Seong A-rin
"Hahh..."
I sent the completion message to RapeLegalization and let out a long breath. Sitting still for that long had left my lower back and neck locked up tight. My muscles were screaming.
I eased myself against the chair's backrest and stretched, slow and careful.
Crack. Pop-pop-pop!
"Ugh."
What the fuck. Did something just snap? The concert of pops ringing out through my entire body actually startled me. I could sit through a six-hour gaming session without so much as a crick, but apparently the universe ran a double-speed multiplier whenever I sat down to work. Truly a wondrous world. Far from stretching physical time, it only ever stretched the time inside your skull — and it reserved that particular miracle for the hours you spent working. If God existed, he was without a doubt some deranged sadist who got off on watching people suffer.
"Well. At least it's done."
I flopped onto the mattress in genuinely high spirits. Rest was finally on the table. The clock read 4:32 a.m. Most of the human race was already asleep. Coming straight home from drinking and sitting down to work had wrung me out thoroughly, and the taste of alcohol still lingered in my mouth — a bitter bloom at the back of my throat every time I swallowed. I lay there tasting that bitterness and turning over what had happened earlier.
Specifically, the part after I'd split from Lee Eun-byul at the bar. In the end, she'd paid the tab on her own card. She'd sat there staring into space for a second, then finally nodded and pulled it out.
Her face in that moment had been hilarious.
Not quite smiling, not quite not — that bizarre expression as she held the card out, the faint twitch in her left eye, the slightly trembling hand. Art, honestly. That's what she got for throwing down a bet on her own. That fucking bitch. Even now, just thinking about it made my teeth grind. She had been doing that fox act on purpose. Consciously. Deliberately. And she wasn't even planning to have sex!!!
And she wasn't even planning to have sex!!!!!!
I said it twice because it mattered. It was a critically important factor. She needed to be taught a lesson. If it were up to me, I'd have stuck her with the check every time we sat down to eat, but...
That wasn't going to work.
She wasn't a sucker, and there was no universe in which she'd foot the bill every time we met. The only reason I'd gotten her to pay today was that she'd actually done something wrong — she'd shown up late. She had a guilty conscience, so she'd paid without a fight. That kind of cheap little hustle wasn't going to keep landing.
I'd keep my head down for a while.
Time was on my side anyway. Eun-byul was the one who'd lose money if this dragged on. Like I'd said before, if I just sat still she'd put on the entire circus herself. All I had to do was play a quiet little push-and-pull and watch the show. That delicate distance was what mattered — a hazy gap that felt like it might give way at any moment, and yet never quite did, a line drawn just firmly enough. That was how you kept her coming back for another try.
Good. That settled my approach to her. We would keep lying to each other.
A bright little KakaoTalk chime cut through the noise in my head. I flung an arm out, groped for my phone, and squinted at the screen.
RapeLegalization, right on cue.
The way they said it, you'd think they were bragging. This one seemed to take life about as seriously as I did. I typed back, a faint nervous flutter in my chest.
I was pretty worried, honestly. A handsome guy dragging a college girl into a dark alley and forcing himself on her. It was the first two-shot I'd drawn in a while, and it even had a woman in it, so I'd actually put some real effort in. The problem was that the effort had gone into the woman. If the guy occupied about 1.75 of the composition, the girl took up a solid 2.25. A ridiculously arbitrary ratio, sure — but the woman had more of the frame either way. It was the visual equivalent of walking in expecting a huge pair of tits and getting a dick in your face instead. You'd paid actual money for this. That was more than enough to sour a person's mood. I'd be pissed too if I commissioned porn and the guy ended up as the main course.
So I was bracing for a negative reaction.
Instead.
"Huh?"
The reaction was a lot better than I'd expected.
No — not just better. They were raving. I tilted my head at the unexpected flood of praise.
"The hell?"
I was in a good mood, at least. Someone looking at my work and actually liking it — there was no better feeling for someone who drew for a living. The question was which part of it had gotten them off. If it were me, even a beautifully drawn piece would turn my stomach the second the male character ate more than half the frame.
Wait...
A hypothesis surfaced, sudden and fully formed.
Do men and women just... see things differently?
Obvious, when you said it out loud. However much the women of this world had been dropped into it and become "women" — however much bolder they'd gotten, however much hungrier their libidos — they were still women. Creatures with a clam between their legs instead of a sausage, and two breasts swelling out of their chests. Biologically, they were built different from men. Which meant the things that turned them on were bound to be different too.
"Ohh..."
I'd cobbled the theory together about thirty seconds ago, but it sounded surprisingly solid. I marveled at my own brilliant mind.
"I might actually be kind of smart..."
Good. Now I just needed evidence to back it up. This might even be the thing that dragged me out of male-character porn hell. I'd look into it first thing tomorrow...
I started getting ready for bed on that thought. It was already painfully late, and the drinking plus the work had finally caught up with me. It was the weekend, sure — but if I wanted to actually start the day right, the smart move was to sleep now.
I was down to just my underwear when another KakaoTalk ping went off. I picked up the phone on something close to a spinal reflex. The life of a phone-addicted modern human... I was basically a slave indentured to my cell phone. I muttered that nonsense to myself and tapped the notification.
The sender was, of course, RapeLegalization. A handle that, no matter how many times I saw it, sat at the absolute peak of creepy. And the truly surprising part: by this world's standards, their taste ran to reverse-rape.
So they were heading off to take care of another round. The way the dropped endings kept mixing with leftover politeness, they were pretty worked up. Did I really need a play-by-play of someone jerking off? That was the thought that crossed my mind — but they were using my art as the side dish. That part made me pretty happy.
I sent that off half-heartedly and killed the lights, then lay back on the mattress. The soft give of the fabric and the spring of the coils rose up to meet me. The alcohol helped — my eyes went easily. Loose, drifting thoughts wandered through a consciousness that was already going dim, and the one that surfaced was about the person on the other end of that commission.
Come to think of it, that chronic masturbator was probably a girl too...
This was a gender-reversed world. Anyone commissioning porn like that was definitely a woman. The image assembled itself without any effort on my part: that woman with her pants off, looking at my drawing, touching herself. A flushed little moan, one finger or two working into her own entrance — the picture formed in my head and then dissolved again. Even as my thoughts blurred, a note of genuine appreciation slipped out.
Oh...
That was... kind of hot, actually...
"...zzz."
And just like that, I was gone.
Late dawn. Sunlight just beginning to seep in, faint as a rumor.
"...nnh... nnhh...!"
In a small room washed with a soft blue glow, a woman let out a heated, breathless moan.
"Hngh...!"
Schlick—schlick—
Every time her middle and ring fingers pumped, slick fluid spilled from inside her. That ticklish, clinging sensation only wound her tighter. She bit down on her moans and stared at the drawing open on her monitor.
Seong A-rin was masturbating to a single picture. A brand-new piece, still warm from the artist's hands. The fantasy she had imagined and dreamed about had been given form — small, yes, but real — by someone else's hands, and the rush of it was overwhelming.
The drawing showed a man on the verge of taking a woman in a dark alley. One hand pinned both of hers as she tried to resist; the other groped and squeezed her large breasts without any pretense of gentleness. A massive erection strained against his jeans, pressing into her stomach. The woman's face was twisted with pain and terror as she struggled, but there was no getting out from under a man's brute strength. They were right at the starting line — a single opening beat, and nothing after. From there, Seong A-rin painted the rest with her own imagination.
The girl stumbled in her struggle and went down, and the man didn't waste a second. He took her from behind, yanked the jeans off her hips, found her entrance, and pushed in. After that it was nothing but a brutal, pounding rhythm.
Thud—thud—thud—thud—
In her head she could hear skin slapping against skin, and the woman's moans climbed with every stroke. Seong A-rin sped up to match.
Squelch—squelch—!
Her two fingers turned violent. She put herself in the other woman's place.
Me too...
She wanted it. She wanted to be taken the way the girl in her head was being taken — her body stripped of its freedom, forced open under someone else's weight. The fantasy pushed her right up against the edge. She sped her fingers one last time and held her breath.
It was 5:02 a.m. She couldn't let her family — still off in dreamland — hear her moaning. She killed the sound as best she could.
"Nnh... I'm coming...!"
Some of it escaped anyway. She couldn't stop it. In the dead hour before dawn, when even the traffic and the footsteps had gone quiet, a thin, frayed moan spilled out of a cramped little room.
"Haa... haah..."
Seong A-rin let the last of the heat leave her in a shaky breath, and a satisfied smile spread across her face. That had been good. Really good. It had been a long time since she'd come that hard. Her first commission, and she was so glad she'd gone through with it.
"Heh... this artist really can draw."
Honestly, his other work had worried her quite a bit. But the quality he'd delivered was more than satisfying. Thanks to it, she'd managed to come twice.
"I should commission him again."
And the girl rummaging around for a tissue to clean herself up — Seong A-rin — was RapeLegalization herself.