The World’s Greatest Sex Friend
“……”
“Wait, this is!”
Thwack! Though it felt a bit late, I hurriedly pried Han-byeol off me. I grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her back a step, away from that slightly tipsy face. After quickly trying to regain my composure, I kept my gaze fixed solely on Yeoeun, as if looking anywhere else would make the world spin, and desperately scrambled for the next words.
“L-look, this is a huge misunderstanding!”
“……”
“She’s just a friend I haven’t seen in a long time! Really, just someone I used to chat with in class!”
“For a ‘just a friend,’ that distance seems pretty sticky, don’t you think?”
“S-s-she must be a bit out of it because she’s had too much to drink! Right, right, Han-byeol?!”
“W-w-whaaaaat?!”
Clatter, clatter, clatter! I grabbed Han-byeol’s shoulders and shook her back and forth like a broken vending machine that had swallowed my money. I was desperately trying to shake up this insane situation and mood to prove that there was absolutely no such nuance to our relationship. Finally, instead of a cowardly change of subject, I asked out of pure, mounting curiosity.
“B-by the way, why are you here, Yeoeun?”
At that, Yeoeun leaned smoothly against the wall pillar next to the sliding door and replied cynically.
“I came to meet some old friends. High school friends.”
“R-really?! Actually, me too… It was a reunion that just happened to be scheduled.”
“Hmm~ So is that what this is? A vibe where lonely people at a reunion hook up for the second or third round?”
“No, no! We’re still drinking, and I was just on my way to the bathroom!”
I denied it desperately.
“And lonely? To begin with, for me…”
You are here. Yeoeun is here. The rest of the sentence didn’t come out with the masculine force I’d hoped for.
“……”
“……”
I don’t even know why myself. Maybe I thought it was too shameless to make such excuses in a scene that anyone would misunderstand, or maybe I’d lost my confidence in front of Yeoeun, who had been acting so strangely lately. I don’t know. It was such a pathetic, crude emotion that it was hard to even put it into words.
“Hey… what is this?”
A low voice. Han-byeol, who had discarded her drunken attitude, asked with a straight face, though she still didn’t turn her head. She just waited silently and pathetically for Yeoeun’s answer.
“Phew… honestly.”
Instead of a long, detailed answer, she let out a sigh as if I were pathetic. Grab! She snatched my wrist. I thought she’d just walk past us or go into the room because she felt pathetic, but she started walking in reverse down the hallway she’d dragged me through.
“Tell me. Where were you drinking?”
“H-hey?”
“Which room?!”
“The one at the very end of the hall on the right!”
I blurted it out the moment she barked at me as if she were angry. Yeoeun charged like a rhinoceros in the direction I pointed.
Click! She grabbed the handle of the sliding door and—Rattle!—flung it wide open. She pushed it with such force that it hit the end with a bang! and even bounced back slightly. With this dramatic entrance, everyone’s attention was drawn to us.
To everyone, including my two friends, who were staring at us with wide, shocked eyes (ㅇ0ㅇ), Yeoeun smiled brightly and declared:
“Hello♥ I’m an acquaintance of Seungwoo’s. Mind if I join you?”
“Honey, say ah~”
“A-ah…?”
“Oh, come on, you have to open your mouth wider♥”
“Gah!?”
She shoved a whole chunk of pineapple snack into my mouth. She was piling on the affection, pressing up against me. Squeeze♥ As she did, she crossed her arms beneath her chest, showing off the existence of her assets. She was blatantly, ostentatiously putting on a show of being overly lovey-dovey.
—…….
Because of her excessive assertiveness, we stole all the attention in the room. It wasn’t just my imagination; everyone stopped refilling their glasses and just stared at us blankly. It was a simple case of visual violence. Her entrance had been loud, but the biggest reason was undoubtedly Yeoeun’s attention-grabbing beauty. It was a face that could bewitch even women. If the target was a man, his eyes would fixate on her face, unable to stop from wandering downward against his will.
“……”
…*Gulp.*
But all these actions were directed at one specific person. It was a sniper shot aimed at one woman. Han-byeol, who had been stumbling around drunk in the hallway, had returned to the room straight after being abandoned by us, and now she was staring daggers at this side, gulping down her drink. I couldn’t tell if she was glaring at me or Yeoeun, but either way, she was looking at us as if she wanted to kill us.
“Honey, you have to return the favor now, right?”
“Y-yeah…”
If you really looked at it, she wasn’t guilty. Han-byeol hadn’t done anything significantly wrong other than expressing her interest while reminiscing about the past.
“Mmm♥”
“……”
Even so, I remained cowardly silent. For now, I just went along with Yeoeun’s intentions. I had to focus only on the points that proved my innocence.
“H-hey! What is your relationship with… Seungwoo?”
Seong-ung, having completely thrown any sense of tact out the window, threw out a question. He’d been drooling openly the moment Yeoeun walked in, and now he couldn’t hold it back anymore.
“Hmm, well?”
Yeoeun took that in stride, too. She drew out her nasal tone, intentionally adding to the room’s curiosity before—
“What kind of relationship is it? Shouldn’t my honey here answer that?”
“T-that is…!”
“Honey, what were we to each other?”
…*Sex friends.* There was no way I could say that out loud. Yeoeun knew that, so she stimulated me even more excitedly.
Soft squeeze♥ She pressed her chest even closer. She began to slide her pretty bottom closer under the floor cushion.
“Wow, holy shit…!”
Seong-ung let out a heavy puff of air through his nose. As if he were living vicariously through me, the guy who seemed more excited than anyone else asked one more time.
“A-actually, we were talking about where to go next… would you like to come to the second round with us?!”
“No.”
An immediate answer. Soon, she leaned against me with that sultry, foxy expression she usually wore so well. She rubbed her cheek and head against me to stimulate my protective instincts and whispered:
“For the second round, I have a lot of things to do with just my honey alone…♥”
—…….
“Hehe, sorry, but I’ll be borrowing my honey for the rest of the night.”
Yeoeun had marked her territory. In front of all my friends, she’d branded my forehead. As ‘hers.’ She’d really rubbed salt in the wound.
“Geez… you really seem to have only told the truth, so it’s a bit of a letdown.”
Once we were alone, Yeoeun let out a little nasal sound. We had escaped the reunion I’d probably never be able to return to, and as we walked side-by-side down a dark alleyway, we talked about what had happened.
“So, what’s the deal with that woman? Did she really just do that because she had good memories from back in the day?”
“Um… that’s what she said?”
“Heh~ She was pretty decent-looking. Must’ve been popular back in school, huh?”
“No, I’m telling you, I wasn’t really popular with girls back then! …Above all, she wasn’t the type to be like that, either.”
Only after we were alone could I finally shed the weight and be completely honest. Every time I confessed everything, I felt relieved of the heart of a suppressed sinner.
“Phew… sorry. I should’ve broken away right then and there.”
Only now did I confess my regret. As I blamed myself for that brief, fleeting mistake, Yeoeun lifted her chin to look up at me.
Then, she dropped her shoulders and said one word.
“Forget it.”
“That’s… let’s just call it payment for acting so strangely lately.”
“…Are you sure?”
“It’s true that I’ve been acting strangely toward you lately. If the roles were reversed, I would’ve been frustrated to death. Ah! You’re the type who gets frustrated to death anyway, so is this a wash?”
“……”
“Hehehe.”
After chuckling at her own silly remark, she said, “Yeah… I think I can say it now.”
“Huh?”
“The reason I’ve been so frustrating lately. I finally have the courage to say it. That reunion thing actually made it easier and more refreshing to understand.”
She stopped dead in her tracks. We had been heading toward the main road to catch a taxi, needing to sober up and have a conversation. She stopped under a streetlamp in a pitch-black alley. Coincidentally, this alley was similar to the place where I’d saved her father, Mr. Young-cheol.
Yeoeun lowered her head slightly at this point. Like a spotlight in a play, the light shone down from above, and as she bowed her head, her whole face was hidden.
“Yeoeun?”
“……”
She’d been talking well and then just cut off. Even after I called her name several times, there was no answer for a long time. She was fidgeting, dragging it out in a way that was really unlike her usual personality. I figured there was something to it, so I waited for a long time until—
“You know, I… I’m only going to say this once.”
A voice that was barely a whisper, coming out after she’d held it in. A voice that had lost all the confidence that had overflowed since our first meeting, now completely deflated. ‘What could it possibly be… to make her like this?’ By now, I was going crazy and really wanted to hear it. What could a woman who lived for today, even causing a scene at someone else’s reunion, find so difficult to say?
I waited. I waited until the very end for Yeoeun, who had said she’d only say one thing and then went into an endlessly long contemplation—
‘I think I… like you.’
“……?”
I definitely heard it. Since it was past midnight and the alley was quiet with no one around, I heard even that voice that sounded like it was trying to crawl into a mouse hole.
“……Huh? What did you say?”
But I couldn’t help but ask that. It wasn’t that I was pretending not to hear, nor was it because I wanted to hear it again; it just popped out because I was emotionally bewildered. I wondered what the reason for that was. That sudden answer didn’t explain the mystery of her recent changes.
Squeeze! But Yeoeun grabbed her tight black pants. As if she were more frustrated than I was because it wasn’t getting through, she stomped her feet.
“Oh, seriously!”
Then, she shouted and snapped her face up. Because of the exaggerated lighting under the streetlamp and her fair, jade-like skin, her face reflected the light perfectly. It was red. It was so red, as if her blood were pumping so hard it might burst. It was a face I hadn’t even seen when we were having intense sex or when I was holding her. With the face of a shy bride who was embarrassed to death—a look the gumiho who always held others’ hearts in her palm was showing for the first time in her life—she said:
“Honey…! No, Son Seungwoo! Really—I’m telling you, I really think I like you, you idiot!”