Have You Decided?
A week passed in a fucking blur.
Every morning, the second I opened my eyes, I checked the front door. It had already hardened into habit. Still half-buried in the blankets, vision smeared with sleep, I squinted at the lock on that beat-up old door—making sure it was actually engaged, and that no pair of black dress shoes was standing out there like a couple of shadows.
For now, we were fine.
I let out a breath that might have been relief, and that was when the smell of ramen came worming into the blankets, tickling my nose. Salty, spicy—the smell of staying alive. Drawn by it, I crawled out of the covers and sat down at the little folding table shoved into the corner of the room.
Park Ajeong was already in her spot, scooping ramen off the steaming pot lid. She was wearing a tacky T-shirt that said I ♥ MU JIN like it was a pair of pajamas. She didn't say a word when I sat down across from her. Like I was invisible.
I reached out without a shred of hesitation and plucked the chopsticks straight out of her hand. Then I grabbed the springiest, chewiest clump of noodles she'd just portioned out and shoveled it into my mouth in one go, fully possessed by the spirit of a bite-thief.
"Ah, you fucking bite-thief."
She clicked her tongue and muttered it under her breath. But she didn't even try to take the chopsticks back. She just propped her chin in her hand and watched me chew, looking perfectly pleased with myself.
Over the past week, this exact scene had played out more times than I could count. Just another morning. I worked the mouthful of ramen around and glanced at the TV hanging on the wall. The morning news was barking the usual bullshit about what a peaceful place the Republic of Korea was today. Not so much as a glimpse of a missing person or an unidentified corpse.
What, do the cops in this country just not work? Why hasn't anyone come for us?
Same thought, every morning, for a week straight. The tension had drained out of the room, and what seeped into the hole it left behind was a thick, suffocating boredom.
A yawn ripped out of me before I could stop it, jaw stretched wide enough to unhinge. In the brief silence that followed, I heard the sink behind me cut off with perfect clarity. Wet hands wiped on clothes. Then her bare feet crossed the linoleum and stopped right at my back.
"So. Have you decided?"
"...Decided what?"
"My dad. You said you'd make up your mind by this morning and tell me."
Her voice was as hollow as it had been yesterday. Like the part that was supposed to hold emotion had never been installed in the first place. I didn't know what to say to a voice like that, so I just smacked my lips—a meaningless little sound, nothing underneath it.
"Ahh, that... uh..."
From eyewitness, to accomplice in dumping a body, to bizarre roommate, and now to a client commissioning a murder. That was Park Ajeong's life story, boiled down to a single week of rapid evolution. A miserable girl who'd gotten fucked raw by her own father, run away, gotten dragged back, beaten half to death, and turned into Daddy's personal onahole.
My silence stretched too long. Her brow furrowed, just slightly. The empty affect from a moment ago vanished, and a voice edged with irritation came flying at me and stuck.
"Hey. I do your laundry. I cook your food. I even give you pussy. And you can't do this one little thing?"
"Hey, killing a person isn't exactly a 'little thing,' is it?"
"You just go shunk and it's over. Cool as hell."
She mimicked the little hand gesture I'd made that day, tiny and precise.
"So it is a little thing, isn't it?"
How the hell did I end up with a reputation as a guy who kills people like it's nothing?
Honestly, though. I was already riding the train straight off a cliff. What difference would one more body make? Park Ajeong's father was the kind of human being who didn't deserve guilt and didn't need it. And more than that...
Call her a used-up slut all you want—she was still older than me, and I couldn't deny that a week of living with her had massively upgraded my quality of life. Laundry. Meals. Sex. Thinking about all of that, I genuinely wanted to take her up on the offer, if I could.
But there was one thing. Just one thing that snagged.
"No, fuck.... If it was just some thug, fine, but your dad's a cop, isn't he?"
"There's barely any difference between him and a thug, you know that?"
Raw hatred and rage rode her voice, unfiltered.
"He gets drunk and beats people. Chases ass... He's the kind of guy nobody would even notice if he just disappeared."
"Nngh......"
I clutched my head and groaned under my breath. A cop. Taking out some random thug and taking out a police officer were two completely different risk profiles. Killing that one bastard hadn't even made a single line in the news. But if a cop turned up dead? The whole thing would blow wide open. You've seen the movies. When a cop goes down, the rest of them act like they're about to start a goddamn uprising.
I ignored the way Park Ajeong was looking at me, stood up without a word, and walked to the one empty patch of floor in the middle of the room. Then I started the morning routine I'd kept up ever since middle school—ever since the day I sealed the Black Flame Dragon in my right hand.
I closed my eyes and slowly evened out my breathing. Every sound cut out. My head emptied. And when I opened my eyes again, Park Ajeong was gone. The shitty little studio was gone. The only thing in front of me was the enemy I had to kill.
I snapped a knife-hand strike into empty air. Throat. Heart. Side. The most efficient vital-point attack line I'd swung thousands—tens of thousands—of times in this unlit room. I was acting out the Art of the Hunt I'd picked up from some web novel back in middle school, acting it out here, in the real world.
I knew, honestly. This was complete bullshit. I wasn't the protagonist of a web novel. No matter how much I trained at this crap, I wasn't going to start seeing Lines of Death like the guy in that story. Park Ajeong's stare alone made it perfectly clear what I looked like right now.
What a fucking loser.
Yeah, it was embarrassing as hell. And I still couldn't stop doing this stupid shit.
Deep breaths, then squats, then push-ups. Nothing special. Just bodyweight work. The ghost of a hellish stretch of my life when I couldn't even start the day without doing them. Tomorrow I'll be able to kill that bastard. Tomorrow I won't be a bottom-feeder anymore. If I didn't keep that sad little hope engine burning, I wouldn't have even had the courage to walk out the front door. An old habit, left behind by the me of the past.
For a long while, the only sounds in the room were my ragged breathing and the occasional slap of a palm hitting the floor. When the routine was over, I dragged my dripping body into the cramped bathroom and showered. The cold water stripped the sweat and the heat off my skin.
When I came out, Park Ajeong was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring blankly at a morning drama. Her eyes shifted to me. She looked me up and down, slow and completely empty of feeling. Then her gaze stopped on my dick, hanging loose under the towel around my waist. There wasn't a shred of anything erotic in that look. It was more like she was checking whether my body had a price tag on it.
"...You work out every day like that. How come you don't have any muscle?"
"Muscle? Why are you suddenly asking about that?"
"I dunno. Just wondered."
"Just, I dunno, constitution, I guess...."
I answered awkwardly and covered myself with the towel. The kind of human being whose genes were designed from the ground up to be a bottom-feeder—eat all you want, never gain weight, never put on muscle. Short. Scrawny. Dick nothing to write home about. That kind of human being. Her gaze felt like it was confirming my pathetic reality all over again. I tacked on a line, like a cheap excuse.
"Still. This is a huge improvement. Back in middle school I was basically a skeleton."
"Hnn. That so?"
She answered like she couldn't care less.
"Yeah."
A short reply. An awkward silence settled in. I was still standing there in nothing but a towel, scratching at my wet hair, not knowing what to do with myself. My eyes wandered, looking for somewhere to land, and then they met hers—Park Ajeong, perched on the edge of the bed.
I don't know what I was thinking. The words just fell out, unfiltered.
"Hey, more importantly. Ajeong. I wanna do it."
At that, her eyes—which had been locked on the TV—slowly turned toward me.
".....No."
"Huh?"
"I said no."
"Why?"
She let out a short, incredulous laugh at the question. Then she stood up and planted herself in front of me.
"You won't even do me this one favor. Why the hell would I let you fuck me? Charity isn't a hobby of mine. If you want it that bad, pay for it."
".....What? You've been putting out this whole time and now you're suddenly like this?"
"Yeah. What about it?"
She twisted one corner of her mouth up, needling me.
"You gonna kill me if I don't give you pussy?"
What kind of human being kills a woman because she won't have sex with him? I was a murderer, but I wasn't that kind of garbage. The fact that she saw me as that kind of person made me feel filthy.
"Haa... shit. You're not even a little scared of me anymore, are you?"
"Nope."
She answered instantly. Not a second of hesitation. Not an inch of give on this one. Then again, the only things I'd shown her over the past week were the pathetic sight of me stealing her ramen and the loser spectacle of me doing weird calisthenics alone in the corner. It wasn't exactly surprising that her fear of me had worn thin.
"Just kill that bastard. Then I'll do whatever you want, okay?"
"Haa?"
"And..."
"And what else?"
"That bastard's going to track me down and come for me soon. You fine with that?"
Her last words drove into my chest like a cold blade. A cop. Coming through that front door.
"He's probably tearing through CCTV footage as we speak, you know."
".....He'd go that far?"
"Yeah. You know why."
"Why?"
She looked me dead in the eye.
"My pussy. It's that fucking good. That's why you're keeping me here too, isn't it?"
I couldn't argue with that. I opened my mouth to push back, but a week's worth of memories swept through my head first. In the mornings she boiled ramen like it was the most natural thing in the world. During the day she sat in the corner of a room with no sofa and stared at the TV. And at night, whenever I wanted it, she spread her legs without a word, without a single expression on her face. All of it, with those same empty eyes. Like a robot programmed to do exactly that.
I didn't have a control group, so I couldn't say for sure—but Park Ajeong's pussy was intense enough to swallow my entire twenty years of life whole. This bizarre little cohabitation was, if I was being honest, a house built on a single pillar. And that pillar was sex.
