“After graduation I won’t have anything to do with that field anyway.”
“Almost everyone lives their life untouched by quantum mechanics, but hardly anyone refuses to understand it like Han Jaeheon-ssi.”
Han Jaeheon wore an ah, caught face. So the answer wasn’t that he couldn’t understand — it was that he wouldn’t. Outwardly pretending to listen so earnestly, when it became established fact that he hadn’t been listening from the start, Eunseo felt closer to resignation than anger.
And now something else didn’t make sense. So why was Han Jaeheon doing this? If it was to torment the TA who dared interfere with his graduation, wasn’t this enough by now? Barely swallowing the tears at his chin’s edge, Eunseo quickened his pace. He wanted to go, eat, go in and rest, quickly. His body ached dully.
“You don’t come out this far to the natural sciences side much, right?”
“Right.”
He’d never come all the way to the business school to eat. At most the student union or the agriculture school cafeteria, and off campus it was usually bar snacks for meals. He ate nearly all three meals at school, so his home’s gas line had been disconnected long ago.
“Isn’t the engineering school farther?”
“It is, but it’s my graduating semester, so I’m looking around campus. This place is clean and the best.”
“……..”
“You look like you have nothing to do.”
It’s not that I have nothing to do… He used to come here often — with Yein, he’d heard. With Yein, the business school omega who’d been here until recently. Eunseo entered the restaurant thinking of the rumors he’d picked up unintentionally.
The moment Han Jaeheon stepped in, the surroundings fell silent as if someone had hit mute. The person spearing pizza with a fork, the person stabbing at pasta, the person who’d dropped their salad reaching for it — everyone was looking at Han Jaeheon.
“Ta-table for two?”
Even the server stuttered.
“Yes.”
“Right this way.”
But Han Jaeheon walked on as if feeling none of it, casually parting the silent current. Feeling every gaze pinned on Han Jaeheon shift onto him, Eunseo squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them. For someone whose life goal was to live quietly, invisibly, unnoticed by anyone, this situation was like someone strangling him.
“TA, this way.”
“…Yes.”
Barely answering, he moved his feet, and the gazes clutching his ankles followed. He was going mad wanting to run, but there was no escaping Han Jaeheon, already seated and waving him over.
No escape again.
“Busy even at dinner.”
“Yeah.”
“The two-person set is good here. Salad, pasta, pizza — good for sharing. Or is there something else you’d like?”
“…No, that sounds fine.”
“What pizza do you want? I like the gorgonzola and the margherita.”
His lips, casually shaping the difficult menu names, were red. Eunseo stared blankly, then startled and jabbed the menu with his finger at random.
“Ah, Hawaiian pizza? That’s good too.”
At Eunseo’s vague nod, Han Jaeheon called the server and ordered. A young omega student, face lit red, took the order very kindly in a birdlike voice and went.
“Nice and quiet.”
Is Han Jaeheon tactless? Or is he so used to this he doesn’t care at all? Eunseo could clearly feel everyone around them shutting their mouths and pricking their ears to listen in.
“Thanks to you, TA, I’ve gotten a lot out of this. Since then, I may be late, but nothing’s unsubmitted.”
Since we started solving problems and writing reports together from submission time and turning them in that evening—
Han Jaeheon was marked late every time, but his assignment and report scores were very good. The late-submission penalty knocked an assignment down one grade — from A+ to A — which was a very profitable bargain for him.
“…Isn’t it about time you started submitting on time? What I originally proposed was that I’d give feedback on the assignments and reports you submit.”
Eunseo said it keeping his voice as low as possible. After all, he was the TA, and a TA being chummy with one particular student in his course wasn’t the kind of thing people spoke well of.
“If I lose you, TA, I can’t even get started from square one.”
“I’d be happy just to graduate like this.”
Eh… do whatever you want. Eunseo had reached the point of giving up. Anyway, he wasn’t doing anything improper with Han Jaeheon, and it was a relationship of helping a student, true to the title of TA — so he let it be.
“The salad’s good. Eat a lot.”
He’d had them make it with salmon in it, so the salad turned out to be a full salmon salad. But Eunseo, who didn’t much enjoy raw seafood, wasn’t fond of that kind of dish.
“They have smoked salmon separately on the menu here. Want me to order some for you?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“You just got told your dark circles are terrible.”
“I’m really fine.”
That damn dark circles comment — thinking he’d grab Jin Seunghu by the collar the moment he got to the lab tomorrow, Eunseo poked at his food with his fork. While Eunseo shredded the salmon into small pieces, Jaeheon called the server over and added smoked salmon to the order, not even pretending to hear Eunseo’s insistence that he was really fine.
Why was everyone around him like this? Even his prejudice against alphas was starting to harden — every person who only ever said what they wanted was an alpha.
“Because no matter how I look at you, TA, you don’t seem like someone who’d say what they want properly.”
As if asking for praise for doing well — looking at that grinning face, Eunseo could only clench and unclench his fists under the table.
“Here’s your smoked salmon first.”
“Yes, thank you.”
The server’s face lit up at Jaeheon’s easy smile. No matter how he looked at it, their food was coming out twice as fast as the surrounding tables. The server was remarkably capable.
“Here, eat a lot.”
Using the tongs to move nearly all the thinly spread salmon onto Eunseo’s plate, Jaeheon looked genuinely pleased. In inverse proportion, Eunseo’s face looked more and more like death. For him, salmon was the kind of ingredient where a single bite felt like dying.
When he forced the salmon into his mouth and chewed, Jaeheon smiled radiantly. His slightly downturned eyes overflowed with undisguised mischief and delight. At the fishy taste surging up his throat, Eunseo scrunched up his face without meaning to, then smoothed it back out at the sight of Jaeheon’s face.
“I hope you look a little better next time I see you.”
At the cryptic words, impossible to tell whether sincere or not, Eunseo could only nod. He felt like he was getting indigestion.
“Here’s your pizza.”
The kind server brought the pizza out really fast too. Eunseo, who wanted to escape this place as quickly as possible, was grateful — but he could feel the murderous glares of the two students who’d arrived before them boring into the back of his head. Their table was still empty.
“I’ll bring the pasta right out too.”
The server, who had kindly cut the pizza and even grated cheese prettily on top, headed back to the kitchen, and only then could Eunseo see what the pizza was. The dish he’d ordered without properly hearing or seeing was topped with the thing he hated most in the world — cooked fruit.
“You must like pineapple.”
As if this were some blind date — what did it matter who liked what — Jaeheon pointedly singled out the pineapple on the pizza. Eunseo hurriedly swallowed a sigh. He’d ordered a dish he’d chosen himself; he couldn’t make a face about hating it.
“…Yes.”
And… well, he did like pineapple itself, anyway.
“But I don’t eat cooked pineapple. Eat a lot.”
Moving every bit of pineapple from the pizza onto Eunseo’s plate with the tongs, Jaeheon said in a gentle voice. Piled high with yellow pineapple, the sour smell stinging his nose — Eunseo’s face crumpled without his meaning it to, and he picked up his fork with a trembling hand. And since he couldn’t take back what he’d said — and didn’t want to hear any more needless remarks from Jaeheon’s mouth — he forced down his churning stomach and chewed the soggy pineapple down.
***
Shin Eunseo was an omega. But no one knew he was an omega.
He was a child born between a male omega and a female omega, for whom natural conception was extremely difficult. The two had loved each other so much that they’d wanted some fruit of it no matter what, and after endless fertility treatments they had barely managed to conceive, and gave birth.
The child was fortunately born without problems, but the female omega, weakened greatly by the grueling pregnancy and birth, passed away the year the child turned three, and the male omega, who grieved terribly, lived steeped in sorrow until the
child came of age — then packed up the house and left.
Leave a Reply