A Son's Regret and Budding Emotions
The image of his mother pressed tight against the closed subway doors, as if shoved there, haunted him until he thought he would go mad.
After sending her off like that, Kim Seojin stood hollow and empty until the rumble of the next train snapped him back to himself; he scrambled aboard at once.
“Click, click, click.”
He gnawed his nails raw under the crushing weight of anxiety. Nothing about the rattling vibration of the car, the noise, or the crush of bodies in the stifling space sat right with him.
“I can’t contact Mom… Damn it…”
Mom still believed he had gone to meet a university professor. He could not call her for at least an hour. If he did, she might realize he had colluded with that man, and every desperate effort she had made to endure the beast’s touch would turn to nothing.
“That bastard isn’t answering either.”
Seojin had messaged Jung Taeyoung—who might even now be freely ravaging his mother—but of course no reply came. He wanted to believe Taeyoung had merely groped her a little roughly, that he himself was inventing the worst out of lust-crazed paranoia. Yet his rage-soaked mind kept conjuring darker and darker pictures.
Mom! Mom! Mom!
He crushed the urge to contact her with everything he had. Clinging to reason that felt ready to snap under excitement and fury, he hunted for their shadows every time the train stopped.
Five more stops until the doors open on my side.
The doors on Seojin’s side faced the same direction where Mom and Taeyoung had stood earlier. Taeyoung might have dragged her off before then, but he discarded the thought. The last sight of the two of them—that scene that looked for all the world as if they were already joined—had not looked like people about to get off soon.
“Huff! Huff! Huff!”
People around him edged away at the sight of Seojin gasping so roughly, but he had no room left to care about stares. Inside his skull, endless visions of his mother being violated and defiled by that man drove him toward madness. What drove him madder still was that even now he was hard.
Fuck…
Blood had flooded his lower body until it hung heavy and swollen. Burning guilt, unbearable perversion, and raw excitement left him far from sane.
I should report him even now… No! No! If I was going to, I should have done it back at the sauna.
Reporting Taeyoung would mean confessing the ugly truth to Mom without escape: how he had met the man, the photos of her he had uploaded online, his twisted lust, and how he had come to feel these filthy things toward her—including everything that happened at the sauna that started it all. Then Mom would hate him.
“…”
Seojin realized anew that he feared being hated by Mom more than anything. He had lived as her doll, pushed along by fear and terror. Why? Because being hated by the mother he loved was scarier than any other fate. Afraid of being abandoned by his only precious family, of disappointing her, he had struggled desperately to meet every expectation. Only now did he understand the honest shape of his feelings toward her.
“Hic…”
Calling himself a fool was not enough. He hated himself so fiercely for making such a retarded choice. He forced down the sob that threatened to burst free. If crying would have solved anything he would have wept freely, but it would not, so he wiped the rising tears and racked his brain with everything he had left to reach her.
The announcement chimed.
“Doors are opening.”
“Did Mom get off here?”
The doors that had stayed firmly shut finally opened on his side. Seojin leapt off and scanned the platform; this was no busy district, only a quiet station with almost no one alighting. Had the two really left the train here? As if hesitation itself were a luxury he could not afford, he checked every direction while exiting the station.
“Haa! Haa! Haa!”
Sweating from pure tension, he searched the area around the station and found nothing distinctive—no clue at all. Ordinary buildings, a quiet street nearly empty of morning commuters. Seojin began running madly wherever his feet carried him, only looking around, then moving, then looking again.
“Is this not it?”
His breath clawed at his throat, yet he could not stop. He returned to the station, boarded another train, and after that got off at every stop hunting for any trace of her. Of course he found none.
“Already this late…”
Only when Seojin, wrecked as if he had run a marathon, could no longer move on trembling legs did he finally halt. Realizing time had crawled all the way to lunch hour, he hurriedly dialed Mom.
“She’s not answering…”
Rage flooded him; he nearly hurled the phone while shouting, but forced himself to stop. He quickly typed a message saying the professor meeting was finished and he wanted to talk about related things. She did not even open it. When contact failed completely, cold clarity poured over him like ice water.
“…She’s with that bastard.”
It was certain. If Mom had safely escaped that man’s hands she would be waiting for his call by now. She would wonder whether he had noticed the molestation she suffered, then wonder about the result of the university meeting. If she had already realized the professor story was a lie and that all of this was his fault, she would wait for him even more anxiously. In that situation, silence meant only one thing: she was in a place where she could not possibly answer.
“Grit.”
His teeth ground together. Rising anger locked strength into every muscle, yet his cooled head raced fiercely over what to do next.
Think! There has to be some way!
At last Seojin remembered a thread that could lead him to her. Bloodshot eyes, raw from anxiety and lust, locked onto his phone. Trembling hands hunted frantically for one particular app. He tapped the spy app installed on Mom’s phone and hurriedly tried remote access.
“Stupid bastard! Why only now!”
He cursed his own idiocy even while thanking whatever let him remember it at last, and checked her phone’s location first.
“…Damn!”
The location the spy app returned pointed, exactly as he had feared, near the first station he had left. It gave only a rough area; pinpointing the exact spot looked difficult. Still, he had no reason to stay where he was. Seojin forced legs that felt ready to collapse and started back the way he had come.
Now, sitting on a quiet subway seat emptied of the morning rush, he activated the function that let him listen to surrounding sounds through the spy app. From earphones filled only with silence, tiny noises began to leak through little by little.
Is the phone inside a bag?
As if something blocked the mic, almost no ambient sound came through; frustration rose. Ignoring the eyes around him, Seojin squeezed his own shut and poured every scrap of attention into the earphones. Creaking sounds and dull, regular thuds like something colliding arrived in irregular bursts.
If I cover my ears with my hands I’ll hear better.
No matter how hard he listened, subway noise and announcements drowned everything else, so he clamped both hands over his ears. With the surrounding racket somewhat muted he could focus far more sharply on the feed.
…Heut!
“…!!!”
When a woman’s lewd moan spilled from the earphones, Seojin jerked as if he had heard something impossible. It was no mishearing. That dizzying cry—something that should never exist on a subway—clearly belonged to a voice that sounded like Mom’s.
“Haa! Haa! Haa!”
His stomach lurched. He could not draw a proper breath; he opened his mouth and gulped air greedily, yet it was never enough. Like a fire that air only feeds, every inhale only made the heat climbing his chest burn hotter. He focused everything he had left on the sounds.
The creaking was definitely a bed. The dull impacts matched exactly what he had heard that night at the sauna—the sticky, filthy slap of flesh on flesh. And the woman’s cries, half scream of pain and half desperate struggle, still carried a damp, wet heat inside them.
“…”
Not the Mom that belonged only to him. A woman he did not know existed on the other side of that line. The hands covering his ears began to shake; boiling heat scrambled his skull until he wanted to faint. Still he gritted his teeth and endured, gathering every scrap of information he could.
It’s definitely inside some room. Damn. Damn! Goddamn it! But I don’t know anything else.
No matter how hard he concentrated, nothing more came through. He should have shut off the useless eavesdropping function, yet he could not tear his ears away from the mix of noises and the moans of his mother tangled inside them. His cock, swollen to the point of bursting inside his pants, screamed for relief. While reason and instinct tore at each other, the sounds beyond the earphones climbed higher. The noise that had seemed to whirl around him began cutting out in drops; Mom’s cries shifted closer and closer to pure screams.
Ah!…Aak!…Heu…Kyaa…!
Seojin’s eyes, gleaming with rage and lust, seemed to see her being taken. The desperate figure of Mom screaming beneath the beast named Jung Taeyoung rose so vividly it hurt. Every time that massive cock that made the difference in class obvious plunged deep into her tight, chewy pussy, she would drool love juices from her lower lips. She might even squirt under pleasure she could not bear. That strong, sharp-minded Mom would be panting as a woman he no longer recognized.
Forgetting entirely that he sat inside a subway car, Seojin’s trembling hand started toward his pants—then Mom’s tearing scream ripped through the earphones.
Aaaaaah…!!!
Click.
As if the microphone had hit its limit and cut out, every sound ringing in his ears vanished in a single instant. Creepy silence flooded in.
“…”
Seojin forgot even to blink, pouring every nerve into his ears. Still, as if mocking the son’s foolish plight, nothing more came from the other side. He had to endure that suffocating quiet all the way to the station where Mom might be.
“Doors are opening.”
Seojin stepped off the train like a man whose soul had left him. Even knowing he had to hurry toward the location glowing on his phone screen, his feet refused to move. His body felt as if every last drop of strength had been wrung out.
“…”
He had to go to where Mom was. The moment that single thought forced his legs into motion, a cheerful little melody dinged through the earphones still in his ears.
“A message…”
The message he had waited and waited for finally arrived—not from the mother he loved, but from the beast that had swallowed his precious family.
Wrapped in crushing exhaustion only a moment before, Seojin felt rage boil up so fast it was as if the earlier emptiness had never existed. He fired back at once.
Clear provocation and open mockery. The easy confidence of a winner who already held every good card. Seojin no longer cared.
“This?”
Before Seojin could even understand what Taeyoung meant, a single photo arrived.
“…!!!!!”
The picture Jung Taeyoung sent carried a raw, terrifying immediacy, as if it had been taken only seconds earlier. The room’s cheap interior screamed love motel; the only real furniture was a shabby bed. On it two naked figures were captured. A man wearing a smile far too vile for his ordinary, harmless face held a woman from behind—she hung limp as if unconscious. Her face was bowed so deeply it looked ready to snap, mostly hidden by sweat-soaked hair, making identification hard for anyone else. Seojin alone knew her at once.
“M-Mom…”
It was Mom. Even with most of her face covered, years of living together, of constantly looking at her, made it impossible not to recognize his precious family. Yet the ruined, debauched state of her body made his mind stutter as if it had crashed. Saliva drooled from her stupidly open mouth; her sweat- and spit-slick body gleamed so lewdly he could not tear his eyes away. The heavy languor in her limbs let him imagine how long she had been tormented. Her skin, white as jade, was covered in livid kiss marks. The blatant traces of sex left on every corner of her body already made his skin crawl, but what froze his heart solid was something else entirely.
“…”
Between Mom’s legs, spread wide like a frog’s. The last time he had seen it, her pussy had been a work of art—beautiful shape, smooth closed seam. Now that seam gaped as if something too large had forced it open, and thick white cream poured out between the lips. On the thoroughly wrinkled bedsheet, dried patches of semen already marked how many times he had finished inside her.
The mocking line arrived right on cue, underlining the son’s foolishness even more. In the photo the beast no longer merely held the woman from behind as if claiming ownership; both hands squeezed one of Mom’s full breasts, fingers forming a crude heart. That vulgar breast-heart. Mom, as if she had no idea what was being done to her, simply hung limp and pitiful in the beast’s arms.
“…”
The son squeezed his eyes shut, trying to shut out a reality he could not accept. When he opened them again the first thing he saw was the wet stain on his pants. The moment he looked at his raped mother’s ruined face, he had come without even touching himself.
“Ha… haha… ha…”
A hollow laugh slipped out. He burned Mom’s location into his eyes one more time, then turned away and shoved the phone into his pocket. The sound of an arriving train reached him; the son who had stood frozen like an idiot finally moved his stalled feet. The train carrying passengers pulled away slowly, and inside the car rolling farther from the station rode the foolish son who had thrown his own mother into the beast’s jaws.
The eyes of the son heading home were stained with thick regret and damp desire—yet another emotion was already lifting its head. That emotion was jealousy.