* * *
The lovemaking with Jiwoon was, at least physically, satisfying.
The sweet burst of Omega pheromones, his soft skin, and the instinctive intimacy momentarily made Joowon forget all the tumultuous thoughts swirling in his mind.
In that instant, he couldn’t think of anything but focusing solely on Jiwoon’s body.
But that was all.
As soon as the intense heat subsided, a dreadful emptiness, made all the clearer by the very intensity of the encounter, washed over him like a wave.
His body felt languidly relaxed, but his mind rang loudly as if it were hollowed out.
Next to him, Jiwoon was asleep, leaning against his arm, letting out a sigh of contentment.
Even with the sweet scent of his pheromones still thick in the room after they finished, Joowon felt foggy, as if a thick mist had descended, and his head continued to pound.
Strangely, his head always ached terribly like this after intense intimacy with Jiwoon.
As if he was doing something wrong.
Emotional emptiness and a splitting headache followed the physical satisfaction.
Sleep was impossible.
The terrible insomnia that had plagued him for months since Yoonwoo left had returned to torment him.
When he closed his eyes, the emptiness deepened, and when he opened them, Jiwoon’s sleeping presence next to him felt alien.
He cautiously slid out of bed.
Jiwoon’s brow furrowed slightly, but thankfully, he didn’t wake up.
Joowon got dressed and headed to the study.
He considered doing some work, but the documents and laptop didn’t hold his attention.
After briefly flipping through some papers, Joowon left them on the desk and walked toward the window.
He stared at the dark city view outside the window, smoked a cigarette, and drank several glasses of strong whiskey, but sleep would not come, and his headache only worsened.
His mind was a mess of complicated thoughts.
The company was unstable, and his relationship with Jiwoon was, contrary to appearances, fraught with friction.
And at the starting point of all these problems, the shadow of the one person he had cruelly abandoned loomed large.
‘Seo Yoonwoo….’
The mere thought of the name made a corner of his heart ache.
The void he left, which Joowon only truly realized after sending him away, was much larger than he had anticipated.
In work and in daily life.
Professionally, he desperately needed Yoonwoo’s sharp feedback and flawless results.
Personally, he missed the stability that Yoonwoo’s quiet presence itself had provided, an ache that drove him mad.
His absence was shaking Joowon’s entire life.
It felt like nothing was going right without him.
It was past 4 a.m.
Amidst the splitting headache and suffocating frustration, he couldn’t endure it any longer.
He impulsively grabbed his wallet and car keys.
The destination was fixed.
The officetel he had tossed to Yoonwoo as ‘alimony,’ which was now someone else’s home.
Even though he knew Yoonwoo had left everything behind and gone, he knew from experience that the terrible headache and sleeplessness strangely subsided, even if only slightly, in that place.
And it was the only space where Jiwoon was absent.
Worried that the sleeping Jiwoon might wake up, he quietly left the study, carefully closed the front door, and walked out.
Joowon habitually entered the password and stepped into Yoonwoo’s officetel.
An empty house. An abandoned space.
It was distinctly someone else’s home, given to Yoonwoo as alimony.
Yet, his feet kept leading him here.
The one or two times he secretly visited right after Yoonwoo left when he felt he would go insane had now become three or four times a week.
Like an addict, he couldn’t survive without the strange peace this cold, empty space provided.
He entered cautiously, like a thief.
Even though he knew Yoonwoo was gone, he was cautious, wondering if he might have returned or if a tiny trace of him might remain.
He knew he shouldn’t be doing this, yet he couldn’t stop.
As the chilling air of the officetel touched his cheek, his pounding headache miraculously seemed to ease slightly.
He stood by the entrance for a moment, looking around the empty space.
Every piece of furniture Yoonwoo’s hands had touched seemed to reproach him.
He walked listlessly into the living room and sank onto the familiar sofa.
How long did he sit there?
His mind was completely filled with thoughts of Yoonwoo.
The more he tried to forget, the more he tried not to think about him, the more often and vividly Seo Yoonwoo came to mind recently.
His quiet smile, the earnest look in his eyes when he was focused on design, the warm gaze he directed at Joowon, the small, everyday moments they shared… everything was as vivid as if it were yesterday.
Of course, he knew he couldn’t forget someone he had dated for eight years overnight.
But he hadn’t expected him to pop into his thoughts so constantly, even after quite some time had passed.
It was as if his presence were a part of himself.
His gentle laughter, his sparkling eyes, the passion with which they debated design all night, his back view brewing coffee in the morning sun… those memories tore at his heart.
And those memories would flow and flow, but always end in the same place: Yoonwoo’s empty eyes, sitting listlessly in this very living room, after hearing Joowon’s harsh words.
It was then.
An unbearable, unexplainable emotion washed over him like a tide.
He jumped to his feet.
Like a madman, he began to ransack the entire house.
He flung open drawers, searched through closets, and checked even the dusty bathroom shelves, desperate not to miss a single trace.
Like a child who has lost a parent and blindly searches for them, Joowon desperately moved, wanting to find even the smallest fragment of Yoonwoo, any proof that he had existed here.
But the house was spotlessly empty.
As if no one had ever lived here.
There was no trace of him anywhere.
Holding onto a final sliver of hope, he entered the master bedroom.
After searching for a long time, he found a piece of black fabric, crumpled carelessly in the dust by the corner of the bed.
“What is this…?”
Picking it up carefully, he realized it was the thin, soft, black silk slip Yoonwoo had worn on their eighth anniversary night.
The sight he had turned away from in bewilderment and rejection that night now returned as the heartbreaking, final image of a desperate Yoonwoo, stabbing at his chest.
Joowon brought the slip close to his face with trembling hands.
He buried his nose in it and inhaled deeply.
He frantically tried to find Yoonwoo’s own scent that might remain in it.
Not his pheromones, but the scent of Seo Yoonwoo the ‘person.’
The slip smelled faintly of a clean body scent familiar to him, mixed with dust.
It was completely different from Jiwoon’s overt Omega pheromones that instantly aroused him—a faint scent, yet strangely moving.
But it was odd.
There was no intensity to excite his body, but the faint scent of the fabric actually calmly soothed his pounding head and quieted his restless heart.
A clarity, as if his hazy mind was clearing up, was accompanied by a sense of stability that settled his heart comfortably.
It was a completely different kind of solace than the intense excitement or comfort provided by pheromones.
He tightened his grip on the slip.
The cruel words he had spat at Yoonwoo on the day they broke up came back to him.
Especially the image of himself mocking Yoonwoo’s pitiful last attempt.
‘…Even so… I shouldn’t have said such harsh things.’
A sharp regret shot through his heart.
His eyes burned as he remembered Yoonwoo’s wounded eyes looking at him while wearing this slip.
At the same time, the memory of his back view as he walked past Joowon and left the company, his eyes hollowed out as if he had resigned himself to everything, brought a tearing pain to his heart.
‘I couldn’t help it. I had no choice. An Alpha must bond with an Omega… through pheromones.’
The contradiction was stark: his body still craved Omega pheromones, yet what he truly sought in this dreadful loneliness and emptiness was this lingering scent, devoid of pheromones.
He fought desperately against the self-loathing that welled up, constantly rationalizing in his mind, but he was utterly confused as to why this piece of non-pheromonal fabric offered him deeper comfort.
‘Everyone says it. Alphas must be with Omegas. That’s the right way. Alphas can’t be happy with Betas. I made the right choice.’
He held the black slip, the slip that held Yoonwoo’s final moment, tightly enough to tear it, and collapsed onto the bed.
The empty space was not filled with the regret he refused to acknowledge, but with a terrible, clear longing that he could not deny even to himself.
While admonishing himself that he shouldn’t miss him, that this was wrong, he clung desperately to the piece of fabric that held no pheromones.
Perhaps because he had finally poured out his emotions for so long, or because he was utterly exhausted from frantically searching the house, he finally felt his splitting headache subside a little and the veil of insomnia that had tormented him for days slowly lift.
Amidst the faint lingering scent, a mix of Yoonwoo’s trace and his own tiny regret, he finally drifted into a shallow sleep after a very long time.
In the abandoned house, on the empty bed, frantically craving the warmth of the past.
* * *
