Reunion (2)
It had only been about three months of tutoring, but in that short span she had managed to surprise him three separate times — enough to make her unforgettable.
The first shock came the moment he heard her full name. Miho alone was fine enough, but put the surname and given name together and the result was staggering. Her name was Gumiho — Nine-Tailed Fox!
He couldn't understand how anyone would name their daughter that, but after three months inside her household he more or less got it. Free-spirited mother, free-spirited father. At best you could call it an American-style home; at worst, a family held together with nothing but spit and good intentions.
The second surprise was that, despite a name that promised a man-eating seductress, she was painfully shy — and yet her curiosity burned bright. In a whole month of tutoring he had barely heard a handful of words from her lips.
As if she were observing some military custom of keeping a private's mouth shut, her entire vocabulary for that first month consisted of Hello, Thank you for your hard work, Yes, No, and I don't know. With so little response, he ended up doing most of the talking — and more often than not the lessons drifted into stories from his own life rather than the textbook. Whenever he touched on university romance, her eyes would light up and she would hang on every word.
To a high school student, college life was always an object of longing and curiosity. Mix personal experience with secondhand stories and any teenager would lean in. And if the subject turned to relationships between men and women, the reaction was explosive regardless of gender. Of course, with Miho being a girl, he couldn't go as far as he might with the boys — but he could still read the plea in her eyes: More. Tell me more. Please.
"So, Ssaem… um…"
"Well, whatever else you're curious about, you'll find out once you study hard and get into university, right? Let's get back to work."
"Aw, come on…"
He had to keep a clear line between business and personal. The last thing he wanted was any misunderstanding. So whenever she mustered the courage to ask something, he cut the story short and steered them back to the lesson.
The third time she stunned him was when she ran away from home.
She called him out of the blue one evening and said she had left. Her mother, who had never once pressured her about grades, had suddenly started nagging her about not studying. It was the third month of their tutoring arrangement.
By then a certain closeness had grown between them, and she called him crying, saying she had nowhere to go. He couldn't very well put her up at his own place, so he contacted a female junior from his department, asked her to let the girl stay for one night, and explained the situation to Miho's mother — promising to send her home the next day. Coming from a girl who was normally so passive, the sudden outburst left him thoroughly rattled.
In the end, Miho stayed out for four full days before going home. She still went to school every morning during that time, so it was a rather conscientious runaway act, if you could call it that. According to the junior who had put her up, the sudden parental interference in her grades and daily life had been an enormous source of stress for her.
After that, the tutoring ended. Her mother said Miho had wanted to continue, but she herself was too embarrassed to face him — and with apologies and thanks, she paid him three months' worth of fees for the final month. And so the tutoring arrangement with Miho closed on the strange note of having shepherded a runaway teenager back home.
And yet the sexy beauty standing in front of him now was that same Miho… Looking only at her face, he never would have known. Studying her carefully, though, he could see the girl from five years ago. Her lips and the shape of her eyes had changed a little — whether from cosmetic work or simply makeup, he couldn't tell — but the slender jawline and that neat, delicate nose were unmistakably Miho's.
"Do you remember me, Ssaem?"
"Wow… Miho. You've changed so much I barely recognized you. You look… incredibly beautiful."
He had almost said her face card was insane.
Miho's face had been styled to the kind of perfection that would make her the ace of any establishment. Even as a high school freshman she had been a pretty girl; now, with makeup and a little medical help, she had become a top-tier beauty.
"Really? Hehehe. You haven't changed at all, Ssaem. When our eyes met earlier I thought it might be you, so I kept looking."
"Me? I'm just an old man now. I was nervous — some random beauty suddenly talking to me out of nowhere."
"Oh, stop it, Ssaem. You're joking!"
She laughed and gave his forearm a light tap. Completely natural physical contact. The girl who used to flinch if their fingers so much as brushed had become this.
"Miho, who is that?"
The two women beside her approached. Wariness and curiosity mixed in their eyes.
"Ah — Ssaem, I'm with my friends, so… Do you do Instagram?"
"Huh? Oh, yeah."
"Then give me your ID. I'll DM you."
She pulled her phone from her Chanel handbag and held it out. Was this how people in their twenties kept in touch these days — Instagram over calls or KakaoTalk?
"I sent a follow request, so accept it, okay? See you later, Ssaem."
"Yeah. Bye."
She took the phone back and slipped away into her circle of friends. He stood there turning over this strange reunion in his mind, watching her and her friends walk off, hips swaying.
"Her hips are a little lacking, though…"
The gods never grant a person everything, or so the saying went. For all her top-tier face, her full, voluminous breasts, and her slender model-like figure, Miho's pelvis was a touch narrow.
After the drinking party broke up, he came home, lay down on his bed, and opened her Instagram feed.
Twenty-two years old.
They said ten years could change even mountains and rivers. The posts of a twenty-two-year-old girl and those of a thirty-two-year-old man were worlds apart.
Unlike his own Instagram, which held little more than a few old landscape and travel photos, hers looked like it had been lifted straight from an influencer's account. Starting from her high school graduation ceremony, the feed was a perfect window into how she had spent the years since.
She seemed to have enrolled in the Airline Service department at a local university as part of the class of 2020. From a tearful post about starting school only to never set foot on campus because of COVID, he could peek into her early twenties. Come to think of it, he remembered her saying once that she dreamed of becoming a flight attendant.
A post about finally attending in-person classes late into summer; a photo of her in the department uniform, hair still awkwardly pulled up, makeup on; a mirror selfie with a girl who looked like one of the two from earlier; hotel staycations with friends; Christmas parties; travel shots, and on and on.
Then, at a certain point, her posts started racking up thousands of likes. It began the winter before last, when the exposure level of her photos climbed.
From the winter she turned twenty, Miho's Instagram had flipped one hundred and eighty degrees. Suddenly there were more daring fashion shots. Even in seemingly ordinary photos, her long, slender legs gleamed, or her cleavage was on full display — the whole atmosphere had changed.
One photo in particular caught his eye: a hotel staycation with her friends.
In the shot taken at the hotel pool, her body was genuinely mouthwatering. A close-up of her upper body showed breasts that were, at a glance, remarkably large. The black bikini couldn't contain them — sideboob and underboob spilled free. In the next photos, high-cut bikini bottoms made her long, slim legs look even more striking. Her friends appeared alongside her. Every one of them was slender, every one of them generously curved. No — every one of them looked delicious.
He wasn't the only one who thought so. Hundreds of comments piled under each post — not just in Korean, but in English and languages he couldn't even identify. A few were from people she knew, but most were from men, and nearly all of them were pure praise for Miho's body and sex appeal.
The pure high school girl in his memory had changed so much. He scrolled through post after post, wondering how Miho had become this. One thing was certain: she had been steadily following the lead of the friends in those photos, transforming into someone who knew exactly how to captivate men.
Gumiho.
True to her name, she had become a real nine-tailed fox. Lying in bed, he spent hours going through her posts until his lower body grew heavy — the same way a teenage boy gets hard looking at dirty pictures online.
Young things… pure young things…
Watching a Reel of Miho and her friends walking toward the camera in high-exposure bikinis, he stroked his swollen cock and masturbated. Thanks to the wide-angle lens and filters, they looked incredibly sexy. All three of them — body and face — could have been the ace of any establishment.