Chapter Two #2
Sungyoon’s pencil stills against the page. His expression doesn’t change much, just a slight tightening around his mouth, a flicker of something in his eyes that he smooths over quickly. He nods.
“Mrs. Han is going to come over to make you dinner and check in on you,” I continue, keeping my voice light. “I already know what you’re going to say, and yes, I know you’re fifteen and you can feed yourself, but she likes doing it and it makes me feel better, so just let her.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Sungyoon says, which I know is a lie, because he always says something.
I push off the doorframe and cross the room toward my bedroom, running through a mental checklist of what I need to do in the next hour. Shower, groom, find something decent to wear that doesn’t look like I pulled it out of the back of my closet.
“Dad.”
I stop with my hand on the bedroom door. Sungyoon’s voice is quiet behind me, carefully neutral, meaning he’s choosing his words.
“Overnight?”
I don’t turn around. My fingers tighten on the door handle for just a second before I make myself relax them.
“Maybe,” I say evenly. “But I’ll let Mrs. Han know to come by in the morning if I can’t make it back. You won’t even notice I’m gone, you’ll be asleep.”
I glance over my shoulder. Sungyoon is watching me with a complicated expression, too knowing for fifteen, his pencil held loosely between his fingers and his notebook forgotten.
I’ve never told him what I really do for a living, but he’s sharp and he’s not a child anymore and there are only so many times you can tell a kid you’re going to a “work meeting” at nine o’clock at night and not come home until morning before he suspects something. We don’t talk about it.
He holds my gaze for a beat, and then he drops his eyes back to his notebook.
“Okay,” he says, and nothing more.
I swallow around the thick lump in my throat and go into my bedroom, closing the door behind me.
I shower carefully, taking more time than usual, scrubbing every inch of myself until my skin is pink and warm.
I wash my hair twice and condition it, comb it back from my face and let it air dry while I deal with the rest. I trim where I need to trim, check where I need to check, run my hands over my body, checking.
Everything functional. Everything clean.
The scar on my left side from a client two years ago who got too rough with his teeth is faded enough to pass for an old injury if anyone asks, and the one on my inner thigh is in a spot where most alphas aren’t looking closely enough to notice.
I stand in front of the bathroom mirror afterward, towel around my waist, and study myself under the overhead light.
My face still holds up, I think. The structure is good, the jawline firm, my skin clear if a little tired around the eyes.
My body is lean and harder than most omegas my age, more muscle than softness, shoulders broader than what’s fashionable for my designation.
I’ve kept myself in shape out of necessity more than vanity, because an omega who can’t physically endure a rough rut doesn’t get called back, and I’ve needed to get called back.
But there’s a tiredness in the way I hold myself that I can see even if I can’t always feel it.
I wonder what this alpha will see when he looks at me.
Whether he’ll notice the tiredness around my eyes, the faint lines forming at the corners of my mouth, the scars I can’t quite hide.
Whether I’ll read as just another aging omega past his prime, one more in a long line of companions this guy has already rejected, or if there’s still something worth paying for.
It doesn’t matter what he sees, I tell myself, meeting my own eyes in the mirror. It matters what he’s willing to pay.
I dry my hair and style it neatly, pushing it back from my face the way I know looks best. I dress in clean dark clothes, the nicest things I own, a black button-down that still fits well through the shoulders and dark slacks that I ironed this morning for exactly no reason, as if some part of me knew I’d need them.
I roll the sleeves to my forearms because the cuffs are starting to fray and this hides it.
I skip cologne because most alphas prefer to smell an omega’s natural scent, and whatever else I might be insecure about, my scent has never been a problem.
Jinkyung tells me it’s one of my best selling points, warm and clean with an undertone that alphas apparently find hard to ignore.
I wouldn’t know. I can’t smell myself the way they do.
I check my phone. The address Jinkyung sent is in the Gangnam district, which tracks with the kind of money this client is apparently throwing around.
I take one more look in the mirror, straighten my collar, and head back through the living room.
Sungyoon is still at the coffee table, still working, his posture unchanged from when I left him.
But his pencil is moving slower now, and I can tell he’s not fully focused on whatever problem is in front of him.
I cross the room and stoop down behind him, pressing a kiss to the top of his head.
His hair smells like the cheap shampoo we both use, the one that comes in the big economy bottle, and underneath it he smells like himself, like my kid, and for a second I want to call Jinkyung back and tell him I changed my mind, that I’m staying home tonight, that I’ll figure out the bills some other way.
But there is no other way. There hasn’t been for a long time.
I ruffle his hair with my hand, messing up the neat part he always keeps, and Sungyoon swats at my fingers with an irritated grunt.
“Dad, quit it. I just fixed it.”
I grin down at him. “Behave yourself tonight. Don’t stay up too late, and eat whatever Mrs. Han makes you, all of it.”
“I always behave,” Sungyoon says without looking up, already smoothing his hair back into place with one hand while the other picks his pencil back up.
“Always,” I echo, even though the word tastes bittersweet in my mouth as I straighten up and head for the door.
I step out into the hallway and pull the door shut behind me, checking that it’s locked, and nearly walk straight into Mrs. Han.
She’s already shuffling over from the apartment next door, her slippers scuffing against the linoleum, a cardigan draped over her shoulders despite the fact that it’s barely cool enough to warrant one.
Her white hair is pinned back in its usual tidy bun, and she’s carrying a plastic bag that I can tell from the shape contains side dishes she’s already prepared.
Mrs. Han has never once shown up to watch Sungyoon without bringing food, even when I tell her she doesn’t have to.
“Mrs. Han, I’m so sorry for the short notice,” I say, bowing my head as I step aside to let her pass. “I know it’s late, I only just found out about this meeting an hour ago, I wouldn’t have called if it wasn’t—”
She waves me off with a flick of her wrist, the gesture so dismissive it borders on impatient. “Stop apologizing. The boy needs to eat and you need to work, what’s there to be sorry about?”
She shifts the bag of side dishes to her other hand and reaches into the pocket of her cardigan, fishing around for a moment before producing a small bottle, one of those vitamin energy drinks from the convenience store downstairs, the kind that comes in a brown glass bottle and tastes like medicine.
She presses it into my palm and closes my fingers around it, her grip surprisingly firm for a woman her age, and when she looks up at me her expression is knowing.
“Take care of yourself tonight,” she says quietly, her voice pitched low enough that it wouldn’t carry through the door to where Sungyoon is sitting.
I look down at the little bottle in my hand and then back at her face.
She doesn’t know the specifics of what I do.
I’ve never told her, the same way I’ve never told Sungyoon, but Mrs. Han raised six children of her own and has been watching me come and go at odd hours for over a decade now, and she’s not stupid.
I slip the bottle into my back pocket and give her a thin smile that I hope conveys more gratitude than I’m able to put into words right now.
“I will. Thank you. There’s rice in the cooker and I left some bean sprout soup on the stove, he just needs to heat it up, but knowing him he’ll try to convince you he already ate so he can skip dinner and keep studying. ”
“He can try,” Mrs. Han says with the serene confidence of a woman who has never once lost a battle of wills with a teenager. She pats my arm twice, firm little taps, and then shuffles past me toward my apartment door, already pulling her spare key from her other pocket.
I watch her let herself in, hear her call out a cheerful greeting to Sungyoon, hear his muffled response from the living room, and then I turn and head for the stairwell.
The parking garage beneath our building is half-empty at this hour, the overhead fluorescents buzzing and flickering.
My car is wedged between a newer Hyundai and a Kia that’s at least a decade younger than mine, which isn’t saying much because my sedan is old enough to vote.
It’s a faded gray Daewoo with a dent in the rear bumper from when I backed into a pole three years ago and never got it fixed, and the passenger side mirror is held on with electrical tape that Sungyoon applied with enough contempt to suggest he was deeply embarrassed to be seen anywhere near the vehicle.
The engine turns over on the second try, which is better than average, and I pull out of the garage and onto the street.