187. Dopamine (8)

It was still a bit early in the afternoon to be eating dinner.

Lying on the bed, I watched Haeun drying her hair while wearing comfortable underwear, my eyelids drooping as I blinked.

“Sleeping?”

“Huh? No. I’m not sleeping, not sleeping.”

“You must be sleepy already? How exhausting was what you did the day before yesterday.”

“I told you I’m not sleeping.”

Of all people, Haeun caught me, so I had to play along with her teasing.

Well, technically, we didn’t do it that many times to be truly exhausted.

I just savored it for a long time, and what I’m feeling now is far from exhaustion.

If I had to describe it…

“If you’re tired, you can sleep. I’m feeling a bit languid myself.”

As Haeun said, ‘languid’ was a more fitting description.

There’s nothing quite as comfortable as resting on a fresh, fluffy bed during the week, just passing the time.

After she finished drying her hair and crawled into the covers, I pulled her close and fully embraced that languid feeling.

The soft, soft bed and blankets.

The smooth, smooth skin of a woman.

The fragrant scent of body wash.

A sleeping arrangement with absolutely nothing uncomfortable.

“It’s really quiet. Right now.”

“We don’t have anything playing.”

On the bed, free from any distractions, I held her lightly and listened only to the thumping of my heart.

There was no sound other than the rhythmic thump-thump of my pulse, neither slow nor fast.

Feeling the relaxing vibrations throughout my body, I hugged her a little tighter and inhaled the scent of her slightly damp hair.

“…Aren’t you sniffing a little too obviously?”

“I just showered, so what?”

As I buried my face in her crown, filling my nose with the scent of shampoo, she grumbled and nuzzled her head against my neck, sniffing.

After sniffing my personal scent, which is hard for me to notice myself, a few times, she let out a sigh, placed her hand on my chest, and gently stroked it before speaking.

“…You really don’t seem to smell much.”

“I shower several times a day, so it would be weird if I did smell.”

“Even so, you barely smell. It’s strangely so.”

“Asians generally don’t smell much.”

“Have you met any Westerners?”

“I’ve met them. Just never slept with them.”

“Who did you meet?”

“The foreign players when I was playing baseball. They were a bit… pungent after games.”

Technically, if I included mixed-race people in the Western category, I had slept with them, but I didn’t feel the need to mention it.

Honestly, I didn’t even know Hinami was mixed-race until she told me herself.

She didn’t smell at all, either.

Seemingly convinced by my answer, Haeun sniffed my scent a few more times before stopping. She then began idly moving her hand on my chest, eventually pressing her thumb against my nipple and teasingly tickling it.

“What are you doing?”

“What you usually do to me.”

“I don’t tease like this.”

“Right. You did it like this, didn’t you?”

“Hey, that hurts.”

“If it hurts, why did you do it to me?”

“To make it hurt… Ah. Hey, hey. Stop, stop.”

As I retaliated with a playful jab, she abandoned her tickling intentions and started tormenting me by pinching instead.

I couldn’t just take it, so I stretched out the arm that had been supporting her head, wrapped it around her back, and tried to get my fingers to her chest.

But it wasn’t easy to bother her when she was stuck so close to my body, constantly rubbing against me.

“…Stop it. You just showered.”

“After doing it for hours, are you horny again?”

“Does it look like I wouldn’t be?”

“Seriously. Are you a middle schooler, a high schooler, what? How did you hold back when you were in school?”

“If you’re surrounded by dozens of bald guys and just exercise all day, your libido disappears.”

“…The bald guys who clung to me didn’t seem like that, though?”

“That’s because it was you. If I had been in the same class as you, maybe it would have been different.”

However, stroking her hair, wanting praise, wasn’t that difficult.

…If I had known her earlier, back when I was a student, would my future have changed?

I don’t know.

Back then, I was a promising prospect in my own right, but she was a gold-spoon high school girl whose very existence was on the level of passing the bar exam three times over.

It was strange that someone with those breasts and that face was struggling, living off her younger sibling before meeting me.

It’s obvious when you think about it; I didn’t give any groundbreaking advice, yet she succeeded as a YouTuber right away.

If she hadn’t developed a strange sexual prudishness due to having a stalker in high school, she might have gone through boyfriends like changing clothes.

Just like those anonymous people with too much time on their hands imagined while we were playing around briefly during sex earlier.

“…If you were in the same class, would you have stalked me too?”

“I don’t do things like that.”

“But you did stalk me after we met again. You even got me drunk.”

“That wasn’t stalking, it was flirting.”

“Then when we were younger, you couldn’t get me drunk, so how would you have flirted?”

“…Hmm? Maybe I would have just gotten your name and face out there, debuted professionally, reached the first team, and then contacted you?”

“But I might have had a boyfriend?”

“Does that really matter? Whether you had a boyfriend or not. …At our age, you’ll eventually have to go to the military anyway, right?”

“Whoa… Were you planning to cheat with a girl whose boyfriend went to the military?”

“It’s not cheating. At that age, whether you have a boyfriend or not isn’t really important. The relationship was bound to break anyway.”

Relationships that were bound to break weren’t important.

Maybe that’s why I didn’t know her back in high school.

The reason I never paid attention to talk about who was pretty or cute in which class was probably because those relationships wouldn’t matter after graduation anyway.

Even among my baseball teammates whom I spent three years with, I don’t keep in touch with many people; there was no reason to engrave ordinary students, whose paths were completely different from mine, into my memory.

Perhaps it was fortunate that I didn’t meet her during that period when I thought I was an idiot and looked ugly.

The baseball players who supposedly stalked her, and me back then.

Except for maybe a slight difference in height, we were probably just the same lump of takoyaki in her eyes.

“…Isn’t saying ‘relationships bound to break’ too unromantic? If you go by that logic, Hinami also just recently graduated.”

“She’s had social experience for a long time. It’s different. Her profession guarantees traces are left whenever she meets someone.”

“Do you have some kind of fetish for women with extensive social experience? Come to think of it, you only dated older women before meeting me, maybe…”

“Do you think I have something like that? …It’s just that dating someone too childish makes me feel a bit guilty.”

“What are you talking about? You’ve done all sorts of dirty things with a twenty-year-old.”

“No, it’s not like that…”

In truth, no matter what I added, I couldn’t rationalize it.

There’s no desire more irrational than sexual desire.

If you don’t eat, you die; if you don’t sleep, you die, but you don’t die from not having sex, right?

Yet, why are so many people driven mad by their libido?

Even masturbation or various pseudo-sexual acts completely unrelated to reproduction, or using condoms and birth control pills even during sex.

The reason, well… there’s no need to explain it at length.

It’s because it’s thrilling.

Scientifically speaking, it causes dopamine to burst out in the brain, putting you in a state no different from being high on drugs.

“What do you mean ‘not like that’? …I saw how damn excited you were when you were with Hinami in school uniforms last time. Did you think I wouldn’t know?”

“…I couldn’t do it when I was a high schooler, so maybe I feel some kind of fantasy?”

“Is it really a fantasy? From my perspective, I bet you would have enjoyed it just as much if you had done it back in high school.”

“…”

Because it makes you feel the thrill of breaking established rules, of going off the rails.

…Maybe that’s why I get more excited when I hold her.

Our relationship is entirely the result of me crossing the line immensely and breaking her.

Her chattering in my arms, her now skillful seduction of me – these are outcomes far removed from morality and common sense.

Is it human instinct to get more excited the more immoral and decadent it becomes?

Or is it my own preference?

“…I’m glad I didn’t run into you in high school.”

“Why?”

“If I had met you then, I think I would have been consumed and discarded by you.”

“How much of a piece of shit do you think I am?”

“Aren’t you? Barely human. Mocking my fans, and getting damn excited earlier.”

“You did too.”

“…Who made me into that kind of woman?”

I couldn’t answer that definitively.

However, I could answer her question firmly.

“Me.”

“…See? You’re a bad guy.”

I was the one who made Seo Haeun this way.

…And I was immensely satisfied by that fact.

“So what? If you liked nice guys, I would have pretended to be nice too.”

“I do like nice guys? …But you’re the bad one, so why are you blaming me?”

“Your body seems to like bad guys, though.”

“Kang Joo-hyuk, considering everything from your personality to your job, isn’t the only good thing about you your body?”

“Is that so? Being a gym owner isn’t that bad of a job, is it?”

“It’s not exactly a good job, though? Not like a doctor or a lawyer.”

“So you dislike it?”

“I don’t dislike it or like it. Whatever job you have.”

“…”

“Why, why are you looking at me like that? Say something too… Hey. Wait. You just showered…!”

Every time I see her giving me that affectionate gaze, my brain feels like it’s melting.

It drives me crazy with joy whenever a woman who used to hate me so much shows me affection.

…That I could quit this drug.

It’s impossible to even imagine.

**

This is a drug.

I think I’ve fallen into drugs.

All day long, during my break, I was glued to my phone.

“…”

Neither laughing nor crying.

Just searching for my name, chewing on the letters, and swallowing them down my throat.

Although the baseless rumors had died down overnight, the remaining embers were more than enough for me to read alone.

Posts criticizing me.

Posts praising me.

Posts criticizing those who criticized me.

Posts criticizing those who praised me.

Countless masquerades.

“Ha…”

…I didn’t like a single person attending that ball.

Why was I watching this nauseating performance all day?

What enjoyment was I trying to get out of it?

Was it to refute the people spouting things completely different from the truth?

Was it to praise those speaking words relatively close to the truth?

…Neither.

Why was I looking at this?

No matter how many times I repeated it, there was only one answer.

“Idiots, really…”

…Because I wanted to laugh at them.

It was too funny how kids who didn’t know the person ‘Seo Jia’ at all were talking nonsense on their own.

It was too enjoyable to refute each of their words in my head and satisfy my intellectual vanity.

I couldn’t escape this debate forum of fools.

It was laughable how some bastards described a twenty-year-old girl like a slut.

And it was laughable how others revered a twenty-year-old girl like a pitiful child who knew nothing.

I’m not the kind of person you think I am.

I’m just…

A bitch with a dirty personality who likes looking down on others.

I got tired of people panting just because I posted pictures fully covered up on Instagram,

…so now I secretly post slightly revealing pictures on Twitter,

And watch the reactions of guys who get horny over just that, without even knowing who I am.

I can laugh heartily inside without moving my lips.

That’s the kind of woman I am.

The woman named Seo Ye-eun.