Half a Hero, Lee Hayun (5)
What... was that.
"Ugh.... Just go up already...!"
"......"
Sure, I'd been hoping for a tiny little event. And yes, it's true I'd pressed myself up against Woojin on purpose. But what was that. What Woojin had just done. ...What had been done to me.
"The blanket.... Which side's the top...? ...No idea. Forget it..."
"......"
I stayed curled up with my eyes shut, still pretending to sleep, and a fluffy blanket settled over my shoulders. Hauling me this far must have been rough on her. Right in front of my face, Jiyoon was panting—huff, huff—before she groaned, rubbed at her lower back, and slipped out of the room.
I tracked her back through barely opened eyes, and the instant the door shut, I shot upright.
What the hell. Did I just kiss someone? And not just kiss—gulping it down, gulp after gulp, drinking a guy's spit like some kind of pervert?
I know what a kiss is. Not just lips touching; tongues winding together a little, too. I've heard that much from my friends. But being fed someone's spit? I'd never heard of that....
Lee Hayun, why did you just obediently drink it, you idiot.
"...Nngh......"
No matter how I turned it over, it was wrong. If this wasn't a dream, there was no explaining it. I pinched my thigh on the spot, and all that came back was vivid, genuine pain. Of all things, the feeling of Woojin's hands sweeping over me rose with it, and my face burned hot.
No—okay. Honestly, I'd wanted something. That part was true. But all I'd wanted was a light hug, or... him grazing my unguarded chest, maybe. Something innocent like that. I never thought that, in the time Jiyoon was in the bathroom, we'd shoot straight ahead to a place I hadn't even imagined....
Maybe it was because the room was pitch black. What had just happened replayed in my head all on its own.
The click of the bathroom door shutting. The sound of water slowly filling the quiet living room. Wondering if this might be my chance, I'd quietly set my cheek against Woojin's shoulder, and after he caught my chin and forced it up—
...my head had short-circuited.
That memory.
"Nnh..."
My lips overlapped Seo Woojin's, and an obscene wet sound I'd never heard before clamored through my skull. Flustered—heub, heh—I tangled my tongue with his before I knew what I was doing, and little by little saliva that wasn't mine began to pool where my throat tightened.
...This was my first kiss. I didn't even have time to say so. Gulp, gulp—I swallowed the man's saliva, tipping someone else's spit down into my stomach one mouthful at a time.
That alone had my shoulders shivering, and I was already lost. Then even my thigh, left completely unguarded, ended up under his hand. Thankfully he never reached the place I absolutely, absolutely, absolutely could not allow—but it was a dangerous spot all the same, one his hand could have slid into whenever he pleased. I offered that place up to Woojin without a fuss and kept obediently drinking his spit, as if somewhere deep down that was exactly what I'd been hoping for.
I... I really hadn't been thinking that far....
The one saving grace was that Jiyoon didn't seem to have caught us at all. If she'd walked out of the bathroom and found me kissing like that, she would've dragged up the old incident on the spot. The thing from high school, when Jiyoon caught me.... That slightly unusual porn history. I mean.
Back then I'd insisted I'd clicked it by accident while looking at something else, and somehow managed to play innocent. If Jiyoon had seen what just happened, who even knows what would've come of it....
"...I-is it the alcohol...?"
Damn this booze. Whenever something happens after you've been drinking, shoving all the blame onto the alcohol makes it easy to feel better. You just treat it as a one-night mistake and let it go.
Except one result had been left behind that I couldn't simply let go of.
Still in my clothes, I lay on my side across the bed like a marionette with its strings cut, and carefully tugged the leggings I was wearing down to my thighs. Then, slowly, I pulled aside panties that clung to my skin far more tightly than usual. The wetness I felt at once made me flinch. With the tip of my middle finger, I slowly traced the place those pure white panties had been hiding so tightly.
...I was soaked.
Just from kissing Woojin. From being made to drink his spit. From having my thigh touched, barely. Drenched like I'd never seen before.
"......"
Was I actually a lot more of a pervert than I looked? Enough that even I had to think so. Wet, and sticky. When I lifted my finger just a little, slick threads stretched between my parting fingers—several of them. Obscenely.
"......"
...Unreal. When I touched myself alone, getting this wet used to take at least ten minutes. And from a quick kiss and a little groping of my thigh.... I was burning up, completely....
"......"
Maybe that was why. A little while passed while I tried to settle my head, and once I'd made sure it was dead quiet outside the room—
...slick, slick.
Until my arousal overflowed and ran down the hip I was lying on. Until the bedsheet went damp underneath me. I started masturbating in earnest.
And of course, the only thing in my head was....
That.
Over there....
A secret.
It had been a fruitful day.
Careful not to strain a body that still had alcohol in it, I'd been jogging lightly, and I paused to catch my breath in front of a traffic light glowing red.
For one thing, it was certain now that I'd come back to the past. I'd figured that out the moment the robber showed up, so I could set it aside. Saving Lee Hayun from him had let me get far closer to her than I'd expected.
While she was being kissed by force, Lee Hayun had definitely been awake. The way her shoulder and thigh flinched, tense, every time my tongue brushed hers made that obvious. And yet she never resisted, not to the end. She let herself be kissed right up until Lee Jiyoon was about to step out of the bathroom.
Of course, it might have been because one of Hayun's erogenous zones was her neck. Even so, for a woman who was always bouncing with energy to take a kiss that obediently, one more condition had been required.
Affection. Toward me.
Without that, Hayun never would have accepted it so quietly—and getting inside her home in the first place would have been impossible.
The start was going smoothly.
"Hoo..."
It was still February, with the winter wind snapping through the air. Like every other school, the Academy was in the middle of winter break. How many times, I wondered, would Lee Hayun end up dropping by the infirmary. ...And Lee Jiyoon—just when would she notice the change in her sister?
Trudge, trudge. The footsteps of passersby reached me. The night air brushing my cheek was cold. Feeling the heat in my body cool, I let a throat lozenge dissolve and picked the pace up a little more than before.
The Academy's health teacher.
No. Again.
My daily routine as the Academy's Health Committee Member was, just as I'd confirmed by word of mouth beforehand, extremely simple. Show up at the Academy on time. When an injured student came in, treat them with my ability, then fill out the sheet. Every other hour belonged to me. If I wanted, I was free to sit in on the heroes' classes however I liked. There was a separate call bell anyway—a little device in the pocket of the Health Committee Member's gown that went bzz, bzz—so there was nothing to worry about, or so I'd been told.
The subjects they especially recommended were the ones tied directly to loss of life: rescue, evacuation guidance, and combat, where the students got hurt often....
...Or so it was written, in the materials Principal Seok Jaehwa had organized and handed me when he dropped by first thing in the morning.
Whoever's handwriting it was, it was awfully dainty. Far too cute to belong to a repulsive old man.
Unfortunately, I had no particular interest in auditing classes. Later, if Lee Jiyoon enrolled, or if some new hero I had my eye on turned up, I'd step in—but for now it was too soon. Right now, Lee Hayun and Lee Jiyoon were more than enough on their own.
So there I was, carefully combing through the world's news on my laptop since morning, when—
Knock, knock.
A knock came out of nowhere. Unlike yesterday, the door was properly marked as the infirmary today, but the visit was earlier than I'd expected. I'd figured injured students would start trickling in only after classes had been underway for a while. Hmm. Maybe some student, curious about a thing they'd never seen before, had stopped by for a look.
I closed the laptop and stood.
"...Oh. Hey."
"......"
But the one at the door was Lee Hayun, a hangover cure clutched tight in one hand—the kind convenience stores sell at a ridiculous markup. The little star-shaped piercing in one ear. The Academy uniform thrown on carelessly, as if she couldn't be bothered. The same long ponytail as always. All of it was the same.
And yet, compared to the Lee Hayun I knew, she looked strangely meek today.
The reason was obvious. It was because of yesterday. Her reaction was cuter than I'd expected.
"Yes, Noona. What brings you by?"
"...This. I wanted to give it to you."
She couldn't even meet my eyes properly as she thrust the hangover cure out in front of me. Money was already tight, and yesterday she'd even bought the alcohol with her own cash—wasn't a hangover cure on top of that too big an expense? It wasn't as if I was suffering from one. Still, refusing it would look strange, so I took it. Besides, if we kept trading gifts under the name of paying each other back, that would be a fine way to keep the thread between us going.
"You really didn't have to go out of your way for me like this."
"Y-your head's gonna hurt, isn't it? You drank a lot yesterday."
"My head?"
Hayun gave a little sway of a nod.
"I, um, yesterday...! I don't really remember it..."
"If you mean yesterday..."
"Yeah. After a little more than one can, it's all gone. Ahaha..."
Even as she said it, Hayun couldn't quite hold my gaze. A brief silence passed, and it was the same afterward. She met my eyes for a moment, as if testing the air, then let them slide unsteadily off to the side again.
...A mean little impulse stirred, so I decided to tease her. Just a bit.
"...I see."
"......"
"Then you won't remember a single thing that happened between us yesterday, either."
"W-w-wha—what..."
"It's all right. It wasn't anything special."
"How is that nothing special—! Nnh..."
The cheeks of Lee Hayun, mid-attempt at playing it off, flushed red. As expected. The claim that she didn't remember was nothing but a bald-faced lie.
"I'll drink this gratefully, Noona."
"......"
"If you get hurt training today, come find me. I'll see you ahead of the other students."
"......"
I said it with a light smile, and Hayun barely managed a nod. Then, ears dyed red all the way to the tips, she creaked stiffly off down the far end of the hall.
"...You're saying it didn't take?"
"Yeaah..."
"Why? Didn't Woojin like you?"
"I dunnoo...? Woojin likes me...?"
"He took your number and everything. From day one."
"...Ah.... I was the one who got his, though.... He looked pretty decent, so I figured I'd get a little... relief out of him..."
"You piece of shit. You should've said something, you airhead."
"Shut your mouth.... I'm plenty rattled that I let him slip, toooo..."
"What now. We can't bid any higher than that. Sweet-talk him later—tell him we'll pay more once we've got a cash cow locked down?"
"...Namho."
"Yeah."
"That guy's address—did we get it at the interview...?"
"We've got one, but it's probably fake. He never meant to join. No way he'd hand over real info."
"......Let me seeee.... Still, it's close."
"...We'll just check it later, I guess..."