If That's What You Want, I'll Just Close My Eyes for Ten Minutes

I told myself that if this was what she wanted, I’d just shut my eyes and endure it for ten minutes. There was no point in feeling disgusted or grossed out. All I had to do was empty my head and hold on for exactly ten minutes. Then this shitty mission would finally be over…!

Seo Jian kept repeating to herself that this ridiculous nonsense was nothing compared to the awful things she’d gone through since turning into a girl. She was gritting her teeth and holding on. There had been that moment when the timer suddenly stopped, but we managed to fix it quickly. If we could just last a little longer, the penalty would disappear and everything would go back to normal. I’d be able to send Kim Hanbin back to the academy too… She kept comforting herself with those thoughts, burying her face in the crook of my neck while gripping me with desperate strength.

But a mind as fragile as hers—one that looked like it would topple over if you so much as breathed on it—was bound to collapse from even the tiniest spark.

“I-I can’t help it! We’ve been pressed together this tightly and I still lasted five whole minutes, okay?!”

“Bullshit! Tell me exactly what you were just thinking. Right now. If you’re having weird thoughts about me, I’ll f-f-fucking kill you!”

Seo Jian clutched the back of my shirt and shrieked at the top of her lungs.

“……”

“What? Why aren’t you answering?”

Our eyes locked. Sometimes words aren’t necessary for a conversation to get its message across. Just imagining what might come out of Kim Hanbin’s mouth made Seo Jian want to die of embarrassment.

“You really want me to say it?”

“…No. Don’t.”

Too ashamed to look him in the eye, she buried her face in his neck again and mumbled, “I changed my mind. I don’t want to hear it. Absolutely do not say it.”

“You’re the one flipping back and forth. But honestly, I feel wronged here. I get that you might not believe me, though.”

“……”

Hanbin seemed to be trying to explain himself, but right now Jian’s mind was such a tangled mess that she couldn’t even form a proper thought. Her heart was pounding like a drum. Her cheeks, ears, and even the back of her neck had turned bright red. Just like Hanbin’s erection, her reaction was purely physiological. It wasn’t as if her heart only raced when she was hugging someone she liked. It was more like the suspension bridge effect, right?

It was humiliating. It made her angry. She wanted to yell at the boy in front of her, but the more they talked, the more embarrassed she felt about herself. She couldn’t bring herself to look him straight in the eyes. And of course, the fact that she’d ended up hiding her face against his neck in the first place was already a critical error.

Why is time moving so damn slow…!

She screamed internally and cracked her right eye open just enough to glance at the whiteboard.

Time really was crawling. Subjectively, it felt like ten minutes had already passed, yet they’d only just crossed the halfway mark. That meant she still had to endure everything she’d already endured all over again.

The unspeakable hardness pressing against her lower belly was bad enough, but the way her breasts were being squished and rubbed against his chest created a sensation she couldn’t even begin to describe. It was pure discomfort.

Just think of English vocab instead. Study, Seo Jian!

She started reciting the words she’d memorized recently. Procrastinate. To put off, to postpone. Irrelevant. Unrelated, having no connection. Vulnerable. Easily hurt, susceptible to injury…

Sometimes stories like this would have the character recalling dirty words at a moment like this, but that didn’t happen with Seo Jian. She stayed perfectly honest, rattling off only the vocabulary she’d studied the day before. But just as no one can control every variable, another problem soon arose.

Kim Hanbin and Seo Jian had been standing perfectly still, hugging each other for over five minutes now. Naturally, the hands gripping each ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠other’s clothes began to shift little by little. Their feet grew numb, so they made tiny adjustments. And when those unconscious movements piled up, they inevitably formed a pattern.

While trying to focus on vocabulary, Jian pinched Hanbin’s waist lightly and said, “Hey… can you stay still for a second?”

“I’m literally not doing anything. I’m just breathing.”

Did he really have to say it out loud? It was frustrating, but she couldn’t let it go unsaid.

“You keep… poking me. You’re not doing that on purpose, right? Like, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠secretly moving your hips so I won’t notice…!”

“That was just me adjusting my leg position!”

“…If you don’t want to be suspected, just stay completely still. Got it?”

Hanbin felt genuinely wronged. He wished she would understand that in this situation, he really couldn’t help it. Why does her shampoo smell so good? And were her breasts always this big? He’d seen them when she was showering, but they felt even larger and softer up close than they had looked. Her body was so small, too. The oversized clothes had hidden it, but now that he was holding her this tightly, he could feel it clearly. So this was how slim her waist really was.

She had told him not to say what he was thinking earlier. But thoughts came whether you wanted them to or not. And when those kinds of thoughts kept piling up, it only made his erection harder.

Meanwhile, Jian subtly pulled her hips back. To an outside observer, her posture probably looked ridiculous, but what else could she do? The boy hugging her much smaller body was clearly hard. She didn’t want to be seen as a girl. She didn’t want to understand it. She didn’t want to know… It was her own desperate form of resistance.

But that tearful rebellion was crushed in an instant.

“Jian-ah.”

Hanbin spoke.

“What. Again.”

“The timer stopped again.”

“……”

“It’s probably… because you pulled your hips back like that…”

Of course, from Hanbin’s taller vantage point, there was no way he could have missed what she was doing. He had tried to pretend he hadn’t seen it and stay quiet, but the timer was acting up again. In the end, Jian had no choice but to stand straight once more.

The moment their bodies pressed together tightly enough for his pants to cling to her, Hanbin’s erection grew even harder. Jian felt it too, of course… but she said nothing. She simply buried her face in his neck again and wrapped her arms tightly around his waist.

All they could hear was the sound of each other’s heartbeats.

His back was starting to ache, so he shifted slightly. Jian immediately pinched his waist.

“One minute and thirty seconds left.”

“……”

Jian didn’t answer.

“A little over thirty seconds.”

“…Count exactly when it hits thirty.”

“Ten seconds.”

“Three.”

“Two.”

“One.”

Click.

The moment the locked doorknob made a sound, both Seo Jian and Kim Hanbin took exactly three steps backward without needing to discuss it. Their palms were drenched in sweat.

That message was now written on the whiteboard as proof.

“…This is another development I didn’t see coming.”

What the hell was a tutorial? And why was there a call from my dad? The information was confusing on multiple levels.

When I glanced to the side, Seo Jian was sitting at the table with her face buried in her arms, completely still. I wanted to organize what had just happened and talk it through, but she was in no state for that.

Weeeeing!

Right then, the phone rang. It was my father.

“Jian-ah, I’m going to step out for a second to take this call.”

“……”

Instead of answering, she just waved her hand dismissively. I immediately left through the hallway stairs and answered the phone.

“Dad?”

“Uh… yeah, I guess? I wasn’t watching the clock so I hadn’t really thought about it.”

I quickly checked the time at the top of my smartphone. It was already a little past eleven in the morning. That was probably right around the time Jian had come back from showering at home and we’d started the mission. Time clearly hadn’t flowed differently on the outside.

“It’s past eleven, so yeah, we’ll head out for food soon.”

“Out of nowhere?”

My dad sounded unusually cheerful.

“…That’s, that’s great. That’s way better news than my lunch, honestly.”

My father had been suffering from chronic kidney disease for a long time and went for regular checkups. His numbers had been getting worse, and we’d even heard he might need to start dialysis soon… and now this call, at this exact moment. It might have just been a gut feeling, but it didn’t feel like a coincidence.

I finished the call with my dad and returned to the rest area. By then, Jian seemed ready to talk. She had straightened her back and was sitting properly. Though she still had both hands squeezed tightly between her thighs and looked like she was spacing out.

“You okay?”

“…I just got 250,000 won from that. After you left, I lifted my head and there were five 50,000-won bills right in front of me.”

“……”

“Fuck.”

Never mind. She clearly wasn’t in any condition to have a proper conversation yet.

“Ha… this fucking tutorial. Who would ever do this again? For just 250,000 won, what the hell did I… Kim Hanbin. What happened today stays a secret until the day we die. No—let’s pretend it never happened at all.”

“……”

Seo Jian didn’t even give me a chance to respond before firing off words like a machine gun.

“We don’t need to know what either of us was thinking just now, or what we saw or felt the whole time. Like you said, ‘that’ was just a physiological reaction. Right? Let’s treat this whole thing like a bad dream and move on. That’ll be easier for both of us.”

“…If that’s what you want, then that’s what we’ll do.”

But my answer didn’t seem to satisfy her.

“That sounded like you weren’t happy about it. Or am I imagining things?”

“…You’re imagining it. We only did it because of the penalty, after all.”

“Exactly! So, should we go get lunch now?”

Only then did Seo Jian finally smile brightly. It was the brightest expression I had ever seen on her face.