Time
On the evening Mina's family went home, Yura scolded her daughter harshly for the way she usually treated her friends at daycare.
"Yurin, whatever you do to your friends—and to other people—comes right back to you."
Yurin almost never got scolded by her mother. Yura was so busy with work that she was rarely home.
"If you're good to people, they'll be good to you. And when they're good to you, you have to be good back. That's how you live in this world. If you want praise, do something praiseworthy. If you want something from someone, you have to give them something equal in return."
It was the same thing the teachers at daycare kept saying. Using this incident as a turning point, Yura began setting aside weekend evenings for her child's education. After that day, Yurin felt her mother treating her a little more strictly. She had no choice but to start listening.
From then on, every weekend evening became exhausting. Her mother, Park Yura, would drink and then launch into the same lecture she called "discipline"—that whatever you did came back to you. Hearing the same speech over and over, like a broken tape stuck on a loop, made Yurin irritated even as the words drilled themselves into her head.
Then one day, Seona enrolled at Yurin's daycare. They were the same age, so they ended up in the same class. Seeing him again for the first time since that day, Seona said nothing about the mistake she had made. She was grateful he had helped her when she nearly got in serious trouble with her mother, and she badly wanted to be friends with him.
He's pretty, too.
Honestly, none of the other kids were as pretty as Seona, so she had never wanted to kiss any of them. But the biggest reason she wanted to get close to him was simpler: at daycare, she barely had friends—no, she had none at all. Given Yurin's habit of pulling mean pranks on people she wanted to befriend, she shoved and hit a little too often, and the other kids simply didn't want to play with her.
In that situation, she wanted to play with Seona, whom she liked, and she wanted to try kissing him again. Then Seona came up to her first, shook her hand, and said they should be friends.
Even after Seona started attending daycare with her, Yurin still couldn't hold back when she got into petty fights with other kids or when her mischievous streak kicked in. She worried that Seona might leave her the way the other children had, put off by her rough behavior—but Seona kept coming back to her anyway. Watching that, Yurin felt many things. That Seona truly liked her. That Seona was different from the other kids. To Yurin, that made him special. She decided he was a real friend who understood her and stuck by her side.
Day after day they hung out together, and as she looked at Seona's pretty face while he listened to her ramble and kept her company, the thought slipped straight out of her mouth.
"I want to kiss again."
Ah—what did I just say?
Yurin clapped a hand over her mouth in shock. Seona giggled with that cute face of his.
"Then if you do what I say, I'll let you. Want to?"
She had only blurted it out without thinking, and yet Seona was actually offering to let her.
"Really?"
"Of course."
The kiss she had shared with Seona last time had felt good. Soft, gentle, warm—and the scent rising from his cozy, warm body had been wonderful. Eager to do whatever he asked so she could kiss him again, Yurin asked,
"What do I have to do?"
"Then let's go apologize to Siwoo—the one you fought with yesterday. If you do, I'll kiss you."
Yurin had thought Seona understood her, but a small sense of betrayal crept in. Maybe he wasn't understanding her at all. Maybe he had just been putting up with her behavior this whole time.
"Why do I have to apologize? And what do you mean, 'let's go apologize together'? This has nothing to do with you."
"I don't think what happened yesterday was your fault, Yurin. But I don't want you getting into such ugly fights with the other kids. I'm on your side."
Thinking back on all the time Seona had spent being kind to her, she didn't want to call his words a lie. Besides, if she wanted that kiss, she needed to listen to him, didn't she? As Yurin weighed it all with a cute, conflicted look on her face, Seona spoke again.
"Come to think of it, last time you kissed me. This time I'll be the one to do it."
Seona's going to kiss me himself this time?
The scales tipped fast and easy. A cute kid had given her permission—turning that down just wasn't in Yurin's nature.
After she apologized to Siwoo, Seona led her somewhere out of sight of the others.
"But you can't tell anyone else. It's a secret. If you tell, I'll never do it again."
"Okay."
From that moment on, she and Seona had a special secret. Afterward, he kept offering kisses in exchange for undoing her "bad behavior," which meant he already knew she didn't get along with the other kids. The specialness that set him apart from everyone else transformed into a different kind of specialness. He was different because he let her have the kisses she liked—and because every time he said he was acting for her sake, he meant it. Even when something had nothing to do with him, he still did it for her.
To Yurin, Seona's words sounded better and were more helpful than the lectures her mother delivered every weekend. Thanks to Seona's efforts, Yurin's social life at daycare—where she had been quietly ostracized—improved a great deal. With kisses as the price, Yurin stopped her mean pranks. Whenever a fight with the other kids was about to break out, Seona would say, "Let's go get a kiss," and lead her away, and she would follow him quietly and meekly.
And so, right up until elementary school, Yurin was able to look back on her daycare years with Seona as a good memory.
Even after she started elementary school, things weren't all that different from daycare. But after a certain incident, Seona began reacting a little differently.
One day, among the lectures her mother gave every weekend evening, there was talk about relationships between boys and girls.
"You're about to start elementary school and you're still calling it a 'kissy'? Call it a kiss!"
"Honestly, the things that come out of a mother's mouth! You can't say that to a child—she's too young!"
Whenever her mother's drunken, lecture-laced rambling crossed a line, her father would step in and rein her in.
Does Seona know the word "kiss" instead of just "kissy"? Tomorrow I'll try asking him for a kiss instead.
The next day, when she asked Seona for a kiss, his eyes went wide with surprise. Those already big eyes growing even bigger on that face of his made him so cute she wanted to nibble him.
"What's a kiss? What do you do for a kiss?"
Seona was usually good at studying—smart enough to answer almost anything she asked out of curiosity. He got perfect scores on tests and workbooks most of the time. And yet he didn't know what a kiss was?
"A kissy is just another word for a kiss. I taught you, so won't you do one?"
This time she was the one teaching and Seona was the one learning. Normally, whenever one of them wanted something, they traded—she would ask a question, Seona would give her the answer she wanted, and then he would ask for a kiss in return. That was their way. It had been a long time since daycare since she had been the one to give the kiss herself. The roles were reversed this time, and it felt surprisingly fresh.
When she kissed him, Seona closed his eyes—something he hadn't done before. When the kiss ended, his expression looked a little strange. As if he had been expecting something. Then his face returned to normal, and she decided she must have imagined it. No—she was sure she had imagined it.
From time to time, quite a few girls confessed to Seona. When he turned them down, he didn't dodge or soften it the way a boy usually might.
"I'm sorry. There's someone I like, so I can't."
The person Seona liked—he had to mean her. Hearing those words come out of his mouth made her so happy. She believed their secret relationship would go on just like this forever.
Every so often Seona came over to her house, and there were times he tried to get rid of anything in her room that felt even slightly dirty. Sometimes he even turned on her computer and checked carefully for any dirty videos. Watching him, Yurin remembered something she had heard now and then—that men got jealous when women used dirty magazines or objects. Seona showed something similar. Looking at him with that thought in mind, she almost thought she could feel his anxiety: the fear that she might get so absorbed in porn and dirty things that she would stop doing their "secret things" with him.
By high school, Seona had lost a lot of the baby fat in his cheeks and grown into a more mature, prettier face. As for Yurin, the scraps of sexual knowledge she had only half-understood in elementary school she learned properly from her college-aged cousin, who gave her a dirty USB drive and some books. Considering Seona's jealousy, those books and that USB absolutely could not be discovered.
The acts in those treasured books and on that USB were on a completely different level—in quality and quantity—from anything in movies or dramas. The books openly showed men and women doing it in all kinds of positions, and on the USB a man with a huge cock lay there while a woman straddled him, sliding the hole between her legs down onto him and riding up and down. Watching it, she felt a heat bloom low in her belly, and "that place" between her thighs throbbed and ached. When the two people in the video started moaning, the heat and the throbbing only grew stronger. Every time she watched, every time the man moaned, Seona's voice layered over the sound.
If Seona panted like that in that sweet voice of his…
She swallowed hard. Dry spit scraped down her throat. And as she thought about it, a warm wetness suddenly spilled between her legs.
Her cousin told her later that men liked it when they got hard down there and a woman took them into the mouth of her lower body from above and swallowed them—and that that was called sex. What if she asked Seona, who hadn't even known what a kiss was, to try that sex thing with her? He seemed to like dirty things well enough already—wouldn't he do it? Wouldn't he want them both to feel good together? But what if he hated it, said he didn't even want to kiss, and looked at her like she was something filthy?
After turning it over and over, she asked him outright.
"Yurin… I'm sorry, but we can't. How about we wait until we get into college?"
"No, I'm the one who should be sorry. That was way too sudden."
Waiting until college wasn't a loss for her. What mattered more was that Seona knew what sex was. In elementary school he had known about kissies but not even what a kiss was. Had Seona been kissing other people too? After telling her it was their secret, just the two of them—was he actually doing more than kissing all over the place? A sudden urgency gripped her.
"Seona, how did you find out what sex is?"
"It's a secret. How am I supposed to say something that embarrassing?"
Ordinarily Seona almost never called anything a secret or tried to hide things from her. She was sure there was something there.
"You really can't tell me? It's you and me. How can you keep secrets?"
"I'm sorry. Is there something I can do for you instead?"
Hearing that, Yurin—who liked dirty things—stopped pressing. There was no evidence anyway, and more importantly, this was a chance to try something dirtier than the "kisses" they had been doing all this time.
"Then let's kiss with tongues. They say that's a real kiss."
They pressed their mouths together as usual, but this time was different. She pushed her tongue into Seona's mouth and licked everywhere. She felt a fragrant taste and a soft texture, but it didn't feel as good as she had expected, and she was about to pull away—when Seona took hold of her face and slid his tongue into her mouth.
He coiled tightly around her tongue, then loosened, then licked every sensitive corner of her gums, over and over, until her mind went completely white. She broke away because she couldn't breathe, and Seona looked at her with a face that said, Why?
"Sorry—I couldn't breathe, so I pulled back."
Seona huffed a soft laugh.
"You can breathe through your nose, you know."
Is this really the same Seona who didn't know what a kiss was? Why is he so good at this? Something's off.
He was far too skilled at a tongue-tangling kiss for her to believe he had ever been a kid who didn't know what kissing was. And once she realized how good he was at it, a restless unease began to grow. The suspicion toward Seona in Yurin's heart only swelled larger and larger. The traces of other women behind him tore at the inside of her chest.