Hyun-woong answered the call right away.
“Why, why did you call?”
Since he’d been talking to Chi-won while thinking of Hyun-woong, he felt unnecessarily guilty. At the blunt question, Hyun-woong reacted as if dumbfounded.
—Why are you talking like that? Are you upset?
“Because someone who has no reason to call called. What is it?”
—I’m looking at what I organized in the PowerPoint again and there are things to fix.
It was about the team project. Well, this was the only reason he’d contact him. Jae-min scratched his cheek and leaned his back against the wall.
“Fixes? Send me which parts.”
—Yeah, but it seems like we need to revise quite a bit. The part you summarized deviates from the original thesis’s main point.
“Haah, got it. We’ll have to look at everything again.”
He’d been doing several assignments simultaneously so he couldn’t focus properly, and that seemed to have been clearly revealed. Thinking of doing it over from the beginning made his future look dark. Jae-min let out a deep sigh and brushed his hair back when Hyun-woong, who had been quiet for a moment, cleared his throat.
—…I compared and checked the different parts, so focus on those. You’ll be able to save time.
It was words that seemed to flow calmly. Jae-min, who was about to naturally answer that he understood, opened his mouth into a circle.
“Huh?”
—Why?
“No, you’re too kind.”
Kang Hyun-woong, who was so polite and obedient when they met as patient and massage therapist at the clinic, always felt prickly when seen on campus. So he couldn’t help but be surprised at the unusually warm and friendly attitude.
—I’m hanging up.
Perhaps flustered by Jae-min’s words that came out mixed with a hollow laugh, Hyun-woong left a curt word and hung up the phone. Jae-min silently stared at the screen that had turned pitch black after the call ended. His pretty, handsome face was reflected on the screen that had become like a mirror.
“Would we have gotten along well if we hadn’t been connected through Lee Yun-ji?”
Rather than just growling at each other, doing the group project and talking, the feeling was better than expected. He’d even reduced Jae-min’s work. Feeling newly sorry for saving him as ‘ㅗ’, Jae-min changed his contact name.
To ‘Kang Hyun-woong’. Entering the three characters, even the name looked quite neat. The more he looked, Kang Hyun-woong was plain and calm. In the first place, he must be popular with women because the person himself was decent.
The moment he reached that point, Jae-min’s expression crumpled terribly. It felt like he’d stepped backward and accidentally stepped on a button that exploded jealousy.
“No. In the first place, I’d have no reason to get close with this type.”
Shaking his head, Jae-min headed toward the friend who would be waiting for him along with the burst tteokbokki. He climbed the stairs with a slow pace quite different from when he’d run down to answer the phone.
03.
Jae-min, who had been working on an assignment, rubbed his haggard face with both hands.
As Hyun-woong had said, thanks to him checking and pointing out the parts that needed correction first, he was spared the trouble of examining what was wrong. However, finding and fixing what he’d originally read from the extensive thesis and spent time organizing, modifying it in the presentation, and even writing the script was inevitably time-consuming work.
Jae-min, who preferred to handle assignments on campus rather than at home, spent several days at the library. Besides the team project with Hyun-woong, he had no time to play because of assignments pouring in from other classes.
“Ugh…”
After finishing one assignment, Jae-min, who came out to the lounge area on the library’s first floor, stretched fully. He was tired. He’d been to the bathroom a little while ago and was shocked seeing himself in the mirror. Just a few days of working hard on assignments and he had dark circles under his eyes and his skin was rough.
While sitting on the lounge sofa massaging his shoulders, someone approached. Jae-min slightly raised his head.
“We meet everywhere here? What are you doing?”
It was Min-jeong, the vocalist of the band Fake Lightning. As a music college student, their paths on campus rarely overlapped, so it had been a while since seeing her at school.
“I came out to rest from doing assignments.”
“You must have a lot of assignments? You don’t look well.”
“I’m tired. I want to shower and sleep.”
“Shower? Just do it.”
At Min-jeong’s casually thrown words, Jae-min furrowed his brow.
“Where would I shower?”
“You’ve never showered at school? There’s one in the student union too.”
“That place isn’t great.”
If it was the shower room in the student union, he’d been there before. Since it was a building where club rooms gathered, it was crowded with all kinds of sports club people. Perhaps because there were many users, even though the school cleaned it every day, it didn’t feel very clean. When Jae-min shook his head, Min-jeong clapped her hands.
“Or go shower at the gym. I heard you can use just the shower room too.”
At the suggestion he hadn’t thought of, Jae-min’s eyes sparkled. Jae-min also knew there was a gym on campus, but since he didn’t particularly like exercise, he’d never used it and was hearing for the first time that showering only was possible.
“Is that free too?”
“No, whether it’s a day pass or membership, students get a discount. The shower booths there are divided into single rooms and it’s clean, so it’s good. I recommend it.”
“Really?”
“If you’re going, go now, it’s the perfect time when there aren’t many people.”
Min-jeong spoke while showing the watch on her wrist. Hearing that, his body seemed even stiffer than before. Imagining warm water pouring over his neck made him want to shower right away.
“Then I should go for a bit.”
Jae-min stood up. Anyway, he had assignments left to do and had to stay at the library until late at night. Jae-min got up from his seat, planning to wash and come back.
The gym was in the basement of a new building on campus. He’d often passed in front of it for other business, but it was his first time entering inside the gym. When Jae-min lingered in front of the counter, the employee asked if he’d come to get a gym day pass.
“Can I use just the shower?”
“Yes, that’s possible. Could you show me your student ID?”
Just as Min-jeong said, when he presented his student ID, he could use the shower facility at a discounted price. Jae-min, who received a towel, walked away. On the way to the shower room, he saw a few students working out.
‘Everyone’s working out really hard.’
He had to pass through one more glass door to enter the fitness area. Even though they were beyond the glass, it seemed like he could feel the heat of the people working out. Jae-min, who had been quickly scanning the people skillfully handling the exercise equipment with his eyes, paused for a moment.
‘That’s a familiar build.’
A man wearing a black t-shirt and training pants was using exercise equipment. Sitting in a chair, he seemed to be training his pectoral muscles by pushing up a bar in front of him. It was at an angle visible diagonally from where Jae-min was, and the man’s face wasn’t properly visible, hidden by other exercise equipment.
Jae-min narrowed his eyes and tried hard to see the face somehow, then gave up, losing energy, and entered the men’s shower room.
Just the right pleasantly warm water poured over his fatigue-ridden body. Jae-min closed his eyes and enjoyed the hot water. It felt like stress was melting away in the water. Having finished showering in a refreshed mood, Jae-min shook his hair with the towel he’d received earlier.
He’d deliberately left his clothes folded outside the door because bringing them into the shower booth would get them wet. Jae-min, who had roughly wiped off the water, opened the booth door. It was when he reached out to put on his clothes again.
“Uh…?”
A not-unfamiliar voice was heard. At the same time, something flashed through Jae-min’s mind. That large-bodied man who had strangely drawn his attention earlier, who had been doing chest exercises.
Jae-min whipped his head up. Their eyes met.
“Lim Jae-min?”
With the naked Kang Hyun-woong, one foot suspended in the air, right before completely removing his underwear.
Jae-min’s eyes slowly moved down. His gaze traveled along the bulge of his chest mound and brushed past his inverted nipples. Then finally it touched Hyun-woong’s cock exposed in the air.
“Wow, it’s big.”
At the words Jae-min blurted out with a start, Hyun-woong flinched in surprise, then turned his body diagonally. His large cock, big even though not erect, became hidden by his firm thighs and couldn’t be seen.
“I already saw everything, so what are you hiding?”
Jae-min asked nonchalantly and brought his clothes into the booth as he’d originally intended. Although he closed the booth’s opaque door, he could still see Hyun-woong’s silhouette, still frozen.
On the way out after finishing showering, a large naked build had suddenly called his name and startled him—that was definitely him. But the problematic naked black bear had frozen as if molested out of nowhere. Thinking about it made him feel absurd, so Jae-min let out a short breath and hurriedly put on his clothes.
