By the time Jiheon wrapped up work and left the office, it was well past eight.
He felt extra tired today. Maybe it was the driving, which he hadn’t done in a while. He would’ve taken a taxi if he could, but walking home only took twenty minutes. So instead, he hopped on a bus. There was a convenience store and a fruit stand on the walk from the bus stop to his place. The sight of the peaches on display reminded him of his conversation earlier with Seungmyung, and that frown when he had asked if Jiheon was a science major. Jiheon laughed.
The first person to ever say that to him was a science major—a girl he’d dated in college. She was an architecture major. They’d taken an elective together, and he was pretty surprised when she suddenly asked him out the day their midterms ended. They hadn’t even spoken before that point. He’d just broken up with a guy he’d been seeing for about three months, so he’d agreed.
About a month into their relationship, they had dinner together and then headed to a café. They were just chatting—routine stuff—when she suddenly asked him.
“Jiheon, you are an omega, right?”
No one had ever asked him that before. Most people just assumed he was an alpha and said as much. He usually responded by asking why they thought so. The question caught him so off guard that it didn’t even occur to him to push back or ask why.
“How’d you know?”
“I knew it.”
The girl smiled knowingly and continued on in the same low tone.
“I’m an alpha.”
It was just as much of a shock as being asked if he was an omega. He had never met a female alpha before, and hadn’t even realized she was one until she told him.
“Of course. The only thing that sets alphas apart from betas is that we react to an omega’s pheromones. Without me telling you, there would be no way for you to know. And implants suppress pheromones altogether. That narrows the gap even more.”
She continued, her tone as calm as ever.
“But I can always tell who’s an omega, and it has nothing to do with their pheromones. To be more precise, I’m only drawn to omegas. It’s not that I know they are an omega before I like them. It’s just that everyone I’m attracted to turns out to be one—men and women alike.”
“Regardless of the pheromones?”
“Probably not. They all had suppressant chips. You do too, right?”
She was right. Jiheon had been wearing a chip at the time, which meant he was giving off little to no pheromones.
“If I am being honest with you, Jiheon... I didn’t think you were an omega. It just didn’t seem possible. You’re so different from the people I’ve dated in the past,” she said with a laugh.
She didn’t describe exactly what that difference was, but Jiheon thought he understood what she was getting at. It was his build—his general physical appearance—that set him apart from the other omegas she’d dated.
“But every time I saw you in the lecture room, I felt this tingling—right here,” she said, pointing to the middle of her chest.
“You mean your heart started racing, or something like that?” he asked.
She tilted her head.
“Hmm. I don’t know,” she murmured. “It’s a bit different from that. I don’t know how to explain it.”
She paused, deep in thought. Then suddenly, her face lit up.
“I know! This is exactly what it feels like. I’m allergic to peaches. Seriously allergic. And I get this itchiness, you know? I don’t even know if it’s real or in my head, but I feel it whenever I so much as catch a glimpse of peach. It’s that kind of feeling. And it comes from deep in here. Somewhere in my chest. Do you get what I mean?”
“I couldn’t say. I don’t have a peach allergy,” Jiheon replied with a laugh.
She laughed back.
“Anyway, it’s something like that. It’s always been the same. A buzzing feeling in my chest whenever I met an omega. I can’t say for sure it’s a hundred percent accurate. It’s not like I stopped them each time to ask. Who knows? Maybe some of them were alphas or betas. But so far, my hit rate is a hundred percent.”
“And you got this feeling even with me?”
“Yes. So I got curious. I wanted to see if I was right again. That was how I ended up liking you.”
Jiheon remembered those words not just because they were surprising, but because the situation itself had been so unusual.
She had known he was an omega despite his suppressant chip. The Jiheon of today would have simply shrugged it off, saying some alphas can apparently pick up on trace amounts of pheromones.
But back then, he hadn’t been so easy-going. He’d been confused—completely thrown off.
Up to that point, it had never really sunk in that he was an omega—or more precisely, he’d never shown any of the typical omega traits.
And Jiheon wasn’t unique in that. It was just the norm. In the past, people found out they were omegas when their secondary sex characteristics developed and they went into heat. Nowadays, kids were tested in elementary schools, and if they tested positive, they were given chips right away.
There was no risk of going into heat if the pheromone production was blocked, and no alphas would smell them and lose control. As for the having-a-uterus part, there was no way to tell by looking, so it wasn’t really part of the conversation.
An omega’s first heat usually happened when the chip was removed—often due to something like pregnancy—after they’d taken a lover or gotten married.
That was why people often said the first heat was more traumatic nowadays than it used to be. People were more educated now, and generally more informed. Most people understood, at least in theory, how heats worked. But couldn’t quite accept that it might happen to them, too.
The more convinced someone was that it would never happen to them, the less prepared they were to deal with the shame that followed—that state of being all instincts and no reason. The later the first heat came, the greater the shock. In the worst cases, it could even lead to depression. Lately, clinics specializing in that exact issue had started to appear.
Jiheon never intended to have any children, at least, which meant he would never remove his chip. Which also meant he would never experience a heat—and never truly understand what it meant to feel like an omega. And he looked nothing like the stereotypical omega, which meant he was rarely a target for the occasional discriminatory bigot. He had always told himself he was basically a beta.
But the moment he heard his girlfriend’s words, he realized that belief had only ever existed in his head.
An alpha could sense an omega—chip or no chip. Could an omega never hide what they were? Was there really no escaping being seen as a sexual target to the alphas? The spiral of depressing thoughts just wouldn’t stop. The fear hit harder because he had spent so long thinking it had nothing to do with him, and no matter what he did, he couldn’t shake the thoughts from in his head.
He found it harder to act normal around his girlfriend, and not long after, they went their separate ways. Some time passed, and as the initial shock faded, a strange kind of rebelliousness started to take shape.
Was it really true? Were alphas and omegas destined to be drawn to each other, no matter the pheromones? It was a fundamental question—one he felt both a strong urge to deny and an equally strong need to answer.
It was around then that he started frequenting bars and clubs. He stopped pursuing serious relationships and started having the occasional one-nighter. He rarely turned down men who showed interest, and afterward, he’d always ask if they were an alpha, a beta, or an omega. Most of them were betas. Occasionally, there was an omega, but almost never an alpha—only two, in fact, during that entire phase.
The sex with them hadn’t felt all that different, either. One of them had kept saying how much he loved it—more than he ever had before. But maybe he said that to everyone. Maybe it was just a habit.
Still, those experiences had made one thing clear to Jiheon. He preferred to be the one being penetrated—simple as that.