Chapter 2

It rained the day I first met Nathan, too.

On the final Saturday of September, the sky morphed into a spiteful, gloomy overcast, painting downtown London in a dismal gray that forced pedestrians deeper into their heavy winter coats.

A text chimed just as Alex reached the Tube station, standing amidst a tide of commuters pressing forward without a backward glance. He had just finished tryouts for Barnes FC, the local football club his father had relentlessly pushed him to join, and right on cue, the first bitter raindrops began to fall.

The message was from his mother.

Her text detailing the finalized divorce ruling read with a sterile, hollow detachment. It was expected; their weekly visits had dwindled to sporadic encounters, eventually degrading into rare, monthly obligations, and even to a fifteen-year-old boy, it was glaringly obvious that his parents’ marriage was a rotting corpse.

Yet, he couldn’t bring himself to resent her.

When his father’s printing business began to hemorrhage money, the man had warped into a stranger. Having emigrated alone from Korea, his father had carved out a formidable foundation in the printing industry, but he fundamentally failed to adapt to London’s fiercely shifting digital landscape. Left behind by modern platforms, his massive printing presses became obsolete metal husks, rendering the fortune he had poured into them utterly worthless.

So, the man turned to the bottle. It was a pathetic, terribly common cliché.

The tipping point arrived when his drinking escalated to the point of draining his mother’s hard-earned wages just to fund his next bender. The starry-eyed country girl who had traveled up from Salisbury, madly in love, vanished entirely the day his father first screamed and raised a hand to her, packing her bags and initiating the separation. Today marked the official end.

—Please refrain from contacting me if possible.

The text message concluded with that cold, final line. There were no apologies, nor were there any lingering declarations of love hidden within the pixels. Alex stood rooted to the spot, reading the words over and over, his lips parting and closing in a silent, suffocating struggle as a heavy weight pressed down on his chest though he couldn’t quite pinpoint why it hurt so much.

It was then that the rain began to lash down in earnest. A group of girls, having just finished classes, shrieked with laughter as they dashed for the cover of the subway station, while Alex merely tilted his head up, his gaze vacant. Heavy raindrops splattered against his phone screen with hollow thwacks, pooling and sliding away.

It took several seconds for the realization to pierce his numbness: his backpack was getting soaked, and the birthday present he had carefully chosen for his mother, safely tucked inside, was undoubtedly getting ruined alongside it.

Yet, he couldn’t bring himself to move.

His Adam’s apple bobbed with a fine tremor, and he held his breath against the searing lump clawing its way up his throat. The moment his eyes landed on the retreating back of a brown-haired woman sheltering her young son beneath her umbrella, something inside him finally shattered.

Like a boy completely lost, Alex raised a trembling hand, clinging onto his phone as he scrubbed roughly at his face, his eyes burning and stinging so fiercely they felt like they might burst.

He had known for a long time that his mother no longer loved him.

It was impossible to ignore, not when it was the very thing she screamed at him every time she fought with his father. The bitter resentment she harbored, how the mere sight of his pitch-black hair, an exact replica of his father’s, made her sick, and her venomous claims that she had endured years of misery solely because of him, were etched permanently into his mind from daily repetition.

Even so… even so…

He had desperately hoped she would at least let him wish her a happy birthday.

His hair grew heavy with the dampness as a biting, frigid wind whipped the rain violently across the front of the station. His feet, now stripped of their destination, hesitated, starting and stopping in a futile dance. It’s fine. You expected this anyway, he tried to convince himself. He had been on his way to his mother’s house, which meant he now had to completely change direction, turn back, catch the bus, transfer once, and…

“Excuse me,” a voice suddenly called out to him.

Alex flinched, his shoulders jerking before he whipped around. The very first thing that registered was a pair of eyes, and amidst the dreary, monochromatic gray of the rain-swept scenery, only the boy’s eyes seemed to hold any vibrant color, glowing with life.

Alex immediately recognized that face. It was Nathan White, the boy he had been watching from afar ever since they first enrolled. Thanks to Nathan being a Beta, Alex couldn’t recall a single instance where they had actually shared a conversation.

After all, an invisible but absolute line segregated Alphas and Omegas from Betas. People claimed things would change once they entered society, but teenagers in their most sensitive, impressionable years instinctively guarded against anyone different from themselves.

There were even cliques of Betas who degraded Alphas and Omegas, labeling them as mere beasts bound by their rut and heat cycles.

“You’re…” The boy began, his expression flawlessly stoic. Alex, entirely incapable of moving, merely stared at him in a daze. “…blocking the way.”

The meaning of those words took several seconds to penetrate Alex’s muddled brain. Blinking owlishly, he hurriedly stepped aside, his lips trembling so violently that forming a reply felt like a Herculean task.

It was only after he managed to swallow down the jagged edges of his voice that he could finally speak.

“Sorry,” he rasped.

The apology was completely swallowed by the roar of the downpour. Unlike the usual misty drizzles of London, today’s rain was exceptionally fierce and unforgiving.

Shoving his phone blindly into his pocket, Alex stood with a vacant mind, roughly sweeping a hand through his hair, which was now dripping water in steady streams. Just stay here a little longer, then you can move, he whispered desperately to himself.

And in that very fractured moment…

The rain stopped.

The icy droplets that had been painfully drilling into his scalp simply vanished. Confusion etching his features, Alex shifted his gaze as a faint, refreshing scent drifted over him. At the end of his redirected line of sight, he once again met those vivid green eyes he had encountered just moments ago. Flawless pink lips and a sharp, pale jawline seamlessly entered his vision alongside them.

“It’s Alex Yeon, right?” Nathan asked.

He had never imagined the boy would actually know his name. Forgetting to even offer a reply, Alex stared, utterly mesmerized by the movement of Nathan’s lips.

The rhythmic, quiet thrum of water cascading off the thin fabric of the umbrella overhead echoed in the sudden quiet. Nathan didn’t say anything else; he simply stood there, watching the unresponsive Alex, steadfastly holding the umbrella over him.

For that singular, suspended moment, Alex’s mind went completely blank. Forgetting the very reason he had been crying, he bit down hard on his pale, bloodless lips before releasing them as a profound wave of sorrow crashed into a sudden, inexplicable sense of relief.

Desperately swallowing back the hot sobs threatening to tear their way out of his throat, Alex scrunched his eyes shut in anguish.

“Don’t stand in the rain,” Nathan finally murmured, breaking the prolonged silence. “You can have this.”

He extended his arm forward. Alex’s gaze snagged on the fingers gripping the umbrella’s handle, long-jointed and elegant, just as beautifully pale as Nathan’s face. Even the meticulously manicured nails were flawlessly rounded, the translucent pink half-moons resting at the beds, the neatly trimmed tips, every tiny detail so quintessentially Nathan.

“Take it,” Nathan urged curtly when Alex merely stared at his hand in a stupor, his expression and tone remaining completely indifferent.

“But then you’ll get wet,” Alex pointed out, his voice wavering.

“Yeah,” Nathan replied, as if Alex were stating the glaringly obvious.

This time, he pressed the issue physically, extending his arm just a fraction further. Realizing that Nathan was on the verge of stepping entirely out of the umbrella’s shelter, Alex frantically grabbed the handle, and their hands overlapped. The skin of Nathan’s fingertips brushing against his own felt startlingly cold.

“Still, I think I’ll get less drenched than you,” Nathan remarked casually, releasing his grip before Alex even had a chance to protest.

Snapping his head up in utter shock, Alex watched as Nathan’s stoic facade finally cracked, a faint, almost imperceptible smile blooming around the corners of his eyes. In that breathtaking second, Alex forgot how to breathe, a tight blockage seizing the inside of his chest and sending a fine, fluttering tremor down to his stomach. His entire body flushed with sudden heat, utterly overwhelmed by the sheer, surreal beauty of the sight before him.

Had anyone ever actually seen Nathan White smile? Probably not. Despite his striking looks, it was his notoriously aloof, almost insufferably indifferent attitude toward others that truly cemented his reputation around school.

“You’ve stopped crying,” Nathan noted softly.

Alex flinched, instinctively swiping a hand across his cheek as the trace of amusement dancing in Nathan’s pretty eyes deepened slightly, so incredibly faint that one wouldn’t even recognize it as a smile without looking closely, but nevertheless, it was a smile.

“Wait, Nathan, this is—” Alex started, desperate to stop him.

“See you later,” Nathan cut in smoothly, stepping directly out from beneath the umbrella as if he had completely finished his business.

Alex’s hand shot out to grab him, swiping uselessly through the empty air, and Nathan never once looked back. With the exact same unhurried, measured pace he had arrived with, he vanished into the station.

Rooted to the spot, Alex stared intently as Nathan faded from view, his eyes tracing the straight line of his back, the soft white curve of his neck, and his fingertips swaying gently in time with his steps. He remained there, completely spellbound, until the rain cascading down the umbrella finally ceased and a belated ray of sunlight managed to peek through the breaking clouds.

For a long, unbroken moment.

☂