Chapter One #2
The rooftop door bangs open and the evening air hits us, warm and tinged with the last heat of the day.
The sky is streaked orange and pink, fading to a deep blue at the edges, and the city sprawls out below us in every direction, lights just starting to flicker on in the buildings and along the streets.
It’s a good view, which is why this rooftop has been our spot since Hongjoong discovered the service entrance could be picked during our first year.
Things happen fast after that. Seungwon produces four bottles of soju from his backpack like a magician pulling rabbits from a hat, followed by a bottle of cheap beer and a bag of paper cups.
Dokyeom dumps three plastic bags worth of snacks onto the concrete: dried squid, shrimp chips, chocolate bars, rice crackers, and an inexplicable bunch of bananas that nobody claims ownership of.
Jaeho pulls out a portable music player, the kind with a tiny built-in speaker that makes everything sound like it’s being played through a tin can, and suddenly there’s music blasting across the rooftop, some upbeat track with a heavy bass line that the little speaker absolutely cannot handle.
Pilkyu is already cracking open the first soju bottle, pouring with both hands, and cups are being passed around.
Someone shoves one into my hand and I take it without any real intention.
I’m not supposed to drink. Omegas aren’t supposed to drink, it’s technically illegal, one of those laws that exists on paper and gets enforced selectively, usually against omegas who don’t have the social standing to push back.
My parents have always been firm about it, not because they care about the law but because they worry about my health, about what alcohol does to omega biology.
And honestly, I agree with them. I’ve seen what it does.
I’ve watched omegas at parties lose control of their scent regulation after a few drinks, watched them become vulnerable in rooms full of alphas whose inhibitions are also lowered.
It’s not a combination I’m interested in testing.
But I’m not about to explain all of that to a rooftop full of rowdy alphas on graduation night, so I hold my cup and I fake it.
“To us!” Hongjoong shouts, holding his cup high.
The orange light catches his face, his sharp features, that damn dimple.
His hair is messy from the wind, sleek black locks pushed back, and he looks so alive, so completely in his element, surrounded by his friends on a rooftop with stolen soju and bad music.
“To surviving four years of hell and coming out the other side!”
“To us!” the chorus goes up, cups clashing together with sloppy enthusiasm, soju sloshing over the rims and onto fingers.
I touch my cup to Hongjoong’s and bring it to my lips. I tilt it back just enough to wet my mouth, then lower it. Nobody notices. They’re all too busy drinking for real, throwing back their cups and immediately reaching for refills.
The first hour is loud and golden. We rehash every stupid thing we’ve ever done within these school walls, and the list is long.
Dokyeom reenacts the time he got caught sleeping in the supply closet during midterms by standing up and pretending to fall asleep standing, then jolting awake with a scream that sends Jaeho into hysterics.
Pilkyu reminds everyone about the time Seungwon accidentally set off the fire alarm by trying to heat up a rice cake with a lighter in the bathroom, and Seungwon defends himself passionately, insisting the rice cake was frozen solid and he had no other options.
Taejun brings up the legendary incident where Hongjoong convinced half the second-year class to skip the school assembly by telling them it had been canceled, resulting in a completely empty auditorium and a furious principal who spent the rest of the day hunting down the source of the rumor.
“That was my finest work,” Hongjoong says, leaning back against the rooftop ledge with his legs stretched out in front of him, cup balanced on his knee. “The look on Principal Kwon’s face. I thought he was going to have a stroke.”
“You almost got expelled,” I remind him.
“Almost,” he agrees, grinning. “But I didn’t. Because I’m charming.”
“Because your mom donated a new computer lab,” Jaeho corrects.
“Charm comes in many forms.”
I snort and shake my head, but I’m smiling.
I can’t help it. These are good memories, even the ones that got us in trouble, especially the ones that got us in trouble.
Four years of climbing fences and picking locks and talking our way out of detention, four years of being the omega who ran with the alphas and never once felt like I didn’t belong. That’s worth a lot, actually.
Someone puts on a slower song and Dokyeom grabs Pilkyu and forces him into an awkward slow dance that devolves into a wrestling match within seconds.
Seungwon is trying to stack shrimp chips into a tower.
Wonjoon is peeling one of the mystery bananas with a contemplative expression, like he’s trying to figure out where they came from.
And Jaeho is on his third cup of soju and starting to get philosophical, which is always a sign that things are about to get either very deep or very stupid.
I laugh along with all of it, shoving Dokyeom when he tries to pull me into the wrestling match, throwing shrimp chips at Seungwon’s tower to knock it over, heckling Jaeho’s attempts at profundity. But my attention keeps drifting.
Hongjoong is flagging. I’ve been tracking it without meaning to, the way I always track things when it comes to him, a natural gravitational pull I’ve never been able to resist. He started strong, matching the others noise and boisterousness, his laugh the loudest on the rooftop, his energy the biggest. But somewhere around the thirty minute mark it changed.
His face is flushing. It doesn’t seem like the normal flush of alcohol that turns your cheeks pink and makes you look warm and loose.
It’s deeper, an uneven red that’s creeping up from his collar, spreading across his neck and up to his ears.
His skin looks hot, like there’s too much blood sitting just beneath the surface, and his eyes, usually so sharp and alert, have gone half-lidded and glassy.
He’s still smiling, but the smile has a lag to it now, arriving a beat too late when someone says something funny, like the signal is taking longer to reach him.
He’s sitting against the ledge where he was before, but his posture has changed.
He was leaning back casually earlier, limbs loose and radiating easy confidence.
Now he’s slumped, his shoulders rounded, his head tipped back against the concrete with his throat exposed.
His breathing is off too. I can see it in the rise and fall of his chest under that red shirt, a little too fast, a little too shallow, like he’s running a low fever and his body is trying to compensate.
I don’t hover. I make a point of not hovering, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned from growing up with five alpha siblings, it’s that alphas don’t like being fussed over.
They get prickly about it, defensive, especially in front of other alphas.
And Hongjoong, for all his easy-going nature, has his pride.
If I walk over there and start asking him if he’s okay in front of the guys, he’ll brush it off and probably drink more just to prove a point.
So instead I throw myself into the drinking game that Dokyeom and Pilkyu have set up, some convoluted thing involving rock-paper-scissors and forfeits.
I sit cross-legged in the circle with the others and play along, loud and competitive, talking shit and shoving at Jaeho when he tries to cheat.
And every time it’s my turn to drink, I bring the cup to my lips and tilt it back and swallow nothing, because I switched my soju for water from the bottle in my bag twenty minutes ago.
But I’m watching Hongjoong.
He doesn’t join the game. Pilkyu calls out to him, waves him over, and Hongjoong just lifts his cup in a lazy salute and shakes his head.
“I’m good here,” he says, his voice is thicker than it should be, the words slightly blurred at the edges.
Pilkyu shrugs and turns back to the game, accepting it easily, because Hongjoong sometimes gets like this when he drinks, quiet and contemplative instead of loud. They’ve seen it before.
But I’ve seen it before too, and this doesn’t look like contemplative.
The red on his neck has spread to his chest. I can see it where the collar of his shirt dips, a mottled flush that doesn’t match the even warmth of someone who’s just had too much to drink.
His hand, the one holding his cup, has a fine tremor in it that he’s trying to hide by keeping it pressed against his thigh.
I lose the next round of the game on purpose and take my forfeit, which is to do ten push-ups.
I drop down and knock them out, and when I get back up I casually reposition myself so I’m sitting closer to where Hongjoong is slumped against the ledge, still within the circle but angled so I can see him in my peripheral vision without turning my head.
His eyes are almost closed now. His cup is sitting on the ground beside him, abandoned, and both of his hands are pressed flat against the concrete like he’s trying to ground himself.
His chest is rising and falling too quickly, and as I watch, he swallows hard, his throat working visibly, and a bead of sweat rolls down his temple even though the evening air has cooled considerably since the sun went down.
Something is wrong with him, and it’s not the soju.