Blue (2)
It was barely past 7 p.m., yet the sky had already dimmed into the ashen glow of dusk.
So that's how it is. Another summer, gone in the blink of an eye.
My phone's lock screen read Tuesday—no, Wednesday, August 26th, 2025. It struck me anew: how time flies.
I didn't head straight home after work. Instead, I was on my way to that wine bar where Team Leader Hye-jeong and I had agreed to meet two days earlier.
A vibration from my phone. A message from her.
Even though our departure points and destinations were identical, we weren't traveling together. We hadn't left the office together, either.
If any of our coworkers happened to see us, misunderstandings would be all but guaranteed. Ah, wait—no. It wouldn't be a misunderstanding at all, would it.
At any rate, the instruction handed down to me was to arrive at the wine bar first and secure us a table.
Had it been an official directive from my team leader, I'd have had no choice but to comply as a subordinate. But when it came to our private affairs, I was, strictly speaking, the Master and she the slave.
Ordinarily I might have said, How dare a slave issue orders. But that day, I let it slide—I had no intention of facing her in our usual master-and-servant dynamic.
After all, she had been the one to suggest meeting at a wine bar, a place where we couldn't even have sex. She must have sensed something: that this was, exceptionally, a date for talking rather than for bodies.
My plan for the evening was to pry into the life story of Team Leader Hye-jeong—the real-life model—so that I could write, in depth, the arc of Kim Jeong-hye, a character in Human Guilty.
And yet, things that could only be called night air brushed against my skin earlier than expected, and I couldn't help wallowing in nostalgia.
I marveled, inwardly, at the fact that Hye-jeong and I had been sex partners for a full year and six months.
During that time, I think we tried every kind of sex two people could try. Aside from anal and group play, that is.
By contrast, I could count on one hand the days I'd slept with Chae-rin, my wife. Once every five or six weeks—so, maybe a dozen-odd times in total?
It astonished me anew that I was a married man, and equally astonishing that I'd kept one woman around this long. My longest relationship before had barely lasted six months.
But if I had to name the most shocking thing of all, it would be that I was seeing two women simultaneously. Until Hye-jeong, I had categorically never been involved with two women at once.
I'd kept a fishpond or two in my day, but anything beyond a fling had always been with exactly one woman at a time. That Han Yu-jae had fallen this far.
The owner of the women's salon I'd frequented for four years was a truly chatty woman. The kind who relished spreading other people's business, which made her an excellent cautionary tale for me.
"You remember that lady I mentioned, the one with thin hair? I keep telling her her scalp can't take it, but she insists on the down perm and the dye anyway… Honestly, hopeless. No matter how much you flatten it with a perm, it barely makes a difference."
Like this—she'd fuss over my hair while casually laying out gossip about her other customers. Every time I watched her, the same thought crossed my mind.
By the same token, she could just as easily be badmouthing me while touching someone else's head, right?
I could never understand a sales pitch that practically invited customers to draw such a reasonable suspicion. It did nothing whatsoever for client relations—why on earth would she behave that way?
And yet, her skill at maintaining my hairstyle exactly as I liked was second to none. Plus, eavesdropping on that backbiting had its own small pleasures. Which is why I'd been a regular for four years.
Much like that salon owner, I could never understand the psychology of cheaters. My reasoning was similar, too.
Say a man cheats while openly having a girlfriend. And say the other woman knows he has one.
Doesn't that mean she's low-quality enough to go after a man who already has a girlfriend, openly?
And dating someone of that caliber would clearly harm me as well. On top of which, she could up and leave at any moment for the next 'sold-out' man on the shelf.
Furthermore, doesn't she know full well that the man she's seeing is a philanderer? Shouldn't she then be bracing herself for the possibility of being discarded too?
Why make yourself wicked just to meet someone wicked? For that reason, I'd always simply considered cheaters stupid.
And then I, of all people, fell headlong into the abyss of vice.
A distinguished person by the name of Kim Hye-jeong appeared and made a show of demolishing every value I held.
Think about it. During my relationships with all the women of my past, we fought—a lot. That's why none of them lasted past the six-month mark.
But Hye-jeong and I? Triple the length of my longest relationship, and not a single fight.
I did marry Chae-rin, true. But setting sleep aside, the person I'd spent far and away the most time with was Hye-jeong.
Moreover, I only met Chae-rin two or three months after joining the company. Hye-jeong and I exchanged greetings face to face on my very first day.
Chae-rin looked young for her age, with the exquisite features of the classic Korean screen beauties of old. But Hye-jeong had magnificent tits and an ass like fresh bread.
Matching my 182-centimeter frame, she stood a good 173 centimeters herself. Which also made her perfect for standing sex.
Chae-rin had never gone anywhere near exercise in her life. Hye-jeong, meanwhile, had practiced pilates for years, and could drain my cock dry with dynamic twerking if she pleased.
Lost in one such thought after another, I found the bus arriving at my stop before I knew it. I hurried off, opened the map app, and walked toward the wine bar.
"Almost there. I'll grab us a seat," I typed, opening the messenger app—only to find Hye-jeong's profile displayed at the top.
Around her profile, something like glittering gift wrapping was fanning outward in radiant bursts. Clearly a special effect congratulating her birthday.
So that's it. Today's her birthday.
Until this moment, I hadn't even known my own slave's birthday.
What was I doing around this time last year, I wonder?
Probably, blissfully ignorant of her birthday, busy ramming away inside a stall in the ninth-floor women's restroom.
The thought made me feel oddly guilty. My feet, as if possessed, carried me across the street to the bakery.
I bought a size-one whole cake that looked about right. Carrying it carefully so it wouldn't wobble, I handed it over to the bartender the moment I reached the wine bar.
"My party will be along shortly—it's her birthday today. Could you keep this refrigerated for a bit?"
The bartender gladly took the cake box. Then, after Hye-jeong had joined me and the timing felt right, he presented the cake beautifully plated for us to see.
He'd even stuck three pretty candles on top—birthday candles I'd completely forgotten. It happened to be the day Hye-jeong turned a full thirty, so the man radiated unintended thoughtfulness.
"Oh my, what's this?"
Hye-jeong's eyes went round as she said it. Whenever she saw something that surprised her, she always, always repeated the same line: Oh my, what's this?
When I handed her my wedding invitation, it was "Oh my, what's this?"
It was the same when I dropped my trousers and boxers and first presented her with my erect cock. She snatched it up in her hand and said, "Oh my, what's this?"
So the birthday cake I'd prepared today, my cock, even the news of my marriage—all of it had, in her eyes, been good news.
Because whenever she said Oh my, what's this?, her face was always lit up bright.
How on earth could the wedding news of a coworker she'd secretly loved be good news? It was time to plumb the depths of that abyss of a heart.
First, I sang her a brief happy birthday. When she blew out the candles, I cheered heartily for her, and pressed a light kiss to her lips.
In that pleasant mood, we swapped relatable stories about other office workers, biding my time.
Then, at last, when the moment felt right, I opened.
"Tonight I'm going to ask you all about Kim Hye-jeong, the human being. Turns out we don't actually know that much about each other, does it? And if there's anything you're curious about with me, ask me anything."
I stripped the coercive edge from my voice as much as I could. I'd created an equal footing—so that she could open up about herself comfortably.
As the night deepened, the wine bottle grew lighter, and heavier and heavier stories came pouring out of her.
The time was thirteen years ago—when she, my same-age peer, was in her second year of high school.
Young Kim Hye-jeong had been, for lack of a better word, close to a straight-A shut-in. A pathetic personality and hobbies to match—if not for her God-given height, she might well have been bullied out of the classroom entirely.
Back then, far fewer girls watched Japanese anime than do now. She was one of those precious few, and so naturally could only socialize with fellow otaku of a similar stripe.
Then, in the middle of that quiet school life, an incident occurred—one that could only end in catastrophe.
She'd fallen head over heels for one of the class delinquents. For the reason that he looked like her favorite supporting male lead from the anime she loved.
But that boy was a full-blown thug. Always with a girlfriend at his side—and worse, those keychain girlfriends rotated out once or twice a month.
Watching from afar, she could only feel that he was living in a completely different world from hers. And so her aching longing only swelled.
He devoured girls wholesale, had a sharp eye, and was vicious beyond measure. He saw straight through that Hye-jeong's gaze on him was anything but ordinary—and used it.
Too plain to parade around as a keychain, so: convenient, casual body, use and discard. Then when she happened to cross his mind again weeks later, call her up, take the body, dismiss her. Repeat…
With a girlfriend of her own, he treated the girl he'd kept as a second, that callously.
It was at this exact point in the story that I sat there, stunned.
At the very least, I had never dismissed Hye-jeong that brutally during our time as sex partners. You could say I treated my slave rather generously, all things considered. I even prepared this lavish cake, after all…
Well. Anyway. That boy was the culprit.
He was the reason she'd awakened, young as she was, to the charms of BDSM—and of men who were already taken.
Afterward, she went hunting for a male-heavy department where satisfying such peculiar tastes would be easy. Her interest had drifted toward computer science, and so she walked that road.
The sex partners she'd kept through adulthood had all treated her like a slave, she said. Including me.
And so her craving for self-control, for taking charge of something herself, swelled in inverse proportion—and that, at last, was the thing that surfaced only when she was handling work at the company.
Regrettably, it never manifested on the housework front, and thus, apparently, that pigsty was born.
Perhaps to clear the heavy air she'd created, Hye-jeong went one further and dropped an even more shocking remark.
"Actually—I was sex friends with Assistant Manager Yu Min-wook, too?"
Impossible. Yu Min-wook? A member of Development Team 1, the very team Hye-jeong led—Yu, born in '96, the closest coworker who sat right next to me.
In that instant, something like an illustration from Moskos by Kenzaburo Oe unfurled behind my eyes.
As Team Leader Hye-jeong casually unwound the full saga of her sex with Assistant Manager Yu, I felt as though I were churning and swimming through a nebula.
Truthfully, a fair amount of alcohol had spread through my system by then, and looking back now, I can't even recall the details of what exactly the two of them did in bed.
"By the way, Yu-jae. Are you putting all these stories in that novel of yours, too?"
Already as emotionally gutted as a man could be, I nodded along absentmindedly. Teacher Kim Hye-jeong, patron saint of decadence, watched my reaction with an expression of deep satisfaction.
"Then while we're at it, toss me the link so I can read that novel through myself."
Had I never sent her the link? Let me think.
I believe I'd always just opened the web novel site directly on my own phone and shown her the screen.
I hastened to follow my team leader's orders. I navigated to the chapter list page of Human Guilty, my work on the web novel platform, copied the URL, and shared it through the messenger.
And then, as a team member whose assignment was complete, I reported in.
"Done. Sent."
And yet—something about the team leader's expression as she stared down at her phone was deeply, deeply wrong.
Why? I'd told her the plot and the title both. What on earth could possibly have shocked her this badly?
That question of mine was resolved in an instant—by the violently trembling voice that came from Hye-jeong next.
"Yu-jae… I just sent this to our team group chat, didn't I?"