Age

Finishing inside her was, undeniably, my fault. And yet it was Chae-rin who ended up comforting me.

My phone buzzed in the middle of work, and when I checked it, that was the message waiting for me. I typed out a reply.

Half of it was empty words. Checking mid-act was no small feat, after all. How exactly was I supposed to pull out at the height of the moment—both of us drunk on the ripest part of the mood and busy fucking—just to inspect the state of a condom?

That was her reply. As I read it, Chae-rin's husky voice auto-played in my head.

Right. In all my twenty-nine years, had a condom ever torn on me even once? If my memory served, it had happened about three times in total. Three different women—and not one of the three had ever ended up with a belly.

And if, by some miracle, Chae-rin did get pregnant, I'd simply have to go along with it and live my life. What choice would I have? A child conceived by punching through those impossibly low odds deserved to be raised like treasure.

Even as I thought it, the anxiety wouldn't quite fade.

I abandoned my work, dimmed my laptop screen, and opened a search portal. Then I typed in things like:

The kindly answers left by licensed doctors on a Q&A site comforted me even more than Chae-rin's texts had. At thirty-five in Korean age, a woman was already crossing into advanced maternal age territory, and the odds of conceiving from a single instance of unprotected sex were vanishingly slim.

I was so busy heaving a sigh of relief that I failed to catch the sound of my team leader's footsteps returning from her meeting.

"Yu-jae. How's the presentation prep coming along?"

"Oh—yes! I was just pulling up some materials."

Struggling to hide my fluster, I hastily closed the browser window. I could not let it be known that the search I'd run mid-work happened to be on that particular topic. Least of all with my team leader.

Kim Hye-jeong. Title: team leader; rank: manager. Her previous job had been her first, and adding up her years there gave her roughly seven years of experience. And she was my age.

Meanwhile, me—Han Yu-jae. Title: team member; rank: entry-level associate. This was my first job in the software industry, so my experience totaled all of three months.

No wonder my feelings grew complicated every time I faced Team Leader Hye-jeong.

At twenty, Han Yu-jae had boldly given up on college and thrown himself into writing. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠He'd bounced from web novel platform to platform entering contests, and time after time he'd drunk the bitter cup of rejection. All the while, Hye-jeong had been basking in the splendor of campus life.

2014 was the era when saccharine couple songs ruled the music charts—Musosoyu and Junggi Stop's "Summer," or Aimmy's "Spring Love, Cherry Blossoms, So Nice," to name the standouts. The ripple effect carried into the following year, when similar love songs kept blowing up one after another. Rucola's "Happened to See You in Spring," featuring Yuja, is still on my regular playlist.

To have enjoyed campus life in that golden age—how sweet it must have been. Four seasons of dreamlike days, blooming like cherry blossoms in full flourish.

Meanwhile, I was holed up in the corner of my room, engrossed in polishing sentences. Then I'd put on some porn, jerk off, go back to typing, then... busily "stroking" this and "typing" that, I burned through the precious springtime of my early twenties.

Fantasy, romance, horror, adult fiction. Add up every miscellaneous serial I'd ever run and it came to more than twenty. Not a single one had ever turned a profit.

I couldn't drop my part-time jobs if I wanted to eat, and I consoled myself with the excuse that this was why I could never invest enough hours in my serials.

Living like that, jerking my way through my twenties, it was sheer luck that at the late age of twenty-nine I'd landed a proper job like this one.

Back when I worked at a convenience store, there was an older guy who came in every weekend for Marlboro Menthols. We got to talking and hit it off. We drank together a few times, and each time I'd lament my aimless lot in life. Finding it pitiable, he suggested I try joining his company.

This was right as the pandemic was dying down, before the world fell under AI's dominion. You could call it the golden age of the software industry. Even a non-major like me was fine. It was an era where all that mattered was proving you had a knack for development. Pass the interview, and ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the offer was as good as mine.

The problem was that the interview was set for a month later. I'd taken on the cramped assignment of mastering the fundamentals of software development in barely thirty days.

I boldly put both of my ongoing serials on temporary hiatus and threw myself into some sorely belated study. Search skills sharpened to excellence by years of digging through porn, and reading comprehension forged by serializing novels—those two were my only strengths. Wielding them as weapons, I curated the best study materials and absorbed knowledge with ruthless efficiency.

The result, as if to show off: hired.

The deputy general manager who'd interviewed me spared no praise for my sharp mind. Even as a man who'd lived his whole life as a writer, I knew perfectly well how rare it was to receive such compliments in an interview.

Come to think of it, even back in high school my grades had been decent for the amount I studied. If only I hadn't gone and fallen for the charms of web novels. If only I'd just listened to my mom...

Anyway, by luck I'd gotten hired here—a company of middling size, too big to call small and too modest to call mid-tier.

Three months ago, right when I'd just been hired, might have been the happiest stretch of my life. Even after learning that the leader of my assigned team was my same age, I didn't feel the least bit cowed.

But now, three months in, things were different. My devotion to the company had slowly seeped out, and an inferiority complex had elbowed its way into the vacancy. Every time I faced my same-aged team leader, bitterness welled up from somewhere deep inside.

Maybe that was why I'd gone looking for a drinking circle of an older crowd.

There, neither my late-blooming career nor my twenties squandered whole counted against me. Only my wide-open age of twenty-nine drew any praise.

In the past, while bouncing between part-time gigs, I'd dated my share of women. Thank goodness I'd been born with clean looks; given my personality, I could easily have been denied even the chance and hit thirty a hopeless virgin without any injustice done.

After all, I'd broken up with every ex for the same reason.

I was prone to spiraling into intense self-loathing, and I habitually compared my circumstances to theirs. Every one of them grew sick of that side of me and left.

But those exes had one thing in common: every last one of them was younger than me.

I made the mistake of hunting for the cause of my serial romantic failures anywhere but myself. So I started scouting older women instead of younger ones. And that was how I met Chae-rin.

Swamped by work and brooding, I'd gone a whole five hours without replying. Then Chae-rin sent me a message.

A far cry from my exes, who'd start acting unhinged if I left them unread for even a couple of hours. It felt warm. Cozy.

Chae-rin was clearly weak to compliments. Her replies always lagged a beat—only when I sent something flattering.

Before her reply could come back, I sent one more message.

Somehow it was already six thirty. I'd planned to put in two more hours of overtime that day, but for some reason I found myself missing Chae-rin terribly. I melted that feeling into a text.

That day, rather than begrudge the cost of a motel room, I invited her over to my place. And we had fervent sex. Unlike our first night, we hadn't touched a single drop of alcohol, and perhaps that was why my stamina overflowed. We went three full rounds.

Forty minutes of sex, a thirty-minute break, another thirty minutes of sex, an hour of rest, then thirty minutes more.

I was studying her at a miraculous pace—far faster than the frantic speed at which I'd crammed software fundamentals for that interview.

Cowgirl was her favorite. Her hips were sensitive, too—whenever I caressed both sides of her pelvis mid-ride, she reached orgasm without fail.

Chae-rin was the first woman I'd slept with on the very day we met and then slept with on every single date afterward, no exceptions. The women I'd met before her had done nothing but play hard to get.

When it came to sexual compatibility, the most important thing wasn't cock size, nor its girth or shape. It wasn't the contours inside her pussy or the right amount of grip either. The most important thing was a frequency that left both of us satisfied.

On that count, Chae-rin and I were a perfect match. In three weeks we'd met nine times in all and had sex a staggering thirty times. She was the type to whine that her pussy would rub raw at this rate, then rock her hips in delight the moment I slid my cock back into her.

And then, the once-in-a-lifetime event struck.

"Yu-jae. There's... actually something I need to confess."

"Hm? What is it?"

"My period was due more than ten days ago, and it still hasn't come."