Chapter 17

“I feel like I haven’t seen Alex lately.”

Jude was the first to break the comfortable silence that had settled over them. Beside her, Nathan, who had been walking quietly, slowly turned his head, while Tina finally looked up from her phone to chime in.

“Yeah, you’re right. He hasn’t said much in the group chat, either. Is he still sick, Nathan?”

The question naturally gravitated toward the Beta. Lowering his long eyelashes, Nathan chewed on the inquiry, a topic that had already been heavily occupying his own thoughts.

“This is the first time I’ve ever seen Alex get sick. I don’t think he’s even gotten hurt playing football before,” Nathan replied.

Jude quickly picked up the conversational thread, seemingly relieved that the heavy silence had finally shattered. After a brief spell of voicing their concerns for Alex, the girls seamlessly pivoted to typical school gossip. They chattered about how Joseph, whose older brother was a known drug dealer, had allegedly brought weed to the last party, and debated whether the false eyelashes worn by a Beta girl in the next class looked pretty or not.

Yet as they discussed such trivial matters, both girls looked genuinely happy. Usually, whenever the conversation veered into this territory, Alex would immediately turn to Nathan and subtly change the subject. He would ask if Nathan’s exam prep was going well, or mention that Nathan’s favorite author had released a new book, strictly limiting the topics to things Nathan actually cared about.

Looking back, across all those countless conversations over the past two years, they had never once discussed something as mundane as their ‘ideal types.’

It was almost comical when he thought about it. Teenagers their age were typically obsessed with only two things: their grades and future careers, or getting a partner. It was the most universal topic of adolescence. Even if they weren’t actively dating anyone, it was perfectly normal to gush over favorite actors or celebrities, yet Alex had never, not even once, initiated that kind of conversation with him.

While Nathan deliberately kept his inner circle painfully small, he actually had several other same-sex friends besides Alex if he counted them. There were his training partners at the gym he had attended since childhood, along with a few Betas in his homeroom. The only demographic missing from his roster was Alpha males, but he still generally mingled well enough with guys his own age.

Whenever Nathan received a confession, the guys in his class would inevitably show a massive, obnoxious amount of interest. They would barrage him with comments, endlessly declaring how pretty the girl was, how lucky he was, or begging him to set them up with her friends until he was thoroughly sick of it.

Alex, however, had never displayed even a fraction of that kind of interest whenever Nathan was confessed to.

The Alpha had merely offered his congratulations with an oddly heavy, troubled expression that always lingered in Nathan’s mind.

Details he had previously brushed off without a second thought were suddenly consuming his mind with increasing frequency. It left him with a suffocating sensation, exactly like staring at a test paper with an unsolved problem left blank. This bizarre mental block had begun precisely on the day he had witnessed Alex’s rut.

—”I used to like you.”

The desperately whispered confession echoed vividly in his ears, sounding as if Alex were standing right beside him. Nathan’s footsteps drifted to a halt. A sudden, phantom tickle flared just below his earlobe, near the nape of his neck. The sensation crept slowly across his skin, prickling exactly like goosebumps. Deepening his frown, he rubbed his hand firmly against the back of his neck.

“What’s wrong?” Tina asked softly.

Jude’s eyes widened as she stared at Nathan, who had abruptly stopped walking behind them. Dropping the hand that had been pressing against his skin, Nathan finally spoke.

“In our school…”

The question felt wildly abrupt even to Nathan himself. Yet instead of swallowing the thought back down, the words spilled past his lips.

“…Are there any Alphas who date Betas?”

“An Alpha and a Beta?” Jude echoed, her tone dripping with surprise as if she had never even considered the concept.

Tina rubbed her chin thoughtfully before slowly shaking her head, and the two girls immediately launched into a speculative discussion.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that happening.”

“Do Betas even date other dynamics?”

“I’ve heard it happens sometimes once you get to university.”

“That’s fascinating. I guess it is possible, then.”

Jude nodded along in eager agreement, thoroughly amazed by the prospect. While same-sex relationships were no longer a societal issue that raised eyebrows, the complex dynamics surrounding secondary genders were a topic slowly, controversially coming to the forefront as the times changed. Even if one championed personal freedom, the grim reality was that mismatched dynamics presented countless, nearly insurmountable physical hurdles.

Alphas and Omegas fundamentally struggled to relieve the agonizing heat of their respective cycles without each other.

Taking suppressants for an entire lifetime inevitably guaranteed severe side effects, and even if they managed to relieve their lust through sex with a Beta, a slew of debilitating aftereffects always followed.

Furthermore, Betas were entirely, biologically incapable of sensing Alpha or Omega pheromones. Overcoming a difference that was fundamentally impossible to understand unless one were literally reborn felt as monumentally difficult as overthrowing an entire ideology.

Nathan’s own perspective on the matter didn’t differ much from the societal norm.

He vastly preferred things that were explicitly clear and defined. He found genuine interest in logical, rational discussions, and derived far more enjoyment from solving mathematical equations that yielded definitive answers.

Consequently, he generally considered the concrete phenomena and results of science infinitely more useful than literature, which often concluded stories with vague, open-ended imagination.

He rigidly applied that exact same logic to human emotions. For a very long time, Nathan had quietly harbored a single desire: if he were ever going to love someone, he wanted to share that love with someone who exclusively liked him, and only him.

It was entirely different from merely accepting the persistent confessions he received and casually making a girlfriend. If he ever truly found someone to love, he desperately wanted them to be a person who would inherently prioritize him above absolutely everything else. It had to be a love where they were the most important existence to each other, far eclipsing anyone or anything else around them. That was the only kind of love Nathan had ever truly witnessed growing up.

From the earliest memories of his childhood, Nathan had guarded an empty house. Unable to forget her deceased husband, his mother had never once sought out another partner. That vast, suffocating void left by his father couldn’t be filled by any of her sons.

The same tragic pattern applied to his eldest brother, Nick, whom Nathan adored and followed almost like a father figure. Nick had already devoted his heart to someone else since he was very young. His second older brother, Neil, possessed zero interest in Nathan, and Nathan largely returned the apathy.

Consequently, Nathan had never once been the single most precious person in anyone’s life.

“But why ask about that so suddenly?” Tina questioned, as if the oddity of the inquiry had just fully registered.

Nathan shook his head slightly, dismissing the thought. The sudden question that had flared in his mind evaporated just as quickly. Glancing at his wristwatch, he noted that it was almost time for his evening training session at the gym.

“I was just curious,” Nathan replied.

Tina offered a quiet, knowing smile. Meeting her gaze, Nathan’s perfectly blank expression silently demanded an explanation.

“It’s nothing, I was just wondering if friends really are just friends. Alex actually asked a really similar question a while ago.”