Flame
As it turned out, masturbating to the mental image of Ha-jeong masturbating had yielded me an unexpected windfall of inspiration — thanks to which I managed to finish writing the eighth serialized installment of The Special Viagra Salesman's Trance-Sex Extravaganza.
In the novel, Crapia the special Viagra salesman finally arrived at a new village. The chief of this insular community was a fiercely patriarchal man, and he had a lovely young daughter named Freya — a girl who, unable to defy her father's relentless watchfulness, had remained a virgin even at twenty. And there was one man who secretly burned with lust for her: the village chief's old friend.
Lusting after a girl young enough to be his own daughter. What's more, the chief, out of old friendship, had lent the destitute man a considerable sum of money. That shameless bastard finally came creeping to Crapia's street stall.
"Just give me one Viagra, will ya."
Crapia, who had the man's repulsive lust read at a glance, handed over a drug laced heavily with hallucinogens without a moment's hesitation. Drunk on the visions, the man ended up staging an impromptu masturbation show in the middle of the street — convinced that the chief's daughter stood naked right before his eyes.
"Ahh...! Freya! Your pussy is so wonderfully warm!"
Fucking the empty air as he cried out, he was ultimately hauled off to jail for public indecency.
To think her father's old friend was such a pervert! Freya, who happened to witness the whole spectacle, was plunged into shock.
Crapia approached her and, posing as an ordinary pharmacist, said:
"I can give you a medicine that will erase the memories you wish to erase."
Freya paid willingly, and Crapia handed her a potent aphrodisiac. So fierce was its effect that the girl instantly flung her clothes to the ground and began sucking Crapia's cock — rubbing at her own pussy with her hand all the while...
Had her father the chief witnessed the scene, he would have been unable to contain his despair. Crapia, for his part, graciously relieved her of that long-fermenting lust.
"Ah! Hahk♡ Hup! Haah♡"
With every thrust, Freya spilled clumsy moans. It was her first time being fucked like this, so of course she had no idea how to moan in a way that sounded pretty.
That fact excited Crapia all the more, and in the end he came right inside Freya's pussy.
Crapia, who had handed over the aphrodisiac with the words "a medicine that erases the memories you wish to erase," never once lied. For the aphrodisiac's side effect was, in truth, precisely that: the erasure of unwanted memories.
And yet Freya would live on forever treasuring the memory of the day she'd slept with Crapia — waiting for the man who'd left her village to come back to her, any day now...
Magnificent.
I hammered away at the keyboard without pause, and in barely two hours pulled off the remarkable feat of completing an arc spanning a full four installments. Come tomorrow or the day after, I could easily attempt a two- or even three-day streak of consecutive updates.
A rich satisfaction seeped through me, and along with it, for some odd reason, Yeon Ha-jeong upstairs struck me as worthy of gratitude.
On nights when the writing flowed this smoothly and I drifted off in a good mood, I always dreamed. That night was no exception.
For some reason, neither Chae-rin, my wife of three years, nor Hye-jeong, my mistress of a year and a half, appeared in the dream. The only ones who ever showed up were two: Ha-young and Ye-jin.
Ha-young and I had lasted a mere three weeks. With Ye-jin it had been a little longer, but even then barely two months.
So why did those two, night after night, shove Chae-rin and Hye-jeong aside to claim their starring roles? I had a vague suspicion why, but I made a point of not knowing.
Age.
Hye-jeong was my age, and Chae-rin was born in '89 — a full six years my senior. Chae-rin looked young enough to pass for someone my own age, but for some reason that number, nothing more than a number, kept needling at me.
And what about Ha-young and Ye-jin? Ha-young was born in 2000, Ye-jin in 2001 — making them the two youngest women I had ever been with.
Setting everything else aside, that single fact alone was enough to make my cock jerk upright.
The twenty-nine-year-old Han Yu-jae who'd once declared, "Age is nothing but a number," simply hadn't yet known the taste of a young woman. In my dreams, at least, I briefly slipped free of the shackles of penance and became a lecher. Sometimes I even dreamed of fucking Ye-jin and Ha-young at the same time.
While Ye-jin sucked my cock, I sucked Ha-young's pretty nipples. Other times I masturbated while savoring the sight of Ha-young and Ye-jin kissing each other.
Waking from such debauched dreams, a hollow emptiness would come flooding in like a tide.
Ah. I missed them.
I missed them with a piercing intensity. Ha-young's soft breasts — I missed the feel of them. Ye-jin's petite chest, held precious in my arms when I pulled her close — I missed that too.
But it wasn't only their bodies I longed for.
What would it have been like to date them properly — not sneaking around behind the mask of a married man...
Whenever that thought surfaced, one side of my chest would pull taut with a sour ache.
Fresh awake, I found myself opening the Tender app without really meaning to. It was the first time I'd opened it since Chae-rin caught me in the act.
The flame-shaped logo unfurling across my phone screen seared itself vividly into my eyes. It looked for all the world like Satan's fire.
Nekosuki (24).
Ye-jin, a devotee of Japanese anime and all things Japanese, had a Tender handle that, read aloud, was "Nekosuki" — Japanese for "loves cats." For that reason alone, the two of us had visited cat cafés no fewer than five times.
Racking my brain for the name of the cheese tabby that had finally recognized us and come trotting over, I opened the long-dormant chat room she and I had shared.
Rereading it now, I think I finally understand. This was the exact moment Ye-jin began nursing a quiet hurt over me — I'm certain of it.
That was the end of it — we never exchanged another word. Who could have known the day we met at that café would be the last?
If the Han Yu-jae of back then hadn't been a married man, would I have seized the wrist of the girl who cried as she told me we were through?
I put the question to Han Yu-jae's inner heart.
"You're not a married man anymore. What's the harm in reaching out?"
And the inner heart answered:
"Come to think of it, she never canceled our match even after we broke up. Maybe she's been waiting for me to message her all along."
In the end, I sent it.
I didn't expect a reply right away. For all I knew, she'd deleted the app without ever canceling the match. In that case, an answer might never come at all.
Stripping away as much expectation as I could manage, I threw myself into the day's routine.
Naturally, that focus failed to survive even thirty minutes. Write for half an hour, check whether the phone had lit up; write some more, check again thirty minutes later — the cycle repeated on and on...
Before I knew it the sun had set and the world outside the window had gone black, yet not once did a notification stamped with Tender's flame logo appear on my screen.
Just as I was letting out yet another long, deep sigh, an out-of-nowhere knock sounded at my door.
Knock, knock, knock.
Even the knock had a bright, bouncy feel to it. That could only be one person: Yeon Ha-jeong.
I hurried to the front door, and sure enough, my instinct hadn't lied.
"We have a huge problem!"
For some reason, Ha-jeong stood there pale as a sheet, eyes round as saucers, gazing up at me.
"A problem...? What kind of problem?"
"I went and told my dad a lie, okay? I said I'd found a good tutor and asked him for the tutoring fees. And now Dad says he has to meet this tutor face-to-face."
"What? And?"
And what? None of that had the slightest thing to do with me.
"The tutor I told him about is you, Teacher!"
Ah. So that was how it had happened.
She was a CSAT retaker, after all — which meant her dream of serializing a novel was one she'd been keeping from her parents. And here I'd been wondering why she'd suddenly shown up asking me to teach her to write, just what on earth she intended to study with...
"Originally, we'd agreed I'd rent out a small study room and go there for the lessons."
Yeah, right. As if her real plan wasn't to barge straight into my apartment, the one directly downstairs.
"But he just keeps insisting — why not switch to home tutoring, with the tutor coming to our house..."
"Home tutoring? You mean I have to visit your house?"
"Exactly. Pretending to be a tutor who teaches CSAT prep."
Unbelievable. I was supposed to put on an act all over again?
I was already thoroughly sick of playing the single man back in my Tender days. And now I had to perform the role of an ordinary tutor — to her parents' faces, no less?
"What about your mother? Your mother knows me."
She'd come by my place just a few days ago. We'd shared honey rice cakes and chatted away like old friends.
"We'll just play it as a coincidence. I haven't breathed a word to Mom about meeting you, so I'll say I never dreamed in a million years that my tutor would turn out to live right downstairs. I'll fudge it — I mean, what are the odds?"
Right. Ha-jeong had already shown up at my door with her mind firmly made up. Any refusal from me at this point was doomed to bounce right off.
"Anyway, I already told him you're coming tomorrow, so plan accordingly!"
With that she scrambled to head back home, and I ended up losing my temper at her retreating back.
"How can you just run off without even hearing my side of it!"
At that, Ha-jeong turned around and came walking back toward my door—
"Oh, right. I should give you my phone number."
And with that, out of nowhere, she snatched the phone from my hand and set those slender jade fingers drumming across the screen. Only once she'd confirmed the call arriving on her own phone did she hand mine back.
"Okay, I'll get going now!"
And so the second storm to strike my door raged through and vanished. Utterly flustered, I hadn't managed to shout so much as a word at her.
Back in the middle of my newly silent apartment, I slumped down and checked the unfamiliar number now sitting in my call log. So this was that shameless girl's number. Just as I moved to save it under the name "Yeon Ha-jeong," my phone gave a single short buzz.
A buzz like that could only mean Tender... and sure enough, there it was — the little flame emblem floating in the status bar.
I hurried to open the Tender app. First things first: the message that had come for me.
The sender was Ye-jin — the very girl I'd been waiting for all day long.