Flower Fiancé Chapter 87

At Choi Moohyuk’s nonchalant reaction, Ji Yeonwoo thought, Oh no.

“…Pardon?”

“What kind of method do you think I’d use?”

Tongue-tied, Ji Yeonwoo clamped his mouth shut with a gasp. The expression on Ji Yeonwoo’s face—as he frantically dug around to dig up and eradicate the thought that had naturally surfaced—was an absolute mess.

Watching such a Ji Yeonwoo, Choi Moohyuk swept back his damp hair with a water-drenched hand. A faint smile hung at the corners of his lips.

Realizing that Choi Moohyuk had been teasing him with full awareness, Ji Yeonwoo glared at him.

“Is it fun teasing me?”

“It’s not entirely unfun.”

Patting the wet back, Choi Moohyuk pulled up the corners of his lips. Suddenly, the illusion arose that Choi Moohyuk’s complexion looked even better than before he went through heat. His skin looked better, too, and his expression seemed brighter. Ji Yeonwoo was the one who had gone through heat, so he couldn’t figure out why Choi Moohyuk’s condition seemed to have improved even more.

“Were you really that happy to hear my confession?”

Ji Yeonwoo asked, staring straight at Choi Moohyuk.

“Isn’t that a given? There’s no one who would dislike hearing a confession from their lover.”

“Just how happy were you?”

“Do we really have to gauge it with a number?”

“Still.”

“Well, if I strictly had to rank the order, I suppose it was the second happiest.”

“Second?”

It was unexpected. He remembered that when they spent the heat together, Choi Moohyuk had been even more aroused to a degree that felt like cheating ever since hearing the confession. Just looking at his expression or reaction, one could easily say it was the happiest, so he was curious why he ranked it second.

“Then when was the first?”

But regrettably, with that question as the last, the conversation that had been flowing naturally was cut off. For some reason, Choi Moohyuk just stared at Ji Yeonwoo in silence. His expression wasn’t hardened or anything, but he didn’t seem to have any intention of answering.

“Let’s get out now. Staying in the water for too long isn’t good either.”

Kissing the corners of Ji Yeonwoo’s eyes—who was only blinking his two eyes—Choi Moohyuk lifted him up while holding him so he wouldn’t fall. Receiving his touch, Ji Yeonwoo fixed his gaze on Choi Moohyuk.

“Hurry up. Won’t you?”

“Let’s see. Hm, I don’t remember very well…”

“Oh come on, you’re really going to be like this?”

It was useless even to send a look saying he was curious so he should tell him. A smile hung on Choi Moohyuk’s lips as he glanced down at Ji Yeonwoo. Choi Moohyuk didn’t end up answering that question all the way until they finished washing up and came out.

Having washed up cleanly, Ji Yeonwoo changed into a loose shirt and shorts. As he was walking along, drying his damp hair with a towel, he paused. Choi Moohyuk, who had come in first, was sitting on the bed holding a hair dryer. Patting the space right in front of him with his palm, he gestured for Ji Yeonwoo to come over.

With a smiling face, Ji Yeonwoo moved according to his touch. Sitting with both legs placed up on the bed, Choi Moohyuk started drying his damp hair with the hair dryer he held in his hand.

Every time Choi Moohyuk’s straightly extended fingers rumpled through his hair, the fine strands fluttered and moved into the air. He felt like he had gotten a sound sleep, but the touch tending to his hair made sleep pour over him in flurries all over again.

Before he knew it, Ji Yeonwoo, who had been dozing off with heavy bobs of his head, snapped his head up. The hand that had been tending to his hair moved downward and stroked his smooth cheek.

“Are you very sleepy?”

“I’m sorry. Sleep keeps washing over me.”

“On top of having gone through heat, you washed in warm water and came out, so you’ll feel even more languid. Still, you have to eat porridge and take your medicine, so bear with it just a little bit.”

“Okay.”

Nodding with a bob of his head, Ji Yeonwoo ultimately couldn’t overcome the sleepiness and let out a small yawn.

“How is your body? Any painful spots?”

“I can bear it. My waist hurts a bit, and my backside is burning, too. Ah, my body feels kind of languid, and…”

At the endless stream of groans, the hand that had been drying his hair came to a complete halt.

“Then that means you aren’t okay.”

Now that he heard it, Choi Moohyuk’s words were right. The symptoms he had rattled off weren’t just one or two, so why had he only thought he was okay? Living alone and adapting to society, he had made a habit of casting self-hypnosis over small and trivial problems by telling himself he was fine, and it seemed that habit remained left behind.

“They’re just symptoms that intermittently occur while going through heat, you know.”

Turning his head to look at Choi Moohyuk, Ji Yeonwoo sat up and turned to face him squarely.

“Mr. Moohyuk, do you know that? When you’re worried or angry, wrinkles form right here between your eyebrows.”

Saying that, he gently pressed his index finger right on the spot where wrinkles had formed between Choi Moohyuk’s eyebrows to smooth them out.

“If you keep pulling a face like that, wrinkles will form. You’re six years older than me, Mister, so you need to manage your wrinkles.”

“Are you going to attack my age out of nowhere in this situation?”

“Hey, I’m just saying it to make you laugh.”

Ji Yeonwoo smiled with a playful squint toward Choi Moohyuk, who let out a ragged breath after being hit with a sudden age attack. Choi Moohyuk could only snort in amusement as he looked at Ji Yeonwoo like that.

Having thoroughly dried the damp hair, Choi Moohyuk went to the kitchen and heated up the porridge he had prepared in advance. It was plain white porridge boiled with just rice. There had been abalone and shrimp at home, but because he had contacted the ajumma not to come to work, he hadn’t been able to prep the ingredients to boil a different kind of porridge.

When Choi Moohyuk added seasoned soy sauce to the steaming white porridge to adjust the seasoning, Ji Yeonwoo scooped up the bowl clean until the bottom showed. Choi Moohyuk’s expression as he watched Ji Yeonwoo eat well was equally satisfied.

Having carefully looked after him even with his medicine, Choi Moohyuk lay down on the bed holding Ji Yeonwoo in his arms. It was still the middle of the day, but because both of them had pulled all-nighters for various reasons, they needed to catch at least a little sleep.

Lying with his head pillowed on Choi Moohyuk’s arm, Ji Yeonwoo blinked languidly while resting his face against Choi Moohyuk’s chest. Watching Ji Yeonwoo yawn to the point where tears welled up in the corners of his eyes, Choi Moohyuk asked as if something had suddenly occurred to him.

“What is the reason your heat came on so suddenly?”

Ji Yeonwoo’s eyes widened round as he wiped away the tears pooled in the corners of his eyes. It was a gaze from which sleep had instantly vanished.

That was something Ji Yeonwoo himself had been curious about, too. Although his heat cycle was irregular to begin with, even Ji Yeonwoo himself couldn’t know the reason why his heat had started without any notable premonitory symptoms.

He retraced his thoughts. When he first saw Choi Moohyuk, he had felt that his body heat was unusually higher than usual. He had even said that his body felt languid and he felt a sense of heat because he had used his pheromones, too. After that, Choi Moohyuk had reacted with arousal to the tiny bit of Ji Yeonwoo’s pheromones that had leaked out in the elevator. Perhaps in the middle of that process, Choi Moohyuk’s dominant alpha pheromones might have leaked out.

Did he react without realizing it because they were in a confined space like an elevator? But is that even possible when he didn’t feel any pheromone deficiency?

“I’m not quite sure which came first, either.”

Lost in thought, Ji Yeonwoo ultimately failed to reach a conclusion.

“Whether my pheromones flared up briefly because heat was coming on, or whether I reacted to some other external factor.”

“As expected, that scent I smelled back then—was it Yeonwoo’s pheromones?”

Ji Yeonwoo nodded.

“Actually, I’ve never directly smelled my own pheromones, so I don’t know what scent it is. However, piecing together what I’ve heard around me, it seems the scent Mr. Moohyuk smelled was indeed my pheromones.”

“I did feel that various scents blending harmoniously and complexly felt like a dominant omega’s pheromones, too. But how… when heat came upon you in the past, did your pheromones flare up and act like this, too? Even if it was just for a moment.”

“No. I can’t know for certain, but it probably wasn’t.”

“Is there even a reason you’re so sure?”

“My physical condition was different from when heat came upon me previously. It was brief, but somehow the feeling… it felt as if I had returned to the state before I contracted pheromone deficiency.”

After hearing everything Ji Yeonwoo had to say to the end, Choi Moohyuk’s expression turned serious. Neither Ji Yeonwoo nor Choi Moohyuk thought this was a simple matter.

Whether heat was the cause or not, the fact that his pheromones had flared up even briefly was definitely a positive sign. However, it was a situation where they only had circumstantial evidence and no physical proof. Now they could no longer delay time.

“Looks like I’ll need to get examined before it gets any later.”

“The problem is the hospital, though.”

“If we want to book an appointment quickly, going to Mr. Moohyuk’s hospital would…”

“That won’t do.”