Before Eunwon could process the answer, Muyoung pressed both his cheeks.
His lips, pursed out like a goldfish, met Muyoung’s pressed hard against them. Chuu, chuu. Two short, firm pecks in a row, almost like headbutts.
And right after, from his mouth burst the words that utterly shattered Eunwon’s mind—which had only registered surprise and bewilderment at kissing Cha Muyoung.
"An alpha doting on his omega—what more explanation do you need?" And if he had to find another reason, maybe it was because you were excessively pretty.
Whenever Seo Eunwon was cute, Muyoung’s teeth itched for some reason. Like a teething beast, he wanted to chew and suck on him. Normally he endured it well, resolving it within the permitted sixty seconds, but today—with everything turned upside down by extraordinary events—he could barely restrain himself, touching and tasting him all over.
If he had to name the cause of today’s behavior, it would be that Seo Eunwon had been hateful and provoking—and excessively pretty and adorable.
Of course, he swallowed the mischievous truth unsaid. No matter how much of a loose cannon Muyoung was, even he couldn’t let that slip at a moment like this.
Right now, Muyoung was flushed with an uncharacteristic flutter.
He had kissed the person he liked and finally delivered the confession he had been saving so long. (Of course, they had already done it—two nights and three days of heat-cycle knotting sex, kisses exchanged countless times in the process—but the important thing was that this time, unlike then, he was completely sober.) He had called him his… omega. Said he was dying of how pretty he was.
That one sentence of Muyoung’s really carried a much longer, expanded confession: "I want you. I want to date you, marry you, live pressed together, have babies that look like you and raise them well. I’m fucking in love with you, sincerely. Let’s imprint as soon as possible. Live with me forever and die with me on the same day."
And Muyoung believed Eunwon must have understood his true feelings. His words were short, but the actions of love he had stacked up over the past two years had been blatant and plentiful enough to allow such understanding.
Now Seo Eunwon would set aside his shyness, throw off all his hesitation and dithering, and fall into his arms, right? But contrary to Muyoung’s confident expectation, Eunwon’s expression was a wreck.
He looked less like someone who had received a confession and more like someone… handed a death sentence, pale and frozen.
"…Seo Eunwon?"
The moment he spoke the name in puzzlement—whump!—a violent collision. Eunwon, who had been squirming and fussing in Muyoung’s arms, shoved him away with all his might and began backing off.
"You knew? You knew… that I’m an omega?"
"What…?"
What is he even saying? Is this a joke?
Unable to immediately understand the babbling, Muyoung furrowed his brow. For a joke… Eunwon’s eyes were churning too violently with terror. And this sweet boy wasn’t the type to joke about such things.
Only when he studied that face to get his bearings did Muyoung realize he might have missed something very important.
…he realized he might have missed something crucial.
"You’re asking if I knew you were an omega? How could I not know? I was with you through your heat—how could I not know?"
Even as he spoke, a single hypothesis flashed through Muyoung’s mind like lightning as he tried to press Eunwon for answers he couldn’t quite piece together.
*Could he… not remember?*
Not remember those forty-four hours of fevered, tangled heat?
He’d heard that the shock of a heat cycle could wipe a person’s memory clean, but Eunwon’s condition at the time hadn’t been that severe.
"*Hnngh,* hyung… Muyoung hyung… I like it, *ah*, *hnngh*, I like it. I like you…"
He had definitely cried out his name, sobbing that he liked him. And yet.
Seo Eunwon did not remember that day of his heat cycle. He didn’t even know that the person he’d had sex with was Cha Muyoung.
Only that assumption made every puzzle piece fit. The absurd question—*since when did you know I was an omega*—the flight from that hotel room, two weeks of desperate avoidance and stonewalling. Even those infuriating words, pushing him toward an arranged meeting, telling him to meet a nice omega and get married.
Muyoung tilted his head, studying Eunwon’s face more closely. It was the despair of someone whose shameful, carefully hidden secret had just been dragged into the light. Eunwon was clearly terrified—because Cha Muyoung had found out he was an omega.
"…You really think I wouldn’t have known you were an omega?"
He didn’t even need to bring up that day of the heat. He’d known from the very beginning. From the day Eunwon presented, from the first wisp of pheromones he’d ever shed, he’d known—and he’d known Eunwon wanted to keep his changed trait a secret. So he’d helped. He’d wrapped him in his own dominant alpha pheromones, watching over him, keeping him safe so no worthless flies would swarm him.
He’d assumed Eunwon knew, of course. Even if he hadn’t known the details, he’d thought Eunwon at least saw him as a *protector*—not someone a fragile omega had to raise his quills against, but a solid shelter to run to first when danger came.
But Eunwon’s frightened face told him those thoughts had all been arrogance. Delusion.
"…Was that a secret from me too?"
His voice sank low with hollowness. *I was a threat to you too?* He’d never once imagined it, and the shock was enough to paralyze him for a moment. Seeing that reaction, Eunwon grew even more frightened, biting his bloodied lip as he kept backing away.
"How… how did you find out?"
"…"
"Since when… and why didn’t you say anything… no, but even so, why would you…"
Muyoung couldn’t answer right away. Looking at that face, crumbling at one corner as if his heart were caving in, he was seized by a mad regret for what he’d done a few weeks ago.
He shouldn’t have left Seo Eunwon alone that day. He should have shaken the kid awake when he fled to suffer alone in that rooftop room. That needless patience—the time he’d given, telling himself he understood a young omega’s fear—had turned out to be poison.
If they’d had this conversation back then, Eunwon wouldn’t be making that face now.
For now, calming the startled kid came first. Eunwon had backed up until there was nowhere left to go, pressed flat against one wall of the living room, and Muyoung carefully reached out a hand toward him.
"Come here for now. Let’s talk this through, slowly—"
"No, I… I don’t think I can talk about anything right now."
"Eunwon."
"I’m sorry, but I need… I need time. I really didn’t know that you—that you, hyung… no, that you, sir… knew what I am. Really." "…"
"I’m sorry I lied all this time. But… let’s talk later. I need time alone to… sort out my thoughts…"
At the plea, which sounded ready to dissolve into tears at any second, Muyoung asked with a stiff face.
"How much time?"
"…A month."
*Are you insane?* Muyoung screamed it only in his head.
"Don’t talk nonsense."
"Then… about two weeks…"
"Three days. I can’t wait longer than that. I don’t intend to."
"Three days is a bit—"
"Don’t like it? Then two."
"…Three days, please."
He nodded, cowed and frightened, looking so pitiful it ached. Somehow he’d ended up in the position of pressuring the kid, which made him even more uncomfortable, and Muyoung let out a short sigh and stepped back.
"Wait. I’ll drive you home."
But in the brief moment Muyoung glanced away to grab his car keys, it happened. With a dull thud of the front door closing, Eunwon vanished in an instant. He rushed after him, but the elevator carrying Eunwon was already plummeting toward the first floor at frightening speed.
Staring at the empty entryway, Muyoung let out a deep *haaah* of a sigh, raking roughly through his hair.
"Like a little shit-mutt, that one—sure can run." Well, he’d loved tag ever since he was little. When he was running from Muyoung with him chasing behind, he’d been the fastest, happiest kid in the world.
"…Should’ve said two days." No, honestly, even two days was too long.
He should’ve drawn the line at one day, max.
Cursing himself for playing the generous hyung in the middle of that chaos, Muyoung gripped his car keys hard enough to crush them, every tendon and vein standing out on the back of his hand. He wanted to follow right away, but Eunwon’s despairing face wouldn’t leave his mind.
As the strength drained from his tightly clenched fist, a hollow murmur slipped from his lips.
"He doesn’t remember anything. That’s what this is."
It was a complication he’d never once anticipated.
—
"…Hyung knew."
Eunwon stumbled along, barely holding his scattered mind together as he fled Muyoung’s home.
*“You really think I wouldn’t have known you were an omega?”*
Muyoung’s languid voice, as if he’d said something strange, rang in his ears like a hallucination.
Since when, and how, had he known?
And why had he never said a word all this time?
Could those weeks when he’d given him no work at all have been because he’d found out he was an omega? Because he wanted him to quit?
Because he was disgusted by the lie? Or because, like with other omegas… he felt repulsed?
But Muyoung had always been kind.
Even during those three weeks when he’d given him no work and teased him in his subtle way, there’d been no sign of avoidance. If anything, he’d clung to him more. And just now, he’d even kissed him.
Cha Muyoung hated omegas. It was because of a brutal childhood trauma—being bound for seventeen hours in clothes soaked with the pheromones of the omega kidnappers, helpless. It wasn’t discrimination or hatred so much as pus seeping from an unhealed wound of the soul, a defense mechanism not the sort of thing he could adjust at will.
*“What’s wrong with an alpha doting on his omega—”* But no matter how he thought about it, it didn’t add up.
Cha Muyoung hated omegas. And yet he’d kissed him. And it wasn’t as if he hadn’t known he was an omega. How was that possible? Cha Muyoung hated omegas.
Questions with no answers chased their own tails, spinning round and round in his head. Eunwon clutched his aching head and shook it hard.
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