Happiness
Ever since that day, she had gotten a little… shameless.
Whatever she might have been feeling inside, at least in front of me she acted like nothing was wrong.
For starters, she had gone back to wearing regular T-shirts instead of thick hoodies or sweaters.
And while I couldn’t be sure about her lower half, it was obvious she wasn’t wearing a bra.
Whether it was leftover male pride or simple discomfort, I had no idea—but it left me with nowhere safe to look.
Doesn’t that hurt, bouncing around like that?
She no longer hid in her room, either.
She made ordinary conversation at mealtimes and used the living-room TV without fretting over my reaction.
And more than anything else, there was this.
Knock knock.
That knock every single night.
Click.
“……What?”
“Sumata.”
She said it like it was the most natural thing in the world.
She was trying to keep her face blank, but the soaked crotch of her underwear made it crystal clear how worked up she was.
Once I let her into my room, she would claim one side of my bed and lie face-down.
“Hwaaaaah♥♥♥”
While she thrashed through climax after climax, I would finish once myself, and then she would leave me with a single line before heading back.
“……I’m going to sleep. Night.”
Last night she had shown up right on schedule.
Knock knock.
“Sumata.”
“……Come in.”
Whether I had gotten better with practice or she had simply been trained, I couldn’t say—
“Hnhiiiiih♥♥♥!?”
—but for the first time since that very first night, she squirted like a water pistol and passed out spectacularly.
She didn’t wake until the next morning.
“……Jammin. Get up.”
“……Mm? Ah…… is it breakfast time?”
And just like that she would rub her eyes as if nothing had happened and pad out to the living room.
That had been this morning.
“What’s the title?”
“Inucamp.”
“Ah, that camping anime.”
“Yeah.”
It was already late; the sun had long since set.
When I stepped into the living room, Jae-min was on the sofa watching an anime on the TV.
Inucamp was a camping series that had been popular a while back. The heroine was a dog-girl demi-human, hence the name.
It belonged to that pure “pretty-girl zoo” genre where no male characters ever appeared—just cute girls.
Jae-min had always liked that sort of thing.
Come to think of it, she had been crazy about yuri web novels too.
“Hey.”
“Hm?”
“You free on the eighteenth?”
“The eighteenth? Yeah. Wait—that’s your birthday.”
“Mom wants me to bring you home for dinner.”
“On your birthday? And me too? Isn’t that a family meal? ……Ah.”
She had figured out why they would invite me.
“So…… did she say anything else?”
“Mom called you ‘that Lee boy.’ Apparently we’ve been married half a year already.”
“…….”
Yeah, this was starting to feel heavy.
I had met her mother before…… once.
A single exchange while taking photos at the high-school graduation ceremony.
That was it.
What was I even supposed to call her when we met?
Mother-in-law?
“If you don’t want to go, just say so. I’ll go alone.”
“No, it’s not that I don’t want to.”
“So you’re coming?”
“……Guess I have to.”
It wasn’t a relationship we could dodge forever.
Skipping this one dinner wouldn’t mean we never had to meet.
I stood there fretting for a moment until she spoke again.
“Why are you just standing there? Sit down.”
Right—I had something to tell her.
“I’m heading out for a bit.”
“……Now?”
Jae-min glanced at the wall clock.
8:40 p.m.
Pretty late to be making plans.
“When will you be back?”
“We’ll drink, maybe play a round of billiards—probably late. Around two?”
“Who with?”
“A middle-school friend.”
He had stayed in college instead of enlisting, so after I got out of the army our midterms had overlapped and we still hadn’t seen each other. It had been a while; the night would probably run long.
But why was she suddenly asking questions like this?
Normally she never cared where I went.
“…….”
She looked at me with open dissatisfaction, then switched off the TV and stood up.
“……Then do it before you leave.”
“Huh?”
“Sumata. If you go out like this we won’t be able to do it today. So do it first and then go.”
“……?”
What the hell was she saying?
Do it and then leave?
……If I was understanding her correctly, in her head sumata was now a daily chore. If I walked out now we would miss today’s session, so I should take care of it in advance…… was that it?
“……I’ll be waiting in your room.”
Even she seemed a little embarrassed by her own words; her face flushed faintly as she slipped straight into my bedroom.
“I don’t exactly have a lot of time……”
……I’d better text my friend that I’d be a little late.
I sent a quick message, then followed her into the room.
Honestly, Jae-min was an easy girl.
From the last few days of near-sex, I had learned she had no weak spots at all.
Her actual genitals and breasts were obvious erogenous zones, but touching her neck, her thighs, or her ass made her whole body tremble with pleasure too.
And it wasn’t only her body that was sensitive.
From what I could tell, being dominated by me—or anything close to that scenario—gave her a mental high as well.
She still tried to cling to her male identity and put up a token resistance, but the moment pleasure took over, those instincts came pouring out.
It had been the same right before I came.
After I finished and was still riding the afterglow, I stroked her hair; she didn’t push me away. She just accepted it.
“……Okay, I’m heading out. Be good and wait for me.”
“……Hwaah…♥ U-uh…♥ Heh, ehehe……♥♥”
She was half out of her mind; I wasn’t sure she would even remember later. Still, it would probably be fine.
“Hey, Kang-yeon! Over here!”
A small chicken place lit with dim, cozy lights.
In a back seat, the guy who had been waiting for me waved me over.
“Whoa, you sure you actually went to the army? That haircut doesn’t look like any soldier I know.”
“What would a draft-dodger know about it? And while you were buried in the library for exams, a whole extra month already went by.”
I sat down, bantering.
The guy across from me was Kim Chul-soo.
An extremely common name attached to a far-from-common personality. Our mothers were friends, so we had known each other since we were kids.
“Exams go okay?”
“Not bad, I guess?”
“So you aced them.”
With this guy, “not bad” meant excellent.
His major was physics.
The reason he hadn’t enlisted after freshman year was so he could go straight to grad school.
Anyone who ran to a professor in his very first semester and declared himself a research slave was never going to have normal standards.
He pressed the call button on the table and spoke again.
“How’s the missus doing?”
“……Huh? Who?”
The word was so foreign to my ears that for a second I couldn’t even process it.
“Don’t tell me—Yoo Jae-min?”
“Heard it from your mom. You got married?”
“Ah……”
Uh. How was I supposed to answer that?
Say yes? Say no?
“Ready to order?”
“Ah—one green-onion chicken set and two five-hundred-cc drafts.”
“Yes, just a moment.”
“You still haven’t registered the marriage, right? I almost got offended hearing about the wedding without ever getting an invitation.”
“Uh, yeah……”
“You always insisted you two weren’t dating, but I figured there was no way you’d keep a girl that pretty next to you and not go for it. So you finally started after graduation?”
“Uh…… yeah, something like that?”
“Figures.”
I had zero plan for any of this.
Wait—did this guy even know who Yoo Jae-min was?
“You know Yoo Jae-min?”
“Huh? Of course I do. I saw her the day you enlisted.”
The day I enlisted? No—Jae-min hadn’t been there then.
“You knew her before that?”
“Well, just by face? Back in middle school she used to wait for you at the school gate sometimes.”
I had first met Yoo Jae-min in high school.
We lost contact after graduation and only ran into each other again inside the army.
But in this rewritten history we had known each other by middle school at the latest……
And she had cared enough to come wait for me outside school.
“Here are your two drafts first.”
“Ah, thanks.”
My head was spinning.
How was I supposed to think about any of this?
In this history, what exactly had Jae-min and I been to each other?
What purpose did that god have for rewriting the past like this?
“Kang-yeon, what’s with the thousand-yard stare?”
“Uh…… thinking about your sister-in-law?”
“Ugh, cut the crap and just toast already.”
“……Yeah. Cheers.”
The cold beer glasses clinked together.
The clean sound rang out as if it were wiping my messy thoughts clean.
“I’m home.”
I opened the front door and stepped inside. Everything looked exactly the way it had when I left.
The faint presence I felt deeper in the apartment filled me with a strange sense of relief.
I walked through the dark house, switched on the living-room light, and slowly opened my bedroom door.
“……Mm……”
The light from the living room brushed Jae-min’s eyelids; she let out a soft, petulant little sound.
“…….”
She had been asleep the whole time since I left, hugging even my pillow, looking completely at peace. Seeing her like that made all my earlier fretting feel ridiculous.
Yeah. Who cares?
Honestly, I was fine with things exactly as they were.
Whatever was going on inside her head, I was living with the top-tier S-rank beauty in the whole region. Why overthink it?
And that same beauty was taking care of my sexual needs every single day. If anything, wasn’t this a win?
All right. Worrying over. Done.
Time to sleep!
I stripped off my clothes, lay down beside her, and let my hand find her chest as naturally as breathing.
“……Nngh……♥”
Yeah. This was happiness.
I decided that was how I would think about it.
Eyes closed, I savored that happiness and slowly drifted off to sleep.