When Did I Start Loving Dad?
This was a first for Min-ah — wrapping her own fingers around a man's cock.
She barely even touched herself down there. Masturbation was something she had never once attempted, and the reason was simple.
This... belongs to Dad.
Her hands. Her mouth. Her breasts. Her sex. She had wanted every first her body had to give to belong to him and him alone.
A question rose in her, unbidden. When had it started? Why had she fallen in love with him? Why had she arrived at the thought of offering every last piece of herself to Dad, and Dad only?
His handsome face? That rough jaw? The taut muscle in his arms? The softness of his stomach?
Min-ah shook her head. It had never been anything so shallow as that.
The woman Min-ah hated with every cell in her body. Park Ah-young. That creature had abused her — carefully, methodically, in ways Eun-hyeok would never find out. And Min-ah had never been able to tell him. She had been too young for the words, too young for the logic.
If I tell Dad about this, you know what happens, don't you? We all die.
On top of the beatings, there had been the gaslighting. Min-ah remembered almost nothing from before she was five, but one thing had burned itself in and never left.
Ah-young, raining blows down on Min-ah's backside, pouring curses over her like boiling water. Every hour Min-ah spent without Eun-hyeok had been indistinguishable from hell. The days were a pit. The evenings he came home from work were the only heaven she had ever known. On those nights, everything arranged itself the way she wanted it to.
Not long after, Cha Eun-hyeok — her dad — divorced Park Ah-young.
Min-ah had never understood why her own father had tried to send her back to Ah-young. To her, that was not an option. It would have been the beginning of an eternal hell. So she clung to him. It was not affection. It was a raw, animal thrashing against death.
Fortunately, Eun-hyeok took her in.
That was the first time Min-ah made the vow. For Dad, she could do anything. Anything at all. That was how she began to fall for her own father.
At first it was simple — a good feeling, the quiet certainty that she would do anything for this man. But as she grew, she came to understand what the word Dad actually meant. And she despaired, because the size of her love would never be allowed to exceed what that word permitted.
She dug through every historical case she could find. Every last one of them was a horror story. Social ruin. Deformed children born of genetic disease. It was hopeless.
But she could not give up.
They could hide the relationship. They simply wouldn't have a child. If she could only give back the love Eun-hyeok had given her — if she could hold her father in her arms for the rest of her life — Min-ah could do anything. Anything in this world.
And so she decided. She would become Eun-hyeok's bride. Her own father's bride.
But no matter how hard she tried, to Eun-hyeok she was only a daughter. That wall was absolute. She could not climb it. Min-ah despaired. If things stayed as they were, even a confession would be useless.
But there was no law that said she had to lie down and die.
Among the girls at school, one shaman had become something of a legend. A young woman who performed Sinjeom — spirit-possessed readings — and who, the rumors went, could bind you to any man you desired.
The moment Min-ah stepped into the room, the young shaman looked her over and asked, a sneer already curling at the edge of her voice.
"You. Think you can handle this?"
Min-ah studied her. A face caked in white powder, eyeliner drawn on thick as a bruise — she looked half a ghost already. Min-ah's instincts had always been sharp. She understood at once. This one was the real thing.
"I came because I can."
"Thick-skinned, aren't you. You've got the kind of energy that eats men alive... and the one you want bound to you is no joke either, in the complete opposite direction. Perfect."
"Then what I want is possible."
"...Hard to say. I can't get a clean read on the man. But......"
A snap. A fan of every color in the spectrum flicked open, and above it the shaman's fingers moved in a gesture that needed no translation. Pay up.
"This is what I do, sweetheart. I make the impossible happen."
"I figured as much. I brought plenty."
"Kids like you are my favorite. Beats the ones who want the world and can't even pay for it."
The shaman and Min-ah laughed for a long time.
And so Min-ah brought her the three things she had asked for.
◈ One hundred strands of hair from the one you wish to be bound to
◈ Worn underclothes of the one you wish to be bound to
◈ A photograph of the one you wish to be bound to
"Handsome, I'll give him that. No wonder a daughter would fall for him. Fall for her own father. Makes sense."
A chill went through Min-ah. She had been careful not to say a word about what she and Eun-hyeok were to each other. The shaman had named it in a single glance.
"But... is he... is he really your father? Something's off. I can't even tell why he looks so cloudy......"
The shaman was muttering something strange. Min-ah, drunk on the certainty that this woman could actually bind her to Dad, let the hidden meaning in those words slip straight past her.
A soft clatter. The shaman tipped everything Min-ah had brought into an earthenware pot no bigger than a palm.
"You. You good with blood?"
"Ah... not really?"
"Then grin and bear it. I need some of yours."
It was over in a blink. Before Min-ah could even make a sound, the inside of her palm had been opened.
Drip.
Drip.
Min-ah's blood. She twisted her face against the pain, but she did not scream. The shaman caught every falling drop in the pot, quick and practiced.
"I need quite a bit. Until all of this is submerged."
"...Alright."
They drew it for a long time. Until the offerings were floating, until the surface of the pot shivered with red.
"Go wash that in the bathroom. Disinfect it with this and put the ointment on."
She pressed ointment, disinfectant, and a bandage into Min-ah's hands and sent her out of the room. Then the shaman carried the pot behind her and set it on the altar where she kept her gods, placed a candle on top of it, and lit the wick. The altar was crowded with pots just like it — dozens of them, row after row.
"I've never had a case this uncertain... but more than anything, this one's going to be fun."
That was how Min-ah began employing a shaman.
The shaman had been firm about that. But there was another reason besides the ritual. Eun-hyeok hated the idea of Min-ah having a boyfriend — technically, he hated the idea of her taking up with some delinquent, but it amounted to the same thing.
She could have simply told him she wasn't seeing anyone. Words would have been enough. But Min-ah wanted him to see it. She wanted him certain, beyond any doubt, that the only man in her life was Dad.
So she recruited one of the boys who followed her around. She put a sum of money in front of a high school student that no boy his age could refuse, and she made him play his part in her little theater. All of it was possible because Min-ah managed the household money herself.
The performance was a success. When Min-ah came home from school that day, Eun-hyeok's face was full of a happiness he didn't seem to have a name for.
It had worked. It had also succeeded in driving every other student away from her. They had all thought she was nothing but sweet — until, in the crush of after-school dismissal, with every eye on her, she slapped a boy across the face. That was all it took. From that day on they called her the Ice Princess, and that was exactly what she had wanted. Min-ah needed more time that belonged only to her.
She had been planning to anyway. But now it was no longer a preference. It was a condition.
The easiest road into Hankuk University was private tutoring, and Eun-hyeok wanted that for her too. Min-ah refused. Tutoring meant letting another person into the house. She would not have another adult — anyone who was not Dad — crossing that threshold. Their home had to remain a private suite for the two of them alone. It was a simple reason. It was also, to Min-ah, the most important thing in the world.
She had been confident she could protect that and still walk into Hankuk University on her own. She had been far too confident. Online lectures and school classes were never going to be enough. She had originally aimed as high as the medical college Eun-hyeok himself had attended, and she had fallen laughably short. In the end she had no choice. She took the lowest cutoff she could find: the Department of Korean Language and Literature at Hankuk University.
Then a problem. She was rejected in the first round.
The ground went out from under her. But perhaps sincerity really could move the heavens. Perhaps wanting something badly enough really was enough. Min-ah made it off the waitlist — a rarity at Hankuk University, the kind of second-chance acceptance people spoke about as if it were a myth.
Adulthood. Acceptance to Hankuk University. Only one thing left.
A few months earlier, the shaman had held out a small, opaque bottle.
"...What? That's... I don't think I can......"
"You don't want to be bound to him?"
"...I do."
"Then make him drink it. By any means necessary."
It was impossible. And she had to do it anyway.
So Min-ah thought of the amusement park. The one thing she could get into him without a fight: something sweet. A pineapple slushie. She mixed in the unidentified liquid — her own urine folded into whatever the shaman had given her — and she watched Eun-hyeok drink it.
"Once he's drunk it, the effect will take hold. That's when you strike. That's your window."
The shaman's last instruction had been this: wait until Eun-hyeok was asleep, and get yourself pregnant.
"But if it looks like he's about to wake up, you stop. Immediately."
"And if... if I fail?"
"Even if it isn't that night, there'll be more chances. The effect will linger."
"Ah......"
Failure. That single word turned Min-ah's face to stone.
"By the way — are you two actually father and daughter? Something about this feels... off."
"You think I'd fork over twenty million won if I were crazy? A normal couple would cost a fraction of that."
The shaman looked her up and down, then pressed her eyes into a long, amused line and laughed.
"Heh. Yeah. It's crazy bitches like you that keep me in business."
"I am crazy. About my dad."
Yes. That was how she had arrived here. At every step so far, the shaman had been right. Eun-hyeok, she had promised, would sink into a sleep too deep to climb out of.
All that was left was to take Dad's semen. And luck was on her side — she was in her fertile window. If she could just let his semen fertilize her, it would all be over.
But she was afraid.
A man's cock. And not just any man's — Dad's. A first. Every first in the world was heavy, and every first in the world was frightening. Semen only came out if you satisfied the thing it lived in. Could she? Could she actually satisfy him?
Min-ah's heart was beating itself against her ribs. But she could not stop here. She could do this. She had learned how, at least in her head. You took hold of Dad's cock, kneaded it until it grew, then stroked it with the whole of your palm, and the semen would come.
She thought she had steadied herself. She pressed against his back and slipped her hand inside his pants.
Something heavy and hot met her fingers.
"Hah...!"
She had made a mistake. A sound had torn out of her before she could stop it.