Mom's Doll
Just as people speak of love at first sight, might sexual tastes also twist when something shocking strikes?
This is the story of Kim Seojin, a son who, by pure chance, came to feel sexual curiosity toward his mother, Kim Soeun.
A sharp crack of a slap against his cheek, and dizzying pain flooded through him.
“Fail?! Say that one more time! You failed to get into university?!”
The stinging heat on his cheek was nothing compared to the fury in his mother’s voice, which clawed straight into his chest.
Her fierce educational drive had always worn him down, yet she had never once raised a hand against him until now…
A sudden rush of emotion surged up inside him.
She demands of me what she never had herself…!
From the time he was small, his mother had drilled into him without rest that he must become someone so successful no one could ever look down on him.
He had swallowed the urge to play, set aside everything he wanted, and lived exactly as she wished.
Study, study, study.
He had struggled to meet the efforts and expectations of the mother who had raised him alone through hardship, yet in the end, by the narrowest of margins, he had failed to enter the department she wanted.
“M-Mom… I didn’t get into the department you wanted, but if I just lower my sights a little, I can easily get into another department at the same university…”
Unlike the resentment boiling inside him, the voice he raised in protest to his mother shrank away.
Not only that—Kim Seojin naturally took on such a timid posture that anyone watching would have felt sorry for him.
In front of others he was fine, yet the moment he stood before his mother he shrank and lost all will to rebel.
Mother’s doll.
That was the most accurate name for Kim Seojin.
“You call that an answer?!”
Displeased with his protest, his mother raised her voice even higher, crushing his self-worth with her complaints.
“I told you, didn’t I?! You have to have a job you can be proud of in front of the whole world!”
“…”
Kim Seojin felt his heart thrash with fear at the words he had heard to the point of exhaustion since childhood.
His mother was a single mother.
She had never been the kind of loose woman people whispered about, nor had she been a poor student.
On the contrary, she had been an outstanding model student.
So had his father led her down the wrong path?
No—his mother had always been sharp and clear-headed, the sort who would never fall for a bad man.
His father, too, had been a top-tier model student.
They simply never knew restraint.
That was the best way she had once described their relationship when she spoke of his father.
Restraint.
The two young people had nurtured a fresh, innocent love while never forgetting their duty as students—to study.
Because both were model students, they treated each other as worthy rivals and, through healthy competition, their grades only rose higher.
Perhaps that was why.
Under the unshakable belief that nothing could go wrong, they had loved each other without restraint.
Cute student dates, studying side by side, and sometimes mixing their bodies and sharing heat with fierce intensity—those were their days.
Son, do you know? Even meat tastes better once you’ve tried it. You need the awareness that you’re crossing a dangerous line if you’re going to stop. We had none of that… and in the end we crossed it.
In the middle of those joyful, happy days, he had suddenly appeared.
Young as they were, they loved each other, so they decided to marry and honestly told both sets of parents everything.
But the world never flows as one wishes.
Precisely because the two had been model students, the shock their parents received was all the greater, and both families wanted only to remove the shackle that would devour their brilliant futures.
I will never abort this child!
Faced with both families’ pressure to abort, the model-student mother had stubbornly insisted she would take full responsibility for him.
Having never done wrong, she could not turn her back on the responsibility and ethics of erasing a life.
As her stubbornness and his father’s indecision dragged on, both families ignored the couple’s wishes and reached an agreement on their own.
His father’s family would pay child support until he came of age, and in exchange the two would never meet again.
His mother had been deeply disappointed and despairing at the coercive atmosphere that crushed every one of her opinions.
Hating her parents who pushed only their own claims, hating her helpless father, hating the entire world, she had left home and raised him alone through hardship.
His maternal grandparents had contacted her, urging her at least to accept the child support, but nothing could break her will.
Yet the world is cold.
Raising a child while weathering life’s storms alone, his mother gradually wore down.
Her solid wish to raise an excellent child twisted, and unbearable expectations began to pour onto her only son, Kim Seojin.
You must have a job you can be proud of in front of the whole world.
To raise a son with a profession that would shame neither his father nor either family—without any support, alone and splendidly.
That alone was his mother’s wish and hope.
Stubbornness had become self-obsession.
Kim Seojin understood his mother’s desperate, clinging wish, so he had endured, held on, and borne it.
And this was the result.
His exhausted, gloomy eyes turned toward his mother, Kim Soeun, who was still seething with irritation.
When was the last time I saw Mom smile?
In her son’s eyes she was beautiful, yet terrifying.
Her black hair cascading to her chest gleamed like silk, and the faint sweet scent that drifted from her was unmistakably the perfume she always wore.
Now in her late thirties, his mother had managed herself rigorously since youth to hide the inferiority of being a single mother.
She had melted the ripeness of the years into beauty, becoming a woman whose gaze naturally lingered.
If we walked side by side on the street now, people would probably take her for my older sister with a bit of an age gap.
Who, seeing her stroll down the street, would ever guess she was a single mother with a child?
Her flawless, clear skin gave her a pure air, and a gentle, kind smile suited her perfectly—yet in front of him she always wore an angry, fierce expression.
When I saw her at the department store I thought she was someone else…
Kim Seojin could never forget the shock of visiting the department store where she worked on an errand.
The mother who dealt with customers wore a face he had never seen.
Even the eyes that always tilted upward in front of him had softened slightly, creating a warm atmosphere, and from her cherry-red lips flowed a voice brimming with kindness.
On the lips that had crushed themselves in rage, a lovely smile had bloomed—one that could make even an onlooker happy.
Mom is truly cunning.
Kim Soeun knew her weapons well.
Though her father’s betrayal had left her with a hatred of men, she had no choice but to grow cunning in order to raise her son alone in a harsh world.
Her wrinkle-free black uniform subtly revealed her exacting nature, and she insisted on a suit one size too small to emphasize her full breasts.
The smooth waistline sculpted by Pilates, the well-spread hips, and the firm buttocks looked appetizing even to her own son—how much more so to the beasts who eyed her?
The cunning mother stirred the beasts’ lust and tossed them scraps to quench their dark thirst one by one.
While serving customers she often bent to pick something from a lower shelf, thrusting her hips back to display the dizzying line of her lower body.
The plump, ripe thighs wrapped in black stockings and the smooth calves she casually revealed were extras.
She had carefully built the image of herself as an attractive fruit that could never be obtained.
“Haa… my head.”
His mother’s irritated mutter cut his thoughts short.
He quickly sealed his lips and assumed a repentant posture; she clutched her head and continued fretting over the hopeless situation that offered no answer.
Suddenly the left hand she was using to rub her aching temples entered his view.
Though she had never held a wedding, she wore a silver wedding band on her left ring finger—both to hide the fact that she was a single mother and to swat away the bothersome flies that clung to her.
Young, beautiful, and a single mother free of any aftermath if taken—that was his mother.
She had never once spoken to him about her problems with men.
Even so, her own son could sense how many beasts must have tried to topple her.
It’s not as if she’s keeping her chastity out of love for Dad. Mom just hates men.
She hated the light men who drooled under the control of lust, and filled with hatred and rage toward the world, she suffered under stress she could not release.
Thus the resentment that only piled up flowed in the wrong direction, and the twisted expectations poured onto him.
After clutching her head in thought for a while, his mother made a decision and delivered a shocking proposal.
“Retake the exam.”
“Mom?!”
“Retake it! You absolutely have to get into that department!”
To his astonishment, she told him to spend another year preparing.
He knew how long a year could feel.
And because she alone would have to bear that burden, he could not understand even more.
“Mom! It’s still one of the best universities in the country. If I just change departments I can get in easily—why retake?!”
Kim Seojin urgently tried to persuade her.
“Is it that you don’t like the university? Then I can apply to a slightly lower one that has the same department and get in without any problem!”
Whether he had inherited the brains of his model-student parents or it was pure grinding effort, his grades were also top-tier.
He had more than enough to enter one of the country’s most prestigious universities; he simply fell a little short of the department she wanted.
If he lowered his sights just a little, he could easily obtain the academic credentials and career the world envied.
Yet she wanted him to retake!
“Shut up! Just do as your mother says!”
“No, Mom, retaking isn’t easy. It’s a whole year. A whole extra year…”
Protesting, Kim Seojin could only close his mouth under his mother’s cold, icy stare.
Her gaze, sharpened like a blade, seemed to dig into his chest, and his body shrank of its own accord.
After staring at him in silence for a long while, she closed her eyelids as if swallowing the rising resentment and took a brief breath.
Then she carefully drew him into a tight embrace.
Within the elegant, sweet perfume mixed the scent of her skin.
The familiar body odor he had known since childhood brought relief, yet at the same time revived memories of scoldings under her high educational pressure, making his heart pound roughly with anxiety.
“I’m sorry, son. But Mom is greedy. If you’d been bad at studying I would have given up cleanly, but it’s just so close.”
Kim Seojin wanted to retort, It’s to fill your inferiority complex and prop up your pride, isn’t it?
His heart, racing as if it would burst, urged him to spit out that resentment, yet what left his mouth was only hollow acceptance.
“Yeah. Okay. I’ll retake it like you said, Mom.”
“Good. Thank you. I’m sorry I got angry. You’re an adult now, yet instead of treating you like one I still treat you like a child. I’m really sorry.”
The soft sensation of her feminine body against him and her faint warmth brought not relief but fear.
He forced down the trembling that wanted to pull him away at once.
After that brief moment of closeness, mother and son separated.
“Haa…”
At the small sigh that escaped his mother after the hug, Kim Seojin’s body flinched slightly.
He felt pathetic for reacting like a child caught in wrongdoing, yet to him his mother was something he could never defy.
“Tomorrow’s my day off, so let’s go to the sauna together for the first time in a while.”
“Yeah. Let’s.”
Without a moment’s hesitation Kim Seojin accepted his mother’s suggestion.
With little financial leeway, she had searched for ways to release her piled-up stress, and the sauna was that place.
Bathing and steaming were good for the skin, and for a fee food and alcohol were prepared right away, temporarily freeing her from the hard housework.
She did not usually enjoy drinking and was in fact weak to it, yet on days like today when stress exceeded her limit she drank until she was dead drunk.
And the one who stayed by her side while she slept in a drunken stupor was the only person in the world she trusted and relied on—him.
Knowing that his lonely mother unconsciously depended on him was why he endured and held on even through her cruel attitude.
“Then go get a change of clothes.”
With words that were nearly a command, his mother headed to her room to pack her own change of clothes.
Left alone on the living-room floor, Kim Seojin was driven by the faint heat still lingering on his cheek into his own room.
Like a doll that had received Kim Soeun’s command, Kim Seojin packed a change of clothes and set out for the sauna that would change the mother and son’s lives.