“Yong. Are you not feeling well?”
Again today, some girl was pressing her palm into Yong Cheonha’s knee and breathing softly against his ear.
“Why do you look like a dog that needs to poop so bad today? Stop shaking your leg — you’ll shake your luck away.”
His luck could fly off into the void for all he cared, as long as a pretty alpha would just drop down in front of him.
“What’s wrong? Scoping out a boyfriend again? Why not just date me instead?”
“If you don’t want her, I’m available too, you know. I’ll treat you well?”
“Leave him alone. Our Yong has very firm tastes. What a shame he wasn’t an alpha.”
Yong Cheonha agreed wholeheartedly. There were so many girls who liked him. And they were all pretty, too.
Pretty girls were everywhere you went — so why. Why were men. Why were alphas among them, specifically.
The ones worth looking at were always taken, and whenever he lowered his standards and made all kinds of concessions, most of them either had some glaring flaw or treated Yong Cheonha not as a romantic prospect but as a rival.
Not even a lovable face to show for it — and on top of that, petty and small-minded too.
It was a shame, but this was reality, and it was a miserable tragedy. God. He needed a cigarette.
“Get off my knee.”
“Whhyyy.”
“I need to use the bathroom. Come on, off.”
The way she pouted and climbed down from where she’d planted herself was admittedly quite cute. If she had presented as an alpha, life really would have been worth living.
If that had been the case, maybe a lot of things would have been different.
For one, he wouldn’t have studied hard, so he probably wouldn’t have gotten into a prestigious university the way he had now — and he would have inherited his grandfather’s loan shark business instead.
Maybe he would have ended up with his first love, and wouldn’t be going through all this trouble trying to land a decent alpha like he was now.
First love.
What a futile pair of words.
Everyone must have their own puppy love.
They said people experienced their first love at an average age of 17.5, but no matter how he thought about it, the statistics seemed to have some margin of error.
Yong Cheonha was now in the third year of middle school and hadn’t had his birthday yet, so he was still 14 in international age — but most of the people around him had already dated someone or were currently in a relationship.
Among everyone around Yong Cheonha, the only one without any dating experience was Yong Cheonha himself.
Were they all just mature for their age, or was he simply a late bloomer?
Or were the people around him just fumbling through imitation romance because they wanted to act like adults without even knowing what love was?
He wasn’t sure which it was, but Yong Cheonha had never once felt a flutter or a pull toward anyone, not for a single moment. He had received a few confessions, but they stirred nothing in him and he turned them all down.
He had started to wonder if he was what people called asexual, and felt a little sorry for his mother — but on the first day back at school, the day he went up to third year of middle school, he met his first love.
His first love was a girl in the same class, seated diagonally across from him — at first, he hadn’t even registered her existence.
She was always there when he lifted his head. It took him quite a while to even notice that he had been looking at her often.
It was only when someone he used to hang around with casually asked in passing whether he had feelings for her that he finally realized.
Once he became aware of it, it was unmistakable. Yong Cheonha had been watching her back at all hours, for no particular reason. It wasn’t that she was always somewhere visible — it was that he had always been looking for her, and that was why he kept seeing her.
Until he figured that out, he hadn’t understood why, yet he had been chasing after glimpses of her, just watching, and before he knew it he would be sighing without meaning to, and — well. That was how it was.
She was someone his gaze was drawn to in a strange way. Maybe it was because, for a girl, her hair was strikingly short.
Naturally curly as it was, her hair was cropped short enough to leave her nape fully visible, with ends that curved slightly and had a fluffy, springy quality.
On days when she came in without having dried it all the way, her head would look smaller and then puff up to twice its usual size as it dried — and when she had napped hard face-down at her desk, one side would be flattened flat, which was a little cute.
She was also quite tall for a girl. 173cm, was it? Her arms and legs were long, which made her look even taller than she was.
And her eyes always looked like they were on the verge of watering, as if she was about to yawn at any moment — every time he looked at her, they glistened.
Somehow, watching her made his insides feel ticklish — she stirred something protective in him. A little like looking at a pretty Bichon Frisé, or a newborn lamb.
Someone his gaze drifted to without reason, someone who kept coming to mind.
That, the world called a first love — and so that girl was Yong Cheonha’s first love.
On top of that, she was said to be an omega.
Secondary types typically presented between the fifth year of elementary school and the first year of middle school, and during that time, they would fall into the fever of a first love. The people around Yong Cheonha had all presented around a similar time and had dating experience to show for it.
Yong Cheonha alone had been a beta, with no dating experience whatsoever.
He couldn’t tell if this was a good thing or a bad thing. The feeling was so unfamiliar that he found himself casually dropping mention of the girl to the people around him — and they immediately piled on, eager to chime in. The ones who had presented started talking among themselves about her pheromones, this and that. Inside knowledge that only they were privy to.
What does her pheromone smell like. What does it feel like.
Why am I the only one who doesn’t know that?
He couldn’t have felt more wronged.
Not even knowing what pheromone scent the person he liked carried.
It was a league of secondary types only, one that Yong Cheonha — a beta — had no right to enter. The fact that he couldn’t belong to her world consumed him with such frustration that he couldn’t sleep.
It wasn’t just that he couldn’t sleep — the frustration was so severe that he collapsed backward in the middle of the night, overcome by a fit of rage-induced illness.
The household was thrown into an uproar.
His guardians, who could never have imagined that a 16-year-old with nothing to stress about and no material or emotional want in his life could collapse from psychosomatic illness born of suppressed rage, were startled and called an ambulance.
Even as he was being loaded into the ambulance, Yong Cheonha kept murmuring why am I the only one who doesn’t know.
His mother teared up asking him what he meant by that, and his father broke into a sweat, telling him he’d give him whatever he wanted as long as he didn’t lose consciousness.
Aside from the flood of Yongmun faction members swarming into the hospital shortly after they arrived at the emergency room and creating a tense atmosphere throughout the ward, the rest of the process went smoothly.
It was nothing serious, and the results came back quickly. The diagnosis was very simple — though somewhat difficult for his guardians to accept.
They had long known that their precious child’s temperament was not exactly silken — but accepting that his body had been unable to outlast his own rotten temper and had gone ahead and presented anyway was no easy thing.
Of course, the hardest time was had by the person himself.
He had only been curious about his unrequited love’s pheromone scent — he had never wanted to present as the same secondary type as his unrequited love.
Yes. Yong Cheonha had, in a fit of rage, presented as an omega just like that.
But he decided to think about it positively.
A true man, after all, does not get hung up on secondary type.
Either way, hadn’t the goal been accomplished? He had presented as a secondary type, so now he could finally sense that girl’s pheromones too.
Thinking about it that way, it didn’t seem so bad.
But as luck would have it, he had presented during the summer break — so there was no chance of seeing even a shadow of his unrequited love for the entire duration of the break.
In the meantime, Yong Cheonha went through a heat cycle he’d never bargained for in his fate, and shot up in height considerably.
They said that when you presented as an omega, your height stopped growing, and in some cases your voice didn’t even change — but he grew so much that his joints ached.
His voice deepened and his facial features sharpened. Strangely, muscle also came to him with unusual ease, and his uncles were beside themselves with awe, making him lift dumbbells for the entirety of the break.
Thanks to that, when school started again, he was met with the question of whether he had presented as an extreme-end alpha.
He wasn’t an alpha, only an omega who had presented — but such a trivial thing as secondary type could not diminish Yong Cheonha.
He was surprised every time he looked in the mirror, day after day. Growing better-looking with each passing day. So this was a growth spurt. The Yong household had produced quite a specimen. What were they to do. Ha.
But more than anything else, what he wanted for the second semester was to get a little closer to that girl.
It would be the first time seeing her face in a whole month. When he thought about it, he had never actually had a proper conversation with her.
What should he say? His insides felt ticklish.
For now, start with a casual “hey” —— and then what? You’re kind of cute? Too thuggish?
While he was deliberating, someone sat down in the diagonal seat that had been empty.
He hadn’t been planning to confess and ask to date her on the spot, so he casually started to speak to her.
“Hm?”
“……”
“What?”
The face that turned toward Yong Cheonha was the same face from his memory — but something felt off……
The soft, ticklish feeling in his heart went stiff.
“No, nothing.”
Why does it feel like this? Something had curiously cooled. Something was missing. Her face that always looked a little on the verge of tears, her slight frame — nothing seemed to have changed, so why had that warm, fuzzy feeling turned hard and rigid?
The feeling that had been like a pink cloud of cotton candy was nowhere to be found. He felt nothing at all.
“……What’s your pheromone scent?”
“Huh……. Why are you asking that?”
Because I got so worked up wanting to know that I collapsed from sheer frustration. And then I presented because of it. Shouldn’t knowing that at least fill this hollow feeling?
He had clearly liked her — or so he thought — but why did it feel like this. Where had his pounding heart gone? It needed CPR.
What an anticlimactic end! He even felt a little wronged.
What in the world was all of that for?
And so Yong Cheonha’s puppy love drew to a close. The price of unrequited love was presenting as an omega — and thanks to that, alphas he had never cared about before kept catching his eye.
Right. He had become someone for whom nothing less than an alpha would do.
The fever of unrequited love at sixteen. From that point on, Yong Cheonha had thrown himself into the pursuit of romance with desperate devotion — but all that remained with him at twenty was a collection of blocked phone numbers belonging to terrible catches he’d long since written off.
