That work he had become so accustomed to that he wouldn’t mind holding a man’s thing in his mouth all day long.
However, the one critical difference between the boy and street male prostitutes was.
The fact that he couldn’t receive any compensation or remuneration from them. The boy wasn’t paid any compensation whatsoever. To put it more precisely, a life as a sex slave worse than a male prostitute.
And so, the boy’s eyes were sinking darkly.
J, who had been lathering with shower gel, suddenly lowered his gaze to look at the boy’s gaunt, darkened eyes. The boy’s face was so damaged that he wondered if he was the same person as the boy he had known before. The same went for his frail body, twisted and emaciated. At an age when he should be eating good things and building solid muscle, the boy seemed to be regressing instead.
J reached out his hand and quietly embraced that small, child-like dry body. He felt a flinching, trembling reaction, but he simply ignored it.
“Does it hurt a lot?”
Because of the hypocritical tone that was deliberately gentle, the boy was cruelly hurt twice over. But J’s tone, unaware of such wounds in the boy, was endlessly gentle.
“Did I hurt you?”
He slowly touched the scars on the pale skin where rope marks remained, trembling with a chilling pleasure. He had hurt the boy. This was a clear fact.
And that fact excited J to the point of madness. That someone is being tamed because of me. That someone is suffering to the point of death because of me.
This is in itself ecstasy and dazzling euphoria.
The boy, who had been trembling with fear, unavoidably nodded his head slightly.
“It… hurts……”
The man who lifted up the boy’s pitiful face closely observed and engraved that pain like someone appreciating an expensive work of art.
“It hurts… so much……”
Watching that face crying in pain with a fading voice, waves of wicked lust began to creep up again.
But today he was planning not to touch the boy.
I’m not that much of a beast, he rationalized to himself desperately.
I’m different from K.
Different from that fucking beast bastard.
Different from that bastard who lusts after a child young enough to be his son and makes him do that disgusting perverted act of calling him daddy.
I’m not that much of a beast.
Instead, maybe I’ll masturbate for the first time in a while while thinking of this face.
A satisfied arc formed at J’s lips, but it was so faint that neither the boy nor even J himself recognized it.
***
PM 7:15
J brought the boy into his room, embracing the soft body that exuded a fragrant smell all over.
The small animal-like body wrapped in a large towel swayed alluringly under the dim lighting.
Suddenly, a scene from the strip show K had made him do came to mind.
He had said the boy made him think of a foreign woman named Natasha when looking at him. That he was sensual to that degree.
The emaciated body panting while intoxicated with drugs was more decadent than expected, which was very pleasing.
But I won’t make him lose consciousness.
The point is right there.
Slowly taming him into a state of helpless obedience, but never destroying him.
After experiencing countless trial and error before, he had learned that drug injection wasn’t really a good method. Especially in the case of the college student who toward the end drooled like a dog, he had become such a wreck that he couldn’t recall his fresh appearance from the beginning at all.
Both K and I had quite a hard time disposing of that stinking garbage.
J let out a slight laugh.
You’re beautiful even when destroyed.
Just where did you fly in from to be this alluring and beautiful?
Flashing sharp eyes from beyond his glasses, J suddenly grabbed the slender nape of the boy who was already nodding off.
I’m jealous.
Of Min who was happy, even if briefly, in a world I didn’t know.
Of Min’s characteristic sunny ignorance that acted especially gentle from when we first met.
I could never feel any kind of happiness even at the boy’s age.
My life was like a maze with no exit. My parents and sisters who acted as the biggest obstacles in life. Those snake-like cunning people and the power of dirty money. The insane obsession of being able to offer up anything for money and desire, even able to sell one’s own soul.
Everyone I had dealt with so far, whether close or distant, was all such people. They were all those who moved only according to thorough self-interest. Perhaps my relationship with K was also like that. My current life, like a new life provided by K.
In return, hadn’t I offered up the innocent boy named Min as a sacrifice?
J slowly traced the boy’s slender neck that fit in one hand, then grabbed it tightly with instantaneous force.
The body that swayed and convulsed for a moment filled his eyes brimming with murderous intent. The boy was breathing painfully, being strangled by J. The boy’s eyes, struggling like a fawn pierced by an arrow, suddenly widened. At the same time, the two people’s eyes met.
J smiled bleakly toward such a boy.
If I killed you here, would that rather be happiness for you?
Rather than prolonging a miserable life being treated like a dog, death where you’d only have to endure brief pain would be a much better method.
J truly thought he could kill the boy.
Even if just to feel a tiny bit of guilty conscience toward the boy.
Even if to prevent the even greater misfortune that will befall him in the future.
But in the end, he couldn’t kill the boy.
The boy’s other master.
Because the mighty K exists.
***
PM 10:30
“My wife was an unknown actress who had appeared on TV a few times. Have you ever seen a drama called <Busan Detective> series from long ago? It’s a shoddy level detective story set at Haeundae Police Station that seems absurd when I think about it now. The role of the young detective’s wife who appears there. She gets raped by a robber-murderer and dies right away in episode 5 or 6. That’s my wife.”
For the first time, a story about his wife emerged from K’s mouth.
Come to think of it, J was newly surprised to realize there weren’t many memories of sitting face to face with him alone like this and confiding personal histories.
It was strange.
“She was a bitch who was determined to seduce me from the start. I probably wasn’t her only man from the beginning. That bitch… those types of bitches have the characteristic of smelling the scent of a man’s money and power amazingly well. To make that money theirs, they’re ready to spread their stinking crotch without any hesitation.”
K looked very pleased today.
Because he had rarely rambled on about his own story in front of J like this.
“At that time, I was just waiting for an opportunity to stab a knife in the back of the vice boss of the Black Bear Gang who had taken me in long ago. I was very young and vigorous. In short, it was a life with nothing to fear. Honestly, going to prison once is rather a badge of honor for lives like ours. A reckless period when I thought it was better in a man’s life to make one big hit and engrave my existence.”
K smiled subtly and poured strong vodka into the already empty glass. At his suggestion, J also reluctantly swallowed the bitter hard liquor down his esophagus.
But J didn’t particularly prefer strong alcohol.
“That bitch saw that ambition in me. Even thinking about it now, there’s no bitch who understands a man’s desire properly like that bitch. She was definitely a bitch among bitches. That’s why I could suddenly give her my seed. I don’t impregnate just any bitch. That’s a lowly act that only dirty losers do.”
J silently directed his gaze toward the window.
Spring would come soon.
The spring scent rushed in like a tide on the night breeze.
“I had one son with that bitch. Right there, that Natasha… one son like our cute little bear cub.”
On K’s face was a faint scar whose origin was unknowable. Running from his temple down to below his sunken left cheek. Quite noticeable if you looked closely, but with minimal presence under dim light.
That scar seemed to have become part of his life now.
It had melded so naturally with K’s existence.
“I actually don’t remember my son’s face. Because I rarely saw him while alive.”
“……”
“Because I killed that bitch not long after she gave birth to him.”
K giggled, shaking his shoulders.
“Because I tried to kill her. With a sashimi knife. You know? Human skin tissue is different from fish, so you can’t slice it at an angle to make sashimi.”
“……”
“You have to stab it in with one stroke and dig around randomly.”
K’s face, telling these terrible stories as if it were nothing, looked genuinely cheerful.
