Chapter Nine
With the pregnancy confirmed and the paperwork signed and filed away, all I have to do is wait.
Grow a baby, collect my payment, move on with my life.
Simple enough in theory, and for the most part, the early weeks of the first trimester are exactly that—simple.
My body still looks the same when I check in the mirror every morning, still feels more or less the same when I’m moving through my day.
The changes are happening somewhere deep and invisible, cells dividing in a part of me I can’t see or touch, and as long as I don’t think about it too hard, I can almost forget it’s happening at all.
My routine barely shifts. Hyunwoo and I work out together most mornings at the gym before my shift starts, the way we always have—him on the bench press while I set up my training station, trading spots between sets, arguing about whose squat form is better while we load plates.
In the evenings we take Kal and Machete out along the river path, the dogs loping ahead, Hyunwoo and I keeping pace side by side while the sun drops behind the apartment buildings and the air cools enough to make the run feel good instead of punishing.
I train my clients during the day, eat dinner with Hyunwoo at night—either something I’ve cooked from one of the recipes I’ve been secretly saving from that omega pregnancy page, or takeout from whatever new place Hyunwoo’s discovered that week—and then we collapse on the couch to game or watch something until one of us falls asleep first. It’s comfortable. Domestic, even.
There is one change, though. The sex. Or rather, the sheer volume of it and the way it keeps escalating in ways I didn’t anticipate and can’t keep up with.
Hyunwoo insists that regular sexual activity is beneficial for my health and the baby’s development, and he backs this up by citing his ever-expanding library of pregnancy research.
Which is fine—I’ve quietly accepted his nightly visits to my bedroom and the occasional quickie during the day with minimal protest at this point.
Even without the medical excuse, I can understand the practical reality of the situation.
Hyunwoo is a young, healthy, virile alpha with needs, and having an available, willing omega living in his apartment is obviously more convenient than going through the effort of finding hookups, especially now that his schedule is packed with meetings about the resort plans and family obligations that eat up most of his free time.
It’s not terrible for me either. The orgasms continue to be exceptional—better than anything I ever had with women, if I’m being honest with myself, which I try not to be—so I can accept the arrangement without too much internal debate.
What I can’t wrap my head around are the increasingly creative ways Hyunwoo keeps pushing the boundaries of what we’re doing, always armed with some new piece of research or medical justification that sounds just plausible enough for my admittedly non-academic brain to accept before I’ve had time to think it through.
He’s always been smarter than me. I know this.
I’ve known it since we were kids and he could talk me into anything—climbing the wall around the estate, sneaking into the kitchen after hours, joining the military with him even though I was exempt.
He has a gift for making insane ideas sound perfectly reasonable, and pregnancy has apparently given him an entirely new arena in which to exercise that talent.
Tuesday evening I’m sprawled on my bed watching a gaming stream on my phone, comfortable in sweatpants and a t-shirt, Machete curled up at the foot of the mattress with her nose tucked under her tail.
The bedroom door opens without a knock—Hyunwoo stopped knocking weeks ago—and he walks in holding something behind his back with a veiled expression on his face that immediately puts me on edge.
I lower my phone and squint at him. “Why do you look like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re about to ruin my evening.”
Hyunwoo grins, which confirms my suspicion, and says, “Turn over and take your pants off.”
I sit up on my elbows, frowning. “Why? What’ve you got now?”
He brings his hand out from behind his back and holds up a long, slender object for me to see.
A thermometer—not the kind you stick under your tongue when you’ve got a cold.
This is a medical-grade digital probe thermometer with a thin, flexible tip and a digital readout screen built into the handle.
It looks like something that belongs in a hospital, not in my bedroom.
I blink at it. “What on earth is that for?”
Hyunwoo’s expression shifts into what I’ve come to think of as his research face—serious, informed, slightly professorial.
“I read in a medical journal,” he begins, and I already feel my guard going up, “that during the early stages of pregnancy, it’s critical to monitor the health of the omega’s womb environment.
One of the most reliable methods is tracking internal core temperature on a regular basis to make sure the body isn’t running too hot or too cold.
” He taps the thermometer against his palm for emphasis.
“Temperature abnormalities can indicate infection, inflammation, or possible issues with how the fetus is developing. Early detection prevents complications.”
I stare at him. “And by internal, you mean—”
“Rectally, yes.” He nods like this is the most normal thing in the world. “The most accurate reading of core reproductive temperature comes from the rectal cavity, as close to the womb as possible.”
I sputter, my face already heating, and start to say that there’s no way I’m letting him stick a thermometer up my ass, but Hyunwoo is already moving forward with the calm, purposeful stride of a man who has decided something is going to happen.
His hands find my hips and he turns me over on the bed with a firm grip, flipping me onto my stomach before I can properly resist. Machete lifts her head, watches us for a moment with mild canine interest, then puts her head back down.
“Come on,” Hyunwoo says, tugging at the waistband of my sweatpants. “It’s for your own good and the baby’s. Besides, you’re used to having much larger things inside you by now—this is nothing in comparison.”
“You’re giving yourself a little too much credit,” I mutter into the pillow, but I let him pull my pants down past my hips because I’ve learned over the course of these past months that arguing with Hyunwoo when he’s in this mode is a waste of energy that could be better spent elsewhere.
Like literally anywhere else. I shift onto my hands and knees, resigned to accept that my life has become a series of increasingly absurd indignities, and I hold still as Hyunwoo parts my cheeks with one hand and positions the tip of the thermometer against my hole with the other.
I inhale sharply as the probe pushes past my rim.
It’s cold—the metal tip carrying the chill of the air-conditioned apartment—and stiff despite its flexibility, a thin, unyielding intrusion that slides into my passage with almost no resistance because my hole is, as it has been for weeks now, slick and loose and perpetually ready in a way that I find extremely annoying.
Hyunwoo’s right that it’s nothing compared to his cock.
The probe is barely thicker than a pencil and I can hardly feel it in terms of stretch.
But there’s something about the nature of it—cold and impersonal, the fact that it’s a medical instrument being inserted into my ass while I kneel on my bed like a patient in an exam room—that makes my skin prickle with a specific kind of embarrassment that sex doesn’t produce.
Hyunwoo pushes it deeper. Slowly, carefully, navigating the slim probe further into my channel with focus.
I can feel it sliding past the curve of my passage, the flexible tip bending slightly to follow the shape of my body, going deeper than his fingers usually reach during prep.
My breathing picks up and I grip the sheets, staring at the headboard, willing my body not to react.
My body does not listen to me.
When the tip of the thermometer reaches the entrance to my womb—that tight, sensitive barrier that my body has learned to recognize and respond to with Pavlovian consistency over the past weeks of Hyunwoo’s increasingly deep penetration—everything fires at once.
My womb clenches around the probe tip, my prostate sends a jolt of bright, sharp pleasure up my spine, and I come with a startled gasp, my cock spurting onto the sheets beneath me completely untouched, my hips jerking forward as my hole clamps down around the thin metal shaft.
My face burns. I just came from a thermometer.
A thermometer. Not even a particularly large one.
My body has become so conditioned to respond to anything touching my womb that a piece of medical equipment can make me orgasm like a switch being flipped, and the humiliation of that is so acute I want to crawl under the bed and never come out.
Hyunwoo, behind me, regards this development with quiet satisfaction.
He doesn’t laugh, doesn’t comment, doesn’t make a single smug remark—which is somehow worse than if he had, because his silence tells me he expected this outcome and finds it perfectly unremarkable.
He leaves the thermometer inserted, the digital handle hanging between my cheeks, and pats my lower back once.
“Hold your position for a few minutes,” he says, his tone mild and informational. “The reading needs to stabilize for maximum accuracy.”