A Sub They Could Never Replace
A man in his early sixties tilted his head as he spoke.
"That's right... He didn't just hit me in the neck. He took off his own clothes, pressed them against my throat, and then struck me through them. Ah... just thinking about it makes my hands and feet start shaking. Really..."
Ko Dong-seok was answering the man in his sixties.
Another of the cafe's operators spoke up.
"The truth is, that insurance company's managing director is a friend of a friend of mine, so I tried putting in a word. Didn't even make a dent. Apparently he caused a scene demanding to be taken up to the CEO's office — the whole company was in an uproar. Sounds like the kind of nightmare you just don't want to mess with."
Another operator clicked his tongue and picked up the thread.
"Aigoo... living a life of obedience for nearly twenty years under a husband like that — maybe that's how Hye-in came by such an extreme submissive streak so naturally. Her ordinary life itself was probably the life of a sub. Obeying. Submitting. Aigoo..."
Everyone sighed and nodded.
Yet another operator opened his mouth.
"Alright, alright. The most important thing here is Hye-in herself. What matters is how Hye-in feels. When have we ever lost sleep over the husband's feelings? Since when do netori men get too scared of the husband to even make a move? Our cafe might have gotten a little warped these days, but let's not forget — this place originally started with a handful of netori guys getting together. Dong-seok... you used to have a seriously strong netori streak yourself. How many couples have you even driven to divorce? After meeting Hye-in, though... Dong-seok, you seem to be turning into a shill."
"So this is purely my personal opinion — something I thought of on my own — but if we're just going to keep becoming shills for the members like this, it might actually be better to just put Hye-in out of the cafe."
When one of the operators in his mid-fifties said this, the rest of them all shook their heads firmly.
"That's not it..."
"No. Don't do that. We'll never find another cafe public sub like Hye-in..."
A man who looked to be in his late fifties, who had not said a single word until now, carefully opened his mouth.
"I've been here since the beginning too — eight years with this cafe — but a sub with Hye-in's kind of presence is the type you might see once every few years, if that. Most women with submissive tendencies, without even realizing it, start giving off a scent not unlike the demimonde once enough time has passed. They change that way. But Hye-in hasn't."
The mood grew solemn for a moment. Then the man who had been leading the conversation from the start spoke up again.
"Let's change the subject and move on. I'd like each of you to give your thoughts on member promotions."
Everyone offered a word on the new topic, and various opinions on how to run the cafe began to circulate. They talked, from a slightly different angle, about how the cafe's public subs ought to be managed going forward, and the operators started in on their soft-shell turtle and chicken stew.
"Am I the strange one?"
Pharmacist Ma Kyeong-il was asking his friend, who was a pharmacist as well.
"No. You're not the strange one. I was the same way. That woman... she doesn't have the kind of striking looks you'd see on a celebrity, but there's something about her atmosphere. Honestly, my own netori streak isn't that deep, so I don't really know — but according to Dr. Jeong, her tendencies run very strong. Of course, she hasn't fully accepted those tendencies herself, not a hundred percent."
"Dr. Jeong? Who's Dr. Jeong?"
"The short guy with the glasses. That's Dr. Jeong. He's got a bit of a Dom streak, apparently. He actually keeps a few subs of his own, but the master-servant arrangements never seem to last very long."
"Ah — so he's a psychiatrist?"
"No. There's a separate psychiatrist among the members. Dr. Jeong is a cardiologist — cardiovascular internal medicine. But he knows as much about psychiatry as the psychiatrist does. He's been studying it on his own, building up his knowledge. He said he'd been interested in that field since his medical school days."
"Are there a lot of medical people among the members?"
"Yeah. Pharmacists are just you and me — two of us. Doctors, maybe five or six. If the medical side alone is close to ten people, that's hardly a small share of the whole membership."
"I got a private message from the cafe operators. I told them I wanted to apply for another in-person meetup, and they said to check public sub Yoo Mi-ran's schedule next week and pick whatever time I want."
"Good. That's the right order of things. You need to pick a girl who does this often if you want to learn this world fast. Give Yoo Mi-ran a try."
His pharmacist friend nodded as he said it.
"This Yoo Mi-ran woman — is she available anytime?"
"No. Only four days — Monday through Thursday. They're a weekend couple, so her husband comes home Friday night and she's off-limits. Four days out of seven, though — that's practically every day. In terms of weekly frequency, Yoo Mi-ran has the most openings of anyone. But most of the members have already been with her a few times each, so even with four slots a week, those four reservations often don't fill up. Interest in her is cooling off a bit, to be honest."
"Have you been with Yoo Mi-ran too?"
"Of course. I've been with Yoo Mi-ran plenty of times already. She's got a decent atmosphere about her, in her own way. She looks a little older than she is, but she's kind, she's obedient, and nothing's off the table."
"Alright. Then let me take a look at Yoo Mi-ran's schedule."
Ma Kyeong-il opened the cafe on his phone and began scanning the updated posts on the board where the public subs' schedules were listed.
"That's strange. As of last week I thought there were five public subs..."
He tilted his head as he said it.
"That's right. Through last week there were five. But a woman named Yoon Yeo-rin got expelled from the cafe. I thought a notice went out to all the members. You didn't see it?"
"Yeah, a bunch of notices came in, but they mostly arrived during the day, so I must have missed them. What did it say?"
"Yoon Yeo-rin lied to the cafe operators and was doing sub work for money at a different cafe. There are quite a few places like that. Once commercial activity gets mixed in, it becomes a headache, so the operators just decided to cut her loose."
"Other cafes honestly tolerate that kind of thing. Finding public subs is genuinely hard, so the other places are a complete free-for-all. The men too — every kind of bastard you can imagine, fights breaking out, people suing each other, total chaos. That's why our cafe never accepts new male members unless they're recommended by an existing member above a certain rank. And if you don't move up in rank within a set period, they strip your membership without mercy. Fail to register your STD test results every month and you get demoted; go more than two months and your membership is revoked on the spot. This place is the strictest about that kind of thing — but that's also why they say the public subs are managed better here than anywhere else."
"Works out well for us, doesn't it. All those membership fees and shared costs we pay go toward keeping the public subs on a regular STD regimen, and toward making sure no other problems crop up. But looking at the operators' chats from back then, they had a lot of worries. They used to only accept men with a thorough netori orientation and run the cafe that way — and when that stopped working, they more or less stopped looking at the men's tendencies and started managing the women's tendencies with an iron hand instead. Either way, once you start managing public subs, the men's tendencies all come out in the open anyway. They really do work hard at running this cafe. That effort is genuinely admirable."
"Watching the public subs get passed around among the members — that's what the true netori men feel their rapture from. That's where men with a Dom streak and men with a netori streak are, in some ways, a little different. This cafe mixes the two and just keeps going."
"Honestly, I didn't understand any of it at first. But as time passed, I started to get the feeling, little by little. If a public sub gets caught by her husband and ends up divorced, she stops being a public sub — she gets rehomed as a private one."
Ma Kyeong-il listened to his friend and shook his head slowly. He had known this was a world he had never known before, but there was so much of it that the values of the life he had actually lived simply could not make sense of. That made it all the more bewildering.
And yet, by now, it had become the most important part of fifty-three-year-old pharmacist Ma Kyeong-il's life — the first thing he thought of when he opened his eyes in the morning.
A place that made him feel alive. A place where he could feel his sexual desire throbbing, leaping, vividly and unmistakably alive. The cafe gatherings had become that source of vitality.