Dopamine (8)
It was still a little early for dinner, the afternoon light lingering outside. I lay in bed, watching Haeun as she moved around in comfortable underwear, drying her hair. My eyelids kept drooping.
“Are you sleeping?”
“Huh? No. I’m not sleeping, I’m not.”
“You must already be sleepy. What kind of exhausting shit did you pull the day before yesterday?”
“I said I’m not sleeping.”
She caught me, so I had to endure her playful, mocking tone. Truth was, we hadn’t gone at it enough times to be that worn out. We’d simply taken our time and enjoyed it. The feeling washing over me now wasn’t exactly fatigue. If I had to name it…
“If you’re tired, just sleep. I’m feeling pretty lazy myself.”
Like Haeun said, lazy was the better word. Taking a break from work in the middle of the week, lying on a soft, fluffy bed—there was nothing more comfortable than wasting time like this.
I pulled her into my arms as she finished drying her hair and slipped under the covers, savoring that lazy haze with my entire body. The silky bed and blanket. The woman’s supple skin. The fragrant scent of body wash. A bed with not a single uncomfortable element.
“It’s really quiet right now.”
“We don’t have anything on.”
On the bed where nothing could get in the way, I held her lightly and listened to the steady thump of her heartbeat. Nothing else could be heard except that regular, rhythmic pounding—neither too slow nor too fast.
Feeling the vibration of released tension spread through me, I hugged her tighter and buried my nose in her slightly damp hair, inhaling.
“…Aren’t you sniffing a little too obviously?”
“You just washed. So what?”
I pressed my face to the crown of her head, filling my lungs with the scent of her shampoo. She grumbled, then tucked her head against my neck and sniffed me in return. After a few curious inhales of a body odor I could barely detect myself, she let out a long breath, placed her hand on my chest, and began gently stroking as she spoke.
“…You really don’t smell much at all.”
“I wash several times a day. It’d be weird if I did smell.”
“Even so, it’s strangely faint.”
“East Asians just don’t have strong body odor.”
“Have you ever been with a Westerner?”
“I’ve met some. Just never slept with any.”
“Who did you meet?”
“The foreign players on the baseball team. After games, yeah… it was noticeable.”
In truth, if we counted mixed-race people as Westerners, I had slept with one, but I didn’t mention it. Honestly, until Hinami told me herself, I hadn’t even realized she was half-foreign. She didn’t smell at all.
Haeun seemed satisfied with my answer. She sniffed me a few more times before stopping, then slowly circled her hand across my chest. Eventually her thumb found my nipple and began teasing it with light, playful strokes.
“What are you doing?”
“What you always do to me.”
“I don’t tickle like that, though.”
“True. You do it like this, right?”
“Hey—that hurts.”
“Then why did you do it to me?”
“Because it was supposed to hurt… Ah. Hey, hey. Stop, stop.”
When I answered her prank with one of my own, she abandoned the tickling and started pinching me in earnest, tormenting me properly. I wasn’t about to just take it. I stretched the arm I’d been using as her pillow, wrapped it around her back, and tried to reach her chest.
But she was glued to my torso, constantly rubbing against me, making it surprisingly difficult to tease her in return.
“…Stop it. I literally just washed.”
“We went at it for hours and you’re already horny again?”
“Do I look like I wouldn’t be?”
“Seriously. Are you a middle-schooler? A high-schooler? How the hell did you hold back when you were in school?”
“Surrounded by dozens of buzz-cut guys doing nothing but exercise all day, sexual desire just disappears.”
“…The buzz-cut guy who clung to me didn’t seem like that at all.”
“That’s because it’s you. If I’d been in the same class as you, who knows.”
Still, stroking the head of a woman who clearly wanted praise and lifting her up a little wasn’t difficult at all.
…If I had known her back when we were students, would the future have turned out differently? I wasn’t sure. I had been a promising prospect myself, but she would have been a golden-spoon girl from an elite all-girls high school—someone who aced everything she touched.
A girl with that face and that body living off her little sister and struggling until she met me? That was the truly strange part. I hadn’t given her any amazing advice, yet she’d immediately succeeded as a YouTuber. It was obvious.
If she hadn’t developed that weird sexual purity complex because of the stalker incident in high school, she probably would have gone through boyfriends like tissue paper. Just like the anonymous, time-rich people who’d played with us during sex earlier had imagined.
“…If we’d been in the same class, would you have stalked me too?”
“I don’t do that kind of thing.”
“You stalked me after we met again. You even got me drunk.”
“That wasn’t stalking. That was flirting.”
“Then since you couldn’t get me drunk when we were young, how would you have flirted?”
“…I don’t know. Maybe get to know your face and name first, then contact you after I debuted as a pro and made it to the first team?”
“What if I already had a boyfriend?”
“That wouldn’t matter much, would it? Boyfriend or not. …Anyway, at that age, one of us would end up going to the military eventually, right?”
“Wow… So you were planning to fool around with a girl whose boyfriend was in the military?”
“Not fooling around. At that age, whether someone has a boyfriend or not doesn’t really mean anything. It was going to end anyway.”
Relationships destined to break apart didn’t hold any weight. Maybe that was why I never knew her in high school. Stories about who was pretty in which class or who was cute never reached my ears—because after graduation, they’d be people I’d never see again.
Even most of the baseball teammates I spent three grueling years with barely kept in touch. There was no reason to remember ordinary students walking completely different paths.
Looking back, it was probably a good thing I didn’t meet her during that time when even I thought I was an ugly, pathetic loser. The baseball club member who stalked her, or me back then—we’d have looked like identical lumps of takoyaki in her eyes, differing only slightly in height.
“…Saying it was going to break anyway is way too unromantic, don’t you think? By that logic, Hinami only graduated recently too.”
“She’s been in the industry a long time. It’s different. Her job leaves traces no matter who she meets.”
“Do you have some kind of fetish for women who’ve been around the block? Now that I think about it, you said you only dated older women before me. Maybe…”
“It’s not a fetish. …It’s just that if they’re too young, it pricks my conscience a little.”
“What are you even saying? You’ve done every filthy thing imaginable with a twenty-year-old.”
“No, that’s not what I—”
No matter what I added, I couldn’t rationalize it. There was no desire as irrational as sexual desire. You die if you don’t eat. You die if you don’t sleep. But you don’t die if you don’t have sex, right?
So why are so many people completely insane about it? Even acts unrelated to reproduction—masturbation, all kinds of simulated sex—or using condoms and birth control when they do have it. The reason… there was no need to explain it at length. It was thrilling. That was all.
Scientifically speaking, it made dopamine explode in the brain until you might as well be on drugs.
“No, my ass. …I saw how fucking excited you got last time when you did it with Hinami in school uniforms. You think I didn’t notice?”
“…I couldn’t do it in high school, so I’m allowed a few fantasies, aren’t I?”
“Fantasies? From where I’m standing, you would’ve liked it just as much even if you had done it back then.”
“….”
Because it gave the thrill of breaking established rules and stepping off the proper path.
…Maybe that was why I got even more excited when I held her. After all, my relationship with her was the result of me crossing every line and ruining her. The way she now chattered away in my arms, the way she skillfully seduced me—these were all products far removed from morality and common sense.
Was it human instinct to become more aroused the more immoral and depraved it became? Or was it simply my own taste?
“…I’m glad we didn’t meet in high school.”
“Why?”
“If we had, I probably would’ve been devoured by you and thrown away.”
“How much of a piece of garbage do you think I am?”
“It’s true, isn’t it? Barely human. You were mocking my fans earlier while getting insanely turned on.”
“You were too.”
“…Who made me that kind of woman?”
I couldn’t answer that part clearly. But to her question, I could respond with absolute certainty.
“I did.”
“…See? You’re a terrible bastard.”
The fact that I had turned Seo Haeun into this.
…And the fact that I was enormously satisfied by it.
“What do you want me to say? If you liked nice guys, I would’ve pretended to be one.”
“I do like nice guys. …But you’re the bad one here, so why are you blaming me?”
“Your body seems to like bad guys just fine.”
“Kang Juhyuk, from personality to profession, the only good thing about you is your body, isn’t it?”
“Is that so? Running a gym isn’t exactly a terrible job, is it?”
“It’s not a good one either. Not like being a doctor or a lawyer.”
“So you hate it?”
“…I don’t hate it or particularly like it. Whatever you do is whatever you do.”
“….”
“Why are you looking at me like that? Say something… Hey. Wait. I just washed…!”
Every time she looked at me with those affectionate eyes, it felt like my brain was melting. The woman who had once despised me so thoroughly now showed me affection, and the joy nearly drove me insane.
…As if I could ever quit this drug.
It was impossible to even imagine.
This is a drug. It feels like I’ve fallen completely into addiction.
All day long while resting, I did nothing but clutch my phone.
“….”
I didn’t laugh. I didn’t cry. I simply searched my own name, chewed every letter carefully, and forced them down my throat.
The ridiculous rumor had died down overnight, but even the few remaining embers were more than enough to keep me reading alone. Posts criticizing me. Posts praising me. Posts criticizing the critics. Posts criticizing the praisers.
A countless masquerade ball.
“Ha….”
…Not a single person attending that ball pleased me in the slightest.
Why was I watching this nauseating performance all day long? What kind of enjoyment was I hoping to get out of it?
Was it because I wanted to refute the people spouting complete nonsense? Because I wanted to praise the ones who were at least somewhat close to the truth?
…Neither.
No matter how many times I asked myself, there was only one answer.
“These idiots, seriously….”
…Because I wanted to laugh at them.
It was too funny watching kids who didn’t know the human being called Seo Jia at all chatter however they pleased. Refuting every single one of their words inside my head and satisfying my intellectual vanity felt far too enjoyable.
I couldn’t tear myself away from this debate club of fools. The bastards describing a twenty-year-old girl as if she were a cum-soaked whore were ridiculous. The ones treating a twenty-year-old girl like some pitiful, innocent child were equally ridiculous.
I’m not the person you think I am.
I’m just… a bitch with a rotten personality who enjoys looking down on others.
Tired of the way they panted over my tightly wrapped Instagram photos, I started secretly posting slightly more revealing shots on Twitter. Then I watched the reactions of men who got horny over something so trivial without even knowing who I was.
Without moving a single lip, I could mock them endlessly in my mind.
That’s the kind of woman Seo Yeeun is.