The Ordinary Days of a Mother and Son
After that, we hammered out a few more details.
Specifically, when I would be allowed to tell Mom that Jinwoo was my friend.
Jinwoo said he would decide when that moment came, but that left the scope far too open-ended.
So in the end, we settled it like this.
The bet would officially begin on the day I enlisted in the military, one month from then.
If Jinwoo slept with Mom within one year of that day, Jinwoo won.
As for the moment I could reveal to Mom that Jinwoo was my friend — Jinwoo would choose it, but the deadline was set at six months after my discharge.
If Jinwoo gave the green light, I could tell Mom at any natural opportunity, and if she stayed with Jinwoo even after learning he was my friend, that would be another victory for Jinwoo.
Strangely enough, I never once worried that Jinwoo might break his promise or pull something underhanded.
Maybe it was because of his personality, or maybe it was just my own blind anticipation, but I genuinely believed that if Jinwoo made his move on Mom without any dirty tricks and ultimately failed, he would actually pay me the money.
That afternoon, Mom came home from work.
Our convenience store ran three shifts a day, and Mom worked the register from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon, weekdays and weekends alike.
Jeans and a black cotton T-shirt, hair tied up carelessly, the barest minimum of makeup.
As always, this was the daily routine that repeated itself without fail.
There was no way a woman like her would be dating anyone.
"Oh, you're up? Have you eaten?"
The moment she walked through the door, Mom asked me with a warm smile.
When I said I had, she went to check on the dishes, saw that I'd already washed everything, gave me an affectionate little look of pride, and then pulled me — sprawled on the couch watching TV — into a hug and kissed my cheek.
"Ugh, come on, stop it."
When I squirmed away, pretending to be annoyed, Mom just grinned playfully and clung on even tighter.
She kept the air conditioning blasting at the store since customers came and went, but it was still the middle of summer, and her body was lightly damp with sweat.
Every time I struggled, her chest pressed against my forearm.
That plush, generous flesh swayed and bumped against me, the weight and softness of it vivid against my skin.
Even as I feigned disgust, I was savoring every second of that contact — but Mom was completely, utterly unguarded.
To her, I was still nothing more than the baby she'd given birth to, and the very concept of anything sexual existing between us simply didn't register in her mind.
"Ew, I'm all sticky, aren't I? Sorry. I'll go wash up and then make you dinner, okay? Wait for me?"
Mom bustled off and disappeared straight into the bathroom.
She was the type who always showered the moment she got home from outside.
Our apartment had only one bathroom, so if you were sitting on the living room couch, you couldn't help but hear her washing.
After a long while, the water shut off. There was the rustle of fabric, then the door opened and Mom emerged.
Carrying her worn clothes and underwear in a laundry basket, she was draped in a white bathrobe with a towel wound around her head.
Right now, Mom was wearing absolutely nothing underneath that robe.
It was the moment of the day when she felt most intensely, dangerously sexy to me.
She carried the basket to the utility room, loaded the washing machine, brought the empty basket back to the bathroom, then went into the master bedroom and closed the door behind her.
A little later came the whir of the hair dryer.
Inside that room, she was probably shrugging off the robe and drying her hair and body completely naked.
And then, fresh and dry, she'd slip into clean new underwear and comfortable clothes — meaning baggy shorts and a loose short-sleeved shirt.
God, I wanted to see it.
I know some very open-minded households have family members who stroll out of the bathroom in their underwear — or even nude — after a shower, but I had never once seen Mom like that.
Even when I was very little, or at least as far back as my memory reaches, Mom never let me see anything inside the underwear line.
So while I knew her breasts were large and knew their softness against my skin, I had no idea what her nipples looked like or what color they were, or how much hair grew between her legs.
She seemed defenseless around me, seemed to see me as still a child — but looking closer, she guarded her line impeccably.
Before long, Mom came out of the bedroom, fresh and dry.
She got straight to work in the kitchen.
If she was only going to work again anyway, she could have showered after dinner — but Mom absolutely had to wash up the moment she came in from outside.
Even sprawled on the couch watching TV, I kept stealing glances at her preparing dinner in the kitchen.
Where on earth did all that energy come from, packed into such a small body?
Mom simply never seemed to tire, and her hands were lightning fast.
Probably thanks to that constitution, she never gained weight no matter how much she ate.
Dinner, like breakfast, came in generous portions.
Not a single day in our house was spent half-heartedly.
I sat down across from Mom and started eating.
"Did you drink a lot yesterday?"
"No, just a moderate amount."
"You smelled pretty strongly of alcohol when you came in, though?"
"I really didn't drink that much."
"What's he like, that friend of yours?"
How much was I supposed to tell her about Jinwoo?
What if I gave something away, and later, when Jinwoo started making his moves on Mom, she caught on?
"He's just... normal."
That was all I said.
"What's his name?"
Mom asked, lifting her spoon and taking a bite of rice.
"Kim Jin... gyu."
"Hmm... Jingyu? He's in university?"
"Yeah. He says he's studying economics at XX University."
I named a school that wasn't the one Jinwoo actually attended.
When I answered her questions about my friend with such lukewarm disinterest, Mom didn't press for details.
Instead, she told me about her day at the store, things the part-timer had said, that sort of thing.
I listened, tossing in the occasional murmur of acknowledgment.
This was what conversation between Mom and me usually looked like.
I was the quiet type, but Mom loved to talk — and I loved listening to her.
She was a genuinely engaging storyteller.
She organized her thoughts cleanly, had just the right touch of humor, and above all, her voice was so rich with emotion that everything came alive.
Give her a bit of a reaction and she'd perk up and chatter away for hours on end — and I could have listened to that voice all day.
After the meal, while Mom rested on the couch, I did the dishes.
Dishwashing and the recycling were, by unspoken agreement, my assigned chores.
When I finished and sat back down on the couch, Mom laid her head on my thigh.
We watched variety shows, then the news, then a drama.
The positions kept shifting.
Sometimes we sat side by side, sometimes I rested my head on her legs, sometimes we lay stretched in opposite directions with our legs tangled together.
Every time her body touched mine, I drank in the feel of it — and sometimes I caught myself worrying that my hardening cock might give me away.
But to Mom, it could never feel that way.
People who felt this kind of thing toward their own family, the way I did, had to be vanishingly rare to begin with.
Somewhere in the middle of the evening, Mom would bring out some fruit, and we'd eat it together in front of the TV.
We were just the two of us, a mother-and-son household, but the conversation never dried up.
After Mom got home from work, this was always how we spent our time together.
During the semester I came home a little later, but even then we always had dinner together and sat side by side in front of the TV until it was time to sleep.
When there was nothing worth watching, we'd pull up a movie or a drama on streaming instead.
Mom's favorite movie genre, surprisingly, was science fiction.
She'd once said that if she could be born again, she wanted to be a scientist or a doctor.
She always claimed that right now was the happiest time of her life, but I knew that somewhere inside, she carried regrets about how her life had gone — and dreams she'd never been able to chase.
Because of the family's circumstances, she'd had to start working the moment she graduated high school and never made it to university, but she said she'd been quite a good student.
It was true — the only thing Mom lacked was a formal education; she was sharp and remarkably well-informed.
That was why, among science fiction, the films she loved were the ones without heavy fantasy elements — the ones that strove to hew as closely as possible to real science.
On the other hand, what she hated most was anything with horror or gore.
"Hated" wasn't even the right word — she simply could not watch it at all.
The moment the atmosphere turned even slightly frightening or a gruesome scene appeared, Mom would squeeze her eyes shut and whimper that she couldn't look.
I once found that side of her so endearing that I tried watching one with her, but it was hopeless.
Usually around eleven, we each retreated to our own rooms.
Our apartment had three bedrooms — Mom's room, my room, and one that served as a closet-slash-storage-room for miscellaneous junk.
Whether out of fear of the dark or just habit, Mom never closed her door completely when she slept, and she left a small floor lamp glowing on low.
So if I stepped out to the living room for water or a trip to the bathroom, I could see a soft light seeping through the gap in her door.
In the early hours, if I crept close and nudged the door open just enough to peek inside, the lamp let me see her lying in bed, sound asleep — but even in the worst of the summer heat, she habitually pulled the blanket over herself and slept neatly and demurely, so catching anything good was impossible.
Me, I always closed my door all the way.
I'd play some games, then lie in bed without falling asleep right away, scrolling through my phone for a long while until sleep finally took me in the small hours.
Then the next morning would come, and as always I'd wake to the alarm and eat the breakfast Mom made.
And after Mom left for work, I would take the underwear she'd put in the washing machine the day before, breathe in the lingering scent of her body, and stroke myself while imagining all the ways I wanted to violate her.