#45
***
Even on the day Bonoh stayed out overnight, Taeseong wasn’t in his right mind. He was clearly awake but kept his eyes tightly shut pretending to sleep, so thinking he must be having a hard time, Taeseong tried to buy him some food. However, when he arrived at the dorm room with packaged soup rice that Bonoh usually ate well, he had already run away with his tail between his legs.
If he had known Bonoh would run away like that, Taeseong would never have gone out. At first, thinking he might have just stepped out briefly, he waited while leaving the soup rice for two people as it was. He should come before the soup rice gets cold. Thinking this, Taeseong kept reheating the soup rice in the communal microwave on the first floor every time it cooled down. Only when the soup rice had cooled down again after reheating it three times did Taeseong realize something was wrong.
Throwing away the cold soup rice as it was, Taeseong decided to target class time. Arriving at the lecture hall a bit early, Taeseong positioned himself right in front of the door and checked each student’s face as they entered. People were displeased, but Taeseong didn’t care.
Not only did Bonoh skip class, but he even stayed out overnight. On the day Bonoh ran away, Taeseong skipped all his meals. But he didn’t even notice that he hadn’t eaten. His attention was so focused on Bonoh that he wasn’t even hungry.
Only the next day did Taeseong consume food for energy to use when facing Bonoh. It wasn’t anything grand – just two packets of tasteless biscuits. Even those felt like chewing sand and he barely managed to swallow them.
During that time, all sorts of thoughts went through Taeseong’s head. Maybe the sex with him wasn’t good, maybe he pushed too hard. Or maybe he went out briefly and got into an accident. Until the sun set, his insides burned with worry. However, when Bonoh didn’t answer his phone and there was no contact until nighttime, worry transformed into anger.
Maybe he was fooling around with someone else somewhere. Especially the persons of interest, Hyungwoo and Junghwan, came to mind. In Taeseong’s head, scenes of Bonoh rolling around with Hyungwoo or Junghwan, or both simultaneously, played randomly. Taeseong realized that day that he was a person with good imagination.
To suppress the surging anger and anxiety, Taeseong listened to the peach blossom frequency all night. Though the possibility was low since the dorm doors were already closed, he played it without headphones or earphones so he could hear sounds from the hallway in case Bonoh came. Unlike usual, he didn’t lie down to listen but constantly walked around that narrow dorm room. He absolutely couldn’t stay still. And the next day, while he was debating whether to keep listening to frequencies or go out and catch him, Bonoh came in.
As soon as Bonoh came out after washing, he secretly checked if there were traces of others on his body first. The hole was swollen and there were marks all over his body, but they were all traces that Taeseong himself had left. Only then did he feel blood flowing through his body.
He had planned to interrogate him about where he went, who he was with, and what he did on the night he stayed out, but Taeseong decided to let it slide once. Even Taeseong, who was indifferent to romance, knew that men who pried into everything weren’t attractive.
Moreover, when he mingled bodies with Bonoh, the anxiety that fiercely tormented him seemed to subside. Before meeting Bonoh, Taeseong hadn’t felt much sexual desire. So it wasn’t simply that physical tension was released as sexual desire was satisfied. When he held Bonoh, whether it was an embrace or intercourse, Taeseong felt greater emotional satisfaction than orgasm.
The morning after sleeping together, while trapping Bonoh in his arms like a snare, Taeseong vaguely thought he should treat him well. Even Taeseong himself didn’t know why he had such thoughts, but it just felt natural. However, that resolution didn’t last even a full day.
On the day he made that resolution, Taeseong discovered Bonoh at school. Standing slightly aside so as not to block the building entrance, Bonoh was looking slightly downward. Taeseong followed Bonoh’s gaze with his eyes, but there was nothing particularly attention-grabbing.
When he looked closely at Bonoh’s face again, he realized he was just standing there blankly. His already large eyes were wide open, so the unfocused pupils were clearly visible. His lips were slightly parted and fixed.
He couldn’t tell if he was pondering something or thinking about nothing at all. Then he would blink as if a soul had entered a doll, and when he did, the shadow created by his eyelashes would briefly appear and disappear under his eyes. Taeseong recalled the eyelashes he had seen when Bonoh was asleep. Though not long, they were dense, and when he brushed them with his hand, the eyelids would tremble.
Taeseong quickly shut his mouth because he felt like a deep sigh might burst out without him knowing. Among the people busily coming and going around campus, only Kim Bonoh seemed to have stopped alone. Taeseong couldn’t just pass by Bonoh, nor could he approach and greet him. He could do nothing but stare at Bonoh.
While he was gauging what this intensely swirling desire within him was, someone approached Kim Bonoh. As if trying to startle him, he could see them sneaking up from behind like a little mouse. Then they approached from right behind, pressing their body close, and tapped Kim Bonoh’s knee pit with their knee.
“Ah, what!”
The little mouse helped up Bonoh, who almost fell, while giggling. Kim Bonoh was startled but then smiled with relief upon seeing the mouse’s face. Then he playfully leaned his weight against the mouse. The mouse was an unfamiliar face, but at a glance, they seemed intimate with Kim Bonoh. They seemed to chat briefly before disappearing into the building.
Taeseong was seized by a feeling of being insulted. Even though he hadn’t heard harsh insults from the mouse, it felt like he’d been subjected to something worse. And he felt betrayed by Kim Bonoh too. After mingling bodies with him all night, he was already with someone else… The intimate behavior Bonoh showed toward the mouse was something he had never shown Taeseong.
The problem wasn’t just Hyungwoo and Junghwan who always hung around together. Kim Bonoh showed intimate attitudes toward many people except himself. In other words, he wasn’t friendly only to him. Taeseong had been living in the same room as Bonoh and matching schedules to share most meals together. However, the realization that this hadn’t led to the closest relationship struck Taeseong like lightning.
The emotional satisfaction he had felt in the morning scattered like wet tissue scraps. The resolution to treat him kindly was the same. Taeseong returned to the dorm and rummaged through the room as if searching for something. And he waited for Bonoh to return to the room while harboring quietly seething emotions.
***
“Hey, isn’t it about time you should head back?”
“Yeah. Just a little later.”
As Junghwan said, even if he left now, it would be close to breaking curfew. Of course, the curfew wasn’t the dorm curfew but the time Taeseong had set. Previously, when this time came, Bonoh would constantly check the time on his phone and worry about whether to go in now or play a little more before going in, but now he was calmly just drinking, which was puzzling.
“What’s up with you? Is your wife being quiet these days?”
“Just, well…”
At Hyungwoo’s playful question with giggles, Bonoh trailed off. He couldn’t deny it because Taeseong wasn’t being quiet lately but had changed his methods. The bigger problem was that Bonoh also enjoyed those methods.
Bonoh deliberately avoided looking toward his phone. Thinking, ‘I’m not doing this to sleep with Joo Taeseong, I just want to hang out a bit more.’ He could sense by intuition that quite some time had passed, but he deliberately didn’t check. Bonoh filled the soju glass in front of him and drank it down in one gulp.
“Oh, Kim Bonoh. This bastard is really going for it today?”
“You guys drink too. Don’t just eat the snacks.”
Bonoh said while pouring alcohol into Junghwan and Hyungwoo’s glasses. Just stay a little longer before going in. Then if Joo Taeseong gives ‘punishment,’ he could just enjoy that too.
Just enjoy it.
That was the result of Bonoh racking his brains for several days. Physical contact with the same sex, which he had never thought about before, confused Bonoh. It was understandable since it wasn’t light physical contact like wiping something off his face or hands brushing, but sex. It wasn’t the kind of mutual masturbation where they helped each other once and that was it, but undeniable sex. In some sense, there was a lot of pulling out and pushing in…
‘Right, when would I ever do that kind of thing with someone who looks like Joo Taeseong? And like Joo Taeseong said, I might be weak to pleasure. Or I might really like men, but I don’t need to decide right now whether I’m gay or not. It’s not like I have to mark it on my passport and carry it around.’
Whenever uncomfortable feelings arose, Bonoh would mutter to himself like a mantra. Each time, his heart would become lighter as if by magic. That didn’t mean he could face Taeseong without feeling anything. Having become intimately physical, he felt embarrassed when their eyes met, and he began to be conscious of the fact that he was in the same room as Taeseong.
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
