Behind Her Sister's Back
Whirrr.
Right beside the churn of the washing machine, Yozora stood in a baggy men's T-shirt.
She felt blank. She couldn't have said exactly why. She just did.
Maybe everything that had just happened was nothing but a fantasy the alcohol had hung in front of her eyes. Her memory was a little faulty — maybe she was the one who had stayed on top of Seo Woojin and seen it through to the end. The thought spun around and around inside her head.
Yozora tugged the collar of the shirt up over her nose again. Whirrr. Listening to the machine, she breathed the fabric in.
An unfamiliar fabric softener. Apple. No — she smelled again, and it might have been nothing but detergent. She smelled again, and she thought she caught Seo Woojin's own scent in it. She smelled again, and the smell of all that semen she had just swallowed seemed to lay itself over the rest, faint and sly. She smelled again, and her head only went blanker.
…Happy, maybe.
Mm.
"Haaah…."
Yozora let the deep breath out slow, then staggered toward the bed. The covers hadn't been folded back or anything. Wearing nothing but Woojin's T-shirt and a single pair of thin panties, she dropped onto it with a thud.
A tiny hehe slipped out as she squirmed. Even with the blanket clutched tight against her, a heeheehee kept leaking through the folds. Kyaah — she drummed both legs against the mattress and twisted her whole body, and when even that wasn't enough she rolled back and forth across the bed until every inch of her long hair was a wild tangle.
At last she reached up beneath the mood lamp, lifted the phone she had left there, and stared at the screen.
Seo Woojin. Inside the chat with him that used to sit completely empty… new photos, filling it to the brim.
"……."
A shot of breasts so big that even she had to admit vulgar was the word for them, gathered to the center and crushed in one large male hand. A shot of the thick, slightly curved cock that had slipped easily out from between them, jelly-thick semen drooling in heavy strings from the tip. A shot of a woman who looked a little vacant, catching every drop of it in her mouth and sticking her tongue out — blehh — like she was submitting to her Master's inspection. A shot of her squinting one eye shut against a long streak of semen across her face, glaring savagely up at the phone as if she wanted to kill whoever was holding it.
"……."
Honestly, the focus was so shaky that it was hard to tell at a glance the woman was Yozora.
Thirty photos in all. She went through them one by one, pinching at her nipples as she looked.
"Heheheh…."
As much as she hadn't been able to smile back then — now, freely.
"…I wish we could work together……."
She smiled, happy.
The window had been thrown wide for a full hour.
Fresh out of the bathroom, I swung the hair dryer around and started shutting the windows I had left open. Committing to ventilation in the middle of winter is no easy thing. Not that the other seasons are much kinder. Spring, with pollen blowing everywhere. Summer, when the mosquitoes are winning. Autumn. Right — take away the chill, and autumn might actually be the best of the lot.
Anyway.
I threw some clothes on and stared at the chat saved in my phone under the name "Crazy Bitch."
There wasn't a single ordinary conversation in it. Nothing but photos gone blurry from a bad focus, shadowed by the body of the man straddling her stomach. About all you could properly make out was a pair of pale, full breasts, jet-black hair, semen oozing thick and sticky down beneath the woman's face, and a cock still greedy for more after a single ejaculation. Blood-red eyes fixed on the camera lens like she wanted to tear me apart on the spot. That was the extent of it.
She could have just snatched my phone and deleted the pictures instead of glaring like that. Backups this, the cloud that, the password the other thing — remembering Yozora babbling whatever came into her head while she trembled, I felt a smile pull at my mouth. Backup or not, every one of those photos lived on my phone and nowhere else.
If I had told her that straight, what would she have done? …Shrieked at me not to lie?
I spent a brief moment wondering how I ought to play with Yozora from here on. I was admiring the way the little 1 stuck at the tail of the photos had vanished clean when an unfamiliar emoticon drifted into view.
Ah. It wasn't an emoticon. It was sitting at the very top of the phone.
So… a KakaoTalk alert.
…A KakaoTalk alert. Except — why on earth was it there?
A personal message? No chance. The reason is a secret. A group chat? Same answer. No chance. The reason is a secret. Those monthly nuisances, the gas bill and the rest, I would have switched off in advance… or rather, the me from before the regression would have.
The first person who came to mind was Principal Seok Jaehwa. But men of a certain age prefer a phone call to text.
Maybe I was mistaking it for some other alert. I dragged the status bar down with my thumb, and the truth came out at once.
Lee Hayun.
And a thoroughly out-of-nowhere question, at that. I was sure I had told her before that I didn't particularly care about games. Why ask something like that all of a sudden?
That wasn't even the whole of it. The number sitting on the alert was 3. Which meant there might be three out-of-nowhere questions waiting. I knit my brow faintly and tapped the notification.
Exactly three lines. And every one of the three questions written on the phone was different from the others. I couldn't tell what she wanted.
Was I supposed to answer the first one, the what-are-you-doing? The one about whether I had a favorite food? Or the one asking if I was in the middle of a game?
…I wasn't sure, but I answered the last one for now. That seemed to be the thing she had most recently wanted to know.
I left it short, went over to the bed, and plugged the phone into the charger. The moment I did, it gave a light buzz.
I had caught a ride in the realtor's car and looked over a place I might move into, and I had spent a little while toying with Yozora — a brat who only playacted at being a sadist — like she was a plaything. Tacking a plausible excuse onto the first one sounded like a nuisance, and I had never intended to explain the second. Inventing a story from scratch, on the other hand, was a headache.
…Nothing for it.
I answered like that as I stretched out on the bed. Didn't like the view. The commute would be a pain. Or simply, I suddenly had some money to spare. Something along those lines ought to do.
But instead of asking why I was looking for a new place, Hayun came at me with something else. …Hearing it, she had a point. What was I supposed to do? Maybe it would have been less of a hassle if I had just said I was gaming, the way she had asked.
I let out a small sigh, and at the same time a string of messages rolled in.
The same thing as the second message I had seen earlier. No particular reason to hide this…. Answering honestly seemed fine.
Hayun didn't answer for a while. It wasn't that she hadn't read what I sent — the little 1 never even appeared in the first place. Strange.
The reason someone asks about another person's taste in food is obvious, isn't it? So that nothing awkward comes up when you go eat together. So you don't end up fighting in the street, the way those couples had been when I saw them on the way home today. Wasn't that why she was asking?
…Well. Something must have come up, and she couldn't text for a minute.
I was just pulling the thick blanket up over myself when the screen on the phone rolled upward a little.
"…So."
"Yeah."
"This is why you were asking?"
"Yeah!"
Lunch hour. Lee Hayun, a limp empty bag slung over her shoulder, nodded. And between her and me—
"You said you don't like vegetables, so I packed it full of meat."
"……."
—sat a lunchbox that anyone could tell she had put together herself. A four-tier one, no less.
"This one's rice, this one's the main sides, mostly meat, this one's the smaller stuff like rolled omelet…. This was supposed to be dessert. I was going to put in the cherry tomatoes we had at home and a few other things, but I got worried you wouldn't like them, so I only put in a little, and instead there's bacon, and tofu with savory soybean paste, and…."
"……."
She was taking the box apart piece by piece and explaining every layer when a name written small in the middle of one container caught my eye. Lee Jiyoon. Maybe something she had used for a bit during the college entrance exam, or whatever that was. Unfortunately I had never set foot in an exam hall, so I wouldn't know. And did a lunchbox even need a name on it in the first place?
"…Thank you. You really didn't have to go this far."
"No, no. I have to eat too."
"There's a cafeteria."
"That's expensive."
"Ex…pensive? It's barely over seven thousand won, isn't it?"
"All of this together is probably around four thousand."
"……?"
Then what exactly were those amounts bleeding out of me every time I had a single bowl delivered? Had ten years of prices climbing one steady step at a time suddenly crashed, and my brain was wrongly convinced this was cheap? The thought passed through — how much had a convenience-store triangle kimbap been going for around now? — and in that same instant something bright red jabbed at the air in front of my face.
Looking closer, it was a Vienna sausage.
"Here. Aaah~"
"……."
And beyond it, Lee Hayun, trying to feed me as if I were a baby.
"Hurry. Aaah~"
"……."
I got the gist of it. Why the same woman who yesterday had hauled my hair like a leash and taken me pounding into her had suddenly shown up at the infirmary with a pretty lunchbox.
…Should I play along, just a little?
"How is it? Good?"
"…It's cooked just right."
"Yeah? Thank goodness. I made it the way Jiyoon likes…. We actually had this as a side at breakfast this morning, too."
"Aha."
Vienna sausage all tastes the same anyway. I couldn't quite bring myself to say it, so I praised her in broad strokes and took the spoon she handed over.
Hayun's sweet spot was packed in front of her womb, after all. A woman like that could fuss around in some romantic position during sex, or try to lead the way a proper noona should and work her hips for all she was worth, and it still couldn't feel better than handing everything over to a man and getting hammered down like an animal until she broke.
…She would figure that out on her own, spending time with me.
I followed Hayun, who was munching away at her rice, and ate a piece of rolled omelet.
"Oh, that reminds me."
"……?"
"Jiyoon. She's been saying her head hurts again lately…."
"……."
"Um, do you think you could… help her again?"
"You're exactly my type, so, um, if you don't mind…."
"Sorry. I have a boyfriend."
"Ah. Okay."
Lee Jiyoon answered without even straightening her back, scrubbing hard at the coffee a customer had spilled.
Everybody's fingers looked perfectly fine, so why was there always, at least once a day, someone who managed to dump their drink all over the table? If you were that hopeless, couldn't you just quietly use a straw? Why manufacture extra work? On purpose? Just to piss off the part-timer? She seriously wanted to kill them. Fuck….
She finished the mopping in a hurry, cracked the stiffness out of a back gone tight from too little exercise — pop — and pressed her fingers hard into her forehead. Her head hurt, too. Nightmare customers were fewer than usual, at least. Annoying chores had of course kept coming from open straight through the mid-shift, but it was almost five. Hold on a little longer and the closing-shift part-timer would get here…. Just endure it somehow…. Chat a bit, rest, then clock out….
Jingle, jingle.
She had been about to take a break when the sound of the door opening carried up from the first floor. Lee Jiyoon, who had been stacking every complaint she owned inside her head, set the cleaning tools down beside the table for a moment and went down the stairs.
And came face to face with him.
"Ah. It's been a while."
"…? …Yeah. Long time no…. No, before that, how did you even know about this place…?"
"Hayun-noona told me you work here."
"Ahh…."
"Uh… I should order something, right? If I'm going to stay?"
Seo Woojin.
Her sister's boyfriend.