The Introvert Who Got Reverse-Hunted
By now, it was noon—the third operating hour since the pool had opened.
As the sun climbed higher, the number of swimmers seemed to rise with it. The parasols without owners were disappearing fast.
Plenty of people had apparently woken up late, eaten brunch, and then decided to head over for a leisurely afternoon at the pool.
Since the place was right in the middle of Seoul, I supposed there wasn’t much reason for nearby residents to drag themselves out of the house early in the day.
Because of that, the youth pool—which had already been noisy enough with elementary school kids—had turned into a hellscape of half water, half brats, and the main pool, which had at least been relatively quiet, had started filling up too.
There were so many people stopping in the middle of the lanes now that it was getting hard to swim from one end of the pool to the other without interruption.
So we agreed to put off our plans to enjoy the pool for a little while and deal with lunch first.
After lunch, we figured some of the people who’d come in the morning would have cleared out, and besides, since we’d left home early for the UCC shoot, we were all starting to get hungry anyway.
In fact, the sudden surge in visitors was making the snack bar’s inventory vanish before our eyes, so if we didn’t handle lunch now, we’d probably have to leave the pool just to eat.
But even if we went to the snack bar, somebody still needed to stay behind and watch the bags at the parasol.
So I stayed put, while Han Sia and Yu Somi went off to buy lunch.
...
Don’t get the wrong idea.
This wasn’t me dumping errands on the girls so I could lie back and relax in peace.
I hadn’t even asked them to buy anything for me.
I just had no intention of letting the pool’s shamelessly predatory snack-bar pricing take advantage of me.
I opened the suitcase I’d left under the parasol, then pulled out a black bag from inside.
When I emptied its contents onto the table, foil-wrapped kimbap, convenience-store bread, cola, and chocolate all came tumbling out.
It had been obvious the food inside the pool would be ridiculously expensive, so these were things I’d quietly brought in when we entered.
You think the pool bans outside food?
You think they check your belongings on the way in and confiscate everything edible?
Hah. Hah. If your imagination is that limited, those crooks will rip you off down to your underwear for the price of a single cup ramen.
This morning, under the excuse of filming UCC content, we’d been allowed in before the pool opened.
That was when I’d taken the chance to leave a bag of outside food in a suitable locker.
Since they didn’t do any bag checks before opening time, it hadn’t been difficult at all.
Of course... I did feel a little bad toward the pool office for letting us in early for the UCC shoot.
I’d repaid kindness with betrayal, after all.
Still, they’d slapped a 2,000-won price tag on a single cup ramen, so I didn’t exactly think they had room to complain.
Considering convenience-store cup ramen cost somewhere between 500 and 800 won, I figured I could afford to feel guilty three times over and still come out ahead.
After wiping down the parasol table with a wet tissue, I set everything out so we could eat the food I’d brought and waited for Han Sia and Yu Somi.
But they still weren’t back, which made it seem like the snack bar was packed with people and taking longer than expected because it was lunchtime.
That was when I noticed two women in bikinis approaching our parasol.
They weren’t Han Sia or Yu Somi. Just strangers.
Now that the number of guests had increased, it looked like all the prime spots close to the pool were gone, so they’d probably come all the way to our isolated corner looking for a parasol.
"Oh... there are a few parasols here too. It’s a little far from the pool, which is a shame, but it’s better than nothing."
"Wow. The guy sitting next to us is kind of built, isn’t he? Should we ask him to hang out with us?"
"Yeah! But... doesn’t he look a little young?"
Were they talking about me?
I couldn’t hear them very well since they were whispering to each other, but if I pieced together the context... it sounded suspiciously like reverse-hunting.
Still, eavesdropping on other people’s conversations was bad manners, and jumping to conclusions about their intentions because of it was pointless.
So I ignored them and lay back on the sunbed, pretending not to notice.
"Hi there~ Looks like your friends wandered off somewhere. Isn’t it boring waiting here alone?"
"How old are you? Are you the same age as your friends?"
I was a little flustered inside.
I knew people went around pools trying to strike up conversations and make friends with strangers, but this was the first time I’d ever seen it happen in person.
No, scratch that. This was the first time a stranger girl had ever spoken to me in a friendly way for any reason outside of work.
Still, I didn’t feel flattered so much as annoyed and tired, so I answered with a rather flat tone.
"I’m a first-year in high school."
"First-year in high school?? Wow!! You’re so young! We’re college freshmen."
"You’re really young, but you’re seriously well built. Are you on the track team or something? Are your friends who came with you built like you too?"
To me, as a man with a 35-year-old core, college freshmen were no different from kids like Sia or Somi.
Sure, they were adults, and it wasn’t exactly unpleasant to have them show me some attention, but...
"Want to hang out with us, then? We came here with a few friends."
"Hey, you little brat. What about your club senior who likes you? Why are you trying to hit on other guys?"
"We’re just asking him to hang out, what’s the big deal? And besides, he looks like he’s got a better body than that guy. Haha, did you hear us? No weird meaning, okay? We were just complimenting your muscles, saying they’re pretty."
No. To be honest, it didn’t feel good at all.
Just listening to them was exhausting. I wanted to be left alone.
Lately, I thought I’d gotten a little better about this, but my loner tendencies felt like they were bubbling back up to the surface.
And those older girls—if they counted as older girls at all—were wearing bikinis too, but somehow...
Was the female body really this plain by default?
No, sure, they were slim enough and didn’t have any sagging flesh, so they clearly worked hard to keep in shape.
But they still seemed to lack feminine curves in all the right places.
Weirdly enough, I felt like if I wore a bikini too, I’d have a bigger chest than they did.
And for some reason, their legs looked short and their hips were almost perfectly straight.
Their faces weren’t ugly or anything, but they weren’t especially attractive either.
...
In other words, I could barely feel any real feminine charm from them at all.
Of course, I understood in my head that they were pretty good-looking by most standards.
Fresh out of college, with faces and bodies like that, they’d probably have men lining up all over campus asking them out.
But all I felt was annoyance and discomfort because some stranger had decided to talk to me. My mind remained as calm and still as the surface of an indoor reservoir.
It was honestly enough to make me wonder if I’d suddenly become impotent or something.
Anyway, I had no intention of hanging out with those women.
It’d be better to turn them down firmly.
Having made up my mind, I opened my mouth to reject them politely.
...
No. The moment I opened my mouth, a cold voice drifted in from behind the women.
"Who are you ladies? If you talk to him without asking us first, that makes things very awkward for us. Do you want things to get awkward for you too?"
It was Han Sia, holding a chicken skewer in one hand.
Her voice was like wind skimming over a sheet of ice, and just hearing it sent chills down my spine too.
But she didn’t stop there. Yu Somi joined in as well, carrying bags of food in both hands.
"Haha. How about we take this little conversation over to that corner for a moment? You don’t want to? Then should we do it right here?"
Somi walked up to the two women, draped an arm over their shoulders, and tried to drag them toward a secluded spot.
With Somi, who was fairly tall, openly acting like a delinquent, the women who’d spoken to me looked so pale they seemed ready to run on the spot.
One of them, flustered and trembling, asked, "Who... who are you? We were just trying to get friendly with the people in the next seat... that’s all..."
Even if Han Sia and Yu Somi acted like this, they still looked like high school girls.
So with girls who clearly looked younger than them coming at them so aggressively, I guess they were wondering whether they should use honorifics or not.
Honestly, I was so stunned by the sudden shift in the situation that I just sat there blankly and watched.
Then Han Sia and Yu Somi smiled brightly at the woman’s question, stepped to either side of me, and said,
"I’m his girlfriend."
"I’m his lover."
As if to show off our relationship to the other side, Han Sia wrapped her arm around my waist and pulled me close, while Yu Somi took my hand and set my palm on her softly parted hips.
...
What?
.
.
After that, the women who’d spoken to me seemed offended and muttered as they left.
Apparently, they’d noticed I had a good body and thought they might try their luck if there were any handsome guys in the group I came with.
At least, that was the implication. They clearly hadn’t even considered the possibility that I’d be here with girls.
In other words, they’d had zero interest in me to begin with.
And yet Han Sia and Yu Somi said they’d called me their girlfriend and lover to drive away those “nasty women.”
According to them, the “nasty women” they’d just chased off were obviously criminals who’d approached me from the start because of my body, and if they hadn’t pretended to be my lovers, I would’ve been tricked into something bad for sure.
"If we hadn’t stepped in, those nasty women would’ve been sweet-talking innocent Ian into doing something awful by now. Honestly, you just can’t let your guard down."
"Exactly. Waving around their bikinis and throwing themselves at you like that? They obviously came here planning to do that from the beginning."
Then what exactly were you two, coming here in bikinis?
...Yeah, probably better not say that out loud.
Their over-the-top reaction left me with mixed feelings, but I still thanked them for helping me out.
...
Still, those women who’d talked to me earlier had honestly been lacking in charm by even the smallest measure.
Flat chests, bodies that were only thin, bland hips, short legs, and merely average faces.
So I turned to Yu Somi beside me, wondering if maybe something was wrong with my eyes.
And then there it was—those soft, impossible breasts that immediately grabbed my attention, and then the breasts again, and the beer-bottle waistline, and then, once more, the breasts.
Damn. I couldn’t even get my gaze down to the lower half of her body easily.
When I tried to move my eyes from top to bottom instead of bottom to top, I couldn’t make it past her chest.
Her face being pretty went without saying.
Even just looking at her for a moment made my heartbeat quicken and left me strangely tense.
And as an extra bonus, I kept worrying for no good reason whether my own desire might be rising.
This time, I looked over at Han Sia.
The memory of her hugging me earlier with the top half of her bikini missing was still too vivid, so I skipped the chest immediately.
Then came her waist, suddenly narrowing with sharp definition, and her hips, made even more prominent by how slim her waist was.
After that, there were her long, slender legs stretching all the way down.
It was clear enough.
My eyes were fine. My sexual function was fine too.
So those women from earlier had just been weirdly lacking in charm, that was all.
For a bikini to do so little for them, I almost felt sorry.
But as I looked from Yu Somi to Han Sia in turn and nodded to myself, they seemed to notice I was reacting to something and asked why I was nodding.
"Ah, I was just thinking those women who talked to me earlier oddly didn’t seem attractive at all, so I wondered if something was wrong with me... but looking at you two again made me realize the problem wasn’t me. I’m not sure exactly why, but I guess a bikini isn’t something just anyone can pull off?"
"..."
"..."
So I gave them a fairly honest answer...
Han Sia and Yu Somi both blushed for a moment, then went quiet for a while.