I leaned my head on one side of hyung’s broad shoulder without answering, and hyung shifted his body from the driver’s seat toward the passenger seat so I could settle in properly. It must have been an awkward posture, but he did not seem to mind at all.

* * *

After borrowing Sungmin hyung’s shoulder yesterday and crying my heart out, I felt a little better. Of course, the reality that felt like a sewer hadn’t changed, but the relief of having someone next to me who could soothe my tears for even a little while was more reassuring than I expected.

Plod, plod.

“…….”

At the entrance of the villa where I walked out to go to school, as always, Park Gyuseok was leaning against the wall and smoking. Put nicely, he was like a personal secretary who escorted me around, put badly, he was no different from a stalker.

Every time, he would get out of the car, wait there, and when he found me, without even a greeting he would walk toward his own car parked nearby. I would follow behind him like I was tied to an invisible rope, get into the passenger seat, and go to school together with him.

The exams and assignment submissions were done, and as of today, all first semester classes were ending. That meant I would have no more business at school during break.

Since the moment I saw Hyeon Jinhoo in the beginning of first semester and fell for him, things had developed into sex with him, then the short lived lover act where only I had been sincere, and after that the strange triangle relationship where Park Gyuseok joined in, plus video recording too…. In just over three months, so many things had happened that could ruin my life.

It was a hell tied together by connections I made at school, but now, even after leaving school, a disgusting rope had been tied around my body so I couldn’t escape. The car soon entered through the school’s front gate. I let out a sigh and rested my forehead against the window. I could feel Park Gyuseok’s gaze glancing toward me.

Park Gyuseok now wanted to have sex with me without putting Hyeon Jinhoo in the middle, and Hyeon Jinhoo ground his teeth at Park Gyuseok and came looking for me whenever Park Gyuseok was not around. Unlike just a week or two ago, the two seemed to be rejecting each other, but inside that, I could detect a subtle pattern.

The two still hadn’t let go of their accomplice relationship, and when Park Gyuseok’s time didn’t work out, he seemed to ask Hyeon Jinhoo for help, so Hyeon Jinhoo came instead. In that way, some kind of conspiracy kept going on, taking turns so they wouldn’t overlap with each other, watching me and binding me up.

They weren’t exactly attached as a pair, but they kept me tied near them and suffocating me, as if I would run away somewhere or even hurt myself. Calling it surveillance was one thing, but while circling around me like that, they forcibly opened my body once every three times.

Yesterday afternoon, after class ended, Hyeon Jinhoo accompanied me on the way home. He followed me all the way into my studio and smashed me down, took off my pants, and did the job. And this morning, right after Park Gyuseok dropped me off at school, he shoved me into the back seat and had a round of sex in the car.

Before inserting himself, he poked at the hole that Hyeon Jinhoo had abused once yesterday and said something nauseating, like, “Are you still letting me fuck your ass because you’re hung up on Hyeon Jinhoo?” He also told me that he would do something so Hyeon Jinhoo couldn’t approach me, so I should think carefully once more about his offer.

[Are you feeling a little better?]

It was when I had finished my last final exam and walked into the cafe. While I was putting on my apron, a message from Sungmin hyung arrived just as I was putting my phone into the apron pocket. I still couldn’t make up my mind whether to tell hyung the truth and get help or not. I stared at the phone screen blankly for a long time, then decided not to reply and ignored it for now.

And when I lifted my head, I witnessed a scene that made my eyebrows furrow. It was Hyeon Jinhoo flirting with a female part-timer at the counter, her face flushed red.

“You should wear low-heeled shoes too. It looks like it would be really hard to keep standing.”

“It’s fine. My legs are stronger than they look~. Being short is my complex.”

“Really? You’d be fine even if you weren’t taller.”

“Oh my, thank you~.”

Just hearing their conversation in one ear made me want to throw up. Hyeon Jinhoo was obviously trying to keep the conversation going with all sorts of trivial topics, and the female part-timer was happily taking in all of his clingy behavior.

Yeah, if the two of them ended up falling for each other and leaving here, that would at least make things a bit better. I couldn’t not know what Hyeon Jinhoo was trying to do with this behavior.

If following me around at school was mainly Park Gyuseok’s job, then when I was working part-time, Hyeon Jinhoo would come every time to watch me. Today too, he was busy getting acquainted with the cafe staff and winning them over.

He targeted the female part-timers in particular and got on their good side, to the point that they would follow him into the supply room with me or even adjust my closing time himself and put me in his hand.

Come to think of it, I remembered the urgent message Chorong noona had sent a few days ago.

[Is there something going on between Jinhoo and that female part-timer there??]

[Jinhoo keeps going to that cafe every day suspiciously…. Could you watch him for me a bit better? Please….]

It was impossible to figure out exactly which part-timer she was referring to. Hyeon Jinhoo had built up familiarity with nearly all the female employees at the cafe, not just the current part-timer. At first I ignored all of noona’s messages, but when she kept contacting me, I replied that there was no “girl problem” with Hyeon Jinhoo here at this cafe that she needed to worry about.

Even so, noona’s worry did not subside. She had never once suspected him while he cheated on me for nearly two months, and now it seemed she was only sensing something after the fact.

The object of Hyeon Jinhoo’s secret straying…. It wasn’t the women she was wary of, but me. The part-timer who kept tucking her hair behind her ears and squirming around answered casually when Hyeon Jinhoo asked if he could take me out with him for a bit.

She said that whether I was gone for thirty minutes or an hour, she would take care of the cafe work herself. He had definitely been hitting on that part-timer today for this very reason.

“Where are you going? You need to work!”

“That girl said she’d do even your share earlier.”

He dragged me away and shoved me into his own car parked at the front entrance of the cafe. (Originally, you weren’t supposed to block the entrance, but thanks to the way he had won over the staff, it had practically become his fixed parking spot.) Then he started the car in a flash, and I shouted as if I were being kidnapped.

“Where are we going?!”

“I booked a room nearby. I’ll let you go after thirty minutes.”

“…W, what?! No!”

“If possible, I’d want to have sex with you leisurely after work, but I’m meeting Chorong soon, so I have to do it quickly and go now.”

While only replying with what he wanted to say, he stubbornly went into a business hotel. In the end, I was led by Hyeon Jinhoo into a room and taken for about thirty minutes by force. As always, Hyeon Jinhoo grumbled while looking at the state of my lower body.

No matter how rough he had been yesterday, today the swelling looked especially severe…. You got fucked by Park Gyuseok today, right? In the morning? That bastard is so eager, you guys almost do it every day. It was a shameless act, criticizing someone else while he himself was raping me again today after yesterday.

“I’m going to tell Chorong noona everything….”

“Go ahead. If you don’t want your video opened up together with it.”

“You know there’s no video for hyung, don’t you…?”

“You sure? Are you that confident? You’ll regret it when I make a move, you know?”

When Hyeon Jinhoo acted like this, I would get scared before I knew it. What if Park Gyuseok was mistaken? What if Hyeon Jinhoo really did have something like a video in his hands?

“I keep asking why the two of you are doing this to me.”

“Yeah, I’m having a hard time too. Most of the videos are on Park Gyuseok’s phone, so I’m reluctantly sharing you too. That doesn’t mean I can tolerate him and you having fun by yourselves.”

Hyeon Jinhoo kept saying only what he wanted, all on his own terms until the end. Even when I complained that being raped by them in itself was frightening and painful, all I got back was a response that he didn’t like me being exclusive to him, and that he was unhappy I was fooling around with Park Gyuseok too. And yet he was the one who handed me over to them, and the one who filmed the video as blackmail material.

Hyeon Jinhoo took me back to the cafe and left to meet Chorong noona. When I returned to the cafe, about an hour had passed. When I apologized for being gone too long, the female part-timer kindly replied that it was fine because there hadn’t been much work.

She was a kind girl by nature, but maybe she had a calculation in mind, thinking that if she treated me well, she would have more chances to get close to Hyeon Jinhoo, my sunbae.

Even though she knew Hyeon Jinhoo had a girlfriend, the way she kept hoping for a connection with him felt exactly like looking at my foolish self from the beginning of the semester. That bastard was so promiscuous that, even while dating Chorong noona, he had just thoroughly ejaculated inside my body and left…. I almost blurted out a warning not to be fooled by that demon’s looks.

“Come to think of it, there are a lot of handsome men coming in today! Do you see the person sitting alone in that corner over there?”

“……!”

I was startled by the direction she pointed with her chin. Thanks to the cafe’s popularity, students from our school sometimes visited, but I hadn’t expected Lee Taegang, of all people, to make it here. I had thought he wasn’t the type to go to cafes alone, but looking closely, he really does roam around everywhere.

Damn it…. While glancing at Lee Taegang, our eyes met. He too seemed briefly surprised, like he hadn’t expected this, then soon widened his eyes at me. What if he was displeased? Anyone could see that he was the one who had stormed into the place where I was working. If being in the same space as me made him feel bad, then it was his turn to leave.