Paid From Here On
Hwayeon, ten years a broadcaster, was thirty-one. Thirty-one, and once this month's birthday passed she would be thirty-two. She was feeling it in her bones now, the old truth that age is a thug. As recently as three years ago—no further back than that—not a single female cam on the platform had been able to threaten her throne.
When everyone else was pulling a million balloons, two million, she was pulling five, six. But she was past season now. She didn't want to admit it, and still the thinning stream of Moon Balloons spelled the fact out without mercy.
There had been a time when a hundred thousand a day was laughable, too easy to count. These days even thirty thousand was hard to come by. The whales had fallen away. Whether the slump had wrecked their businesses or they'd simply traded her in for some other woman, the big spenders who used to show up every day—who used to meet her in person, often—no longer came to her stream at all.
I have to catch him.
Which was why a newly appeared whale had to be caught, no exceptions. A whale who fired off six hundred thousand in under two hours. Land Coin God, and for a while she wouldn't have to worry about income at all.
Or she could take the marry-rich route outright. She had already judged that her life as a female cam didn't have much left in it. Look at the older girls who never hooked a decent whale and so never married, and the future drew itself. You clawed and scraped just to keep a hold on youth and figure. Better, maybe, to do what Seah and Jiyeon had done—sink her teeth into one reasonably decent silver spoon and marry him. For the life she had left, that might be the sounder call. Of course the whale would also need to be passable to look at, and not too sharp around the edges.
"Oppa! Can you come pick me up?"
Fresh from the shower, Hwayeon had dressed like she meant it. The leggings from the broadcast went into the laundry basket; in their place she put on a dress that gave her figure away. The woman in the mirror was perfect. She paid herself a compliment, then called Kim Taeyoung.
"Huh? You want me to come get you? Uh... I can, I can come, but I'm taking a taxi, all right? I'm on foot until I sell the car and take delivery of a new one."
A taxi? On foot?
Her brow twitched at the two words. A taxi she could allow. She drove an import herself and still used them all the time. But on foot was the phrase furthest from rich that the language owned.
Surely he wasn't not a silver spoon?
More people than you'd think sprayed balloons all over Corea TV without ever having been born to money. The ending for that type was obvious. They took on debts they couldn't survive and went into the Han River, or they became credit delinquents.
Did I read him wrong? Me?
Impossible. Not unless ten years of broadcast instinct had simply vanished. The pattern of the Moon Balloons alone gave you the answer. A real silver spoon didn't spare money on whatever pleased him. But the moment it stopped pleasing him, he cut the balloons off cold. Someone only playing at being a silver spoon, on the other hand, kept sneaking glances at the BJ even while he donated. He wanted her to like it. He wanted her to shield him, and to make her fond of him while she did.
Coin God was plainly the first kind. As if Hwayeon's favor didn't matter in the slightest, he spent to enjoy his own interest and his own fun. In plain speech, he had pulled gabjil like an absolute bastard. If a man like that turned out not to be a silver spoon...
Then it really is time to retire.
It wouldn't be that. And besides, Coin God sent his Moon Balloons in coin. You could guess easily enough just from the delay before a donation landed. Prices had climbed hard lately, so the odds were good he was either newly rich off crypto or a silver spoon who had already made a great deal of money.
"Then should we meet in Gangnam? It'll save time. I think that's better."
"Let's. Where in Gangnam?"
"There's a place I know well. I'll send the address. See you there."
Some tens of minutes later, a restaurant in Gangnam—a restaurant by day, a bar the moment night came on. It ran nearly twenty-four hours and had private rooms, so once a broadcast ended she used it often.
"Hwa—Hwayeon! Over here."
She stepped out of the taxi, and a man was calling her. The voice told her it was Coin God. Hwayeon swept him in a single fast look.
An Ecobloom fanboy? Head to toe, every last piece of him was Ecobloom. Still, it wasn't cheap luxury, so he passed. The height wasn't bad either. The face, at this level, was decent enough. Pass. Her head nodded almost on its own. At least he didn't seem like the type who donated on borrowed money.
"Oppa! Were you waiting long?"
"No. I just got here too."
She closed the distance as if it were the most natural thing in the world and linked her arm through his. She felt him flinch. Not much experience with women? All the better. He'd be that much easier to cook.
God. I almost died from the nerves.
A private room in the restaurant. In the brief space while Hwayeon stepped away to the restroom, Kim Taeyoung let out a breath of pure relief. The thought of meeting the ideal woman who had shared his twenties had wound him far too tight. Then she had linked arms out of nowhere, and his whole body had locked.
The soft give of her breast still seemed to linger on his forearm. Was it only because it had been so long since he'd touched anything that soft? His heart was still hammering.
Get it together.
Keep on like this and all he'd leave behind was the impression of a loser. Kim Taeyoung had ground nearly ten years in customer service. Reading people—women's feelings and women's faces above all—he trusted himself to do. Hwayeon was still watching him, still taking his measure. Exactly like a Jin-sang wondering whether a poke would go in.
He couldn't give ground here. Show a gap worth testing and a Jin-sang turned vicious. They drove into the opening and piled on demands that made no sense, and cleaning up after that was brutally hard. Better never to show a gap at all. If you did, you cut it off clean.
"I can do this."
He had finally met Hwayeon. Was he really going to hem and haw his way through the night and then go home? Even if he never got to date her, he at least wanted to talk with her and enjoy it before he left.
"What can you do?"
"Oh. You're back?"
"Yeah. What were you muttering to yourself?"
Hwayeon set a hand on his shoulder. Her index finger traveled from the shoulder up toward his neck, over a stretch of skin the clothes didn't cover.
"I got way too nervous today. I was psyching myself up, trying to shake it off."
"Ahaha, nervous? You mean you were nervous about meeting me, right? Oppa, you're sneakily good at saying things that make a woman happy."
She took her hand away and sat at his side. They weren't facing each other. They sat shoulder to shoulder, because that was how Hwayeon had chosen to sit.
"I've got a little skill. And it isn't only talk."
"Hm? And what's that supposed to mean?"
The outer corners of her eyes curved. Kim Taeyoung could see past the smile. She was laughing, but her pupils flicked left and right, fast. She was thinking through the sudden change in him, and judging it.
He read the face. It was the look that asked, How do I squeeze more out of this sucker? Back in his early twenties, drowning in want, he had slammed every won he earned at the department store into hostess bars. The expression was an old acquaintance.
She was close to his ideal, and he had watched her broadcasts all through his twenties, so of course he had been wound too tight. But once the tension let go, the woman called Hwayeon came clear. Just as he'd thought—only a little pretty. An ordinary woman. Then this was easy.
"Making a woman happy. I'm good at it the other way, too."
This time Kim Taeyoung was the one who reached. His fingers found Hwayeon's thigh. The dress was short, so his index finger met bare skin. He tapped twice—tok, tok—and she startled hard.
"Haha. A joke. It's a joke. Was that not funny?"
Still startled, she managed to lift one corner of her mouth into a smile, then rebuilt the eye-smile from scratch.
"Oppa... I thought you were the innocent type. You weren't?"
"If a man is still innocent at this age, isn't that a problem all on its own?"
"That innocent act at the start. Was it an act?"
"That part was real. I told you. You were my ideal type. I watched your streams a lot in my twenties. So I was shaking."
"Hmm. Meaning you're not shaking now?"
"Haha."
Kim Taeyoung laughed, big and easy, and somewhere in the laugh his arm found its way around Hwayeon's waist. She didn't refuse it.
"I'm still shaking. But this beats being so shaken I can't do a thing, doesn't it?"
He drew her in by the waist. Bodies and faces closed the distance. Hwayeon's expression was still locked in some fierce calculation.
Tak. An instant before their lips met, she raised a hand and covered his mouth and his chin. The deliberation was over.
"Oppa, from here on out, it's a paid service."
Kim Taeyoung was not a silver spoon. Through the talk, though, she had learned that what he held was considerable. He had offered it himself: cash assets somewhere between four and six billion won. An awkward figure. The fortune she had stacked came to nearly twenty billion, once you added the cash in hand, the stocks, the buildings.
So she folded the marry-rich idea. She would run something that looked like a relationship and suck the balloons dry. He had seemed more of a sucker than she'd expected, and she had thought she could drain him. Then he showed his real face, and it was no different from the other silver spoons and rich men she already knew.
Meeting this breed was Hwayeon's profession, and she switched tracks fast. Out in the world, people looked at Corea TV's female cams and called them Moon Balloon sluts, cyber whores. That was true, up to a point.
She was a real prostitute. A high-class prostitute who spread her legs only for whales.
"Damn..."
The word slipped out of Kim Taeyoung as pure admiration. He hadn't thought she would say it that baldly. Put like that, what was even the difference between her and an actual whore? No—was she simply a whore? The price was outrageous on top of it. But for Kim Taeyoung as he stood now, price was hardly a problem.
"Do I have to pay right away? Now?"
"Yeah. Today's our first time."
"Mind if I pay in balloons? All my cash is tied up in coin."
"Then tack on twenty percent."
He let out a short breath of a laugh and opened the Corea TV app. A moment later he dropped two hundred and forty thousand on Hwayeon's replay.
CoinGodGodGod has gifted 240,000 Moon Balloons!
CoinGodGodGod has become a Hot-blood Fan.
"Oh. I hit Hot-blood."
"No way. For real? You really did spray a ridiculous amount today, oppa. My Hot-blood cutoff is eight hundred seventy thousand."
Hwayeon's eyes lit. Kim Taeyoung caught her by the waist again.
"So from now on, you're mine?"
"Nn—why would you say something that cringey."
"I'll do what I want, then?"
His hand went up under her skirt. Past the soft, springing flesh of her thigh, he closed a hard grip on the firm swell of her ass.
"Wait, oppa! Why are you in such a rush? Let's go to a hotel."
"Can't. I'm in a rush right now."
He hiked the dress up. Those hips had eaten a generation alive, and the line of her lower body was a work of art. At the center of it sat a flash of ornate lace.
"Ah—no!"
Hwayeon resisted. Surely she wasn't embarrassed to do this here?
"Outdoor play is an extra five million."
"What? Hahaha! Don't tell me every other kind of play has a price tag too?"
"Obviously."
"Then keep a tab on all of it. I'll settle when we're done."