Side Story — Han Mi-jung (1)
Where on earth did it all go wrong... I closed the shutter of the shop, sat down in a chair, and poured myself a shot of soju as the question circled in my head.
I had been happy as a child. We were never well-off, but I was an only daughter doted on desperately by my parents, and my pretty face made me popular at school. Bright and easygoing, I was liked by the girls as much as the boys. Then my father died while I was in high school, my mother had to go out to work, and I gave up on college. When I started working at a factory, the men wouldn't leave me alone. There was the quiet harassment, too — a hand resting on my shoulder like it was nothing was routine, and some men would smack my butt and call it cute. Every company dinner, someone would try to get me drunk and haul me off to a motel, so at some point I simply stopped going.
The man who stole my heart was a coworker five years my senior. He wasn't educated, but he was kind, attentive, a gentleman. We started dating naturally, and one day the year I turned twenty-one, I had my first time with him in his room. It was nothing but painful, that first experience, but he did everything he could to be gentle with me, and the love we made in that narrow sunlit room remains to this day the most beautiful memory in my head. Still young and full of appetite, he wanted my body whenever he could find the time afterward. I didn't yet know much about the pleasure of sex, but I did my best for the man I loved. And then one day, I found out I was pregnant. It wasn't something I could do while carrying a child — there was no such thing as maternity leave. I had no choice but to quit. And I worried, too, that he might abandon me.
But he wasn't that kind of man. I can still see him vividly, tears welling up in his eyes with joy when I told him. We registered our marriage and quit our jobs together. We couldn't afford a wedding. With the money he'd saved over the years — working twice as hard as anyone and spending half of what he earned — plus what I'd saved, we got a small jeonse room and opened a little shop.
Business was slower than we'd hoped, though. After our son Seh-hwan started elementary school, my husband went back to factory work and I ran the shop alone. And once I was there all day, the shop actually began to do well. Our main customers were the boys from the schools nearby. I knew perfectly well why they kept coming. I'd been used to the eyes of men stealing glances at my body since I was young. I was still in my twenties then. The way those kids stared at my chest or my behind while calling me "noona, noona" annoyed me a little, but maybe because they were just children, it didn't really upset me. My husband's wages plus the shop's earnings were enough to live on. That was how "noona" turned into "ma'am," and the three of us, I thought, were living a reasonably happy life. Apparently my husband didn't see it that way. Our son was more devoted to sports than to his books, but he wasn't dull — handsome and outgoing, popular with his friends. My husband wanted to leave him a better life.
By the time I learned everything, it had already festered past the point of saving. My husband had borrowed money to sink an enormous sum into some absurd business venture a coworker had introduced him to — bank loans on top of private loan sharks. For days he did nothing at home but drink. He couldn't afford to be like that. Even having made a mistake, he should have been moving heaven and earth for me and Seh-hwan. When I yelled and demanded answers, my husband hit me for the first time. It was the first time in my life anyone had ever struck me. And he didn't stop there — he laid me down on the living room floor and forced himself on me. All the years before, I had given him my body whenever he wanted it, but that day I begged him no, please stop, and still he pinned me down with his weight, thrust into me a few times, emptied himself inside me, and fell asleep just like that.
Then, a few days later, when I closed up the shop and came home, my husband was collapsed on the floor. At first I thought he'd fallen asleep. He hadn't. The man I loved left behind nothing but a mountain of debt, and he lies in a hospital bed to this day, still unconscious, eating up hospital fees on top of it all. Even so, I had to feed my son somehow. So in the evenings I started selling alcohol at the shop. Sales ticked up a little, but it was nowhere near enough. So I began selling something else along with the drinks.
As I topped off his glass, the man sitting beside me wrapped a hand around my waist and downed it in one gulp. I picked up a morsel of food with my chopsticks and fed it to him. Across the table, a middle-aged man grinned like a kid at a carnival.
"How is it? Tastes even better when a pretty girl feeds you, doesn't it?"
"The food's good, but the best side dish of all is a woman, isn't it?"
The man beside me chimed in, kneading my breast with one hand. Then he lifted my glass, poured it into his own mouth, grabbed my face, and kissed me. Bitter soju flooded into my mouth, followed by a tongue that reeked of cigarettes, pushing in and rummaging everywhere inside.
The man across the table was Mr. Choi, a real estate man. The one beside me was Mr. Park, who owned several buildings in the neighborhood. Choi had been coming by nearly every day since I started selling liquor. One day, when he came alone and I sat beside him pouring his drinks, his hand began groping my body. In the end, for a few bills, I let him have me inside the shop with the shutter down. After that, word must have gotten around, because men started showing up, flashing money and demanding my body — and I became a whore selling myself to men in the very place that was filled with memories of my husband. And at some point, Choi began bringing other men along like this, using me as entertainment.
"I've been watching this woman since she opened shop here two years ago, and back in her twenties she was unbelievably gorgeous. God, I wanted to nail her so bad. Even now, you couldn't find a woman this good for her age anywhere in the country. But then one day she starts selling booze? Word is her husband became a vegetable. So I figured — she's starving for money and starving for cock. I gave her a little feel, and sure enough, like she'd been waiting for it, she shut the shutter and spread her legs. A windfall, a real windfall. Shutter's down now, so let's eat our fill."
"Mind if I go first?"
"Of course, Director Park — I brought you along for the tasting."
The two clinked glasses, knocked back their soju, and told me to stand up and sing. Maybe I should get a karaoke machine in here... I thought, standing to sing without any accompaniment. I was partway through a trot number — the kind drunk middle-aged men love — when Park rose, came around behind me, and wrapped his arms around my body. Since I'd started selling myself, I'd begun wearing more revealing clothes than before. My body, in nothing but thin shorts that left my thighs bare and a flimsy t-shirt, was swallowed up in the man's thick arms.
He kneaded my breasts with both hands while pressing his lower body tight against my behind. Something hard wedged itself between my cheeks. He hiked my shirt up, unhooked my bra, and told me to take it off. I kept singing as I removed it. Now the man held my shirt up to bare my chest and began groping away.
"Nice soft tits. Love it."
That word — tits — was one I first heard after I started selling my body. When men got drunk, they liked calling them "tits" or "udders" instead of breasts. Aside from ordinary sex with my husband, I'd had no experience at all, so I was learning one by one what men liked. Because a satisfied customer comes back.
"Not big, but not lacking either, huh?"
"This counts as big. My wife's flat as gum. Feels just like a high school girl's chest — even better."
With that, the man kept grinding himself between my cheeks. He was getting harder and harder. I could feel how desperate he was to get inside me.
"Slim body, but this ass is plump and juicy, isn't it?"
"She was like that even as a kid. Tiny little thing with nothing but tits and an ass sticking out — adorable. Should've nailed her back then, honestly."
"How old are you now?"
"Thirty... thirty-something. Hey, how old are you this year?"
"Thirty-seven."
I stopped singing to answer.
"Ahh, that's the perfect age. That's when a pussy's filled right to the brim."
With that, Park pushed me forward until I was bracing my hands on the table.
"Then I'll take the first taste, Director Choi. You just sit there and enjoy the live porno."
"The soju's going to taste incredible."
Chuckling at his own joke, Park stripped off my t-shirt and dragged my shorts and panties down. My naked body was bared in front of the two men.
"You washed up?"
"Yes..."
I felt Park's face press against my behind. His damp tongue slid and wandered over the flesh of my ass. Goosebumps rose all over my body. His rough hands gripped my cheeks and pulled them apart, and his tongue slipped into the crevice and began lapping.
"Ah... ahhn..."
There was nothing but disgust, but I raised a fist to my mouth, pretending to hold back my moans, and let out a lewd little sound for him. Because I'd learned that men loved this.
"Feels that good, sweetheart? At this rate shouldn't you be paying us?"
The men snickered again. Proof that my performance was a success.
Behind me came the sound of a man undoing his trousers. Then a spit — ptoo — and my lower half went slack as his cock pushed its way into my body.