The Side of My Wife I Never Knew
"O-oppa…… drinks, all of a sudden? You probably have evening plans too, Teacher. Springing it on him out of nowhere like that must be a burden……"
Jisu pretended to chide me, doing her best to carve out an escape route for Sangjun. She wore the mask of a gentle wife tactfully discouraging her husband, but she couldn't quite hide the faint tremor clinging to the ends of her voice.
"Oh, is that so?"
I gave a hollow laugh and nodded. Then, as naturally as breathing, I pulled my phone out of my pants pocket.
"Then, since we can't do drinks today, could I at least get your number? As a parent, there are a few things I'd like to discuss privately about Hayul's grades and the direction of her tutoring. And maybe the two of us can grab a beer sometime."
Things to discuss as a parent. There could be no better pretext for dropping the hearts of these two — who had committed adultery while their student's father sat them down in his own home — straight through the floor.
The boy's pupils shook as if an earthquake had struck them, utterly defenseless.
"Sorry? Ah…… my number……?"
In that brief moment while he froze solid, darting glances at Jisu, she cut in urgently from behind me, flustered far worse than he was.
"O-oppa…… you can just ask me about that kind of stuff, why go to the trouble of getting the teacher's number? I'll pass along anything about Hayul's studies."
It was his wife's desperate flailing, trying by any means to sever any point of contact between me and the boy. The way she even stumbled over her own words — what a sight it was.
Without so much as turning my head toward Jisu, I met the boy with a perfectly composed smile and brushed her off gently.
"Hm? Whether you ask or I ask, it comes to the same thing. I'm Hayul's father, after all. What's the point of taking an unnecessary detour through you? Wouldn't you say so, Sangjun?"
I drove a nail into Jisu's coffin and, at the same time, hammered the wedge into him.
Faced with my unbending composure, Jisu could add nothing more; her lips only quivered.
Watching the strange tension crackling between husband and wife, Sangjun rolled his eyes, clearly working his brain. But with the homeowner, the student's father, staring him down in person, he had no grounds to refuse.
"Right away. ^^"
When I waved the lit phone screen lightly in front of him, Sangjun could hold out no longer. He swallowed hard and reluctantly took the phone from my hand. I caught the way his fingertips trembled faintly as he pressed the display.
A short while later, I took the phone back, confirmed the number he'd entered, and immediately pressed the call button.
Ri-ri-ring, ri-ri-ring……
The ringtone wailing from the depths of his pocket sliced sharply through the silent entryway.
I ended the call, looked Sangjun dead in the eye, and smiled crookedly.
"That's my number. Save it. I'll be in touch on my own before long."
Every single word carried a blade in it, but all he could do was bow his head again and again, crushed by my momentum.
"Ah…… yes, yes…… understood, sir. If you contact me, I'll answer."
Wearing a face drained bone-white, Sangjun barely managed a reply, then threw open the front door and fled. The slam of the door behind him pressed down on the living room's silence all the heavier.
The moment Sangjun was out, Jisu's eyes changed a full 180 degrees. The jittery, cowed woman from moments before was gone without a trace; she knitted her brows in open displeasure and raked me with a frosty glare.
"Oppa, what's gotten into you today? Why are you pulling this out-of-character act?"
Thorned, shameless — the aggressor playing the wronged party. Whenever his wife bared her fangs like this, the man I had always been — the doting husband, the good father behind a smiling mask — would take a step back and soothe her mood. That had long been the script.
Jisu's irritated expression, too, plainly expected me to tuck my tail between my legs and mumble an apology, just like old times. It was the shameless calculation of a woman raising her voice to seize control of the situation so her affair would stay buried.
But I did not flinch from that loathsome expression. I met it head-on, straight and unblinking. Under my cold gaze, Jisu's eyes wavered, just barely.
"I told you on the phone I wasn't feeling well and went to the hospital. And what exactly was it I did that's so out of character? So impossible?"
At my low, sunken voice — a voice that chilled to the marrow — Jisu's face went rigid in an instant. The stark panic was plain to read; she'd never once imagined such a firm, bristling response from me.
"No…… that's not what I meant, that you can't…… it's just, you suddenly telling the tutor to drink with you, then asking for his number too — it caught me off guard, that's all……"
Her bravado deflated, Jisu trailed off into mumble and fog. She'd come out swinging, ready to brazen it out, and had walked straight into the teeth of a poker face she never saw coming.
Nausea surged up in me at the fact that these same lips had recently sucked down and swallowed that bastard's cock — and now stood before me lecturing, playing the ordinary housewife again. My hand itched to yank the phone from my pocket right then and thrust that repulsive footage in her face.
But I swallowed the rising emotion and held it down. The hilt of the knife was in my hand. There was nothing wrong with savoring this precarious upper hand, this delicious depravity, a little longer.
Leaving my wife mid-stammer, mid-excuse, I walked to the bedroom without offering a single word in reply. I felt her dumbfounded stare drill into my back, and I shut the door coldly behind me.
I threw myself roughly onto the bed, its sheets freshly changed. The instant the stiff fabric met my skin, the violent motions and moans of Jisu and that bastard entwined on this very spot mere hours before battered my ears like phantom sounds.
In my bed…… these filthy fucks.
Rage boiled up from somewhere deep in my chest, blood surging backward. My clenched fist trembled. The impulse flared to run out to the living room this instant and seize Jisu by the hair and shake her.
And yet, behind that extreme fury and wretchedness — bizarrely — my cock stiffened and swelled again between my legs. It was a kind of brain-numbing arousal I had never once felt in my life.
Fury and depravity churning together, an ungovernable curiosity came flooding next, along with a voyeur's hunger — how had my wife, so prim and proper, locked eyes with that fresh young bastard and ended up crawling into this bed?
I could not bear this grotesque arousal and this boiling anger a second longer.
I rose from the bed and opened my phone. Scrolling through the footage I'd secretly filmed through the crack of the bedroom door, I found the frame where Sangjun's bare face was caught most unmistakably, and captured it. Then I pulled up the number I'd saved minutes ago and opened a message window.
The moment I pressed send, my heart pounded until it felt like it would burst. I stared holes into the screen, and before long the read receipt beside my message vanished without a trace.
He'd read it. He had seen it.
But for a long while, nothing came back. On the screen where the little "1" had disappeared, no reply appeared. I could feel it through the screen — the sheer terror and despair the boy must be drowning in — and a strange, sadistic pleasure trickled down my spine.
I sat on the edge of the bed, breath held, and waited for his response. After roughly five minutes of silence that felt like time itself had stopped, the phone finally buzzed.
His reply sat there on the screen, meek and utterly drained of spirit. I twisted my mouth into a smirk and got to my feet. The thought of carving up the boy who was even now sprinting, white-faced, toward the park made my heart pound violently.
I threw on the jacket hanging roughly on the stand, opened the bedroom door, and stepped out.
From the living room sofa, Jisu glanced back at me and asked, sharp-edged:
"Where are you going? You said you were sick."
"Yeah. A friend dropped by the park up ahead for a bit, so I'm going out for a beer with him."
I tossed the words out as flatly as I could. And with that, Jisu — business as usual — began brazenly unspooling her nagging at my back.
"Honestly, you come home early for once and you can't even play with your kid? Instead you drag that body of yours out to drink again? Friends, I swear — you'd get up out of a dead sleep for them."
The same everyday nagging I would once have smoothed over with a soft apology now stoked my fury past loathing into something close to murder. This was the woman who had taken her daughter's tutor's cock in her mouth, acting the moral wife and mother to her husband's face.
For a heartbeat something hot and violent surged up in me, but I barely held my poker face and gripped the door handle.
"I'll be back soon."
Leaving Jisu's nagging behind me, I shut the front door. The steel door boomed closed, and only then was the hateful warmth at my back finally cut off.
As I stepped out of the apartment complex, dusk had already fallen and the world was dimming toward dark. My steps toward the park felt strangely light even as something inside my chest froze over, hard and cold. The strange lust for power of being able to squeeze the throat of the man who had defiled my family — and the depraved heaviness swelling between my legs because of it.
Carrying that grotesque impulse, a mix of misery and elation, I quickened my pace toward the park where the boy waited, white as death.