By Zephyria 
“Mae-gu must be the one who destroyed the Hongsal Gate at the market. The reason?”
For a fleeting moment, Jeil Heon paused in deep thought before opening his lips. The gap before his answer flowed naturally, so Kang Suk-young did not realize that her question had given him pause.
“It was nothing much. He said he hadn’t seen me in twenty-two years and was curious if my skills were still intact.”
“Sigh… That fox bastard, I’d pluck his tail and fry him alive. Did he say anything else?”
“The usual. He told me to hurry up and become an Aberration.”
“There is at least one guy who would be happy even if you did become an Aberration, Sunbae.”
Though the tone was fierce, Jeil Heon knew it was rooted in concern for him, so he left the director’s office with only a faint smile.
He had hesitated for a moment when asked why the Hongsal Gate was destroyed. He wondered if he should reveal the truth to Kang Suk-young and ask for her help. But he couldn’t. Kang Suk-young was a person who prioritized reason over emotion and took pride in the Management Bureau’s devotion to protecting their own.
If she recognized the necessity of Yoo Jiha, she would agonize over it, but in the end, there was a high probability she would try to use him. Was that not why Lee Yeo-jin, in the past, had asked him for help instead of her own close friend?
A bitter sneer escaped from between his lips. How ironic. Despite being a profoundly human matter, the only ones he could ask for help were Aberrations.
Including himself, who had one foot stepped into the realm of anomalies.
* * *
Even when clothed, his hidden curves were apparent, and the fabric pulled taut whenever he moved. With his innerwear completely cast aside, his broad upper body and chest were covered in muscles far thicker than his own, yet they never felt clumsy.
Drenched in the fluids of an Aberration—a sight that could be described as cruel or grotesque in some sense—it was a charm that captivated the gaze. Just by following the grain of the muscles with his eyes, a strange current swirled erotically in his gut, making his skin feel as if it were heating up.
And the line of his body, leading from the waist to the hips, hidden by trousers…
No, there was no longer a need to stop at delusions.
As he boldly reached out and placed his hand on the waist, the man let out a low laugh that vibrated in his throat.
Jiha. Do you like this?
It felt fucking great.
While despairing at his own catastrophic vocabulary that could only produce such an expression, he gasped for breath as the heat in his stomach gradually took a distinct shape. The man relentlessly swallowed the lips that had parted slightly in a pant. The tongue, pushing into his mouth, vividly imprinted the memory of that one moment when their lips had overlapped. At the time, he had been too flustered to perceive it properly, but later, as he looked back, it had become internalized and etched clearly into his mind.
He remembered vividly how the man’s tongue moved, how it ransacked his mouth, and how it entwined with his flesh. He also remembered how violently the sudden kiss had poured over him.
Hngh.
The kiss repeated as if playing back a memory. From the initial kiss that began while the man cupped his cheek as he gripped the collar, to the moments they clung to each other tightly and were naturally laid down upon the mattress—all of it. The heat transmitted through the lips pierced through his body, winding around his entire frame like a snake and stimulating him. Gasping in an ecstatic pain that went beyond heating his gut to a throbbing ache in his groin, he thought: this is not simple heat. He knew. He had already witnessed this with his own eyes.
In the middle of a steam-filled bathroom, between the man’s bewildered eyes and thick thighs, a member that hung just as thick and heavy. In other words, a cock.
“…Aaaagh.”
The moment Jeil Heon’s member writhed like a snake and entwined around him, Yoo Jiha woke up, his face contorting miserably. It was because he felt his underwear was damp. Not just a normal dream, but a nocturnal emission over his crush… A silent scream howled beneath the covers.
Yoo Jiha made a miserable face while washing his underwear. This was all Jeil Heon’s fault. Jeil Heon was the one who acted as if nothing were wrong despite having such a thing between his legs, and Jeil Heon was the one who treated him like a four-year-old. Anyway, it’s not my fault.
He had been agonizing over this for several days. What should he do to make someone who treats a twenty-one-year-old adult male as a four-year-old child recognize his physical age?
“…”
No answer came.
He had considered going to a public bath together to flaunt his body as an adult male, but he discarded the idea immediately. He worried that compared to Jeil Heon, his own meager body wouldn’t make the man think of him as an adult, and more importantly, there was the extremely realistic problem that he didn’t have the confidence to withstand the sight of the man’s naked body.
A belated sense of regret washed over him. If he had known, he would have shown him the agony of an ‘adult male’ whose body reacted simply because the other person was an ‘adult male,’ even when entangled with some stranger in the human rights-violating cabinets of the Eight Phases Mental Hospital.
“No matter how much you treat me like a kid, four years old? Four!”
He had always felt that Jeil Heon’s skinship felt like something done to a child, but he hadn’t known he was actually being treated as a four-year-old.
Today was the day Jeil Heon was out of the house for an appointment. Because of that, Yoo Jiha, who had been shouting and venting his frustration toward Jeil Heon, suddenly stood up. Come to think of it, he wasn’t the only one left in the house. This was a ghost house. There were ghosts with him.
Yoo Jiha hurriedly escaped the house.
“Crazy. The Team leader is even providing a boarding house?”
His friends, whom he met for the first time in a while, shook their heads in disbelief. Yoo Jiha nodded as they entered a raw fish and meat restaurant. Since it was weekend lunch hour, the restaurant was bustling with customers.
“It’s surprising enough that he’s taking boarding fees, but for free? What’s his angle? Isn’t he just laying the groundwork to harvest your organs?”
If it had been a few days ago, he would have been fine with the question, ‘Why would he lend a house for free?’ because Jeil Heon had whispered tenderly that he was giving him something more precious than money. But now…
‘Since a four-year-old is commuting from Suwon every day by shuttle bus, of course he looked anxious…!’
As his frustration erupted, he also wondered if he wouldn’t have been able to board if he hadn’t been treated like a child. In that sense, being treated like a kid might have been a blessing.
‘Blessing my ass! At this rate, he’ll see me as a four-year-old until the day I lie in a coffin!’
As expected, his only option was to stick his ID card to his forehead.
“Well, he’ll probably be nice to you until he harvests your organs. What do you want to eat?”
After finishing the order, Yoo Jiha stepped into the restroom for a moment. And as he was coming out, he witnessed it. In a room with the door slightly ajar, he saw Jeil Heon sitting across from a middle-aged woman who felt strangely familiar.
Up to that point, it was fine. Yoo Jiha’s hand, which had started to move to greet him thinking he had met someone from his past, froze. Jeil Heon carefully wrapped a ssam, and then popped it into the mouth of the woman—who looked like she would be more suited to elegantly slicing a steak in a quiet restaurant rather than a noisy meat house. The woman, after eating the ssam, laughed and slapped his arm. They seemed to be in a very intimate relationship.
…Jeil Heon had definitely dated older women mostly. And she, who looked to be in her late forties, was naturally older than Jeil Heon, who was in his thirties.
A hypothesis he didn’t want to imagine dropped like a hammer on the back of his head.
* * *
Jeil Heon asked the kitchen separately and ate a piece of beef tartare without any seasoning. Then, he fell into a slight sense of self-loathing. While his stomach still couldn’t handle it, it went down much easier than cooked food.
“Isn’t it fishy?”
“It’s edible…”
“I’ve seen everything in my life. You couldn’t even eat raw fish, let alone tartare, because it was fishy, and now you’re eating it unseasoned?”
“They say tastes change as you get older.”
“What age have you reached, Oppa?”
Je Eun-jung chuckled at him, who looked far younger than her. To gloss over the unpleasant topic and to take care of his cute younger sister’s meal, Jeil Heon wrapped a ssam and put it in her mouth. After eating the ssam, Je Eun-jung laughed and patted his arm.
“If my younger brother tried to feed me, I would have broken his wrist, but I really can’t win against my big brother.”
“I’m the brother who raised you, carrying you and soothing you since you were nursing from a wet nurse.”
“It’s absurd that I can’t deny this even though we grew up in a household with both wet nurses and nannies.”
Je Eun-jung shook her head.
“Since we’re on the subject, if it weren’t for big brother, our siblings would have split into two groups long ago. Isn’t it natural for the children of the legal wife and the concubine to clash?”
“It’s thanks to you all following along well.”
“I still remember the verbal abuse Father hurled at you when I found out Mother had passed away. I’ll never forget it until the day I die.”