Chapter Twelve #3
I eat mechanically, shoveling rice and braised beef into my mouth without tasting any of it, my eyes fixed on my plate.
My body is screaming at me to look up, to meet Hyunwoo’s gaze again, to acknowledge the bond humming between us like a live wire.
I refuse. I chew and swallow and reach for more food and don’t look up.
“Do you want to play some games tonight?” Hyunwoo asks, his voice careful, telling me he’s choosing every word with deliberate caution. “That new expansion dropped yesterday, the one we’ve been waiting for.”
I set my chopsticks down, push back from the table, and walk past him without a word. Down the hall, into my room, the door swinging shut behind me with a slam.
I drop onto the floor with my back against the side of my bed, my legs stretched out in front of me, one hand resting on the curve of my belly.
The baby shifts inside me, a faint fluttering movement that I’ve only recently started to feel, like butterfly wings brushing against the inside of my stomach.
I press my palm flat against the spot and feel it again, that tiny flutter, and my lungs feel tight for a moment.
I sit there feeling both foolish and petulant, my head tipped back against the mattress, staring at the ceiling of the room Hyunwoo decorated for me in my favorite colors.
Ye-eun was right. She called it weeks ago, telling me it was just a matter of time.
I knew it too, deep down. Every night Hyunwoo’s mouth grazed my neck while we were knotted together, every time I felt the tension in his jaw as he fought the urge, every morning I woke up with his face pressed against my bond gland and his breath hot on my skin, I knew.
I was playing with fire and I kept my hands in the flames anyway, and now I’m sitting here on the floor with a burn I can’t treat and no one to blame but myself.
Bonds between alphas and omegas are significantly more likely when the pair already has an existing personal connection.
I know this. Every omega health class I ever sat through, every pamphlet in every clinic waiting room, every article I scrolled past on those pregnancy forums I pretend I don’t read at two in the morning, they all say the same thing.
Emotional intimacy makes the instinctive pull exponentially stronger.
The deeper the attachment, the harder it becomes for the alpha to resist the claiming instinct during moments of heightened arousal, and a rut is about as heightened as it gets.
Twenty-some years of friendship, months of living together, months of sex, a pregnancy, a heat, and then a rut on top of all of it.
The odds were never in my favor. I might as well have handed Hyunwoo a loaded gun and dared him not to pull the trigger.
It still pisses me off.
This was supposed to be temporary. Carry the baby, collect the money, move on.
Nothing about a bond is temporary or simple or anything close to the clean exit strategy I was promised.
And when I think about what Hyunwoo said, asking me what the big deal was because we were already having sex anyway, it makes me want to put my fist through the drywall.
Like the sex being good is some kind of excuse for branding me as his property without my consent.
Like my body enjoying something means my mind agreed to it.
And fuck him for the other thing too. That smug, knowing look when he said I can’t come from the front anymore. The casual cruelty of it, aimed with the accuracy of someone who knows exactly where my insecurities live.
I totally can come from the front.
The thought hardens into conviction as I sit there, my jaw set, my hand still resting on my belly.
I’m going to prove it. Right now. To myself, if no one else, because I refuse to accept that my body has been so thoroughly reprogrammed by Hyunwoo’s cock that I can’t even get myself off the way I’ve been doing it since I was fourteen years old.
I push myself up from the floor and go to the bathroom, leaving the door open behind me. I grab a bottle of lube from the cabinet and push my shorts and underwear down to my ankles. I pour a generous amount of lube into my palm, the cool gel making me shiver, and wrap my hand around my cock.
It takes a while to get hard. My cock sits small and soft in my slicked palm, and I have to work at it, stroking slowly, trying to coax blood into the tissue.
My fingers keep slipping because there’s not enough of it to grip properly anymore.
My hand is comically oversized for what it’s holding, my fingers closing around the entire shaft with room to spare, and I can’t form the tight fist I used to use when I was bigger.
I adjust my grip, using just my thumb and first two fingers, and manage to get myself to a shaky half-hardness after several minutes of focused effort.
The strokes feel wrong. Too loose, too slippery, not enough friction against the head where I used to be most sensitive.
I try different angles, different speeds, squeezing tighter, rubbing my thumb over the tip the way that used to make my toes curl.
My hole throbs insistently the entire time, clenching, leaking slick down my inner thighs in a warm trickle.
My body wants something inside it. My body wants Hyunwoo inside it. I grit my teeth and keep stroking.
The arousal plateaus at a frustrating middle ground, present but going nowhere, building to a point and then just hovering there without tipping over.
Like trying to push a boulder up a hill that keeps getting steeper.
I can feel the orgasm somewhere in the distance, a faint shimmer on the horizon, but no matter how fast I stroke or how tight I squeeze, I can’t close the gap.
My body has learned a different language now and my hand doesn’t speak it anymore.
I stroke until my cock is chafed and sore and my wrist cramps, my forearm burning with the effort, and then I hunch forward over my knees with a ragged exhale, my hand falling away. Defeated. The arousal sits in my gut like a stone, unresolved and mocking.
I make a furious, guttural sound and slap the bathroom floor with my open palm, the crack of skin against tile echoing off the walls.
Angry tears burn in my eyes before I can stop them, blurring the grout lines between the floor tiles into watery smears, and my shoulders start to shake.
I press my forehead against my knees and sob, the sound ugly and raw in the small tiled room, my pregnant belly pressing against my thighs as I curl in on myself.
I hear my bedroom door open. Footsteps crossing the room, soft on the carpet, then stopping at the bathroom threshold.
“Yuggie?”
Hyunwoo’s voice is cautious, pitched low. I sniffle hard and swipe at my face with the back of my hand, smearing tears and snot across my cheek.
He appears in the doorway and stops. I glare up at him through wet, furious eyes, my vision swimming, and watch him take in the scene.
Me, sitting on the bathroom floor with my shorts around my ankles, my bare lower half exposed, my shrunken cock lying pink and useless against my thigh.
The bottle of lube tipped on its side beside me, a small puddle of it spreading across the tile.
My red-rimmed eyes and tear-streaked face.
Hyunwoo’s brow creases, his lips parting. “Yuggie, what’s—”
He looks down at the lube, at my exposed lap, back up at my face. I watch understanding dawn across his features like sunrise, his eyes widening slightly, his mouth forming a small O.
I swipe at my face again, angrily, and my voice comes out thick when I speak. “It doesn’t work.”
Hyunwoo blinks. “What doesn’t?”
I gesture furiously at my groin with my free hand, a sharp, jerky motion. “I can’t fucking cum. I tried and I can’t. It won’t work without—”
I cut myself off, my jaw clenching shut so hard my teeth grind together, because I am not going to say it. I am not going to give him the satisfaction of hearing me admit out loud that I can’t orgasm without his cock inside me.
Hyunwoo’s face goes through a remarkable journey.
Surprise first, his eyebrows shooting up.
Then comprehension, his eyes flicking down to my lap and back up with a click of understanding.
Then something that looks dangerously close to sympathy, his brow softening, his mouth pressing into a line.
And then finally, settling on something he is very clearly trying extremely hard to suppress.
His lips press together so tightly they go white.
His jaw tightens. A muscle twitches visibly in his cheek, jumping once, twice, as he fights what is obviously a laugh trying to claw its way out of him with both hands.
“Don’t you fucking laugh at me,” I snap, my voice breaking on the last word.
“I’m not laughing,” Hyunwoo says, in a tone so strained and unconvincing that it’s practically an admission. His voice is pitched half an octave too high and there’s a tremor running through it. “Not at all. I would never.”
“Yes you are, I can see it on your face.” Fresh tears well up and spill over before I can stop them, rolling hot down my cheeks, because this is rock bottom. This is the lowest point of my entire existence.
“Yugyeom.” Hyunwoo’s voice softens, the laughter retreating, though I can still see the ghost of it lurking at the corners of his mouth.
“Just shut the fuck up,” I say, louder than necessary, my voice cracking again. “Shut the fuck up, Hyunwoo. You’re an alpha jackass and I’m emotional because I’m pregnant and my dick doesn’t fucking work anymore and it’s not funny!”