The door… it’s locked, so it should be fine.
“I’m opening the door.”
How can you open the door?
Panic stopped my thoughts. And before I could even grab the doorknob, the bathroom door slowly opened. Eyes wide open, I hurriedly reached out and desperately pushed against the door.
“I… I locked it though?”
“The lock here is broken.”
You should have told me that!
Won Dogyeong sighed and warned me in a low voice.
“Come out.”
I tensed my arms and held firm, but since it was already open and holding out like this didn’t seem to have much meaning anyway, I slowly backed away. It’s not like I could overpower Won Dogyeong with strength anyway.
As soon as I stepped back, he opened the door and came inside, and I stumbled backwards step by step. My lower back touched the sink, and he pressed his arms against the sink, trapping my body in his embrace as he turned down the faucet, stopping the water stream that had been pouring noisily.
During the struggle, things had calmed down below, but the situation had become even stranger. It was the worst.
He lowered his head to look directly into my eyes and spoke.
“Tell me what the problem is. Do you dislike me?”
“No!”
I shook my head. His face was so close that my breathing unconsciously became shallow. His coolly settled eyes felt unfamiliar, so when I fumblingly grabbed the hem of his t-shirt, Won Dogyeong relaxed his body with a slightly softened expression.
“Then do you dislike sleeping with me?”
“That’s not it either….”
He let out a small sigh and lifted one hand from where it was pressed against the sink to gently wrap around my elbow.
“I thought so too… but I really can’t understand why you’re acting like this.”
“……”
“What’s the problem?”
“……”
“You have to tell me so I can fix it or something.”
I carefully raised my gaze that had been wandering over his chest. Past his neck flushed red with heat and his well-defined jawline, I met his face that showed anxiety—his lips flushed from constant biting in contrast to his slightly pale complexion.
I fumblingly opened my mouth.
“It’s not you….”
“Yeah.”
“I’m the problem…..”
My face heated up uncontrollably.
He raised an eyebrow as if asking what I meant. I avoided his eyes again. Then the hand gripping his clothes tightened.
“What’s wrong with you?”
I kept moving my lips several times, but words didn’t come out easily.
When I lie next to you, I keep getting hard. That’s why I avoided it.
Two sentences could have explained it clearly, but it was too explicit to actually say out loud. My throat felt scratchy.
Won Dogyeong gently rubbed my elbow that his hand was wrapped around, as if to tell me there was no need to be nervous, but I instead felt my neck burn hot at that contact.
“You… you smell… too… too good.”
“What?”
At the baffled question, I hung my head and blurted it out in a rush.
“Your scent is on the bed, it’s covered in pheromones, and when you come back from showering, I can smell your shampoo.”
“…Do you dislike the smell?”
He asked in an incredulous tone, and I shook my head while looking at the floor.
The tiles look different from the outside bathroom, I thought uselessly. It seemed like I needed to activate such self-defensive thoughts to endure this situation.
“So that’s why……..”
I got this far, but the important words kept getting stuck trying to come out.
“So….”
Won Dogyeong must have been frustrated because he tried to cup my face and lift it up, so I quickly grabbed his wrist to stop him. I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them.
“……I… I get turned on. So I kept trying to stay away… Actually, I haven’t been sleeping well either. But you sleep just fine without a care, so it’s embarrassing, but this isn’t something I’m doing on purpose, so there’s nothing I can do about it….”
I rambled incoherently while analyzing the tile pattern visible between our tangled feet. Opening the floodgate was difficult, but once I started, the thoughts I’d been holding spilled out one after another like a stream of candies.
I’m not sure what expression Won Dogyeong is listening with. My face felt hot anyway. I was definitely bright red if I looked in the mirror.
“It’s not that I dislike sleeping with you, I thought about taking care of it alone but that’s really embarrassing too…. I thought maybe I’d get used to it if more time passed, but I don’t really understand why I’m like this either.”
He finally shook off the hand holding his wrist and lifted my face. His black pupils, with their light gone as he had his back to the fluorescent lamp, persistently bored into mine. It felt like being devoured.
I blinked and finished what I was saying in a shrinking voice.
“I heard that sexual desire increases around this time, so I thought maybe that’s why…..”
Won Dogyeong, who had been listening to my story with an unreadable expressionless face, just stared blankly at me for a while. Then he rolled his eyes and smirked. I flinched slightly.
“So you’re saying you got hard because of me?”
“……Yeah.”
Do you have to spell it out like that to be satisfied?
“Because you like my smell?”
“……It’s because of hormones.”
Technically it wasn’t wrong, but I felt like hiding in a mouse hole, so I made some excuse.
“Yeah yeah, hormones.”
He cut off my words dismissively and waved his hand carelessly, then smiled with narrowed eyes.
I wanted to faint from shame. I wished Won Dogyeong would forget this entire conversation when I woke up after fainting.
It might be faster to knock Won Dogyeong out. I glanced at the back of his head and was momentarily seized by that impulse.
I want to feed him a memory-erasing potion or something, desperately so. Even if I had to pay a fortune, with my current feelings I’d readily nod my head.
Or I wanted to go back five days and somehow prevent the conversation about sleeping together. Then I wouldn’t be in this situation.
He smiled cheerfully and brought his face right up to mine. His playful eyes sparkled an inch away.
“What do I smell like?”
“I don’t know… just pheromones and… your scent….”
Even now I can smell it. It was a rich scent mixed with pheromones and body odor, so there was no way to really describe it. It was just a scent that made you think, ah, that’s Won Dogyeong’s scent, when you smelled it.
Even in the midst of this chaos, I suddenly became curious.
“…Don’t you smell anything from me?”
“You do too. These days my bed only smells like you.”
He slowly looked over every part of my face with his eyes and grinned. When his gaze lingered on my lips, I unconsciously held my breath.
“I like it.”
I bit down hard on my tongue. I could feel the blood rushing to my cheeks, bringing heat in an instant. I wanted to scream asking why he would say such things.
“But I was too busy being considerate of you, so I didn’t get hard….”
Won Dogyeong muttered in a suggestive tone.
What, you think I got hard because I wasn’t being considerate?
I glared up at him and irritably swatted away the hand cupping my chin.
But he paid no mind and cupped my cheek again, then stroked the dark circles under my eyes with his thumb. It tickled, so I wrinkled my nose a bit.
“You haven’t been sleeping well?”
“Yeah.”
“The whole time?”
“Yeah.”
He looked into the air as if recalling something and narrowed his brow, then spoke again.
“Were you awake when I came in too?”
“…Yeah.”
“You seemed uncomfortable, so I deliberately stayed outside until you fell asleep….”
“…Sorry….”
“Then you must have noticed all those secret kisses.”
I also know about the hand-holding while sleeping, you know.
I pursed my lips in dissatisfaction and glared at his thoughtful face.
How much more are you going to torment me before you let me go?
All my worries had become reality, and I was already suffering enough. Today I wanted to sleep pressed against the wall for a somewhat different reason.
I’d be grateful if you’d just treat me like I don’t exist until tomorrow morning. Couldn’t I act nonchalant when I woke up as if nothing had happened?
I anxiously stared down at the t-shirt in front of me.
Soon Won Dogyeong came to some conclusion about something and tilted his head at an angle with a “hmm.”
I gulped nervously, not knowing what he would say.
But instead of a teasing remark, his fingers slipped between my awkwardly hanging fingers. The gently squeezing movement of his hand had a different nuance from how he usually held my hand. It was a bit more ticklish and intimate.
What is he trying to do? I looked at him suspiciously, and he took a step forward, trapping me more firmly in his embrace. I instinctively hesitated, trying to back away, but blocked by the sink, I couldn’t move an inch.
The distance had already been close, but now it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say our bodies were almost touching.
The atmosphere changed abruptly. Flustered, I couldn’t find a place to look and my gaze wandered here and there.
…What is this?
Won Dogyeong opened his mouth in a low voice from less than a hand’s span away.
“Are you going to sleep in my room tonight?”
It was the same question as before, but the intention contained within it was worlds apart.
“…Yeah.”
I affirmed while holding my breath slightly.
He caressed the back of my clasped hand with his thumb.
“I’ve been thinking… you can’t not sleep again, right?”
I could feel we were entering a point of no return. If I wasn’t an idiot, I’d have more than figured out what kind of situation this was.
I lowered my eyes and secretly swallowed my dry saliva.
“You have to go to work tomorrow too, right?”
He had come down to a precarious distance just before our noses would touch.
Won Dogyeong slowly pushed up the bottom of my t-shirt and placed his fingertips on the waistband of my pajama pants, lightly gripping my waist. At the touch of another person’s skin against my side, goosebumps rose along my spine.
“…Should I help you?”
