Chapter Five #3
I yelp and jerk forward, cigarette nearly falling from my fingers. “At least let me put out my cigarette first, you psycho—”
I reach blindly for the edge of the desk, stretching my arm out as far as it’ll go while Hongjoong laughs behind me and picks up the pace, his hips snapping forward hard enough to shove me up the couch.
My fingers find the rim of a coffee mug and I stub the cigarette out against the inside of it, hearing the hiss of the ember dying, and then Hongjoong hits that spot deep inside me and my arm gives out and I drop back down into the cushions with a moan that I’m sure carries all the way down the empty hallway.
Later we’re sprawled together on the now thoroughly debauched couch, and I can feel the leather sticking to every inch of exposed skin as I lie between Hongjoong’s spread legs with my back against his chest. Neither of us has moved in what feels like twenty minutes.
We’re both naked and too wrung out to do anything about it, covered in a film of sweat and dried fluids.
Hongjoong runs a lazy hand down the length of my spine, his fingers tracing the knobs of my vertebrae one by one, and then his palm slides lower and grabs a full handful of my ass and squeezes hard enough that the still-tender skin where he bit me earlier flares with a sharp sting.
I hiss through my teeth and reach behind me without looking, find his soft cock resting against my lower back, and pinch it between my thumb and forefinger with enough force to make my point.
Hongjoong barks out a laugh that shakes through both our bodies, his chest vibrating against my shoulder blades, and then he ducks his head down and catches my mouth in a kiss.
The angle is awkward and upside down, our lips meeting off-center, sloppy and warm and tasting like cigarette smoke and each other.
His tongue slides lazily against mine and I let him have it for a few seconds before I pull away and settle back against his chest, my head resting in the hollow beneath his collarbone.
He’s quiet for a moment. His fingers are still moving absently along my hip, drawing shapes, when I glance up at him his expression has quieted. The sharpness has gone out of his features, the teasing edge smoothed away, and he’s just looking at me with his head tipped slightly to one side.
“You’re starting to get lines around your eyes,” he says.
I snort and turn my gaze back to the ceiling. “I’d be surprised if I didn’t, given everything.”
Hongjoong doesn’t laugh at that. His thumb keeps moving against my hip in those slow absent circles, and the silence stretches for a beat before he asks, “Was it stressful? Raising a kid alone?”
I consider the question, consider whether the truth might cut through the careful story I’ve built. “Yes,” I say carefully. “Of course it was.”
“What happened to your family?” His voice is casual but I can feel the attentiveness in the way his body has gone still beneath mine, the absent stroking paused. “Why didn’t they help?”
I look down at the arm draped around my waist, at the tattoo visible along his forearm and wrapping up toward his ribs.
The crane is partially obscured by the angle but I can see the camellias curling around the bird’s outstretched wings, the petals rendered in such fine detail that I can make out individual veins in each one.
His family name sits in bold traditional characters just below his ribcage, the ink still dark and sharp after however many years.
I trace one of the camellia petals with my fingertip and decide this much is safe enough to share.
“My parents and my siblings wanted me to give the baby away,” I tell him, keeping my voice even.
“Or to sell myself off to the first alpha willing to claim me and take the kid as part of the deal.” I pause, feeling the old bitterness rise up in my throat like bile.
“I refused both. They kept pushing, kept telling me I was being selfish and stupid, that I was ruining my life and theirs by association.” My finger stills on the edge of a camellia petal.
“So I cut them off and decided to do it alone.”
Hongjoong absorbs this in silence. I can feel his breathing against my back, steady and measured, and after a moment he asks, “Why didn’t you just bond a different alpha?”
I bite my lip. The real answer is sitting right behind me with his arms wrapped around my waist and his chin resting on the top of my head, and the irony of it is so sharp I could choke on it.
I can’t say that. I can’t say that I only ever wanted one alpha.
So I say nothing, and the silence must speak for itself.
“Did you care that much about your son’s father?” he asks quietly.
I nod against his chest, deciding this much is safe enough to admit. “I was young and foolish, probably,” I say, I sound steady, calm. “But I didn’t want to be claimed by anyone else.”
Hongjoong tenses slightly behind me, a subtle tightening of the muscles in his arms and chest that I wouldn’t notice if I weren’t pressed flush against him. “Are you still not going to tell me what bastard knocked you up and got away with leaving you to raise a baby alone?”
I shake my head. “It would be no use now either way. It’s ancient history.”
He lets out a slow breath through his nose that I feel warm against the crown of my head, and I can tell he wants to push it further, can feel the questions building in the way his jaw works against my hair. But he lets it go, and I’m grateful enough that I feel like exhaling in relief.
“What’s your son like?” he asks instead.
I hesitate. Describing Sungyoon to Hongjoong feels like walking across a frozen lake, each step a calculated risk.
But Hongjoong can’t possibly know from a description alone.
There’s no way to connect a handful of personality traits to a face he’s never seen, to a boy he doesn’t know exists in relation to him.
“He’s smart,” I say, and I can hear the warmth bleeding into my own voice despite my efforts to keep it neutral.
“Confident. Sporty kid, does well in school, has lots of friends.” I pause, a smile tugging at the corner of my mouth.
“He’s far better behaved than I ever was, which honestly isn’t saying much, but still.
And he’s witty as hell, always has some comeback ready that makes me want to ground him and laugh at the same time.
” The smile wins out and I let it stay. “He’s a good kid.
He’ll have his pick of colleges in a few years. ”
“You sound like a proud father,” Hongjoong says, a soft warmth in his voice that catches me off guard. “It’s rather cute.”
I snort. “Well, I am a proud father.”
Hongjoong hums, the sound vibrating through his chest and into my spine. “That’s good,” he says after a moment. “At the very least you have something to show for all the life we’ve lived apart.” A pause, and then quieter: “I wish I could say the same.”
I tilt my head back to look up at him, frowning. “What do you mean? Your face is on the side of buses. You have your own fortune separate from your family’s money. How is that nothing to show for it?”
Hongjoong sighs heavily. “Success is awfully lonely, though,” he says.
“I still see some of our friends from school, but I haven’t had a real relationship in years.
” He shifts beneath me, adjusting his arm around my waist, and his voice drops lower.
“Actually, until you walked into my hotel room I was starting to think I might be impotent.”
I go very still.
“Every encounter I had with other omegas ended the same way,” he continues, I can hear him frowning.
“Disappointing sex, couldn’t knot, didn’t matter how pretty they were or how willing.
And worse than that, they smelled wrong.
Off. Something about their scent made my stomach turn and killed any arousal I had to start with.
” He pauses. “At first I thought it was a fluke, maybe stress or overtraining or something physical. But it kept happening, year after year, omega after omega, and eventually I started thinking maybe my nose and my dick were both broken.”
He bends down and presses his nose to the curve of my throat, right over my scent gland, and inhales deep. The sound he makes is low and content, almost a purr, his lips brushing my skin as he exhales warm against my pulse.
“But I guess not,” he murmurs. “Because you smell incredible. The way an omega should smell.”
I say nothing.
Because I know exactly why.
I know that the reason no other omega’s scent works for him, the reason he can’t knot anyone else, the reason every encounter has left him frustrated and unsatisfied and convinced something was fundamentally wrong with him, is because his biology already made its choice and has been rejecting every substitute since.
He’s been suffering for years because of something I did, something I let happen, something I ran away from instead of facing.
The guilt twists in my gut and I stare at the ceiling of the office, at the recessed lighting and the neat rows of acoustic tiles, and I wonder if I should tell him.
If it would be the right thing to do. He deserves to know.
He deserves to understand why his body has been working against him for a decade and a half.
But would it do us any good? Telling him now could unravel everything.
The contract, the rebuilt connection we’re carefully stitching together on top of old foundations, all of it.
If he found out that I’ve known this entire time, that I’ve been keeping it from him deliberately, he might not just be angry.
He might be done. And if Hongjoong walked away, not just from whatever fragile thing is growing between us but from the contract too, leaving me with nothing, then I’d be putting Sungyoon’s future on the line.
The tuition fund that’s finally starting to look like an actual fund.
The bills that are paid up for the first time in years.
The college savings that might actually get my son into the school he deserves.
All of it riding on me keeping my mouth shut.
So I say nothing, and I hate myself for it.
Hongjoong walks me down to my car later, both of us dressed and looking almost presentable despite the state of the office we left behind.
I buttoned my shirt wrong on the first try and had to redo it while Hongjoong watched with undisguised amusement, and my hair is a lost cause, flattened on one side from being pressed into the couch cushion for the better part of two hours.
Hongjoong looks annoyingly put-together by comparison, his hair finger-combed back into something resembling its usual style, his jacket zipped up over the wrinkled t-shirt beneath.
The parking garage is quiet and dim, our footsteps echoing off the concrete as we cross to where my car sits under the fluorescent lights looking even more pathetic than usual next to the row of sleek company vehicles parked along the opposite wall.
Before I can reach for the door handle Hongjoong catches my arm and turns me around, then presses two items into my hand.
I look down. A small black credit card, matte finish. And a white keycard with the logo of Hongjoong’s apartment building embossed in silver.
“The card is for you to get whatever you need,” Hongjoong says, nodding at the credit card. “No limit. Groceries, clothes, stuff for your kid, whatever.” He taps the keycard. “And that’s for the lock on my apartment so you can come and go without having to buzz in every time.”
I turn both cards over in my fingers, feeling what they represent. “Hongjoong—”
“You should really just move in,” he adds, like it’s the most reasonable suggestion in the world. “At least for the duration of the contract. It would make things easier, you wouldn’t have to drive across the city every time I call, and I wouldn’t have to wait forty minutes for you to show up.”
“I have a son,” I remind him.
Hongjoong shrugs. “I have an extra bedroom. Your son would be welcome too.”
I consider it for exactly half a second.
The image forms in my mind, Sungyoon sitting at Hongjoong’s dining table doing homework while Hongjoong pours himself coffee in the kitchen, Alto and Rennard weaving between their legs.
Sungyoon looking up from his textbook with that face, those features, that dimple pressing into his left cheek as he smirks at something, and Hongjoong standing three feet away with the exact same dimple in the exact same cheek, looking back at him. The thought sends ice through my veins.
“It’s not practical,” I say, and I wave the suggestion off with what I hope reads as casual dismissal rather than barely controlled panic.
Hongjoong takes it in stride, shrugging again like it was just an idea, no big deal. “Offer stands,” he says.
Then he leans down and kisses me hard against the side of my car, one hand braced on the roof above my head, the other cupping my jaw and tilting my face up to meet his.
He kisses me deep and slow, his tongue sliding against mine with a tantalizing stroke that makes my knees soften, and I grab the front of his jacket with both hands to keep myself upright, the credit card and keycard digging into my palm where they’re trapped between my fingers and the fabric.
He takes his time with it, kissing me until I’m breathing hard and my lips are swollen and tingling, until my body is stirring again despite the fact that I’m so thoroughly fucked out I shouldn’t be capable of arousal for at least twelve hours.
Hongjoong pulls back, his thumb tracing my lower lip, his eyes dark and half-lidded as he looks down at me. “I’ll call you soon,” he says.
Then he turns and walks away, hands in his pockets, his footsteps echoing through the parking garage as he heads for the elevator. I stand there against the side of my car and watch him go, the keycard and credit card still clutched in my hand, my lips still warm from his mouth.
It doesn’t feel like just a job anymore. I’m not sure it ever was.