The Secret Shots (3)
The Seo Jia I knew would never do something like this. She was so upright it bordered on annoying, a narcissist who didn’t spare a single glance for anyone else. She always talked about repaying her fans’ love, but she was never the type to feel burdened by other people’s attention. Seeing a girl like that suddenly uploading these kinds of photos in secret left me beyond flustered—it was downright absurd.
“...Why is she acting like this all of a sudden?”
“I don’t know either. I figure it’s probably stress.”
At first I naturally assumed Oppa had ordered her to do it, but the tone of his answer made it sound like she had done it on her own. Would you call this exhibitionism…? Saying it out loud felt off, though—she wasn’t fully naked. She had erased her face, and the photos only emphasized the curves of her body. On top of that they were slightly out of focus, so they weren’t even particularly erotic. It was simply her body that was sexy.
“Did you ask Jia about it?”
“After the article broke, I haven’t gone within a meter of her. I found it by chance too. I sent her a DM and she told me to mind my own business, so I couldn’t say anything else.”
“I see…”
Honestly, when I saw the tweet I felt it was pretty dangerous. Of course ordinary people would never notice, but for anyone close to her—like me or Oppa—the photos were enough to make us flinch. Of course, since Jia still hadn’t revealed where she lived, the chance of fans finding out was nearly zero. Still, she had already suffered from baseless rumors recently, so I couldn’t help worrying about what would happen if they caught onto something similar.
…Not that I was in any position to talk, sneaking over to Oppa’s house at this hour.
“…What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she’ll stop on her own eventually. …She probably won’t show her breasts anyway.”
“Hmm… you think so?”
“If I say something unnecessary and it stresses her out until she snaps, that causes problems for me too. …And another thought occurs to me. If I comment on this, it gives her the right to comment on us, so it feels like she might be doing it on purpose.”
As Oppa said, we had no right to stop Jia from relieving her stress with her own body. Uploading sexy photos to Twitter after erasing anything that could reveal her identity, or filming sexy videos packed with identifying details for private collection—the degree of deviance wasn’t all that different. If anything, what we were doing was far more dangerous. No matter how widely Jia’s photos spread online, it wouldn’t cause her any real trouble, but the moment our videos leaked we would be socially dead. I didn’t know about Oppa, but I would never be able to live in Korea again.
“Anyway… okay. …I’ll casually ask her about it later.”
“Yeah. And while you’re at it, reconcile if you can.”
“She has to be the one to reconcile before I accept it. …If she just acknowledges my relationship with you, I’m willing to overlook anything she does.”
“…Do whatever you want. It feels awkward for me to butt in on whatever emotional fight you two are having.”
But between me—who had done what I did because I loved Oppa so much—and Jia—who was simply acting out because of stress—there was one huge wall. I wouldn’t do it if Oppa told me not to, but Jia was not the type to listen no matter who tried to stop her. I didn’t even understand why she was doing it in the first place, so how could I possibly stop her? A girl with that much money should have had more than enough ways to relieve stress, so why on earth had she chosen to secretly upload sexy photos? Was she afraid eating would make her gain weight? Was she worried singing would damage her throat? Or why not just date someone? If not that, if it was simply pent-up sexual frustration, she could just masturbate. I couldn’t be satisfied with that anymore now that I knew Oppa, but she…
Ah.
…After trying a cock in her mouth once, maybe nothing else satisfied her anymore? I had never searched every corner of Jia’s house, but of course any woman would masturbate and probably owned a toy or two.
“Anyway… well. Let’s go into the room. It’d be bad to wake her, so we’ll use the soundproof booth.”
“Yes.”
Since I had also lost all interest in toys after tasting Oppa, my guess that Jia had started deviating for similar reasons seemed fairly plausible. It made even more sense that she wasn’t meeting any men. The excuse that she was too rigid no longer worked, but the excuse that she couldn’t meet men because of Oppa was still perfectly usable. In reality, after seeing Oppa’s body other men just looked like anchovies and she felt no sexual attraction, but if I thought about it from Jia’s perspective there were plenty of excuses she could use. The excuse that if she met another man, Oppa would get angry and rape her. It was so plausible it actually sounded realistic. So she was relieving her built-up sexual desire by uploading sexy photos to Twitter. And on top of that she was secretly a coward, so she couldn’t bring herself to fully expose her breasts.
“Should I take my clothes off? …Or keep them on?”
“…First turn on the light.”
Unlike Jia, I had already practically taken my shirt all the way off. I switched on the softly glowing stand lamp and sat obediently on the bed, waiting for Oppa.
…If she would just accept it the way I had, things would be so much easier for her. The pleasure was far more intense than the thrill of possibly being caught. It seemed so pitiful that she didn’t know the electric feeling you get when you’re held by the person you like. Imagining her touching her clit alone at home made her look truly miserable. Well, until yesterday that had been me too.
“Stay still.”
“Yes.”
Oppa closed the soundproof booth door and climbed onto the bed where the soft lighting fell. He pushed aside my shirt with all its buttons undone and ran his fingers over my shoulder. Feeling the goosebumps rise instantly, he let out a small laugh, then traced his index finger past my collarbone and down between my breasts before unclasping my bra with a snap. As the front hook sprang open and the fabric dangled, Oppa swept the annoying scrap of cloth behind my back. This time he circled his finger around my nipple and gently laid me down on the pillow.
“…Don’t you think this is dangerous?”
“Huh? Me?”
“Coming here. Doing these things with me. All of it.”
“I do think about it…”
“Which means you don’t. …You don’t honestly believe it’s that dangerous.”
While I was slowly melting under Oppa’s touch—something I hadn’t felt in a long time—his deep voice against my eardrum let me briefly escape the sticky atmosphere. What we were doing here right now was extremely dangerous. When I thought about what I had done to shake off that reporter, it was something I absolutely shouldn’t have forgotten.
“Th-that… it can’t be helped. …It’s been so long since I saw you, and I’m a little drunk.”
“I feel the same. …Still, you have a lot more to lose, so I’m at least trying to keep my head on straight.”
“For someone trying to keep his head on straight, you don’t seem very hesitant…?”
“That can’t be helped. Whether we do it or not, people’s opinions won’t change, right?”
He wasn’t wrong. Whether I secretly came to Oppa’s house, spent the night innocently, played games, and left. Or rolled around on the bed with him like this. …Or did every kind of play imaginable and even recorded it. From the outside, no one could ever tell the difference.
“That’s why I was worried when she started acting crazy earlier. …If that gets discovered, what we’ve done together stops being just a rumor.”
“Come on, what does Jia doing that have to do with me…”
“It has everything to do with it. Your name came out after the article too.”
“But that never became a big issue, did it?”
“Only in places where they’d get sued for talking carelessly. …In anonymous spaces they were going wild with it. Do you know how many times the rumor that you and Seo Jia are actually lesbians who lure well-built men into threesomes has come up?”
What Oppa was saying was the same kind of nonsense. The moment Jia’s secret account doing something close to sex tweets got discovered, those baseless rumors would suddenly gain credibility. The logic would be that since she was already a dirty slut, what wouldn’t she do? …And when you thought about it, it wasn’t even nonsense. We had sucked the same cock on the same bed before. We hadn’t done any lesbian play, though.
“That’s why I’m so fucking anxious. The reason I couldn’t come see you is similar. …Honestly, just what we’ve done is already dangerous, but I feel like even worse rumors are going to spread.”
“What kind of rumors?”
“Well. That you’re a total slut. That you got pregnant and had an abortion. That you do drugs and have orgies… Things like that could easily spread as real nonsense, right? Once a scandal breaks, quite a few people will believe it.”
“…As long as you believe in me, I don’t really care.”
“If you really don’t care, do you want to make it public right now? …No need to call a reporter—just upload any video we have to a porn site and it’ll spread on its own.”
“Are you joking?”
“Of course it’s a joke. You think I’d be serious?”
That was why I could more or less understand the anxiety in Oppa’s heart even as he held me. I was standing on thin ice, and he was worried I might fall through at any moment. …He had been so fearless when he first touched me.
I placed my hand on Oppa’s cheek—the same man who was now afraid now that he had me—and whispered softly into his ear.
“…It’s okay even if it’s not a joke.”
“Hey.”
“What? I’d get some finger-pointing and it would be hard to live proudly in Korea… But that’s the end of it, right? I have plenty of money anyway. Did you plan to throw me away if I quit being an idol?”
“That’s not it.”
“Then that’s enough. …You don’t have to worry so much. Jia’s probably just doing it because she’s irritated, and I know better than anyone that she’s a coward. She won’t do anything more dangerous.”
“…Yeah.”
“You’re so much cooler when you just do it instead of hesitating, so stop worrying. …If you weren’t that kind of man in the first place, I wouldn’t have fallen for you.”
Bringing back the look in Oppa’s eyes that I had fallen for, I gazed into those pupils mixed with tenderness and ferocity. I closed my eyes tightly and waited for him to devour me savagely. …If we weren’t inside the soundproof booth, I would have wanted him to fuck me so loudly the paparazzi getting off work right about now would hear every vulgar second of it.
I was fed up.
Even watching them pour out every kind of evaluation and sexual harassment over nothing but body photos had stopped being fun. If anything, the insults seemed to have increased. Why were there so many bastards cursing at me to show my tits already? What was so great about bumpy nipples that weren’t even that pretty?
“Ha…”
Everything felt so pathetic that I deleted the entire account. That was the end. Every act of deviance I had committed would sink beneath the water and drift through the ocean like trash. Feeling the thrill of secretly throwing garbage on the ground while walking spread through my whole body, I closed Twitter, searched my own name on the internet, and stared at the posts with a stiff expression.
Sexual harassment comments that no longer even registered as malicious comments. That my breasts are big, that they want to touch them. This much no longer stirred any emotion. The vulgar words I had heard over the past few weeks had simply been too varied. Instead, I copied that ridiculous comment, tightly grabbed my own breast over my clothes, and took a selfie where my face wasn’t visible.
“…”
…Should I upload this and then delete it?
The thought suddenly occurred to me, so I randomly typed in an ID, created another account, and uploaded the photo of me tightly squeezing ‘Seo Jia’s breasts’—the very thing all those men wanted so badly. Unfortunately, this time no one discovered the photo; it was simply buried in the flood of information.
…See? In the end, no one is actually interested in me.