The First Contract
Squelch. Squelch. The wet, filthy sounds ricocheted off the grimy bathroom walls. Every clumsy thrust of my hips drove her body into the sink with a dull, heavy thud. The give of Park Ajeong's ass against my pelvis — soft, plush, yielding — was so vivid I could have counted every point of contact.
Skin hitting skin. Damp fabric twisting against bare flesh. All of it was so crushingly real it circled back into unreality. And more than any of that: the inside of her, clamping down on my sorry excuse for a cock without mercy, was enough to wipe every thought clean. It squeezed and released like something alive, determined to swallow me and never let go.
The orgasm came screaming in in under a minute. First kill. First fuck. First time with nothing between us. Every first tangled into one knotted mess and blew the fuse behind my eyes. When I came back to myself, I had already spent myself inside her.
Don't come inside. I hadn't kept the promise — her only condition, the last scrap of pride she had left. No. I hadn't even tried.
For a while she didn't move, her forehead resting against the sink. Then she looked at me. Her eyes burned with the kind of disgust and contempt you'd reserve for a cockroach. Overwhelmed by that stare, I mumbled something that was half apology, half excuse.
"...Sorry?"
My clumsy apology didn't change her expression in the slightest. As if I weren't even worth acknowledging anymore, she walked past me without a word and squatted down on the floor. She picked up the rubber hose still trickling water from its tip and brought it between her legs. A cold stream ran down her thighs, mixing with the muddy water on the tiles.
Ah. So that's it... the after-rinse I'd only ever heard about.
I lit a cigarette and took a deep drag. Through the haze of smoke, I just stared blankly at what she was doing. Park Ajeong washed the semen out of herself with meticulous care, then tossed the hose onto the floor without a second thought. She didn't even bother with the water dripping down her legs. She just yanked her soaked underwear back up and straightened her rumpled skirt.
She stepped toward me. Those empty eyes locked onto mine.
"...So what now?"
A sudden hunger hit me. Hauling a corpse, trudging through the mudflats, and then sex on top of it all — maybe I'd burned too many calories in too short a time. The biggest problem in my head right now wasn't what do I do next. It was the primal, simple fact that I was starving.
"Dunno. I'm hungry. Wanna go eat?"
My answer left her speechless for a moment. Then she looked at me like I was the most incomprehensible creature on the planet.
"You're actually insane."
"Yeah... fair."
I shrugged. Park Ajeong didn't say another word. She just shook her head once, then turned and pushed open the creaking bathroom door like someone who had given up on everything. I watched her back for a moment, then followed in silence.
The moment we stepped out of the dilapidated bathroom, a cold, briny night wind hit us full in the face. As if we'd agreed on it beforehand, we started walking side by side down the darkened coastal road, no destination in mind.
We walked in silence for a long time before I glanced over. In the scattered glow of the streetlights, her face looked strangely peaceful. A question surfaced in my mind, unbidden. But seriously — why is this woman so compliant? She hasn't even thought about running. Just because I took a picture of her ID? Because she's afraid I'll track her down and hurt her? She didn't even seem that scared of me. So then... why?
I kicked a small pebble off the roadside. The unanswerable question was giving me a headache. Well... does it even matter? Whatever she was thinking, as long as she didn't bolt and report me to the cops, that was enough. I wiped the complicated thoughts from my head. What mattered right now wasn't what was going on inside hers. It was the honest, practical growl rumbling from my own stomach.
It wasn't a familiar alarm that woke me. It was a faint thread of light leaking through the gap in the window. Whatever had happened overnight, my body felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. Not a hangover — a bone-deep, throbbing exhaustion. For a while I just stared at the morning sun, dust motes drifting through the beam.
Last night's memories gouged through my head in broken fragments, like a film with the reel cut. A knife. Blood. Screams. A suitcase. The mudflats. And then... sex.
Fuck.
The curse snapped me fully awake. I tried to sit up in one motion — and froze at the warmth I felt beside me. I turned my head. The back of Park Ajeong's skull. She had claimed half of my shabby single bed and was sleeping with even, peaceful breaths. Short hair scattered across the pillow. On the shoulder that had slipped free of the blanket, the flower tattoo I'd seen yesterday stood out sharp and clear.
Last night, we'd ended up at a nearby all-night diner — the kind cab drivers haunt — and put down a bowl of rice soup each in total silence. Then we took a taxi to my studio. While I showered and changed, she sat on the floor like it was her own living room couch and watched TV. And when I lay down on the bed, she flicked off the lights like it was nothing, crawled in beside me, and fell asleep. As naturally as a roommate of several years.
Why doesn't this woman run? Why is she sleeping so peacefully in a murderer's bed? Well... did it matter? Whatever the reason, my life was already one scene from the credits. One day the front door would fly open and the cops would come pouring in, and that would be it. That was the ending that had already been written. Once I thought about it that way, the question of why she was lying next to me felt trivial.
A different thought crossed my mind instead. Before I go to prison, I just fuck my brains out the whole time — that's a jackpot, isn't it?
In the middle of this completely abnormal situation, my body was greeting the morning with embarrassing honesty. For a moment I just looked at her, breathing evenly in her sleep beside me.
"...Nnh."
She stirred faintly and her eyes drifted open. Sleep-blurred, unfocused, they found me in the morning light. We looked at each other for a while without a word. The horrors of last night felt strangely distant in the quiet of this morning, like a lie someone else had told.
I watched her hazy gaze slowly pull into focus — and I couldn't fight the impulse. I pushed into her, slow.
Something soft and hot wrapped around my cock. At the same time, Park Ajeong's brow furrowed. The dazed, sleep-drunk look vanished without a trace, replaced by a stare thick with irritation. She didn't resist. She just looked at me the way you'd look at the most annoying insect in the world, and said it quietly.
"Don't come inside."
The kind of answer you'd expect from a woman who'd been spreading her legs like an automatic door since the moment we got home last night. I didn't stop moving. I just answered short.
"Yeah."
The old bed took up its monotonous scream again, creaking in time with my hips. The sensation without a condom in the way was still dizzying — but what bothered me more was the way she was looking at me. Empty, dry eyes, like sex was something she'd done so many times it didn't register anymore. She stared up at me with those eyes and, completely out of nowhere, asked a question that had nothing to do with what we were doing.
"Hey. Do you... kill people for money? That kind of thing?"
"...Me? A hitman?"
"Yeah. That."
My brain, which had been melting into a puddle of pleasure, locked up. I was panting, and I had to make sure I'd heard her right.
"...Why would you even think that?"
"I don't know. You just... seemed really good at it."
Park Ajeong was still looking up at me with those hollow eyes, like she was admiring someone else's body. Beneath my frozen hips, the faint twitch of her insides was the only thing that still felt real.
How the hell do you watch someone kill a person and come away with "he seemed good at it"? Without hesitation? Fast? Was that what I'd done? I'd just clumsily copied something I'd seen on the internet. I was so stunned I couldn't even speak. I just stared down at her like an idiot.
She must have read the confusion on my face, because she went on.
"Yesterday I was... that bastard... what was his name."
"You don't even know the name of the guy you were fucking?"
"Do I need to? Anyway. When I was pinned under that son of a bitch, you just... stabbed him."
"So?"
"You didn't even blink. Just went straight in. Like a pro. That's what I figured. Normal people can't do that."
Her last words kept circling in my head. A pro? Me? My head hurt. I didn't understand a single thing she was saying. Complicated thoughts just pissed me off. If that was the case, I was better off focusing on the pleasure right in front of me. I gave up on thinking, started moving my hips again, and let out a long breath.
"Look, I have no idea what you're talking about... just tighten up a little. I'm about to come."
Over the emptiness already sitting in her eyes, a clean, sharp contempt rose to the surface. She let out a quiet scoff.
"Premature piece of shit."
"So what."
The words rang in my ears, but I couldn't have given less of a shit. I just kept moving my hips, mechanical, chasing whatever pleasure I had left. Pleasure hit, and every thought stopped. Almost on reflex, I pulled out.
A rush of heat met the cold air outside her. I didn't hesitate. I finished it with my own hand. From the head of my cock, still slick with her, a thick white rope of semen shot out hard. It arced through the air and landed in scattered drops across Park Ajeong's lower stomach. She just watched it happen with those empty eyes, unmoving.
The creaking of the bed stopped. So did our ragged breathing. An awkward, heavy silence settled over the room again. I stared blankly at the mess I'd left on her stomach, then sat up and lay down beside her. She was on her back, staring at the ceiling, not moving a muscle. I couldn't tell what she was thinking or what kind of expression she was wearing. It felt like she could stay like that through morning, through noon, through nightfall, and never change.
She was the one who broke the silence.
"Can you kill someone for me?"
Still looking at the ceiling. In a voice with no feeling in it at all, the way you'd ask what was for dinner.
"...What?"
I doubted my own ears. That was not a sentence that should have come out of the mouth of the woman who'd just been underneath me without making a single sound.
"I've got about five million. I'll give you that."
"The hell?"
I sat bolt upright on the bed. Park Ajeong finally turned her head and met my eyes. Those empty pupils were the same as always — but there was a clear will sitting inside them now.
"If that's not enough, then..."
She glanced away, thinking it over, then looked back and forth between my face and my lower half, which still hadn't gone cold.
"...I'll let you fuck me whenever you want. Like just now. How's that?"
The eyes making the offer were just... empty. The eyes of someone who wanted one thing so badly she had erased everything else to get it.
I didn't know about the rest of it. I just thought, for a second, that those eyes looked a lot like mine.
