The Spicy Omega
Translator: Katie
Editor: Derpy
Read at Watashi wa Sugoi Desu!
Chapter 20
The beaten egg, after getting cooked for a moment, was poured over the ketchup rice while maintaining the perfect scramble’s solid-to-liquid ratio.
I poured my special demi-glace sauce over it and brought it over to the living room table.
The table already had salad and soup placed on it.
Amami was waiting with an excited face for the food to arrive.
“Sorry for the wait.”
“It was worth the wait! Wow~ The omurice looks so fluffy. Thanks for the food.”
“Enjoy. Do you want some Tabasco?”
“N-no, I’m good. Is omurice better when it’s spicy?”
“That’s not it, I just feel like having Tabasco with it today.”
I squeezed some Tabasco sauce around the yellow hill and mixed it up with a spoon.
Yep, it looked good.
Amami seemed satisfied with the taste since he kept complimenting it as he ate. I would be embarrassed if he complimented me that much.
As if the intense events from earlier were mere hallucinations, only a peaceful atmosphere remained.
However, I couldn’t treat it as a figment of my mind anymore.
The words Amami said—”fated mate” echoed in my mind constantly.
Without really having a conversation, Amami just kept talking about his thoughts on the food. As our slow lunch came to an end, we set down the tableware.
“Ah, I can clean up the dishes…”
“Stay seated. We have more important things to talk about.”
“……Yeah.”
We moved from the dining room to the sofa.
I sat down on the one-seater first, so Amami sat down on the long one opposite from me with a little bit of hesitation.
“First… Is it true that I am your ‘fated mate’?”
“That’s right.”
“And you also… knew this since middle school?”
“Yeah, ever since the entrance ceremony.”
I wanted to hold my head.
I had already been hiding my secondary gender in middle school, and I consciously avoided making close friends so that no one would find out, so I really thought I got away with it.
Furthermore, Amami was the one who approached me in my first year of high school. It was just yesterday that I thought the only one who knew about my gender was Kijima, other than the teachers.
To think the person I didn’t want finding out I was an omega the most had known from the beginning… To think it was a problem from before I even hid it…
There should be a limit to how embarrassed I can get!
“Yeah, I’ll just go die now.”
“Wait.”
Amami pushed me back down on my seat after I stood up.
Once I sat back down, I took a deep breath and calmed down a little.
Well, I could die any time. While I was at it, I could also beat Amami till he lost his memories.
“You just thought of something super disturbing just now, didn’t you?”
“Of course not. So, although you recognized me during the entrance ceremony, I had no clue at all?”
“Yeah. After that, I tried so hard to make you conscious of me, but you just treated me like air. It was unbearable to say, ‘Nice to meet you,’ when we first greeted each other in high school…”
“Uh… Sorry about that.”
Right, when I was in the same class as Amami in my first year of high school, I hadn’t realized we were from the same middle school yet, so I said to him, “Nice to meet you.” I only remembered who he was after he told me his unusual name. Though, it was safe to say that you typically wouldn’t remember the face of someone who was only in the same middle school and had never shared a class with you.
I apologized afterward, but Amami’s smile was probably filled with more bitterness than I realized.
“Karasawa, even though you didn’t know about your fated mate, I couldn’t take my eyes off of you… Even though I liked you more and more regardless of you being my mate, you didn’t even acknowledge my existence. It was quite despairing, you know?”
“Ughhh… In the first place, we had never made contact before, what part of me did you even start liking?”
“That’s what you’re asking me? It might take an hour.”
“…No, never mind.”
I felt overwhelmed by Amami’s brazen statement.
Perhaps it was because he didn’t have to hide anything anymore, but Amami was speaking more promptly than usual.
“Then, um… you played along with me hiding my secondary gender.”
“Yeah. I was really hoping I could protect you before someone did anything to you, or at least have you bring protective items with you. I didn’t think you’d carry spicy things around with you just to trick everyone.”
“My pheromones smell weird, don’t they?”
“It’s not uncommon to have strange or food-like scents, but there aren’t many cases where one was able to fool everyone for so long.”
He laughed while saying, “Even though I knew it was the scent of your pheromones, it still made me hungry.”
By the way, my parents often teased me saying that they would never lose their appetite with me around, and I was called the enemy of dieting. It was your fault for giving birth to me like this, was what I would’ve said now, but I used to have a lot of worries back then.
“So when we became second years and you suddenly got close to Kijima, defenselessly hung around other alphas, and was even assaulted by a teacher… Do you know how worried I was?”
“I-I wasn’t that defenseless…”
“You’re defenseless in the eyes of everyone else. On top of that, even though you knew I was an alpha, you were fine with letting me get close enough to caress your nape.”
“Ugh…”
Oh no, Amami was in his lecturing mode.
He didn’t raise his voice at all, but when he got like this, it was hard to interrupt as he built up his verbal momentum. Furthermore, what he was saying wasn’t even that unreasonable as I was clearly in the wrong. I could only earnestly apologize.
Hearing him honestly say I was defenseless here and unguarded there made me lower my head in shame.
However, this time I had a lot of things I wanted to say as well.
“B-but you also let another omega touch you…!”
“Huh?”
“I’m referring to Nishikawa! I thought your mate was Nishikawa. And with how well you got along with your assumed ‘fated pair’, I didn’t think I could compete….”
The words that rushed out of me in anger tapered off.
If Nishikawa wasn’t his “fated one”, then why did I feel such an intimate air around them?
Laughing by his side with a relaxed atmosphere—wasn’t that very lover-like? One with mutual feelings?
I didn’t seem like an omega.
My height and weight were much higher than the average omega, I wasn’t as beautiful, nor could I ever act as cute as one. I even had weird pheromones.
Someone like me could never compete against a cute omega Amami should accept, nor would I ever be accepted… or at least that was what I always told myself.
“Ah, Mitsuru. He’s my little brother.”
Huh?
“Huh?”
“More specifically, he’s my adopted brother.”
According to Amami:
There was a dispute 10 years ago in the Amami family, which was far more respectable than I imagined, with its branch family—which, first of all, when do you even use this phrase normally?—and it seemed like the Nishikawa family, which was right in the middle of the mess, ended up dispersing.
But Amami’s parents felt responsible for it so they took Nishikawa in.
After that, when the official notice for Nishikawa’s secondary gender inspection came in, they found out he was an omega.
Just when it seemed like they were about to kick him out for the sake of the family—since everyone in the Amami household from the grandparents, parents, and children were alphas—they discovered that he was actually the “fated mate” of Amami’s father’s private secretary.
But because of his age, he couldn’t get married yet, nor could they make his precious subordinate’s “fated mate” work for the next ten years, so they decided to adopt him instead and have him stay in a different house.
So because of that, Amami and Nishikawa may be brothers on paper, but they had never lived together long enough for it to count, and Nishikawa himself wished to keep his surname.
“I… see….”
“Ever since Mitsuru graduated from middle school, he’s been firmly attached to his mate, probably because he spent a lot of time traveling abroad with him. Since he was bonded already, the whole family had been clingy to the point his mate got jealous. He came back last year, and it seems like he studied at that cram school so that he could go to college.”
“Hahh…”
“Were you perhaps… jealous?”
“Wha- No! …I just thought that the two of you would be happy as mates, so I gave up.”
“…Sorry. Even though I said I would protect you, I ended up hurting you instead.”
“Huh? No, it wasn’t your fault, Amami! I just got wrapped up in my own misunderstandings.”
“But still, you’re the only one for me, so I shouldn’t have carelessly touched another omega. I won’t do it anymore, I swear.”
I panicked when he gently hugged me.
First of all, this exchange in and of itself was already embarrassing enough, but to think that my feelings of jealousy toward Nishikawa were also revealed… The fact that Amami accepted it so readily was hard for me to comprehend.
Also, what he said just now…
“That sounded a lot like you were p-proposing to me… didn’t it?”
I said that as a joke with a faint smile, but I was hit by Amami’s slightly troubled and serious eyes.
When I looked into his eyes, it felt like it would suck me right in and make me spill all of my deepest secrets, so I typically didn’t gaze into them.
But I couldn’t tear my eyes away this time.
“I just can’t keep up with you, Karasawa. I wanted to confess and tell you I was your mate in a more romantic way so that we would remember it like that for the rest of our lives. But when it comes to you, neither the order nor the method went as planned.”
He got up from the sofa and gently held my hand.
Amami kneeled down in front of me, sitting on the couch in a daze, as if he was a prince from a fairytale.
“I may be an unreliable and useless alpha, but you are the only one for me. I don’t need anyone else. Please be my mate.”
My left hand, clasped in both his hands, trembled slightly.
I knew those words weren’t easily said.
I gave up on everything, put a lid on my feelings, and spent countless nights killing my overflowing thoughts of love.
To be rewarded like this, I never saw it coming.
It was the future I desired, but I couldn’t believe it even now.
“Please make me your mate, Amami…”
Even though I usually didn’t cry so easily, the tears uncontrollably spilled again.
Amami tugged on my arms and pulled me to his chest.
The countless times he had embraced me like this before didn’t affect me as much, but now, all the worries and fears I was filled with felt like they had finally disappeared.
For the first time, I returned the hug that I had pushed away until now.
“We had promised to be lovers until graduation, but is it okay to stay like this from now on…?”
I voiced my last question.
The reason why I still felt lonely while in the embrace of the person I liked was because those words had been like a thorn in my conscience, torturing me and telling me not to get my hopes up.
I had given up on my feelings because our relationship had a time limit, but I don’t think I could give it up if my feelings were returned.
“Hm? …Ah, I see, so that was bothering you.”
“Of course it would bother me.”
“Sorry, I worded it wrong. I wanted to be attached while we were still attending school and then get married after graduation, so… I got a little ahead of myself. But I thought that if I said it like that, you would’ve gotten scared, so I kept it to myself. That’s what I ended up going with…”
“…Ah.”
Correction.
I guess even if I was hugging the person I confessed to, worries can still arise.
When I reflexively pushed Amami away with both arms, I noticed Amami making an odd face.
“I think I need you to elaborate on that a little more.”
“Huh!? Why did you push me away?”
“Thinking of marriage even though we’re only lovers feels a little stalkerish, and the weight of your love is heavier than I expected, so I just…”
“Oh, come on… I shouldn’t have elaborated after all.”
I was amused by Amami’s disappointed face and my shoulders shook with laughter.
A/N: Next is Kijima’s POV.
