Ruin (1)
My moral compass had shattered.
Had I ever, in my entire life, slept with this many women at the same time?
If Han Yu-jae at thirty and thirty-one had walked the downhill slope of corruption, then Han Yu-jae at thirty-two had become Satan himself.
Around two in the afternoon, I met Nagyeong, a married woman one year my senior, and had sex with her in her car.
Her light-blue Jeep, bouncing in the middle of a supermarket's underground parking lot, was a magnet for the stares of shoppers pushing their carts—but Nagyeong couldn't have cared less. She kept riding on top of me, shaking her hips without a shred of shame.
One nice thing about meeting her was that I didn't have to hide the fact that I was a married man. Even so, some flicker of conscience must have remained, because I took off my wedding ring before meeting her, just as I did with all the other women.
Around four in the afternoon, I rented a motel room and had sex with Tika, an exchange student who had crossed the ocean all the way from Indonesia.
Tika had fair skin, stood a staggering 178 centimeters tall, and had such striking features that she looked like she had Western mixed heritage. And above all, her legs were insanely long.
When we stood face to face, you could say her pussy sat a good hand-span above the level of my cock.
Trying out all manner of positions with her was a genuine logistical nightmare—but then, the prettiest rice cake is also the hardest to eat. When I buried myself inside her while pressing my lips against those long, sleek calves of hers, I felt like a chaebol heir who'd flown in a supermodel for the night, and I loved it.
At seven in the evening, I stopped by a manga café with Ye-jin and we watched anime together. She was especially fond of Giant of the Real Culprit, so that day, naturally, we watched Giant of the Real Culprit again.
I'd been spoiled on the whole thing ages ago thanks to one of those summary videos on the internet, but I broke a sweat performing reactions as if I were seeing everything for the very first time.
After having dinner with Ye-jin as well, I didn't head home until we parted ways at ten. My wife, unusually, had gotten off work early and actually praised me for it.
"Did things finally calm down at the office? You've been working so hard, honey."
She said this as she pulled me into an embrace, and my left ring finger suddenly felt strangely bare, so I brushed it absently with my left thumb. Only then did it dawn on me that I'd forgotten to put my wedding ring back on.
"Mmm... by the way, I really need to pee, so I'm gonna run to the bathroom real quick—"
I shuffled into the bathroom, sat down on the toilet, fished the ring out of the front pocket of my laptop bag where I'd stashed it, and slipped it on.
"What, you were in such a hurry you had to bring your whole bag in there?"
My wife's voice drifted in from outside the door, and cold sweat trickled down my back in rivulets.
That was how my days always went.
In the mornings, I wrote as many serialized chapters of Human Guilty as I could. Then I would meet a woman, then another woman, then yet another woman, until it was time to clock out.
At home, I faithfully played the role of the doting husband until I fell asleep. When I woke, I "commuted" to a café to write more chapters of Human Guilty.
I lived an undeniably busy life. I can say with certainty that I was far busier, at least, than Ha-young, who had once canceled our match on the pretext of being swamped with work.
My wife, for her part, understood that I was busy. Even though dates with her husband came only once every two weeks, she never complained much.
And I used the Tender app with real diligence. I squeezed every last drop of value out of that paid subscription—every won that left my account each month was money well spent.
I came to realize that there weren't actually that many women in Seoul who used Tender regularly. No matter how much I swiped, it was the same faces showing up again and again.
Not that I wanted to admit I'd spiraled that deep into a swipe-addled trance to get there.
Whenever a rare new face did appear, I sent a Like♡. That way, I was matching with three or four fresh women a day, like clockwork.
With some of them, I'd chat for a day or two before meeting up; with others, it took two or three weeks.
And meeting them didn't always end well.
Some women would have dinner with me, part ways, and then unmatch me on the spot. There were even plenty of bitches who ghosted me right before we were supposed to meet, leaving the date dead in the water.
For that reason, Nagyeong and Tika—my steady, reliable sex friends—were as comforting to me as a piping hot bowl of sundae gukbap. But even they left my side before long.
Nagyeong left because her husband's surveillance had grown too intense. Tika left in a huff because she'd begged and begged for anal sex, and I kept turning her down every single time.
Looking back, a terrifying thought occurred to me: Tika might actually have been transgender.
Her pussy had always felt somehow... off. Not unpleasant, mind you—but it was less like penetrating a pussy and more like thrusting into something inorganic, closer to an onahole. The texture inside her chest had that same synthetic firmness of breast implants.
Once that thought took root and I dredged up my memories, I realized that even her moans at the height of passion had, come to think of it, carried a strangely deep, throaty register.
For about two weeks after that, I didn't meet any new women. I couldn't. A vague, formless dread—that she might not have been a woman at all—had wrapped itself around me and squeezed.
The novel's serialization, meanwhile, sailed along without a hitch. Han Jae-yu in the story had by now become a true master of women's hearts, an alpha male who plucked and devoured a colorful array of women with effortless ease—a shining example to readers everywhere.
Of course, that colorful array of women were all characters modeled on the ones I'd met through Tender. The sole exception was Tika, whom I refused to use as a model, thanks to that one terrifying thought.
With Ye-jin, I never managed to break through the wall of a first kiss before we parted ways.
She had hoped we'd blossom into something serious, and she grew increasingly insistent on checking my phone.
My memo app was crammed full of profiles I'd written up on the countless women I'd met through Tender, and my photo album was packed to the brim with our wedding shoot and honeymoon pictures. My phone was, in short, a Pandora's box.
So there was no way I could grant Ye-jin's wish, and she tearfully told me she wanted to break up.
I silently nodded my head. I did not cry.
Still, of everyone I'd met through Tender, Ye-jin was the one I'd seen most often, and for the longest. Maybe that was why a hollow ache lingered somewhere deep in my chest.
It was around that time, after all, that I started wandering the cafés near Ha-young's place to serialize my novel.
One day, missing Ha-young and Ye-jin so much that I sat staring blankly at the dinner my wife had made, something went wrong.
"I guess my tastes really did change after I got pregnant. Ttikka changed me so much."
Ttikka was the prenatal nickname of the baby my wife had tragically miscarried, two months before the due date.
But Han Yu-jae, the idiot, misheard it as "Tika," and blurted out in a panic:
"Tika? Who's that?"
My wife—who for over two years had been unable to forget that name, who had never been able to forget it—instantly burst into tears and said to me:
"How could you forget that name..."
Only then realizing my mistake, I pulled her tightly into my arms.
And in that moment, tears came surging out of me as well. It was the first time since I was twenty-five, maybe—since I'd cried watching some movie whose title I can't even remember.
For as long as those tears—streaked with every emotion under the sun—kept falling, Han Yu-jae was not Satan.
That's right. I did sometimes think this way.
Ttikka's existence had thrust me into a marriage I never planned. But what if Ttikka had been born safe and sound?
At the very least, I wouldn't be living the life of a piece of trash who chased every skirt in sight. Ttikka, with Chae-rin's features and mine blended half and half, would have been more beautiful than any woman in the world.
Living in this world means standing before countless choices. And the power to choose is never mine alone.
There are such things as forces beyond our control. Ttikka's birth, and Ttikka's miscarriage—that's the kind of thing I mean. But to minimize the fallout of those forces, in the end, you have no choice but to make the best possible decision at every single crossroads.
I, Han Yu-jae, refused my wife's wish to try conceiving again. I granted Hye-jeong's wish for a married man.
Then I refused Hye-jeong's wish for me to stop serializing the novel. I granted Ha-young's wish, her craving for sex.
And Tika's wish, her desperate craving for anal... ah, no. Let's skip that one.
Anyway—the point is, I chose to live a life of my own depravity. And the price for that choice, whenever it may come, will come without fail. When that day arrives, I will finally pay what I owe.
Thinking of it that way put my mind at ease. And with that newfound peace of mind, I opened the Tender app once more.
That day, having already written out the next three serialized chapters in advance, I devoted myself entirely to Tender even after clocking in at the café.
Notifications arrived at the same moment from two different apps. One was Tender; the other was my messenger.
Then another notification came through on the messenger.
My mind went numb.
My wife, ever so considerate, never once called me while I was at work. In our entire marriage, she had called me out of the blue exactly twice.
The day two lines showed up on the pregnancy test. And the day Ttikka unexpectedly left for heaven, when a sudden hemorrhage and cramping left us both terrified.
This was a moment portending news of exactly that magnitude. My hand trembled uncontrollably as I dialed her number and pressed the phone to my ear.
The instant Chae-rin picked up, the questions came pouring out.
"Honey. What is this? Human... Guilty? And who is this Kim Hye-jeong? She's the plaintiff, they said? And the defendant is you? What on earth is going on?"
Unbelievable. Of all days, Chae-rin had taken a half day off that morning because she was feeling unwell—and that was precisely when the summons landed on our doorstep.
To the flood of questions pouring through the phone, I had no answers to give.
Where had all my grand vows about paying what I owed gone? With trembling hands, I barely managed to end the call.
I clutched my head in both hands and tore at my hair. And in doing so, one message Hye-jeong had sent me long ago floated up from memory.