One-Room Dictator 27

#27

When the food came out, Taeseong placed two pieces of tenderloin katsu on Bonoh’s plate.

“Oh yeah. Try this too.”

Bonoh also gave two pieces of his katsu to Taeseong. At first, Taeseong didn’t like sharing food. He preferred to eat only the food given to him and had a slight aversion to food being mixed. However, he developed the habit of sharing small portions before eating because Bonoh was curious about the foods Taeseong ate.

Bonoh bit into one piece of the tenderloin katsu that Taeseong gave him. It was properly cooked, moist inside, and the meat chewed tenderly. True to Japanese-style katsu, the batter was crispy, creating a good balance of textures. The sauce tasted fine too, but the tenderloin katsu, which released juices as you chewed, was much more delicious when eaten with a little wasabi on top. Even while eating something so delicious, Bonoh unconsciously let out a deep sigh.

“Why are you sighing?”

“No, the class I’m taking now is a retake, and what if I get bad grades again…”

“‘Critical Thinking and Argumentation’? What’s so difficult about that? The exam isn’t even hard, and you just need to write the reports well.”

“Right. You’re so great.”

“……”

Bonoh’s expression suddenly became sullen.

“You said you got an A+ in this class, right? What’s the secret?”

“When we get back to the room, I’ll show you the reports I wrote, so stop sighing and just eat your katsu.”

At those words, Bonoh smiled and said thanks, then ate his cabbage salad. He really had a simple personality.

***

After Bonoh left for class, leaving Taeseong alone, he got in his car and headed to the gym. Although the dormitory had exercise facilities, there were few types of equipment and even those were terribly crude. Because of this, Taeseong continued using the gym near his family home that he had been attending.

After bench pressing, Taeseong wiped the sweat beading on his chin with the back of his hand and drank water. Gazes flew in from around him at his tensed muscles and the wild neckline revealed as he tilted his head back to swallow water, but Taeseong didn’t pay attention and was lost in thought.

That day, the day Bonoh bought alcohol to celebrate the end of the semester, Taeseong had failed to receive a confession from Bonoh. However, after fondling Bonoh’s member, there had been many changes for both of them.

Taeseong was greatly shocked by the fact that touching another person’s genitals, especially those of another man, and fondling various parts of his body wasn’t as disgusting as he had thought. Rather than disgusting, it had aroused him. Taeseong wasn’t particularly shaken by that fact. He simply accepted it as realizing that he too was a person with sexual desires like others.

What was unexpected was Bonoh’s reaction afterward. Far from being ecstatic, his desire to forget that incident was irritating. Taeseong couldn’t understand why Bonoh would dislike what happened that night, no matter how much he tried to guess. Then one hypothesis occurred to him.

Could it be that he disliked how quickly things progressed? Bonoh might have wanted to enjoy innocent romance, starting with holding hands and gradually building physical intimacy. Taeseong realized his mistake and admitted he had been hasty.

After finishing his water, Taeseong lay back on the bench and completed the remaining sets.

***

“Hey, this is a summer session so there are no assignments. Instead, we have to settle it with an exam.”

Bonoh, who had already been showing obvious signs of struggling and wracking his brain for several days, now had a face that looked like he might really wither away. Perhaps because his midterm wasn’t very satisfactory, he said he really needed to get a good score on the final exam, but unfortunately in Taeseong’s view, Bonoh had no talent for this subject.

“You don’t have anything to do anyway. Try making up some problems for me.”

“It would be faster to find past exams for this subject in that time.”

“No, I know about that too. But because past exams are circulating so much, they’re going to completely change all the problems this time. They’re even modifying all the examples from the textbook. And this is a summer session. The professor is crazy.”

Bonoh, who criticized Taeseong for having nothing to do without even knowing what he was doing, was looking at Taeseong with pitifully drooped eyes that made it impossible for Taeseong to get angry. For Taeseong, there hadn’t been any particular difficulty, and it was just such a liberal arts course that what he learned was vague. Even so, when Bonoh begged like that, he couldn’t coldly refuse. He could easily reject other people’s requests, but for some time now, he strangely hesitated in front of Bonoh.

“Fine. What kind of help do you want?”

“I don’t have that much I can give you… but could you just explain the parts I don’t understand?”

“Alright, I’ll answer when you ask, so please just eat first.”

“Okay. Thanks, man.”

He didn’t seem like the type to be particularly obsessed with grades. Watching Bonoh desperately trying to maintain his grades was fascinating. Well, thinking about it, last semester too, he seemed to have worked hard during what he considered exam periods.

Separately from that, just looking at what he did to Taeseong, Bonoh was using his roommate excessively. He knew intellectually that he could get angry enough to ask if he had entrusted something to him. But it was strange that he didn’t get that angry. Rather, he was pleased that Bonoh clung to him like this.

Time passed faster than expected, and although it didn’t seem like much time had passed since vacation started, Bonoh was withering away, preparing for his final exam. He had started studying with his butt glued to the dormitory.

Taeseong was also caught up in it. The reason was that having someone you could ask whenever you had a difficult part was precious.

Bonoh pushed his chair all the way back to Taeseong’s spot. When Taeseong, who had been tapping on his laptop, turned his head, Bonoh held out his book.

“Hey… look at this once. Why isn’t B included here?”

“The conditions are listed here. It says if B, then D or E, but looking at the first condition, E doesn’t hold.”

“This is about B being the problem. E isn’t the problem, right?”

“…Look.”

Even though Taeseong directly wrote formulas on blank paper to explain, his eyes weren’t bright with understanding but rather half-absent. The path to good grades seemed far away. Bonoh was just staring at the formulas Taeseong wrote with his mouth half open.

Even acting so foolishly was cute. Taeseong wasn’t even aware that he was looking at Bonoh with such warm eyes that his parents would be shocked if they saw.

Only when Bonoh, still with a blank face, looked up at the fairly close distance once, then flinched again at Taeseong’s gaze, did Taeseong realize that some strange dynamic had been created.

“What. Why are you looking at me like that?”

“How was I looking at you?”

“…Well, it was strange anyway.”

“I was just laughing because it’s funny how serious you are over just this?”

Bonoh glared like an angry puppy. Just as Taeseong was looking at him and the atmosphere was about to become subtle, Bonoh quickly lowered his head. He stuck the paper with Taeseong’s writing at the end into his book and rolled his chair back to its original position.

Taeseong imagined what would have happened if Bonoh hadn’t lowered his head, if their eye contact had lasted just a little longer. His mouth seemed to go dry for no reason, so he swallowed once. The gulping sound felt unusually loud.

“Anyway, thanks, though I don’t understand…”

“……”

“It’s okay! They say being smart and being good at teaching are separate things.”

This is how he roundaboutly says that his teaching skills are terrible. Whose fault is this now? Taeseong, who was about to nitpick, just pressed around his eyes once and let it go.

“I should buy you a meal when the exam is over… for using you like this.”

“Sure.”

Perhaps thinking his words were too harsh, when he glanced around and added words sweetly, the anger quickly subsided. It also earned many bonus points that what Bonoh was talking about was planning their next meeting.

Anyway, it wasn’t the worst situation. That was enough. Taeseong was gradually learning how to be patient like this.

Depression washed over him. Bonoh thought he had just chosen the wrong major, but wasn’t particularly bad at studying. In reality, just looking at the university, that was true. It was just that there were many exceptional students in the school’s comparison group.

However, when he came out after taking the exam, Bonoh thought he was really fucked. It was easy. The problem difficulty was so average that even Bonoh could see the answers to most problems. For the essay questions, his handwriting was a bit sloppy, but he managed to write answers. What this meant was that one or two problems wouldn’t just change a plus or minus in his grade, but change the alphabet entirely, and this wasn’t a midterm but a final exam.

Retaking successfully, my ass – he’d be lucky to get the same grade again.

All the effort of earnestly chewing pen caps and asking Taeseong about problems he didn’t know was worthless. When an exam ends, you should naturally feel refreshed, but far from feeling refreshed, he just felt drained as his energy was sucked into the classroom he didn’t even want to set foot in. If Bonoh hadn’t known the answers, he wouldn’t have been this depressed, but knowing all the problems made the sense of deflation even worse.

Just then, his phone suddenly rang. Looking at the phone screen with half-closed eyes, it was Taeseong. Bonoh answered the phone with a weak touch.

-Where are you.

“I just finished my exam…”

-Where are you?

“Oh, I’m on my way to the dormitory.”

-Got it.

Taeseong said only what he wanted to say and coldly hung up. Even though he had never expected Korean warmth from Taeseong, his particularly cold tone today made him feel even more deflated.