The two across from them had barely looked away, but that didn’t make the embarrassment lift.
Even so, with Taegun still clamped hard to his left hand, it would look strange to set the chopsticks down.
Jaeha bit his lip and brought the piece of meat in his chopsticks to Taegun’s mouth.
He couldn’t quite meet his eyes; all he managed was to stare at the high, cliff-like bridge of his nose. But when the man didn’t open up, he had no choice but to meet his gaze.
The eyes fixed on him curved, just a little. Just a hair. Jaeha realized that was Jang Taegun smiling.
“…Please eat.”
“Impatient.”
As if indulging him, Taegun opened his mouth. The bright red tongue sitting there naturally came into view.
In that instant, Jaeha almost spilled pheromones. He held tight as his center dropped, barely keeping control, but he couldn’t stop the flush at the rims of his ears.
In public, in a restaurant no less, it was the first time his scent had bucked like that. He’d never had it happen even in the full bloom of his adolescence as an alpha, thanks to his iron self-control. It rattled him.
He hadn’t expected to discover this clumsy, unripe part of himself now, and because of Taegun.
But he couldn’t set it right. Feeling, not reason, had its grip on his control for the first time.
Everything about Jang Taegun was a first for him. Everything that made the man, and everything that drew him toward the man, was a world he’d never known.
“What’s with the starved face. We ate plenty earlier.”
He’d thought he’d schooled his expression, but somehow the man read that faint heat and tugged the hand he was holding. Their shoulders bumped.
What he whispered low seeped into Jaeha’s skin.
“Ah—brother-in-law, you ate at the office and still suggested dinner?”
Eyes shining, Jeonggil looked at him.
“Because you thought I was hungry…? Hah. From now on, brother-in-law, you’re my big brother too.”
Jaeha had no idea where to start untangling the misunderstanding and shut his mouth. Taegun, lips at his ear, chuckled.
“Our director’s full because he got a bellyful of his husband’s cock. Right?”
“…Team Manager Jang.”
In the end he could only say the name in a low warning. If not for the ear rims blazing, his blank face might have carried more weight.
But Taegun just tapped that ear rim with his index finger, smiling, and ordered a cola.
He’d ordered soda because he’d been told not to drink.
He snapped open the can—so much smaller in his blunt fingers than his hand—and poured it into a glass. Seeing it, Jaeha felt the stiffness melt from his face; he rubbed a cheek and let it go.
A server by the kitchen was coming over with a tray of four bowls of cold noodles. Water-style, ordered in a fluster.
With the bowls added, the table was full to the brim. To clear space for two of them, Jeonggil picked up the soju bottle and flicked a glance their way.
Jaeha snorted softly and held his glass out. It was a trick, with Taegun still not letting go of his hand.
“Pour me one, Jeonggil.”
Left hand light to his chest, he extended his steady hand with the glass.
At his composed, fluid poise, Jeonggil straightened his spine a little, face faintly abashed, and supported his pouring wrist with his other hand, steadying the stream. This chapter is updated first at novelping dot com.
The sudden flicker of tension on Jeonggil’s face was funny and odd. Still smiling, Jaeha tilted his head and knocked back the shot.
Then, without a word, he caught the bottle by the neck from Jeonggil’s hand.
Giggling, Jeonggil cupped his glass in both hands and offered it up. Matching his earlier form, Jaeha poured with his left hand at his chest.
“Team Manager Jang says from now on I should rely on you and Myungsoon when I move around. If that’s the case, I’ll be in your care.”
“Gasp—no, sir. Please, drop your speech, brother-in-law.”
Flustered, Jeonggil didn’t know what to do with himself. He was a touch smaller than Jaeha but heavily built, and his features weren’t soft—and still he was humbled. Jaeha didn’t find it strange.
It was how most alpha or beta men acted in front of him.
Hosting people himself came naturally; being hosted was even more so.
At that smooth, water-like flow, Myungsoon and Jeonggil were full of admiration. At a glance he could look cold and severe like Taegun, but at moments, Lee Jaeha could wear a strikingly gentle face.
That softness for those below him, held without losing his dignity, was something even two men raised in a world where rank was set by strength could only admire.
They clinked more glasses, easy as that. He never once left a glass untouched, and though the place was far from dirty, it wasn’t pristine; he ate broadly from what was on the table without a single complaint, neat and orderly.
The chopsticks in his hand moved in clean silence, like the edge of a well-honed blade; even as he spoke now and then, there wasn’t the faintest chewing sound. Watching even Jeonggil and Myungsoon go docile under those table manners, Taegun chuckled to himself.
Maybe he’d missed the touch during that brief break—he laced their fingers together again.
Startled by that simple contact, Jaeha turned his head for a moment to look at him. Taegun cocked one brow with a brazen face.
He’d grabbed the hand first; the look that came back said, what are you staring at me for. With a faintly puzzled tilt, Jaeha turned away and answered something Myungsoon asked.
Taegun set their linked hands on his own knee. Jaeha didn’t look back at him, but his voice, answering Myungsoon, slowed a little.
Watching that, Taegun lifted his glass of cola. He meant to behave.
A light buzz. He could hold his liquor, but drinking happily had him a little giddy.
Coming out of the restroom outside the shop, he took the handkerchief from his inner pocket and dried his wet hands—then drifted to a stop.
He stared across the alley at the convenience store, unable to let go.
I quit… but every time I drink, I think about it…
Other third-generation heirs dodged service by being born abroad, but his mother, citing her own family’s anti-occupation history, had drilled it in like a mantra that he should serve.
From very young, she bought him model planes and added, lightly, that being a pilot would be good. She seemed rigid, but she thought with flexibility, and told him she didn’t care what he became. Both of them knew, really, that it was only words.
She herself hadn’t escaped the obligations laid on the children of old houses and had married trash like Ikhyeong.
But Lee Jaeha couldn’t become a pilot. She couldn’t be a perfect bulwark for him. She sought her rest far too soon.
It wasn’t exactly because of that, but he naturally thought of enlisting. Even Lee Jaeho had French nationality and was exempt; perhaps uneasy about sending the elder son, Ikhyeong had once asked, obliquely,
“Want me to get you out?”
He only shook his head and left his father’s study. There was no need. He didn’t see service as suffering, and he wanted to understand the ordinary view held by citizens of the country where the company he would run had put down roots. His mother was the biggest reason among many.
So he enlisted. He’d grown too tall to be a fighter pilot, just as she’d said, but he volunteered as a driver and spent his whole time driving a brigadier general.
He never talked about his background, and apparently Ikhyeong kept his mouth shut, so no rumors spread. The general, who would never have imagined his private was a chaebol scion, would always press a ten-thousand-won note into his hand and send him for cigarettes. If he bought two packs, one was his.
At first he tossed them to his quarters mates starving for non-issue smokes, but later he started taking a stick or two himself.
He smoked especially in winter. It wasn’t Cheorwon, but it was forward enough that in winter, every breath through the nose condensed at once and even his nostrils went chapped.
On days that cold, the smell didn’t stick to you even if you smoked. So he picked only days that cold—and after discharge, he stayed quit.
But on nights when drink wedged through the seams of his restraint, he craved nicotine. Reason had been whipping the habit into a corner—and now the impish addiction crept up again.
“…A pack of the blue ones in the back, please.”
He told the clerk what he wanted and fished for his wallet in his inner pocket. He spotted a lighter on the counter and picked it up as well.
The clerk flicked him a glance. The look said, are you planning to pay? Before, even at convenience stores, if you handed over a card they ran it for you; these days you had to insert it yourself, it seemed.
Slow to it and fumbling, he felt stupid under the stare and hurried. Leaving the counter, he pushed through the door with the dangling paper charm and stepped out—then felt foolish. He wondered why he couldn’t check the impulses tonight.
He’d never once even let similar ideas cross his mind in the office he’d worked in for years, never mind sex—yet here he was, spilling himself slack across the water-buffalo leather sofa; and now, after a few shots, he was thinking about a smoke.
Even when the impulse stirred for a second, it always stopped there—he’d never gone as far as buying. Forgetting he’d only popped to the restroom, he tore the thin wrap off the pack, thumbed the box lid open with a tap.
He took one neat stick from the tight cluster and set it between his lips.
He lit up and drew so hard his cheeks hollowed. The butt bloomed cherry red and ate down.
Once it caught, he slid it out to the V between index and middle finger. The nicotine after so long left his head fuzzy. He didn’t bother to hold back the little cough.
The fingers holding it didn’t travel far; they pressed right back to his lips. Slightly dizzy, he squeezed one eye shut and opened it.
Right—if it’s this nauseating, why did I want one.
Even thinking that, he only shifted his fingers from his lip and took it back between his teeth. He inhaled until his cheeks sank, then let the smoke leak in thin, cloudy breaths.
“Excuse me.”
Someone called, and with his head ringing dull, he turned—and blanked for a beat. He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them, but his sight stayed blurry. His brow ached; he pressed hard at the bridge with the thumb of the hand holding the cigarette.
To others, it was nothing but a handsome man narrowing the thick brows and frowning, smooth and elegant.
When he finally got his eyes open, a fine-boned man was smiling slightly, looking his way with his friends. An omega, it seemed.
“Hey, do you know where Samyeong Skewers is around here?”
So they were asking directions.
He turned his head and blew the smoke away from passersby, then answered,
“Ah, this alley is new to me.”
When he turned, the thick nape, the sternomastoid, the viney veins like a grape stem stood out—and the omega’s eyes lit.
He tittered with his friends, but with his head fogged from the smoke after so long, Jaeha missed their giddy faces.
In the end, the one who had spoken up first took a step closer and asked, bluntly,
“Excuse me, are you alone?”
And just then the smell of water surged up from behind and a solid arm hauled him in by the chest. Taegun.
“No, he’s married.”
Out of nowhere, he snatched the cigarette and put it in his own mouth, and answered for him around the mash of a smoker’s vowels.
Startled, Jaeha looked back. The hard line of his jaw stood out as he held the cigarette.
Squinting one eye against the smoke from the tip, talking with that face, he looked bored.
“Mar… ried… Ah, my apologies.”
The omega flicked a glance at Taegun, dipped his head, and backed off.