Not All Good Things Are Good
The sound of rushing water filled the air. Warm streams poured down with surprising force from the showerhead mounted on the wall.
“......”
“Seriously. I couldn’t even argue if someone called me a freak. Haah…”
Seo Jian sighed and washed her face, pushing up the bangs that clung to her forehead. She swept both palms over her entire face in one smooth motion.
The warm water started at her crown, tracing down her ears, along her chin, over her collarbone, gliding through her cleavage before reaching her navel and splashing diagonally onto the floor.
With her hands still covering her eyes, Jian gargled noisily.
“Ughhh… Ptooey.”
She spat it out immediately.
That’s life for you. Good things become memories the moment you share them with others, but bad things can’t be shared, so forgetting them takes a painfully long time.
…I did something incredibly stupid.
Just thinking about how she’d forced herself on Kim Hanbin at the reading room today made her want to crawl into a hole and disappear. It was humiliating. All that fuss over a few measly tens of thousands of won.
“I’m insane. Completely insane… Fuck.”
If she’d at least gotten some kind of result, it might have felt justified. But after all that ridiculous performance, she’d come away with nothing. Well, except for that mysterious thing called a Penalty.
Looking back now, she couldn’t believe she’d enthusiastically pushed to play a game that could clearly be dangerous.
“A penalty, huh…”
The problem was the penalty itself. The only explanation she’d gotten was some vague line about it being “assigned at an appropriate time.” She had no idea when it would trigger, how it would happen, or what kind of punishment it would be. Pure instinct told her it wouldn’t just pass by quietly. There had to be something. If she had succeeded in the mission, she wouldn’t be stressing over useless nonsense like this.
Shaking off the lingering regrets, Jian squeezed a generous amount of shampoo into her palm and worked it into a rich lather. Even though she was a woman now, her hair was still just a neat bob, so washing it wasn’t much trouble.
As usual, she massaged her scalp firmly, working the foam all the way through, then tilted her head under the showerhead to rinse it clean.
Next came her body. She squeezed body wash onto the shower ball two or three times and built up a thick foam. She started by rubbing it along her shoulders and down her arms. Then she lifted each arm to thoroughly clean her armpits. She washed her collarbone and neck, then moved to her chest—starting at the upper slopes without any particular self-consciousness, cleaning around her areolas and the soft crease beneath where skin met skin. Her navel, of course, and from there down along her groin all the way to her ankles. An utterly ordinary shower.
When she had first ended up in this body, she had cried during showers. Later, once she grew somewhat used to it, she had naturally felt curious about the new form. If anyone had been watching her shower through her eyes right now, she would have to count herself lucky that today wasn’t one of those days.
And it would have been even better if the shower had ended without incident, but…
Jian rinsed away the last of the foam and turned the valve shut. She wiped the fogged-up mirror with her palm until it squeaked clean.
Her naked body appeared clearly in the reflection. After staring at herself for a moment, she cupped her breasts in both hands, lifting them up and letting them drop. It was the sort of thing she could only do alone with the bathroom door closed.
Boing. Boing.
Then she squeezed them, kneading and rolling them in her palms, even brushing her nipples as if scratching an itch. The description sounded suggestive, but the feeling wasn’t erotic at all.
“…They’re uselessly big, seriously. So damn useless.”
Jian muttered under her breath, then grabbed a towel and carefully dried her wet hair before moving down to wipe every drop of moisture from her body. Once she was dry, it was time for underwear. Everything had felt awkward at first, but she had adapted to this part faster than expected.
She slipped her arms through the bra straps, leaned forward to settle her breasts into the cups, then reached behind her back to hook it with practiced ease. She used to need her mother’s help, but now she could manage it alone. …Not that it was anything to brag about.
After adjusting the bra perfectly, she pulled her panties up with a sharp snap. Finally, she slipped on an oversized white short-sleeve t-shirt that loosely covered her hips. These clothes were from back when she still lived at home. Before all of this.
The counseling room at the retake academy. The counselor had my report card up on the monitor and was explaining things to me and my mother.
“Kim Hanbin’s scores… Well, if he starts working hard from now on, they’re definitely in the range where he could aim for a Seoul university. Though reaching the upper-middle tier will require quite a lot of effort.”
“Even considering that this March mock exam was relatively easy and that the retake student sample hasn’t been fully factored in yet. After all, the test is graded on a curve. Easy is easy and hard is hard for everyone. Plus, last year’s CSAT was notoriously difficult, right? Since Hanbin experienced it firsthand, I’m sure he knows exactly how brutal it was…”
Mom sat beside me, nodding at every word the teacher said. She asked more questions and gave more answers than I did. It was clearly something I should have been listening to more carefully, but the teacher’s voice refused to sink into my head.
I was the one who suggested coming here. What the hell was I doing?
“…Hanbin?”
“……”
“Student?”
“Hanbin, what’s wrong?”
“…Ah, yes! S-sorry! I’ve had a headache since this morning…”
It was a lame excuse, but the teacher nodded understandingly.
“That can happen. After a big test like the mock exam, some students suffer from migraines for a day or two. The tension builds up so much.”
“…Yes.”
“Still, if the pain is too severe, you should definitely take something like Tylenol. It’s fine to hurt once, but the mindset of ‘I’m in pain so I’ll just rest today’ can repeat itself. You know how important condition management is for examinees, right?”
“Yes. I’ll keep that in mind.”
I swallowed hard and kept clenching and unclenching the fist I’d been gripping tightly under the desk. Focus. I had to focus. Kim Hanbin.
No matter how many times I told myself that… honestly, I doubted anyone in my current situation could stay sane enough to concentrate.
It had been like this ever since last night, when I unintentionally caught a glimpse of Seo Jian’s shower.
A penalty is being applied.
The moment I opened my eyes, I couldn’t close them or look away no matter how hard I tried. If she had been studying properly, I might have just studied with her, but since she was standing naked in front of a mirror taking a shower, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from her bare body.
Thankfully, the connection cut off the moment she left the bathroom. It would have been better if that had been the end of it, but the problem was that it didn’t stop at once.
It happened again when she changed clothes before bed, and again in the morning when she stripped and showered. It felt like the penalty was deliberately choosing the most embarrassing moments to show me. At least it had the courtesy not to show me while she was using the toilet… Anyway, it had just happened again.
While I was talking with the retake academy counselor, I was suddenly dragged into Jian’s point of view. The location was inside a bathroom stall. There was no stall like that at home, so by the timing it had to be the women’s restroom at the reading room.
…The bathroom?
This is bad.
It was ridiculous to gloss over the other things, but I knew that seeing this would make everything irreversible. I screamed internally and struggled desperately to close my eyes, but it was useless.
Jian pulled down her pants and panties together, sat on the toilet, and peeled the sanitary pad from her underwear. She rolled it up neatly, tossed it in the trash, then took out a new pad and tore open the wrapper.
Thankfully it wasn’t showing me her actually using the toilet, but who could have imagined I’d end up watching her change a pad? Something I absolutely should never see was being forced into my eyes against my will.
“…Urp.”
“Are you okay, Hanbin?”
“Urp… Excuse me, I need to use the restroom for a moment…!”
“Should Mom come with you?”
“No! I’m fine alone!”
I shot up from my seat, burst out of the counseling room, and ran down the academy hallway. Where was the bathroom? Fighting back the nausea rising in my throat, I finally found it and stumbled into a stall.
“Urrgh, urgh, ugh, blegh, urghhh…”
I retched until I threw up everything I’d eaten for breakfast. It wasn’t that what I’d seen was disgusting… but even though it was against my will, the guilt was unbearable.
Would this penalty ever end? If I kept my mouth shut and endured it… I shook my head. After splashing cold water on my face at the sink, I retraced my steps.
By then the counseling seemed to have ended. The teacher and my mother were standing near the academy entrance, chatting. I composed my expression and walked over to them.
“…Hanbin? Is your stomach feeling better now?”
“Yeah, whatever was stuck finally went down…”
The counselor pulled a sheet of paper from the file folder and handed it to me. It was a timetable densely highlighted with fluorescent marker.
“Hanbin, your mother and I put together a class schedule based on your March mock exam and CSAT scores. We tried to match it perfectly. What do you think?”
“Yes…”
“Since math and science inquiry are in a range where you need to solidify basic concepts from the ground up, I recommend taking in-person lectures three times a week for those. For Korean and English, which are relatively better, using video lectures during self-study time would be good for securing more practice hours. How does that sound? Think you can handle it?”
“I…”
“…Huh?”
Seo Jian frowned at the four messages from Kim Hanbin that had arrived in quick succession.
“Didn’t he say he was going to check out the retake academy?”
When the texts actually came, the feeling that rose first wasn’t the pathetic memory from yesterday but a strange sense of gladness. She let out a small laugh and immediately typed a reply.