Chapter Six #3
I climb onto the mattress, dazed, and curl onto my side. My hand reaches out automatically and grabs Hyunwoo’s pillow. I drag it toward me, press my face into it, and inhale.
Hyunwoo’s scent floods my senses. Concentrated, intimate, layered with the faintest trace of the alpha pheromones he keeps carefully locked down whenever I’m around.
They’re there in the fabric though, leaked out during sleep when his control is unconscious, soaked into the cotton over weeks and months of nights.
It’s barely a whisper of what his full pheromones smell like—I’ve caught the real thing a handful of times over the years, when he’s showing off for women at the gym or when he forgets himself during sex—but even this ghost of it hits me like a freight train.
I groan. A low, pained sound deep in my chest. And my hole gushes.
Slick. A sudden, copious flood of it that soaks through my sweatpants in seconds, warm and wet and spreading across the sheets beneath me.
Not the inconsistent trickle my body usually produces during sex with Hyunwoo—this is a deluge, my body opening up and pouring out slick like a faucet someone turned on full blast. My cock hardens instantly, painfully, straining against the damp fabric and leaking precum in a steady stream that adds to the mess spreading beneath my hips.
I clutch at the pillow, my fingers digging into the fabric, and another cramp tears through my lower belly—violent this time, a deep clenching spasm that makes me curl in on myself with a strangled sound.
My hole aches. This is nothing like the mild discomfort I’ve felt during sex with Hyunwoo, the burn of being stretched open.
This is a furious, gnawing emptiness, my inner walls clenching on nothing, squeezing and releasing in desperate pulses that demand to be filled.
The ache is so intense it spreads outward from my core into my hips and thighs and lower back, a full-body need that makes me whine and writhe against the mattress, grinding my hips into Hyunwoo’s pillow because the pressure against my cock is the only thing that offers even a fraction of relief.
I know what’s happening now. Through the haze, through the heat and the fog and the slick soaking my clothes, I know.
The cramping. The fever. The slick. The overwhelming sensitivity. The way my body dragged me to this room, to this bed, to the concentrated scent of an alpha like a compass needle swinging north.
I’m in heat.
Full heat. Full estrus. And it isn’t the mild, manageable episodes I’ve had a few times a year since I presented—the kind I could ride out alone in my apartment with a cold shower and gritted teeth and maybe a hand on my cock.
This is my omega biology, suppressed and dormant for years, starved of the alpha contact it was designed for, finally waking up.
And it’s not waking up gently. It’s waking up furious, like it’s making up for lost time, flooding my system with every hormone and instinct it’s been holding back.
The concentrated alpha scent on Hyunwoo’s pillow is making it worse.
Each breath I take accelerates the cycle, my body interpreting the pheromones as a signal that an alpha is close, that relief is near, and responding by ramping up every symptom to pull that alpha in.
More slick. More heat. More of the aching, desperate emptiness that’s turning my insides into a clenching, spasming mess.
I should let go of the pillow. I should get up, go to my own room, close the door, try to ride this out alone the way I always have. But I can’t make myself release it. My fingers won’t unclench. My face stays buried in the fabric, breathing him in, and every inhale makes the fire burn hotter.
I slip in and out of awareness after that.
The heat builds in rolling waves, each crest worse than the last. My body burns and aches and empties itself of slick until the sheets beneath me are soaked through.
I’m vaguely aware of the dogs—Machete has stationed herself on the floor beside the bed, her chin on her paws, whining softly every few minutes.
Kal is lying across the bedroom doorway like a guard, his ears swiveling at every sound.
The cramps come and go in surges, each one pulling a sound out of me, my body curling and uncurling on the ruined sheets.
At some point I kick off my sweatpants because the fabric against my skin is unbearable, and then I’m naked and it doesn’t matter because nothing matters except the ache inside me and the scent on this pillow and the desperate, animal need for something to fill the emptiness that’s eating me alive.
By the time I hear the front door lock clicking and footsteps in the main living area, I’m in agony.
Slick has soaked my thighs and pooled beneath me on the sheets.
My cock is throbbing and leaking, flushed dark and untouched because even the brush of my own hand is too much and not enough at the same time.
My hole is clenching furiously, the muscles inside me spasming in waves that make my vision blur, the ache so intense it makes me want to claw at my own skin just to give my brain something else to focus on.
“Hey, I’m back. Yuggie, you home?”
His voice carries down the hallway, casual and warm, same as every time he walks through the door.
I open my mouth to answer and nothing comes out.
My throat is dry, my jaw clenched so tight my teeth ache, and my fingers are locked around his pillow.
I press my face deeper into the fabric and breathe him in again, and my hole clenches so hard that a broken sound escapes my chest muffled by the pillowcase.
I hear him moving through the apartment.
The fridge opening and closing. A glass being set on the counter.
Then a pause, and I know he’s found the kitchen—the abandoned dishes in the sink, the half-cleaned pan on the stove, my shirt draped over the back of the chair.
I can picture the slight furrow between his brows as he realizes that something’s off, that the apartment doesn’t look the way it should if I’d just gone to bed early.
His footsteps come down the hallway. They slow as he reaches the stretch between my bedroom and his, and I hear when he spots the dogs.
“What’s going on with you two?” Hyunwoo’s voice has shifted, the casual ease replaced by a note of confusion. I can hear Machete’s whine spike in response, that anxious high-pitched sound. Kal lets out a single sharp bark, alert, a notification. “Why are you sitting out here like—”
He stops talking.
I know the exact second he appears in the doorway because the air in the room changes.
Or maybe that’s just my body, every cell orienting toward the source of the scent I’ve been huffing off his pillow for the past however many hours, now amplified a thousandfold by the actual living, breathing person standing six feet away from me.
I turn my head on the pillow just enough to see him through the damp hair plastered to my forehead.
The image swims—Hyunwoo in the doorway, his navy blazer slung over one arm, his dress shirt open at the collar, his gold watch glinting.
He takes me in. I watch his gaze track across the room and land on me, and I watch it sink in piece by piece.
The way I’m curled around his pillow like it’s the only thing keeping me from flying apart.
The visible trembling in my shoulders and arms that I can’t stop.
His eyes drop lower, to the dark stain spreading across the sheets beneath my hips, the fabric saturated and glistening where slick has been pouring out of me, and his lips part.
“Yugyeom—”
Hyunwoo inhales.
I see the exact moment my heat pheromones—uncontrolled, unfiltered, pumping out of every pore in my body in concentrations I didn’t know I was capable of producing—reach him.
His pupils blow wide so fast the brown of his irises disappears, swallowed by black in less than a heartbeat.
His nostrils flare. His jaw locks. A groan tears out of him and his entire body goes rigid in the doorframe, every muscle in his neck and shoulders pulling taut under his skin.
He stands there for two full seconds, frozen, his blazer slipping off his arm and hitting the floor without him noticing.
His chest expands with another breath—slower this time, deeper, like he’s trying to get more of it—and I watch his hands curl into fists at his sides, the tendons in his forearms standing out sharp beneath his skin.
He steps into the room and turns to the dogs.
A single word in Belgian Dutch leaves his mouth—”Blijf”—firm and authoritative even though his voice has dropped a full register and there’s a strain running through it that I’ve never heard before.
Kal and Machete both flatten their ears but obey, holding their positions in the hallway as Hyunwoo grips the bedroom door and pushes it shut with a decisive click.
He’s already pulling at his tie with one hand before the latch catches, yanking the knot loose and dragging it over his head.
His other hand works the buttons of his dress shirt, fingers moving fast but fumbling on the third one down in a way that Hyunwoo’s hands never fumble, popping it clean off instead of threading it through.
The shirt comes open and he shrugs out of it, letting it fall behind him as he crosses the room toward the bed, and the sight of his bare chest—flushed, the muscles of his abdomen tight and jumping, his gold chain swinging against his collarbones—makes me moan into the pillow.
He stops at the edge of the mattress and looks down at me.
His eyes are almost entirely black, just a thin ring of brown visible around the blown pupils, and his jaw is clenched so hard I can see the muscle jumping beneath his ear.
His chest rises and falls with controlled breaths that are getting less controlled by the second.