Forbidden
The moment I pushed open the hotel door and stepped outside, the cool night air brushed against the back of my neck, still damp with sweat.
For the thirty or so minutes after Hyeon-seok left, we hadn't spoken a single word—just sat frozen on the sofa. Once the sour scent of bodies and the crushing tension that had filled the room drained away, an unbearable emptiness and humiliation rushed in to take their place.
"Let's go."
It was the first thing I'd said since Hyeon-seok walked out.
We sat side by side in the back of the taxi the whole way home, and a suffocating silence hung between me and Jeong-hee. She stared blankly out the window, but her face reflected in the glass was still flushed a deep red. I caught sight of her fingers resting on her knee, trembling faintly.
I had no idea what to say.
Barely an hour ago, I had groveled at another man's feet with my face to the floor, and Jeong-hee had straddled my back, licking another man's toes while crying out in ecstasy. The boundary of the ordinary relationship we'd spent three years building had been shattered to pieces in the space of a few dozen minutes.
When we got home and I punched in the door lock, the familiar scent of fabric softener washed over me. This was the peaceful space where we'd simmered doenjang stew together and traded the small talk of daily life. But that familiarity now felt so alien, so strange, that I could barely stand it.
"...I'm going to shower first."
Jeong-hee's voice came out small and cowed as she slipped into the bathroom.
Listening to the hiss of running water, I collapsed onto the living room floor. My cock was still rigid inside my pants, refusing to subside. The humiliation of licking Jeong-hee's arousal off Hyeon-seok's toes, the hot, damp skin of Jeong-hee pressed against my back, the sound of her confessing I'm turned on—it all kept circling endlessly in my ears.
Before Jeong-hee came out, I peeled off my panties—sodden with sweat and precum—and threw them into the washing machine. Even in that moment, my cheek from the slap earlier was still burning with a dull sting.
Back in reality, all I could think about was having to go to work the very next day. My body and mind were both completely drained.
A little later, Jeong-hee emerged in a loose t-shirt, toweling her wet hair, and perched on the edge of the bed. I hurried into the shower after her and doused myself in cold water, but the heat in my body and the fever in my head wouldn't cool down so easily.
As I showered, I stared blankly at my reflection in the mirror—my naked body, smoothly and completely shaved. The events of the night flickered past like a death montage. Before I knew it, a fresh wave of heat was spreading through my groin.
Ha... you pathetic fuck.
A self-loathing curse spilled out of me on its own. What else could I say? I'd shaved off every last hair from the most intimate part of my body to please a man barely twenty-six, then crawled around at his feet like a dog.
When I finished and lay down beside her, Jeong-hee was the first to speak, cautiously.
"Oppa, let's... let's stop here."
Her voice trembled out of the darkness.
"..."
"That guy isn't a joke. His eyes, the way he touches... none of it is something ordinary people like us can handle. Making you do those things, treating me like that... I was so scared. If we go any further, we'll never get back to our normal life."
Jeong-hee pulled the blanket up to her chin and squeezed my hand. Her voice was a tangle of relief and lingering fear, like someone who had just barely pulled their foot back from the edge of a cliff.
"...Jeong-hee, are you sure? If that's what you want, I'm fine with it."
"Yeah, I'm sure. I don't want to see you suffering either... I think we took this way too lightly."
"Okay. Then I'll contact him and end things."
I nodded and brushed the hair back from her forehead.
And for the first time in a long while, we fell asleep holding each other tightly. We hadn't slept entwined like this since the early days of our relationship. Like two people to whom nothing had happened that day, we forced ourselves toward sleep by rambling through memories of our first meeting three years ago and the trips we'd taken together.
And so we agreed to bury everything under the rug of 'it never happened,' our first session now behind us. I would be the one to send Hyeon-seok the message that it was over. In name, at least, I was Jeong-hee's boyfriend and protector.
But hell had already begun quietly raising its head the moment that agreement was sealed.
Deep in the night, I fell into a vivid nightmare. No—not a nightmare, but a viciously sweet flashback. It was as if I'd been pulled back into that hotel room on Wednesday night.
You're the lowest tool of all, hyung.
Noona, lick it.
Hyeon-seok's cold voice. The grotesque sight of Jeong-hee from behind, ass raised high beneath him, pouring out her arousal. And my own wretched self, lapping it up from between Hyeon-seok's toes.
"Hahk—!"
When I woke gasping for breath, my underwear was already soaked through. It was an enormous amount—more than I'd ever released in my life. A wet dream. In my thirties. But what hit me first wasn't even the shame of it; it was the unquenchable, twisted thirst that gnawed deeper than any humiliation.
I reached down and slipped my hand inside the wet fabric. Every time my trembling fingers wrapped around my cock and stroked, guilt and jealousy—and beneath them, a depraved ecstasy that overwhelmed everything—came boiling up through my veins. I'd forgotten Jeong-hee was even asleep beside me as I came again, panting, but the thirst didn't quench; it only dragged me down into a deeper abyss.
Thursday and Friday, even at the office, my daily life was in complete paralysis.
The Excel numbers on my monitor might as well have been written in an alien language, and every time my phone's messenger alert chimed, my heart plunged. What if it was Hyeon-seok? No—I hoped it wasn't him, and yet at the same time I was disgusted with myself for waiting, desperately, for another message from that glacial dominance.
The air inside our home had warped, too.
When we had dinner together after work, Jeong-hee simmered doenjang stew and set it on the table just like always. Across from me, as I silently spooned down my soup, her gaze drifted over me—then suddenly came to rest on my left cheek.
The redness had long since faded; outwardly there wasn't a trace left. But it seemed the scene from that night was superimposing itself over her eyes.
The crack of Hyeon-seok's palm slamming into my cheek as I lay sprawled on the floor, and the grotesque sensation of her own body going slick with arousal at the sound of it. As if that memory had flashed through her unbidden, Jeong-hee's eyes wavered, ever so slightly.
"Oppa, your cheek... did it hurt a lot back then?"
The question slipped out between her lips before she could stop it. It carried less the tone of worried sympathy than a languid, strange undertone—as if she were unconsciously tracing that stimulating memory she'd been trying so hard to forget.
"No... doesn't hurt at all. Let's eat."
I dropped my gaze in a panic and hurried my spoon along. But that single secret glance Jeong-hee had dragged across my cheek was enough to make my pants tighten heavily beneath the table. Jeong-hee, too, was pushing her food around her bowl, unable to hide the flush creeping up her face. Neither of us had escaped that night's domination for even a single second.
Worse, on Thursday night we'd tried to reclaim our old, ordinary intimacy—we turned off the lights and attempted to have sex.
But tragically, my body didn't respond to Jeong-hee's soft touch at all. The tender kisses and careful caresses I'd grown used to over three years stirred nothing in me. It was the same for her. My hands wandered over her chest and thighs, but between her legs there was nothing but desert. The obscene woman who had flooded like a waterfall just from sucking his toes in that hotel room was nowhere to be found.
In the end, we never even managed penetration, just lay there in an awkward silence, backs turned to each other. The door to ordinary pleasure had already swung shut for good.
Saturday at lunch, the last thread of my reason snapped, miserable and complete.
Jeong-hee woke rubbing her eyes and sat perched on the bed, staring blankly down at her smartphone. On the lit screen was the empty chat window she shared with Hyeon-seok, not a single message in it.
"Oppa, you still haven't contacted him?"
She asked it almost accusingly.
The truth was, even though we'd agreed to stop, I hadn't managed to actually deliver a firm rejection to Hyeon-seok in all the days since. There was also the rule—we don't contact him first—but honestly, the real reason was that I couldn't convince myself. Could I really end it here? Wouldn't I start craving that twisted pleasure all over again? My heart felt like it could flip at any moment, and so I'd hesitated, unable to bring myself to sever the connection completely.
The moment those words left her mouth, every circuit in my head burned out.
I strode over and snatched Jeong-hee's slender wrist.
"Ah—! Oppa?"
Jeong-hee flinched and looked up at me.
My breathing had already turned as rough as a beast's, my eyes rimmed red. My composure, my reason, the pathetic shred of pride I'd clung to as her boyfriend of three years—all of it had burned down to nothing but ash.
"Jeong-hee. I... I can't take it anymore."
My voice was trembling to the point of sounding pathetic.
"...What?"
"Let's... let's call Hyeon-seok again. Okay? I'm seriously going out of my mind. That day hasn't left my head for a single second. And it's the same for you, isn't it? You were thinking about him just now too—I know you were!"
More begging than pleading now, nearly sobbing, I dropped to my knees at the side of the bed and buried my face between Jeong-hee's thighs. It was an abject surrender—a man in his thirties smashing his last shred of dignity into the gutter with his own hands.
Jeong-hee stared down at the crown of my head, frozen. Her breathing quickened, and her thighs began to tremble faintly. Shock and bewilderment flashed across her face—and then a very faint, very hot breath escaped her lips.
"...Oppa, you really won't regret it?"
Her voice carried, untouched by the fear beneath it, the raw tremor of an excitement she could no longer suppress. She, too, had been burning with thirst for that cruel pleasure these past few days.
"No. I won't regret it... Please, Jeong-hee. Let's call our Master."
At the word 'Master' bursting from my mouth, Jeong-hee's pupils blew wide.
Once our minds were made up, we ached to throw ourselves at Hyeon-seok immediately, transgressing the taboo at once. But we couldn't quite summon the courage to be the first to break his absolute command, so we agreed to endure the maddening, hellish restlessness until Sunday, and only then reach out.
Every minute felt like a year. Sunday was the worst—the hours simply refused to move. If Hyeon-seok had been standing in front of us, I would have fallen to my knees and begged him just to send us a message. Jeong-hee and I spent the whole weekend sleepless, staring at nothing.
And then at last, in the small hours of Monday morning, his message finally arrived. With shaking hands I opened it, and immediately shared it with Jeong-hee.
It was an invitation to our second hell—and, at the very same time, to the paradise we had been aching for all along.