“Why aren’t you saying anything? Even an alpha can at least tell me where the bathroom is, can’t you? Hm? Hurry——.”
What does being an alpha have to do with giving bathroom directions.
When Cheongmyeong stayed silent, the other person squirmed, completely at a loss. Bright brown eyes — vivid enough to register even in the darkness — darted around the living room. Then, a cautious hand reached out and landed on Cheongmyeong’s forearm, urging him on.
“Hurry……. Hurry…….”
Letting the enemy reach out and touch me. A fatal mistake — but the moment skin met skin, something rose to the surface just beneath the threshold of consciousness, and there was nothing to be done about it. A foreign spy with a face impossible to look away from, screaming about a bathroom. Without warning, a wave of indecent imaginings crashed over him.
Yu Cheongmyeong had always been a man of vivid imagination. Doctors were, by nature, half artists. Of everything he’d learned in medical school, the only things he could remember were how to stitch up wounds and how to draw a pretty anatomical diagram of the human body. Thanks to that, Yu Cheongmyeong had built quite a name for himself as an agent with an exceptional eye for vital points.
In Cheongmyeong’s imagination, the man had both arms pinned behind his back, legs twisting together in obvious distress. His heels, helpless against the height difference, lifted off the ground, and he could only barely hold himself up on the tips of his toes. A mirror bathed in white light. The spy reflected in it looked utterly worn from crying, lips bitten shut in what seemed like surrender.
Cheongmyeong met the spy’s eyes through the mirror. Smooth skin without a single mark on it. Neatly trimmed fingernails. And a scent — embarrassingly soft and warm for a grown man, like a baby — drifted off him. All of it weapons the spy had honed to seduce him.
You said you needed to go. What should I do about that.
With one hand, Cheongmyeong easily held both the spy’s arms and slid between his thighs. The bathroom, thick with stifled, ragged breathing. The moment his fingertips grazed the inside of those thighs, the man shuddered violently and shrank in on himself — until at last, damp eyes lifted to plead with him.
Let me go, it’s too much to bear…….
After that needlessly elaborate and obscene fantasy, blood rushed to his head in an instant, and air flooded sharply into his brain.
His vision swam. His head felt light. What on earth is happening in the middle of the night. Cheongmyeong decided, for now, to play along with the intruder putting on this act of wide-eyed innocence.
Right. Playing along, purely. Not because I’m drawn in, not because I’ve fallen for this man’s clumsy seduction — if anything, this is closer to a counter-offensive…….
Cheongmyeong suppressed his roughening breath and asked.
“……Want me to help you go?”
“I can go by myself?”
The spy shot back curtly and looked up at him with hazy eyes. Just being looked at like that was almost enough to tear an involuntary gasp out of him.
Head still spinning, Cheongmyeong belatedly realized that the scent coming off the man was not a baby’s scent at all. A floral fragrance he had never smelled before mingled recklessly with the raw smell of water, wrapping itself around him.
Is he insane. The moment his mind registered the shape of the scent, the floral smell thickened brutally, as though burrowing into his brain. There’s not even a diffuser in this apartment — how is this possible.
Did he spray perfume on his bare skin? He came here determined to seduce me.
He was going to lose his mind. Something was wrong. No matter how much the man looked like his ideal type, even accounting for that — his own head was in far too much chaos. Something beyond reason’s ability to control had become a hook, closing around his throat and heart.
Yu Cheongmyeong was not, by nature, this emotional or impulsive. If anything, years of life as an intelligence agent had earned him a reputation for being cold and heartless. He did occasionally fail to suppress the urge to beat a target senseless — but in those cases, they were always people who had it coming.
Damn it! Damn it!
The person in front of him, on the other hand, felt like too much of a waste to simply kill or arrest and hand off to the NIS. What man in the world could easily give up an ideal type who looked like they’d stepped straight out of a dream?
But work and personal feelings had to be kept firmly on separate sides of a line. Ideal type or not, this person was clearly a capable enemy with their sights set on Cheongmyeong’s life. Having made it this far inside, letting them live was simply not an option. Having barely managed to cool his unrestrained excitement, Cheongmyeong met the man’s youthful eyes and spoke.
“If we’d met outside instead of like this, we would have gotten along so much better.”
“What……? I don’t know what that means, I need to pee!”
“For the love of——.”
But regardless, the man had been saying nothing but I need to pee over and over again from the start.
What is even the concept here. If this is a strategy to throw me off guard, it’s definitely working.
Cheongmyeong looked the man over from face to feet. His eyes landed on those impossibly thin legs, and he clenched his back teeth and made a decision.
Knock him out first. Figure out the rest after. He was about to raise his hand and strike a pressure point — that very instant.
“Should I just go in the sand, then.”
Scowling, the man muttered — and disappeared from Cheongmyeong’s field of view in an instant. Truly, in the blink of an eye. A split second, less than a single moment of light.
“What.”
Cheongmyeong let out a baffled sound, eyes sweeping rapidly around him.
The spy was gone. The spacious living room was bare — just a sofa and a TV, with hardly any furniture or decorations to speak of. No matter how thin the man was, there was nowhere for a fully grown adult to hide. And in that short a time? Just a moment, the barest blink of an eye……
“Mya-ang.”
Startled by the spy’s sudden disappearance, he spun around at the sound of a cat’s cry. It came from the cat litter box beside the bathroom — the one filled with sand. May, crouched in the sand, bared her fangs at him.
“Myaa-aang!!”
For whatever reason she was displeased, she raised her voice in a long, high yowl. Her eyes, too, had narrowed into sharp triangles. Bewildered as he was, Cheongmyeong moved on instinct and walked over to crouch in front of May. He watched his cat using the litter box with a blank expression and muttered to himself.
“What on earth is even…….”
Some spy shows up in my apartment demanding to know where the bathroom is, then vanishes into thin air in an instant — and instead of a spy, my cat is now in the middle of peeing in her litter box.
“Was it a dream.”
Cheongmyeong muttered, pressing a hand to his forehead, then stood and turned back toward the front door.
The triple-layered locks he’d installed at the entrance were all securely fastened, and the angle of the door handle — which Yu Cheongmyeong always bent a precise way out of habit — was unchanged. If someone had forced their way in through the front door, the angle would certainly have been different. He checked the balcony just in case. Same result. Not a single trace of any break-in.
Well. No human being could disappear from inside an apartment in under a second. Was it really a dream.
Come to think of it, sure. An ideal type who looked like he’d walked straight out of Cheongmyeong’s own mind, suddenly appearing naked with his sights set on him. It was a story with no grounding in reality.
What a shame.
A heaviness settled over him, as though he had abruptly lost his ideal type for the first time in thirty years of life. An enemy spy, of all things. Attractive, too. He’d briefly entertained a future where he did all sorts of things to the man under the guise of interrogation.
Cheongmyeong turned to go — and caught May’s eyes.
May had finished her business with great satisfaction in the litter box that was quite large for her small body, and was now poised to leap out of it with great dignity.
“Kyaang.”
From May’s still-small vocal cords, the sound that came out was less ferocious and rather more adorable than she probably intended.
He’d only been looking because it was cute — but as Cheongmyeong’s gaze lingered, May seemed to hesitate, propping a paw up on the edge of the litter box. Then, methodically, she began to cover the traces of her business with sand. It was the act of acknowledging that the owner of this home was not herself, but Cheongmyeong.
“I don’t mind either way.”
Even if May thinks she’s the owner, well. Somehow, the burning thirst from before was entirely forgotten.
Mio was in a predicament — he had transformed into a human without warning the night before.
The timing, at least, had been ideal since it happened in the middle of the night, but a significant problem remained.
He didn’t know the way home.
Chae Mio, who had never taken a taxi on his own or navigated the streets with a maps app on his phone, had no clear path back to his house. City life was far more complicated than he had ever imagined from inside the manor. Knowing the home address wasn’t enough on its own. And more immediately, he needed to deal with a very basic physiological urge first.
He needed to use the bathroom.
He cautiously pushed open a door and found a toilet in what looked like an extremely cramped storage closet. There was a shower stall and a mirror, too, but the size and shape were so different from what he knew at home that Mio couldn’t quite register it as a bathroom.
Didn’t a bathroom have to have a large window, several potted plants, a big bathtub?
More than anything, Chae Mio was at the point where the slightest push would send him over the edge — his need to use the bathroom was so urgent that rational thought was impossible. Just as his vision was about to start spinning, Cheongmyeong appeared, having woken up from sleep.
Since the two of them had met as human and cat, Cheongmyeong clearly had no way of recognizing Mio in his true form. But Chae Mio’s physiological need was so pressing that his brain could barely function. He didn’t want to be rude in the apartment of an alpha he’d met for the first time outside.
Yu Cheongmyeong had failed to understand him when Mio was a cat too, and this time, once again, communication wasn’t getting through. In that moment, wishing intensely that he could just turn back into a cat and go in the sand — his body actually reverted.
What incredible luck!
By the time day began to break, cat Mio was lying on the bed Cheongmyeong had bought him, belly exposed to the ceiling, fast asleep.
Unlike before, when his regular routine had him opening his eyes at exactly seven in the morning, the early-morning ordeal seemed to have taken its toll — his eyes refused to open properly. Even when someone poked and prodded him here and there, he only grumbled and didn’t wake.
Mio had written off last night’s incident as a harmless little mishap. As far as he could tell, the man had gone straight to bed after everything was over, and hadn’t shown a flicker of suspicion when they’d made eye contact — so there shouldn’t be any problem.
“May.”
A warm voice reached him first, and the sensation of touch followed a beat later. Cheongmyeong reached out and carefully, gently stroked Mio’s white belly with his fingers.
The two front paws that had been drifting through the air slowly, as if swimming, flexed — and tiny claws peeked out just slightly. A sign that he didn’t like it. But Yu Cheongmyeong paid no mind. After a moment, he scooped up the cat’s body in both hands.
“Our May is such a sleepyhead.”
“…….”
“May, you know — daddy met his ideal type in a dream last night.”
