He needed to think of a way to handle this. Yuhyeon, anxiously gnawing at the edge of a fingernail, set down the medication in his hand. Since today was the very start of the cycle, he figured he could take half a pill tomorrow and the remaining half the day after. As long as he stayed shut in his room, it should be manageable.
Or maybe I can get a few pills from the community health center.
It wouldn’t be formulated for his constitution, so there’d be side effects — but anything he could take was better than nothing. The question was whether he could get it for free. If that didn’t work out, he’d have to stop random omegas on the street and beg them for their medication. Yuhyeon’s face, already weighed down with worry, crumpled further into something wretched.
Do I really… have to go that far?
Yuhyeon tapped the corner of the medicine packet absently and let his empty gaze disappear behind his eyelids. When he closed his eyes, thick darkness welcomed him. He couldn’t see past tomorrow — was there any point in struggling this hard just to keep going? Dark thoughts began seeping slowly into his mind, though they never quite reached an ending like just end it all. Yuhyeon was too much of a coward to choose death.
Money, money, money.
He was so tired of it. There hadn’t been a single moment in his life when he wasn’t worried about money. He couldn’t even remember the last time things felt livable — so what was left to sink to, really. Revisiting all the misery of the past somehow, strangely, calmed the pounding in his chest. Somehow, if you keep living, life continues. If he ground through each day, his existence would be prolonged whether he liked it or not. His thoughts settled into something vague and shapeless, and his hand drifted to the foreign sensation at his throat.
“…Oh. The ring.”
A subject he’d briefly turned over a few hours ago resurfaced and tugged at something in him. What if I just sold it and disappeared — wanting something that belonged to someone else just because he was struggling, what a terrible thing. Yuhyeon told himself again not to go there. Doing something reckless would only invite the worst possible outcome.
He let his heavy, limp body fall onto the bed sheets and lay there — when someone knocked at his front door. Surely it wasn’t his father again. Since his father had found out which unit he lived in, Yuhyeon tensed slightly as he pushed himself upright. If it was his father, he had absolutely no intention of opening the door. He crept to the shoe cabinet and pressed his ear toward the sound coming from outside. The moment he was certain it was his father, he planned to go silent and pretend no one was home.
Knock, knock, knock. The sound came again.
“Mr. Seo Yuhyeon. Are you there.”
It was Chae Seongjun’s voice.
The boss…?
Yuhyeon’s first shock was hearing Seongjun’s voice just outside his door. His second was the realization that Seongjun knew where he lived.
Oh… right. The resume.
There was no reason an employer wouldn’t know where a part-timer lived. He had moved mid-employment and his address had changed, but he’d informed the manager of the new one — so pulling up the staff records would make finding the address easy enough.
He opened the door to reveal Chae Seongjun standing tall in the hallway. He was dressed just as neatly as he had been at the bar that afternoon. There was a disconnect between this version of him and the one Yuhyeon had found. Even after a successful surgery, moving around this soon should have been difficult — yet Seongjun showed no sign of discomfort or pain whatsoever. Yuhyeon’s eyes had lingered somewhere around the man’s abdomen before they met Seongjun’s.
The expression looking back at him was so composed it was impossible to read. He was simply standing there, gaze resting near Yuhyeon’s throat. Within that look were emotions Yuhyeon couldn’t find words for.
“It seems like we have things to discuss.”
The unhurried voice that filled the quiet space reached Yuhyeon’s ears. Things to discuss. It was broad enough that Yuhyeon couldn’t tell what Seongjun actually wanted to say.
The smashed phone? The hospital? Or maybe…
The one thing he was certain about was that the ring would definitely come up.
Yuhyeon reached toward his throat, feeling for the necklace the ring was threaded onto, intending to return it to Seongjun right then. At that, Seongjun crossed the threshold and stepped into the narrow entryway. At the proximity — close enough that their breath could reach each other — Yuhyeon felt the pressure and stepped back instinctively. But putting distance between them in a space this small wasn’t easy.
Too close. If he was being slightly dramatic, the man’s chest was practically right in front of his nose. Every breath he drew in carried Seongjun’s scent. Whether it was simply because of how uncomfortably close they were, the image of the man pulling him into his arms kept replaying in his head. Yuhyeon worked hard to push away the stray thought that kept surfacing.
“Would it be alright if I came inside?”
“Oh, inside…”
It clearly wasn’t going to be a short conversation — he wanted to come in. The man’s question snapped Yuhyeon back to his senses, and he quickly scanned his room with a sideways glance. Setting aside the fact that the room was too cramped to properly receive a guest, the word yes simply wouldn’t come out.
Seongjun was an alpha. And he was an omega in the early stages of a heat cycle. His own pheromones were faint enough that they wouldn’t be an issue for Seongjun — but the reverse was a different matter entirely. A dominant’s pheromones were something Yuhyeon had to be careful around.
“There’s a park nearby… Would you like to go there instead?”
An open space would hopefully keep him from getting caught up in Seongjun’s pheromones. Seongjun didn’t seem to dislike the suggestion — he turned around without hesitation. His manner suggested the location made no particular difference to him. Yuhyeon followed the man down the stairs and out of the building.
The nearby park was only a three-minute walk. It was a short enough distance, and yet Yuhyeon trailed behind him the whole way, fidgeting with his fingers out of awkwardness. It had been Yuhyeon who suggested the park, and yet the man moved as though he knew the area well. He didn’t look around, and he didn’t ask Yuhyeon where the park was — which made it certain. He had definitely been here before.
The boss knows a neighborhood like this well… That’s unexpected.
This area was packed with single-room apartments — not the kind of place someone who didn’t live here would have much reason to wander through. The main road would be a different story, but around here, there was nothing except entertainment bars and karaoke places.
Maybe he passed through at some point.
Yuhyeon let the thought end there, unremarkably. Even just covering the short distance felt stilted in the silence. He wanted to bring up something ordinary, anything, to dissolve the awkwardness. But there wasn’t really a fitting topic to raise with this man.
The only thing we’d have to talk about is that incident.
The boss had come looking for him with that exact topic in mind, most likely. Yuhyeon’s mind turned as he unconsciously pursed and unpursed his lips out of habit — and he caught a gaze on him. His head turned toward Seongjun, and their eyes met.
How long has he been watching?
Yuhyeon tucked his lips back in and clasped both hands together in embarrassment. It felt, somehow, like the places his gaze had passed over were tingling. Yuhyeon stared hard at his own moving sneakers and desperately hoped the park would come into view soon. The moment the entrance appeared, he darted forward and pointed to a nearby bench.
“Would you like to sit here and talk?”
“Let’s do that.”
It was set beneath a large tree and was the only seat that hadn’t been soaked by the rain. Yuhyeon gave it a rough brush-off and settled himself beside the man.
The streetlamp installed in the park seemed to be on its last legs — it flickered frequently. Every time the light went out completely, shadow fell across the man’s face and made him look like he was angry. Each time, Yuhyeon had to work to hide the way he startled.
Someone should maintain these lamps…
Yuhyeon directed his irritation somewhere it didn’t belong.
Glancing around, he realized it was just him and Seongjun in the park. The rain that afternoon had left the ground wet, which seemed to have kept the evening walkers away. Just as he was soaking in the desolate atmosphere, cool fingers made contact with the back of his neck. More precisely — with the necklace that the ring was threaded on.
A coldness that didn’t feel like it could belong to a human body made Yuhyeon instinctively shrink back. Then the thought crossed his mind that Seongjun might have found that embarrassing, so he flapped his hand through the air as though he’d been startled by an insect.
“Before I bring anything up, there’s something I need to tell you.”
Seongjun leaned his upper body forward and tapped his own temple lightly.
“My memory right now is not entirely intact.”
“I’m sorry…?”
When Seongjun had suggested they talk, Yuhyeon had expected him to bring up the ring or the question of compensation for what had happened. But the words that came out of his mouth were nothing like what he’d anticipated.
His memory isn’t intact…
Did that mean something like amnesia? A condition he’d only ever seen in dramas — hearing it now from someone right in front of him left Yuhyeon at a loss.
“I looked into it, and it seems you acted as my guardian.”
“Oh, if you mean the hospital… yes.”
It wasn’t anything special. Calling an ambulance and helping with emergency care was something even a stranger could do.
“Could you walk me through the situation in detail — what it was like when you found me?”
Seongjun pressed his temple again, as though to emphasize that his memory wasn’t there. Yuhyeon carefully read his expression and tried to gauge the situation. It was possible that his account was needed to piece together what had happened. If that wasn’t the reason, there was no reason for the man to come looking for him and bring up memory loss. But even if Yuhyeon was willing to tell him everything, the truth was that he knew nothing about the incident itself — so in reality, he wasn’t going to be much help.
