“Ow! Take it easy, would you?”
“You should’ve been more careful…… this face is all you’ve got!”
“Hey, Bulgom. What did you just say? Hm? Are you putting feelings into your hands?”
Gang’s insistence that a little spit would fix it just fine was thoroughly ignored. The ones who’d been making a big fuss about his handsome face getting injured had gone and sat him down on the sofa and dug out a dusty first aid kit.
Their expressions could’ve put an emergency surgeon to shame. They bickered endlessly among themselves — one said they needed to wipe it with an alcohol swab first, another said they had to apply the red antiseptic, someone else insisted a different ointment should go on first — and when they started pulling out bandages, Gang gave each of them a light rap on the top of the head with his knuckle. Three times each. That settled them down, and they quietly pulled out a single tube of ointment.
Bulgom, who had been fretting over the possibility of scarring, dabbed ointment on the tip of his little finger and started applying it.
“Oh Lord…… please, please don’t let it get infected.”
Everyone joined Bulgom’s desperate prayer in calling on higher powers.
“You’re overdoing it again. It’s a disease with you lot.”
Bulgom’s little finger was so thick that the ointment ended up smeared not just over the cut on Gang’s forehead but generously all around it. It seemed like a touch of emotion had gone into it, but the care was thorough. The end result was ointment covering roughly half of his forehead. In the middle of all this, Gamja started going on about how Bulgom should have used a cotton swab and whether he’d even washed his hands, and got smacked in the back of the head by Mangchi.
Gang sat still, mouth clamped shut, and studied his face from various angles in the hand mirror Gamja was holding up for him. The position kept shifting because Gamja’s hand wouldn’t stay still, and Gang had to fix his wrist in place multiple times. A rather high-maintenance mirror.
Tsk — it’s a bit embarrassing that the cut came from some small-time guy, but…… it actually looks kind of cool? The diagonal slash across his forehead — not too big, not too small — really brought out his rugged, macho—
“Bulgom’s right. What’s a cut like that doing on such a fine face, honestly.”
Gang whipped his head toward Mangchi and glared. Ah, of all times to interrupt, right in the middle of a good look.
“Even if it’s been a while, you got a bit too worked up out there.”
Gamja added his disapproval as well, clearly unhappy about the line across Gang’s forehead.
But then, getting too worked up because it had been a while — that was just an excuse. He’ll admit it himself: a bit of personal feeling about his recently-ended ex-boyfriend had been mixed into his fists. And on top of that, Gamja going and queuing up songs and grabbing a tambourine to cheer him on from behind while he was in the middle of punching someone — that really pushed him over the edge.
He hadn’t held back the way he might have when he was in a relationship. There was no one to look good in front of anymore, and no reason to. If he would’ve hit once before, now he hit twice. Then three times. Then four. It was deeply, thoroughly satisfying. Ha! Eventually it wrapped up after Gang gave Gamja’s head a rousing round with the tambourine inside the room.
And now, just because his forehead got cut in a moment of carelessness, he had to sit here and take this from everyone. Could they pick one — either worry or nag, not both? Making such a fuss over a little nick.
On top of that, those guys actually had a running tab of over 300 in unpaid bills, so the timing of the clean-up couldn’t have been better. He’d been generous enough to add the interest on top and collect it all — and instead of a word of thanks, the green-haired manager had looked at the wrecked room and started slapping Gang on the back. What a sting. The palm slaps to his back hurt more than the cut on his forehead. If Gamja hadn’t spread his arms wide and stood in the way with his bumped-up head, saying don’t hit our hyung — there might have been bandages wrapped around his torso instead of just his forehead.
“You going to report this to Director Kang?”
The noisy chattering went dead quiet all at once. The ones who had crowded around pretended not to have heard anything and scattered in a flash, suddenly very busy — tallying ledgers, sweeping the floor, counting money.
How many times are you going to count that same stack of fifty-thousand-won bills?
“Ah, no, why would we ever do that, hyung.”
Bulgom, the one responsible for the neatly applied bandage — carefully peeled from its paper wrapping, the adhesive backing removed, and positioned with multiple angle adjustments — met Gang’s gaze without flinching, insisting he would never do such a thing.
“Go ahead and report it. All of it. Tell him I cracked that guy’s skull wide open and got a perfect score, and tell him I got a cut on my forehead. Oh! And especially that the worst injury is my back — make sure you pass that on.”
“Ah, oh no. Why are you saying such terrifying things?”
“What, something even more terrifying happens if you don’t report it? Tell him my forehead was cut so deep blood was gushing out. Gushing. A lot. Enough to pool on the floor. Got it?”
Whether Jaeho wanted to hear it or not, this would definitely reach his ears eventually. Go on and worry about it a little. He was someone who couldn’t stand so much as a scratch on Gang’s fingertip — he’d surely scrunch up that annoyingly handsome face of his. Ah, but was that all in the past now? Maybe since they were strangers now, he’d just bark at them not to bother him with useless updates. Gang started imagining that good-looking, gentle face going expressionless and radiating cold — and stopped himself with great effort. Because even that was unbearably attractive.
“Time-wise, hmm, about five minutes? No wait, tell him it was a three-minute clean sweep, done before anyone could blink. Right?”
They were all visibly trying to figure out what the correct answer was. Their faces said that saying yes felt like asking for a beating, and saying no also felt like asking for a beating.
“Right?!”
“Y, yes!”
“Good. Now move.”
He must have lost muscle from the emotional strain lately — that was the only explanation for coming away with a scratch like this. Before, people didn’t even dare resist when he was simply standing nearby — now they were actually throwing punches? Even making eye contact…… something was off. Time to bulk back up and put them all back in their place. Just you lot wait.
He got up and was rubbing his hands together, about to get into some proper push-ups, when something caught his eye. The metal bookshelf. Something had glinted for just a moment in the gap between the thick bundles of file folders stuffed inside it.
Against the darkening outside and everything else around him, that glint was suspicious. It wasn’t blinding by any means. But once he registered it as strange, it no longer looked natural at all.
As if drawn by something, he walked up to the stack of files and yanked it out without warning.
“What is this!”
He didn’t trust his own eyes.
“What the hell is something like this doing here!”
But no matter how many times he looked, what was in his hand was a camera lens. At a glance it looked something like a CCTV unit, or maybe a webcam. The lens was bigger than expected — it had the feeling of something that recorded everything in high definition. Including, presumably, his own face right now, blank with disbelief.
It was a size that didn’t seem to have any concern about being discovered. It looked less like something meant purely for stealing information covertly, and more like something installed to monitor his every move.
After his shout, the office had fallen into a silence so complete it was grating — and then just as quickly, it erupted with the voices of his subordinates. It looked like a collective uprising.
“Wh-wh-hyung. What is that?”
“I, i-i-i, is that, ca, caa, a camera?”
“What kind of brazen bastard put a camera in our office……!”
Gang pushed away the faces pressing in from all sides with a shove. Ignoring the uproar, he tried to examine the camera more closely — and Mangchi let out a bellow as if he’d swallowed a train horn.
“Let’s smash it right now. Hyung!”
Before Gang had even processed that the others were more enraged than he was, Mangchi had already snatched the camera out of his hand. Then hurled it onto the floor with full force and stomped it to pieces.
All of this within ten seconds of the camera being found.
Before Gang could even look at it properly, the camera was in shattered pieces. He went to pick up the remains — and these bastards suddenly started playing football with it. Passed like a ball to another member, the camera skidded noisily across the floor several times before landing squarely in the trash can.
Watching that unfold, a realization hit him and he pressed his palm to his forehead. The one who was supposed to be screaming and smashing cameras and making a scene — that was supposed to be him, not them. A wave of unease crept in and he started picking at the bandage under his fingertips.
“That’s insane…….”
“Hyung. Don’t worry too much. It’s not working anymore.”
“We’ve taken care of it, haven’t we.”
These utterly unflappable bastards. Somehow, even with an unidentified camera having turned up inside their own office, they acted like it was no big deal. They’d seemed genuinely startled for a moment — but that died right down the second the camera was smashed to pieces. A completely different attitude from the way they’d been stomping their feet over the little cut on his forehead.
“Have you all lost your minds?! Search the entire office — see if there are more cameras!”
There was no way only one had been installed. Obviously. This was someone bold enough to plant a large camera in plain reach. Who knew what else had been done to his perfectly comfortable office.
At the sudden command, every person in the office — roughly twenty-five square meters’ worth of space — combed through every corner. They were so worked up that they searched the ceiling, walls, drawers, and went so far as to flip over every sofa cushion. But for all the noise, as they say — a rattling cart carries little. The office was turned thoroughly inside out, yet nothing much came of it.
That’s strange. Only the one?
Gang stood back watching, chewing at his lower lip, then rolled up his sleeves and stepped forward.
“Move. I’ll find them. But if I find any — for every camera I find, you each take a hundred hits. You understand? Not a hundred combined — a hundred each, you hear me?”
He grabbed the shoulder of one guy who kept fidgeting and trying to stay tucked in a corner—
“F-f-found one!”
Suddenly, a camera had been found. These bastards only work when they’re about to get beaten.
Reports of finds kept coming from all over after that. Within five minutes, the number of cameras found in that office was fifteen. Add the one that had been smashed, and sixteen cameras had been hidden inside the office.
“You son of a—!”
Gang kicked the heap of cameras piled on the floor and seethed. Looking at them, it appeared that footage was being transmitted in real time as it was recorded.
What kind of voyeuristic freak did this to his perfectly comfortable office?! How long had these been installed?
Director Kang flashed across his mind for a split second — but he shook his head and dismissed it. There was no reason for that. They’d been skin-to-skin morning and night, and these guys would have reported everything as it happened anyway — what could he possibly have been lacking that would drive him to do something like this?
The first camera that had been found was installed in the bookshelf near the office entrance, positioned to face the sofa directly. The cameras found after that were installed with a thoroughness that was almost nauseating — in locations no one would have imagined. The bathroom, naturally. The sprinkler on the ceiling above the sofa. The mirror. There was not a single blind spot in this office.
Damn it. Right. That was the problem. Who installed those cameras and why they’d hidden them — that wasn’t actually what mattered to him. Why? Because……!
“FUUUUUCK!”
Because every single day this past week that he’d been in the office, he’d been jerking off by himself while imagining Kang Jaeho going down on him!
The inner scream that could never be shouted out loud to a single soul echoed through him.
