[Side Story] Han Mi-jung (4)
After hearing my son explain the academy's system, I sat there dumbfounded. What on earth was he saying? It was absurd enough that such a place existed, but it was even more absurd that my son was trying to send me there. So he was telling his own mother to become a sex slave for other boys?
Yoon-gyu asked where he'd heard about the academy. Seh-hwan said he'd heard it from an older schoolmate. A while back, the two of them had been drinking together, and because Seh-hwan was taking the failure of his college entrance exams so hard, the senior had told him about the academy he himself had attended. Yoon-gyu said that since he didn't yet know exactly what kind of place it was, he would look into it further, and the conversation ended there.
After the meal, Yoon-gyu went into his room, and I was washing dishes in the kitchen when someone grabbed my shoulder. Startled, I turned around—it was my son. Still seething inside, I silently kept washing the dishes. I had endured so much humiliation for him. And now he wanted to sell his own mother?
"Mom, I can't live like Dad did."
At my son's words, I felt my heart sink like a stone.
"Back when you sold drinks at that snack bar, I used to go stand out front sometimes. If you stood in front of the shutter, you could hear everything coming from inside. That day the loan sharks broke into the house, I kept pretending to be unconscious, but the truth is I came to halfway through. I saw everything they did to you, right in front of my eyes. I know exactly how Uncle Yoon-gyu treats you even now. I can never give that kind of life to my wife and children. If anything, I'll be the one taking—I will never be the one taken from. Just one last thing, Mom. Only you... only you..."
Seh-hwan couldn't finish, and went into his room.
So that was it. I was my son's mother, not his woman. He was preparing to offer me, his own mother, as a sacrifice for himself and for the wife and children he would someday have. Seh-hwan had changed. That wasn't the boy he used to be. But then, he had every reason to change—and it was entirely the fault of us, his parents.
Some time later, while we were in bed together, Yoon-gyu spoke up. He'd looked into the academy, he said, and it seemed what Seh-hwan had told him was true. He suggested sending Seh-hwan there.
"If you and Seh-hwan do well there and bring back good results, I'll put Seh-hwan in my family registry."
"Really?"
I cried out in surprise. The reason I obeyed his every demand day after day—licking when he told me to lick, spreading when he told me to spread—was for that alone. I wanted my son to be able to inherit his fortune.
"I mean it. The connections Seh-hwan could make there would be considerable. Of course, getting into the school he wanted matters most. And if he's going to build those connections properly, you'll have to entertain those boys properly."
A few days later, the three of us headed to the academy for the interview. Yoon-gyu and I were escorted somewhere separate from Seh-hwan, and there a man was waiting.
"Hello. I am Yoo Jin-hyeong, Director of MF Academy."
Nearly 190 centimeters tall and grotesquely fat, he was the largest man I had ever seen in my life. He greeted us in a voice that boomed as if echoing out of a cavern, then sat down across the sofa where Yoon-gyu and I were seated, and began introducing the academy's system. It was all stuff I already knew from what Seh-hwan and Yoon-gyu had told me.
"This is a place where bonds are made. People with great power—people with the power to move nations—come here to forge those bonds. There are actually several places like this besides the academy; this is only one of them. I serve as director, but I'm really just a worker. A 'vassal,' you might say. When we work hard, those people help us in return. Of course, a relationship like that can never be brought into the open. An 'employee' and a 'vassal' are different things. There are some who are both, but most are simply employees—transients who leave when they're done. A vassal is different. The word makes us sound like servants or slaves, but to exaggerate a little, we're something like relatives. Only, since we're not connected by blood, another kind of link is needed. This is the place where that link is made. And you, madam, will be the one serving as that link."
"What exactly would I have to do?"
I asked to confirm, though I already knew the answer.
"Nothing difficult. It's the thing women are best at, after all. Looking at your face, madam, I'm quite certain you'll excel at it."
I glanced at Yoon-gyu's profile. He was flushed red, whether from excitement or something else. If he were a real husband, how would he have reacted? He was a pathetic man, but he had loved me sincerely.
"The choice belongs to the two of you and your son. But for now, I'll need the parents' answer here. We've told you a great many secrets, after all. Though of course, even if you went elsewhere and spoke of this, it wouldn't do you much good."
With that, he brought over a camera and set it on the table.
"If the parents agree to send your son to our academy, then here and now, I will take the madam's body. Father, you may film it with this."
Yoon-gyu looked at my face and nodded. Not a trace of hesitation. He was aroused—I could tell he was practically urging me to hurry up and strip, to spread my legs.
And so, before Yoon-gyu's eyes, I gave myself to that man called Yoo Jin-hyeong. I poured out everything I had learned from countless men. Whether at the snack bar or the massage parlor, I had always observed and studied how men reacted whenever I was with them. I knew exactly where and how to touch them to please them. Every man's sweet spots were different, but a look in the eyes and a few exploratory touches told me roughly what kind of man I was dealing with.
Yoon-gyu, trembling with excitement, held up the camera and filmed us. Even through his trousers, I could see the bulge straining at his crotch. Satisfying a man took more than the body's erogenous zones—the mind mattered just as much. Every man carried his own private fantasy, his own particular bent. Some things they could tell anyone, some things they could tell no one, and then there were men like Yoon-gyu, who blurted out the very things they should never have said. When a man wouldn't speak, I would read his character and open the door for him—"Do you want to do it with your real mother?" "Do you like young girls?" "Do you want to do it with your daughter?"—and once I offered the words first, they would pour out their desires freely. Then all I had to do was play the role to match. In Yoon-gyu's case, he harbored a twisted lust for his own mother, a famous actress, and after marrying he discovered his son shared the same bent. He had quietly savored mapping his relationship with his mother onto his son's desire for his wife, but his wife died early, and now he was using Seh-hwan and me as their substitutes.
When it was over with the director, Yoon-gyu set down the camera and pounced on me. The director watched the two of us with a satisfied smile.
A few days later the acceptance notice came, and we took our son to the academy. After he went inside, I was waiting in the car when, before long, the proctor came and led me to a different building. The room was large and clean. It couldn't compare to the house we lived in now, but it was better than any home I'd ever shared with my husband. The proctor explained life there in detail. I was to refuse no request from anyone at the academy—instructors and students alike—and I was never to leave my room without permission. He had been courteous right up until he escorted me to the room; now he was talking down to me. He kept repeating that from now on, I was a slave. His name, he said, was Yoo Chan-hyeong. He and the director were brothers.
"My brother says your pussy tastes absolutely divine. Let's have a taste, shall we?"
Then he began tearing off my clothes. He didn't even bother unbuttoning my shirt—he simply seized it and ripped it apart, buttons scattering across the floor. I could roughly guess what this man liked, and with a terror-stricken expression, shielding my stripped body with my arms, I gave him a full performance of a woman being raped. Satisfied, he said I would make an excellent slave and left the room.
The next day, two middle-aged men came to my room. They said they were instructors at the academy. They'd apparently settled the order with a round of rock-paper-scissors. I cooked for them, poured their drinks, let them caress my body, spread my holes for them. It wasn't so different from selling myself at the snack bar. After that, the instructors came by in rotation every single day. I developed a kind of regular clientele, and from what they said, I could tell I was rated quite highly. It might have been natural, since they were my regulars, but considering the number of instructors teaching a hundred and fifty students, my regulars were remarkably many. Sometimes they talked about the other women, and one name came up again and again: Jeong In-ae. In my mind, I marked her as my rival.
Then one night, past midnight, just as I was about to sleep, someone came to my door. I opened it and found a woman. It was the first time I'd seen a woman since arriving here. And she was quite beautiful—a woman overflowing with a raw, sensual allure entirely unlike mine. For a moment, I wondered if this might be Jeong In-ae.
The woman was fairly drunk, and said she was an instructor at the academy. Her name, she said, was Yoon Ah-hyun.