By Zephyria 
The face I saw in the rearview mirror wasn’t a human face. If I walked around like that, it was the kind of face that would make someone report me as a victim of domestic or dating violence. Because Cha Soo-kyung’s face was pretty and his build was small, it had the effect of looking even more miserable and terrible.
The suit, which had been soaked in water and then roughly dried by the car heater, looked shabby. I should have changed my clothes. I walked through the hotel lobby, where the lighting felt exceptionally bright today, shrugging my shoulders, and Kwon Yi-kang, who stepped close beside me, took off the cardigan he was wearing and draped it over my shoulders.
“Your face is one thing, but why do you look like such a mess?”
While waiting for the elevator, Kwon Yi-kang finally couldn’t hold back and asked. I told him I’d tell him once we reached the room; he really is impatient. As I stepped into the elevator with a ding, I answered lightly.
“I got drenched in water.”
“And your face?”
“I got hit by a hand.”
“Then why on earth…”
Whether the answer was unsatisfactory or not, he suddenly raised his voice, then stopped and caught his breath. The people who had entered the elevator with us shifted uncomfortably, sticking close to the walls, then hurriedly pressed the nearest floor buttons and poured out as soon as the doors opened—even though the buttons for the floors they originally intended to go to were still glowing.
“Is my face that hideous? It seems like people are avoiding me.”
Are they so repulsed they don’t even want to ride an elevator with me? When I played up my sorrow, Kwon Yi-kang ruffled his hair in frustration.
“It’s because of me. My emotions became fierce.”
The deeply furrowed brow and the bulging vein in his neck showed how agitated his emotions were. Every time he caught his breath, a sweet scent, thicker than usual, tickled the tip of my nose. I don’t like it when he’s annoyed, but this is actually kind of nice. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, inhaling the man’s scent.
“Who was it.”
“…”
“Who did it? Hmm? Soo-kyung.”
As if the sudden raising of his voice had been a lie, he instantly changed his tone, asking softly as if soothing a child. It was a kind and gentle voice that made me feel as though I should spill everything I knew without any guard. At the sound of my name, I stared blankly at Kwon Yi-kang. A darkness like an abyss was boiling within his black pupils.
“I think that’s the first time you’ve called my name.”
“That’s probably not the important part here.”
“Your pheromones right now are so sweet it’s almost pungent. And it’s not even your heat cycle. You’re releasing this on purpose, aren’t you? Are you seducing me?”
“This is… anger. No, he’s… holding back anger.”
I toyed with the hem of Kwon Yi-kang’s shirt, panting for a moment as I tried to suppress my heating breath, and unlike me, he had cooled down, spitting out each word with force as if chewing them.
“Tell me who did it.”
“I want to kiss you. I want to have sex with you.”
I want to hold your body, get drunk on your pheromones, and be filled by your genitals until I ejaculate. As I whispered while leaning close against Kwon Yi-kang, he let out a hollow laugh and rubbed his lips against my forehead.
“This is not the situation for that. Get a grip, Cha Soo-kyung.”
“It’s not?”
When he’s emitting such a sweet scent. When your pheromones are enveloping me and exciting me. I don’t know what I’m misunderstanding.
“If you tell me who it was, I’ll hold you. I’ll kiss you, and we’ll have sex. I’ll thrust inside you and come as much as I want.”
His lips lingered close to my ear as he whispered slowly. Hot breath dampened the curve of my ear, and his tongue licked up the contoured outline.
“If I tell you? Are you going to go punish them?”
“I might go punish them myself, or I might make it so that you can punish them.”
Looking at him, who guaranteed a perfect act of filial impiety, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and I ended up making a strange expression.
The elevator arrived, and Kwon Yi-kang, grabbing my wrist, strode toward the room. Opening the door with a hint of urgency, he pulled me inside.
“Now tell me. Who did what and why.”
“Aren’t we having sex?”
“That comes later.”
“Then can I wash first? My mind is foggy. I can’t think of anything.”
As I gazed at him with blurred eyes, he let out a short sigh and led me to the bathroom. Click, he closed the door and disappeared, and along with him, the scent that had been dizzying me faded, and my clouded mind gradually returned.
Why is my body heating up so suddenly? As they say, a late-blooming thief doesn’t know when the sun rises; every time I touch Kwon Yi-kang’s body or feel those pheromones, my body becomes helplessly aroused.
I turned on the water, dipped my hands in, and caught my breath for a moment.
The face reflected in the mirror was swollen, and bruises had already begun to surface. The area under my nose, which I hadn’t managed to wipe, was stained with dried blood. The faint image of Cha Soo-kyung had become incredibly vivid.
I stripped off the expensive suit that had become trash. As I took off the jacket, loosened the tie, and removed the dress shirt, I saw reddish-purple bruises in the shape of a human hand from my shoulder to my chest. I felt it then, but his strength was not something to be underestimated just because he was an old man.
I slowly looked at my completely naked body in the mirror. The scrawny, bruised body didn’t look good. It was a small, fragile, and insignificant body. Does vulgar and baseless blood flow within this body? Is that why an Omega father and Cha Soo-kyung had to be treated that way?
As I was blankly staring at the body in the mirror, Kwon Yi-kang appeared through the quietly opened bathroom door. He scanned my bare back and the front reflected in the mirror, letting out a low sigh.
“I came in because it was too quiet… You’ll catch a cold if you stay like that.”
“I need to wash, but I have no strength. I have no motivation. The person in the mirror looks too unfamiliar.”
“It’s only natural that it feels unfamiliar.”
Rolling up his sleeves, he stepped into the bathroom, grabbed me, and carefully sat me on the edge of the bathtub. He adjusted the water temperature with the showerhead and brought a gentle stream of water to my shoulder. The touch stroking my shoulder and back was soft.
“It’s your fault.”
As his hand rubbed and wet various parts of my body, I suddenly blamed him.
“Until a moment ago, I was truly full of motivation. I was thinking I’d ask you to curse with me when we met. If you hadn’t stimulated me in the elevator, I would have. You made a perfectly fine person’s legs go weak for no reason.”
“You’re the strange one. If I get that angry, a hundred out of a hundred people would be terrified and run away; there’s no one who gets excited and lunges at me. I guess you didn’t see the guys in the elevator fleeing in terror?”
“You were leaking pheromones everywhere. I couldn’t help it.”
“In the first place, the pheromones released when excited and when emotions are agitated should feel different.”
“What do you mean different? They felt the same. Anyway, that was really your fault.”
At my mumbling words, he laughed quietly and replied, “Right,” but it felt strongly like he was just letting me win.
“Close your eyes.”
Before I could say anything else, he spoke in a whisper and brought the showerhead near my face. As I squeezed my eyes shut, warm water poured down from the crown of my head over my forehead.
“Tell me if it hurts.”
A large hand began to gently wipe and rub my wet face. Fearing it might hurt if he pressed too hard, his fingers moved without much force, wiping away the dried blood under my nose and washing away the sweat and tears.
After washing my hair and rinsing my body several times to ensure no soap remained, he wrapped a large towel around my body with a kind touch until the end and moved me onto the bed.
I had simply been sitting there, yet I had washed my face, showered, washed my hair, and been dried until I was fluffy. It was the highest grade of service I had ever received.
“Get under the covers and lie down. You’re going to feel unwell.”
“What’s with that curse?”
“I can tell just by looking at your dazed state right now. You’ll wake up with a body ache tomorrow.”
Kwon Yi-kang, who had stepped away for a moment due to a phone call, returned and scolded me. On the tray in his hand were wine and a cold compress.
“Right, I got permission to stay out today. I’m going to sleep here. There isn’t anyone else coming, right?”
“You can’t go anyway because you have no clothes to wear. You’d have to go naked.”
“I have the clothes I wore.”
“I threw them away. I’ll prepare clothes for you to wear tomorrow, so stop changing the subject.”
He handed me a glass filled about one-third with wine and urged me with a quiet gaze; I took the wine with sparkling eyes, downed it in one shot, and smiled proudly. Perhaps this wasn’t the reaction he wanted, as a thin line appeared between Kwon Yi-kang’s brows.
“Now… I should tattle and ask you to curse with me. About which bastard hit you like that, when and where.”
As if exercising extreme patience and endurance, he spoke rapidly through clenched lips and poured more wine.
“To tell this, I have to start from when I left the house. First, it wasn’t that bad when I started. Father’s expression…”
“Keep it simple and clear: just tell me who hit you, when, where, and why.”
“Then you won’t understand, will you?”
“…I’ll listen to the details.”
Speaking in a tone of half-resignation, he swallowed a sigh and waved his hand. I laughed because the expression on his face—looking as if he were forced to endure it—was cute. He doesn’t need to listen to it to the point of enduring something he dislikes so much.
I just wanted to leave that house and go somewhere else. Kwon Yi-kang was the only person I knew, and it didn’t particularly matter if he didn’t care about my ruined face. It would be great if he accepted me and spent the night with me, and even if he refused because I wasn’t in a state to mix bodies, it wasn’t something I’d be hurt by.
But this man worried about me and wanted to hear what had happened. He was facing me and listening to me. He cared about every word that came out of my mouth and worried about my bruised wounds.
As if he cared for me. As if… we were lovers.