The Negotiation (1)
After giving Han Sora her lesson in fellatio, I opened the dorm room door and stepped inside as usual — and felt a strange energy hanging in the air.
I moved a little deeper into the room, and there she was: Do Yoonchae, sitting on her own bed, glaring daggers at me.
Her guard's up even higher now, huh.
Couldn't be helped. It was a necessary evil.
She'd caught on to her secret while I was still in an ambiguous position with her, so instead of playing the trust-building game, I had no choice but to stoke her suspicions even further.
"Lee Seonho."
"Yeah?"
Do Yoonchae, perched on the edge of her bed, spoke my name in a resolute voice, eyes locked on me. I pretended not to be particularly bothered by her reaction, and settled in to at least look like I was listening.
"Right up until this morning, you were playing the nice guy, trying to deceive me."
"...What?"
"It's no use playing dumb. I've figured out what you're really after. Including the fact that while you pretend to protect my secret on the surface, you've been harboring some filthy little scheme underneath."
"No, seriously, what are you talking about all of a sudden?"
"...You intend to keep playing ignorant, then."
Eyes brimming with suspicion, Do Yoonchae slowly rose from the bed.
Judging by the state of her, her paranoid delusions had apparently reached an all-time high.
"At first, you were planning to pose as my secret-keeper, reassure me, build up my trust. Get me to gradually feel gratitude and guilt toward you for your 'kindness.'"
"......"
"And then, at some point, you were going to use that debt of heart you'd stacked up as leverage to start making strange demands of me. Did you honestly think I wouldn't notice?"
"...Look, Yoonsung, I genuinely have no idea what you're—"
"But it's over now. None of your schemes will work on me anymore."
With those words, Do Yoonchae shrugged off her academy uniform jacket and laid it neatly on the bed.
Then, tugging her tie loose with one hand in a rough, jerky motion, she brought both hands up to the top buttons of her black dress shirt.
"Wh — hold on, Yoonsung! What are you doing?!"
"...Showing you that I have no intention of quietly going along with your little plan."
"No, that's — that's not it! Why are you suddenly taking off your clothes?! You're a girl!"
"...Truly disgusting. Even now, you keep up the act of being embarrassed."
With that, Do Yoonchae kept going, undoing her shirt buttons one by one, baring herself to my eyes.
The stark white skin beneath the fabric — the same sight I'd stumbled upon this very morning.
...Not caught by accident or stripped by force this time, but exposed purely by Do Yoonchae's own will.
"Before you try demanding anything in exchange for keeping my secret—"
"H-hold on, Yoonsung! Just calm down for a second—"
"—I will be the one to pay the price first. For keeping my secret."
Shffff.
"Uwah — wawah?!"
I stumbled backward with deliberately exaggerated acting, feigning total panic — all the better to amplify the suspicions of a girl who had already witnessed every last moment of my tryst with Han Sora.
As I did, the knot of the compression bandages binding her chest came loose, and the white wrappings wrapped around Do Yoonchae's torso unraveled and slipped down.
"......"
"......"
The soft flesh that had been crushed flat by the bandages sprang free in an instant, swaying right before my eyes.
Not as large as Cha Eunju or Kim Isabel, but far from small either — a modest, well-balanced pair about Park Hana's size came into the open air.
Along with her cute, pink nipples, shyly announcing their presence.
"H-how is it? Something like this should be plenty, right? As the price for keeping my secret?"
"......"
She hadn't quite managed to hide the fluster in her voice, it seemed — Do Yoonchae spoke with a slight tremble, carefully gauging my reaction.
There was something almost absurd about her tone of certain victory, and yet the sight of her acting exactly as I'd predicted nearly made the corners of my mouth curl upward.
I barely managed to hold it in by biting the inside of my cheek. Wouldn't do to get caught.
"Um, Yoonsung? First of all, calm down and cover your chest."
"......"
"And don't get any weird ideas about this. I told you, didn't I? We're going to be living together for a long time, so I was just planning to keep that much of your secret."
"......"
"'You have to pay me something to keep it quiet'... what on earth goes through your head to arrive at a conclusion like that?"
"...Well. You probably know the answer to that better than anyone."
I pleaded my case, deliberately playing the flustered, wronged party — but Do Yoonchae only stared back with an unyielding expression.
Expression aside, though, the faint tremor running through her body and the flush of embarrassment she'd failed to hide from her face were honestly kind of cute.
"A-as long as we're inside the dorm, I'll let you look at my chest as much as you want from now on."
"......"
"Whether you get aroused looking at it or masturbate to it, that's your business. I won't interfere with what you do."
"No, um..."
"This is the 'price for concealing my identity' that I can offer you. So if you try to make any other strange demands by holding my womanhood over my head, I will refuse you flatly."
...Our Yoonchae really can't negotiate to save her life, huh.
Well, if she had any gift for words, she wouldn't have ended up this isolated inside the Cheongun Do Clan in the first place.
Granted, those people had a blind, almost religious faith in male heirs — but even so, she could have avoided erasing her own name and living as Do Yoonsung's shadow if she'd played her cards right.
'What kind of idiot lays her entire hand on the table and then asks the other side to negotiate?'
Too easy to twist around with words... no, forget words — this was a heroine who could be trained without me saying a single thing, just by letting her spiral into her own delusions.
In the original story, this kind of cluelessness got written off as an endearing airhead quirk. But a personality like hers could be exploited as thoroughly as anyone pleased, if you set your mind to it.
"Wh-why aren't you saying anything?! I-it's a chest, a chest! Don't all guys love this sort of thing?!"
And because I was still holding my silence even now, she was the one growing flustered, anxious, at a loss for what to do next.
The sight of her cupping her hands beneath her breasts, lifting them toward me and practically begging me to just take the bait — it was starting to look almost pitiful.
"D-don't tell me you're not even interested in my ch— n-no, wait, that doesn't seem to be it."
Do Yoonchae's eyes darted to my crotch for a split second, then hastily snapped away as she nodded to herself.
And on my end, of course, I was deliberately, conspicuously hard. So that she would keep pressing her negotiating chips against me with full confidence in what she was doing.
Once she saw that my body was reacting, she'd convince herself that showing me her chest was actually working.
"Ngh... d-don't tell me even this isn't enough..."
The moment I stayed silent, she did exactly as expected — misread the situation on her own and moved to reveal her next card.
Do Yoonchae, chest still bared, wore the expression of someone weighing her options for a moment — then carefully offered me a 'slightly improved' proposal.
"I-if you would just keep my secret..."
"No, Yoonsung, don't—"
"...th-then my chest... y-you can d-do whatever you want with it..."
"......"
The next card she barely managed to force out, her face burning completely scarlet.
Between that complexion — redder than a ripe persimmon — and the violent trembling of her frame, I figured this was probably the Maginot Line of what she could say while sober.
"N-no, Yoonsung... th-that's..."
Matching her lead, I responded with a look of my own — flustered yet hesitating, as if I were one more push away from giving in. As if I might not be able to resist temptation much longer.
Growing more and more certain of herself at my reaction, she leaned her body further forward, still gripping her own breasts in both hands.
"T-touch them, Lee Seonho. It's a good deal for you too, no? All you have to do is keep one little secret, and I, a woman, will let you grope my chest to your heart's content. Surely you're not planning to refuse?"
"......"
"My, my terms are simple. Until we graduate from the Academy, all you have to do is never reveal that I'm a woman — not to the Academy, not to anyone. Y-you said it yourself, didn't you! It's as simple as keeping your mouth shut. That's all it takes."
"......"
"A-accept it, Lee Seonho! I-I don't care that you're holding my weakness over me, but if you try to demand anything more unreasonable than this, then I will flatly—"
Thud. Thud.
"Hhk — huuuh?!"
One moment she was declaring with pride that she'd brace herself for anything; the moment I took a few steps forward, she scrambled to cover her chest with her arms, wincing.
She'd clearly steeled herself expecting me to lose control and grab hold of her breasts — and smiling inwardly at that wound-up posture of hers, I picked up the uniform jacket she'd taken off and—
Shffff.
"......h-huh?"
—draped it over her shoulders and chest, then opened my mouth again with forced nonchalance.
"Yoonsung. I don't know what circumstances drove you to disguise yourself and attend the Academy like this. But even so — I don't think a girl should be doing this kind of thing in front of a guy."
"......"
It was clearly the last thing she'd expected to hear. Do Yoonchae stared up at me, frozen, her expression blank as ice.
I left her there, locked in place, pulled my pajamas and a change of underwear out of my carrier, and walked toward the bathroom as calmly as if nothing had happened at all.
"I'm going to wash up."
"......huh?"
"Take that time to sort out your head, Yoonsung. And put your clothes back on properly."
"......"
"Oh, and from now on, you don't have to bind yourself up so uncomfortably even when we're inside the dorm. You're going to be crossdressing out in public regardless — so at least in here, you might as well be comfortable."
Someone with a simple mind would take that last remark of mine as pure goodwill. The Do Yoonchae of right now, however, would not.
I deliberately left behind words she could read all sorts of meaning into, and strode into the bathroom without missing a beat.
⁎ ⁎ ⁎
Shhhhhhhhh.
"......"
Seonho had gone into the bathroom. The dorm room was quiet, and she was alone.
Do Yoonchae stared down at the academy uniform draped over her body and thought, quietly.
What... what is he thinking?
It had been an offer she'd made with considerable resolve. Her identity had been discovered, and somehow, by any means, she had to keep it from leaking out.
She'd gone as far as offering to let him touch her — something she never would have permitted under normal circumstances. If having her chest groped for the duration of her time at the Academy was the price of keeping her secret, she'd judged it an acceptable cost to bear.
And yet Seonho, even while wearing the expression of a man wavering on the edge... had ended up doing nothing at all. He'd simply covered her exposed chest with her jacket, left behind words that sounded almost like advice, and strolled off into the bathroom.
"Don't tell me..."
Was he saying that this much still wasn't enough to satisfy him?
That merely letting him touch her breasts wouldn't buy her secret?
Which meant: think it over carefully on your own, and come back to me with an offer more to my liking. That had to be what he meant.
"...Truly, a filthy creature."
Convinced now that he was a man she could never take lightly, Do Yoonchae steeled her resolve all over again, deep inside.
...Somehow, some way, she would just have to craft a new proposal — one that could satisfy Lee Seonho's demands, so long as she didn't cross the line.