Chapter Sixteen
I’m hovering right at the edge of a perfectly good dream involving a beach and an absurd amount of grilled seafood, rudely interrupted by a slow, idle touch between my legs, a fingertip tracing a path that has absolutely no business existing at this hour of the morning.
I open my eyes with a groan and lift my head just enough to look down the length of my own body.
Hongjoong is lying on his stomach between my spread thighs, propped up on one elbow with his chin practically resting on my hip, wearing an expression of casual fascination as he lazily traces circles around my rim with the pad of his index finger.
He looks like a man examining something mildly interesting at a museum, completely unhurried, his blonde hair still mussed from sleep and falling across his forehead, his other hand resting warm on my inner thigh to keep my legs apart.
Alto is curled up at the foot of the bed, one long elegant ear twitching in his sleep, and Rennard is sprawled across the doorway to the bathroom like a furry barricade, neither dog remotely concerned about what their owner is doing.
“Stop that,” I grumble, my voice still thick with sleep. “I’m trying to sleep.”
Hongjoong doesn’t look up. His fingertip continues its lazy orbit, light enough to tickle, firm enough that my body is already starting to respond against my will, warmth pooling low in my belly and slick beginning to gather at my entrance.
“I can’t help it,” he says, his tone conversational and completely unapologetic. “It’s just so pretty and pink and little.”
I open my mouth to tell him exactly what I think of that assessment but before I can get a word out he presses his thumb flat against the center of my hole and then sinks two fingers in with a slick easy glide that knocks a moan out of me, my hips twitching up off the mattress, my body clenching around the intrusion and then relaxing to pull him deeper before my brain has fully caught up with what’s happening.
Hongjoong sighs with the deep contentment of a man who has found exactly what he was looking for and crooks his fingers gently, rubbing against my walls and making my toes curl into the sheets.
“So tight,” he murmurs, almost to himself. He spreads his fingers slightly, testing the give, and I bite down on my lower lip as another wave of slick leaks around his knuckles. “I genuinely cannot believe you pushed a whole baby out of here.”
He pauses then, fingers still buried inside me, and tilts his head up to look at my face with an expression of sudden genuine curiosity.
“You did push him out of here, right?”
I stare at him. This man has two fingers knuckle-deep in my ass at nine in the morning and he’s asking me obstetric questions.
I let my head fall back against the pillow and glare at the ceiling for a moment before directing the glare where it belongs, straight down at his stupidly handsome face nestled between my thighs.
“Yes,” I say flatly. “I had a natural birth. Twelve hours of labor. It was the single worst experience of my life, worse than any rut contract I ever took, and if you don’t remove your fingers in the next three seconds I’m going to kick you in the face.”
Hongjoong does not remove his fingers. He hums thoughtfully, his gaze going distant and soft, and then he says in a voice that’s gone quiet and wistful, “I wish I could have seen it.” His fingers slide free slowly, leaving me clenching around nothing, he shifts up the bed until he’s lying beside me, propping himself on his elbow.
He puts a flat palm on my stomach, his hand warm and broad against my bare skin, and his thumb strokes back and forth just below my navel.
“I wish I could have been there. Wish I could have seen you all round and swollen with my baby growing inside you.”
His mouth curves and the dimple appears, deep and devastating, and his eyes take on a brightness that I recognize with a sinking feeling as the particular gleam Hongjoong gets when an idea has taken root in his head and is rapidly becoming an obsession.
“I should put another one in here,” he says, patting my stomach.
I curse and slap his hand away. “Are you out of your mind?”
Hongjoong pouts, his lower lip pushing out and his brows drawing together, and the full devastating force of his dimple deployed like a weapon. I despise that it works on me even a little bit because I’m a grown man and I should be immune to this by now.
“Why not?” he says, and he sounds so genuinely wounded by my rejection that for a split second I almost feel bad.
“I missed your first pregnancy, Jae. I didn’t get to see you grow and change, didn’t get to see Sungyoon as a baby, never got to hold my newborn son.
” He rolls closer, his chest pressing against my side, his mouth hovering near my ear.
“You owe me that. Very reasonably, in my opinion.” His hand finds my stomach again, palm flat, fingers spread possessively. “Let me get you pregnant again.”
“I’m too old to have a baby now,” I snap, shoving at his shoulder. “We’re thirty-four. I’m not doing that to my body at this age.”
“You’re absolutely not too old,” Hongjoong says with the confident authority of a man who has clearly already researched this.
He shifts up the bed and leans over me, bracing himself on both arms, his face hovering above mine with bright, eager eyes that spell nothing but trouble.
“Omegas can carry well into their forties, and you’re in excellent health.
Your body is incredible, you’re strong, you’ve always been strong.
” He’s really getting into it now, building momentum, trying to sell me on something ridiculous, his voice picking up speed and enthusiasm.
“I’ll hire a nanny. And a cook. And a cleaner, and a night nurse, you wouldn’t have to do anything but get fat and pregnant and sleep and give the baby lots of love. ”
He dips his head and presses a kiss to my jaw, then another one just below my ear, his breath warm against my skin.
“I’ll rub your feet every night,” he murmurs between kisses.
“I’ll bring you whatever weird food you’re craving at three in the morning, I don’t care if it’s pickled squid and ice cream, I’ll drive across the city to get it.
” Another kiss, this one on the corner of my mouth.
“Come on,” he says, his lips brushing mine. “Come on, Jae. Just one more.”
I stare up at him, my hands braced against his chest, and I’m realizing with growing alarm that Hongjoong absolutely means this.
This isn’t a bit, this isn’t him being playful or provocative for the sake of getting a rise out of me.
His eyes are bright and earnest and underneath the grin there’s a raw, hungry edge, a longing for all the things he missed, the pregnancy he never witnessed, the birth he wasn’t present for, the tiny newborn version of his son that he never got to cradle against his chest. I took all of that from him and he wants it back, wants the chance to experience it from the very beginning this time.
The want in his expression makes my resistance feel petty and small.
But I’m not going down without a fight.
“I can’t have a baby now,” I sputter, grasping for arguments. “Sungyoon is nearly grown. The house is finally calm, we just got settled, and besides he probably wouldn’t even want a sibling after being an only child his whole life.”
“Let’s ask him,” Hongjoong says, and before I can grab him he’s off the bed and across the room in three strides, yanking open the bedroom door and leaning out into the hallway in nothing but his low-slung sweatpants.
Rennard lifts his narrow head from the bathroom doorway and watches him with mild interest.
“Sungyoon!” Hongjoong calls out, his voice carrying down the hall toward the living room.
A distant “Yeah?” comes back, Sungyoon’s voice slightly muffled like he’s eating something.
“Would you mind having a sibling?”
There’s a pause. I can picture Sungyoon’s face, the slight furrow of his brow, the way he’d look up from whatever he’s doing with an expression of weary teenage tolerance he’s perfected over the last few weeks of living with Hongjoong’s particular brand of chaos.
“I don’t care,” Sungyoon calls back, his tone flat and unbothered. “It’s your life, do what you want.” Another beat. “Close the door if you’re going to be weird about it.”
Hongjoong closes the door and turns around, grinning so wide his dimple looks like it could swallow his entire cheek, his arms spread in a triumphant look-at-that gesture. I gape at him from the bed, the covers clutched to my chest like they’re going to protect me from the force of his enthusiasm.
He crosses back to the bed and climbs over me, settling between my legs with ease, his weight pressing me into the mattress as his hands bracket my head on the pillow.
“See?” he says, his face inches from mine, still grinning. “Unanimous approval from the household. So what do you say, Jae?” He lowers his mouth to the hollow of my throat and kisses the spot where my pulse is hammering. “Just one more.”
I stare at the ceiling. I think about my body, about what pregnancy did to it the first time, the swelling and the nausea and the twelve hours of agony that ended with a screaming infant and a recovery that took months.
I think about how old I am, and how tired my joints get, and how my back already aches on cold mornings.
But then I look down at Hongjoong’s face, at the brightness in his eyes that isn’t just want but genuine hope, unguarded vulnerability he almost never shows, and beneath the playfulness I can see how much this would mean to him.
This chance to be present for something he was robbed of.
To put his hand on my belly and feel his child kick.
To be in the room when it happens, to hold the baby first, to have the beginning he never got.
I sigh, long and suffering, and let my head drop back against the pillow.
“Fine,” I say. “Fuck it. Whatever.”
Hongjoong’s face splits into the widest grin I’ve ever seen on him, and I’ve seen a lot of his grins over the years, the cocky ones and the teasing ones and the sharp dangerous ones, but this one is pure unfiltered joy, his dimple cutting so deep it transforms his whole face.
He scoops me up before I can change my mind, flipping me onto my back and pinning me flat, his hands bracketing my head, his body warm and solid between my thighs.
“My perfect little omega,” he says, and the words dig into the place in my chest where I’ve stopped pretending they don’t affect me. “Should we get started now?”
I shove at his chest with both hands. “Sungyoon is right downstairs.”
Hongjoong hums against my neck, already mouthing at my scent gland, his hips rolling forward so I can feel how hard he is through the thin fabric of his sweatpants, the thick line of his cock pressing against my bare inner thigh. “It’s okay. We’ll be quiet.”
“There is absolutely no version of this where you are quiet about anything,” I inform him, even as my body is already responding, slick gathering between my legs, my cock filling against my stomach.
“You’re the loudest person alive, you scream on rollercoasters, you scream in cars, you screamed when Sungyoon hit the gas pedal yesterday and that was at fifteen miles an hour. ”
Hongjoong takes this as a challenge. He covers my mouth with his own and kisses me deep and slow, his tongue sliding against mine, making my thoughts scatter and my fingers stop pushing against his chest and start pulling instead, curling into his hair, dragging him closer.
He makes a low satisfied sound against my lips when he feels me give in, when my legs wrap around his waist and my back arches up into his chest, and he reaches down between us to shove his sweatpants past his hips.
I feel the blunt head of his cock nudge against my entrance, hot and thick, and then he pushes inside me in one long steady slide that makes my breath stutter and my eyes fall shut, the stretch familiar now in a way that it wasn’t at the beginning, my body opening for him like it knows him, because it does, has known him since we were eighteen years old.
Hongjoong presses his forehead to mine, our noses brushing, and I can feel his breath against my lips, can see his eyes even with mine half-closed, dark and warm and looking at me like I’m the only thing in the world worth seeing.
He starts to move, slow and deep, and I pull him closer and breathe him in and think that maybe this is what it was always supposed to be. The two of us, together, making up for all that lost time. One day at a time.