Chapter 14

“Why are you leaving me behind?” Mugyeol sobbed when Yi-seon announced he was moving away. He had not cried this hard even when his Omega father left. By the end of the day he had exhausted himself, slumped against Yi-seon’s shoulder and struggling to catch his breath.

“You promised you’d stay with me.”

“Let’s definitely meet again…”

Usually, Yi-seon could soothe Mugyeol’s anger with a few words. Not today.

Meet again? So there was a chance they wouldn’t? The obvious reassurance only made Mugyeol angrier. He knew they might see each other again someday. What he could not bear was Yi-seon leaving now.

If it were Mugyeol, he would never have left. The idea of willingly going somewhere without Yi-seon was impossible to imagine. Yet Yi-seon seemed to accept the move with maddening calm.

Mugyeol begged and clung to him, but nothing changed. Yi-seon left for Jeju, and Mugyeol was alone again.

Once Yi-seon left, everything lost its appeal. Mugyeol had no appetite, so he barely ate; he had no motivation, so he slept. He lost enough weight that Grandfather finally tore into his father over it.

“How on earth are you managing the child! Don’t you know how critical the growth period is for an Extreme Dominant Alpha?!”

Watching his father get thoroughly chewed out by Grandfather brought a brief surge of gratification, but that was all. Without Yi-seon, even his emotions felt drained of color.

Even while barely eating, Mugyeol shot upward like a beanpole. His knees throbbed with growing pains, and he messaged Yi-seon constantly. Every day he reported the details of his own routine, hoping Yi-seon would tell him just as much in return.

Yet Yi-seon’s replies were always slow. At times, an entire day would lapse before he responded.

Mugyeol planned to visit Jeju over winter break, but Grandfather refused. Of all places, he had to go to Germany instead. Even when Mugyeol poured out his disappointment to Yi-seon, Yi-seon’s response felt frustratingly mild.

“Nothing can be done about it. Let’s see each other next time then.”

If Yi-seon had shown even a little disappointment, Mugyeol might not have felt so hurt. Instead, Yi-seon’s calm maturity felt almost like indifference.

So Mugyeol began rationing his messages in protest. Some days he deliberately sent nothing at all. Yi-seon did not seem to care. Worse, he did not seem to notice.

Come to think of it, Yi-seon had once abruptly advised him to make other friends.

I only need you, so why do I need other friends?

Do you have fun playing with other kids? I don’t.

Mugyeol had snapped at him, but afterward he decided the reaction had been childish. Fine. He would make friends like a mature person and show Yi-seon how well he was doing.

So Mugyeol made friends and deliberately spent time with them. In his deeply biased opinion, none of them came close to Yi-seon, but that could not be helped. The world was unlikely to contain two people that perfect.

To provoke a reaction, Mugyeol also mentioned Su-ah constantly. Yi-seon liked her, so surely hearing that Mugyeol and Su-ah were spending time together would bother him. Maybe he would even come to Seoul. Yi-seon, however, barely reacted.

When Mugyeol boasted that he had made plenty of friends, Yi-seon sounded genuinely happy for him. The response stung far more than Mugyeol expected.

No, not just a little—a whole lot…

After returning from Germany over winter break, Mugyeol immediately began planning another attempt to visit Jeju. He had been working hard to earn Grandfather’s trust, and fortunately the old man seemed to notice.

“Lately, our Mugyeol has changed a great deal. His gaze is firm and dependable.”

“It’s because he’s friends with Yi-seon. That kid is so mature and bright.”

“Indeed. There’s no child with an upright gaze like Yi-seon.”

Mugyeol seized the opportunity and asked to visit Yi-seon over summer break. Grandfather readily agreed. Mugyeol was already in sixth grade and would only get busier in middle school, the old man said, so he should go see his friend while he could.

From that day on, Mugyeol planned every minute of the trip: horseback riding, the ocean, dolphins, the maze park. He tried to cram ten days of plans into every twenty-four hours. There was too much he wanted to do with Yi-seon.

Then, the day before the trip, everything went wrong.

For about a week before the flight, Mugyeol had felt slightly off. His heart would pound without warning, and waves of fever came and went. He assumed it was excitement over finally seeing Yi-seon again.

Only when he collapsed while finishing his packing did anyone realize the symptoms had been warning signs of his first rut.

“You didn’t know until the child reached this state?! As his father, you didn’t even know when your child’s first rut was approaching?!”

“Even the hospital couldn’t predict it, Father. The projected rut date hadn’t even been determined yet. It’s not that I was indifferent—”

“Not indifferent?! When they found him, his fever was over thirty-nine degrees and he had already been unconscious for ten minutes! They said he must have been running a fever beforehand, and you didn’t even notice? If Driver Oh had found him any later, we could have lost him!”

Grandfather’s and his father’s voices stabbed through his aching head, muffled as though they were arguing from very far away.

His limbs felt impossibly heavy. Antiseptic stung his nose with every breath, and his heartbeat skipped and raced. His senses were so raw that he imagined he could feel the medication moving through his veins.

At the same time, an unnatural calm held him down, as though his instincts had been forcibly muted along with his senses.

Memories of his collapse returned in fragments. His whole body had burned with fever while an uncontrollable impulse tore through him. Drenched in cold sweat, he had been barely conscious of anything around him.

Haa, ha… Every breath had scraped his throat raw. His vision cleared only to plunge back into darkness, and as he clawed at the floor in pain, one name had repeated endlessly in his mind and on his lips.

Ryu Yi-seon.

Ryu Yi-seon.

Ryu Yi-seon.

Yi-seon’s name had filled his head until there seemed to be room for nothing else.

Maybe because the rut had struck while he was packing for Jeju, his fevered mind had fixed on Yi-seon.

I was supposed to go see Yi-seon.

I have to go see Yi-seon.

He had collapsed soon afterward and woken here, in the hospital.

The first time Mugyeol opened his eyes, he could barely move. Confused, he looked down and found soft restraints securing his arms and legs.

“…”

So it was not medication keeping him still. They had physically restrained him.

Why did they tie me up?

I have to go to Jeju.

Rage surged without warning. Mugyeol clenched his fists and thrashed against the restraints, his emotions impossible to regulate under the hormonal storm. The metal bed frame shook and the guardrails rattled violently.

“Mugyeol-ah!”

A startled Grandfather rushed over.

“Untie me.”

“You’ll hurt yourself! Calm down!”

“Untie me. Hurry.”

Rattle, clatter! He yanked at the half-torn straps bound around his wrists.

When Mugyeol began spiraling toward another frenzy, his father spoke sharply to the nurse. She nodded, hurried over, and injected medication into the IV line.

Coldness spread up his arm as the medication entered his bloodstream. Strength drained out of Mugyeol until he went limp against the bed. The adults’ voices receded as he panted into the pillow.

“What are you doing! The boy keeps losing consciousness!”

“Chairman, your grandson’s pheromone levels are exceptionally high even for an Extreme Dominant Alpha. We’ll need more tests, but he may fall into the high-risk category for rut-related loss of control.”

“So you’re going to keep putting him to sleep like that?!”

“We can’t manage this the same way we would an ordinary Alpha rut. We’ll take his physical condition into account and determine the safest approach…”

With those words, Mugyeol lost consciousness once more.

❖ ❖ ❖

When he opened his eyes again, several days had passed.

The medication seemed to have quelled the rut. The irrational impulses and violent emotional swings were gone, leaving only an eerie hollowness, as though something had scooped out his insides.

“My phone.”

As soon as he regained his senses, he took his cell phone from Driver Oh and checked it.

Yi-seon must have waited for me. What if he’s disappointed? If he waited for me all this time, how should I apologize…

Yet when he unlocked the screen to call Yi-seon, all that met his eyes was the last message he himself had sent.

Mugyeol backed out of the chat and checked his other messages, half wondering whether the phone was broken. It worked perfectly. Notifications filled the screen: people who had heard he was sick, classmates asking if he was okay, friends telling him to recover so they could hang out. Amid all that concern, there was not one message from Yi-seon.

The one message he wanted was the only one missing.

That’s strange. Why hasn’t he contacted me?

He definitely must have waited for me.

Disappointment drained what little strength he had left. His fingertips went cold and numb as he scrolled through the phone again and again, unable to believe what he was seeing.

“Driver Oh. Did you happen to touch my phone?”

“Hm? I didn’t touch it.”

“Did you delete anything?”

“No.”

“Really? Nothing at all?”

“Why would I delete anything?”

“…”

Mugyeol stared into the chat room with Yi-seon.

For the first time, Mugyeol saw how one-sided their contact looked. He was always the one who messaged first, always the one dragging dying conversations forward. Once, determined to make Yi-seon initiate, he had waited in silence for days—only to cave when the waiting became unbearable and text first again.

Only then did Mugyeol think he understood what their relationship really was.

In truth, Yi-seon simply found keeping in touch with a childhood acquaintance bothersome.

In truth, he didn’t care whether I came to Jeju or not.

In truth, telling me we’d definitely meet again was all a lie.

Yi-seon was everything to him. To Yi-seon, Mugyeol was apparently an afterthought.

Maybe Mugyeol had mistaken pity for friendship. Yi-seon was kind; perhaps he had only stayed beside the pathetic kid with no friends and no place in his own family because he felt sorry for him. Mugyeol had been the only one treating it as something absolute.

A small, bitter laugh escaped him. Mugyeol covered his eyes with one arm, and tears dampened the sleeve of his hospital gown.

After being discharged, as he sat in the garden gazing listlessly up at the sky, a message arrived from someone.

— Yi-seon-ie: Yeon Mugyeol, what’re you doing? Wanna play Blic? haha    [6:02 PM]

It was Yi-seon.

“…”

Is this all you have to say?

You’re not even curious why I couldn’t go to Jeju, why we couldn’t meet?

Yi-seon must have forgotten all about him and only remembered now because he wanted someone to play a game with.

Since leaving the hospital, Mugyeol had waited constantly for Yi-seon to contact him. He had not needed a dramatic show of concern. He only wanted to hear that Yi-seon had been disappointed too. I waited for you. That alone would have been enough.

Yet Yi-seon hadn’t even offered that. Because that was Ryu Yi-seon’s true sentiment.

Mugyeol’s blood seemed to turn cold as his breathing quickened. The feeling was stranger than anything he had experienced during his first rut. He had expected too much on his own and been disappointed on his own, yet it felt like betrayal. After staring at the message until anger swallowed everything else, Mugyeol deleted Yi-seon’s number.

Delete.

Then he hurled the phone into the garden and stormed inside. As adolescence and his newly awakened Alpha trait crashed over him at once, Mugyeol shoved his childhood memories as far out of reach as he could.

❖ ❖ ❖

Mugyeol decided Yi-seon no longer existed.

Still, whenever he saw Yi-seon’s parents at family gatherings, the questions returned. Most of the time he swallowed them. Once in a great while, he gave in and asked whether Yi-seon was still in Jeju and whether he was doing well.

Naturally, the answer was always the same:

—“Yi-seon is doing well. He is doing well in Jeju.”

Every update about Yi-seon ruined Mugyeol’s mood and tied his stomach in knots.

Living just fine without me, I see.

Think I’m any different?

Every time Mugyeol heard the same cheerful update, irritation kept him awake half the night. More than once he dreamed of swimming all the way to Jeju just to grab Yi-seon by the collar and shake him. Other dreams ended with Yi-seon tied up and locked somewhere he could not walk away from.

Mugyeol even vowed that once he grew up, he would track Yi-seon down at least once just to make a scene. Whatever this miserable connection between them was, he refused to let it end without a confrontation.

Mugyeol grew taller and broader, but the Ryu Yi-seon lodged in his mind never aged or moved. He hated that most of all.

Then one evening over dinner with Grandfather, a piece of news dropped out of nowhere.

“I hear Yi-seon is coming back. Have you heard?”

Ryu Yi-seon is coming back?

To our school?

He remembers me, right?

If he doesn’t, he’s not even human.

After learning of Yi-seon’s transfer, Mugyeol could barely sleep. Excitement, anticipation, and something he refused to name sent his heart pounding at random. Night after night he lay awake, then dragged himself to school exhausted.

Rubbing temples that throbbed from another sleepless night, Mugyeol headed to the classroom Yi-seon had been assigned. He spotted him immediately. Nearly every eye in the room was already turned his way.

“Ha…”

Annoyance flared before Mugyeol could explain why.

Doesn’t that bastard even get pimples?

After all those years, Ryu Yi-seon had barely changed. He sat surrounded by people, smiling as comfortably as if he had always belonged at the center of a crowd. Boys and girls alike looked at him with obvious affection, and Mugyeol hated that too.

Those idiots know nothing. Ryu Yi-seon fools everyone with that innocent face. None of them would guess he’s the kind of coldhearted bastard who makes you think he’ll give you the world, then forgets you the second you’re gone.

Fucking putting on a show of being so nice.

Instead of going over, Mugyeol turned around and returned to his own classroom. He refused to become one more face in the crowd around Yi-seon. At lunch, however, he found himself pacing the hallway outside Yi-seon’s classroom. After three complete laps of the corridor, he finally managed to cross paths with him.

“Heard you transferred.”

Mugyeol planted himself directly in Yi-seon’s path and looked down at him, angling his body as though determined to advertise how much bigger he had grown. Yi-seon did not seem impressed.

“Yeah. That’s how it turned out.”

“Long time no see, Ryu Yi-jeong.”

Mugyeol deliberately called Yi-seon by the wrong name.

It was meant to prove that Mugyeol could be indifferent too, that Yi-seon’s name was forgettable enough to get wrong.

And yet…

“Right. Long time no see, Yugyeol-ah. How have you been?”

Yi-seon smiled and got Mugyeol’s name wrong in return—without even realizing it. Mugyeol had done it deliberately. Yi-seon’s mistake was genuine.

“…It’s Mugyeol.”

Mugyeol ground his teeth and forced himself to breathe evenly.

Are you serious?

You even forgot my name?

Without another word, Mugyeol turned and walked away. An honest mistake, he discovered, could hurt far more than deliberate spite. By the time he reached his classroom, anger had tightened the back of his neck into a painful knot.

That fucking bastard…

If you were going to be like this, you shouldn’t have been nice to me in the first place.

❖ ❖ ❖