Am I the Weird One?
It was an age when curiosity about sex ran high. Even if it hadn't been, it was the kind of period when anyone might take a peek at least once.
In high school, I played dumb the whole way through. Every so often, stories would surface about some senior a year above or a college guy, but they weren't all rosy, and that scared me.
Guys who pushed to go further. Guys who got a little rough in bed.
Maybe because of what I'd heard back then, fear outweighed curiosity by a fair margin.
Still, the shock of those blunt, vivid lines was hard to shake.
In the end, once I became an adult and could more or less take care of myself, I let the curiosity take root. It had been there all along, really—I just decided I could handle it.
A woman's naked body I already knew from the mirror, so that never occupied me. A man's naked body I knew up to the bare torso; the lower half was a blank.
The anatomical charts and diagrams from health class always felt like looking at the surface of something and nothing more. To actually satisfy the curiosity, I had to find another route.
It was a closed-off country. There was no path you could walk down openly. People shared information along quiet, half-known trails everyone somehow already knew about.
I'd heard of people getting hammered the moment they got caught, but when I went looking myself, those consequences suddenly felt real.
"Whoa. Guys walk around with this attached…?"
I'd known, of course, but seeing it in that kind of detail was a first.
Or… was it?
"That guy, too…"
It had been a while, but once—just once—I'd caught the twin born a few seconds ahead of me masturbating. The look on his face, sitting in front of the computer with his pants down, was still sharp in my memory. Frozen solid, gripping himself.
The more I watched, the more addictive it got. I was interested in the act itself, sure, but the images on the screen made it almost impossible to look away. The women with those slack, blissed-out faces—was it really that good?—kept pulling my eyes back.
Did sticking something like that in a place like that actually feel good?
Even just bringing a finger near it felt like crossing a river I couldn't come back from, and that alone made me uneasy.
In the end, "trying it myself" never went further than lightly touching around the area.
It was a house no one ever came to, anyway. Watching on the living-room TV became a habit. I didn't do it often, but when the moment arrived, that was how it went.
The habit carried over even to times when someone was about to walk through the door.
More precisely, I'd forgotten he was coming home.
I'd watched, sure—but being watched was a completely different story. The same way his face had looked that day: watching might be one thing, but being seen handed you a shame you couldn't put into words.
Saying we'd both seen the same thing didn't untangle the mess in my head.
When I wanted nothing more than to forget it, Song Hamin was the one who offered me a drink first. Alcohol wasn't my thing, but he said it wasn't bitter, so I took it. The mild buzz seemed to lift a little of the embarrassment.
But that wasn't the only thing that got lifted away.
When I became a man's body, it felt like every life I'd lived up to that point had been denied. In a silent room with no mirror, all I could do was reject the reality that had landed on me.
When I finally stripped down and looked, I was Song Hamin—but I was Song Haneul.
I'd never once wanted to live as Song Hamin. Changing places had never even crossed my mind. That kind of thing belonged in imagination; actually swapping was the sort of nonsense I simply didn't believe in.
So what were you supposed to do when the nonsense turned real?
If it wasn't something he'd done, then what the hell had caused this?
Me or you—that was the only line of questioning I had, and even when I tried to push it backward, no answer came. I just held the anxiety close and went out to greet Mom.
It should have been a relief that it wasn't some total stranger, that it was Song Hamin—and yet handing my body over to someone who wasn't me still didn't sit easy. Call it paranoia if you want, but the fear of what he might do with my body kept blooming whether I wanted it to or not.
He'd jerked off before… he wouldn't do that with my body, right?
I'd touched myself once with that body, too—and gotten caught afterward. The worry that he might decide that made it fine and start touching freely wouldn't leave me alone. I didn't know if there were people twisted enough to treat a sibling's body that way, but then again, you never really know.
And Mom was home. I didn't think he'd do anything that stupid with her around.
…Or so I told myself. The second we each went into our own rooms, the thought flipped again. There was no CCTV or home cam installed. Close the door and you had no idea what was happening inside. Picturing Song Hamin walking into my room with my body made the imagination stall out, and that only made me more anxious.
Ask me if I could trust him because we were siblings, and the answer was no—not completely. Different genders, after all.
"Am I the weird one?"
Maybe watching that kind of thing lately had scrambled my circuits. Finding someone who could judge me objectively was hard enough; even if such a person existed, there was no way I could open with a story like this.
Going to a friend right now, looking like this, and asking was impossible. Explaining the situation alone was already a wall.
I greeted the morning without finding a way back.
When I woke, something felt wrong below the waist. The blanket was tented up, and I couldn't keep the panic down.
"What the hell is this."
The lower half tensed on its own. The first time I'd ever felt the sensation of something hanging in the middle of me. Softness I'd registered somehow, but the feeling of it going hard was something else entirely. Strength surged into it; even when I tried to will it away, instinct kept clenching, making it twitch.
I tried calling Song Hamin for a solution. Nothing useful came of it. I had to go completely slack and wait a long time before I felt it slowly subside—and even then I had to be careful, because any tension and it would stiffen right back up.
I hadn't asked for this. Was morning wood just… normal?
It was disorienting. Being in a man's body for the first time, I'd never dreamed I'd learn it this way. I'd known it in words, in videos, in a half-assed way—never like this. There wasn't exactly a place you could go to experience it properly, either.
"……."
Was Song Hamin fine with all of this? Was I the only one suffering?
Had she even taken the bra off alone because it was uncomfortable? Was this not her first time? Had she gotten a girlfriend without me knowing? I didn't think I'd ever heard anything like that.
She went to the bathroom whenever she wanted and seemed perfectly at ease in my body. No—I'd gone whenever I wanted, too. It was uncomfortable, so why wasn't she saying anything?
It was confusing. The suddenness of the situation, and everything that kept hitting me just because one body had been swapped. This wasn't ordinary. Even peeing, if I didn't grip and aim carefully, it sprayed all over the toilet. Waking up rigid made stepping outside mortifying.
I didn't have to do makeup or brush long hair, but the physiological problems never stopped. Just having something dangling there was irritating enough on its own.
The more the thoughts looped, the more suspicion crept in. Why was she living so quietly and competently? How was she managing so well on her own? It was a little strange—her adaptability was almost unnatural—and I started wondering whether she was the one who'd switched our bodies in the first place.
At the same time, I started fantasizing that she might be doing something weird with my body. Whether that counted as persecution complex or grandiosity, I seemed to have a foot in both.
If she did try anything strange, I could stop her. I had the strength for it now. Looking at "me" through Song Hamin's body, she was short, her arms and legs barely muscled—frail. When we'd fought over a door, the difference had been absolute; she hadn't budged me an inch. All that time shut in a room meant there was never going to be any muscle. Obvious result.
"Why are you washing so carefully?"
"…I'm just washing like you wash a body?"
"What was that detail under the chest just now."
"It's a body, okay?"
This bastard was suspicious. Definitely.
"Ugh, just get out. You're making a whole thing out of a shower."
"You didn't wash your hair properly. Give me your head."
"I can just do it again."
"No. Like this. Do it like this."
"Ow—ow—"
I stepped in close and took hold of her hair. I dumped shampoo onto Song Hamin's bent head—my head—and worked up a lather. It had been hard enough when I did it alone; I wasn't about to assume the person who'd taken my body would get it right from the start. If we were washing, we were washing clean, so I decided to teach her properly from the beginning. No idea how long this life was going to last.
"Like this—don't dig your nails into the scalp, work it through, then make a comb with your fingers and go between the strands…"
"Nngh. Got it…"
"Keep your eyes closed. Shampoo's getting in."
"They are closed. But I'm really slippery."
"Sit in the tub. Just stick your head out."
The hair was longer than I'd expected, so the shampooing took forever.
"Do conditioner too, and after you dry it later you have to do a treatment."
"Why is this so complicated…? Can't I just use shampoo?"
"You only use shampoo?"
"No, even shampoo alone takes forever. My body uses both, obviously."
"My body uses conditioner too. So just do it. If the hair splits, you're done for that day."
Handing the body over was already irritating enough. If on top of that the care slipped and the body got wrecked, I didn't think I'd be able to hold my temper.
Song Hamin didn't seem to want this either—but that didn't make it acceptable.
"Augh, my head… my head…"
"Yeah."
Beep. Beep-beep.
Behind the pained sounds coming from Song Hamin—no, from "me"—came the soft chirp of the door code being entered.
"We're fucked."
"…Yeah. We're fucked."
Mom had come home way earlier than expected.