That kind of work had always been the easiest career path for omegas to choose. Even now, this very moment, was proof of that. Seohan had known full well that what Cesare wanted was an omega he could draw pheromones from at any time — and hadn’t he gone to the interview anyway.
It was common enough that it wasn’t even a heavy topic. And yet Seohan squeezed his eyes shut as he denied it.
“I really haven’t!”
“Damn…… do I believe this or not.”
Cesare slowly dragged his tongue over his lower lip and narrowed his eyes.
The flush spreading over the reddened corners of his eyes and his pale cheeks was sensual. Like a peach soaked through with water. A peach with the skin split open, showing the tempting flesh beneath.
They all just left someone like this alone?
That was the harder thing to believe. Any alpha worth anything would have paid up, whatever the price, to take him home. Even a recessive with weak pheromones — a face like that wouldn’t be held against him much.
“I really haven’t……”
But Seohan mumbled with a thoroughly aggrieved pout. Those gentle eyes wavered slightly, and the long lashes trembled. Whatever he was imagining on his own, his cheeks flushed softly pink and then faded again.
The sight of him — like a little groom who’d just been gravely teased — stirred a petty mischief in Cesare along with a desire he hadn’t felt before.
“Someone watching would think I’d just asked you to tumble right here.”
“R-right here?!”
Seohan gasped at the throwaway remark and clutched his collar shut. Those clear eyes, which had been slowly letting their guard down, sharpened to a point in an instant. When he should have been baring skin and begging to sign the contract, here he was bundling himself up tight. Hopelessly foolish.
It was ambiguous. For Cesare, who had always been clear-cut in what was right and wrong, what he liked and disliked — ambiguity was a feeling he hadn’t experienced in a long time. But the man in front of him couldn’t be defined with any clean, precise label.
By qualifications alone, he was the most lacking omega Cesare had ever seen. The naive type was also exactly the kind of person Cesare most avoided.
And yet the mere fact that his pheromones weren’t repulsive made him tempting enough to deliberate over. More than that — all the individual qualities that would normally have made Cesare’s skin crawl weren’t bothering him at all. If anything, they kept snagging his gaze, which was inconvenient.
Cesare’s long fingers tapped slowly against the sofa’s armrest. Like a cat tracking a toy, Seohan’s eyes moved in time with the rhythm.
“……Go on, then.”
“Oh — yes.”
The moment Cesare flicked his hand in dismissal, Seohan shot to his feet as though he’d been waiting for nothing else. His relief at being shown the door was painfully obvious.
“Goodbye.”
Seohan bowed and then bolted in the direction of the elevator. His light hair swayed with the movement.
Not a rabbit, is he — watching him scurry away before the words were even out of his mouth, a muscle twitched in Cesare’s cheek. But then the sight of Seohan turning to Colin for help because he didn’t know how to use the elevator — for no particular reason, that twisted something in him. The wrong person to be asking for help, wasn’t it.
“Looks like you don’t need fare money.”
“Oh……!”
The impulsive mention of fare money brought Seohan spinning around from where he’d been hovering near the elevator. And his eyes lit up like a dog wagging its tail at a treat.
“You’re giving me fare money too?”
He’d come running over so fast that his wavy hair was thoroughly disheveled — whether he knew it or not, Seohan was breathing in quick, expectant little puffs.
You’d expect someone to at least put up a show of refusing out of courtesy or pride, but there was no sign of any hesitation. He stood before Cesare like a ten-year-old waiting for pocket money and held both palms straight out together.
The palms of those small hands looked especially soft. As pale and faintly pink as his cheeks.
“Here.”
Cesare pulled his wallet from his inner pocket and took out a fifty-krang note. He’d intended to hand over about ten krang and be done with it — but his hand was pulling out fifty as if enchanted. No sooner had he held it out than Seohan snatched it up. A small exclamation escaped those plump lips.
“Wow!”
Not fifty one-krang notes, not five ten-krang notes. Just one single bill. Seohan, touching a fifty-krang note for the first time in his life, actually began tilting it this way and that under the ceiling light to examine it.
“Ha! You think I’d give you a counterfeit?”
“It’s not that I don’t trust you, it’s just — it’s so amazing……”
At the scolding, all he did was smile sheepishly. The way his hands handled the bill was like someone cradling a gemstone.
“Wow……”
The eyes gazing at the bill were bright, like a new sprout catching spring sunlight for the first time. Eyes where every emotion spread transparently. Even a small smile curved those eyes into something lovely.
Cesare frowned without realizing it, then opened his wallet again. Another twenty krang came out.
“Take more if the ride’s far.”
“Thank you……!”
Seohan quickly scooped up the two notes that landed on the table. As though afraid Cesare might take the words back, he even pulled his wallet out of his bag.
The cloth wallet that came out of the worn bag was a tacky little thing printed with peaches and tomatoes. Figures — it suited him perfectly.
Seohan folded the bills neatly and tucked them into the worn cloth wallet, put the wallet back in his bag, and hugged the bag tightly to his chest. Then he shot a sideways glance at Cesare as if asking whether he could really go now. It was impossibly irritating.
“……Go.”
“Right this way, please.”
Colin guided Seohan toward the guards. Even after stepping into the elevator, Seohan kept his eyes down on the bag he was clutching so preciously. All Cesare could see from where he stood was the round top of the man’s head. When even that disappeared from view, a pointless thirst stirred in him.
“I’ll replace your gloves.”
The moment the elevator doors closed, Colin — who had already ordered the room aired out — held out a fresh pair of gloves.
It was nothing out of the ordinary. Whenever contact with an omega ended, Cesare always changed his gloves first.
Not just the gloves, either. Whatever he’d been wearing that day went straight into the trash. It was his firm belief that omega pheromones clung like leeches — better to just throw everything out cleanly.
“Executive Director?”
“……”
Cesare said nothing and slowly opened and closed his gloved hand. The sensation of that throat moving beneath his palm lingered faintly in his hand. Along with the barest trace of pheromone.
With a careless motion, he knocked the fresh gloves aside.
“It’s fine.”
The man’s pheromones resembled his clear, unspoiled face.
The scent of young green leaves just unfurling in spring, and something like sunlight. There was a crisp freshness to it too, like an unripe apple — but no matter how many deep breaths he drew, it was so faint he couldn’t quite grasp it.
Cesare’s gaze drifted toward the window. A raw, green scent that didn’t belong at all to this grey city, where rain fell endlessly day and night.
The Graven Federation was drenched in rain. In this city where a clear sky was a rare sight, it was an ordinary scene.
The rain that had started before dawn turned to a downpour by morning. District 4 had many homes patched together with planks or small rooms that leaked, so days like this had everyone scrambling.
“……”
Among them all, Seohan sat in a private hover car for the first time in his life, watching the people of District 4 running back and forth.
A hover car was a vehicle that moved while suspended above the ground. It wasn’t quite the feeling of flying through the sky — it was a high-end private vehicle that floated roughly ten centimeters above the surface and glided smoothly forward.
This was his first time encountering a hover car outside of hearsay. Apparently it had been a common mode of transport before the Chaos Era, but that was already seventy years ago.
The fuel demands were so enormous that now, in the present day, the number of people who could actually use a hover car could be counted on one hand. A hover car was more than a simple vehicle — it was a symbol of power. Seohan found himself thinking about how the Herald family had built their wealth through the fuel industry in the aftermath of the collapse.
On a rainy day like today, hover cars were particularly useful. Because they floated above the ground, they were unaffected by weather conditions like snow or rain, and they were fast as well.
Unlike the dreary world outside, the interior of the hover car was dry and warm. With only a single pane of glass between them, the air was starkly different on either side, and it gave Seohan a strange feeling. A slight discomfort came with it.
Hope the room’s alright.
Seohan and Eddie’s place got especially damp on days of heavy rain. Fortunately it didn’t leak, but no matter how many times they tried to get rid of the mold, it just kept spreading.
Seohan watched the raindrops hitting the car window and absentmindedly ran his fingers over the leather seat. It struck him as a little surreal, sitting on a leather seat instead of out in the downpour.
“Is today something like a second interview?”
Seohan asked Colin, who was seated up front. Colin looked mildly flustered for a moment, then turned back to look at Seohan before answering.
“Yes, you could say that.”
Even Colin found it hard to answer with confidence. They’d never gotten as far as a second interview before, and normally the decision of whether to proceed to the bedroom was made at the very first meeting.
“I see.”
Seohan drew out the last syllable of his reply and fidgeted with his fingers.
It had been a few days since the interview with Cesare Herald. He’d assumed he’d been rejected outright at the first meeting — but the very next day, Seohan had received a text. It said he needed to come back in for an STI screening.
The deliberation was brief. The fare money alone had covered his rent and then some, so there was no reason to refuse. And so Seohan had gone in and had blood drawn, a secondary gender test done, and various other checks performed.
And now, a week later — word had come that the results were in and he should visit again.
Honestly, when he’d first gone in for the tests, he’d worried about his terminal diagnosis being discovered. It wasn’t a contagious illness, but this was Cesare — someone who was finicky enough about choosing an omega as it was. Nothing good would come of him knowing that his omega wasn’t in perfect health.
It was odd that nothing had been said even after the blood test and the secondary gender test were both completed, but either way — if he hadn’t been found out, that was a good thing.
Seohan, being the easygoing soul that he was, brushed it off without giving it much more thought.
