A Tuesday Alone
"...Mph—ah...!"
The moment I opened my eyes that morning, just facing my senior was enough to send my mood scraping along the floor. More precisely, it was the way her tongue immediately began exploring the inside of my mouth the second I woke.
Unlike Inha, who looked ready to head out the door at any moment, I was lying in a position that wouldn't let me straighten my knees even once — and somehow that felt like a gimmick designed to remind me exactly where I stood. The way a shackle around an ankle or a chain around a neck can, by its mere presence, drain a prisoner's will to resist, it seemed to say: You are a kidnapped person. You cannot run anywhere.
"Ah, sorry. Hehe — you're just too cute. I like how warm Heeyeon's body is."
Inha murmured it almost to herself as she sat me up. The human body was, structurally speaking, capable of stretching its legs out straight — but unfortunately my flexibility was abysmal, and even trying to ease my legs open sent a sharp ache through the backs of my knees.
When I glanced down at my thighs without meaning to, they looked somehow worse than yesterday, and I sucked in a sharp breath before I could stop myself. Red lines were scrawled across the skin in a chaotic scramble, as if I'd been struck by lightning.
"...Hah, it's fine. It'll heal soon. Just some burst capillaries. Mm — bruises, basically!"
As she spoke, Inha lowered herself down, shifting so that her face deliberately brushed against my thigh while she pulled out the table attached to the bed and locked it in place. The touch of her hair against my skin was a strange enough sensation that goosebumps prickled up in a shiver.
Come to think of it — when had the bed been changed? Wait. When had I even fallen asleep?
...I was seriously entertaining the possibility that I'd been unconscious this entire time and had only just come to, when Inha set a lidded tray from the nightstand onto the bed table.
"Unnie has to go to work. Let's eat and brush our teeth, okay?"
"...Yes..."
Half-asleep, I doubted food would even go down in a state where I could have drifted off again at any second — but what choice did I have? And judging by yesterday's experience, it was obvious Unnie would no longer leave me untied, so eating now was the wiser move for my own well-being.
Even granting that the company we'd worked at hadn't been a black enterprise, I still wouldn't be able to eat for more than nine hours until Inha came home from work.
"Ta-da. Sandwich."
"...It, it looks good..."
If that was all it was, why bother covering it with a lid? Below my field of vision, below the table, my bare body was fully on display, the most private parts of me left completely exposed — so I fixed my gaze on the sandwich for no good reason at all.
Fresh vegetables were packed between the slices of bread as if they might burst out. I hated vegetables. I only ever managed them when I was eating meat. Even maratang, which had been all the rage, I'd stopped eating the moment I realized it was basically vegetable soup.
"..."
Still, half-hoping she might untie me, I looked up at Inha — and she, as if to say not a chance, picked up the sandwich with her own hands, cupped it from below, and held it out to my mouth.
What an inefficient way to do things. I opened and closed my fists for no reason and parted my lips. I wasn't particularly hungry, but I opened them anyway.
The sandwich entered my mouth, and I closed it with a soft ahng. With my wrists still linked to my ankles, even leaning my neck forward a little made everything ache.
A few pieces of vegetable tumbled down onto Inha's hand.
"Mmph..."
"Ahaha, it's fine, Heeyeon. Is it good? Hm?"
"I-it's... it's good..."
"Oh! What a relief! I made it myself!"
Inha said it bouncing with delight. Honestly, the fact that she'd made it herself was a little surprising. The quality was store-bought level.
Every time I chewed, a crisp crunching sound echoed inside my mouth.
After dumping the spilled vegetables onto the tray, Inha picked up her phone and snapped another photo of me — click. By now the camera lens had grown familiar enough that I simply lowered my eyes a little and swallowed the adequately chewed bite of sandwich.
Noticing I'd swallowed, she brought the sandwich close again for another bite. While I chewed once more, Inha took another photo — click.
"Heeyeon. Look over here for me."
When she said it, waggling the phone, I managed to lift my eyes just enough to look at the camera — and then, again, click. Shame wrapped itself around my entire body.
Apparently finished taking pictures, Inha set the phone down, swept the corner of my mouth with those leisurely fingers, and brought them to her own lips.
"..."
Even though I was in the middle of a meal, strength kept draining out of me. So when I'd finished one sandwich and shook my head to say I was done, Inha force-fed me two more. You'll need to eat, she said.
And the reason for that only became clear after a round of toothbrushing that showed no particular concern for my gums.
"I'm off~."
Inha's voice. I thought I'd been looking straight ahead, but at some point my head had turned; I looked toward the sound of the door and murmured a small, "Have a good day." That tiny voice must have reached her ears with perfect clarity, because a mischievous little hehe of laughter came back, and then the door clunked shut.
"..."
My position had changed. Maybe it had been ordered along with the bed — I was arranged in something like a ski-jump pose. Hands and feet shoved back and bound to a steel-hard bar: a strange posture, but one that made a kind of sense.
A bridge pose, you could call it. I worried whether it would still be bearable after a long stretch of time. Whenever I thought about the muscles along my lower back and shoulder blades being contracted enough that a cramp might seize me again, my heart would start to pound.
Inha had given me permission to lie on my side, so I did. Between my ankles was an iron bar similar to the one that had bound me a few days earlier, and with my wrists still connected behind me to that bar in a yoga-like position, rolling onto my side made me think it would be hard to roll back.
So I grunted and struggled and barely managed to sit up again.
"...Unnie?"
No answer came.
"...Uh, Unnie...?"
Still nothing. If an answer had come just then, that would have been startling in its own right.
"......Senior?"
I said it and squeezed my eyes shut. Rubbing my ear and the side of my head against the wall, I worked off the blindfold that had been covering my eyes.
Nothing in front of me changed. There wasn't a single window in the room, so once the door was closed and the lights were off, you truly couldn't see a thing.
I opened my eyes again. Or — had I? With closed and open feeling perfectly identical, I couldn't even tell where my eyelids were.
"Hnn... she's gone."
Still, for what it was worth, today was the most comfortable day since I'd arrived here. I flopped onto the bed and looked up (gravity was how I knew the direction I was facing was up) and saw the fluorescent light still holding a faint residual glow.
Right — there was the proof I was looking upward, too. That said, falling asleep in this position would absolutely give me a cramp, so I rolled onto my side and buried my face in the blanket.
It smelled like my own skin. Whether I'd been dropped into someone else's body or simply fallen into this world one day the way you summon an NPC, I couldn't say — but thanks to that, I could smell myself.
A small but certain ability. As long as your body didn't reek of rotting fish, a person normally couldn't smell their own scent.
The blanket was soft and clean. Maybe it was from being pickled in the internet, but this silence that left my ears ringing felt awkward. So I made a pointless aah sound, listened to it with my own ears, and reminded myself that my hearing was still normal.
Today was Tuesday. Since the kidnapping — well, had it been past midnight when I drank that alcohol? If I counted from being taken on Friday, four days had passed. I'd been absent without leave from work Monday through today — two days — so surely a call or something would have come in.
I didn't have my phone, so there was no way to check.
"Ah. Aah."
My ears felt so stuffed that I made the sound with my mouth again and let my head, which had been floating in the air, drop onto the pillow with a soft thud.
Opening my eyes showed me nothing, and the only sounds were my own voice and my heartbeat, so the only thing left to do was daydream.
"Aah. Aaaah."
Honestly, I was bored. Even at training camp I'd never gone this long without doing anything.
Of course, it was a pleasant kind of boredom. At least it didn't hurt. If this had been like yesterday or the day before — with a dildo still inside me, or that bizarre toe device clamped on — I might genuinely have bitten through my own tongue.
"Aah...?"
The sound seemed to echo a little. Had I misheard?
Feeling that something was off, I wriggled my way up to the head of the bed and leaned my body against it. Only after finding a halfway decent position did my body ease a little — and then, with nothing in particular to do, I just sat there blankly.
On and on.
"Ah, well... I'm not really sure..."
"Is that so? No, I mean — it's not that we don't know, but... you should at least say something before you quit, right?"
A coworker slurped their coffee. The fact that Heeyeon had been silently absent without leave for a second day had already spread through several teams. She was more well-known than I'd expected.
Yeah — someone with that face who came in every day and worked with a blank expression was bound to be famous. Even if she wasn't famous among people as a group, everyone had almost certainly taken her in with their eyes at least once, privately.
Coming in every single day, wandering around with a dead expression hidden behind a blank face, printing things out, attaching receipts, still somehow producing the designs assigned to her — and never exchanging a single word with anyone.
"It's not like this is school or a cram academy. Is she trying to skip out on her severance too?"
"Mmm..."
"Hasn't it been over a year? Or has it?"
"Ah, Inha — you talked with her the most, didn't you? You don't know anything?"
Among the people trading theories about Heeyeon, I gave the spoon I'd been eating with a little shake and opened my mouth.
"Well, actually..."
"Oh my, so there is something."
Why was everyone so interested in other people's business? They could just forget and live their lives. Still, it wasn't as if I had no excuse prepared.
I picked up the phone that had been lying face-down on the table and opened social media. I went into the Heeyeon account I'd thrown together in a hurry, tapped the pre-saved Instagram story, and turned the screen around.
"Looks like she... went on a trip."
"Wow, for real?"
"She posted this too? Wait — you knew you were friends on there?"
"Come on, what's 'friends.' It's mutual follows. Mutual follows."
"Ahaha... right..."
The oldest person at the table shoved food into their mouth and started talking with the entire contents still visible. Disgusting.
"Hey. Just eat, will you. Stop going on and on about it. Inha, don't go talking about this elsewhere either. It'll get annoying."
"Ah... yes. Understood."
At that single line, everyone who'd been chattering shut their mouths, read the room, and picked up their chopsticks or forks to poke at the food in front of them.