Guilty (1)
Back in my school days, my nickname was Guilty. My actual name is Han Yu-jae, after all — you have to hand it to elementary school kids for their cheap puns.
Then 2020 rolled around, and that nickname flipped on its head — in a good way.
Guilty Human.
People had started using the phrase to describe a man so charming, so devastatingly attentive, that everyone around him couldn't help but fall for him.
By that point in my life, the passion I'd once poured into serializing my novels had dwindled considerably. Han Yu-jae, late twenties. His one and only passion was seducing women.
If you wanted to seduce a woman, you had to start by managing yourself. So I groomed my eyebrows and thinned out the hair on my legs and under my arms.
I studied exactly what women despised in conversation, and therefore what to carefully avoid saying.
Where to seat a woman at a café or restaurant, whether the man should get into the taxi first — I internalized all the basic etiquette as second nature.
I restrained myself from droning on about my own life and made a habit of listening attentively whenever a woman spoke.
With good looks as my foundation, I managed to juggle quite a few women.
And then one day, I heard this:
"You know what people call a guy like you these days? A 'Guilty Human.'"
Soo-yeon said it back then, lying with her head pillowed on my arm in a motel bed.
Chae Soo-yeon. Born in '97, two years younger than me. We'd gotten together when I was twenty-eight and dated for about two months — a brief fling.
She had a charming, unassuming shoulder-length bob.
At 157 centimeters she was on the short side, but she had a small face and long limbs — a slender build with great proportions.
Guilty Human. The nickname she'd given me. God, how I loved it.
From then on, I was always gentle with women. Even with women I had zero intention of dating. I happily played the Guilty Human.
Which is probably how I ended up winning over Team Leader Hye-jeong without even trying.
"Did you know? When I heard you had a girlfriend, Yu-jae, I almost wailed out loud."
I'd never seen the team leader this drunk. Out of nowhere, she was spilling her guts — apparently she'd had feelings for me all along.
This was the woman who, even at company dinners, rigorously kept all personal topics off the table and stuck strictly to work talk.
That ice queen — Kim Hye-jeong, who'd been promoted early twice thanks to her rationality and charisma — was saying this to me.
It made no sense whatsoever. And for good reason: Han Yu-jae was already a married man, wed to a woman named Moon Chae-rin, honeymoon and all.
"You see, I'd secretly been hoping you'd break up soon. And then you shove a wedding invitation in my face out of nowhere. I've never seen a fortress wall that thick."
The thoroughly plastered team leader was using the table as a pillow, in a state so sloppy she looked ready to start snoring at any moment.
We were the only two customers in this quiet wine bar. Wednesday, 9 p.m. Office workers generally take it easy on Wednesdays.
Well, judging by the team leader's condition, taking it easy would've been the right call. Our team in particular gets slammed on Thursdays and Fridays, so she'd clearly thrown all common sense out the window.
And she'd bragged she could put away two bottles of soju. Wine was a different beast, apparently? One shared bottle and she'd turned into a completely different person?
"Team Leader, you're very drunk. Should I call you a taxi?"
As I said this and cupped the back of her neck to lift her head, my thumb accidentally brushed her lips.
Sticky saliva smeared across it. I knew this was wrong, and yet my erection would not go down.
"Do you know why I dressed up like this today?"
The team leader asked, nearly sleep-talking with her eyes closed.
I was pretty drunk myself, so I had to rack my memory to answer.
"...You had an important meeting with a client today. That's why you dressed up."
Right. As the team leader of a development department at a software company, she normally came to work looking slovenly. The reason she'd shown up in such a textbook office look could only have been that meeting.
"You idiot. You think I'd suffer through squeezing into these uncomfortable stockings for some mere meeting?"
The team leader snapped at me all of a sudden.
Apparently a little sleep had sobered her up, because she propped herself up and plucked at the black stockings she was wearing with two fingers. On her thigh, no less.
[Snap—]
The friction of the smooth stockings snapping against her skin was so obscenely erotic that a sigh escaped me. So did a bead of precum.
"Hahh..."
How had things come to this? Not only was I drinking alone with the team leader, I was now serving as her confessional for an unrequited love.
Oblivious to my inner turmoil, the team leader kept fanning the flames.
"You requested a one-on-one meeting with me, Yu-jae. For today."
Ah. So that was it.
She'd wanted to look pretty for me, using that brief one-on-one meeting as her excuse.
Right — we'd had our one-on-one that afternoon.
Only then did the pieces in my head start snapping into place.
The previous Friday night, Team Leader Hye-jeong had told me my performance didn't match my workload. That if I was going to clock overtime pay, I should at least hit my deadlines.
So I'd bowed my head low and explained.
"I'm sorry. I've been going through a lot in my personal life lately. I just couldn't focus on work."
Her tone softened a little.
"What's going on? Something happen? If it's too hard to talk about, don't force it."
"...I'll tell you once I've sorted my thoughts out. Could I request a one-on-one meeting, perhaps?"
And so, wedged into a rare gap in the team leader's packed schedule, that meeting landed on this very day.
The one-on-one was scheduled for Wednesday, 2:00 to 2:30 p.m. Thirty minutes would normally be more than enough for a one-on-one, but in my case it wasn't.
In my heavily impaired state, I'd poured out a whole lot.
That my marriage had been a shotgun wedding. That before the pregnancy, I'd never considered marriage anything but a distant prospect.
That once I'd stumbled into marriage, the weight of responsibility as head of a household hit me so hard I was consumed with regret. That two months before the due date, my wife had miscarried.
Team Leader Hye-jeong had listened to every word of it, riveted, letting the time slip away. Then her phone alarm went off to mark 2:30.
"This won't do. I have another meeting to get to. Heavy stuff like this needs alcohol. Let's go for a drink after work."
And so the place we'd gone to after work was this wine bar.
To my wife, I'd given some vague excuse about listening to a friend's sudden troubles and being out for a few drinks.
There was no way I could say I'd be having a deep conversation with my female team leader, just the two of us.
My litany of grievances had continued straight through dinner at the wine bar, and with alcohol mixed in, it had ballooned beyond all control.
Yes, I was genuinely sad about the miscarriage itself. Yes, I was so worried about my wife's physical and mental state that I couldn't focus on work.
But with the cause of that unexpected marriage seemingly gone, I felt this strangely complicated relief.
Since the miscarriage, my wife had grown even more obsessed with getting pregnant. Meanwhile, I'd developed an actual phobia of sleeping with her.
What if she got pregnant again just like that? What if we had to go through the pain of another miscarriage?
And yet my wife wanted sex every single night. She begged for my cock. She craved finishing inside.
She hated me — me, unable to grant the requests of a wife in the grip of severe post-miscarriage depression. I felt like I'd committed some sin myself, and the guilt kept me from sleeping properly.
Looking back, I wasn't the only one who'd blurted out everything better left unsaid. Team Leader Hye-jeong wasn't alone in that. I was just as guilty.
Someone had clearly poisoned this wine.
Yes. That wasn't the liquor talking — it was the poison. We'd downed a poisoned chalice together.
My wife, of course, would never have graciously accepted any of these excuses. And so I slept with Hye-jeong behind her back.
Granted, right up until we were in the taxi headed to her place, I hadn't entertained even the faintest thought of sleeping with her.
She lived in Unit 302 of a four-story villa. An old building with no elevator, so I had to carry her up the stairs on my back.
At 173 centimeters with a bit of meat on her, Hye-jeong was no small burden. And the weight of those thick breasts pressed into my back the entire climb.
Because of that plush softness against me, my blood would start rushing to my cock, then divert to my screaming thigh muscles, then back again — an endless, agonizing cycle. A blood-draining march of a thousand miles, in every sense.
"One-three-three-seven..."
She murmured it the moment we stood in front of 302. The timing was so uncanny that I suspected she might have been faking sleep the whole way up.
Either way, I was a mere employee, a team member. I had no choice but to obey the team leader.
I punched in the passcode 1337 and stepped inside, and her apartment was an absolute disaster zone.
Crumpled chip bags strewn across the floor, delivery boxes... even socks and underwear lying about.
And yet, in the middle of all that, apparently still caring about how the place smelled, incense sticks and diffusers were stationed in every corner.
This was the home of that aloof, charismatic Kim Hye-jeong?
Apparently her fastidious, type-A planning and organizing instincts only ever manifested at the office.
Maybe she'd poured every ounce of her energy into being so ruthlessly thorough at work that there was simply nothing left for her own household.
Even amid the minefield, Hye-jeong — familiar with her own home — somehow weaved masterfully around those mines, staggering her way into the bedroom.
I, meanwhile, had to kick my way through the swarms of snack bags just to follow her in.
She was already lying on the bed. And so I said to her:
"You're going to sleep without showering? Without even washing your face off? And it doesn't look like you've taken your contacts out, either."
I was already dead tired from hauling that big body of hers up the stairs. Team leader or not, my voice dripped with every ounce of my simmering irritation.
And to that, the team leader responded with utter languor.
"Come here and lie down with me."
Complete with an infuriating little beckoning gesture. A curse bubbled right up out of me.
"Ugh, damn it."
Unable to contain the boiling fury, I dove straight onto her bed.
At that moment, the wall clock hung askew on the bedroom wall read half past ten in the evening. It was a cute little thing, decorated with characters from Crayon Shin-chan.
We fucked that violently. It was only after the precariously hung clock, unable to withstand a shaking worthy of an earthquake, came crashing down, shattered with a resounding crash, that I finally realized.
It was already almost two in the morning.