Unrequited Love Channel (Part 1) — BSS
"Thanks again for today, Mingi! I feel so bad always taking and never giving anything back. Let me buy you a meal sometime, at least!"
Yurim said it with a smile as bright as the weather.
A meal was not what Mingi wanted. Not even close. But he understood — with the kind of clarity that lives in the gut, not the head — that the moment he said what he actually wanted, this arrangement would end. So he answered the way a friend was supposed to.
"I didn't do much. But if you're buying, I'll take you up on it."
"That's more like it! I keep putting you out, so at least let me do that much. I'll take you somewhere expensive. You know I'm loaded, right?"
"...Yeah. I know."
"Once my date with him is over, I'll come back and suck your cock while I tell you every last detail about how it went. You're the only one I give the full recap to, so consider yourself honored!"
His heart seemed to creak in his chest, like something poorly fitted and bearing too much weight. How could anyone wear a face that innocent while carving a person apart? He knew that innocence was a performance. He still couldn't bring himself to call her on it. So he changed the subject, doing his best to sound like none of it had touched him.
"Shouldn't you get going? All that creampie I just gave you is going to start running out."
"Oh, please. Don't worry about that. Your cum is seriously viscous — it doesn't leak out easy. It just clings to my womb and camps out in there. I swear the owner of my uterus isn't me, it's your load."
Yurim laughed and patted her belly, then pointed between her legs as well, as if that ought to put him at ease.
"And look at this. That vibe you bought me as a gift is plugging my pussy so tight! Unless a whole lot of time goes by, your cum isn't getting out of my womb anytime soon. So seriously — nothing to worry about."
It was almost funny. Even here, in a situation this bleak, the knowledge that his gift was being put to good use by Yurim tugged the corner of his mouth upward.
"Ahem. Anyway. Thank you. Really. Who else but a friend as good as you would pump a girl full of cum just because she said she was going on a date? I really lucked out in the friend department."
With that, Yurim left. To go meet a man who was not Mingi.
He'd stood in this doorway more times than he could count. He ought to have been used to it by now. And still, watching the receding back of the pussy he was in love with made his chest go cold.
"...I need to let this go."
Easy words to say. But a person's heart did not move just because you told it to.
Seven years of unrequited love. Mingi knew he was nothing more than a tool being used by the girl he loved, and he still could not put the feeling down. Unable to choose the only real solution — giving up on her — he did what a man with a toothache does when he already knows the painkiller will not fix the tooth. He posted on the community, hoping someone out there would put a hand on the bruise.
He was alone right now. But online, there were any number of people suffering the same way he was.
Written out like that, it was a bleaker story than he'd realized. Self-pity surged up so hard he could have cried. It was the kind of pathetic that should have earned him nothing but mockery — but not on this channel. Anyone who found their way onto the Unrequited Love Channel had pain of their own.
They'd all been through something like it, and the empathy that came back was genuine. And among them, there were users who delivered a rebuke sharp enough to draw blood, offered from the heart.
Mingi read the comment and smiled a bitter little smile. Yurim was using him? Of course he knew that. He'd known it for a long time.
Yurim was not some specially innocent girl. She had figured out a long time ago that Mingi had feelings for her. She pretended not to notice anyway. That was how she got to keep using him so conveniently. Mingi knew all of that, and he still let her lead him around by the nose.
There was no hope for him.
Posts lamenting what a sucker he was. Posts that cut him down to size. Posts that simply understood. Posts dumping stories of the same thing happening to someone else. The bait Mingi had thrown out brought the channel regulars swarming, dumping write-ups all over the board. And among them, one post snagged in his eye and would not let go.
On the surface the story was told calmly, almost flat. Underneath it, Mingi felt a venom so thick he could barely draw breath. Filming a gift for the man the woman you love is dating. That was already well past anything a normal person would do. That was the territory of madness.
Platonic love had caught fire as a trend lately, and its rarity — and some of its prestige — had thinned a little because of it. Even so, nobody doubted the nobility of that kind of love, or how tightly it bound two people together. To wedge yourself between a couple like that and serve as their dildo?
It was not easy. It was really, truly not easy.
Mingi was not the only one who thought so. The comments under that post came close to flooding the thread.
He hadn't been looking for anything in particular. Even so, the thread he'd started brought him more peace of mind than he'd expected.
"Man. There are people who've had it even worse than me."
And those people had pulled themselves together and gone on living their lives, hadn't they? So maybe he could stand to live a little more positively too.
People who had never seen each other's faces, who didn't even know each other's names, quietly doing each other's lives a kind of good. Wasn't that the whole point of a community?
"...Huh? What's this post? Ragebait?"
...Not that you could ignore the other side of it — the time wasted, the life leaking away into a screen.
As if something had taken his hand, Mingi tapped the next post. Even a broken heart over a crush deserved a proper binge of the channel's best-of first.