-hot affection, like the sun from the window is striking through him. Beomgyu is radiant, smiling in the bright sunlight. Irresistible.
Beomgyu wants this, and Soobin can give it to him. This, he can give him. He smiles back, and Beomgyu glows.
“You have such a lovely apartment,” Beomgyu says, and fixes his big doe eyes on Kai. “Thank you so, so much for letting us share it.”
Soobin hears a noise next to him, a heavy exhale. Soobin turns his head to look at Kai, and the omega stares back at Beomgyu strangely, with a look that feels too familiar.
“When — when do you think you could move in?” Kai says, stuttering over his words. Something pink is spreading across his sharp cheekbones.
Irresistible. Beomgyu is irresistible, and Soobin knows that Kai is seeing it too. He recognizes that look, that helpless, heart-struck look on Kai's face. It’s his own look, the shaking feeling he gets when Beomgyu hits him with a particularly dazzling smile. The one he gets when Beomgyu rolls over in bed and blinks himself awake, eyelashes trapping Soobin's gaze.
Soobin hadn’t expected that.
“As soon as possible,” Beomgyu beams. “I can’t wait to get to know you.”