Chapter Text
Royal Palace
“You will be perfectly safe. No one will touch you. Every person you meet on the street will offer you any assistance you require. I guarantee your complete inviolability on my own name. You could leave a bag with a million dollars in it on a dark street, and no one would take it. In exchange, I ask you, Mr. Min, to agree to have dinner with me whenever it is convenient for you.”
Yoongi read the lines of the letter over and over again and ground his teeth. His manager and the director sat at the other end of the table, watching every twitch of muscle on their star’s face and afraid to breathe.
“Yoongi-ssi, it’s just dinner,” the Director began in the most indifferent tone he could muster.
“Just dinner?!” Yoongi-ssi exploded. “Right, of course, why am I even making a fuss! Just dinner with just the most terrifying man in the Southern Hemisphere. A man who, if he felt like it, could slice me into noodles, twist those noodles into little spirals, and brew them with boiling water. And no one, not you, not the local valiant police, would be able to do a thing to him!” he was practically shouting now, stabbing a threatening finger at his interlocutors and at the empty space where, somewhere beyond the walls, that very police force was supposed to be.
“Oh, well, when you put it like that, the idea really does seem less than ideal,” the manager snorted, already imagining how he would return to the hotel and brew himself some illegally smuggled ramen from home with boiling water.
“Less than ideal?!” Yoongi was already slipping into a yell. “A less-than-ideal idea is shouting ‘Look, a cockroach!’ at the lighting guy and then having the whole group run away from the spotlight. This is a catastrophe!”
“But it was your idea to shoot in these favelas,” the director tried to shift the blame.
“Yes!” Yoongi cried hotly, slapping his palm against the armrest of his chair. “And I still believe it’s incredibly important to show the world how badly people can live. Yes, I want to convey to our consumer society that there is someone who needs its help. Someone who won’t be able to stand up unless a hand is offered to them! And what does this… what’s-his-name… Monkey King have to do with any of that?”
“What he has to do with it is that he is the real power in these very favelas. Not a mouse sneezes here without him knowing,” the manager began to boil over in return.
“Listen, I understand, the situation isn’t great,” the director switched back into persuasion mode, “and we, as a company, have no right to demand this of you, but think about it yourself. It’s just dinner. Dinner can be arranged in a public place. You’ll just need to sit there and smile. In return, we’ll be able to shoot in complete peace, without fearing for the life and health of every member of the crew. If we don’t get this monkey prince’s approval, we’ll have to assign a police officer to every single crew member, and even then there’s no guarantee it will help. Or we can simply turn around and fly home.”
“I’ll pay the penalty,” Yoongi said, tossing his chin up proudly.
“Listen, we’re already here, everything is going so well,” the director continued in his most flattering tone. “It would be a shame to leave. It’s a good project. It could help a lot of people. Besides, you could ask him why people live so badly on his territory.”
“Exactly!” the manager seized on the lucky thought. “He’s the big boss here, you could discuss it with him.”
“Hold on! What is this now? What are you two inventing on the fly?” the singer was slipping into shouting again. “Talking to him about poverty and crime is like talking to bees about the honey problem!”
“Well, you can talk about bees, then, our little star,” the director tried to steer the conversation back into peaceful waters.
“What bees? What are you trying to distract me for?” Yoongi was nearly in tears now. “What is this? How do you not understand? I still want to live! They say he can kill a man with his bare hands in three seconds!”
“Well, we’ll give you security, we’ll put two of our people at every neighboring table,” the Director shrugged.
“Your security won’t be fast enough,” the Singer pleaded, his voice thick with tears. “He’ll put me on one palm and swat me with the other! Stuff me in a trunk and feed me to piranhas! Only the bones will be left! Actually, what a great idea for fan entertainment! Display my gnawed-clean skeleton in our museum and charge people money to look at it!”
“Listen, think about it yourself,” the manager cut in again. “If he wanted to, you’d already be sitting in his trunk.”
“Exactly,” the director picked up. “Do you think hotel doors are an obstacle to him? And yes, remember, we agreed to the motor scooter scene. Now it’s your turn.”
“What did I do to deserve all this,” Yoongi groaned and dropped his head onto the table, realizing he was not going to win this battle.
“Then it’s settled,” the director spread into an oily smile. “Tonight at eight, at Royal Palace. We’ve already booked everything.”
Yoongi slowly lifted his head. If looks could burn, there would have been two little piles of gray ash lying where the director and manager had been.
“You. What?” the singer asked again, hoping he had misheard, while his hand reached toward the heavy crystal ashtray that looked heavy even from a distance.
“Ah… well… we booked it for ourselves. Yes. For ourselves. A Michelin-starred restaurant. Ages ago. We wanted to have a cultured evening, but since the occasion came up, we’ll give it to you,” the manager rattled off.
“Yes, yes! We’ll give it to you. We’ll go somewhere else,” the bosses echoed each other and began edging sideways, sideways toward the door.
“Oh, so that’s how it is, huh? Somewhere else… I hope it’s the same place I have already mentally sent you! My entire next album will be called Two Merry Rats!” Yoongi shouted, raising his arm.
“Whatever you say, our little pearl! I’m sure it will be a masterpiece,” the director nodded enthusiastically, shoving the manager toward the exit.
“Royal Palace. The limousine comes at seven twenty. White tie,” the manager blurted, and with one tigerish leap he was behind the door, dragging the director with him.
Behind their backs, shards of the ashtray scattered in a rainbow across the wall.
---
“Royal Palace,” the omega fumed, pacing across the room from corner to corner like a tiger in a cage. “Honestly. What a vulgar name! I bet the whole place is covered in fake gold stucco. Ugh, fuck it. Fine! Where are my emerald cufflinks?”
Grumbling, he opened the hotel safe. The dress code allowed omegas a few more ornaments than alphas, but there still wasn’t much room to roam.
“Oh, hell… who does he think he is, that I should break out the Indian emeralds for him? He wanted a star? He’ll get a star!” He snapped the little box with his precious cufflinks shut with force.
Snorting, swearing through his teeth, and cackling wickedly, Yoongi dragged the stiff moon-white waistcoat off himself, slithered out of the narrow, hot trousers and tall silk socks like a snake, threw all this splendor onto the bed, and fished his favorite pants out of the wardrobe. When the costume designer had brought him this beauty, Yoongi had thought they had accidentally dropped them into a shredder. That was how evenly and finely they had been sliced, both front and back.
With satisfaction, he shoved his thin white legs into the roomy pant legs and pulled one more dearly beloved item out from under the lining of his suitcase: a T-shirt with the words “Go Fuck Yourself” on it. It was in Russian, so the agency hadn’t immediately understood why the fans had suddenly become so excited. A noble little scandal it had been, when Yoongi flashed that masterpiece during an American interview. The fans quickly explained what was written there and in which language, but the recording had already sailed off onto the internet. Since then, he’d had to hide it from the manager. By now it had faded a little and even worn thin in a few places, but that made it even better. Perfect for Royal Palace.
Examining himself in the mirror, Yoongi spotted a black pencil on the table and nearly groaned with pleasure. Yes. Tonight he would remember how the inexperienced noona makeup artist had painted him at the dawn of his career. Black smudged smoky eyes and a mermaid sheen burning blue over his cheekbones and lips.
It would be a bit hot in the tractor boots, but he could endure it. A pair of chains with skulls, huge silver rings on every finger. Let the piranhas break all their teeth. Ah, where were his beloved rings with the SUGA letters now? They’d flown off during a performance and were now gathering dust in someone’s jewelry box.
He went without security. What was there to guard anyway. It wasn’t as if he’d be walking through the crowd by the main entrance. The limousine driver, who secretly picked him up in the underground garage, did not react at all to the magical image, unlike the restaurant doorman. The man swayed forward to block his path, then thought better of it.
The host greeting guests twitched an eye, but professionalism won. With a low bow, Yoongi was led to his table. Among people dressed like the first class of the Titanic, he looked truly alien in his trembling and thrilling pants. The host minced ahead, showing the way, while Yoongi lifted his nose to chandelier level and confidently stamped his heavy boots into the fluffy carpet. In this very important little pair, they passed straight through the green room, then the red room, and stopped only in a small one with delicate pinkish-violet walls. Though, to be fair, it was difficult to make out the color of the walls. Very little of them showed through the mirrors, paintings, bronze, crystal, and stucco.
In the center of the room stood a huge grand piano, multiplying all that bronze and crystal in its polished wing. A jazz band had gathered around it. Not the most ordinary one. One of the musicians sat with a little concertina, which delighted the guest with its toy-like appearance.
Pointing the star toward a small empty table in a cozy niche, the host bowed, wished him a pleasant evening, twitched his eye one last time, and hurriedly withdrew.
The table setting of a thousand and one objects was untouched, which meant the Monkey King had not yet appeared.
For the hundredth time, Yoongi praised himself for his choice of outfit when he felt the delightful coolness of silk upholstery against his bare skin. But that little joy did nothing to brighten the situation. Even “The Girl from Ipanema,” which the orchestra had struck up, could not save him. The way he had rolled his shoulders, lifted his chin, and marched as if on parade while walking in had been only so he would not shake with terror.
Mentally cursing himself for not looking up what this King looked like, Yoongi put his elbows on the table and glanced around.
There weren’t many people there: two elderly couples, waiters, and musicians. No hulking men with earpieces and shoulder holsters, no laughing painted half-naked girls, no shifty little errand rats, no suitcases of money, no batteries of champagne bottles with fireworks. That was roughly how Yoongi had imagined the mafia king’s entrance into society. But here it was quiet, beautiful, almost noble. The orchestra played bossa nova; long crystal pendants on the chandelier rang iridescently from the breath of the air conditioner.
One of the waiters, catching Yoongi’s gaze, rushed over to him at full speed. With a deep bow, the pretty blond alpha of Asian appearance handed the guest a menu and greeted him in Korean. The guest nearly fell off his chair from surprise. Blinking and smiling with delight, he accepted the heavy red folder with both hands and thanked him warmly.
The waiter smiled back, making his eyes turn into thin little slits, and returned to his place.
There were no prices in the folder.
Yoongi struggled through the cunningly invented names in French and English and sighed heavily. What was it with everyone and French cuisine! In such luxurious establishments, menus with pictures were considered bad taste, but without pictures, you, a simple person who grew up in Daegu, had no earthly idea who these “Loup savage” and “Moules de giol” were. Either you were going to eat it, or it was going to eat you.
“There! Tartare! That’s like a sauce, sort of like mayonnaise, only with pickles. I’ll take that,” the omega thought, rejoicing at the familiar word as if it were an old friend.
Turning a couple more pages, he caught on the word “Tomate” and rejoiced even more. Tomatoes could be ruined, given the proper level of imagination, but this was a Michelin-starred restaurant. They should understand.
Raising his head, the guest looked hopefully at the waiter. The man flew to him so quickly it was as though he had dreamed since childhood of bringing Yoongi food.
“I would like to order this and this,” the omega said, poking his finger at the golden letters.
“As you wish,” the waiter nodded enthusiastically and smiled like sunshine. Yoongi even found himself staring at his pink lips and slightly protruding front tooth.
“And you’re not going to write it down?” the guest asked, surfacing from sweet contemplation.
“I’ve memorized it. You ordered Loup savage de Mediterranee and Tomate des soeurs risso. What wine would you prefer with the fish?”
“With the fish? Ah, forgive me, which of the two is the fish?” the omega swallowed nervously and lifted a gaze full of despair to the alpha.
“The loup savage is the fish. It’s also called sea wolf, or sea bass: a white fish with firm, tasty flesh and no sharp fishy smell,” the waiter explained, still smiling tenderly. Yoongi even noted that it was not a service smile, not a polite smile, not a friendly smile, not a hospitable smile, but precisely a tender one. That was how people smiled when they tucked a blanket around a sleeping child, not when they explained to a dim customer what dish he had just ordered. “Now that’s service. Michelin, fuck yeah,” the customer thought, and continued.
“You know, I don’t understand wine at all. Could you recommend something?”
“Of course. Will you allow me to surprise you?” the alpha arched a brow slyly.
“You know what… I will. Surprise me!” the omega said decisively and snapped the folder shut.
The waiter flicked his napkin and fluttered away to the kitchen. The guest, having followed the lithe, well-built little figure with his eyes, began studying the table setting and listening to something languid and southern rustling from the orchestra.
The Monkey King was not there.
“Interesting… am I supposed to be sad about that or happy?” Yoongi could not untangle his own feelings. On the one hand, it was good that no one was demanding “payment” from him. On the other hand, it was somehow rude. Invited him himself, arranged everything himself, didn’t show up himself. Independent! You could tell at once: a big boss. And curiosity, of course, would not leave him alone. What could a person with so much power look like? Surely there was something animal in him, something primal. Surely he was fat, greasy, with thick stubble, a low forehead, and terribly hairy hands. And lips, too, probably thick, the lips of a libertine. Most likely he was precisely that libertine, a man who had never denied himself anything: not food, not drink, not omegas.
While the Star painted the frightening image of a fat, hairy libertine in his head, borrowing illustrations from Rabelais, the waiter returned to the room. Almost dancing, he carried an enormous plate and a silver bucket. When the plate landed on the table, covering half of it, Yoongi discovered that it held a little mound of raw fish sliced so thin it was nearly transparent, covered with orange and blue flowers. Around that mound, some clever pentagram had been drawn in sauce. The chef, it seemed, had been conjuring over the dish, in the most literal sense of the word.
“Please!” the alpha smiled slyly, setting the silver bucket with a sweating green bottle on the table. He reached to open it, but the guest stopped him.
“Thank you, but I’d like to wait for my companion.”
The waiter bowed and stepped back to his place. From there he had an excellent view of the anguish in Yoongi’s eyes as he contemplated the exhibition of cutlery art laid out around his plate. The guest was painfully recalling the company’s special training course, trying to understand which fork, by count, was the fish fork and whether one was allowed to eat this fish with some other fork. Otherwise tomorrow the news would write that the world-famous rapper had eaten fish with an oyster fork, and then he would be apologizing until he died.
Then the waiter loomed over him again and, in a conspiratorial whisper, offered to bring chopsticks. Flowers should absolutely have bloomed on him from the look Yoongi gave him. The singer nodded quickly and squared his shoulders proudly. The alpha rushed back a minute later, carrying chopsticks and the second dish. And at the exact moment when the hand with the plate was lowering toward the table, Yoongi had to turn his whole body.
The little tomato, lying all alone on the plate, slowly rocked, rolled, and plopped straight into the slit in his pants. For a second it froze, as if considering something, then slid down his leg and plopped onto the floor. It was seen off on its final journey by two pairs of eyes and two astonished breaths.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” the waiter mumbled, going pale and ripping the napkin from his hand.
“Excellent pants. I was right to wear them!” the omega laughed nervously, watching the alpha scrub at the sauce stains on his leg with the napkin.
“I’ll pay for dry cleaning, please don’t be angry!” the waiter babbled.
“Oh! I wasn’t even thinking of getting angry. No dry cleaning needed. Those noodles were just missing a little tomato sauce.”
Which one of them snorted first, they never figured out, but a second later they were both howling, clapping each other on the shoulders and wiping away tears. All the tension of the day escaped in laughter, so unrestrained and loud that the neighboring tables turned in surprise, and the pianist shot them an angry look through his gold-rimmed glasses.
“Well! Won’t this be a sight! The big boss arrives, and his guest is sitting there in torn, dirty pants, cackling with the waiter,” Yoongi declared, gasping and hiccupping on every word.
“He won’t arrive,” the alpha answered, wiping his tears and trying to catch his breath. “He’s already here.”
The alpha smiled craftily and waggled his eyebrows.
“I knew it! It’s the pianist!” the omega tried to guess, choking on laughter.
“Wrong,” the alpha winked conspiratorially.
“Don’t tell me it’s you,” Yoongi said, still laughing, and shoved his interlocutor in the shoulder. He nearly fell off his chair when his waiter rose, straightened, and bowed with an utterly balletic movement.
“Allow me to introduce myself! The Monkey King, at your service!”
While the guest blinked and opened and closed his mouth like a fish, the alpha had time to snatch his hand and shake it gently.
The mafia king’s hands were small, calloused, rough, but not damp: dry, hot, and strong.
“You cannot imagine how much I dreamed of meeting you, Mr. Min. I know all your songs, I’ve watched every performance of yours, I bought every album, I even sent gifts to your company, but they probably never reached you,” the alpha said hotly and quickly, turning the guest’s fingers over in his own and peering into his eyes.
Mr. Min, having received the necessary amount of oxygen to restart his brain, shook his hand in return. In that moment, all his wit was enough only for: “Very pleased to meet you. Min Yoongi.” Still, fame did give a person certain bonuses. You always had a set of phrases that worked when you had no idea what to say.
Yoongi looked at his waiter all over again. Fair hair, a flat face, a straight even nose, eyes with a spark in them, a strong chin, and plump lips. Well, at least he hadn’t been wrong about the lips. Strange, though, how much the feeling changed depending on the word you chose. Thick lips or plump lips. Large either way, and yet what different fates. For some reason, precisely these odd thoughts rushed through the omega’s head while he silently examined his vis-à-vis. And that vis-à-vis was already rustling ice, taking out the bottle. With a pop of the cork, he poured champagne into rainbow-bright glasses, pushed one into the frozen celebrity’s hand, took the second for himself, clinked one against the other, and took a sip.
The ringing brought the celebrity slightly back to himself, and in one motion he tipped the champagne into himself.
“Fun place you’ve got here,” Yoongi drawled, hiccupping and carefully releasing the prickly bubbles through his nose. The last thing he needed was to flaunt a burp in such company.
“May I ask, Your Majesty, what all this performance was for?” Yoongi asked, remembering that he was, after all, a severe, sharp-tongued rapper, and pouring into the question all the sarcasm that his origin and upbringing had allotted him.
The alpha smirked from one corner of his mouth, twirled the thin stem between his fingers, and said sadly, “Celebrities come in all kinds. The easiest way to learn what a person is like is to see how they treat service staff.”
“I’m not leaving you a tip! You ruined my pants! Designer pants!” The champagne seized control of the speech center, and the star sharply switched to the informal “you.”
“Then my poor little sister will go to bed hungry tonight!” the alpha wrung his hands theatrically. “Have mercy, good sir! Is there any way I can atone for my guilt?”
“I’ll think about it! And anyway! I didn’t give you permission to test me! And what kind of waiter are you if you didn’t tell me the fish was raw! How was I supposed to eat it?” Yoongi protested.
“But on that one show, you ate sushi in a restaurant, and that fish was raw. I remember,” the mafioso defended himself, wounded, deciding that if he was being addressed informally, he had the right to do the same.
“On those shows I’ll put my head in a crocodile’s mouth and smile while doing it! Contract! Understand?! You of all people should understand what obligations are! Or are things not that strict in your shadow business?” Yoongi blurted out, his brakes completely released. He said it and went cold. What had been in that champagne? For words like that, they were going to take him under his tender white arms, put him in cement shoes, and drop him in the bay… what was it called again… their main one.
“I didn’t realize it was so strict for you! I’ll lure your lawyer away,” the head of the shadow business smirked.
“Ha! As if you could. You’d have to bring him kimchi straight from Korea!”
“Ha! I moved an entire Korean restaurant here for myself. I have unlimited kimchi now!”
“Let’s go!” Yoongi seized the alpha’s hand and looked into his eyes with mad hope. “I’m ready to kill for normal food right now!”
The dumbfounded almost-waiter lifted one eyebrow and said with a laugh, “Had I known, I would have sent you a barrel of kimchi instead of flowers.”
“It wouldn’t have reached me! The guards who inspect gifts would have eaten it, and the managers, and the hair stylists, and the makeup artists, and the lawyers. It wouldn’t even have reached the dancers,” the omega waved a hand sadly.
“I will take you to Auntie Park’s restaurant, honored one, only allow me to fulfill one dream first,” the alpha whispered insinuatingly, leaning very close.
He went over to the pianist, whispered something with him, and returned to his guest.
It was not hard to guess what someone wanted from you when the clear, clipped chords of tango sounded, performed by that very little concertina, and a stately alpha extended his hand to you and looked straight into your soul.
“This tango is called ‘Gloria,’” the Monkey King whispered, drawing the star into a close embrace.
“I don’t know how at all,” the omega breathed, yielding and allowing himself to be pressed close.
“Trust me and just step,” the alpha whispered, temple to temple. “I’ll lead. Just lean forward a little and rest your chest against mine. I need to control everything below the chest. You can close your eyes.”
The mafioso gently rocked his guest from one foot to the other, while the guest clutched at his back, just below the nape, feeling like a cat in a tree. Not a tall tree, but clearly an iron one. What he felt beneath the shirt did not fit with the pretty little face at all.
“Terrible dance. Immediately obvious why it used to be banned. Where has anyone ever seen strangers embrace like relatives at an airport after a long separation, and bury themselves in each other’s necks in the first minutes of acquaintance? All that’s left is to undress, though without that everything is already clear,” rushed through Yoongi’s head.
Tango, to his surprise, turned out not to be slow and languid, but quite an energetic dance. The alpha led, and the omega marveled at his own legs. Thousands of hours of dance training teach the body to obey, but for that body to obey not him, but someone else… that had never happened before. He, a severe rapper, was being led backward, turned, spun, and all of it fit so beautifully into the music. And then there was that damp shaved temple and the thin sweet scent breaking through the scent-blocking patch. His feet in enormous combat boots were caught by polished shoes, moved, invaded between his legs by a knee, while he simply hung like a cat from the strong, wiry shoulders.
“This song says that love cannot be bought with money,” the alpha scorched his partner’s ear, and made another turn. The tractor sole squeaked on the parquet.
Yoongi wanted to answer with something worthy, but all thoughts melted from the hot whisper.
Legs intertwined, breath faltered, the clear chords subordinated the beating of the heart. The whole world disappeared. Only the ring of strong arms remained, a neck with a collar, a delicate rounded ear, a shoulder in a white shirt, and a heated whisper. Yoongi felt that just a little more and he would surely fall, but the Monkey King caught him and turned the fall into a new step.
On the final, nerve-stretching chords, the alpha led them into that very position printed on postcards.
While they stood there breathless, pressing sweaty foreheads together and laughing quietly and happily, the orchestra began the next one. The omega had only drawn in air to protest when the alpha breathed directly into his ear, “Tango is danced in sets of four songs. It’s called a tanda.”
Pressing his partner to himself, the Monkey King began once again to draw patterns over the parquet with someone else’s legs. The air flew out of Yoongi together with his objections. Everything became unimportant: unimportant that someone might film it and post it, that his palms were wet, that the old T-shirt was sticking to his sweaty back, unimportant that the pencil was running and the boots were squeaking. The only thing that mattered was how carefully he was pressed to that chest, how often and desperately they were both breathing, how firmly and tenderly his hand was held, how the little concertina beat in both of them instead of a heart. Tango began to resemble not a dance, but a life. If the first song had been an introduction, the second became tender infatuation. Two people learned each other. Grew a little bolder, grew used to one another, relaxed. People who had been strangers an hour ago became kin.
But the third turned into what, in a worn-out saying, is called “horizontal desires.” In the heat of the dance, already entirely at ease, Yoongi began to comb through the hair at the shaved nape of his partner’s neck and heard a short, high moan.
“Got you!” the omega noted maliciously, and continued.
And the music circled and sang, lifting dark ancient desires from the bottom of the soul. It inflamed and intoxicated. In its own language it told of unquenchable passion and burning jealousy. It ran over the entire nervous system in electrical discharges, spread through the blood like flaming alcohol. Yoongi was already clearly aware that his amygdala had seized control, launched the ancient programs, and injected hormones into his blood. His body shamelessly responded to the other body, to the caress, to the scent, to the heat. From the breath tickling his ear, the hair on his nape stood on end, sparks ran along his spine, his arms and legs went weak, his cheeks burned. It seemed to him that both of them remained vertical solely because of the alpha, although, judging by his ragged, hoarse breathing, it was also costing him no small effort to remain conscious and within the bounds of propriety.
The alpha, meanwhile, pressing the flexible, yielding body to himself, thought that it would be nice to press that body into himself even tighter, absorb it into himself, dissolve it, devour it. Spread it over himself like butter on hot bread. Fuse with it forever, like anglerfish. He wanted closer, still closer, so that not a single millimeter remained, so there would be one heart for two, the beast with two backs.
Moving faster and faster, they reached the end of the song wet, breathless, and utterly drunk. They stood with their foreheads pressed together. They could not breathe enough and could not catch their breath. The air brought neither freshness nor coolness. Between them lay the noonday heat of the Amazon jungle. Damp, hot, full of hidden life and unknown dangers. Somewhere there, at the border of their world, in the rest of the inhabited universe, people applauded the silenced orchestra, waiters moved about, someone shouted “Bravo,” but in their world there was scorching heat and ringing silence.
Yoongi hid his face on his partner’s shoulder, realizing too late that all his eye pencil would remain on the white shirt. But he cared so little. He had no strength to look the alpha in the face. His cheeks stung. All that was left was to be glad that they were not touching below the waist.
The fourth song suddenly sounded with some inexhaustible, piercing melancholy. That strange bitter sorrow when you suddenly understand clearly that it will never be like this again. There are only these seconds, slipping away quickly. Perhaps it will be better, perhaps worse, but exactly like this—never again. The hand on the clock will move, and the world will change. That is how people who have lived many years in love and harmony understand that one of them will go first.
When the last chord fell silent, the alpha and the omega stood for a long time yet, not tearing themselves away from each other. Someone had to be the first to unclasp their hands, to give that very impulse that meant enough, it was time, they had to let go. But for now they stood stunned, drained, feeling the hurricane in the soul subside and the thunderclaps fade somewhere far away.
That very impulse was provided by Yoongi’s stomach, which emitted a mournful hungry groan.
“Let’s go,” the star grumbled, releasing his partner and regretting that he could not sink through the floor that very second.
“Let’s go,” the mafioso answered with a short laugh, without unclasping his arms. When you are holding a treasure against your chest, you can borrow one more second from the universe.