PIA 121

“…Did you like me then?”

Ji-an’s blunt question made Jeong Hee-seo’s eyes widened. His expression wasn’t particularly pleasant for someone reminiscing about memories, so it wasn’t hard to guess that Ji-an was approaching the subject from a different perspective.

“I want to know. If you liked me then… how you, I mean, how you felt.”

“Hmm…”

Jeong Hee-seo rubbed his jaw with a perplexed expression. He found it difficult to find the right words. Jeong Hee-seo’s intuition flashed a red light. Something felt off, but it was hard to pinpoint exactly what.

“To be honest, I don’t remember much about that night. As you know, we weren’t in our usual state then.”

“You must have liked it. That’s why the knotting happened…”

He couldn’t even imagine what knotting is. Ji-an suddenly pouted.

“That’s why Poggle happened too.”

“Right..?”

Jeong Hee-seo turned to sit facing him. He propped his elbow on the sofa head and looked down at Ji-an. Since he couldn’t grasp the context from the question about when he started liking him, he decided to focus a bit more. Ji-an, who was usually easy to understand, sometimes became hard to read like this.

Moreover, this time there was a tickling feeling in the corner of his heart.

It was as if Ji-an was… jealous of himself.

“Didn’t you say you’d forget about all that?”

Jeong Hee-seo deliberately brought up what Ji-an had curtly said at the hamburger place. He lowered his eyes and whispered in a small voice, like someone who had been keeping it in his heart.

“Seriously, why can’t you ever let anything slide, why.”

But Ji-an reacted more angrily than expected to his playful remark.

“Ji-an, are you disappointed that you don’t remember that night well? The knotting?”

Jeong Hee-seo’s eyes, which had asked somewhat mischievously, quickly darkened. The word ‘knotting’ itself had a certain weight.

“Ji-an?”

The next moment, Jeong Hee-seo was startled. Tears welled in Ji-an’s eyes and fell, as he bit his lower lip hard. Ji-an seemed equally surprised, suddenly getting up and running to the bathroom. Ji-an’s eyes had looked red from the glimpse he caught.

“Are you crying?”

Ignoring the voice following him, Ji-an grabbed a towel from the bathroom and buried his face in it. Ah, what a sight this is. Embarrassment burned up to the top of his head as his tears soaked into the towel.

“Ji-an. Is this something to cry about?”

Jeong Hee-seo’s flustered voice pulled Ji-an’s attention. Glancing up, he caught sight of himself in the mirror: red eyes, red nose—a mess. Frustrated, Ji-an rubbed his face hard with the towel.

The end of Jeong Hee-seo’s eyebrow, who was perched on the marble sink, twitched subtly. He looked like a malfunctioning android unable to derive the correct answer.

Seeing him like that, Ji-an let out a weak laugh.

“I think I’m a bit strange right now. Actually, since we arrived at the hotel, no, since I saw that party venue, I’ve been feeling weird.”

As he fumbled with an excuse, holding the towel in both hands, Jeong Hee-seo reached out and brushed a hand over his damp cheek.

“When I saw the party, it reminded me… No, I remembered being there. It just felt… so strange.”

“I remembered too, the first time I saw you.”

At Jeong Hee-seo’s warm response, Ji-an’s eyes welled up with tears again helplessly.

“This is so strange. It feels like I keep stepping on the wrong answers since earlier.”

Ji-an approached Jeong Hee-seo and rested his head against his chest. He wished these were his memories. He wished it had all been him. Taking the rut inducer, having their first night like an accident, the knotting, he wished it had all been him. 

This was all because of the scenes occupying his mind. Each scene felt so vivid, as if it were his own, that it created a sense of desire. Even knowing it wasn’t his memories, he found himself longing for it.

“Hyung, let’s talk about that day. From beginning to end, I want to hear everything you remember.”

It was about time to revisit the events of that day. Jeong Hee-seo rested his chin on Ji-an’s crown and let out a long sigh.

The bed in the suite was expansively wide. Ji-an lay in the very center, his hands neatly placed on his chest. He looked up at Jeong Hee-seo like a child waiting for a bedtime story. Jeong Hee-seo lay next to him, propping his chin on one arm. His face still showed traces of bewilderment.

“Well… to start with, you were acting kind of like a drunk person.”

Jeong Hee-seo began to retrace that day in a low, quiet voice. Ji-an also followed him, holding his hand as if entering the fog, tracing his memories.

***

Ji-an on that day was also lying on the bed in the suite room, just like today.

He seemed to have been in his own room just moments ago, but when he came to his senses, he found himself in the middle of the party hall, and with another blink of an eye, he was in the hotel suite with Jeong Hee-seo. He couldn’t understand how this had happened.

Although it was a completely unfamiliar place, he felt as if his head and body were moving on their own, as if they knew everything.

‘Am I dreaming?’

Ji-an hadn’t drunk much since arriving here, but his body felt difficult to control, as if it belonged to someone else. Every time he turned his head, he felt dizzy and his vision blurred, just like right before a heat cycle.

‘Was my cycle around this time?’

His mother always kept a close eye on Ji-an’s body, saying that when a recessive Omega gets pregnant, there’s no hope. The medicine his mother always gave him wasn’t in his pocket today. Above all, these clothes weren’t Ji-an’s.

No, was this body even his? His consciousness drifted strangely.

‘What was my purpose for coming here?’

“Are you alone?”

A refined voice broke through his haze.  When he turned his head, he saw Jeong Hee-seo through his swaying vision.

Only then did a few pieces of his fragmented memory puzzle fit together. He had been wandering the corridor with some purpose, but his body wouldn’t listen, and Jeong Hee-seo had picked him up when he collapsed.

Ji-an remembered grabbing his arm and asking to lie down for a moment, wanting to rest and avoid the gazes of people passing by in the corridor.

He was rubbing his eyebrow with a troubled expression.

As Ji-an barely managed to raise his body that felt like a water-soaked cotton, Jeong Hee-seo cleared his throat.

“It would be better if you could control your pheromones a bit.”

Being a recessive Omega, his faint pheromones probably didn’t even feel like a heat cycle. Still, the fact that Jeong Hee-seo mentioned control implied they weren’t entirely negligible. Ji-an rubbed his blurry eyes while Jeong Hee-seo swung the windows wide open.

“Who did you come here with?”

When Ji-an didn’t answer, Hee-seo continued asking questions. The dark-colored jacket he’d worn earlier was off now, and he rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt. The light reflecting off him was dazzling, making Ji-an squint harder. Misinterpreting Ji-an’s discomfort, Hee-seo moved closer to study his face and asked again.

“Your companion—if you’re unwell, shall I take you to a hospital? I can call someone for you.”

“I came alone.”

“Ah.”

“And the hospital’s not necessary. I just felt a bit dizzy.”

Along with the vivid sense of reality and the surreal situation, Ji-an decided to think of all this as a dream for now.

As he staggered to his feet, Jeong Hee-seo brought over a bottle of champagne and glasses from the table and sat on the edge of the bed.

“Where did you get the invitation from?”

“…I think an older friend gave it to me.”

“An older friend? Who?”

Ji-an omitted both ‘Jeong Han-joo’ and ‘I don’t know ‘as answers because neither felt certain. As he just kept his mouth shut, Jeong Hee-seo didn’t probe any further.

Hee-seo twirled the champagne bottle in his hands, examining the label. A brief sigh escaped his attractive lips.

“If Jeong Han-joo knew he left this wine here and forgot about it, he’d grind his teeth.”

“…”

Ji-an suddenly felt thirsty and licked his dry lips.

“Can I have a glass too?”

“This is quite good wine, but are you sure you’re okay?”

Jeong Hee-seo looked at Ji-an with a somewhat worried expression. He was a young person with a flushed face and poor control over his pheromones. But his eyes looking at him were clear and he didn’t seem drunk.

Above all, Jeong Hee-seo strangely felt that it was difficult to refuse.

“It’s okay. Just one glass.”

As Ji-an, who had wheedled a glass of champagne from Jeong Hee-seo, looked into the glass with sparkling eyes, Jeong Hee-seo felt inexplicably anxious. He kept licking his dry lips.

What should he even say?

Jeong Hee-seo rarely agonized over anything, but now he tilted his glass and downed its contents in one gulp.

“…”

“It’s delicious.”

Ji-an’s voice broke the silence as he took a sip of his drink, offering a brief observation. Just as Jeong Hee-seo was about to comment that the taste felt slightly different from what he expected, his words froze. A faint smile formed on Ji-an’s crimson lips, contrasting against his pale, porcelain cheeks.

Jeong Hee-seo, momentarily entranced, blinked slowly.

“Yeah, it is.

And then he found himself agreeing without realizing it.

* * *

“That wine had the rut inducer in it, right?”

Ji-an, who had been quietly listening to the story, raised his head to look at Jeong Hee-seo. He was silent for a moment, then traced Ji-an’s forehead with his fingertips.

He had once hypothesized that Ji-an, who liked Jeong Han-joo, had put the drugged wine in the hotel room. But had he ever told Ji-an that he had found traces of the rut inducer in the remaining wine?

Jeong Hee-seo blinked once to shake off the thought.

“Yes, you’re right. You remember.”

Ji-an became a bit confused. On top of the strange déjà vu he had been experiencing all day, disjointed and contradictory memories now collided in his mind.

Just moments ago, Ji-an had been thinking and wishing that their first night together, that rut, those memories were all his. But just because he wished for it, could it really emerge so vividly, as if it had been his from the beginning, as if it had been waiting to surface?

‘Am I finally losing my mind? Or…’

As Ji-an continued his train of thought, he arrived at one hypothesis.

‘Could it be that I actually first came to this world on the day of that party?’

As his desperate wish mixed with his memories, which were like cookie dough with all sorts of ingredients mixed in, it started to feel real.