The Delinquent (2)
Utterly dumbfounded, I had no idea what to do with myself, and the girl, as if to put me at ease, calmly continued her explanation.
Her mother was indeed Cho A-ran. It was just that A-ran hadn't given birth to her at seventeen—she was her stepmother. In other words, the woman her biological father had remarried. And yet she referred to her as "Mom" without fail, so there seemed to be none of that wicked-stepmother strife you only ever run into in childhood fairy tales.
Only then did things begin to fall into place. The Cho A-ran who had stopped by my place a few days ago had told her little girl all about me, and that girl—long harboring a dream of serializing web novels—had come looking for my apartment.
"Feel free to speak casually with me, Teacher♡"
Teacher? This bewitching little minx had already gone and bound us in a master-student relationship of her own accord? I wanted to give her a piece of my mind, but I bit it back.
"Uh… sure, I will."
Oblivious to my feelings, the girl just kept raking her nails across my nerves.
"Well, now that the explanation's all done, I can come in now, right?"
'Come in,' not 'go home'? And as if afraid I might fail to grasp her meaning, she even thoughtfully jabbed a finger toward the inside of my front door.
'Who said you could barge in!' I opened my mouth fully intending to say exactly that…
"Uh, come on in."
Han Yu-jae, whose tenderness had hardened into reflex, could never bring himself to voice a refusal.
And yet, she—
"So this is what it looks like. The place where you ate rice cakes with my mom."
The moment she crossed my threshold, out came a remark that loaded.
"Ooh, you clean the bathroom really diligently, huh? You must be the tidy type."
Out of nowhere, she was switching on the bathroom light and having a look around.
"For a guy living alone, you've set this place up nicely. All sorts of things."
She inspected the home of her family's tenant as though she were the landlord herself. Someone had taught this girl her manners all wrong.
At last, this Han Yu-jae resolved to set down his incurably gentle nature and let fly a proper scolding, when…
"Seeing it like this, it's really spacious. Our place is so cramped."
That one line brought me to a halt.
"Oh…"
Of course. It would be cramped, wouldn't it. Directly overhead it would be the exact same size, the same layout—another three-bedroom. With a father, a stepmother, and a little brother mixed in, four people under one roof, the space would have to be tight.
Had Cho A-ran felt something similar when she visited a few days ago? The family's circumstances didn't look all that comfortable. Maybe that little brother of hers tore around like a wild thing every night because of the suffocation of being cooped up in so small a home. For no particular reason, the girl's eyes, too, seemed to brim with a quiet sorrow.
"Should I brew you some coffee?"
"No, I'm okay. I don't really like coffee."
Right. That's about the age for it.
"Anything else to drink?"
"I saw you heading home from the convenience store with an energy drink earlier. Give me that one!"
I gladly picked up that can—dear to me as my own blood—and handed it over. After popping the tab for her, of course.
[Snap—!]
The crack of the tab rang out with startling force. And at that, the girl flinched so hard she actually let out a scream.
"Eek!"
"Whoa! Did I scare you? Guess it came out louder than I expected. Should've warned you first."
Hmmm… it hadn't even been that loud. Once again, the suspicious heart of Han Yu-jae and his doting exterior squared off in a contest of strength. In moments like these, the exterior usually won.
"It's okay. It's nothing. Just the sound of a can opening."
Saying this, I laid both hands gently on her shoulders, hunched high with fright. Pat, pat.
"Thank you, I'll enjoy it…"
We sat facing each other across the low table in the living room, and from there came the introductions and every manner of conversation. Come to think of it, a few days ago I'd had this very same kind of first-meeting chat with her stepmother. No wonder it all felt so familiar…
Her name was Yeon Ha-jeong. Born in 2007, twenty years old. She wasn't attending school at the moment—a retaker, studying for this year's college entrance exams.
On behalf of her parents, I shed a sigh of despair. They'd spent serious money sending her to cram school so she could study, and in return she was faithfully serving as a ranking officer in a pack of punk delinquents…
Anyway—this Ha-jeong and I, born in '95, were a full ttidonggap apart, twelve years under the very same zodiac animal.
She wrapped up her introduction with a request that I be careful around her, since she sometimes startled badly at sudden loud noises. She'd presumably heard plenty about me through A-ran already, so I didn't offer much in return. Just as with A-ran, I saw no need to volunteer the fact that I was divorced.
"By the way, Teacher, aren't you posting a chapter today? Web novel writers usually upload every day, from what I've seen. Oh, I guess you already did?"
Good grief. It was already pushing nine o'clock. I had all of three hours to get a new chapter uploaded. First things first, I hurriedly flipped open my laptop.
"You're taking a hiatus…?"
How had this sunny little minx read my mind? I'd been planning to leave a notice up that very moment. Something like: feeling unwell today, so I'm suddenly taking a break. My sincerest apologies to all my readers…
"Huh? Uh… right. Posting today's a lost cause. I need to hurry and at least put up a hiatus notice."
With that, I scrambled onto the Novelympic site and pulled up the page listing my serialized novels, when…
"Oh? You write adult web novels?"
Ha-jeong, who'd been sitting across from me not a moment ago, had somehow slipped around behind me.
"Human Guilty… What a profoundly deep title."
"Wha—! No, not this one—"
Not this one, my ass.
"…That one's already completed. The one under it is what I'm serializing now…"
The Special Viagra Salesman's Trance-Sex Extravaganza. I couldn't bring myself to say that obscene title aloud.
"The Special Viagra Salesman's Trance-Sex Extravaganza… Yes. Now that's what a web novel title should be. Way more intuitive than Human Guilty."
Ha-jeong, of all people, read the title off without a flicker of embarrassment, and my spine went board-stiff.
"Is it fantasy? The cover makes it look like fantasy."
Her guess was spot on. That lewd cover I'd generated with AI was stuffed full of textbook fantasy-world elements. An elf with a blissed-out expression, drool trailing from her lips. Behind her, a holy knight in armor, driving his cock home.
"So you were a pervert all along, Teacher♡?"
Ha-jeong bent at the waist and whispered it right into my ear. My face burned past crimson, blazing like a blast furnace. Perhaps my flustered fumbling looked comical enough, because a smile played across Ha-jeong's lips.
"Can I read this one? Looks like this one has way more likes."
She pointed at the cover of Human Guilty on my laptop screen.
"Huh? Um… that one's…"
"I have to verify what level your prose is at, don't I?"
Still bent over, she said this while looking me dead in the eye, and I broke out in a sweat fighting the urge to let my gaze sink lower. And I had no choice… Ha-jeong's white tank top had lost its fight with gravity and sagged downward, and through the gap that opened up, her milky-pale breasts were on full, unobstructed display.
I strained with everything I had to take in those breasts with the whites of my eyes alone. 'Whatever you do, do not lower the pupils.' Han Yu-jae's inner heart entreated Han Yu-jae's outer face.
Having posted the hiatus notice without incident, I exhaled a faint sigh. Then I dug out the question I'd been keeping in reserve.
"So why the sudden urge to learn how to write? From what you said earlier, you're a retaker."
"Because I hate studying!"
Truly, an answer of crystalline clarity. I barely held back a snort of laughter.
"Do you have any idea how stressful writing is? Me, I gave up on college at twenty and threw myself into nothing but serializing web novels. And it took me years before I could even scrape together a living, you know? Ten whole years. Ten."
"Ooh, that's quite the résumé?"
"…What I'm saying is, I've had my share of regrets too. I still regret it. If only I'd buckled down back in school, gotten into a good university, landed a job somewhere decent…"
"…Ugh. Boomer."
Apparently this girl had made it her mission to test the limits of my patience.
"Anyway, this isn't a field you walk into just because studying bores you. It's for people who, say, find reading novels more fun than gaming, or who carry a story inside them that they simply have to tell."
"Sadly, I'm neither of those?"
Once more, I heaved a deep sigh on behalf of her parents.
"It's just… my friends say I have a knack for writing."
Ha-jeong added with a smug little look. That much, at least, sounded plausible enough to catch my interest.
"Ooh, is that so? Then I'd better see for myself. You can't judge a student until you've looked at her work. Do you have anything already serialized?"
I figured it was my turn to launch a counterattack—
"Ahaha, you just called me your student."
All that came back was a smirk. Feeling inexplicably routed, I hung my head.
"You diiid take me on as your student, right? Right? Teaaacher♡"
Ha-jeong hooked her arm through mine and rubbed up against me with practiced coquettishness, and those milky-pale breasts I'd just taken in with the whites of my eyes pressed against me in full through the soft fabric of her thin tank top.
Huh? Was she going braless? No, no. I'd never made eye contact with a poking-out nipple, so she was probably wearing an adhesive bra. I abruptly shook off her arm and discreetly shielded my straining hard-on with my forearm.
"Ah, that's enough. Hurry up and show me what you've written so far."
"Yes sir! Teacher!"
Ha-jeong gave a clumsy imitation of a salute, then pulled out her phone and started swiping through screens. Only then did my own curiosity stir. What sort of writing had bloomed from those fingertips…
"Oh, here it is. This is a practice piece I posted on Novelympic. I put it up as private and only let my close friends sneak little peeks."
At last, Ha-jeong thrust her phone screen toward me. Swelling with anticipation, I fixed my eyes on the title of the novel on that screen. But what in the world was with the look of this title…
Utterly flustered, I found myself murmuring that obscene title aloud before I could stop.
"The Tutoring Student Is Too Curious About Sex…"
