A World He'd Never Known
Life, no matter how long you stretched it, was never a thousand years. Never ten thousand.
Yoo Kang-soo was certain of that, too. His wife, Ji Hye-in, was not the kind of woman who would ever be the one to demand a divorce — not unless he, her husband, asked for it first. Of that fact, Yoo Kang-soo was more certain than anyone alive.
The drinking had something to do with it, yes. But the truth ran deeper. The thought of growing old someday without Ji Hye-in beside him — of missing her so badly he might lose his mind — had taken root in him and would not let go.
He wanted to grow old together. He couldn't help but picture it: the two of them, hands clasped tight, fading into the years side by side.
And so divorce was off the table. Bit by bit, that was how Yoo Kang-soo was making up his mind.
Ma Kyeong-il was, frankly, trembling.
He'd loosened up some during the first round, drinking and talking with the group. Even so, the tension hadn't fully left him. At the karaoke bar they'd gone to for the second round, he'd sung a song himself and watched her perform — but the woman who'd changed into an outfit so completely different from what she'd worn at the first stop, standing there singing, left Ma Kyeong-il unable to keep his head on straight.
Watching her sing with those little, careless flashes of skin, he genuinely couldn't tell whether he was dreaming or hallucinating. It made that little sense.
Ma Kyeong-il had never known anything but family life. He was fifty-three years old, a pharmacist who ran two pharmacies, and he had spent his entire life inside the walls of his own household. He'd married a woman he'd met at church, and they were in their twenty-first year together. The older child had started university this year; the younger was in high school.
His wife was a good woman. But the honest truth was that they had been sexless for over a decade. Ma Kyeong-il's drive had always been strong. Hers had not. He'd gone out drinking with close friends now and then, visited massage parlors and the like — but past fifty, even those diversions had started to lose their luster. The desire was still there. It was just that doing the same things over and over had drained the fun out of them.
Then, a few months ago, a pharmacy-school classmate — a fellow pharmacist he used to go out drinking with — had introduced him to a certain cafe club.
On the surface, it was just a social gathering. A friendship club. The reality was something else entirely. It wasn't a cafe just anyone could join. It aimed for a small, select membership. There was an initiation fee, monthly dues, and contribution assessments, and if you failed to participate, your membership rank dropped immediately. Once you rose above a certain rank, you were required to get a comprehensive STD panel and an HIV test every month, and submit the results to the cafe.
At first, Ma Kyeong-il hadn't understood any of it. He'd gone out drinking with his friend a few times, then learned the cafe's shocking secret, and found himself in deep conflict — this didn't seem like his kind of thing at all.
But his friend had explained it to him in careful detail. This wasn't a cafe you could join just because you wanted to. Forget about whether it matched your "inclinations" or not — you would never, for the rest of your life, get to have an experience this intense. And then, step by step, his pharmacist friend had laid out exactly what kinds of experiences he'd had himself.
Ma Kyeong-il couldn't believe it. A world entirely different from the one he had inhabited for fifty-three years was unfolding before him.
The membership process was extremely rigorous. Background checks were thorough. The men all seemed to have calm, even temperaments — no sharp edges among them. Men in their fifties and up, and while they weren't all fabulously wealthy, they were men who wanted for nothing financially. That made sense, looking at the contribution fees and monthly dues that kicked in once membership ranks were assigned. Without real financial breathing room, you simply couldn't participate in this cafe.
Perhaps because of that, every male member had money to spare, and not a single one spoke carelessly. They were all men in their fifties or older who'd achieved a certain standing in society — a few in their sixties, it seemed — though the membership was primarily built around men in their fifties.
Even as a simple social club, it would have been a pleasure. The people had class. Nobody ran their mouth. Nobody showed off, maybe because they were all educated enough not to need to. Nobody got falling-down drunk or made a spectacle of themselves. In any gathering of men you'd usually find one or two complete assholes; here, even those were almost entirely absent. That was how strictly they managed the male members' ranks.
Even after joining, each gathering had its own rank requirement for attending in-person meetups. The cafe was built around mandatory offline attendance. It wasn't structured so you could lurk online forever without ever showing up in person — which was why the entire membership numbered fewer than fifty people. But even those fewer-than-fifty members were strictly divided by rank.
Ma Kyeong-il's pharmacist friend had secretly shown him a board his own rank couldn't access, and there he had glimpsed a new world so unbelievable he could barely process it.
And today was Ma Kyeong-il's first in-person meetup since his membership rank had been raised. He had transferred the rank-upgrade contribution fee to the cafe administrators immediately, and they had designated this as his commemorative first offline meeting.
The woman from those photographs — the ones on the board nobody was supposed to see — was walking beside him now through the entertainment district.
When he'd first seen her at the eel restaurant during the first round, it had felt like his breath had stopped. She'd looked so pure. So demure. Then at the second stop, watching her sing in a completely different outfit, Ma Kyeong-il had genuinely been unable to keep his wits about him. And now the two of them were walking the entertainment district streets together. When she'd slipped her arm lightly through his, he'd actually flinched like an idiot.
The woman and Ma Kyeong-il entered the massive commercial building in the entertainment district and went straight to the elevator. Then they stepped into a room.
"You seem quite nervous..."
The woman asked it gently.
"Ah... yes. I... honestly, this is my f-first time doing anything like this..."
"Yes... I know. They told me today's the day you pop your cafe cherry. Let me introduce myself again. I'm Hye-in, the cafe's public sub."
"Ah... yes. I-it's an honor. I... I'm... Ma Kyeong-il."
"Oh, come on... Kyeong-il. You already introduced yourself at the eel restaurant earlier. And you can speak comfortably with me, you know. That's how it works with the cafe's public subs. Actually... they say dropping the formalities entirely is the default."
Ma Kyeong-il looked thoroughly awkward as he opened his mouth again.
"I... um... well... the thing is... I don't have... uh... I read all the cafe notices, and... I don't have those kinds of... sexually... unusual... inclinations..."
He was so tense the words wouldn't come out right. She had a sexiness he had never once felt from the wife he'd lived with for more than twenty years — a woman in a leather micro-miniskirt so tight it laid bare every curve of her taut ass, black fishnet stockings, and a top that clung to her body like yoga wear, as if she'd poured herself into a one-piece swimsuit. Between that outrageously provocative outfit and the many faces she'd shown him over the course of the evening, Ma Kyeong-il couldn't keep a single thought straight.
The truth was, his pharmacist friend had talked himself hoarse telling Ma Kyeong-il about this woman Hye-in, the cafe's public sub. Because she was a public sub, members above a certain rank were all supposed to get their turn — but there were so many applicants and the competition was so fierce that even his friend had only managed to sleep with her once. He'd already taken the other public subs to bed multiple times, but among all of them, Hye-in was the one whose bed was hardest to get into. When she was assigned as Ma Kyeong-il's rank-upgrade commemorative partner, his pharmacist friend had been envious — though he'd also said it was probably because Ma Kyeong-il seemed so well-behaved and decent that the administrators and the public sub had conferred and decided to give him the opportunity sooner.
"Kyeong-il. You can take your time getting used to speaking casually. A male member's particular inclinations don't matter. The other members are all the same way."
"Then... let me give you a little explanation. I couldn't really talk about what a public sub is during the first and second rounds, after all."