Exposed
It had been about a month since I got caught skipping my part-time shift to go fool around and ran straight into the boss at the event. Funny enough, I still hadn’t been fired. Whether they simply couldn’t find a replacement or my uncle had asked him not to cut me loose, I wasn’t sure. The important thing was that I kept showing up to work in this strange limbo where I had no idea when the axe might fall. Surprisingly, no one except the boss even knew I was on thin ice. As one day became a week and the weeks piled up into nearly a month, I’d reached the point of wondering if maybe I wasn’t getting fired after all. …I’d been so certain I would be that I’d already bought a camera and all the equipment. But a part-timer can’t exactly walk up to the boss and ask, “So when are you firing me?” If I wasn’t getting fired, I wanted to keep the job. My uncle and the boss were close, so there was no risk of power harassment. The trainers who kept trying to lure me out for meals could be shut down at the boss’s discretion. The gym was free once my shift ended. There wasn’t a better part-time gig out there. Besides, if I quit on my own I had no idea what excuse I’d give my uncle.
“Haaaa…”
I let out a heavy sigh while staring at the fully set-up computer. If I don’t get fired, can I even start streaming? If it flops I can just quit, but if it takes off they’ll dig up every last bit of my personal information. A stalker following me all the way to the gym would be a nightmare. There were already hordes of weirdos latching onto my tweets.
In the end I couldn’t bring myself to go live today either. Caught in the hollow feeling of having wasted money, I opened the internet. What should I do today to kill time in the most meaningless way possible? The only cure for this shitty mood was the usual, so I slipped into my voyeur account and began digging through all sorts of filthy content.
For some reason I wasn’t in the mood for male-on-male today, so I went looking for female getting fucked by male instead. I’d originally planned to stick to 2D, but nothing decent caught my eye so I switched to 3D and stumbled across something unexpectedly incredible.
“…Wow.”
A GIF of a black-haired woman with an insane body getting relentlessly pounded by a man with an equally ridiculous physique. It was only a few seconds long, yet the way her flesh trembled wildly stirred my lust like nothing else. I never imagined such a precious clip would be hiding in such a shabby corner of the net. Like a bee drawn to honey, I drifted into the account, mesmerized, to see if there were any other side dishes.
“Ugh, what the hell…”
My expectations had swollen too high; the disappointment hit just as hard. Everything else was still images. The bodies were all incredible, but most of the focus was on the woman. Of course I didn’t care which side it was, but I’d liked the man in that earlier GIF more. Tall, broad-shouldered, muscular without being excessive. Among everyone I’d seen in real life, no one except the boss had a body that perfect. As for the woman… unless it was around my level, I’d never seen anyone that beautiful.
“…Hm?”
A strange sense of déjà vu hit me, so I scrolled back through the GIF and photos I’d passed. Black hair. Painfully fair skin. A tattoo right below the navel. …The man’s flawless shoulders. Every detail looked different from what I remembered. Yet that obscene room kept flashing through my mind.
“…Ugh.”
…There’s no way. It had to be my imagination running wild because of that weird article that came out about me and the boss. Of course the boss was probably sleeping with both the madam and Hinami, but not with me, right? And even if he were, there was no chance they would secretly upload something like that to Twitter. Unless she was insane, why would I do something that would destroy my own life?
That thought instantly cooled the heat that had risen inside me. Sensing I was wet, I stroked my pounding heart and moved on to something more wholesome.
Yeah. I’d worked out hard yesterday and passed out from exhaustion, so I might as well catch up on the community’s popular posts from the last day.
Oh, “Certain YouTuber’s boyfriend barges in during live stream.” Now that was a stimulating enough title to blow away my gloomy mood completely.
Clicking the interesting-looking title with the feeling of chewing gum, I naturally couldn’t stop myself from blurting out a stupid sound.
“Huh?”
…It was the boss and the madam. It wasn’t that I was shocked an acquaintance had suddenly appeared online. They’d been a frequent topic lately anyway. What actually flustered me was that the GIF attached to the post showed a body that looked exactly like the man from the tweet I’d seen earlier.
Ah, of course the woman was different. Different hair color. Slightly larger breasts. But no matter how many times I looked, the man was identical to the one in the previous GIF. The only difference was that his shoulders were covered in this one.
I carefully recalled the boss I’d seen at the gym. …He often wore sleeveless shirts, and I was pretty sure he’d been wearing one today too. The memory was hazy, but there had definitely been a scar on his shoulder. It was quite large, so it had stuck in my mind. But that scar wasn’t in the GIF I’d seen earlier. If not for that, I would have been completely certain.
Seized by the feeling that I had learned something I should never have known, I left the people happily arguing in the comments and hurried back to the tweet. I downloaded one of the photos and tried to zoom in as far as possible on the man’s shoulder to check.
…But the quality wasn’t good enough to tell. If I had professional knowledge in this area I might have been able to distinguish whether the blurred, mashed-looking skin on the shoulder was natural or edited. I simply didn’t have the expertise.
Even so, I couldn’t get rid of the dirty lump left in my chest. No matter how I looked at it, that was the boss’s body. It looked far more impressive in real life than in photos. It didn’t seem likely there were many people in this country with both that physique and such clean skin. And… if it was the boss, I could believe he might actually do something like this.
He had answered the phone in the middle of sex before, after all. Of course that was because I had asked him to call after Seo Jia, whom I barely knew at the time, told me to, but still….
…Jia? When I thought about it, at that time it had been Seo Jia—who I didn’t know well yet—who asked me to call the boss for her….
“….”
The moment that occurred to me, every event so far connected like a single thread. I could only cover my mouth and carefully send a DM to that account.
If I had noticed, someone else might notice too.
My heart dropped with a thud. How did they know? There wasn’t only one muscular man in the world. How on earth had they figured out that the man in the photo was him?
“….”
I placed a hand over my pounding heart and hurriedly moved to delete the account, but then the post I’d seen earlier flashed through my mind and my fingers stopped.
…Yesterday they were doing some strange things with my sister. Maybe they were planning to mess with me too. A clearly suspicious throwaway account. An anonymous stranger asking about the not-particularly-famous Kang Juhyuk. No matter how I thought about it, it seemed perfectly reasonable that the person behind it was Kang Juhyuk himself.
If I panicked and deleted the account, he would definitely use that as an excuse to demand something horrible. Since you deleted it on your own, now I’ll upload whatever I want. Or, seeing how anxious you are, this time I’ll put a wig on you and film something new so it won’t get discovered.
The more I suspected him, the more plausible it felt. I calmed my now-docile heart and, filled with irritation instead, fiddled with my phone.
But this man, as if he wanted to toy with me as much as possible, was mocking me by even bringing up the shoulder scar.
…There was no way he would have left it. I had checked everything. Did he think I’d fall for such an obvious bluff? It was so transparent I almost laughed. I no longer felt the need to reply, so I tossed my phone onto the bed and headed for the shower.
Ha, as if I’d fall for it again. The nightmare from that day should have ended that day. Why dig it up?
“…?”
While I was standing under the water for a long time, the front door opened with a cheerful ding-dong.
…Ha, he’s barging in now just because I didn’t reply?
Feeling nothing but contempt for him, I wrapped a large towel around myself and burst out of the bathroom, locking the front door first. Then I picked up the phone I’d left on the bed to see what nonsense he had been spouting in the DMs.
“…?”
Strangely, after my last reply there were no new messages at all. What? Did he really come running just because of that little exchange? I was sure he’d shown up because I stopped replying….
“Hey. Seo Jia.”
At that moment my door rattled violently, then his voice came through with heavy bangs. His tone was thick with rage. There’s a limit to turning the tables. He was the one who pulled the strange stunt first, yet here he was barging in and throwing a tantrum. I was about to snap at him when—
…Hearing what he said, my head froze. I couldn’t process the situation at all.
I sent a DM? Me? To him?
…Well, I had sent one. Because he sent one first. But nothing he was saying matched up….
Yet seeing how seriously furious he sounded as he continued interrogating me, I had no choice but to realize I had been thinking wrong from the very beginning.
…What if the person who sent the DM wasn’t Kang Juhyuk? What if they had genuinely noticed the man in the photo was him and asked me about it? Then… maybe that person had also sent a DM to Kang Juhyuk. Asking if the man in the video was him. If he had received the exact same DM I had, who would he suspect?
“…It wasn’t me.”
“….”
Because of that horrifying possibility, my heart sank. Still wrapped in nothing but the towel, I flung the door open.
Kang Juhyuk, standing in front of the door in outdoor clothes rather than his usual comfortable attire, looked startled by my appearance. Then his eyes fell on my phone and his mouth clamped shut.
…After stroking the back of his neck for a moment, he took out his own phone and showed me the DM that had arrived with the exact same content as mine.
“…What is this.”
“I don’t know… either.”
We had been found out. By someone who knew him, even if we didn’t know who it was.