Chapter Ten #3
Hongjoong goes still. His eyes land on Sungyoon and stay there, fixed, his whole body locking into a pose of rigid attention that I’ve never seen from him before.
The hallway is narrow enough that they’re only a few feet apart, close enough to touch, and the similarities between them when they’re face to face like this are so painfully, glaringly obvious that I feel like someone has reached into my chest and squeezed.
The same cat-like features. The same sharp brown eyes set at the same angle beneath the same strong brow.
The same bone structure, the same jawline, the same high cheekbones that catch the light in the same way.
And when Sungyoon’s mouth twitches with uncertainty, the dimple appears in his left cheek, exactly where Hongjoong’s sits, in the exact same spot, cutting the exact same depth.
Sungyoon is a younger, softer, unfinished version of the man standing across from him, and neither of them can stop looking at the other.
The apartment goes deadly quiet. I can hear the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen and the muffled sound of traffic from the street below, and nothing else.
I can see the confusion gathering on Sungyoon’s face, the way his brow furrows as his eyes move across Hongjoong’s features with that perceptive intelligence he got from both of us, clearly noticing something he can’t explain but can’t look away from either.
And Hongjoong is staring at the boy with an expression that shifts from curiosity into a sharper, more unsettled analysis, his brow creasing deeper with each passing second, his eyes flickering between Sungyoon’s face and mine as something begins to take shape behind them.
Then Sungyoon moves. He bows slightly to Hongjoong, polite but wary, the way I taught him to greet adults he doesn’t know, and says nothing.
He steps carefully around Hongjoong in the narrow hallway, their shoulders nearly brushing, and disappears into his bedroom. I hear him rummaging through a drawer.
Hongjoong’s gaze snaps to me. I feel those eyes like a hand closing around my throat, the fire building in them, the rapid thoughts I can almost hear clicking into place behind his expression.
He saw himself in that boy. I watched it happen in real time, watched the recognition, and now the gears are turning and there is nothing I can do to stop them.
Sungyoon reemerges a moment later with his swim trunks stuffed into his backpack, zipping it shut as he steps back into the hallway.
He moves around Hongjoong again and the two of them eye each other in another loaded heartbeat of silence, Sungyoon’s gaze lingering on Hongjoong’s face with open curiosity now, like he’s trying to solve a puzzle.
Then Sungyoon looks past Hongjoong to me, a question in his expression that I can’t answer right now.
“I’ll be going now,” Sungyoon says.
“Right,” I manage. My voice sounds far away. “Be careful. Have fun.”
The front door opens and closes. The lock beeps.
The apartment goes silent.
I clear my throat carefully and move for my bedroom, keeping my movements careful and unhurried even though every nerve in my body is screaming at me to run.
“We should get going too,” I say, stepping toward the hallway.
I try to move past Hongjoong in the narrow space, angling my shoulder to slip by him, and his arm shoots out and his hand closes around my bicep hard enough to stop me cold, his fingers digging into the muscle through my sleeve.
I look up into his face, and my pulse jumps at what I see there. Controlled fury. His jaw is clenched so tight that a muscle jumps beneath the skin of his cheek, and his eyes are burning with an emotion that goes beyond anger into territory that’s near nuclear.
“You better start explaining.” His voice is a low, harsh growl, the kind of sound that vibrates in the chest of the person hearing it.
I hold his gaze and keep my voice as calm as I can. “Explain what?”
Hongjoong’s eyes narrow and he leans closer, his grip on my arm tightening until I can feel each individual finger pressing into the flesh. “Explain why that child looks like a carbon fucking copy of me.”
I shift my weight, testing his grip, but he doesn’t let go.
My arm is locked in place and so am I, pinned by his hand and his stare and the fifteen years of lies that are crumbling around me.
There is no lie in the world good enough to explain away what Hongjoong just saw with his own eyes.
No excuse, no deflection, no convenient half-truth that can account for a fifteen-year-old boy wearing Hongjoong’s face like a mirror.
Hongjoong doesn’t wait for an answer. He steps closer, looming over me in the narrow hallway, using every inch of the height difference between us. “How old did you say he was again?”
I take too long to answer. I know I take too long because Hongjoong’s grip tightens another degree, his thumb pressing hard against the inside of my arm, and his expression tells me that silence is the wrong choice here but I can’t make my mouth form the words fast enough.
“Fifteen,” I say quietly.
I watch Hongjoong’s eyes flicker. I watch him do the math, watch him connect to the date. I watch the exact moment the math adds up because his whole face changes, the anger cracking open into a worse, more devastated emotion.
Hongjoong closes his eyes. He lets out a long, slow breath through his nose, the kind of breath someone takes when they’re restraining themselves from putting their fist through the wall beside my head.
His chest expands and contracts with it, his nostrils flaring, and when he opens his eyes again they’re terrifyingly calm, the fury banked down into a cold and controlled look that makes my skin prickle with genuine fear.
“Yoonjae,” he says, and my full name in that voice, that careful measured voice, is worse than if he was shouting. “Is that my son?”
I think about denying it. The reflex is so deeply ingrained after years that the lie forms on my tongue automatically, ready, a dozen variations of no and you’re imagining things and it’s just a coincidence lined up and waiting.
But Hongjoong is looking at me with those eyes that have always been able to see through me, that could see through me when we were eighteen and can see through me now, and I am so fucking tired.
I’m tired of carrying this alone, tired of the burden of it pressing down on my chest every single day, tired of looking at my son’s face and seeing the father he doesn’t know he has.
I give up.
“Yes,” I say, the sound of it quiet and small.
Hongjoong takes a giant step backward. His hand drops from my arm and he staggers back like I’ve shoved him, his shoulders hitting the opposite wall of the hallway with a dull thud.
I watch him, every nerve in my body screaming, as he puts both hands through his hair and stares at the ceiling, his chest heaving.
He paces the narrow hallway, three steps one way, three steps back, turns on his heel, and when his eyes meet mine again they look wild, unmoored, the composure from seconds ago shattered.
“When,” he says. “How—” And then he blinks. I watch the realization dawn on his face in real time, each piece falling into place one after another like watching a building come down floor by floor. His mouth opens slightly. His hands drop to his sides.
“The night of graduation,” he says, his voice hoarse.
“It was you, wasn’t it? That omega scent all over the classroom.
” He starts pacing faster, his strides eating up the tiny hallway, his voice rising with each word.
“I thought I recognized that scent when I smelled you again at the hotel. I thought it was familiar, it drove me crazy because I couldn’t place it.
” He spins and stares at me, his eyes boring into mine.
“That was it, wasn’t it? Graduation night, when I went into rut. It was you I slept with.”
I stand with my hands clasped tight together in front of me, my knuckles white, too terrified to speak. So I just nod.
“Fuck!” The word comes out loud enough to echo off the walls of the small apartment, bouncing back at us from the kitchen and the living room and the ceiling.
Hongjoong paces again, faster, agitated energy rolling off him in waves that make his pheromones spike hard, the smell of angry alpha flooding the hallway until it’s thick enough to taste on my tongue, bitter and sharp and suffocating.
My omega body responds involuntarily, wanting to submit, to bare my neck, to make myself small, and I fight it, locking my knees and keeping my spine straight even as my hands tremble.
Then he whirls on me, and in his eyes I see betrayal and agony in equal amounts, unguarded in a way Hongjoong never lets himself be, not in front of anyone, not ever.
The mask he wears for the cameras and the sponsors, and the rest of the world is gone, and what’s underneath is a man who has just learned that the person he trusted most in the world has been lying to him for half his life.
“And you just ran off?” His voice cracks on the last word, and he doesn’t seem to notice or care. “Fuck, Jae, why didn’t you just tell me instead of running? Instead of taking off with my child?”
I breathe out shakily, my ribs aching with the effort of holding myself together.
“I didn’t know I was pregnant right away,” I say, and my voice sounds thin and reedy in my own ears.
“Obviously. It was weeks before I realized, and by then you were starting university, starting your career. I didn’t want to be the thing that derailed all of it. ”
Hongjoong laughs. The sound is mocking and hurt and nothing like his real laugh, sharp-edged and bitter, and it cuts through me worse than any of the words. “That wasn’t your choice to make,” he says, pointing at me, his finger jabbing the air between us.
He rakes a hand through his hair again, hard enough that the strands pull taut against his scalp.
When he speaks again, his voice is ragged and sounds dangerously close to grief.
“Fuck. Fifteen years, Jae. I have a fifteen-year-old son.” He stops pacing and faces me, his chest rising and falling too fast. “Do you have any idea how unfair that is? I didn’t even know he existed.
This whole time you knew, and you never said anything.
You kept him from me. From even getting the chance to be his father.
” His voice drops. “What did I do to deserve that? Was I so terrible to you that you would go to that much effort to keep my own child from me?”
“It wasn’t like that,” I say, but I can hear how inadequate the words are even as they leave my mouth. “I wasn’t trying to hide from you. I just didn’t want to impose on your life. I wanted to handle it on my own.”
“Yeah, and what about what I want?” Hongjoong fires back, his voice rising again.
“You took the first fifteen years of my son’s life from me.
” He gestures sharply around us, at the cramped hallway, the peeling paint on the doorframe, the apartment that suddenly feels even smaller than it is with his anger filling every corner of it.
“I could have helped you. Yoonjae, you didn’t have to live like this. Sungyoon could have had a better life.”
My chin lifts. The defensiveness is automatic, bone-deep, forged from fifteen years of doing everything alone and refusing to apologize for it. “I never needed anyone’s help and I didn’t want it,” I say, my voice harder now. “Sungyoon had a fine life. I did everything I could for him.”
Hongjoong fists his hands at his sides, his knuckles going white, and for a second I think he’s going to hit the wall.
He doesn’t. He breathes through it, his jaw working, and then he says in a voice that’s gone flat and controlled in a way that scares me more than the yelling, “You know what, I can’t do this right now.
This is fucked up, Jae. This is really fucked up. ”
“You don’t have to go out of your way,” I say quickly, the words tumbling out, the old instinct to give him an exit, to make it easy for him to walk away the way I always assumed he would.
“We can take care of ourselves. You don’t need to do anything for Sungyoon if you don’t want to. I won’t ask anything of you.”
Hongjoong’s mouth twists into something ugly.
“Well, how noble of you,” he says, the sarcasm like a slap.
“But that’s not how this works, Jae.” He steps into my space, close enough that I have to tilt my head back to meet his eyes, close enough that I can see the redness at the rims of them that he’s fighting to keep from becoming anything more.
“You can’t take it back. And you can’t undo what I know. ”
He turns and walks toward the front door. His strides are long and stiff, his shoulders rigid, and I watch him go with my heart in my throat.
“Where are you going?” My voice comes out high and panicked.
Hongjoong pauses with his hand on the doorknob. He doesn’t turn around, but he lifts his other hand and points back down the hallway toward Sungyoon’s bedroom door.
“That’s my son,” he says, rough and final. “And I’m going to take responsibility for him whether you want my help or not.”
He wrenches the door open and walks through it and slams it shut behind him hard enough to rattle every frame on the wall.
The apartment goes silent.
My knees give out. I sink to the floor right there in the hallway, my back sliding down the wall until I’m sitting on the thin carpet with my legs folded under me, and I put my head in my hands.
My fingers dig into my scalp and I press my palms against my eyes until I see spots, breathing in shallow gulps that don’t seem to fill my lungs no matter how hard I try.
The smell of Hongjoong’s angry pheromones still hangs in the air around me, fading slowly, and underneath it I can smell my own scent, sour with fear and guilt and the sharp acrid edge of an omega in distress.
I sit there on the floor of my hallway and I know that my life is about to blow apart. And every single piece of it is my own doing.