Senior, didn't I have leverage over you?
Senior, didn't I have leverage over you?
Tadak, tadak.
In the pitch-black room, where the monitor's glow was the only light source, the sound of typing echoed.
A red leather collar was tightening around my neck. The bone-shaped metal tag at the end rattled faintly in time with my breathing.
That sensation, which would normally have made me want to bite my tongue off in shame, now felt like the only lifeline that could put me at ease.
"Yeon-woo-ya."
A soft, gentle voice drifted from beyond the monitor. Goosebumps prickled down my spine. Like a beast, I crawled on all fours and burrowed between her legs.
The top student of our Korean Language and Literature department, Cha Do-hee-sunbae.
Her cold fingers gently cupped my chin, which was tear-stained and twisted in a grimace, and lifted it up.
Sunbae's eyes, glowing eerily red from the monitor's light, ensnared me.
Stripped naked, I trembled like someone facing the abyss, helplessly rubbing my flushed cheek against her palm.
"About this description here. I wrote that they resist the shame but eventually succumb to the pleasure and gasp... What do you think? Editor-nim."
Sunbae's cool smile deepened.
As she pointed to the sentence on the monitor screen and asked, I felt a sudden rush of heat between my legs. Those cursed sentences that Sunbae had written were burrowing into my brain, controlling my reality.
Where on earth did it all go wrong?
Back when I first discovered the serialized draft of this novel on Sunbae's laptop, I had firmly believed that I held all the power in the world.
Because I had the most secret and shameful weakness of Cha Do-hee, the perfectionist who always looked down on me like I was a bug, in my grasp.
'Sunbae, your writing smells too much like a virgin? I'll plan and edit it in real life so it can become a perfect novel.'
I wanted to tear apart and kill the past version of myself who had arrogantly lifted her chin and spat those words out.
That pathetic weakness I thought I was using to control her was actually a spiderweb Sunbae had meticulously designed to drag me down to the bottom.
I wasn't a great editor polishing her writing.
I was just a plaything, dismantled alive and reassembled into print for the sake of a perfect manuscript, nothing more than a dog raised to react only to the sound of its master typing.
"Good girl. Look forward to tonight, too, Yeon-woo-ya. I'll write it as the angst genre you like best."
Sunbae, wasn't I the one who held your weakness?
The question I had swallowed tens of thousands of times in my head swirled at the back of my throat, then dissipated. The tears that flowed down soaked the red collar. The rest of my life was trapped forever in the prison she had created.