With another tired sigh, Gi-hyeon followed Yeon-oh inside.
Even drunk, the Alpha had lined up his expensive wingtip shoes neatly by the entrance. Meanwhile, Gi-hyeon’s sneakers were lying in opposite directions like someone had kicked them off mid-collapse. The contrast was ridiculous enough to make him snort quietly under his breath.
From the bathroom came the steady sound of running water.
Apparently, the second Yeon-oh stepped inside, he’d gone straight for the shower.
Typical.
When sober, Yeon-oh usually made an effort to hide how obsessive he was about cleanliness around Gi-hyeon. But alcohol stripped away that restraint almost immediately. Whenever he drank, the neat freak tendencies he normally suppressed came flooding right back.
His showers also took forever.
More than once, Gi-hyeon had seriously wondered whether the man had drowned standing up in there.
Pulling his eyes away from the bathroom door, Gi-hyeon started cleaning up the mess in the living room with the expression of someone swallowing medicine he hated. If Yeon-oh came out and saw empty beer cans and food containers everywhere, there was no telling what kind of lecture he’d start giving.
Gi-hyeon was rinsing out the beer can in the sink when the bathroom door finally clicked open.
Thank God.
He crushed the can and tossed it into recycling before stepping back into the living room.
Then he stopped.
The room was empty.
Frowning, he peeked into the bathroom.
Aside from the lingering steam, the place looked untouched. The floor was dry. The shower glass was spotless. Even the slippers had been neatly propped against the wall.
The psycho had definitely spent ten minutes wiping down every surface after showering.
The squeegee itself had been something Yeon-oh forced into the apartment in the first place.
Assuming the Alpha had gone to change clothes, Gi-hyeon dropped onto the sofa. But after several minutes passed with no sign of him, Gi-hyeon finally stood again with a sigh.
Did he pass out in the closet or something?
The apartment had three rooms: a bedroom, a study, and a walk-in closet.
The place itself was far beyond what Gi-hyeon could ever afford on a physical therapist’s salary. It was the only thing his mother had left him after she died.
Out of all three rooms, Yeon-oh had completely renovated two of them: the bedroom and the closet.
Technically the apartment belonged to Gi-hyeon, but almost all the furniture inside had been chosen and installed by Jo Yeon-oh. According to him, he’d “extorted” most of it from a cousin who ran a luxury department store.
Gi-hyeon still remembered staring at him in disbelief.
“Why are you even buying me this stuff?”
“What, do you want to split the bill?” Yeon-oh had shot back irritably. “I don’t have talent for living like a poor person.”
The sheer confidence of that answer had drained all energy from Gi-hyeon’s body instantly.
The walk-in closet had gotten the worst of it.
Yeon-oh had hired contractors to rip everything out and rebuild the room from scratch. Floor-to-ceiling wardrobes. Glass display cases. Automatic lighting inside the closets that turned on whenever the doors opened.
The entire thing looked less like a closet and more like a luxury boutique.
Which made it even more ridiculous considering most of Gi-hyeon’s clothes were just athletic wear and cheap sports brands he folded once and forgot about.
The absurdly oversized wardrobes existed almost entirely for Yeon-oh’s suits.
Honestly, looking around the apartment now, almost everything had been chosen for Yeon-oh in the first place. The enormous bed. The expensive sofa. Even the absurd reclining chair in the study.
“What are you doing in here?”
Gi-hyeon finally found him inside the closet.
And immediately froze.
Jo Yeon-oh was standing in front of an ironing board wearing nothing but boxer briefs, a towel draped over his damp hair. In one hand, he held an iron.
For several seconds, Gi-hyeon could only stare.
“I didn’t have anything clean,” Yeon-oh mumbled slowly. “So I’m ironing something.”
His speech was sluggish enough to make it obvious the shower hadn’t helped sober him up at all.
Gi-hyeon squinted at the ironing board.
“…Are you ironing underwear right now?”
Yeon-oh had always been obsessed with perfectly pressed clothes. He refused to wear denim because it couldn’t hold sharp creases properly.
But Gi-hyeon had never imagined the insanity extended to underwear.
Apparently drunk Yeon-oh couldn’t tolerate wrinkled cotton either.
Then Gi-hyeon’s eyes drifted downward.
And suddenly a horrifying thought crossed his mind.
If Yeon-oh was ironing his underwear… whose underwear was he currently wearing?
There was a neatly folded pile of freshly ironed boxers beside the board.
Gi-hyeon’s voice came out strangled.
“…Those are mine, aren’t they?”
“All mine were wrinkled,” Yeon-oh replied calmly. “I’m borrowing yours.”
The low, sleepy sound of his voice sent a sharp shiver down Gi-hyeon’s spine.
“You’re seriously…”
His breathing immediately felt uneven.
No. Absolutely not.
He needed to think about literally anything else.
Anything except the sight of Jo Yeon-oh standing there half-naked in his underwear.
Because if he let himself keep thinking about it, he was done for.
His gaze betrayed him anyway.
The boxers were obviously too small. With their height difference, the fabric stretched tightly across Yeon-oh’s hips and thighs, outlining far more than Gi-hyeon wanted to acknowledge.
Gi-hyeon felt his soul actively trying to leave his body.
“…Just finish up and come out,” he muttered roughly. “I’ll dry your hair.”
“Okay.”
The immediate obedience caught him off guard.
For some reason, Yeon-oh had always been weirdly obsessed with drying Gi-hyeon’s hair after showers. Gi-hyeon had rejected it enough times that eventually the arrangement somehow reversed itself instead.
He still didn’t understand why either of them needed to be involved in each other’s hair-drying routines at all.
But since Yeon-oh usually ignored requests he disliked, the fact that he agreed so easily now probably meant he was satisfied.
That was the problem with Jo Yeon-oh.
Underneath the foul mouth and violent temper, he could be absurdly gentle.
And keeping up with that side of him exhausted Gi-hyeon more than anything else.
Back when they were just friends, none of this existed. They were two teenage boys who shoved each other around and celebrated basketball wins with convenience store soda.
Normal friends didn’t dry each other’s hair.
Gi-hyeon hadn’t even done things like that with the girls he dated briefly in high school.
But Yeon-oh had always been different.
He was the type to keep black hair ties around his wrist so he could tie his girlfriend’s hair up for her whenever she asked.
Every time Gi-hyeon noticed one of those hair ties back then, something ugly and heavy twisted inside his chest.
Even now, part of him still wondered if Yeon-oh’s constant need to fuss over him was just leftover habit from dating Omegas.
And once that thought entered his head, it became impossible to enjoy any of Yeon-oh’s affection properly.
Just then, Yeon-oh unplugged the iron and stepped out from behind the board.
Gi-hyeon immediately snapped his head away.
Too late.
The image had already burned itself permanently into his brain.
Broad shoulders. Sharp collarbones. Thick muscle across his chest and stomach. The deep lines disappearing beneath the waistband of Gi-hyeon’s underwear.
Because Yeon-oh waxed for fencing, his skin was smooth enough to make the whole thing even worse.
Fucking psycho.
Gi-hyeon already knew he wasn’t sleeping tonight.
He walked straight out of the closet and into the bedroom, grabbed a spare pillow and blanket, and dumped them onto the sofa.
There was no way he was surviving a night in the same bed after seeing all that.
The visual damage alone was catastrophic.
A man who normally refused to even change shirts in front of him had suddenly wandered around half naked wearing Gi-hyeon’s underwear.
How exactly was he supposed to sleep peacefully after that?
After brushing his teeth quickly, Gi-hyeon collapsed onto the couch and pulled the blanket over his head.
“What the hell? I thought you said you’d dry my hair.”
Yeon-oh sounded genuinely offended.
Gi-hyeon ignored him and pulled the blanket higher.
Honestly, he was exhausted by his own life.
Sometimes he wondered if things had actually been easier back when he loved Jo Yeon-oh silently from a distance.
At least back then he hadn’t been driven out of his own bedroom by his boyfriend.
“Hey. Are you seriously sleeping?”
Yeon-oh called his name several times, sounding more offended each time.
Gi-hyeon didn’t answer.
At this point he wasn’t even pretending. He genuinely didn’t have enough energy left to open his mouth.
Between yesterday’s stomach issues, work, and the emotional damage from Yeon-oh’s awful confession, he felt completely drained.
He just wanted to disappear into sleep.
Right as his consciousness started fading—
“Ah—!”
A startled sound tore out of him.
Before he could process what was happening, Yeon-oh had scooped him up entirely off the couch, blanket and all.
“What the fuck are you doing?!”
“Why are you sleeping on the sofa when there’s a perfectly good bed?” Yeon-oh scolded him calmly. “Especially a bed your hyung bought with blood, sweat, and tears.”
“Who the hell are you calling hyung?!”
Ignoring the outrage completely, Yeon-oh carried him toward the bedroom while humming to himself.
Apparently showering immediately after arriving had put him in an unbelievably good mood.
Gi-hyeon glared up at him resentfully.
Sure, Yeon-oh was a Dominant Alpha over 190 centimeters tall with years of fencing training behind him, but the ease with which he carried another grown man was still irritating.
And because Gi-hyeon was worried struggling too hard might actually make the idiot drop him, he eventually gave up resisting entirely.
“Your face still looks pale,” Yeon-oh muttered. “Was your stomach bad all day again? I literally opened a Family Medicine department at that hospital for a reason.”
Gi-hyeon kept his eyes closed.
His exhaustion had absolutely nothing to do with his stomach.
It was Jo Yeon-oh himself making him sick.
“Why are we angry again?” Yeon-oh asked teasingly as he collapsed on top of him the second they hit the bed.
Gi-hyeon genuinely felt like he was dying.
His body was exhausted. His nerves were fried. And now this idiot was practically wrapped around him again.
“Please,” he muttered weakly. “I’m exhausted, Jo Yeon-oh.”
“Then sleep, dear husband.”
Repulsed by the nickname, Gi-hyeon immediately smacked him several times across the forehead.
Despite the force behind the hits, Yeon-oh only whined dramatically and tightened his arms around him even more.
“Stop giving me the silent treatment,” Yeon-oh complained. “Do you know how insane it makes me when you get mad and refuse to explain why?”
Gi-hyeon nearly laughed at the hypocrisy.
He was the one losing his mind here.
“Dr. So,” Yeon-oh murmured softly. “Ignoring me again?”
Then he pressed his lips lightly against the back of Gi-hyeon’s neck.
Right where an Alpha would mark an Omega.
“Ha…”
“Oh? You laughed.”
Damn it.
Yeon-oh was right.
A hollow laugh had escaped him before he could stop it.
He immediately turned his head away before Yeon-oh could look at his face.
It wasn’t because Yeon-oh was funny.
He was laughing because his life was pathetic.
Because even now, something as meaningless as a brief touch against his neck was enough to make his heart drop straight to the floor.
Tonight was ruined already.
Another sleepless night.
Just like always.
In the end, none of Gi-hyeon’s choices mattered when it came to loving Jo Yeon-oh.
Accepting defeat, he closed his eyes.