The Side of My Wife I Never Knew (3)
“You fucking bitch……”
In that instant my heart plummeted. A hollow emptiness yawned open deep in my chest, as if something vital had been ripped clean out, while at the same time a scorching lump of fire clogged my solar plexus and left me gasping for air.
With one short confession from Sang-jun, my world shattered into pieces all over again.
I barely managed to steady my trembling jaw and force my breathing under control. I tried desperately to keep my composure, yet the voice that escaped me still shook with a tremor I could not hide.
“From…… from the very beginning……?”
At my question Sang-jun glanced around nervously, clearly terrified, yet the uselessly logical nature peculiar to a medical student seemed to surface on instinct; he opened his mouth with careful caution.
“Ah…… it wasn’t from the very beginning.”
Smack!
The words had scarcely left his lips when my upper body shot forward as if launched from a spring. My open palm cracked mercilessly against the back of his head. A dull thud of flesh on flesh rang out and Sang-jun’s head snapped forward.
“You little shit! Then you say it wasn’t from the start, huh? Can’t you talk straight?”
“Augh……!”
Clutching his head, Sang-jun stammered out a reply laced with a mixture of grievance and pure terror.
“Th-that’s not it. Father asked whether I liked Jisu nuna— I mean, Ha-yul’s mother—from the beginning, so I was only trying to distinguish precisely between the timing of our first physical relation and the reactions that followed…….”
At the sudden slip of “Jisu nuna” my eyebrows twitched hard. The way this twenty-one-year-old with his clever little head was trying so earnestly to explain himself in that orderly tone only made my blood boil worse. A hollow laugh escaped me. I straightened my torso again and made a light flicking motion toward his forehead.
“Hup……!”
Sang-jun hunched his neck like a turtle and instinctively covered his head with both hands.
Looking down at that abject posture, I sank deep into the sofa once more and muttered coldly,
“You going to keep talking back?”
“I-I’m sorry.”
“Tell me everything about how it was at the start. Don’t leave a single thing out.”
“At first…… Jisu nuna, no, Ha-yul’s mother seemed rather wary of me, perhaps because I was a young, sturdy man. She never made any personal conversation at all; she was just the perfect picture of a polite, boundary-keeping parent.”
The phrase “young, sturdy man” twisting out of his mouth made my guts churn, but I waited in silence for whatever came next.
“So I simply focused on the lessons. I applied the efficient wrong-answer note method and weak-point analysis techniques I’d personally learned and perfected back in elementary school, and Ha-yul was so bright and sharp that she followed my teaching style extremely well.”
The unexpected praise for my youngest daughter Ha-yul made a strange little warmth of pride bloom unbidden in one corner of my chest. Weakness for a child’s accomplishments must be an unavoidable paternal instinct; for a brief moment a peculiar satisfaction slipped through the cracks of my smothered rage.
Then the original purpose slammed back into me like a bucket of ice water.
“Fuck, what does any of that have to do with what I asked? Cut the bullshit and get to the point.”
“Ah…… I’m sorry. You did tell me to tell everything from the beginning…….”
“Hold on.”
“Yes?”
He hunched his shoulders and stopped talking.
A strange intellectual curiosity and a sadistic urge rose together inside me. Just how had that conservative wife of mine—who normally seemed utterly devoid of sexual desire and always threw up iron walls against other men—suddenly gone wild for this green kid’s cock? I was dying to know every secret, concrete step of that process.
I glanced down at the watch on my wrist. The metal strap hung loosely. Time was plentiful.
“Just ramble at your own tempo.”
“……What?”
“Fuck, didn’t I tell you not to make me say things twice?”
I lifted my hand again in a threatening gesture and Sang-jun flinched, both hands flying up to protect his head.
“N-no! I’ll speak right away! So…… after teaching Ha-yul for about two weeks like that, I guided her to take genuine interest in studying and to plan her own schedule proactively.”
……Wow, even a medical student’s tutoring is on another level. Turning a third-grader around in a mere two weeks.
An involuntary note of admiration rose inside me. Remembering how Jisu had constantly fretted over Ha-yul’s grades and study habits made this kid’s ability feel depressingly impressive in that wretched moment.
“Once Ha-yul started enjoying studying, the way her mother looked at me and the way she spoke to me definitely softened. The snacks and drinks she brought out herself also became noticeably more elaborate. And then one day…….”
Sang-jun swallowed dryly and began groping through the memory of that afternoon. As his voice carried the story, the fog of the day their affair first began settled slowly over the living-room lights, as if a scene change were taking place.
Click.
“Hello, Ha-yul’s mother.”
Sang-jun stepped through the front door with his backpack slung over one shoulder and offered a polite greeting.
Jisu, who had been pacing the living room, hurried over, looking flustered and at a loss.
“Ah, Teacher! What should I do?”
“Yes? Is something wrong?”
“Apparently the school suddenly called together a prep class for the education office math competition today. They said they’re still working through practice problems after school and haven’t been able to leave yet—her homeroom teacher just contacted me…… And because parent consultations overlapped, I wasn’t able to let you know about the schedule change in advance. I’m truly sorry, Teacher…….”
Jisu bowed her head, clearly mortified and unsure what to do with herself.
At that, Sang-jun gave his characteristic easy smile and gently shook his head.
“Oh, not at all. If it’s competition prep, school classes naturally come first. Ha-yul will get a good result today, I’m sure.”
He chuckled lightly and turned his body toward the door lock as if to leave.
“Then I’ll just go grab a coffee at a nearby café and come back when the time’s right.”
The moment he started to step outside, Jisu’s hand shot out urgently.
“Oh my, Teacher! It’s so hot outside—where would you even wait? Just come in.”
Tak—
Jisu’s soft, slender fingers gently closed around Sang-jun’s firm forearm. Then, as if refusing to give him any chance to escape, she drew him lightly deeper into the living room.
“You haven’t eaten yet, have you? Come sit at the table. I’ll bring out something simple for you to nibble on.”
Beneath the dim lights of the room salon, Sang-jun stopped speaking right there and suddenly clamped his mouth shut. His face drained visibly white; he kept swallowing dryly and glancing at my expression for cues.
Clearly some secret too blatant and humiliating for a twenty-one-year-old kid to spit out in front of the husband was waiting right after that moment.
I leaned my chin a little farther forward on the table and fixed him with a gaze as cold and flat as a snake’s.
“Why’d you stop? Bastard, did your tongue get cut off? Talk properly.”
“I-it’s not that, after that we just sat at the table…….”
“I’ll decide what’s trivial and what isn’t.”
I slammed my palm down on the table with a loud crack and glared. Sang-jun hunched his neck like a turtle and his shoulders began to tremble finely.
“Speak. Don’t test my patience. What were you thinking inside when Jisu grabbed your arm that day? If you don’t answer honestly I’m turning the phone on right now.”
“…….”
“Want to see the link go up on your school’s Everytime board? Keep stalling. One, two……”
“I…… I jerked off…….”
Realizing there was nowhere left to run, Sang-jun squeezed his eyes shut and spat the confession out like a scream. His ears burned scarlet all the way to the tips; he kept his head bowed low as the words poured out.
“Actually…… the truth is, three nights before that incident, lying on the bed in my one-room…… I roughly stroked myself while imagining Jisu nuna’s body. She isn’t exactly a stunning beauty like an actress, but…… her looks are solid and she takes such good care of herself that her figure and the fullness of her breasts are no joke. And at that age when you’re right in the middle of being obsessed with women, every time I came over for tutoring I was already…….”
He panted as he continued.
“But then the object of all that fantasy suddenly grabbed my arm and pulled me inside, and for a second it felt like my reason just short-circuited. Unexpected physical contact made my heart pound like it was going to explode, and……”
Sang-jun clamped his mouth shut again after the syllable “and.” His face was already flushed to bursting; he clearly could not bring himself to finish the sentence and looked utterly desperate.
Watching that face, my temper started rising again. My guts were already twisted from my wife’s betrayal; every time the kid cut himself off at the juiciest part my patience scraped closer to zero.
I took my hand away from my chin, slapped the table sharply, and barked in a voice thick with irritation.
“What else!! Didn’t I tell you not to hesitate and just say everything? Huh?”
“Hic……!”
“You need another smack to the head before you wake up? Why stop again, you bastard? Spit out the rest right now.”
Sang-jun instinctively leaned his torso backward, trembling all over. Completely overpowered by my cold fury, he finally squeezed his eyes shut and forced the filthy secret out.
“My…… my cock…… between my legs got so heavy and swollen that it was visibly bulging through my pants, completely out of my control…….”