Chapter 29

Dante stared fervently at Rhys’s back as he checked in.

The long, straight line of his shoulders, his posture upright as he handled the front desk clerk, felt maddeningly lovable. This was really a problem. Dante had been scolded ever since they met, yet as time passed, he only liked Rhys more. He even felt as if he loved him more now than he had while they were actively dating.

Was it because Rhys pushed him away so hard, only to keep letting himself be held at important moments? Dante had never understood as strongly as he did today why people said a push-and-pull was necessary. Rhys probably had not acted this way intentionally, but as a result, Dante was helplessly falling for his powerful control of pressure and release.

Haa… I want to smell Rhys.

Looking at Rhys’s back made him want to breathe in that faint, floral scent unique to him. If Dante followed his heart, he would approach from behind, wrap him in a tight embrace, and bury his face in his neck. But if he did that, Rhys would probably be disgusted enough to run away. So, Dante decided he would be satisfied with simply moving to his side.

Quietly rising from his seat, he approached Rhys, who was receiving the room key at the hotel front desk. Although they had arrived early in the morning, fortunately, a prepared room happened to be empty. They had been allowed to check in early by paying a little extra, and Rhys was just finishing the additional payment.

Sensing Dante’s presence, Rhys turned his head. The face that had not revealed any emotion one could properly call an expression shifted the instant it placed Dante in sight. Rhys faintly frowned, his elegant brow tightening, and asked in a cold voice, “Why?”

The front desk clerk, who had been waiting for the receipt to print, bowed his head to Dante. The employee was a young man who looked as if he had only just entered his early to mid-twenties.

If Dante said something like, Because I don’t want to be apart from you for even a moment… in front of the employee watching them with curious eyes, he would surely earn Rhys’s hatred. So, Dante smiled at the employee out of habit.

His dark brows, as if each hair had been drawn carefully in graphite, curved cleanly, and the corners of his mouth, which had been closed in a straight line, lifted brightly. Following the soft smile made by only curling the ends of his lips, faint dimples appeared in his cheeks.

“Hello. Thank you for helping us,” Dante said.

“It was nothing,” the employee replied.

When Dante greeted him with an ordinary smile, the employee’s face also brightened. Just as the young man, looking slightly excited, opened his mouth to say something more, Rhys’s voice cut in sharply.

“Is check-in finished? I’d like to go up now.”

“Ah, yes! Here are your receipt and the information sheet,” the clerk stammered. “If you scan the QR code, the details page will appear, so please refer to that for facility use as I explained earlier. Your luggage has already been sent up.”

“Thank you.”

After effectively cutting off the employee’s attempt to speak to Dante, Rhys took the key and stared at Dante. No—he glared at him. The blazing look seemed as if it would pierce right through his skin. Bewildered, Dante unknowingly tilted his head slightly, looking at him in confusion. Why? Why are you making that face…?

Rhys stared hard at Dante, who clearly understood nothing, then wiped his expression clean and exhaled an empty breath. Perhaps because his face was entirely devoid of a smile, the sound seemed especially cold. Rhys turned without saying another word and crossed the lobby first. Dante hurried after him, quickly falling into step beside him.

“Rhys, why?”

“Stay away. I don’t want to look at your face.”

“Did I do something wrong? I mean, of course I’m continuously in a state of having done wrong, but….”

Standing in front of the elevator, Rhys adjusted the strap of the bag slung over one shoulder and pressed his lips firmly shut. Dante watched those stubbornly closed lips with anxiety. After a moment of thought, he lightly tugged at the fabric of Rhys’s leather jacket.

“Tell me, hm?”

Rhys, who had been staring straight ahead, briefly lowered his gaze to the hand pulling at his jacket. He watched Dante’s fingers carefully gripping the outerwear with his index finger and thumb for several seconds, then turned his eyes away again.

Just then, the elevator doors opened. Rhys strode inside, and Dante followed immediately. He felt like a lost duckling. The tense realization that if he let his guard down for even a second, he might lose Rhys entirely swept over him. Since he had actually lost Rhys on the plane once already, Dante stuck to him like a magnet.

The hotel Dante had booked, like other five-star establishments in central Rome, was not especially tall. There were likely local regulations preventing buildings from blocking historic sites or ruining the historic city view. This hotel’s top floor was only the seventh, and the floor they were staying on was the fifth. In the photos, the room had shown a beautiful view of the outside. He had really worked hard choosing it. As that thought brushed past, Dante wondered whether Rhys liked the accommodation and quietly asked, “How’s the hotel? I chose somewhere as pretty as possible. You like places with clean design. You hate things that feel busy.”

Rhys, who had almost never shown outward dislike in front of Dante, would express discomfort in only a few exceptional situations, and a prime example was when he visited Dante’s apartment. Dante knew he was bad at keeping things organized, but the memory of Rhys visiting his home for the first time and being completely unable to bring himself to cross the threshold remained vivid.

When Dante subtly showed that he understood this part of him and asked for his impression, Rhys glanced at Dante, then fixed his gaze forward again. This time, however, an answer actually came.

“It’s not bad. It’s in the center, and it looks like we can walk to most places.”

“Right? The room was pretty, too. They said the city view here is good.”

“They said the employee you liked gave us a special upgrade.”

“Really? That’s great!”

Dante had only been purely delighted by the news that the employee had upgraded them out of kindness, but the instant he answered cheerfully, Rhys slowly turned his head and stared at him. Even though his face remained expressionless, Dante strongly felt that Rhys was angry.

At the same time, Rhys’s faint, floral scent deepened in the enclosed space. Dante had wanted to smell him since earlier, and it was as if Rhys had noticed his wish. Dante inhaled deeply, engraving Rhys’s scent as much as he could into his olfactory cells, when Rhys suddenly spoke.

“I thought you were only interested in women, but I suppose men work too now? Is an Omega good enough?”

“Uh…? What are you talking about?”

Rhys’s attack came entirely out of nowhere. It was almost an ambush of a question, so Dante could not even properly comprehend why the topic of an Omega had suddenly come up. As a Beta, Dante had no ability to distinguish designations by scent. But Rhys gave him no time to ask for details, snapping at him immediately.

“You smiled at him because you were trying to seduce him.”

“Me? When?”

“Do you not remember going out of your way to come beside me and smiling at the employee? You smiled prettily, as if showing off, and the other person seemed to like it, too.”

Rhys clearly listed Dante’s actions in a low voice, his tone laced with mockery.

Ah. He misunderstood. He completely misunderstood why I went over there.

“No! I didn’t go there for that guy,” Dante protested with sincere injustice. “I went to see you. I stood beside you because I wanted to see you, but saying that in front of a kid was embarrassing, so I smiled. That’s all.”

When Dante protested, Rhys’s sharp gaze seemed to loosen faintly. Swallowing a sigh of relief inside, Dante followed the instinct that told him to seize the opportunity and pressed close to his side. The moment their arms brushed, Rhys frowned and flinched. As Rhys tried to move away, Dante crowded him into the corner of the elevator and asked, “But beautiful, the things you’re saying right now sound an awful lot like jealousy to my ears.”

“Stop talking nonsense and move.”

If Rhys had shown even a little fluster, Dante felt he could gain certainty, but there was no sign of a flush on Rhys’s cheeks, ears, neck, or anywhere else. Instead, his gold-brown brows distorted frighteningly.

“Was it that annoying that I smiled? But did I smile prettily earlier…? I just did it like I always do.”

The moment Rhys heard Dante’s puzzled remark, he snapped. “Because you go around smiling at every woman you meet like that, you receive numbers.”

As if he could not stand the fact that he himself had blurted such a thing out, Rhys grimaced, then gripped Dante’s shoulder hard and pushed him away.

But Dante could not retreat here. Now that they had come to the accommodation together, he wanted clear grounds to believe it was all right to press in further. Only then did he think he would have the courage to make the bold decision Lazzaro had advised: to come out of the bathroom after washing up completely naked, as if by accident. Based on Rhys’s behavior so far, it was incredibly difficult to predict how he would react.

“No matter how I look at it, this sounds like jealousy, beautiful.”

Dante put strength into his lower body and held his ground so he would not be pushed away. Rhys was stronger than Dante had expected, but Dante was, at the end of the day, a person who used his body for his livelihood. When he put his weight into resisting, Rhys could not push him away completely and resorted to glaring at him with sharp eyes.

“I think you still love me,” Dante said, lowering his voice richly and looking at him with serious eyes. “If you’d forgotten me, we wouldn’t be in this hotel together at all right now. You haven’t forgotten me, right?”

Inside, he prayed desperately that Rhys would please give him an opening. But a beauty’s thorns were sharp.

“I came here because you were whining like a rain-soaked dog, and now you’re using that mouth to spew nonsense,” Rhys said in a scathing tone, pointing out the brutal facts. “I suppose you’ve already forgotten that I ignored your attempts to contact me for two whole months.”

Dante paused, stung by the reminder. Rhys used that exact split-second opening to shove Dante away hard, erasing every flicker of agitation from moments before and driving in the final wedge.

“I came with you because I pitied you, so stop misunderstanding.”

Dante had believed this was exactly the chance to dig in, but Rhys truly was not easy. Damn it. Should he have dated a man before meeting Rhys? He had absolutely no idea how to properly seduce a man.

While they were arguing in a way that was not quite arguing, the elevator finally arrived at the fifth floor. In fact, it seemed to have arrived a moment earlier. The doors had opened because a couple outside was waiting to get in. Seeing the intense scene immediately in front of them when the elevator doors parted, the couple looked startled and stepped back with a small gasp.

Dante belatedly realized he looked as if he were practically pouncing on Rhys and quickly retreated. The moment he did, Rhys left him behind and walked straight out.

“Rhys, don’t go alone!”

To show the strangers that he had absolutely not been trying to do anything strange, Dante called Rhys’s name and hurried out of the elevator. He could feel the couple’s suspicious gazes burning into the back of his head, so he practically ran after him. Falling into step beside Rhys as he crossed the hallway in a quiet rage, Dante kept pressing, “If you haven’t forgotten me, why were you angry earlier just because I smiled at the employee?”

“Because it reminded me of what you did while we were dating, and I was sick of it.”

“…I really didn’t know. If I’d known you hated it this much, I wouldn’t have smiled at other people.”

“You, who like women so much?” Rhys added with a cold sneer, “You said it couldn’t be helped because of your father’s teachings.”

“It is a habit that came from that, but if I’d known it was hurting you, of course I would have stopped.”

As Dante whispered desperately, the two of them arrived in front of their room. Before holding the key card up to the electronic lock, Rhys turned to Dante and spoke in a low, tight voice.

“I don’t believe what you say. If you were someone who would go that far for me, you wouldn’t have thrown around the words let’s break up either. Someone who couldn’t even manage that much says he’ll change a lifelong habit for me?”

Rhys gave a hollow laugh, then opened the door and went inside without waiting for an answer.

For a moment, Dante was left utterly speechless. Every word Rhys had poured out was sharp, precise, and based on undeniable fact. It was natural for dissatisfaction to arise while dating, and even Dante himself had always been anxious because of Rhys’s excessive secrecy, but he had truly not known Rhys felt that way in return.

Throughout their relationship, Rhys had been as tolerant toward Dante as his soft smile suggested. Whenever the topic of breaking up came up, he became upset and cried, but instead of resenting or blaming Dante for saying those words, he had always held on to him. Because it happened every year, Dante seemed to have unconsciously assumed Rhys did not truly care.

“You’re the one who never showed me these sides while we were dating, either,” Dante muttered, following him inside. “Why are you only telling me after we broke up?”