Maybe My Daughter... While I Was Unconscious...
"Smell?"
"Yeah."
What smell is she talking about?
I gently peeled Ayeong off me — she'd been nuzzling her face into my chest, sniffing — and held my clothes up to my nose.
Sniff sniff.
All I can smell is Ayeong.
Probably because she'd just been rubbing her face all over my chest. Nothing else came through but the scent of body wash.
"All I smell is body wash?"
"No, Dad. There's a smell on you that you don't usually have. It's pretty strong."
"Hmm...? I don't notice anything..."
"No... mmm..."
This time she rose up on her toes, sniffing near my hair, and her face scrunched slightly.
"Yeah... I'm right. It's citrusy, I think? ...Grapefruit, and... something else mixed in...?"
"Grapefruit...?"
Grapefruit... grapefruit...
I thought it over for a moment, and then it hit me — one of today's events, the kind you don't forget.
— Is that... not okay?
The way my junior had looked down at me with those damp eyes.
It was when her face was buried in my chest.
I remembered a thick grapefruit scent. Bright and sharp at first, then turning slightly bitter as it lingered — strangely addictive.
The moment the atmosphere had swept us up so fast we'd nearly gone all the way.
Wait. I was too worked up to notice at the time.
I swallowed hard.
If Ayeong has feelings for me... isn't this basically cheating...?
She hadn't said she liked me out loud. All I had was other people's suspicions. But looking at the situation, wasn't that exactly what this was?
An affair.
The thought alone sent a cold sweat down my back.
"That's weird...? We don't have any grapefruit body wash or anything like that at home."
Whether she could sense what I was thinking or not, Ayeong just tilted her head and sniffed again. Panicking, I scrambled for a cover story.
"Ah. Aah. That — my junior at work told me to try her perfume today."
"Huh?"
The moment I mentioned Seoyeon, Ayeong looked straight at me.
"You know, the junior I always talk about."
She seemed to search her memory for a second, then fixed me with a steady look.
"Ahh~... that girl junior you said you get along with? The super energetic one."
"Yeah. Seoyeon."
I answered with her name, and Ayeong echoed it back.
"Seoyeon?"
"Yeah?"
"Come to think of it, this is the first time you've ever told me her name."
My daughter's sweet little smile. On any other day I would have taken it as ordinary conversation. But with a guilty conscience already gnawing at me, something about it felt... cold. Like a chill was seeping out from behind her face.
What? Did I mess something up in this conversation?
"I... is that so?"
"Yeah. Seoyeon-nim? You always said she was so lively, like a puppy. That she had so much energy you sometimes had a hard time putting up with her antics."
"...Right?"
"Hmm... I see. So it wasn't that she offered you perfume and you tried it. You got hit with another one of her pranks, didn't you."
"Wh... what?!"
How did she know?
Of course, it hadn't been perfume at all — I'd ended up in a very different kind of situation. And the "prank" of an adult woman was the real problem here.
"Why so surprised, Dad?"
"Ah... no. I just thought it was amazing how you described the whole situation like you'd seen it yourself, even though I hadn't told you anything."
"Really? It's nothing special. I can tell just from the things you usually say."
"I... is that so?"
"The only people you ever talk about are that Seoyeon junior and your friend Taeyang. There's not much else, right?"
"True..."
She wasn't wrong. My social circle was narrower than I'd realized.
But... my daughter doesn't look happy.
There was an edge to the way she was talking.
She only sounds like this when we've had a fight.
But today felt different from usual...
Jealousy?
Because I'd come home smelling like a female junior's perfume and said her name so familiarly?
"Dad. You just got home from work, so go wash up. Looks like you sweated a lot, and you've got other smells on you too."
"...I'll go wash up, Ayeong."
"Okay. I'll get dinner ready."
After my shower, I dried my hair in my room and thought.
Ayeong really doesn't seem to be in a good mood...
In the old days, I would have turned it around on her:
Ayeong. There's an edge in your voice. You need to tell Dad what's bothering you if we're going to fix it. Talking like this just hurts both of us.
That's what I would have said.
But now...
Putting everything together, my thoughts kept leaning one way.
What if what Kim Taeyang said is actually... true...
Because the reaction my daughter had just shown me was hard to call a normal daughter's reaction.
Haa... what am I supposed to do about this.
Just ask her straight out?
Do you like Dad?
But if I said that and she just went, "Yeah! I love Dad!" — I'd only sink deeper into the maze.
And I couldn't follow up with, "I mean, do you see Dad as a man?" either.
That would be insane. Seriously.
Absolutely not. I could never say that.
"Haa..."
My hair was already dry. I ran a hand through it for no real reason, tried to settle my restless heart a little, and opened the door.
The scene that greeted me: slightly overdone but properly shaped fried eggs, along with the side dishes I'd prepared earlier, all laid out on the table. I glanced over and found my daughter holding a rice bowl, looking at me.
"Dad. How much rice do you want today?"
"Hm? Ah. The usual amount."
Once the table was set, a sense of wrongness crept in.
She... doesn't usually cook, does she?
Back in high school, even when I told her to cook so she could learn to stand on her own, she never did. And yet this was already the second time this week.
"...You cooked again today?"
"Hm? Yeah. We learn cooking at school too. So I'm planning to keep cooking from now on."
"Hmm? Is that so?"
That explains it.
On the rare occasions she used to make me fried eggs, they were usually burnt to a dry, crumbly crisp. But now...
Only the outside was a little browned. The inside was moist. Soft, even.
"Your cooking's improved a lot, huh?"
"Yeah. I've been practicing a lot. It's for an assignment in next week's Cooking Lab — 1."
"They're assigning something that simple for a cooking lab?"
"Yep. These days most households use domestic androids, so."
Fair enough.
They cost a fortune to buy, but...
Once you had one, it handled the entire household for at least a decade or two until it broke down. Families that could afford it usually got one, from what I'd heard.
"But they say cooking is essential when you're taking care of a husband."
"Uh... uh-huh... I see."
"So I'm working hard at it. Gotta show my future husband how hard I'm trying."
"Huh?"
What... did she just say?
Show her future husband how hard she was trying?
I was so floored I just stared, and Ayeong smiled with her eyes.
"If I work hard and get an A+, it'll show how much effort I put in, right?"
Watching her beam at me, I pressed a hand to my chest inside.
Ah... whew... that nearly gave me a heart attack.
"Aha... so that's what you meant."
"But Dad. How was today?"
"Hm?"
"Normally when you leave on time you're bouncing around full of energy, but today you look especially worn out."
"Ah... about that."
I laid out the unexpected mess from today. How a sample specimen had shattered, how the whole Research Institute had gone into an uproar over it, how the safety management team and even the higher-ups had come down to sort everything out.
...Leaving out everything that had happened with my junior.
Ayeong's eyes went wide, then filled with worry.
"Really? You're okay, though? Nothing happened to you?"
"...Yeah. Cleaning up the accident took a while, and writing the incident report drained me a bit, but that's it."
"Thank goodness... I thought something might have happened to you."
Seeing how genuinely worried she was only made my heart heavier.
Come to think of it, talking about that day brought something back.
The time I'd collapsed in front of Ayeong — and somehow nothing had gone wrong.
Back then I'd just thought, I must have toughed it out with sheer willpower...
But that's strange. There's no way.
With necrosis syndrome, if you can't ejaculate in that state, you simply leave this world.
I cast my mind back to that day.
After that whole incident, when I went into Ayeong's room, the smell of semen had been thick in the air.
At the time I'd been in a panic and rationalized it away as the smell of pre-cum.
— Ayeong, she likes you.
— I like Dad. Of course I do. You're all I have.
Kim Taeyang's advice. Ayeong's ambiguous remarks that could be read two ways. And every time she said she'd "helped" me while I slept, how refreshed my body felt afterward. Piece by piece, the circumstantial evidence piled up.
As the puzzle started coming together, everything looked different.
What if that really had been the smell of semen?
And what if the wet mark on her mouth hadn't been drool... but semen?
Then there was only one conclusion I could draw.
— Ayeong had helped me ejaculate.
Suspicion chased suspicion until it produced a result that seemed impossible: the hypothesis that my daughter had extracted semen from her unconscious father.
I deliberately brightened my expression and spoke as if nothing were wrong.
"...Ayeong."
"Yeah?"
"Dinner was great. Dad's pretty wiped out today, so I think I'll head in and sleep."
I cleaned up, then put on an even more exhausted act as I went into my room.
A room I'd left perfectly tidy. Tonight, though, I planned to mess it up a little.
"Whew..."
I left my bag by the door instead of setting it on the desk out of the way like usual. I drew the blackout curtains I never normally closed, and switched off the light.
A pitch-black room with not a single scrap of light.
I deliberately left the blanket off and lay on top of it, thinking.
If... everything I've been thinking is true...
What was I supposed to do from here?
If I found out my daughter had been helping me ejaculate every night, then what?
And after that?
Haa... what am I supposed to do.
Two opinions collided violently inside me.
So you're looking at the daughter you raised for ten years that way. In the end, you've been corrupted too. By this other world. I'm disappointed in you, Park Seongchan. You of all people shouldn't have gone there.
Ha. What are you talking about. A daughter who's received nothing but boundless love for ten years loving you back is the most natural thing in the world. Aren't you the one who's confused? In this world, this is normal. The one-eyed freak isn't everyone else — it's you! Admit it! Accept it!
I felt like I was going insane.
Ordinarily I would have sided with the first opinion, but...
Am I the one in the wrong?
With all the sudden incidents lately, my head was a mess of thoughts.
Am I just making excuses — telling myself I was only acting according to my old common sense?
Violent, swirling confusion.
How long had I been lying there with my eyes closed?
Creeeak.
A sound I never would have heard if I'd been asleep — but wide awake, the hinge was unmistakable.
Then a small voice began to reach me.
"...Dad... are you... asleep?"
"···."
Please, please, please. Don't let it be what I think it is.
It was a selfish thought, but deep down I prayed Ayeong would just close the door and leave. If she did, I wouldn't have to keep wrestling with this dilemma.
"···."
When I gave no answer, I heard the door start to close.
I was about to feel relief —
Rustle.
The sound of something bumping into my bag made my heart drop straight through my chest.