Words of Love (4)
Everyone carries a lack of their own.
Some, pricked by a petty inferiority, go looking for someone beneath them—someone they can look down on whenever the mood strikes. Some, never loved by their parents, search for a person who will hold them dear. And some, because of a secret taste all their own, hide behind anonymity and hunt for whoever can satisfy it.
That is how a lack gets filled.
Sometimes, people call this feeling love.
Han Sua's lack was being a loner. She hadn't been bullied, or torn open in any way like that—just a tiny, shabby little deficiency that a few like-minded friends would have fixed on the spot. Honestly, it was closer to a scratch than anything you could call a lack.
Aside from that, she was a woman who already had everything, wasn't she?
Money.
In the modern world, there was nothing money couldn't do. The joke—if there's something money can't buy, it only means you don't have enough of it—had been making the rounds for years. Born, by a stroke of luck, to something like a princess's station, there was no chance she would ever come up short.
Why a woman like that would go so far as to practice conversation just to make friends, I wasn't particularly interested in knowing. She'd never made any before, so she was probably practicing now in the hope of making some. I let it pass with that vaguely plausible guess, and nothing more.
Using the hobbies I'd heard about from Yozora, I played the ideal friend as well as I could, stayed at her side until being with me felt easy, and cleared from Han Sua anyone who might have made a more convincing real friend than I did.
That was enough.
In the end, only Yozora and I would be left beside her. At least until she graduated from the academy.
That was enough.
If anything came up, she would hesitate, then come looking for me. Even if she didn't, the only person she had to turn to was Yozora.
That was enough.
Rather than lose the friends she had barely managed to make, she would yield a considerable part of herself in the relationship.
That was enough.
As groundwork for Han Sua, this much was plenty.
"Hoo..."
I'd tried to stick to the softest words I could manage. Had it actually worked? Trying it once was all well and good, but no matter how I turned it over, that way of speaking didn't suit me in the slightest. I wanted the act dropped as soon as possible.
A biting winter night. I'd been loosening up along the paths near Ichon Hangang Park when I dropped onto a bench to catch my breath.
I pulled the nagging earbuds free, tucked them into their case, and took the phone from my coat pocket. Unfortunately, not a single notification had come up.
It had to be nearly two hours since I'd left Sua's place, where she'd been going on enthusiastically about manga—honestly, aside from the talk of money, I hadn't understood a word. You'd think a thank-you for being her practice partner today would have shown up by now. I'd meant to take that and spin the conversation out, this way and that, and lay in a little more goodwill. I hadn't expected silence.
Well. A shame. Still, it wasn't as if I'd come away with nothing. I knew where Han Sua lived. Whether I'd ever need it was another question, but I'd also noted the first three digits of the front-door code. And I'd learned that the bed where she usually did nothing but snore the night away was exactly the right size for a long, soaking night of sex.
All that was left was to someday watch that cold expression of hers—so particular to Han Sua—twist apart with pleasure on top of it. I'd worried about slipping the first button into the wrong hole. Didn't look like I needed to. Now I only had to fasten the rest.
Get a little closer, and she'd probably start sending private texts now and then. For the moment, I'd call it awkwardness and leave it at that.
Fluttering... No. No, that wasn't it.
Didn't fluttering sound a little too much like a girl? I must have picked up the way that genre talks, sitting through Han Sua's three-hour manga lecture. I'd been planning to carve nothing but the wrong ideas into her from here on, and I was the one who got hit first.
Looking forward to it.
Yeah. That was a better word.
Han Sua someday panting under me, tail wagging. That, I was looking forward to.
Hardly anyone around in any case. I pocketed the phone, slapped both cheeks, and stood up from the bench. I was just hauling my neck warmer higher when it happened.
A woman I could have sworn I'd seen somewhere shot past, pushing off the track. Fast, for an ordinary person. Faster still, once you factored in that she was a woman. A cold wind trailed after her, and right as She runs well was turning into That hip line is insane, my eyes snagged on the cyan-white hair swaying about her waist.
What came to mind was a woman who had stopped by the infirmary a few days ago. The student council president. A spy for another villain syndicate, sitting in that seat. Baek Seoyeon. The hair was a perfect match for the woman who had left that vacant, blank-faced impression behind her.
"Hm..."
Strange. It was a route I'd used often enough even before the regression, and in ten years I didn't think I'd run into her once. I crossed so many people—maybe I simply didn't remember. Or maybe I'd missed her back then, holed up in the smoking booth every time I took a break. If not that, then... some kind of butterfly effect.
The thoughts only rolled for a moment. Whether she hadn't seen me or hadn't cared, she ran the course straight on and vanished past the streetlights. Cold as it was, she'd dressed thin, and under the flapping outer layer those Nike leggings—packed tight from hip to ankle—had been well worth looking at. A shame. I should have been watching her ass in the time I spent on her hair.
Hah.
"Hoo... shi— fuck... hoo..."
Right on the heels of that lukewarm little fantasy, a man came struggling past, clearly dying out there. Not much stamina, by the look of him. I could tell he was trying. The sound of him panting, though, got on my nerves something awful. If he was going to gasp like that, I'd rather have heard it in a woman's voice...
I dug at my ear, pushed off, and started down the course again at an easy pace. Cool night air slid beneath my ears.
...Something. Something's wrong. I'm not sleepy...
What time is it? I've been tossing for thirty minutes at least...
...Nnngh.
I groped around where the charger was until the phone was in my hand.
Exactly an hour since I'd lain down at midnight, fully intending to sleep. On any normal night I would have been pleasantly drowsy and gone by now. So why was my head still this unbearably clear?
Squirming under the covers, I poked my head out from the blanket I'd pulled all the way over. I brushed back the messy hair tickling my cheek and sat up against the headboard, the way I did when I read manga. My eyelids, blinking, felt impossibly light. As if it were noon.
"...Weird."
During the day I'd worn myself to shreds trying to speak to people first. In the evening I'd drained myself dry giving Seo Woojin a master class on what romance manga even was. After I sent him off, I'd been busy praising myself, replaying a conversation that hadn't broken once in three hours—for a first try, hadn't I kind of killed it? Then, sometime later, it hit me that Seo Woojin had been matching me and leading the whole three hours, and I'd launched myself onto the bed and pounded the innocent sheets with the tops of my feet.
So I ought to be tired right now.
What is this, seriously?
"Hmmmm..."
Since it had come to this, maybe some water would refresh me. I switched on the fluorescent light, padded out to the kitchen in my pajamas, and wet my throat with the cold barley tea in the fridge.
The housekeeper was probably asleep. The moment she heard rustling in the kitchen late at night, she was the sort to ask whether I needed a snack, so I was sure of it. Well. It was her hour to sleep, too.
While I was already out here, I nibbled two or three pieces of pork out of the kimchi stew, licked my fingers, and went back to the bedroom. Sleep still refused to come. Brushing my teeth after the fact changed nothing, and washing my face while declaring Since it's come to this, how about walking in someone else's shoes!—I didn't really know what that meant—left things exactly the same.
I wasn't sleepy in the slightest. Like someone whose brain had been soaked through with endorphins. (I didn't really know what that meant, either.)
Tomorrow was Saturday, but I still didn't want my sleep pattern thrown off...
"..."
I let twenty minutes go that way. Which meant the thing eating at me was, of course, this evening—the lecture I'd thrown myself into in front of a Seo Woojin who actually seemed interested in manga. I'd probably gotten so excited back then that my brain was still stuck in an awakened state.
...Well. It had been fun. That part was true.
The deduction ended on a flat note. Culprit found, I plugged in my earbuds and opened YouTube, meaning only to put on some clean rain-sound ASMR and try to sleep.
"...Huh?"
Right under the video. That had been the plan, right up until an extremely smutty manga ad caught my eye.
"What is this..."
Cut away every unnecessary detail, and a woman was half-naked. If that had been all, it might have been a relief—but the speech bubbles held lines carrying a quiet sex appeal, too. The particular coloring, the natural Korean. Probably a Korean work.
What even was this. There were usually plenty of fun ads. Why was something like that showing up all of a sudden? Because it was night? Or because I'd been searching dirty manga lately, on account of Yozora? Lord AI's terrifying algorithm?
I didn't know. I turned the screen off and quietly closed my eyes.
"..."
But what surfaced, before long, was Seo Woojin. Seo Woojin, who out of consideration for me had deliberately kept the talk on shoujo manga alone. And with him, the Seo Woojin Yozora called Master.
Someone with tastes of that sort. Pervert Seo Woojin.
Hadn't I learned it for myself today—that a good way to talk to a person was to bring up that person's hobbies? Would they say for men for no reason? Would they say for women for no reason? So maybe taking a little look at that would help, even slightly, the next time I talked to a man...
"...Nngh..."
As if. I blew out something that was almost a sigh and pulled the blanket a little higher.
"..."
Under brows pinched tight. Eyes cracked open, just a sliver.
"...I'm not really tired right now anyway. Just a... just a little. Yeah."
I already understood, roughly, what sex was. Yozora's Special Selection of Shoujo Manga—studied, as it happened, across twenty-one adult titles wearing that disguise. More violent than I'd thought. The se... the semen was incredibly sticky, and there was an enormous amount of it. Being driven in all the way to the root felt good enough to blank your head white. At the drop of a hat, the woman squirted something like pee all over the bed. And the moment the act ended, she always ended up drooling from her mouth. I understood that much, more or less.
...Oh. Right. And at the very end, the woman licked it clean with her mouth. Yeah.
But what Yozora had recommended was probably the kind made for women. The kind made for men might be a little different. So this was only about what men liked. What the pervert who had helped me today liked. Nothing but broadening the spectrum of my knowledge. It might even help me talk to a man later.
Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely not because I wanted to look at something dirty. I had not the slightest interest in that nauseating act of reproduction to begin with. Truly. I swore it.
The extremely convenient self-justification came to an end. For no good reason, I strained to hear whether any sound was stirring outside the bedroom, then carefully turned the phone screen back on.