The Inappropriate Mockery

I fled into the bedroom and locked the door behind me.

Goddamn Min Chae-yoon. That rotten, no-good Min Chae-yoon!

What, I can't do it? Of course I couldn't do it well—it was my first time!

My heart was hammering so violently the world in front of me flooded red. It felt as though extra hearts had been grafted onto my temples and the nape of my neck. I was dizzy. The inside of my throat had gone bone-dry. Every oversensitive nerve I had locked onto the noise beyond the door. It sounded like Min Chae-yoon gathering her things, getting ready to leave.

Whether she went home alone or not, what the hell did I care. Goddamn it—that wasn't what mattered right now. I looked down past my waist. If Min Chae-yoon had pointed out the awkward, half-crouched way I was standing, I'd have bitten my tongue off and died right there. At least I'd been spared that much.

A grown woman!

A grown woman, in a man's house!

In a man's house, her T-shirt ridden up to leave her stomach completely bare, pressing her face against a man's thigh without a shred of fear, wrapping her arms around his waist...

"Insane."

I pressed down hard on the left side of my chest. The rhythm of the beating was all wrong. I slumped against the bedroom door and sank to the floor. Sitting with my knees drawn up, the swollen head of my cock stood out in sharp relief against my loose sweatpants. I'd shoved Min Chae-yoon out of my sight, and still the erection showed no sign of going down.

My pride was wounded. This malfunctioning body of mine refused to respect my sense of self!

Those arms, thin as thorns, had been supple and yielding as a snake. The skin beneath my fingertips, seeping with damp, had been soft and smooth. A sensation that ought to have been repulsive was instead so startlingly vivid it scraped across the surface of my heart. My nerves were burning down to cinders.

When Min Chae-yoon had lain against my thigh and wrapped her arms around my waist, I had summoned every last scrap of endurance I possessed just to keep from moving.

There had been thick fabric between her faint breath and my skin. Her breathing couldn't possibly have reached me—and yet I'd had the illusion that those clueless, merciless lips had grazed the top of my thigh.

That's my groin, you stupid woman!

The reason I hadn't screamed was, horrifyingly, a flicker of anticipation that had crossed my mind in that instant. The nausea only caught up with me afterward.

The moment Min Chae-yoon locked both arms around my waist and clung to me, I had expected her to take my cock in her mouth and suck it. The fact that I'd had that kind of filthy fantasy about that Min Chae-yoon made me feel utterly disgusting.

That's Min Chae-yoon. Get a grip.

Min Chae-yoon was my only witness, my only confidante—practically a little sister. She knew every humiliating chapter of my life, and even as she complained that my honest words made her skin crawl, she had never once left, her face perfectly composed. The only...

The only person in the world I could actually call a friend.

Right. That was Min Chae-yoon. The reason my cock was standing at attention was because my body was malfunctioning. I'd heard that when stress reaches an extreme, the nervous system can go haywire. I hadn't actually heard that from anyone, but it felt like the kind of thing that would be true. What mattered right now wasn't the facts. It was the possibility.

I pictured Min Chae-yoon's infuriating face, the way she let every word I said go in one ear and out the other. Listening to you is such a mood-killer. Your greatest talent is taking that mouth of yours and using it to sabotage every good quality you have... I tried imagining her catching me in this state. The arousal seemed to recede, just a little. Goddamn it—the cock pointing straight at the ceiling clearly disagreed, but the inside of my brain, which had felt like it was burning with some alien fire, recovered its composure. I pressed down roughly between my legs to hide it and grabbed the doorknob.

It was late.

Even if it was Min Chae-yoon, letting her go home alone at this hour was dangerous. She could call a taxi, but my already-malfunctioning brain dredged up every ominous news story it could find. She could get jumped by some psycho on her way out to catch a cab.

She wouldn't have gone out dressed like that... would she?

The calves stretching long beneath those baggy shorts, the round knees—they were unnecessarily sexual. I swallowed a curse and rubbed my throat. It wasn't just my cock that was broken. My heart and my eyeballs were off, too. They were just feet. Pale soles, ankles with the bones standing out, toes splayed freely—why, for the love of god, did any of that look sexual?

Saliva pooled in my mouth and I swallowed without meaning to. Feeling the urge to suck on Min Chae-yoon's toes at the mere sight of them was clear evidence of a psychiatric disorder. Some kind of pica? Or a deviant appetite? Either way, it was a serious problem. A defect. I immediately abandoned any thought of going to a hospital. Nothing good would come of anyone finding this out.

I opened the bedroom door. The living room was dark, the lights off.

I looked for my phone. I had no idea how long I'd been holed up in the bedroom, but I wasn't going to be able to sleep until I confirmed where Min Chae-yoon was.

The call went through. But I had to hang up almost immediately—because I found Min Chae-yoon's phone glowing on the sofa table. So that sloppy Min Chae-yoon had left her phone behind. I started around the sofa and nearly had a heart attack.

Min Chae-yoon was asleep, her head resting on the sofa's armrest.

The sound of my own inhale was so loud I clapped a hand over my mouth. My body nearly collapsed from the shock; I barely kept myself upright.

It was October.

It wasn't winter yet, but it was too chilly to curl up on the sofa without even a thin blanket. This house had a guest room ready and waiting, and Min Chae-yoon knew it existed. She'd never stayed overnight, but if it was too late and she didn't want to go home, she didn't have to be so pathetic about it—she could have just used the guest room. She had to know I wouldn't get angry over something like that. It was infuriating.

If she'd been determined to turn my insides out, she'd succeeded.

"Min Chae-yoon. Get up."

"Mmh..."

"Don't pretend you're asleep. I said get up."

Goddamn it, why was she sleeping so soundly on an uncomfortable sofa?

She hadn't even looked that tired. She'd taken a half-day, barged into my house the second she got off work, and sprawled on her stomach like she owned the place. If anyone was exhausted, it was me.

Min Chae-yoon didn't so much as twitch. I shone my phone light on her. If I shoved or shook her shoulder she'd probably wake up, but I couldn't bring myself to touch her. Not because contact with her was unpleasant or repulsive the way it was with other people.

It was because I had a gut feeling that if I touched that soft-looking cheek, the cock I'd only just managed to calm down would lift its head again. Even now, honestly, it was a close call.

My reason couldn't make sense of this situation at all.

I sat down beside the sofa and looked at Min Chae-yoon's deeply sleeping face. Even at a glance, her lips were swollen. Without meaning to, the corner of my mouth tugged upward—and I startled at myself. A low, vulgar satisfaction welled up from beneath my sternum. At the fact that I was the one who'd left her lips like that.

What was pretty about lips swollen like a goldfish's, lying there on her side? Those teeth visible through the slight gap in her parted lips had no business looking appetizing. I pressed a hand to my forehead. I wanted to rip my own eyeballs out. My brain and my cock were telling two different stories.

That's Min Chae-yoon.

The squashed cheek, the swollen lips—objectively, they weren't even pretty. They were ugly, actually. No—Min Chae-yoon was on the pretty side, but a face pressed out of shape like that couldn't possibly be attractive. I'd found the goldfish even in the faces of actresses praised as the most beautiful in Korea. They'd purse their lips thinking they were being cute, and it just looked grotesque. So why, then, this...

Was this that thing?

The kind of attachment you develop toward something that's yours?

If it wasn't that, there was no other explanation.

Because they were the lips I'd been biting, sucking, licking until a few dozen minutes ago—because I'd tasted every last bit of the damp, slick lining deep inside her mouth? I couldn't believe it. Other people's saliva made me grimace just imagining it splashing on me, and yet I'd latched onto Min Chae-yoon's mouth like I was trying to seal it shut and swallowed every drop of her saliva. That shouldn't have been possible unless I'd lost my mind.

But Min Chae-yoon's breath had been impossibly sweet. Just recalling her shallow, heaving chest and that small, wet tongue sent blood rushing back into my cock. I looked down. There was no hiding this. I decided not to wake her. Earlier she'd been out of it too, but now she'd definitely notice.

Fine. She wasn't at an age where sleeping on a sofa for one night would do her any lasting harm.

I was about to go straight back to the bedroom when I stopped, hand on the doorknob.

But it was October, and even with the heating on, the living room was cool. The air would be colder still toward dawn. Min Chae-yoon was generally healthy, but once she caught a cold it tended to linger. One time she'd called me out somewhere and then, right before we were supposed to meet, phoned me in a teary voice saying her fever wouldn't come down. If she was running a temperature of a hundred and two, she should have canceled in the first place...

Oh, for fuck's sake.

I pulled out a thick blanket, taking care that my body would never come in contact with Min Chae-yoon's—and that even if it did, she would feel nothing at all.

I moved Min Chae-yoon to my bed. And I went to the guest room.