I hesitated at the unexpected words. What? Fellatio? The one from this morning? It was hard to think properly. Each word sounded like a difficult foreign language to understand. But Ruben didn’t stop.
“Who taught you to swallow it all? How many people have you sucked off until now? And you, when I said I’d change the profile picture, you tried to snatch your phone away. If you have nothing to hide, you wouldn’t have tried to grab it, so why did you do that? You’re in contact with men, aren’t you? I saw your contacts. There were twenty-three men? And earlier when we went to the factory on South Street, you greeted the manager there, didn’t you? Why did you smile? You could have just treated him professionally. I don’t even smile, so why do you? It’s the same at restaurants. Why did you answer the waiter? He was asking me. So why did you answer? Did you like that waiter? That bastard was blonde too, wasn’t he? Do you like blondes? Is that why you answered?”
“……………………”
Ruben’s words didn’t even start calmly. I thought he’d calmed down a bit with my efforts, but I started feeling dizzy at his voice immediately turning hysterical.
‘What… what… the hell…’
Even hearing the reasons from Ruben’s mouth, I couldn’t understand. With the feeling of looking at a creature that I couldn’t understand, a non-human being, I listened to the voice coming from Ruben’s mouth. Ruben’s voice continued for quite a while. I blankly watched as Ruben brought up stories I didn’t even remember, pulling from his memory every moment I talked to men or made eye contact with them. What brought me to my senses was the very last of the crimes Ruben accused me of.
“And about that dog, you heard them say it was male too. You must have heard it! That woman had a fucking loud voice.”
“……Pardon?”
“…I’d prefer if you didn’t touch even dogs if they’re male. At least I’d like you to get my permission before touching them. I’m not asking for much.”
“……Ha…?”
At those words, I unconsciously flinched and took a step back. It was a natural reaction. When faced with a creature we utterly cannot understand, we first step back. Fight-or-flight response. A natural reaction to take against a source of stress.
But that slight distancing must have felt significant to Ruben.
“…What.”
“…………”
“What, what, what, I said what.”
“…R-Ruben,”
“Why are you stepping back?”
“…………”
“You said you did wrong. You said you’d fix it. Why are you looking at me with those eyes?”
Saying that, Ruben firmly grabbed my shoulders. Ruben’s face, which had calmed down a bit, turned bright red. Tears filled Ruben’s eyes. His strong hands trembled uncontrollably as he shook me.
“C-calm down, I-I don’t mean you’re strange…”
“Liar!!!”
When Ruben shouted violently, my ears rang. Ruben shook me roughly while screaming.
“I won’t be fooled anymore, everyone said the same thing as you! They said the same thing as you!”
“R-Ru…”
“You’ll do the same, won’t you? You’ll pretend to like me, then run away the next day! You’ll only be by my side when things are good, and won’t listen to anything I say! You’ll run away! Right?! Right?!!!”
Ruben, shouting and shaking me roughly. An ordinary woman would have felt the fear of death. But I had no fear. No regret either. Rather, I started thinking something else. Ruben wasn’t just a demon. He was a demon with a mental illness. I originally thought he had anger management issues, but at this level, it was definitely at least borderline personality disorder. If I had finished majoring in psychology, I could have known a bit more, which was somewhat regrettable.
‘…As expected,’
As expected, I was probably the only one who could handle Ruben. Thinking that, I looked at Ruben’s bloodshot eyes. I still remembered what was in Chapter 1 of the hypnosis introductory book.
‘Hypnotizing someone who has lost their composure due to extreme anger, deep sadness, or overflowing joy can be considered a basic of hypnosis.’
This time was the same. Looking at Ruben, who seemed to have lost not only his composure but also himself in extreme anger, I prepared to hypnotize him.
*
What is Ruben’s problem?
When exposed too much to Ruben’s terrible personality—no, when exposed too much to this violent human being—one eventually starts looking for the reason for violence in oneself rather than in others.
I was once like that too, but now Ruben is no longer a fearsome existence to me. Ruben, who is no longer fearsome, has become not an unknown terror to me, but a manageable existence.
I moved Ruben, who had fallen into a cataleptic state, and placed him on the bed. Love, he says. Ruben’s way cannot be love. Even though I dressed it up with the nice-sounding shell of “lover,” it can’t be love. In the first place, I remember what Ruben said about women.
‘I like easy women better than women who play hard to get.’
One day Ruben said that, and whether he liked those words, he repeated them quite often. In fact, when I heard those words, I thought Ruben was a person who didn’t obsess over women.
Watching him constantly have women whenever the opportunity arose, and seeing him unable to properly settle with one woman, I thought he was an endlessly frivolous person who didn’t know how to love in the first place.
But his attitude today was very different from what I had thought. Not a light heart, but an extremely heavy one. So heavy that it was sticky, gloomy, and dark. Moreover, based on Ruben’s words, it wasn’t behavior directed only at me—he seemed to have done the same to all the women he’d dated until now.
‘What is he doing to a lover he’s only been dating for a few days…’
I thought while looking at Ruben lying down, blankly staring at the ceiling. So, summing up the situation so far, it seemed that Ruben, while outwardly saying he liked easy women, obsessed disgustingly with lovers he’d only been dating for a short time, and kept experiencing women running away in the middle of the night because they couldn’t stand it.
“Ruben. It’s okay to speak while lying down. Try answering what I say.”
“…Yeah…”
“Y-your newly dating lover… um, I mean, Elbek who became your lover, did you treat other women the way you treat Elbek? Your ex-girlfriends too?”
“…Yeah…”
I asked wondering if perhaps he acted that way because he particularly liked ‘me,’ but the answer matched my expectation. Shaking off the pointlessly bitter feeling, I asked the next question.
“Why?”
“…Because I want to…”
“Why do you want to?”
At those words, Ruben fell silent. However, Ruben must have entered the behavioral acceptance stage by now. It meant he would do as I told him. So, even things Ruben would absolutely never consciously say, I might be able to find out a little through hypnosis. If I learned the fundamental reason Ruben treated lovers this way, I might also be able to know where Ruben’s personality was fundamentally twisted.
“U-um… L-let’s start from the beginning… Th-the phone profile picture, you changed it, right, wh-what were you thinking then…?”
“…The profile picture didn’t matter… I wanted to know how many men there were…”
“…At the factory and restaurant, when Elbek, um, greeted people, why did you feel bad…?”
“I hate it… when you smile at other men…”
Ruben’s answers were simpler than I thought. Unable to really understand why Ruben was acting this way from those answers, I decided to go a bit further.
“Wh-what about the dog? Th-the dog is just a dog. I-it’s not even human, so why did you feel bad?”
“You… didn’t get my permission…”
Endlessly simple answers continued. When I asked ordinary people questions in this manner, they usually talked for quite a long time without hesitation. For example, when I asked Amelia-ssi how work was, she explained at great length in what ways Manon’s Pleasure was bad. When answering in a hypnotized state, I guessed that what they were constantly thinking inside came out without any filtering whatsoever.
So the reason Ruben only gave answers like this was probably because he himself only thought and acted exactly to this extent. That also meant Ruben engaged in such strange behavior through thinking that wasn’t complex at all. I decided to ask a question that seemed easier to answer.
“R-Ruben, then normally, how many days after meeting do you become lovers…?”
“…One day…”
‘One day?’
My mouth fell open in bewilderment. With a face that handsome, there would naturally be women who would date him as soon as they met, but… you can’t know a person in one day, yet I couldn’t understand Ruben’s behavior pattern at all.
“S-so it takes one day to start dating…”
“……”
“And even to women you’ve been dating for less than a week… d-do you act like this too…?”
“…Yeah…”
‘This obsession with someone you haven’t even known for a week…?’
Something became clearer as we conversed. When Ruben made lovers, it wasn’t because he liked someone. He didn’t start relationships from the natural feeling of loving someone and wanting to be with them, but had the strange habit of meeting someone just because he wanted to have a lover.
“R-Ruben, then, previously, the people who dated you… did you like them…?”
“……”
To my question, asked because it was hard to imagine Ruben repeatedly falling in love in one day, he had no answer.
