A Transgression
Damn it. The second the words left my mouth, I regretted them. No—regret wasn't even the right word. They'd just slipped out before I could stop them. Why had I said that?
Silence hung in the air. Junhyuk's expression looked indifferent, and somehow that made it all the more unsettling.
Thinking it over, it wasn't even an answer that should have raised suspicion... but I've always been the type to picture the worst-case scenario first.
"...Yeah? Schools don't really crack down on dyed hair these days, huh?"
"Yeah. I-it, it seemed that way!"
With that, Junhyuk handed the cardigan back to me. Then he just started sipping the strawberry smoothie sitting on the table.
He'd let it go. Without a shred of suspicion.
It wasn't even that big a deal, but once it passed without incident I felt the strength drain right out of my body.
Why had I even lied? My head was already such a mess I couldn't begin to figure it out.
On a rare date with my boyfriend, I'd been thinking about another guy, scaring myself, then sighing in relief all on my own. What was I even doing?
Looking at Junhyuk's harmless face, a wave of self-loathing washed over me.
Please. Just get a grip and live like a normal person.
The clumsy date, cobbled together on the fly, stretched on until evening.
I'd been so out of it that the hours seemed to fly by, but once I got home and saw the clock pointing at ten p.m., the exhaustion started to hit.
The place I'd gotten with streaming money plus my parents' support.
Well—calling it a studio apartment wasn't quite right. It was an actual apartment. Anyway.
Having a well-equipped home with a decent amount of space usually made me feel good just walking around it, but today was a little different.
No—thinking about it, I'd felt this way every time I looked at the apartment these past few days.
The pile of dishes in the sink. Disposable containers from delivery food dumped carelessly on the table.
Stale air from never cracking a window, dust gathering in clumps here and there.
The entryway light cutting through the dark apartment seemed to steal away what little energy I had left.
When Junhyuk used to come over, we ate meals I cooked myself rather than delivery. I actually liked cooking, and I liked that my boyfriend enjoyed eating what I made. Junhyuk liked my cooking too, of course.
The dishes that piled up after cooking for two had never been a problem. That much barely even counted as labor, and it was always the first thing I handled when I did housework.
But after the fight with Junhyuk, that changed.
Looking at the sink was stressful.
Every time I saw that pile, I felt like I was the only one putting in the work.
I'd grown up hearing that in a relationship, a woman has to yield a lot to a man, and I really had given Junhyuk a great deal—yielded a great deal.
And that yielding often bled into streaming, too. Most of my days off the air had something to do with Junhyuk.
And yet he'd gotten angry at me over a stream shoot. How much further was I supposed to back down? After all the time we'd spent together, shouldn't he respect me more?
And around that point, the current of my thoughts would start to reverse.
Was I blaming society for a couple's fight? Was I tallying things up like we were trading goods? Hadn't Junhyuk yielded things for me, too?
Had studying so much twisted my personality? Was I being pathetic, sulking alone over something this small?
After running through that whole chain of thought, I wouldn't want to do the dishes or cook or anything at all, and I'd end up lying in bed staring at a delivery app.
Yesterday, after walking Yuhan home, I'd come back without thinking much of it—so why did I feel this drained today, the way I had then?
I'd known myself for twenty-three years and I still couldn't make sense of what was going on inside.
Well. I couldn't stay like this forever. Time to get back to normal.
I turned on every light in the apartment, opened every window that would open, and went to the sink. I was pulling on the rubber gloves when I paused.
I should put something on so the repetitive work wouldn't get boring.
With a rubber glove already on my left hand, I thought for a moment—and something snagged.
I'd never actually watched Yuhan's stream properly. Not even once.
Honestly... and then I'd gone and decided on my own that he was a bad person. That still left a bitter taste, even now.
I turned up my phone volume so it wouldn't get drowned out by the water and opened Geum Taeyang's channel on TwizyTV.
Yuhan was in the middle of a game stream. Even looking at it again, that was a pretty solid climb for a beginner streamer.
The stream growing this fast on such simple content—was it because his character was so distinct?
I started scrubbing a dish with the sponge, and then I heard something weird.
"Pfft—!!"
Holy crap! I almost dropped the plate! What on earth was that?
Good lord. Was this even the Seong Yuhan I knew?
The guy with that easygoing, almost feminine way of talking and that refreshingly open personality?
And why was he trading insults with his viewers in the first place?
The smaller the stream, the more you pamper your viewers, don't you?
I set down the plate I'd nearly dropped and looked at my phone. Behind the tiny game window in the corner, the big cam feed showed Yuhan sitting with a pillow on his knees, in a posture that looked almost demure, delivering filthy language in a gentle, honeyed voice.
And the chat...
What was this.
A completely different atmosphere from my own stream. I knew chat culture varied from channel to channel, but I'd never seen a gap this extreme.
And weren't comments like that lawsuit material? Your average male cam streamer would have a mental breakdown over a single chat that explicit.
Unable to make sense of any of it, I peeled the rubber glove off my right hand and typed.
What... why was I getting cursed out? I was old enough that hate comments barely registered, so it was more confusion than hurt.
I'd always thought I was pretty good at reading a room. This time, I genuinely had no idea.
Was this what they called a culture gap? It barely even qualified as culture.
Still reeling from that bizarre shock, I finished the rest of the dishes and started picking up the trash scattered around the apartment—and that was when I felt it. Something damp and hungry, stirring up from somewhere deep inside me, trying to surface.
No. Maybe it had already surfaced.
I picked up my phone again and went back into Yuhan's live stream.
Same broadcast. Same chats. Nothing had changed.
...Even if I tossed in a comment or two like that, it would just vanish into that suspiciously lively chat. Nobody would ever know it was me.
This was an account I'd made separately for watching other people's streams, so I had a decent layer of anonymity, too.
And Yuhan didn't exactly look like he was trying all that hard to shut those comments down.
...Ugh. You've finally lost it, Ari. What are you even thinking? Nobody will know, so let's sexually harass someone in their chat?
I must have been more stressed lately than I thought.
I'd always believed I'd lived a moral life. Turns out there was filth in me I didn't even know about.
Mmm... still, though... well...
I mean, if you looked at it a certain way, Yuhan had contributed to my stress, hadn't he? I'd already concluded that I was the one in the wrong first, but even so!
And I'd never said a single nasty thing on the internet in my entire life. Just once. Just once would be fine, wouldn't it?
It would be buried as something only I would ever know. Of course it would.
Obviously that was nonsense. I knew that better than anyone. But my mind felt just unhinged enough that knowing it wasn't enough to make me stop.
My fingers moved on their own. No—my body was just doing what it was told. This was the territory they called instinct, wasn't it?
And so I sent a single line of chat.
I don't remember what I typed.
The one thing I do remember is that after I hit send, a thrill so sharp it was almost frightening raced through my entire body.
The pleasure of a single transgression had blown past anything I could have imagined.
And.
The moment I realized I would never, ever forget that pleasure—my body was already sending the second message.
I couldn't stop. Not until one in the morning.