The Spicy Omega
Translator: Katie
Editor: Shizukuku
Read at Watashi wa Sugoi Desu!
The Three’s Drinking Party (Kijima POV)
Karasawa, Amami, and Kijima’s first time drinking together.
It was a known fact in this world that secondary genders, also known as verses, existed.
They were split into three categories. Sometimes, I thought of them as something like traffic lights.
For example, many dramas, movies, mangas, and novels had adopted this part of our world into theirs.
In those worlds, the ones in the spotlight were obviously the alphas and omegas.
The omegas chosen to be the lead role often hid their secondary genders for various reasons or had faced trauma in the past.
The alphas were often characters of outstanding status and positions but were either a little twisted, hated omegas, or had personalities along those lines.
The stories flowed and eventually ended, like the pedestrian traffic lights that only flashed red and green, with a performance that gave no hints that there were other people hidden in the dark, not bathed in the spotlight. That was the law of nature.
However, in reality, our world was more like the three-colored traffic lights for cars.
The yellow lights represented us normal betas.
Of course, it’s not like there weren’t any works that had betas as the theme. In essays, slice-of-life anime, and documentaries, we were the protagonists. However, in those stories, there was a strong tendency to believe that nothing significant would ever happen, unlike the dramatic stories about alphas and omegas.
I felt like one of those yellow lights, trapped in between the red and green.
I stood between an alpha and an omega, sometimes asking how they felt, and sometimes acting as a middleman for the two.
In other words, what I was trying to say was…
“Wahhh~ Shinya, don’t abandon meee!”
“Ahahahaha! Kijimaa! Ren is crying–ahahahahaha!”
I came here for the first time to have drinks with two of my best friends from high school. One of them was an alpha, who was the worst crying drunk I’d ever seen.
The other was an omega, who was falling over laughing while pointing at his alpha mate with his mouth open the widest I’d ever seen.
So I, sandwiched between these two people with a dry smile, thought I was exactly like a struggling traffic light, stuck between these two colors…
A few days ago, Karasawa celebrated his birthday, so all of us were finally 20.
Naturally, the first thing a youth who had just turned 20 would do was drink.
To be honest, I’d been tasting and drinking alcohol with my dad during his evening drinks since before I turned 20, but my two high school friends were extremely serious honor students, so I figured they would have waited until their birthdays to have their first drink.
I immediately messaged the two with an izakaya in mind.1
We took a seat in a semi-private room with spacious seating. The specialty here was local sake from various regions.
The moment we brushed aside the sign curtain and stepped inside, the place seemed completely different from chain restaurants. It might’ve seemed too expensive for three people who just came of age, but that was where Amami came in.
With this guy leading the way into the store, the workers would naturally wait on us and the customers would look away.
The presence of an exceptional alpha could be detected just by approaching him, so ordinary people would try not to get involved with us.
The fact that such an alpha was one of my best friends sometimes gave me a weird feeling.
With Amami leading the way, we leisurely took our seats with a sideways glance at the bustling restaurant, though it didn’t feel too noisy.
My other friend, Karasawa, could not hide his excitement at being in an izakaya for the first time.
He glanced around at the interior, stared at the posters on the walls, and happily read the menu.
In high school, Karasawa secretly hid the fact that he was an omega, and it seemed like his secretive nature still hadn’t changed. However, he was already mated to Amami, and ironically, he would be considered more beta-like than an actual beta to all but Amami.
The pheromone of an omega whose nape was bitten by an alpha would only affect the alpha they’re mated to.
Without his pheromone, pretty much no one would discern that he’s an omega.
“Hey guys, will this be your first time drinking?”
“I drank a few times after my birthday.”
“Hey, listen to this, Kijima. Ren immediately starts crying after he drinks.”
“Huh~ I can’t wait to make you drink! How about you, Karasawa?”
“Today will be my drinking debut!”
“Oh, that’s nice. Then you should take the chance to test your alcohol tolerance.”
As the one with the earliest birthday in our friend group, I had a good grasp of my alcohol preferences and tolerance. When I said this with a bit of seniority, Karasawa nodded firmly and smiled.
Meanwhile, Amami was lovingly looking at Karasawa and had already blocked me out of his line of sight.
(The two of them really haven’t changed a bit…)
The nostalgic atmosphere brought me back to our high school days.
Amami always watched over Karasawa like this until he brought his long unrequited love to fruition just before graduation.
I felt like all the hard work I put into encouraging Amami and providing him with support was rewarded every time I saw them looking so happy together.
Feeling slightly old and sentimental, I rang the bell for the waiter to order some drinks along with a few side dishes.
A few hours had passed since we had that exchange.
It was already too late when I realized the two of them were completely plastered.
The drinks were so good that all three of us had gotten carried away.
When I got drunk, it only uplifted my mood and made me sleepy, but… those two seemed to have some nasty drinking habits.
It all started when Karasawa, who was sitting cross-legged next to Amami, moved over to look at my phone.
We were looking at a picture of my dog and were startled when we noticed Amami acting strange.
“Wha– Why are you crying, Amami!?”
Amami had tears pouring down his face as he clutched a glass of sake with a moderately high alcohol content.
I wasn’t the type of person to make someone cry, even during a breakup. The last time I had seen another person’s tears up close was in elementary school, so it was something I wasn’t used to.
And yet, it was Amami of all people who let me see him cry.
“Hey, are you okay?! Did the alcohol taste bad? Or is that actually just sweat?”
“Ugh… Kijima took Shinya away from me…”
“Hah?”
“Shinyaa… Don’t abandon me!”
Amami, who plopped down on the table and started crying in earnest, was saying things that didn’t make sense and I could only tilt my head in confusion.
I took Shinya away from him? What did he mean?
Did he mean the seats?
Bewildered, I noticed Karasawa’s shoulders shaking beside me as I leaned forward to comfort Amami.
Right as I thought, “Him too?” and turned around, Karasawa began laughing wholeheartedly.
“Ahahahaha! What’s with you, Ren?! Ahahahaha!”
“K-Karasawa…?”
“Abandon, you said… Pfft, that’s so hilarious~ Ahahahahaha!”
This guy was also super drunk!
From the way he was looking at Koro’s picture earlier, he just seemed to be in a good mood, but there was no indication that he was drunk.
Suddenly, I saw the empty sake cup that Karasawa was holding.
Did that mean that the cup I just poured him was the last straw before he reached his upper limit?
As expected, Karasawa, who loved spicy food, also had a preference for dry sake and seemed to enjoy the lighter, more palatable brands.
Although I could see out of the corner of my eye that he was drinking what was in his hand, I didn’t notice anything unusual in his intoxication, which was more like a switch being flipped than gradually becoming drunk.
“Seems like both of you are lightweights… Here, drink some water.”
“Eh~? But this is water, Kijima, ahahaha!”
“That’s the alcohol you’ve been drinking until now! Water is over here!”
“Shinya prefers water over me, huh…? Wahh…”
“Ahh, you’re being a pain in the ass too! You crying drunk!”
I managed to resist the urge to splash water over both of their heads and took their drinks away, putting them off to the side.
A closer look at the table revealed that the amount of food hadn’t really decreased and that this catastrophe was the result of pouring alcohol they weren’t used to into empty stomachs.
I forced Karasawa, who was laughing and rolling over on the tatami mats, and Amami, who was sobbing so hard on the table I thought he was trying to create an ocean, to grab chopsticks so that the food would not go to waste.
From then on, I was so busy taking care of the two of them that my own drinks had completely slipped my mind.
Karasawa must have liked the sake so much that even after taking his glass away, he was drinking the rest of the bottle before I knew it. The more he drank, the more drunk he became, and he kept laughing so hard with his hand on his stomach that it felt like he was having a seizure.
Amami was saying pathetic things like, “Shinya is going to die from laughing too much,” and started clinging to Karasawa and crying. And then Amami’s streaming tears set off Karasawa’s laughter again and created a horrible loop.
(I wanna go home already…)
I didn’t think that both of them would be such lightweights. And they even had such unexpected drinking habits.
Karasawa was not usually the type to laugh out loud, so perhaps he was in a state where his reason and ability to stop it was gone.
Amami looked like he would eat a few slices of cheese while drinking wine at a fancy restaurant, but he was a crying drunk, which was far too removed from his image.
“Hic, hic… My abs and cheeks hurt…”
“You laughed too much. What was so funny?”
“I don’t know either… Hah.”
Karasawa, who had been lying on the tatami mats, suddenly came to his senses and got up with a start.
As if he hadn’t laughed so hard his face turned red earlier, he sat back down with his usual neutral expression on his face.
“…Did I really laugh that much?”
“Yep, it was amazing. Amami was crying, saying, ‘Shinya is going to die from laughter~’ and all.”
“Were you imitating Ren just now? You suck at it!”
“Don’t laugh. Hey, stop laughing.”
Perhaps his cheeks still hurt, but he smiled while trying to hold back his facial muscles. Karasawa seemed to be one of those drunks with a switch that flipped back and forth. It was quite the fast switch.
When I peeked at Amami, who had quieted down, he seemed to have cried himself to sleep.
Karasawa moved to Amami’s side and put his own jacket over his back.
It was the first time I’d seen Amami cry, and I hadn’t seen him asleep since our last school trip.
Looking at him now made me think that the power of this man, who seemed to have the world at his fingertips, was like armor that he wore consciously on a daily basis.
“It’ll be tough for Amami. In the real world, he’ll have plenty of chances to drink. If he cries like this at every one of them, his eyes will get dry.”
“…Hehehe.”
“What? Why did you laugh so ominously?”
Karasawa wiped Amami’s tear-stained cheeks with his finger, and his previously affectionate expression suddenly turned into a loose grin.
He stared at me with that look on his face, so I asked him about his true intentions while slightly leaning back and avoiding his gaze.
“Ren was able to drink alcohol first, so he went to various places to drink, such as college gatherings and parties with relatives. Not just Japanese sake, but wine, champagne, and cocktails. If any of them were good, he’d tell me about them.”
“Seems like he was quite the busy person.”
“But, no matter the occasion, he said he never got drunk.”
At that sentence, I widened my eyes.
I saw with my own eyes that Amami got drunk before Karasawa and started crying.
I wasn’t sure about unfamiliar words like “parties with relatives,” but it would be nearly impossible for an eye-catching guy like him to make it through a gathering of college students without having a drink or two. He must have drunk a considerable amount.
Did he just have an extremely incompatible drink today?
Karasawa, who was grinning in front of me as he tilted his head, continued talking in a pretentious manner.
“The only times Ren got drunk from alcohol were the night he drank with me at home on his birthday and today.”
I was about to reply, “What do you mean?” when the words stopped in my throat.
There were certain types of people who were fine with how much they drank outside but would get drunk easily at home.
It was important for them to be in a space they could relax in. Drinking outside gave them a sense of responsibility to stay sober since it was part of the job, which also held them back.
When the two of them celebrated Amami’s birthday together, that was the first time they found out that Amami became a crying drunk when he drank alcohol. But I could understand that he was able to get drunk to the fullest because he was at home.
But now?
Although it was a safe environment with his mate beside him, this was an izakaya, not a completely private room, and above all—I was here.
How was it possible for that proud and perfectionist Amami to end up crying himself to sleep… in a place with me, who wasn’t even his mate or family member?
Did that mean that to him, I was like a family member he could relax around?
My face flushed.
“…Tch, w-well, I guess our alpha does have a cute side to him after all…”
“Hehehe, Ren is a guy with only cute sides to him.”
“Damn, now I’m getting embarrassed… Something like this… He’s such a player.”
“Isn’t his imperfect side also nice?”
Karasawa, smiling as he stroked Amami’s hair, looked blindingly beautiful.
I had heard that they had forged a mating bond right after they went to college, but the both of them seemed so normal, and it didn’t feel like anything had changed from my point of view, so I hadn’t really processed it until now.
But now, I could tell. They became mates in the truest sense, filling in the missing pieces of each other’s souls.
I understood firsthand what “destined mates” were, which I had only heard about before.
Having seen their twists and turns up close and personal, though I couldn’t say it carelessly… I couldn’t help but envy them.
It was a place that we, who had no “fated pair,” could never reach.
“…That’s right.”
I tipped my glass, hiding my embarrassment and the mixed feelings that swelled beyond that.
I hoped they didn’t notice that the redness in my cheeks wasn’t just due to the alcohol.
“Kijima, you drank quite a lot too, yet why aren’t you any different?”
Karasawa, who had been sitting next to Amami, sat next to me again and faced me while he lurched with the sake bottle and cup in his hands.
“I’m a heavyweight. It must run in the family.”
“Aw~ No fair! I was going to make you do a belly dance when you got drunk and take a video of it.”
“So you were thinking of something like that… You should be the one belly dancing instead.”
“No way, my abs hurt.”
“C’mon~ Show your belly~”
“Stop it~ You should show your belly instead~~”
When I confronted Karasawa to dispel this embarrassing atmosphere, he responded in a flirtatious manner, his face still flushed with alcohol.
As we were tugging at each other’s jackets and playing with each other, I felt a tremendous force squeezing my shoulder from behind.
“What are you doing to my mate, Kijima?”
I turned around to see Amami’s face at close range, smiling at me but radiating tremendous intimidation.
My throat squeaked completely involuntarily and I naturally prepared myself for death.
Karasawa managed to intervene and saved me from having my head separated from my torso, but… this guy was really scary when he got angry.
Although I never acted with much restraint because we were friends who knew each other well and we were both guys, I decided it might be a good idea to maintain a minimum distance from Karasawa, as one would with a married partner. Like refraining from unnecessary physical touching.
If not, I would be erased. Physically.
Thus, we took a step up the ladder of adulthood and had a fun yet terrifying time at the izakaya.
I, who got a good look at Amami’s disgraceful behavior, was later targeted by Amami for my life (or memory), but that’s another story.
