The Meeting
That was when it happened.
"Uncle Hoo!"
I jolted. My mind snapped wide awake.
My name is Seo-hoo. A single-syllable given name. As you can tell, it isn't a common one. Being that rare has its upsides — it lodges itself in people's heads without much effort — but in a situation like this, that was exactly the problem. Because someone I absolutely had to avoid was standing right here.
I snapped my gaze toward Ha-yeong. She was looking at someone. I followed her line of sight, and there she was — the girl I'd just seen on my phone. And that girl's eyes were locked, without the slightest error, on me.
This is bad.
I ducked down fast, pretending to tie my shoelace, then eased myself sideways through the crowd.
Ha-yeong. The married woman from next door I'd gotten involved with four years ago. Ordinary enough, if you wanted to call her that — except that the entire time we were together, she'd shown a raw, clinging obsession with me. And I had learned, through more than a few ugly incidents, that people like that were dangerous. No matter what, I had to stay clear of her.
I snuck another glance in her direction. Sure enough — there was something unhinged in the way she moved. She was coming this way at a clip, scanning every face with frantic, meticulous care. I used a knot of travelers as cover and started slipping away — when someone suddenly grabbed me.
"Uncle! What are you doing here?"
Shit. She nearly gave me a heart attack. A curse climbed all the way to the back of my throat before I swallowed it back down.
A girl had her hand on my shoulder, crouched low just like me, studying my face with bright, curious eyes. She wore a sheer white shirt you could almost see through and a pair of black hot pants painted onto her hips. Jae-min's daughter. Min-ah.
The fact that she recognized me after seven years was surprising enough. But there was something even more startling.
She's the spitting image.
She looked exactly like her mother. Seeing that face in the flesh brought my first love rushing back so vividly that my chest went tight and restless. But every second counted right now. I shoved the feeling aside and rattled the situation off as fast as I could. A clumsy excuse would only invite questions and burn time I didn't have, so I cut straight to the point.
"There's someone here I absolutely have to avoid. Let's split up and meet at Exit 8. Got it?"
"Yes!"
She flashed a bright little smile and nodded. Must have taken after her mother instead of Jae-min — she caught on instantly and moved. The girl took off running in one direction.
Ha-yeong spotted her and hesitated. Chase the girl and start asking questions, or keep hunting for me? She glanced back and forth between the two directions, then seemed to make up her mind and started after Min-ah.
Damn. That's going to be a headache later...
If she caught her, she'd start digging for everything she could about me. But thank God — Min-ah realized she was being followed, darted through the crowd, and shook Ha-yeong off completely. In the end, the woman who had once been mine just stood there like a dog that had lost the scent, then slowly walked off and vanished from the airport.
Hoo. I need to be more careful from now on.
What rotten luck. Of all the women in the world, I had to run into one of the Obsessive Girl trio here. Even after she was gone, my heart wouldn't stop hammering. I was going to need a dramatic change of look... Maybe I should grow a beard while I was at it.
"Uncle, hi!"
"Yeah. Hey."
"Where have you been all this time? You just disappeared for a while."
"I've been pretty busy."
The last time I'd seen Min-ah, she'd been in elementary school. Or was it middle school? Seven years, anyway — long enough that most people would have forgotten a face. The fact that she still remembered me was genuinely strange. Don't kids usually let that kind of thing fade?
The question answered itself soon enough.
"Even if you were busy, you could've stopped by once in a while. After you visited, Dad wouldn't go on one of his drunken rants for at least a month."
Ah.
"He still does that?"
Min-ah nodded hard.
"Yes. The second he starts drinking, he just chants Mom's name over and over. And sometimes he says yours, too!"
Well. That would explain why she hadn't forgotten me. The idiot. He could've just called. I would've sat down and drunk with him every now and then, at least...
Then I thought about it properly. He had called. Fairly often. I'd just kept putting him off because I was busy with women.
"Well, I quit my job, so I'll come around more from now on."
"Please do!"
A bright, unguarded smile. The kind only kids her age could still produce — the kind no adult could ever quite manage again.
We slid into my car and glided out onto the road, heading for Jae-min's place in Seoul. After so long apart, you'd expect a little awkwardness, but Min-ah didn't have a trace of it — maybe that was the foreign-country upbringing. If anything, she was more outgoing than I'd expected. Whenever something popped into her head she asked me about it, and I answered, and that easy back-and-forth carried us the whole way.
"So what are you going to do for a while?"
"Not sure. Kill some time, I guess, then take a break with your dad when he uses his vacation days."
"Yay! That's perfect! You have to! Let's all hang out together! Hehe."
"Yeah. Let's do that."
She grinned, all sunshine. A personality like that made her easy to get close to. And since we already knew each other, it wouldn't even take much time. There was just one thing I had to be careful about.
The way paper soaks up water — slow, quiet, so she doesn't even notice she's being pulled under.
Swallow a bright, open girl like that in one gulp and there was no telling what kind of reversal you'd get later. Move too fast and someone around her would catch on before the work was even done.
Slow. Take it slow.
So I listened to everything she wanted to tell me, stacking up goodwill as fast as the conversation would allow. The real problem, though, was still ahead.
What excuse am I supposed to use?
The whole game hinged on manufacturing as much time together as possible. Booking regular outings with a girl young enough to be my daughter was the kind of thing that invited suspicion. Which left only one approach.
"Hoo. Anyway — I need to find a place to live, too..."
I let it drop like a passing complaint, and her ears pricked right up.
"Huh? Why? You don't have a house, Uncle?"
"Ah. Yeah. I really didn't think the company was going to let me go... I sold the place and moved into company housing."
"Oh no... that's awful."
Mm. Young and lively — her reactions were excellent. She pressed her hands together like a prayer and looked at me with genuine worry. Beyond them, I could see the damp cherry-red of her lips.
"Tell me about it... So for now I was thinking I'd just stay at some motel nearby."
She frowned in thought for a moment, then spoke like she'd made up her mind.
"Hold on. Let me ask Dad!"
There it is. Hooked.
Min-ah's fingers moved with easy familiarity as she called the old bastard.
"Dad?"
"Yeah, I'm heading home with Uncle right now. But he says he doesn't have anywhere to stay? Should I tell him he can live with us until he finds a place?"
"Okay! Got it. Love you!! Mwah-mwah."
Judging by the reaction, it had worked. Watching her make little kissy sounds into the phone, I couldn't help smiling. It was cute. And imagining those same lips going mwah-mwah on something of mine was enough to get me hard.
"Uncle!"
"Yeah."
"Dad is, like, really happy about it!"
Of course he was. His old drinking buddy — the one who'd sit through all his sloppy rants — was moving in. That said, the man still had the situational awareness of a brick, then and now. Close as we were, we were still two unrelated men. And Min-ah and I were a man and a woman.
I can't wait.
For everything that was about to happen. For all the fruit that was about to ripen.
"It's over there!"
I followed the tip of Min-ah's finger and eased the car into the apartment complex.
Hillstay, Building 107. This was it. The stage where my newest fruit was going to ripen.
My friend's place was unusual. With no woman in the house, the overall feel was clean rather than bright. Other people might have called it ordinary, but for someone who spent every other day coming and going from homes full of women, the lack of that softness actually made it distinctive.
"This way!"
I followed Min-ah down the hall. She showed me into a room and said,
"In here! Um... it's been a while, so there's a bit of dust."
Not enough to bother me, but she wasn't wrong — the room had clearly been sitting empty. A clear plastic sheet was draped over the bed, the kind you put down when you don't expect anyone to use it for a long time. I ran a hand across the surface and, sure enough, a faint film of dust came away on my fingertips. Not black, but there.
"Haha. Pretty dirty, right? Don't be too grossed out, though. I have a feeling my room isn't much better."
"Where's your room?"
"Right there!"
She led me to it. The room next door. She pushed the door open, and sure enough — hers wasn't much different. She'd clearly been away on that trip for a good while.
"Right. Come to think of it — have you eaten?"
Min-ah shook her head.
"No. But it's only been about four hours, so I'm okay for now."
"Alright. In that case..."
I rolled up my sleeves.
"Let's knock out this cleaning and then go eat something good. My treat."
"Yay! Really? Then let's clean fast!!!"
And just like that, a round of housework that hadn't been anywhere on the itinerary got underway. There was more dust than expected, so we moved fast, and getting soaked in sweat was a foregone conclusion. I glanced over while I was wiping the floor. Her sheer shirt had plastered itself to her skin, clinging in a way that was frankly obscene. Dark hair stuck to the back of her neck. And every time her hand swept the rag across the floor, the ass packed into those hot pants swayed hard from side to side.
Wipe. Sway. Wipe-wipe. Sway — sway — sway.
Goddamn.
Just watching her was enough to send the signal. But what really did it — what made my blood go thick — was that face. A synchronization rate so high you could have called her the doppelgänger of my first love. Looking at it, the thing that had been swelling by degrees went fully, rigidly hard and shoved the front of my pants up in a hook.
This is a problem.
I already wanted her so badly I could barely stand it. The way her ass rocked left and right, I could almost convince myself she was doing it on purpose — putting on a show to pull me in. But this was the time to hold back. I palmed myself sideways in my pants, dropped my eyes from her face, and let them travel over her body instead.
A modest chest. A thin waist. And an ass on the larger side. Truthfully, the figure itself couldn't touch the well-kept married women I usually went after. Just the ordinary body of a twenty-year-old girl. I'd spent so long on wives — on hips and breasts that had widened with childbirth — that a frame like hers looked almost scrawny by comparison. It didn't matter. In those thin arms and that narrow waist, in the slender wrists and ankles that belonged only to the young, there was a force that outstripped any grown woman's ripeness.
I'm already salivating.
As if something had taken hold of me, I kept wiping the floor and closed the distance one step at a time. Then I turned, put it in reverse like an accident, and backed into her.
"Ah...!"
Ass against ass — a strange, dense little shock of contact. That packed, springy firmness unique to a young girl traveled straight up through my hips.
"Uncle, I'm back here! Hehe."
"Ah, sorry. I was so into the cleaning I didn't even realize you were there."
She giggled.
"Aren't you working a little too hard, Uncle? This is our house... At this rate I'm going to have to treat you."
"Haha. Don't worry about it. One way or another, I'll be the one doing the treating."
You just worry about taking it with those holes of yours.