“Mmm…”
The moist and soft sensation felt so good it made my body tremble, and a moan came out naturally. Without letting go of the man’s face, I held both his cheeks and inhaled his breath for a long while. The distinctive scent from his flesh, his saliva, his breath—I liked it insanely. It felt like my mind was dizzyingly melting away.
Only when my breath ran out and I felt like my head would go strange did I release my grip, and the man who was finally released poured out rough breaths and said:
“I like you.”
The voice exhaled with his breath was dreamlike and hazy. Like my hazy vision, all the sounds I heard shook inside my head like large echoes bouncing off something.
“Me too.”
I answered irresponsibly. It just felt like I should answer that way. The man’s eyes, his body temperature, and that breathtaking scent commanded it. You are my match, I’ve been waiting for you like this.
I could see the other person’s eyes widen. They were pretty eyes. Looking at those surprised eyes, I grinned. Instantly, like blazing flames, a tremendous flood of pheromones overwhelmed me. It was an intense Alpha’s pheromones I was feeling for the first time.
“Ah, aah!”
A huge shock swallowed my lower region. As if to break and destroy me, the man collided with me fiercely. My body shook here and there like a powerless rag doll. With each collision, my body was pushed up higher and higher.
The man pulled up my upper body and hugged me tightly. Each time he thrust upward, a different part than before was crushed. Pain and pleasure mixed messily. It felt like my stomach would burst, but since my body and mind were already a complete mess anyway, I thought it didn’t matter.
I stretched out my arms, wrapped them around the man’s neck, and swallowed his lips again. I sucked in his wet breath as if it were the water of life. It was a strange sensation. A thirst endlessly rose, as if I would die with a parched throat if I couldn’t breathe this air.
“Hngh.”
Suddenly letting out a suppressed moan, the man stopped moving. Then he hugged me so tightly I couldn’t breathe. The feeling came of the creature that had been ravaging my insides wriggling and my inner walls getting warmly soaked. His who-knows-how-many-th ejaculation. My stomach and the man’s stomach had long been messily soaked with my semen.
The pheromones enveloping my entire body, the sensation of skin pressed close, the man’s bodily fluids filling my insides. A strange sense of fulfillment filled my consciousness. The breath the man exhaled while burying his face in my chest felt satisfying. The fire that had been attached to my entire body was slowly dying down, leaving residual heat.
Strength drained from my arms. Feeling the man’s solid arms embracing my back, I let go of my consciousness in a relieved state. The sensation of long fingers tangling with my fingers and a thick fragrance wrapping around my body was the last afterimage of that day when I fell into a deep sleep.
***
The next afternoon, I was stuffed into a Europe-bound airplane with a body that felt like it would shatter from unfamiliar pain, habitually chewing on the tip of my pinky finger. My anxious mind was filled with what had happened at dawn.
When I woke up in the morning, I was on a bed in a hotel room. I lay there blankly staring at the hotel ceiling, then came to my senses with a start at several flesh-colored memories that surfaced afterward. I sat up convulsively, then screamed and collapsed again from the dull pain striking my entire body.
The bruises mottling my body weren’t the problem. I felt intense dull pain not only in my waist and thighs but even in parts I’d never felt pain before. It was physical evidence that the images that had surfaced in my head weren’t simply dreams or my imagination.
I tensely looked around. I was alone in the room. I didn’t hear any sound like running water, and there were no clothes or belongings that weren’t mine. A note was placed under the lamp on the side table, but as soon as I saw it, I averted my gaze as if I’d discovered a landmine.
Then, without even thinking of washing, I hastily put on clothes first. I deliberately ignored the fact that the clothes I didn’t remember properly taking off were neatly arranged.
Just as I was about to leave the room, I turned back around as if something had grabbed my hair. The white note on the table grated on my nerves. I carefully went back into the room and stood by the table. After briefly deliberating, I tore it to shreds while still folded so I wouldn’t accidentally see the contents, and threw it in the trash.
I went straight back to my lodging, washed away the traces of last night in the shower, then immediately rushed to the airport with my luggage. My bags were already packed anyway, so it wasn’t particularly difficult. Originally, I’d planned to rest one day after the graduation party and then leave for a two-month European trip, but I just moved up the schedule by one day.
There were contacts from friends looking for me, who had suddenly disappeared without saying goodbye, but I made up excuses that I’d suddenly changed my mind. Since it wasn’t like I’d never been capricious or acted impulsively before, my friends cursed a few times and just let it go, saying they’d see me next time.
I replied to my friends in a light tone, but in truth, I was in an extremely confused state.
That was because last night’s incident wasn’t just an accident of a one-night stand done in the heat of the moment. I wasn’t married or in a relationship anyway, so I wasn’t naive enough to lose my mind over having a one-night stand.
What made me panic was that it had been a manifestation. It was the first heat in my 23 years of life. I’d already judged that there was no possibility of me fully manifesting as an Omega, so I’d never dreamed that the mild fever of the past two days was a precursor symptom of heat.
Last night had completely flown from my memory except for a few stimulating scenes. Things like the other person’s face or voice didn’t remain in my memory. I simply thought it was because my film had been cut due to excessive drinking, but I later heard from a doctor that such memory loss sometimes occurs during the first heat.
Anyway, unlike me who couldn’t remember, there was a possibility the other person knew me. They must have been drinking too, but they weren’t in rut, so they wouldn’t have been completely out of it like me. Who among the Alphas who attended Leroy’s graduation party could it be? On the plane heading to Paris, I thought of the Alphas I knew one by one while enduring the stabbing pains throughout my body.
First of all, Alphas and Omegas were only a tiny fraction in terms of population ratio, and they had a culture of associating with each other, so unless they deliberately came forward and revealed it, most people regarded each other as Betas. Even if they felt something different, it was common knowledge that asking someone if they were an Alpha or Omega was rude.
Unless it was meetings between families commonly done in the upper class, the way Alphas and Omegas recognized each other in daily life was mainly through pheromones. If they thought the other person was the same kind, they would release their usually controlled pheromones a bit more strongly, containing sexual seduction. If the other person responded to this flirting, it meant they were the same kind, and if they didn’t respond, it meant they were a Beta or had absolutely no interest in that sense.
I’d lived pretending to be a Beta among my friends, but in truth I was an Omega. This was possible because my body was no different from a Beta’s. I’d been judged as an Omega when young, but hadn’t fully manifested even after puberty passed. Since I had neither pheromones nor heat, outwardly I was exactly like a Beta.
I couldn’t even sense Alpha pheromones well. Of course, I wasn’t completely unable to sense them like a Beta, but I only felt them as faint cologne scents, not enough to be sexually stimulated.
Nevertheless, to Alphas, I apparently looked unmistakably like an Omega. I was fairly popular, with not only Beta girls but also Alphas occasionally making passes at me. Even just counting after coming to Leroy, there were three Alphas among those who had flirted with me, whether subtly or openly. Of course, there was no law saying Alphas and Betas couldn’t date, but judging by how they approached while openly displaying their pheromones, they’d clearly approached with the expectation that I might be an Omega.
In the first semester, an Alpha named Chad from the same department once asked me on a date.
‘I’m grateful, but I’m not interested in men.’
I pretended not to notice the pheromones the other person was giving off and declined indirectly. Showing his disappointment plainly, Chad openly tried to get confirmation from me.
‘I thought you were an Omega…’
Did he think if I were an Omega, I’d naturally fall for him? His face was fairly cute, but as I’d been living like a Beta, I preferred women’s appearances, so men weren’t that attractive to me. I sighed inwardly, but I deliberately made a slightly puzzled expression and asked back:
‘Ah, you were an Alpha? Sorry, but I really don’t like Alphas. I’ve had some personally bad experiences too. I’m sorry.’
I felt sorry for Chad who looked hurt, but I needed to drive the point home. These kinds of stories tend to spread as rumors later, even if they don’t seem like much. Anyway, I hadn’t lied. I didn’t say I wasn’t an Omega, and the parts about not being particularly interested in men or disliking Alphas were all true.
After this happened a couple more times, rumors gradually began to spread at Leroy that Kang Doyun seemed to hate gays or Alphas. My rejections did become more firm as time went on, but stories more exaggerated than the truth circulated and eventually reached my ears.
I felt bitter thinking “hate” was going too far, but at least after that, anyone who knew me—whether men or Alphas—didn’t make passes at me. Since I at least got the result I wanted, I just pretended not to know and let it go. In any case, thanks to that, my remaining two years were somewhat more comfortable.
If you counted them up, there weren’t many Alphas who had confessed to me like that, or people I’d heard through the grapevine were Alphas. Among them, if you picked out those who might come to Leroy’s graduation party, the number dropped sharply again. Chad, Chris, and Ryan, perhaps? But in reality, I didn’t even see Chris and Ryan at the party venue. I only glimpsed Chad from afar.
But the problem was that there might be more Alphas at Leroy who lived pretending to be Betas like me. The reasons would vary for each person, but I’d heard there were quite a few Alphas and Omegas who disliked it because they were rare beings that attracted curious stares.
Moreover, that day there were quite a few students from other universities or people from other regions who came as graduates’ partners. If that night’s partner was one of them, they wouldn’t know me either, making it nearly impossible to find them.
Nothing particularly unusual happened even after a month of European travel ended. There was no contact from someone at Leroy shouting “I heard a weird rumor” or “So you were an Omega!” Seeing that there was no contact from home either, it seemed I was the only one whose world had been turned upside down by my manifestation.
As time passed and my bewildered and anxious feelings subsided a bit, curiosity began to creep in. Still, they were the partner with whom I’d spent my first memorable heat, so wasn’t it a bit much not to know their face? Was I too oversensitive to have torn up the note?
