Iheon’s parents were, by every social measure, admirable people. As parents, they weren’t much good at all.
Both of them were so busy that the house stood empty more often than not, and the gap they left was filled by sitters who changed every year.
Maybe that was why. Having passed through so many different kinds of people from such a young age, Iheon came to enjoy observing and analysing others. He had a real talent for it, too.
People who lied. People who made excuses. People who faked guilt.
The harder someone tried to hide what they felt, the more certain it was that they left a trace somewhere.
In their eyes, in their breathing, in their fingertips, in the set of their feet.
No matter how convincing a face they wore, there was always a seam they couldn’t keep closed to the end.
And yet Lee Jei never lined up.
To Iheon, Jei was the problem he could never solve.
She was like smoke that slipped out of his fist the moment he thought he had it, like a spark with no telling which way it would jump.
There was a time when exactly that had hooked his curiosity, made his pulse quicken, left him half out of his mind with impatience.
But not today.
Today, of all days, that damned answer he’d never managed to find grated on him past bearing.
Iheon pulled his cock out of his black briefs, thick and heavily risen, and gripped it loosely. The sight of it swollen and worked up all on its own, at a moment like this, was really something.
He dragged his hand up the shaft a few careless times and the slit flared open, pre-come running out of it in a thin trickle. The thing even bobbed, as though it would lunge at the table laid out in front of it any second now.
A dry laugh escaped him.
To be this hard over a woman’s body that wasn’t even wet.
Self-disgust lashed up his spine and the back of his neck went hot.
Still, he didn’t want to back off here.
The moment he did, it felt like he’d have to admit what a ridiculous figure he cut, clinging to this woman.
He hated that. Better to go all the way down and be as base as it got.
Iheon took himself by the root and pushed the head of his cock against her dry entrance. The narrow hole, barely wide enough to swallow a single finger, clenched shut against the intruder.
Let it.
He tried again. There was none of the usual foreplay.
It would hurt. Her, and him both. But he was already so far gone with rage that his vision was about to spin, and it made no difference to him at all.
If it meant this woman could hurt as much as he did, then clawing, driving into, tearing at her with his teeth still wouldn’t have been enough.
Iheon caught Jei behind both knees and pressed them down until they touched her chest. Between her spread thighs, the folds that cradled her perineum trembled.
He set his rigid head against the hole that refused to open and shoved his hips forward, and there came a rough, grinding sound of dry flesh giving way.
Jei squeezed her eyes shut and a moan full of pain leaked out of her mouth.
“Ugh, hngh!”
With dark, shadowed eyes Iheon watched her chewed-raw lips drain white, and forced his cock into the cruelly tight opening.
Her entrance stretched taut as though it would split, taking in the shaft with enormous effort. The red flesh inside, scraped by the head of him, swallowed down the burn and screamed in shivers.
Even her first time couldn’t have hurt this much.
“Hk, hhk.”
Jei panted through clamped lips. Her pale cheeks had flushed scarlet. Beneath her long lashes everything was damp.
And still she didn’t tell him to stop. Instead she gripped the edge of the kitchen island until the veins stood up on the backs of her thin hands, shaking all over.
She looked pitiful, like prey caught under some vicious predator.
“You saw this coming too, didn’t you.”
Self-loathing twisted coldly through his gut. His mouth was bitter, as if he’d drunk lye.
“You knew it would turn out like this, and you came back anyway to get treated like this. Isn’t that right?”
And even so. Even so, there was no sign on Lee Jei of another man’s arms around her, and the relief he felt somewhere deep down made him wretched.
“And you sure as hell didn’t come expecting me to fuck you like a gentleman.”
Revulsion and self-contempt, fury and dread, emptiness and resignation, all of it snarled together and raked wildly under his ribs, and his throat kept cinching tight.
What on earth was he supposed to call a state like this? How many times in a whole life does a person get to feel something this fucking foul?
If it weren’t for Lee Jei, he’d have gone through life never knowing feelings that couldn’t be given a name.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Once again, nothing came out of him but curses.
I hate this woman, who’s set out to ruin me.
You threw me away, so all I have to do is throw you away just as readily, like I’d been waiting for the chance.
So why can’t I be the one to let go of you first?
How is it all so easy for you?
How many times does this make now?
Bewitching my eyes with that clear, guileless smile.
Turning me inside out with those red lips.
A vein rose on the smooth forehead half-hidden by his disordered hair. He yanked the cock he’d forced inside her back out and drove it in again, hard, lined up at the mouth of her.
“Ah! Ahhk!”
The pain was like being run through with a harpoon, and Jei lost hold of the lip she’d been biting. A sharp, aching cry burst out of her.
“Don’t bother holding it in. Be louder. I’ve got no intention of stopping whether it hurts you or not.”
His sharply drawn lips twisted to one side. Then he forced himself through that still-unready opening all over again.
“Ngh!”
Sweat gathered at his temples and ran down his neck, and his cock was crushed to the point of snapping, and through all of it he consoled himself with one thing alone: that she was feeling this pain with him.
The deeper he dug into that dry flesh, the harder Iheon clenched his teeth. His body was already burning at its limit, and his head was a white blur of rage and want tangled together.
His hips moved without any smoothness, and the tender flesh inside, scraped this way and that, swelled quickly. With every thrust that carried pain into her, Jei’s face contorted.
“Ah, ah, Iheon, g-go a little easier!”
At that pleading request of hers, his eyes went darker still.
“Jei.”
He said her name low, this woman moaning in pain while skewered on him, and tapped her temple once with his index finger, sneering.
“Use that clever head of yours and actually think for a second.”
Caging her between the island counter and the heavy weight of his body, Iheon rasped the words bleakly against her burning ear.
“Right now you’re being raped by me. Forced, at that.”
“N-no. That’s not... I want this...!”
“Oh, do you? Then stop clenching. Unless you want to tear.”
“Hnngh!”
Iheon pulled his upper body back and straightened his hips. He kept his grip under the backs of her knees, forcing her open wider so he could move in and out of her more easily.
Crunch, crunch. The shards of glass pinned under his shoes ground down into smaller pieces. Even her insides, which had been nothing but dry and tight, were growing slick by tiny degrees, as if her body had decided it had to in order to survive.
It was the faintest trace of wetness, nothing more, and yet, pathetically, it drove his arousal higher.
“Fuck.”
The flesh of her thighs in his big hands was slippery with heat, and every thrust pushed her body a little further across the table. Each time, her thin arms clamped harder onto the edge of the counter.
Breathing that had already been ragged collapsed into a mess. Iheon couldn’t tell whether the sound of it was his own or hers.
He didn’t want to know, either. The heat surging up from somewhere deep inside him and the shame right beside it were draining the blood out of him together.
The island counter couldn’t take the brutal rhythm of his hips and creaked in a way that grated on the ear. Two ruined silhouettes overlapped, then came apart.
His broad back swelled tight with every breath he dragged in and sank low with every one he let out.
Beneath the shirt plastered to his skin, his shoulder blades jutted out sharply with each movement, and blue veins stood up along the forearms braced under her knees.
There was no elegance left in the sight of him from behind. Only the dogged shadow of a man shoved along by rage, dragged under by desire, who in the end couldn’t control himself at all.
“Ah, ahh, nngh!”
“Haa.”
Friction, moans, and swallowed curses tangled together in the cold air of the kitchen.
Every one of those sounds was too vivid, and it sickened him. Under the bright lights he felt as though the filthy bottom of himself had been laid bare, all of it.
And still he did it anyway. End to end. A hard, forced slam. When he crammed his cock into that narrow hole all the way to the root, a low sound thick with pleasure tore through his lips.
The heat that had been scorching his mind black cut out all at once, and for a while Iheon couldn’t move.
His heaving shoulders settled by slow degrees, and belatedly the strength went out of his hands.
The climax was short enough to feel hollow.
What was left where the pleasure had passed wasn’t triumph. It wasn’t revenge, either. Just a filthy, shallow relief, and a self-loathing twice as deep.
Iheon slowly lowered his head.
The woman pinned beneath him was a wreck.
Hair in tangles, eyes wet at the corners, lips crushed red from being bitten down on. And not one tear shed through any of it. That was so like Lee Jei.
But the moment he took in the sight of her like that, something inside Iheon snapped clean through. Even the thin scrap of reason he’d barely been holding on to shattered to pieces.
His memory of what came after is patchy.
