LLU 27

The lie came out as fluently and smoothly as last time. I glared at Choi Junghan, who was watching me with an intrigued smile, as I spat out the last words.

The settlement money was a lie, but it was true that some rich bastard had given me money. Though it must have all burned to ashes in the closet last night. I was planning to throw that money in Choi Junghan’s face, so it was a bit of a shame that I couldn’t.

“Settlement money?! Are you serious right now! Is that the problem right now…”

My mother’s shoulders trembled faintly as she covered her face with both hands. Chairman Choi, flustered, helped my mother, who had started to sob, sit down on the sofa.

“Ms. Jeongin, you’re going to collapse at this rate. Please, sit down. Oon-ah, you sit down too.”

While Chairman Choi painstakingly soothed my mother, I did as he said and perched on the edge of the sofa, waiting in silence.

My gaze flickered and caught sight of Choi Junghan. He was sitting in his seat with extreme leisure. At a glance, his face was neat and proper, but having experienced several crazed moments he had orchestrated, I could tell just how amused Choi Junghan was right now.

That bastard was just finding this whole situation entertaining. Our house burning down, my mother shocked at seeing the wounds he had inflicted on me, and me watching, unable to tell her any of the truth.

“And Oon, you, I heard from the Chairman. You said you were going to a friend’s house. You were going to go to Junwoo’s, did you really think that?”

My mother, having barely calmed down, lifted her bloodshot eyes. She looked at me with great resentment and continued speaking in an agitated manner.

“How could you. You weren’t a child who threw tantrums like this.”

“…”

“Are you trying to drive a nail into your mother’s heart? Huh? How could I, in a situation where you’ve lost your home and everything, send you off to a friend’s house. I get to live here warm and comfortable, and send you to a friend’s house? Do you think that makes sense?”

I just listened blankly to my mother’s words, which poured out like a thunderbolt. Since a while ago, both my mother and Chairman Choi keep getting angry at me. Without knowing anything. Really, without knowing anything at all.

They all talk about their own reputations being tarnished and the nails that haven’t even been driven into their hearts yet. When my own heart has already been completely worn away. When it’s not a nail but a knife that’s already stuck in my chest.

“Honey, calm down. You’re overly excited right now.”

The term of endearment he used to call my mother had already changed to be so affectionate. Chairman Choi wrapped his arm around my mother’s sobbing shoulders and patted her warmly.

He didn’t pay much attention to the wounds on my face, just as he hadn’t when we first met at the police station. All he did was ask once what had happened, and when I gave him the same excuse I’d given my mother, he didn’t ask any more about it.

My mother remained in Chairman Choi’s embrace like that for a long while. Finally having stopped crying, my mother opened her mouth and spoke in a low voice.

“Stop being stubborn, and just live here from now on, Oon-ah. Okay? I know you and Junwoo are closer than anyone. You grew up like brothers since you were kids.”

Suddenly, Choi Junghan lazily drew a breath. One of his eyebrows twitched minutely.

“But what’s wrong is wrong. Junwoo’s father is there too. No matter what, he’s a stranger, so is it okay for you to live off him there? It makes me so upset to think of my baby living uncomfortably in someone else’s house, Oon-ah.”

“…”

Does my mother then think that this place isn’t someone else’s house? It might not be for my mother, but for me, this place was more uncomfortable than any other place in the world.

“You’re going to the dorms anyway. It’s just a little over a month left now. You can listen to your mom for that long, can’t you.”

“That’s right, no one in this house will make you uncomfortable.”

Chairman Choi, who was listening from the side, chimed in.

“I’ll barely be home anyway since I’m busy with company work, and it’s the same for Junghan. In fact, Junghan spends more time at the company or his own officetel than here. It’ll be an almost empty house. So I hope you’ll think of it comfortably and stay.”

The gazes of the three people turned to me all at once. The looks, each holding different emotions, tightened around me, suffocating me. One held worry, one held irritation as if to say stop being a nuisance and just listen, and one held only interest.

I was struggling with all my might not to collapse, but they kept pressuring me, asking why I was being so sensitive. Under their gazes that ceaselessly whipped me, I had to make a decision without delay.

The unfading nightmare of violence, the fear that I might lose my most dependable friend, the house that had disappeared in an instant, leaving only black ashes. I had become too weakened by everything that had shaken me in the past few weeks. In this situation, I had neither the energy to escape nor the strength to deal with the aftermath that would follow.

I listlessly opened my mouth and gave an answer.

“…Yes.”

“Good thinking.”

“Chairman, thank you so much.”

“I told you not to say that. And don’t call me that.”

At my short reply, the two of them were visibly relieved. And the remaining one was satisfied. Choi Junghan, who had watched every single moment of me being hounded by them until I finally gave a positive answer, smiled cheerfully when our eyes met.

I no longer had the strength to get angry at his smile, which was clearly provoking me. At the words to go up, wash up, and rest since I must be tired, I bowed my head and slowly climbed the stairs. Fortunately, Choi Junghan did not follow.

I went straight to the guest room from last time and locked the door firmly. I went into the attached bathroom and took off all my clothes. The clothes, stained with soot here and there, smelled horribly of burning.

After washing my body completely, I came out and opened a drawer to find a few sets of sweatpants and sweatshirts that were presumably Choi Junghan’s. The thought of wearing his clothes made me want to vomit, but I couldn’t pick up and put back on the clothes that smelled of burning either.

I had no strength left to stay awake any longer. I had no choice. I picked the smallest-looking clothes among his and laid my body on the bed. And I immediately fell into a deep sleep.

‘How is it? It’s fun, isn’t it.’

It was a deadly poison coated in sweetness. The voice, as alluring and dangerous as a devil’s.

In the blinding darkness, I couldn’t move an inch. As if bound by sturdy iron chains, I couldn’t move any of my four limbs.

I couldn’t even tell if the damp voice that whispered to me had a form or not. In the pitch-black darkness, I tried to scream, shout, and kick, but all of it was impossible. What was binding me was the darkness itself.

‘I’ve told you before. You’re in the position of a receiver.’

The voice said so. Words of ridicule and humiliation followed. But it wasn’t just the gloomy voice that was dragging me into the abyss.

At some point, my ankles were caught and both my legs were spread apart. At the deft touch that held not a shred of hesitation, my buttocks trembled with a start. As my body flinched and jumped, I heard a low sound. It was definitely the satisfied laughter of a well-fed predator.

The terrible sensation that had been sleeping was startled awake. I shuddered at the feeling of the sensation, deeply engraved in my body, quickly reviving. The fully awakened sense began to beat like a drum, waking my body.

It poured and poured. The terrible memory of that day. I wanted to scream at the afterimages that covered my mind like vomit, to stop, fuck, to stop. While my throat was blocked and I was pouring sweat like rain, the disgusting touch had already reached the deepest part of my legs.

Soon after, something thick and hot plunged deep inside.

My head tilted back and my tongue went completely stiff from the ruthless invasion. In the darkness that felt so pure it was lucid, I was pierced and pierced again and again, and I screamed my lungs out, but still, no sound came out, instead it balled up inside my throat like a lump and blocked my airway, and far from moving my arms and legs I couldn’t even twitch a single finger or toe and I absolutely could not block the hot, thick, and wicked thing that was invading me and the afterimages stuck in my head flickered rapidly and shattered and and and I—

“Heok. Heok. Heok. Huk!”

“You’re awake?”

What I heard at the end of the gasping breaths was a terribly gentle voice.

The handsome and disgusting face that came into my vision. And, the massive volume filling me from inside and the pain that tore through my body…

“Ah, heuak!”

Along with the greeting crafted from a soft voice, something terribly large and hard came rushing inside. A wet sound burst out from below as a raw scream shot out of my mouth.

“Fuck, what… the hell is this…!”

I gritted my teeth, trying to suppress the hot breaths that were escaping in between. A bursting heat gathered in my eyeballs. Seeing me glaring at him as if I would charge at any moment, he instead laughed as if it were amusing.

Choi Junghan’s innocent smile, devoid of any falsehood or pretense, was something he only showed when he was alone with me. I didn’t know what he was like on the outside, but I could be sure that at least Chairman Choi and my mother did not know that face of Choi Junghan’s.

Not the gentlemanly and elegant face he presented to the public, but the face that smiled so brightly while trampling on others seemed to be his true face, so I got the chills every time I faced that side of Choi Junghan.

“Shh.”

He covered my mouth with his palm, his eyes curving vexatiously. The cold temperature covering my face was so identical to that of the touch in the nightmare that had just assaulted me that it gave me goosebumps.

“Do you want to let our parents know that brothers are fucking each other?”

“Ugh, oop…!”

“I’ve felt this for a while, but your tastes are quite hard.”

He said that and then removed the palm that had been covering my mouth.

“The master bedroom is right below this floor, so behave yourself.”

The smiling face was seared into my trembling vision. Without warning, he pulled out his penis and pushed in with ruthless force. The moment he slammed into me, my insides were pushed all the way up, and then they found their place again in time with the biting motion of his hips.

My inner walls, unable to accommodate the huge foreign object that had invaded after several weeks, trembled desperately and screamed. He seemed to be enjoying that sensation fully as he pressed his lower body against me and slowly rotated his hips.

“Euh, heu, ah… ack!”

No matter how hard I gritted my teeth, fragmented moans continued to leak out. The option of screaming loudly and showing this sight to my mother and Chairman Choi, who must be on the floor below, was completely out of the question. Even though it was the only way to escape this hellish situation.

“Are you really, heuk, crazy…?”

Physiological tears streamed down from the corners of my eyes. Just before the teardrops rolled into the shell of my ear, Choi Junghan came closer and slowly stuck out his tongue. The sticky feeling of him licking up my tears like a beast was ten times more terrible than having my lower body being pounded by his penis.

“Wh-why on earth are you doing this. Wasn’t what you did that day enough, why again…!”

I was different from him, who was leisurely extending his hand to rub my wet eyes, while I was stifling my cries and screams in case any sound escaped.

“It’s disappointing for you to act like this when you were the one who seduced me to fuck you first.”

“…What? W-what kind of bullshit is that, for God’s sake…!”

“Look at yourself now. You’re wearing my clothes, lying defenselessly on the bed I used.”

He let out a small, moist breath into the shell of my ear and laughed.

“A little brother waiting for his hyung to rape him like that. Doesn’t that look like a slutty whore to anyone?”

I was so dumbfounded that I stared at him with my mouth hanging open blankly. My vision trembled with rage. If I could just dig out the filthy words Choi Junghan had just injected into my eardrums, I felt like I would even cut out my own ears with a knife.

“Stop saying that filthy, word hyung. I’ve never had a hyung, like you.”

“Your tongue is running its mouth quite arrogantly, it seems you’re already missing the time we spent before.”

He chattered on nonchalantly and raised his hand. His left hand. A hand that had likely never done a day of hard work in its life, smooth yet manly, thick, and well-defined. That hand, which could only be described as beautiful, had at some point branded me with an indelible mark.

I reflexively closed my eyes. The inherent fear of violence made my shoulders shrink and my lower lip tremble, regardless of my will.

“…Ha.”

But what came back was not violence, but a satisfied laugh. When I opened my eyes, Choi Junghan was stroking my hair and smiling benignly.

“Yes, that’s it. That look, like a servile son of a bitch.”

Choi Junghan’s voice, full of ecstasy, rang out joyfully. He hooked his arms under the crooks of my knees and pushed his lower body forward without mercy. He grabbed my wrists that were flailing in the air and pinned them on the bed. His strength was inhumanly ruthless.

“…Ah! Ugh, ah…!”

“You really are, fun to tame.”