Guilty (2)
"Yu-jae, when you drink this much, what do you usually reach for the next morning to sober up?"
"Hmm... for me, I'd say a piping hot bowl of sundae soup? Or sometimes I order a cheeseburger combo. What about you, hyung?"
"Well, those are fine, I suppose. But listen. There's one thing that works like a charm. I'm telling you, if you took it right now, every drop of alcohol in your system would vanish on the spot."
"Oh, come on. There's no such thing. If it really existed, you could bottle it as a hangover cure and become a bigger tycoon than Melon Musk. Maybe I should whip some up myself."
"Go ahead and make it—if you get married first, you little punk."
"I'm sorry, what?"
"That miracle hangover cure I just mentioned."
"Okay... but what does that have to do with marriage?"
"It's your wife's cursing you out, you idiot. That's the cure."
"Ah."
"Anyway, I'm off."
With that, Min-hyeok hurried out of his seat.
"Uh, hello? Honey? Sorry, I'm almost there."
He fumbled his phone to his ear as he scurried away, and I watched him go—that shriveled back of his.
Apparently the hangover cure he'd mentioned really was something else.
It was then that I made a resolution. I would put off marriage for as long as humanly possible.
The time was January 2023, three days before my job interview. I was drinking with Min-hyeok, the man who had recommended me to the company, my stomach twisted in anxious hope that the interview would go well—when his scolding came crashing down on me.
"Hey, you. If you don't pass, just live your life anyway. At least you're not married."
His hobby was photography. It was an old passion he'd kept long before it became trendy the way it was these days.
He used to have plenty of hobbyist friends he'd travel with on photo trips, but after his wedding he could never see them anymore, which he lamented bitterly. With a tiger of a wife glaring daggers and policing his every move, what could he do?
Maybe that was why he was so grateful for one Han Yu-jae—someone who lived near his place and could knock back a few cans of beer with him at the convenience store. When he told his wife he was just stepping out to see Yu-jae for a bit, she'd let him go without a fuss.
That's right. I was that married man's escape valve. And to repay the younger brother who'd willingly become his outlet, he had recommended me to his company.
Thanks to him, I landed the job—and met Hye-jeong, my superior and my same-age peer. Every time I faced her, I couldn't help comparing our situations, and it depressed me. I needed an escape valve of my own, psychologically speaking.
So I downloaded a meetup app. I joined a drinking group with a somewhat older crowd. That was how I met Chae-rin, fatefully, and—baby before vows—married her.
Two life-shattering events struck back to back. The shotgun wedding. And the miscarriage.
My life barreled toward catastrophe like that. And then, in a state of impaired body and mind, I went and had an affair with Hye-jeong.
Yes. Min-hyeok hyung was the problem.
Cho Min-hyeok, born in 1990, Section Chief and Team Leader of Development Team 2—the brother team to my own Development Team 1.
If that man had never gotten me hired, none of this mess would ever have happened.
March 2024. Having just finished my first sex with Hye-jeong, I was scrambling into a taxi for the ride home.
My wife had already racked up ten missed calls. Fair enough—it was already half past two in the morning.
[Riiing— Riiing—]
Caller ID: Honey ♥ — Moon Chae-rin
That son of a bitch, Cho Min-hyeok. I heaped silent curses on him as I picked up.
"H-hey, honey."
That's what Min-hyeok had said, wasn't it? A wife's scolding was the hangover cure that worked like a charm.
But my case was different. The moment my wife asked this in a voice unusually calm for her, my drunkenness evaporated completely.
"Where are you?"
Good heavens. Not once in my entire life had my brain ever spun this fast.
I threw that prodigious mental horsepower into hunting for a suitable excuse—but there was no such thing to be found.
A reason for missing ten straight calls without answering once. There was no plausible explanation in existence.
I had to switch strategies.
"I'm in a taxi heading home. The thing is... that friend I mentioned? It was actually Min-hyeok sunbae. I've told you about him plenty of times—the hyung who counseled me through all my worries, the one who got me hired."
"..."
A silence stretched between us. That silence came through to me loud and clear: let's see what else you little bastard spews out of your mouth.
"...When he suddenly brought up divorce, I couldn't exactly refuse to hear him out, could I? I owe him a lot. And as I just sat there listening, I actually found myself understanding his wife's side of things too."
That's right. I was serializing a short story in real time. Even though I'd stopped publishing a year after joining the company, apparently the old chops were still there.
"I mean, get this. Apparently every single one of his photography club outings is a minimum two-night, three-day trip. From the wife's perspective, of course she wanted to put a stop to it."
Naturally, the conversation drifted away from my explaining why I was so late with no word, and settled instead on the tumultuous married life of Min-hyeok.
Without my having to explain anything further, my situation came through on its own.
I'd been so absorbed listening to a close hyung's deeply personal troubles that I'd lost all track of time. I hadn't even felt my phone buzzing, and I was so sorry about it.
Besides, my wife and I had been through our own fairly turbulent newlywed days. We'd especially been drifting into a rut, our desires mismatched when it came to how often we had sex.
Under those circumstances, hearing another couple's story as a cautionary tale—it was impossible not to get sucked in.
I serialized the novel out of my mouth without taking a breath. Then, right around the time the taxi pulled up in front of our building, her voice came through the phone.
"...If you ask me, Min-hyeok's the one in the wrong."
Whew. I was saved.
Only after stepping into the elevator and ending the call did I finally let out the relief I'd been holding in.
I punched in our home passcode—different from the one at Hye-jeong's place—and opened the front door.
Thankfully, my wife was already lying in bed, fully prepared for sleep.
If she had gotten up to greet me with a hug, she would have caught the scent of Hye-jeong's perfume clinging to me, plain as day.
Ugh, just imagining it sends a chill down my spine.
"Honey, if you're sleepy, go ahead and sleep. I'll be right there."
With that, I darted into the bathroom and showered first.
Lying in bed beside my wife as usual, I pictured Team Leader Hye-jeong in my head.
Barely a few hours ago, I had been at her place, having sex with her.
"You wanted to fuck me like this, didn't you? How badly did you want it?"
That was how Team Leader Hye-jeong had consoled me, a man tormented by a phobia of sex with his own wife. A true leader indeed—she knew exactly how to comfort her team member.
She was the type who enjoyed rough sex. It wasn't my first time with a woman like that, so I whipped her generous ass without the slightest hesitation.
I also rammed my cock deep into the back of her throat, then—reading with uncanny precision that hair-trigger moment just before she'd gag—pulled it back out.
My wife sometimes ground her teeth in her deep sleep. That night she was grinding away, grit-grit-grit, and I kept thrusting in time with the rhythm—thinking of Hye-jeong all the while.
She was a completely different creature from the Kim Hye-jeong I saw at the office. All that aloof dignity, gone without a trace—replaced by a woman begging me to hit her harder.
This was the woman who used to ride me for missing deadlines. And now there she was, stark naked in the middle of that pigsty of an apartment, kneeling before me, rubbing her palms together as she apologized.
I burned with the urge to film it and spread it across the company messenger, but I barely managed to hold myself back.
The next day, Team Leader Hye-jeong took an urgent half-day off in the morning and showed up at work late.
She spent the entire workday subtly avoiding my gaze. Was she dying of embarrassment?
Then she sent me a personal text—not the company messenger.
Now she'd started dropping the honorifics over text as well. Utterly shameless. So I replied like this:
In that instant, the atmosphere of the office transformed, if only briefly, into the middle of Team Leader Hye-jeong's pigsty.
In place of the bleak smell of office supplies and printed paper, a strange hallucinatory stench—burnt-out incense, diffuser oil, and a medley of snack crumbs all blended together—crept up and tickled my nose.
Hye-jeong didn't reply for a long while after that. Only when quitting time drew near did she finally send this:
We each wolfed down a bowl of soup. Every calorie we'd secured went straight into fueling sex.
The dim motion-sensor lights in the B4 stairwell of the company building flickered off and on every time we changed positions.
From that day on, this gloomy underground floor became our own private hideaway.