TTDOTO 9.3

Seo Jae-rim woke Jae-an, who’d been nodding off like a sick chicken, then pulled out the leash and fitted Jaegu into a harness. It was Jaegu’s walk—Jae-an’s one and only excuse to go outside. Excited, Jaegu hopped around restlessly the entire time the leash was being clipped on.

They stepped out onto the street. With steady sunlight and a cool breeze, it was perfect autumn weather for a walk. Jaegu liked daytime walks more—probably because there were more dogs to meet than on the evening route.

Even though it wasn’t cold enough for it, Jae-an tugged his turtleneck higher to hide the bruised discoloration. A cap pulled low cut off his view—and cut off the light small talk other owners made. As he walked with his head lowered, following after Jaegu, Seo Jae-rim’s phone rang.

“Let me take this,” Seo Jae-rim said, as if it was work, and drifted a little farther away. Since being injured he hadn’t gone in to the office, but day by day, the number of calls he took only increased. Jae-an watched his retreating back with uneasy eyes, then kept walking ahead with Jaegu.

Jaegu was busy marking every corner of the neatly kept path and sniffing at everything he could. He was so enthusiastic he shoved his head under a low flowerbed and stayed there for a long while.

“Jaegu, what are you doing. Come on.”

Jae-an crouched beside him. A branch brushing against Jaegu’s side bothered him.

“What kind of smell is that, that you’re so obsessed with it?”

When Jae-an tugged the lead carefully, Jaegu finally wandered out with grass stuck to his face. Worried he might’ve licked something dangerous—chicken bones, chocolate—Jae-an checked his mouth. Thankfully, there was nothing.

But as Jae-an started to stand, something orange caught at the edge of his vision.

“…….”

In a corner of the flowerbed lay a small orange plastic box cutter, no longer than two knuckles. It was the kind students kept in their pencil cases—one of those mini cutters for opening packages. This one was a cute carrot shape, the type schoolgirls used to carry around.

Before he could stop himself, his hand reached for it.

The moment he picked it up, Jae-an turned his head to check Seo Jae-rim. Seo Jae-rim was still on the phone, far off, not looking his way. Taking advantage of that, as if bewitched, Jae-an slipped the cutter into his pocket.

Jaegu whined and pulled at the lead, eager to keep going. Jae-an got up fast and followed, but the pocketed cutter felt oddly heavy. Again and again he fidgeted near his thigh, checking that the small thing was still there.

Just then, Seo Jae-rim finished his call and came over, draping an arm around him.

“Sorry it took so long, hyung.”

“You hold it now.”

Jae-an handed him the leash. His palm was so sweaty he’d nearly let the strap slip. He wiped his hand against his clothes, careful to do it where Seo Jae-rim wouldn’t notice. Even if the handle was damp from cold sweat, Seo Jae-rim didn’t seem to pick up on anything.

Jae-an’s attention was fixed on the slight weight against his thigh. He kept touching the area, making sure it was still there. It was small, but it was dangerous. A blade could split flesh, tear blood vessels—make someone pour out blood until the moment they died.

He didn’t even have the courage to do anything like that, so why had he taken it? He didn’t know. It felt like he’d done it in a trance.

And yet, he wasn’t anxious.

In a life where every action was monitored and his will had been cut out of him, the simple fact that he’d done something—anything—without Seo Jae-rim knowing filled him with a bizarre, crooked thrill.

˚˚˚

“I need the bathroom,” Jae-an said.

“Okay.”

He set down the tablet game and went into the bathroom closest to the living room. After using the toilet, he washed his hands, then checked—again and again—that the door was shut. He wet his dry lips with his tongue and reached toward the tissue box. The faucet was still cranked wide open.

He slid his hand into the opening, rummaged through the soft tissues—until something hard snagged against his fingertips. Carefully, he drew the box cutter out.

He extended the blade just a little, tugged down his loose loungewear, and let the sharp tip graze his thigh.

A bead of blood welled from a cut as thin as a hair. His thigh was already a mess of nail marks and bruises; a faint slice like this didn’t stand out at all. Without blinking, Jae-an watched the blood rise—then scratched over the same spot, hard, to make it blend in with the other marks.

Satisfied, he pulled his pants back up and pushed the cutter back between the tissues. The tissue box had become a perfect hiding place for the small blade he’d picked up last week.

When he returned to the living room, Seo Jae-rim’s gaze was still fixed on the TV. When they were together, Seo Jae-rim didn’t check the CCTV—so Jae-an only dared to take out and handle the cutter when Seo Jae-rim was right there.

He hadn’t planned to hurt himself from the start. At first he’d only fidgeted with it, then started extending the blade—then, eventually, drawing it across his skin.

He wasn’t doing it because he wanted to die. He knew this wouldn’t kill him. If anything, every time he was wounded, he felt more alive. It was bitter—his one act of will was self-destructive—but when skin split and red blood surfaced, it felt as if something clogged and knotted inside his chest burst open and flowed out with it.

Once he’d tasted that small act of rebellion, he couldn’t stop thinking about the cutter. But when he was alone, CCTV made it too risky, so he forced himself to endure the urge. The secret he’d hidden from Seo Jae-rim was the one way he could treat Seo Jae-rim like a fool. He couldn’t throw that away.

As if nothing had happened, Jae-an sat on the sofa and poured the remaining whiskey into a plastic cup. The fabric brushing his thigh stung, and he had to hold back a laugh.

Seo Jae-rim’s eyes didn’t move once from the screen, where a childish cartoon played. His profile was so rigid it was almost frightening—made stranger by the fact that what he watched was something so juvenile. Jae-an sipped, listening to the cartoon’s exaggerated sound effects more than watching it.

Seo Jae-rim always drank alongside him, but never seemed drunk. He wasn’t drinking for pleasure—he was waiting for Jae-an to get intoxicated enough that his defiance would die.

[강압적 성행위의 노골적인 묘사 구간은 번역 대신 비그래픽 요약으로 처리합니다.]
That night, Seo Jae-rim again forced unwanted intimacy on Jae-an. Jae-an, exhausted and leaning on alcohol to get through it, complied as a way to make it end sooner—answering “I love you” on command because refusing only dragged the ordeal out. He drifted in and out of consciousness, waking briefly only to realize it hadn’t stopped, before blacking out again.

“Gasp—!”

Jae-an jolted awake, sucking in a short breath. He sat up abruptly and turned to look at Seo Jae-rim. For a long moment he stared at the sleeping face—eyes bloodshot, unblinking—then swallowed hard and lifted a trembling hand beneath Seo Jae-rim’s nose. Only when he felt warm breath did he pull away.

Seo Jae-rim turning cold and still, not breathing after being stabbed—thankfully, that had been a nightmare.

Jae-an lowered his tired eyes. Judging by the changed loungewear, he must have fallen asleep again while their bodies tangled. The end of it, the cleanup—his memories had been cut out cleanly, as if with scissors.

The room was dark, without a speck of light, and sleep wouldn’t come. If he closed his eyes, he felt certain he’d dream again of Seo Jae-rim dying. If he kept them open, the black apparition waited, as if it had been expecting him, swelling larger in the dark.

He drew his knees up and pressed his fever-warm forehead against them.

Blink. Blink.

All dawn, Jae-an repeated it—closing his eyes and opening them again—over and over, like a compulsion.