SSS 2012: For smartstar501 (Part 1/2)
For: smartstar501
From: Your Secret Santa
Title: Bitonal
Pairing: Jonghyun/Key
Rating: R
Warnings: sex
Authors’ Notes: I’m really sorry if this is not what you wanted ;A;
On the first day of the new semester I did not feel particularly scared, or even intimidated. In hindsight, though, being zestful was completely uncalled for, considering the SMS I had gotten a week before, which read,
- Long time no see. I’m glad to be back from America, and I’m glad to see you again. In case you’re wondering, I’ve heard of your teaching at my university and decided to come to your Stravinsky seminar.
It’s always nice meeting old friends again.
- Kibum
Although it left me with a feeling of general weirdness, since he was now going to be my student and not my friend, which he’d been some years ago, I still agreed with him-seeing old friends again is always nice.
I had one course to teach that day, which was actually quite the amount. Scientific assistants like me do not get to play professor very often; most of the time, we help our superiors with their research. It goes without saying that I was thrilled to have two courses to conduct solely on my own. Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’ and the seminar with the wonderfully original title ‘What is bad music?’ were all mine.
I was so caught up in my preparations for the course I had to teach in the afternoon that the thoughts about Kibum’s SMS lay blanketed beneath my heaps of papers on Stravinsky. When the clock above my desk struck four PM, I gathered my materials and left my office. The lecture hall I was supposed to teach in is directly beneath the roof-the biggest one the music faculty has to offer-but in comparison to the facilities of the other institutions, it is fairly small.
It was almost forgotten, even as I entered the lecture hall, that I’d see that guy again. And it was no big deal to me, really, it was just another old friend from another old life.
Standing behind the microphone on its wooden stand, I tried not to feel nervous. I was only twenty-six, had just gotten my Master of Arts and only taught once the semester before. Those students sitting before me in the narrow room were all inquisitive, talented people, demanding an excellent education. The previous night I’d dreamt of this situation, but instead of heads, my students had all had light bulbs on top of their shoulders and I was zapping electricity into them to make them glow. It was a silly dream.
I looked at the clock then, and it was a quarter past four-time to begin. I cleared my throat and said,
“Welcome to this semester’s course on Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Spring.’ As I hope you all know, it is one of the most influential works of the beginning of last century. The pop song of new music so to say. I’ll hand the list of attendants around so you can fill in your name and email, please.”
The first lecture had begun, and I felt confident about myself, I felt that I had the presence of an authority and the correct intellectual connection with my students.
Stravinsky proved to be an interesting subject; I was so caught up in giving an introduction to his persona that I only noticed Kibum about halfway through. It might also have been due to his black hair and casual but stylish clothing. He’d been blond back when we knew each other, and his clothes had been so much like mine only always a little off-kilter. And I remember thinking that god, he looked grown, that his eyes were sharp and so keen that they reminded me of a fox.
When our gazes met, he simply smiled and stuck his pencil between his lips, as if he were smoking a cigarette. I turned away, continuing with my deliberations until it was a quarter to six and the lecture was over. Thanking the students for their attendance and wishing them a nice week, I gathered my papers and turned my Macbook off. The students were filing out of the room, chattering among themselves. A pencil tapped the front of my lectern.
Kibum stood before me when I looked up-not that I’d expected anyone else.
“I have a question, professor,” he said with a mocking smile, the pencil still placed against the corner of his mouth. Up close, the butt was covered in bite marks and the paint chipped.
I expected him to simply want to catch up with me, so I answered him affably.
“I’m not a professor, you shouldn’t call me that. Well, what’s your question?”
“Did you miss me?”
I looked at him in bewilderment. Of course he was not the person I’d known years ago, the kid with ambitions that fit him like his oversized clothing. Still, I did not know what to expect from him-I really did not. Quickly, I focused my attention on stacking my papers evenly, answering,
“It is nice to see you again, but certainly you know that there’s no way that we can be friends. You’re my student now.”
“Well,” Kibum laughed and settled down on my desk, his legs crossed. He was posing on there as if he was the cover for a men’s magazine. “Haven’t you become one old killjoy. Why would I want to be friends with you? Seriously.”
I sighed, figuring he was still mad at my past self, and that his SMS had probably been blatant cynicism that I had overlooked.
“If you don’t have any questions related to Stravinsky, I suggest you leave. Look, I’m new here, I just got this position, I don’t want to get involved again in any long outdated personal affairs. I simply want to do my job. So please leave me alone.”
“Nope, not gonna happen, professor,” he said.
I decided to ignore him and walked toward the stairs-he’d follow me anyway, else I’d lock him in. But then he called after me, loud enough for anyone who was passing the door to hear,
“Do you remember that time when you met those three girls backstage after a gig? You know, the foreign ones?”
I did. I yanked the key back out of the lock, turned, and dashed back to him. There I spat,
“What are you trying to do, Kibum?”
“Just chatting, reminiscing.” He shrugged. “But what I mean is, you really made it good right? Screwing them-“
My hands grabbed his shoulders in a desperate grip.
“Kibum,” I huffed, “why are you doing this?”
“Would you let go? It hurts. Thanks. I’m doing this because there are these photos on my phone. You know, I save old picture because I don’t want to forget the good times I’ve spent. Especially with you and the others. And I came across these…”
He fumbled inside his vintage bag, his feet meanwhile swinging beneath the table like a schoolboy’s. Then he pulled out his phone.
“Here it is. Those pictures are really becoming, wouldn’t you agree?”
With an innocent smile, he turned the phone around so I could see. My breath caught, like my lungs had suddenly decided to simply give it a rest. On the screen were pictures of me and said three girls. Even now, I still remember exactly what the images looked like, how the sides of my hair were still shaved in them, and how all three girls were on my body, all skin, glistening limbs entangled like a pile of earthworms. We were flesh that melted together, mouths opened with moans I was glad I couldn’t hear. It was the most disgusting thing I’d seen in a long time.
“Why do you have those? Delete them. Now. And I want you to leave. I don’t care about the grudges you’re still holding, I have no idea what you’re trying to do right now. Just leave. We don’t know each other anymore, Kibum. You’re my student and nothing else.”
“Just one second,” he replied, slipping the phone back into his bag. “There’s this hypothesis that I’ve been entertaining.”
“Leave. Or else I will have to file a complaint.”
“But professor, I said I have a hypothesis. You’re supposed to encourage the autonomous learning process of your students. So listen to it.”
My shoulders sagged and I said foolishly,
“You have a minute. Will you leave me alone then?”
“Sure.” I took a few steps away from him while he slid back on the table to fold his legs beneath him. Afterward, he chewed on the pencil for a moment, before explaining,
“I’ve been pondering the correlation of two circumstances which I became aware of. In the first place, I have this phone here in my pocket with some nice pictures on it. It’s a smartphone so it has Internet access, so that I can visit sites like, say, Facebook. We’re friends on there, do you remember? Anyway, and then there’s also you, who has a job newly earned. Just gotten your degree, without a stable reputation at this institute, yet. Hm, so I was thinking, making a logical connection, I’d say it’d be an interesting experiment to post those pictures on Facebook and tag you, and then see how that behaves related to your job. I mean, if there are suddenly a bunch of pictures flooding the internet of the new professor nailing three girls-at once!-what do you think would happen? Of course I haven’t conducted the experiment yet, but my hypothesis is… that you’d most probably lose your job.”
His head was titled to the side as he looked at me-so innocent, so intellectual, so cunning.
He was going to blackmail me. Before that day I would have never thought that my past would come and catch me with a noose around my neck, and especially not through Kibum.
I breathed for a moment, loudly. Everything was always so loud inside that room.
“What… do you want me to do? It’s money, isn’t it?”
He looked at me quizzically. The pencil stuck between his parted lips, he mumbled around it,
“I don’t want money. I would never ask you for money.”
“Then, what? Wait,” I added hastily, “let’s discuss this some place else. Let’s have some coffee and talk about it.”
“Ah, no. I really like it here. It’s one of those buildings whose walls emit the wisdom they’ve witnessed, don’t you think? Anyway, come here.”
I gingerly took the few steps that separated us, stopping directly in front of the desk. I didn’t dare disobey him. He looked at my face as if he was studying it thoroughly. Then he lowered his pencil and let it drop onto the table with a clunk.
“Kiss me.”
I was about to ask, “What?!” but stopped before I could expose myself. Instead, I just stared. It dawned on my, though, that it should have been obvious to me that he’d want that-it made so much sense.
“You’re despicable,” I belched out.
He shrugged. “It’s not like you don’t want to kiss me. So do it, or the pictures flood your Facebook account.”
So I figured there was no way to avoid this. I was used to kissing people, and the act itself had never excited me much, but he was a man, and he was forcing me. As I pushed our lips together, it felt like a grater had been stuck inside my stomach, and that humiliation and disgust were pulling it slowly through my intestines.
I leaned away, but he yanked me back in and whispered against my mouth,
“Kiss me right. Like you kissed all those girls.”
It was impossible to object, so I did as he wanted me to. My heart beat with fear of someone coming in while his tongue dug into my mouth. Suddenly, I heard the sound of a shutter and, opening my eyes, I saw that he’d taken a picture.
“For future reference,” he said, pushing my chest away, and getting up. “I might visit you in your consultation-hour, professor. Have a nice evening!”
With that he was gone, but the noose around my neck remained.
Not to say that I thought that it was over, that he’d give it a rest after a simple kiss, but when I went to bed that night I was relieved that I didn’t have to see him for a few days. I was trying to think of a solution with which I could keep him from spreading those pictures. None came to my mind. Of course, I didn’t expect him to get back to me on the same day he had started this. But before I could fall asleep, I received an SMS from him.
- You know that the last toilet stall in the men’s room is twice as large as the others? Let’s meet there tomorrow. At half-past one.
See you then~
I didn’t reply-there was no need to. Surely, he didn’t care if I wanted to, if I was available or not. I would be there. Still, I was scared of what he’d want from me. The number of possibilities was narrow actually, but I didn’t want to fall asleep with the image of the two of us engaging in sexual activities. Right then, I was still convinced I wouldn’t even be able to get it up with a guy. But I would.
The worst thing about entering the men’s room the next day wasn’t the sight of Kibum’s black vans at the bottom of the last cubicle, or the certainty that I would have to fling my self-respect out the window, it was the presence of the head of the faculty, my boss, who was on his way to a stall.
He was the most knowledgeable person I’d ever known, his field of expertise being historical musicology. I was convinced that there was no question to be thought of that he couldn’t answer.
My respect for him was infinite, but he was very old-as all great professors are-and age had left him with an uncanny likeliness to a mole with his small eyes and long profile. The only real problem with him was that time seemed to flow differently for him. If I set the speed of time as most people feel it to a value of 1, his estimate would be at about 0.7. Consequently, his movements and speech were both as if in slow motion.
Because of that, I knew that he’d be in the men’s room for long while, and the thought of kissing my student right next to him had me one impulse short of throwing up into one of the basins.
“Oh, hello… Mr. Kim,” he said to me then, and I cringed. From the corner of my eye I saw Kibum’s feet shuffling.
“Hello, professor.”
“I’ve heard…” he continued, “that you are doing well… conducting the Stravinsky seminar. Congratulations on that. If you are still in need of materials… please come by my office… I think I have some old essays… about the subjects in my files.”
I nodded and smiled. “That’s very nice. I’ll pick you up on your offer one of the next days. I’m sure I haven’t grasped the subject completely.”
The professor opened his mouth to speak, but it took a few seconds for the words to come out.
“Learning never stops. If you’ll excuse me now…” he said nodding toward the stalls, “Men my age have some inconveniencies… to deal with.”
I certainly had my fair share of inconveniencies as well, even though they were of a different nature. We said goodbye, and I walked toward the last stall. When I turned the knob it was unlocked.
Kibum was sitting on the windowsill. He greeted me with half a smile and his knees spread before him. I locked the door behind me and saw his lips part to speak, so I clamped my hand over his mouth quickly. Leaning in as close to his ear as possible, I whispered,
“Be quiet. There’s a professor in here. Please, let’s wait until he’s gone. Please.”
Kibum nodded beneath my hand. I let it sink reluctantly.
“Come here,” he whispered back, and pulled me in forcefully by wrapping his legs around my hips. I frowned but kept silent.
Just as he was sticking his hands beneath my shirt and I shivered at what I assumed was the cold air, the splashing sounds started from a few stalls over. I felt that I had never been more miserable in my life. Having to listen to my adored professor urinate while a man was feeling me up so that I wouldn’t lose my job was a situation I could have never imagined being in. But I didn’t have a lot of time to drown in self-pity, since Kibum started kissing the side of my neck with long, loud sucks. I flinched and hissed into his ear,
“Shit. Stop it, he’ll hear.”
Of course Kibum didn’t stop. And as much as I tried to concentrate on the nauseating image of my superior urinating, Kibum’s licks and touches were hard to ignore. They incited the grater on my insides, only that the tearing from before was now reduced to a burning tickle.
It made me want to throw up once again, right against the crook of Kibum’s neck, where my head was resting. I wanted the vomit to run down his back to show him what kind of person he was to force me into this.
Yet I did not throw up. Instead, I got an erection.
I willed it down, but it didn’t go away. I had never been good at controlling my libido.
Kibum pressed me up against the windowpane. He must have a nice view, I remember thinking that. Opposite the institute towered a large museum, which featured ancient art and which was so famous that it attracted tourists like an apple slice draws in ants.
“Don’t worry,” Kibum whispered-he must have noticed my constant glancing, “they won’t notice. If you ever want to snipe someone, this is the place to do it from. Those stupid tourists never look at the windows.”
The sound of a toilet flushing washed away my worries, since Kibum used the noise’s cover to squeeze my crotch. The unexpected sensation flatted out my mind completely, and-embarrassingly enough-I moaned out loud.
“You want me to take care of that?” he asked, his voice low again.
I shook my head vehemently. I would not let a man do that to me. But he ignored me of course, sank to his knees before me, and jerked my fly open.
“Sure,” he said, “I’ll do it anyway.”
After that, I bit into my sleeve while he was blowing me, feeling as good as I hadn’t in a long time. I pictured myself imagining that he was a woman, but in fact I was very much aware that the lips around me belonged to a man. And only then did I realize that apart from getting his revenge, what he wanted to achieve with this extortion was breaking me. Still, I was convinced that that would never happen. I was holding onto that thought when he flicked his tongue, and I came to the sound of another flushing toilet.
Afterward, he opened the toilet lid, and spat my semen into it. It splattered loudly-or at least it seemed that way to me-on impact with the water surface. I re-zipped my jeans, mentally preparing for what I assumed he’d want me to do-I’d never had another man’s penis in my hand let alone in my mouth.
Back against my ear to stay unnoticed, Kibum whispered,
“Sadly, I don’t have a lot of time right now, so I guess we’ll need to meet up again one of the next days.”
“Huh?” I breathed, utterly baffled. “You won’t force me to return… that? Is that not what you want from me?”
I could feel his lips smile into the skin beneath my ear.
“Oh, professor, you have so much yet to learn. Maybe you should look yourself up in the Encyclopedia of Gay Men instead of reading so much about Stravinsky.”
He left my ear and kissed me on the mouth, holding up his index finger for me to wait, while slipping out of the door, leaving me yet again. Why was he of all people, I wondered, a person to slip so stealthily through of doors, in and out of scenes and lives. No metaphor, no simile could describe the feeling I had for him better than simply saying that I hated him-I hated him with every muscle fiber of my heart.
Even though I doubted it after he was gone and I went on to spend the rest of the day on research, he really did not contact me again that day. If he kept his word then the next time we’d see each other would be in a few days. Time to get rid of the feeling of him-physically and mentally-and concentrate back on work.
During those days, I managed to get a lot done. I wrote a few hundred words of my doctoral thesis, which had been creeping about as arduously as a snail climbing a rose stem, wrote the script of the next three lectures, and had lunch with an ex-girlfriend (who had turned into an utterly plain, dreary woman). I even went out with some friends one night. It had become rare for me to do that since I’d left the band I had been playing in and given up on my related promiscuity.
Because I was so busy, the day he contacted me again surprised me by arriving so early. He wrote me a text that we’d meet in the library’s backroom, and, even though I felt uneasy knowing about what I would have to do again, I wasn’t scared. When he showed up in the evening, he honored me with two sentences of smalltalk, after which everything went like last time. And once again, I could not think of an explanation for his not wanting any sexual favor from me.
The next day was again the day of the Stravinsky lecture. I thought that it wouldn’t be a problem looking at Kibum from the point of view of my professional self, and it wasn’t at first.
Like usual, he was sitting at the far left of the room, right next to the wall with the essay ‘The Unity of the Senses’ scrawled from top to bottom. Pleased, he looked, like always, and the pencil was back between his teeth. Some faint feeling stirred in my gut, but I didn’t make much of it, decided I’d simply focus on the other side of the room.
So I began the lecture. The subjects of that day’s teaching unit were the French society around 1910 and its reactions to other works that had preceded The Rite of Spring, and whose premieres were related to the Rite’s scandal. Particularly, I wanted to focus on Debussy’s Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un Faune.
What I had not thought of, though, was that that piece would provide Kibum with a target.
Being oblivious to that, I started talking about the composition and its-at that time-unprecedented choreography. I explained the stardom revolving around the main dancer, Nijinsky, and the reactions of the audience to his performance.
“At the end of the ballet,” I said, “the Faun takes the veil he acquired from one of the Nymphs and lays it down on a rock. He descends upon it and performs a masturbatory action on top of it. As you can guess, that small scene shocked the audience immensely.”
I was about to go on talking about Nijinsky’s choreography for the Rite, but from the corner of my eye I saw a pencil lifted into the air. This was a lecture not a seminar, but I couldn’t simply ignore a student-especially not Kibum.
“Yeah?” I said reluctantly.
“Even considering how the times were back then, I feel like the scandal around Debussy’s prelude is a complete overreaction of the audience,” Kibum explained.
I felt that I should probably not ask him why, but again, couldn’t simply remain silent.
“How come?”
“When you look at the recreated version of Nijinsky’s choreography, the masturbation-scene is extremely short and very simplified. It’s just one thrust of his hips, and a silent gasp.” The other students began mumbling quietly-I perceived it as white noise, while I was trying not to fall into the way Kibum was looking at me so smugly from across the room. “As it happens, I read the poem by Mallarmé in another course. I think when you’ve read it, it’s clear that its whole theme-and thus the theme of the ballet as well-is lust and desire. I have the poem here, don’t you think it’d be helpful to discuss it?”
“I don’t think it will be necessary,” I replied as if on auto-pilot. Without noticing, really, I was sucked in by the way he was talking about lust and desire.
“But it would explain a lot about the French society, about the prevailing conservatism. After such a poem, every sane person would expect porn to be enacted on stage.”
Some students laughed, and Kibum continued,
“Why don’t you come here and fetch it so that you could read it out loud? So the other people here know what we’re talking about.”
With a stiff posture, I went and took it. Our fingers brushed. I recoiled.
Back at the podium, I read it out. I knew that we’d dismissed our teacher-student relation the moment Kibum had started talking about masturbation, but now that I was already so caught up in the things I was sure he wanted me to think about, there was no way to focus my mind on anything else. Mallarmé’s words drenched my brain like an aphrodisiac.
“Inert, all things burn in the tawny hour
Not seeing by what art there fled away together
Too much of hymen desired by one who seeks there
The natural A: then I’ll wake to the primal fever
Erect, alone, beneath the ancient flood, light’s power,
Lily! And the one among you all for artlessness,” I read.
The wooden stand in front of me concealed my erection to the students. I felt it hot inside my pants.
“Of kisses that the gods kept so well mingled:
For I’d scarcely begun to hide an ardent laugh
In one girl’s happy depths (holding back
With only a finger, so that her feathery candor
Might be tinted by the passion of her burning sister,
The little one, naïve and not even blushing)”
There was no thought of a woman in my mind, what I saw was Kibum (naïve and not even blushing) naked from the waist up, white feathery shoulders beneath a translucent veil. I could see myself taking that veil and imitating the faun, lowering it into my lap…
“Than from my arms, undone by vague dying,
This prey, forever ungrateful, frees itself and is gone,
Not pitying the sob with which I was still drunk.”
When I finished the poem, my mind was soaked with unthinkable thoughts, my groin pressed against the stand-the feeling of utter wretchedness had overcome me.
“I go to see the shadow you have become.”
I saw a student lifting her hand, frown on her face. I picked on her gladly.
“I disagree. The society at that time could never have expected this to be enacted on stage. Besides, Debussy never intended to recreate a narration in his works,” she said and then continued to discuss the subject with Kibum.
I counted the minutes until I could close the lecture and hoped that my erection would be gone by then.
It was gone by then, but what remained was Kibum. He sat at his desk, waiting until everyone had left. I knew what was going to happen, so I didn’t even worry.
When the sound of trampling feet had disappeared, he said,
“Where are we going to get it on today? I think I’ll let you choose.”
“I believe ‘nowhere’ is not going to be accepted?” I asked.
He glanced at his phone, which was the only thing still left on his desk. Small as it was, it still looked intimidating.
“No.”
“Well, then…”
We ended up inside my office again. “C’mere,” he said, and sat me down on my desk. My fingers were trembling, curled around its edge, as he went down on me yet again. This room had a lot more privacy than the toilet stall or the library, but I was still worried about someone noticing us. And of course, my thoughts circled around how despicable he was. With every one of his sucks, I suffered more from my hatred for him.
Yet in other ways, I didn’t suffer at all. Just like the last two times, he sent me into orbits I had never been in before. My toes curled inside my loafers and one of my hands broke away from the table to delve into his hair.
There was nowhere to spit the semen into, so he swallowed it. A shiver ran down my back that I couldn’t hide. He smirked.
“Do you want to touch me now?” he asked, standing up.
I exhaled lengthily.
“No, I don’t want to touch you. The thought of doing that disgusts me.”
He nodded, slowly, as if he had just grasped the crucial part of a complicated math problem.
“Alright, if that’s the case, then I don’t want you to touch me, either. But I think that we should meet more often. I actually like having your thing in my mouth.”
I kept silent.
“So,” he continued, “how about tomorrow? I have a course from two to four and another one from six to eight. In the meantime I’m free.”
“That’s when my consultation hour is-“
“That’s great, then we have your office all to ourselves again.”
“No,” I cut in, “I can’t. I really can’t. The door is going to be unlocked and there will be students coming in. Choose a different time.”
He sighed but he had a smile on his face. It created dimples in his cheeks.
“Then in the evening. Till when are the practice rooms opened?”
“Till ten.”
“Perfect.”
I dreamt of the Faun and his veil that night, and the image of him kept making appearances throughout the morning. After I’d had a quick lunch in the canteen with my friend Jinki, who was a scientific assistant as well, I went to the media library to search for different interpretations of The Rite until it was time to move back to my office for the consultation hours.
I didn’t expect a lot of students, I had talked to a woman who wanted to discuss the topic of her presentation for my other course with me, but apart from her, I didn’t think anyone else would come.
The woman knocked at my door at around half-past four, and we talked about her presentation, but afterwards I was alone for a long time. Then another student came in to ask me about literature on Stravinsky that I recommended. I printed out a list with book titles and handed it to him. When it was almost six, I was about to leave my office and go down to the library again, but someone knocked at my door. I called them in.
A young-looking boy came inside. His head was a hazelnut balloon of hair and his eyes two black marbles. I recalled having passed him on the staircase once or twice, but I was convinced that he wasn’t in any of my courses.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Kim,” he said politely.
“Good afternoon,” I replied. “Have a seat.”
He complied and I waited for him to speak.
“My name is Lee Taemin and I’m not in any of your courses, if you were wondering,” he began.
“What can I help you with, then?” I asked and he hesitated for a moment.
“I’m here to talk to you about Kibum.”
I inhaled sharply, my fists clenching on top of the table.
“What about him?” I asked, playing innocent, in case this had nothing to do with what I assumed it had. How could he have noticed us?
“Um. We’re friends, Kibum and I. He told me about the… affair the two of you are having. Don’t worry-“ he gushed, probably having noticed my terrified expression, “I won’t tell anyone. I know it’s not your fault. I wish I could make him stop, but I don’t think I can.”
Pausing, he looked at me empathetically. I didn’t know what to reply.
“Well,” he started again, “what I came here to tell you is that he doesn’t do it because he hates you. You think that, right?”
I felt uncomfortable laying my personal feelings bare in front of a student and answered awkwardly,
“Yes, of course I do. He is blackmailing me-what else could I be thinking about that?”
“He told me about that time when you were playing in a band together until you left for the university. That you got along really well, but that you then-“
“Please. That’s my personal past, I don’t think that it’s the right subject to discuss with you.”
“Yes, of course. When Kibum talks about blackmailing you, he says he does it for revenge, but I’m sure that it’s only partly true. That’s what I came to tell you. I’m sure he’s still in love with you.”
I made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a gasp.
“I highly doubt that,” I said, “And I don’t think that it’s of any importance. He’s blackmailing me one way or another.”
The boy shook his head.
“What I’m trying to say is that if you just told him no, I don’t think he would release those pictures.” I flinched at the implication of his having seen them. “He doesn’t want you real harm. He wouldn’t destroy your career. You should just refuse, and it’s going to stop. I’m sure.”
“Well.” Sighing, I stood up. “I appreciate your concern. I will consider what you suggested, but I ask you to keep to your own business. This is only between Kibum and me.”
He looked concerned as he stood up.
“I will. Thanks for your time. Have a nice evening.”
“You, too. Goodbye.
“Goodbye.”
And he’d left.
As promised, Kibum and I met in front of the piano rooms at eight. I let us in and locked the door once inside.
Kibum strode over to the piano, a brown one with a prominent grain, and stroked the lid while I waited near the door. After he’d been staring down on it wordlessly for some time, he said,
“Yesterday, in the lecture, you were really agitated, right?”
“It was a lecture like any other. Let’s get on with this,” I replied, hoping to get him to stop talking.
“Right, but I saw it, your boner, I mean. It’s kind of funny. Do you happen to have a faun fetish, or what was it?” he asked sarcastically, then added, “It couldn’t have possibly been my elaborations on the subject?”
“Could you just… do the usual and then leave me alone?”
Laughing quietly, he drew away from the piano.
“Or,” he said, “I could tell you how hot it was when you pressed your crotch against the microphone stand. Who would’ve thought you’d be such a needy person that you can’t even keep yourself together during a lecture.”
“I wasn’t needy. I just didn’t want the students to see.”
“Well, don’t worry about that, I don’t think anyone saw.”
I didn’t reply to that, and he seemed to have mercy on me, called me over and slid down my pants.
Afterwards, I was slouching against the piano, trying to catch my breath. Kibum was standing close to me, resting one hand on my shoulder, the way you do when you want to comfort a stranger.
“There’s a question I want to ask you,” he began. I nodded, swallowing. “When you were reading that poem and looking up at me, you had that certain flushed expression. Did you think about wanting to fuck me, then?”
Fucking him, sleeping with him, going to bed together, I was insulted by the idea, and had certainly not been thinking about that while reading the poem. The way Kibum’s mouth enunciated the word ‘fuck’ and the sly expression lathered on top of it were replaying in my head. So I went out to a bar that evening, to get drunk.
I had adapted the habit of going to bars that had a respectable clientele: no drunks, no drug-users, no smoke-smothered air or booming basses. But that night, I did not care and went to the run-down kind. Bars in which everyone was intellectually stimulating got me thinking far too much. (And isn’t that absolutely counterproductive?)
The one I ended up entering wasn’t the type with ear-shattering pop, but it featured screeching guitars and screaming singers. I had frequented it some years ago.
Pleased with the cloaked atmosphere, I slid onto a seat in one of the corners. The longhaired bartender came over to me immediately, and I ordered a whiskey on the rocks.
While I was sipping it, I looked around the bar. In the far back, there was a narrow stage with full equipment but without a band. Two women, both dressed in leather skirts, were dancing alone on top of it, shaking their hips to the guitars’ unconventional rhythm.
Suddenly, someone’s hand landed on my shoulder.
“I don’t believe it, man!” the guy called.
It took me a few seconds to recognize him-the hair was black and short and there were new tattoos snaking up his neck. But there was no mistaking it.
“Minho?”
“Yeah, hi!” He let himself drop into the seat next to mine. “How the hell did you end up here, Jonghyun? Last time I heard, you were a renowned professor.”
I sighed, thinking about how improbable it was that two remnants of the very same past came creeping up on me in the time span of two weeks. And why was everyone so obsessed with calling me ‘professor’?
“I just wanted to have a drink in solitude.”
Minho didn’t get the hint so we went on talking. He told me about his several band projects-if I’d followed his (admittedly complicated) elaborations correctly, he was currently a part of three. One of them was the band we’d been playing in together, but as he said, it wasn’t the same anymore since Kibum and I were gone.
“You know,” he mused, “We had real ambitions back then, attempted a new style. It can almost be called pop what we’re doing now, if you know what I’m saying. Of course it’s still loud and somewhat trashy, but it’s the usual 1-6-4-5 crap. Fuck, how I loved the harmonies you wrote, man.”
I had downed three drinks by then and lulled around the fourth one,
“You’re giving me way too much credit, dude.”
“No, I mean it! After you left, everything was such a fucking mess. Kibum turned into a raging bitch and going on without a lead singer was such a pain in the ass.”
“Well, sorry, but studying musicology is my true calling,” I said, laughing out loud. I was drunk.
“You can’t lie to me, man. Squeezing your skinny ass behind a desk can’t be as much fun as playing with us. C’mon. And think about all the girls you fucked. I bet you don’t get half as much pussy now.”
I fell into a fit of guttural laughter at that.
“Well,” he said, grinning back at me, “Speaking of girls, have you heard that Kibum’s back in town?”
This time, we both guffawed as if it were the funniest joke ever told. For me, it was in a way. When the laughter had died down, I said,
“I sure do. He’s my student.”
“No,” Minho made, his eyes looking dangerously close to dropping out of his head.
I told him about it, but of course left out the details of the blackmailing.
“You’re shitting me,” he said as I was done, “That guy… the only nice memory I have of him is of his face when you humiliated him. Honestly, up to this day, I think it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever witnessed. He looked like he’d been slapped. Do you remember that? It was hilarious, man. And he cried his eyes out after that-I’d never seen a guy cry like that. My baby sister used to cry that way when she’d pooped in her diaper.”
He exploded into laughter once more. I silently stirred my drink, watching the ice clink together, unable to hear the sound over the music.
After that, we changed topics, talked about my job, my apartment, his girlfriend (apparently, she had breasts as big as basketballs. I wasn’t very impressed.)
It was almost two when we got up to leave. I was once again struck by how tall he was. When you hold you thumb and forefinger next to each other, that’s us. One short and stubby, and the other tall and lanky.
We walked the small distance to the subway station together. As we parted, he asked for my phone number, saying that we definitely should not lose touch again. I gave it to him and also saved his, but in fact I did not plan on seeing him ever again.
For the first time since reuniting with Kibum, I felt as if I had something with which to spite him. He and Minho had always disliked each other because of incomprehensible reasons. I used to be fond of both. (And how that had changed, I thought. From both to neither.)
So when we got together again two days later, I decided I would tell him about my meeting Minho.
At first, Kibum seemed disinterested. He was sitting cross-legged on top of my desk, face resting in one of his palms.
But I went on recounting the conversation we’d had about him, only that I invented the parts I had supposedly said. He did not need to know that I had actually kept silent when Minho made fun of him.
“I really like talking about mutual friends,” I said. I used so much cynicism-how out of character for me. “He reminded me that you used to call yourself Key back then. Because music…?”
He looked at me with narrowed eyes.
“… is the Key to everyone’s heart.”
“Ah, I remember that now. How nice.”
At least for this short instant, I had turned the tables. Kibum was sitting there, obviously searching for a way to keep the embarrassment from seeping too deeply. It should have occurred to me earlier that his sixteen-year-old self might be his weak spot.
Still, I had forgotten that this wasn’t a battle of wit or of hitting each other where it hurt-in reality he had his boot positioned on my throat. He demonstrated that to me beautifully the next moment by saying,
“You know, I don’t want to talk about that. It’s boring. I’d much rather make out with you. And that’s what we’re gonna do, so if you’d come over here…”
I complied, of course.
I expected aggression, his teeth in my lips and his tongue forced into my mouth to clog my airways. But it was almost gentle, the way he pushed me against the wall. He even touched my face albeit only with the very tips of his fingers, and closed his eyes. I saw it since I kept mine open, watching him until he was done with me.
It did instill something in me, something like the swelling beep of the alarm clock in the morning. Half asleep, you write it off as a remnant of your dream, but then it starts escalating and screaming at you, “Get the fuck out of bed!” and there’s no denying that you’re late and that it is time to get out of your cozy cocoon.
My thoughts followed similar patters when it came to Kibum. Even though I did not like admitting it in front of myself, Lee Taemin’s suggestion had lingered. And Kibum’s sudden want to kiss did not help kick my mind out of the orbits in which it was currently circling.
And what was worst of all was that, after he’d kissed me in my office, he did not show up again. At first I was relieved, then confused, then worried. I went through the last meeting in my head, and it did not need an effort to discern how odd it had been. It felt almost like a betrayal, that he’d skipped the usual sexual favor. (I caught myself using the word ‘favor’ all too often when it should have actually been something along the lines of ‘punishment’.)
After the first week of his absence, my gut was churning so conspicuously that I pulled Lee Taemin aside when I caught sight of him in the hall to ask him where Kibum was.
“He told me he’s sick. I don’t believe him, though. He also said that he made some kind of mistake… maybe you should check on him.”
Mistake. Was it really? Or was it his cunning? If it was the latter, it was working. It had been two weeks since he’d last shown his face at the university, and I had even gone as far as to text him, but there was no reply. At night, I lay in my bed, feeling like an eel on a sandbank, rolling and writhing. It was the sex, as simple as that. I had ran right into his trap, I thought, I was five years older, I should have the experience to know when I was holding my face right into his open maw. But it had happened, and my libido had been switched into high performance. Now I was used to getting laid every other day, even if it was by a man.
I turned and tossed, unable to sleep and unable to stay awake without thinking about everything I did not want to think about. As I threw myself onto my stomach, my arms were squeezed into the mattress. Because my hand was already so conveniently placed, it snuck into my pajama bottoms. I reached over to the nightstand to grab my phone, opening the folder with the porn files. Large breasts, open thighs, butt turned toward the camera, couple on a picnic rug. God, his arms looked strong as he held her to himself and even though my phone’s resolution was bad, I could see the tendons in his neck. I don’t remember through how many pictures I scrolled, who I stared at and who I ignored, but the feeling of coming by my own hand was foreign and utterly unsatisfactory.
Everything ugly was lying in a pile in front of my bed. Each time I climbed inside, knowing that I’d be alone with my thoughts for a while now, I plodded through the bog of unfulfilled sexual desires, of confusion and hatred, and of Lee Taemin’s words. It was like a disease that had spread to me-I felt physically sick. Another few days later, it reached a point, where only the chance of calling every contact with Kibum off and thus also the need and distress I was feeling, seemed that big of a salvation that I was willing to risk falling prey to Kibum’s threats.
At the university, I logged into the system and looked up his address. If you just told him no, I don’t think he would release those pictures. He doesn’t want you real harm. He wouldn’t destroy your career. You should just refuse, and it’s going to stop. I’m sure. I held onto that while trying to convince myself of visiting Kibum and following Lee Taemin’s words.
The day I had finally managed to lay my worries aside and go see him, turned out to be at the end of the following week. It was an afternoon that blinded with its crispness. It was so clear that it appeared as if the clouds had all moved to the upper air-layers.
I arrived in front of the building, a house typical for the city we lived in. Shops of various kinds filled the first floor, above were normal apartments. I found his house quickly, and pressed the button next to his name.
“Yeah?” it came grainy through the intercom after a few seconds.
“It’s Jonghyun.”
Another silence followed, after which he said, “Backyard,” and the buzz of the door resounded.
I walked through the entrance hall, whose tiles were covered in illegible graffiti. Outside in the backyard, the graffiti continued beneath the uncut vines like a dirty ribbon. I found the door (which was almost completely hidden by a bush) and climbed up the staircase. Those buildings were wonderful; I regretted having moved into a modern flat.
Upstairs, I rang the doorbell, but no one answered. When I was about to ring it again, I noticed the door was slightly ajar, so I simply went inside the apartment.
“Kibum?” I called once in the hallway. He did not seem to be there. When I went into the capacious living-room I heard water running. Once again, I called his name, and this time he responded, voice almost completely swallowed by the sound of the water.
“I’m in the shower. I’ll be out in ten minutes!”
Wonderful, I thought. Anxiety had been creeping up my back the whole day; the only thing I wished for was to get this over with quick. I did not want to spend another ten minutes inside his personal environment. Apartments make me feel like I am standing inside a person’s head.
But, well, there was nothing to do until Kibum came out of the shower aside from taking a look around.
The apartment had the typical high walls, all covered in white ingrain wallpaper, and the floor was parquet that was unevenly laid. Overall, it was tidy, with the occasional exception of some clothes flung over the furniture. Two doors were in the wall next to me, one of which obviously led into the bathroom, and the other one had a glass square in the center, allowing me a look into the kitchen. I wondered where the bedroom was but then found a king size mattress in the opposite corner, right beneath the windows. It was a mere mattress; he didn’t even have a real bed. For some reason, that observation irked me. I took a closer look. The fitted sheet was of a faded orange, and below it strangely pattered stains were visible.
I was about to go over to the bookcase to inspect it, when I heard the jingle of an SMS. It was the major triad iPhones have by default. I had been distracted by looking around the apartment, but now the jingle woke me up like an alarm-clock, bringing my nervousness back in a flash. Back to worrying, I went over to the coffee table, on which the phone was lying. I don’t know what I expected to see on the lit-up screen, but not this. Definitely not the picture Kibum had taken on the day of the first lecture.
I gaped at it. There we were, kissing. Our mouths were open, meshed together, my eyebrows furrowed as if I was passionately kissing back even though what I had actually felt was distaste. And Kibum, he was smiling slightly, eyes open by a slit, wide enough for me to see the black behind them. Involuntarily, I thought about the pictures he had used to blackmail me. It seemed like I was a different person in them, the way you look into a mirror and realize that your reflection is a being like everyone else, and they become someone who is not you entirely.
Over our picture, the text message Kibum had gotten was displayed. It was from Lee Taemin and read,
Go talk to him please. You’re making things worse for the both of you.
When I think about it now, I still cannot explain why that message unsettled me so deeply; it simply did. Maybe it was because of the picture I saw peeking through the letters, that it suggested to me that what Lee Taemin had told me concerning Kibum’s feelings was actually true.
I had come here to put a stop to our affair, and God, I still wanted that. But my heart was pounding so loudly through my ears that I almost missed out on the sudden absence of the running water’s sound. Almost.
I stood rigid in front of the coffee table, listening to the faint rustling coming from the bathroom. Then the door opened.
Kibum stepped out of it, not even looking in my direction at first. His hair was still damp, jet black, and he was wearing a shirt that fell loosely around his clavicles, and a pair of boxers.
“There you are,” he said, but I didn’t respond.
It is such a cliché that his wet, makeshift appearance drew me in so much, but also, in a way, I felt the symbolic significance weigh down on me. What I’d seen and felt recently was like being put onto a rack-at some point it only takes another centimeter and your head is ripped off.
Kibum’s newly washed self was that centimeter. And my head was gone.
I mouthed his name, our eyes caught. He looked confused, but when I said, “Come here, now,” it seemed to click.
While I had taken one step toward him, he had already crossed the whole room. And then suddenly I had him in my arms, our mouths melding, sliding past and over and into each other. Somehow, we managed to get over toward the mattress, and I flung him onto it ruthlessly.
There we were in a pile on top of the orange sheet. Kibum’s shirt was yanked over his head as fast as possible so that I could press myself up against him, my nose into his neck. When he’d disposed of my shirt as well, I slid closer and then, then I brushed his hip and felt his erection hard against me. I shivered quietly. All I wanted was to get my hands around it. But we were busy running our fingers over each other, over my chest and over his shoulders. I savored the feeling of his sharp shoulder blades, the way I could feel the muscles firm and strong and solid.
He started grinding our hips together, but I wouldn’t have it, shoved him away once more to get rid of everything still in the way. I wrapped my hand around his penis finally, and when I heard myself sigh loudly, the feeling of wanting to hear Kibum’s voice instead seized me. I squeezed him. And the sound coming from his mouth was more of a sob than a moan, and with his touched out breath it blew the last layer of willpower away. We were reduced to crawling hands and lips and skin, ravishing each other, squirming over the pale orange as if it were liquid sunlight.
I think we both couldn’t take it anymore, at least I couldn’t, so I turned him over, shoved his front hard into the mattress. His face flushed, he gazed at me from the corner of his eye. His profile looked luscious like that when it was pressed into the sheets.
Light from outside was slanting through the window, lying down on top of us. It was that certain rare one which is brought about by an afternoon in the middle of Fall, that is so orange that it surpasses the color of the trees. It dyed Kibum’s skin in its hue, all the way across from his thick neck down to his narrow hips and the beginning of his thighs that I was sitting on. I didn’t have any inhibitions left to tell myself that thinking ‘Beautiful’ was inappropriate, so I thought it. Because it was.
Then he shoved a condom and the lubricant at me, and I applied both, about to hold him down and take him, but he slapped my hand away.
“Wait, wait,” he mumbled hastily. I watched him prepare himself and cursed under my breath, because I wanted my fingers to be his.
Finally, he was done, and I didn’t even care to ask ‘Okay?’ or ‘Ready?’ or any of the like. I simply wanted wanted wanted him.
It went fast then, rushed. Still, I remember thinking that his insides didn’t feel very different from a woman’s, but the sensation of his edgy body, his voice, deeper than mine, made a difference so huge that it threw me completely off center.
It was all a seemingly infinite spiral, a vortex sucking me in. The only things I was focused on were outrunning myself with the speed of my thrusts and the raw sound of our voices so alien, like the melody you don’t recognize because it’s played in a foreign arrangement.
Somewhere half along the way, Kibum’s voice gave out and his body snapped up, almost throwing me off. I didn’t take much notice, only pressed him more tightly to myself, the thought of stopping nowhere on my mind. When I finally came, it was almost brutal, and my mind was gushing out of my head, spilling onto the mattress. The moment you’ve jumped and you’re mid-air, right before you’re pulled back down to the ground and you’re in a state of zero-gravity-thoughtless, weightless.
Then my mind slipped back in and I sank down flat on top of his back and I realized that I had lost myself in him, in the most literal sense of the phrase.
There was nothing after that except for the feeling of Kibum’s warm hand on my forearm, just the blank space of my closed lids. It seemed so serene.
But the moment didn’t last long; after what felt like no more than a minute, Kibum stirred, crawling out beneath me. I opened my eyes, watched him fetch a dishtowel to clean himself off. When he was done, he let it drop to the floor and came back to the mattress, where he lay down without a word.
So there we were, flatted out next to each other in silence. I assumed he expected me to confess what we must have both been thinking about, but I didn’t dare. Kibum used the idleness to lighten a cigarette. Its ashes fell into the broad cracks inside the floorboards.
“Some very few moments ago, just now, basically, I thought of something,” he said eventually. “It was like a déja-vu, only that the surfacing memory wasn’t fiction, but my own real memory.” He took a drag from the cigarette. I was listening carefully.
“I think I should tell you about it. It’s interesting. You’ll like it.
“You know, some years ago, I was playing in a band. I was sixteen then. We were all pretentious as fuck but I liked it a lot, actually. It was an all-guy band, and the other four weren’t easy on me all the time, I was the youngest.” He took another drag. “The guy who wrote the songs and lyrics was also our lead singer. He dyed his hair dark brown, and always wore a little eyeliner around the outer corners of his eyes. I was so infatuated with his eyes, I can’t even tell you. And when he sang, his voice was so soft and special, that the stupid sixteen-year-old me always thought the whole world was upholstered with velvet.” The drag he took now was drawn out, as if he was acting in an old black-and-white movie.
“Well, I was sixteen so I guess I would have fallen for anything that paid me attention and had a dick, but that guy was really something. So yeah, I was head over heels for him.
“We got along well even though we were five years apart. After the practice sessions, we used to stay in the band room together, and he’d make me sing, because he thought I was good at it or something. I’m not, though.”
He had finished the cigarette by now, stubbed it out on the bare floor, and lit another one.
“So I considered him a friend, a real good one. Not the we’re-bandmates-so-you-can-take-my-guitar-and-I-fuck-your-girl kind of friends, but real ones. I was sure he thought so, too.
“Pretty quickly, after the first few meet-ups, actually, he started flirting with me. He had that way of touching me when he was talking to me. It was like he’d memorized a book on how to flirt. And when he made me sing he locked gazes with me and his pupils were huge and I was fucking scared of messing up completely. Even though I kind of had self-esteem issues at that time, after a few weeks I was beginning to believe that he actually liked me back.” The cigarette was burning by itself, the tip slowly turning into ashes.
“All my female friends I told about this, said I should confess. But I was, you could say, tremendously speech-impaired, so I decided it would be best to take some physical action instead.
From: Your Secret Santa
Title: Bitonal
Pairing: Jonghyun/Key
Rating: R
Warnings: sex
Authors’ Notes: I’m really sorry if this is not what you wanted ;A;
On the first day of the new semester I did not feel particularly scared, or even intimidated. In hindsight, though, being zestful was completely uncalled for, considering the SMS I had gotten a week before, which read,
- Long time no see. I’m glad to be back from America, and I’m glad to see you again. In case you’re wondering, I’ve heard of your teaching at my university and decided to come to your Stravinsky seminar.
It’s always nice meeting old friends again.
- Kibum
Although it left me with a feeling of general weirdness, since he was now going to be my student and not my friend, which he’d been some years ago, I still agreed with him-seeing old friends again is always nice.
I had one course to teach that day, which was actually quite the amount. Scientific assistants like me do not get to play professor very often; most of the time, we help our superiors with their research. It goes without saying that I was thrilled to have two courses to conduct solely on my own. Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’ and the seminar with the wonderfully original title ‘What is bad music?’ were all mine.
I was so caught up in my preparations for the course I had to teach in the afternoon that the thoughts about Kibum’s SMS lay blanketed beneath my heaps of papers on Stravinsky. When the clock above my desk struck four PM, I gathered my materials and left my office. The lecture hall I was supposed to teach in is directly beneath the roof-the biggest one the music faculty has to offer-but in comparison to the facilities of the other institutions, it is fairly small.
It was almost forgotten, even as I entered the lecture hall, that I’d see that guy again. And it was no big deal to me, really, it was just another old friend from another old life.
Standing behind the microphone on its wooden stand, I tried not to feel nervous. I was only twenty-six, had just gotten my Master of Arts and only taught once the semester before. Those students sitting before me in the narrow room were all inquisitive, talented people, demanding an excellent education. The previous night I’d dreamt of this situation, but instead of heads, my students had all had light bulbs on top of their shoulders and I was zapping electricity into them to make them glow. It was a silly dream.
I looked at the clock then, and it was a quarter past four-time to begin. I cleared my throat and said,
“Welcome to this semester’s course on Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Spring.’ As I hope you all know, it is one of the most influential works of the beginning of last century. The pop song of new music so to say. I’ll hand the list of attendants around so you can fill in your name and email, please.”
The first lecture had begun, and I felt confident about myself, I felt that I had the presence of an authority and the correct intellectual connection with my students.
Stravinsky proved to be an interesting subject; I was so caught up in giving an introduction to his persona that I only noticed Kibum about halfway through. It might also have been due to his black hair and casual but stylish clothing. He’d been blond back when we knew each other, and his clothes had been so much like mine only always a little off-kilter. And I remember thinking that god, he looked grown, that his eyes were sharp and so keen that they reminded me of a fox.
When our gazes met, he simply smiled and stuck his pencil between his lips, as if he were smoking a cigarette. I turned away, continuing with my deliberations until it was a quarter to six and the lecture was over. Thanking the students for their attendance and wishing them a nice week, I gathered my papers and turned my Macbook off. The students were filing out of the room, chattering among themselves. A pencil tapped the front of my lectern.
Kibum stood before me when I looked up-not that I’d expected anyone else.
“I have a question, professor,” he said with a mocking smile, the pencil still placed against the corner of his mouth. Up close, the butt was covered in bite marks and the paint chipped.
I expected him to simply want to catch up with me, so I answered him affably.
“I’m not a professor, you shouldn’t call me that. Well, what’s your question?”
“Did you miss me?”
I looked at him in bewilderment. Of course he was not the person I’d known years ago, the kid with ambitions that fit him like his oversized clothing. Still, I did not know what to expect from him-I really did not. Quickly, I focused my attention on stacking my papers evenly, answering,
“It is nice to see you again, but certainly you know that there’s no way that we can be friends. You’re my student now.”
“Well,” Kibum laughed and settled down on my desk, his legs crossed. He was posing on there as if he was the cover for a men’s magazine. “Haven’t you become one old killjoy. Why would I want to be friends with you? Seriously.”
I sighed, figuring he was still mad at my past self, and that his SMS had probably been blatant cynicism that I had overlooked.
“If you don’t have any questions related to Stravinsky, I suggest you leave. Look, I’m new here, I just got this position, I don’t want to get involved again in any long outdated personal affairs. I simply want to do my job. So please leave me alone.”
“Nope, not gonna happen, professor,” he said.
I decided to ignore him and walked toward the stairs-he’d follow me anyway, else I’d lock him in. But then he called after me, loud enough for anyone who was passing the door to hear,
“Do you remember that time when you met those three girls backstage after a gig? You know, the foreign ones?”
I did. I yanked the key back out of the lock, turned, and dashed back to him. There I spat,
“What are you trying to do, Kibum?”
“Just chatting, reminiscing.” He shrugged. “But what I mean is, you really made it good right? Screwing them-“
My hands grabbed his shoulders in a desperate grip.
“Kibum,” I huffed, “why are you doing this?”
“Would you let go? It hurts. Thanks. I’m doing this because there are these photos on my phone. You know, I save old picture because I don’t want to forget the good times I’ve spent. Especially with you and the others. And I came across these…”
He fumbled inside his vintage bag, his feet meanwhile swinging beneath the table like a schoolboy’s. Then he pulled out his phone.
“Here it is. Those pictures are really becoming, wouldn’t you agree?”
With an innocent smile, he turned the phone around so I could see. My breath caught, like my lungs had suddenly decided to simply give it a rest. On the screen were pictures of me and said three girls. Even now, I still remember exactly what the images looked like, how the sides of my hair were still shaved in them, and how all three girls were on my body, all skin, glistening limbs entangled like a pile of earthworms. We were flesh that melted together, mouths opened with moans I was glad I couldn’t hear. It was the most disgusting thing I’d seen in a long time.
“Why do you have those? Delete them. Now. And I want you to leave. I don’t care about the grudges you’re still holding, I have no idea what you’re trying to do right now. Just leave. We don’t know each other anymore, Kibum. You’re my student and nothing else.”
“Just one second,” he replied, slipping the phone back into his bag. “There’s this hypothesis that I’ve been entertaining.”
“Leave. Or else I will have to file a complaint.”
“But professor, I said I have a hypothesis. You’re supposed to encourage the autonomous learning process of your students. So listen to it.”
My shoulders sagged and I said foolishly,
“You have a minute. Will you leave me alone then?”
“Sure.” I took a few steps away from him while he slid back on the table to fold his legs beneath him. Afterward, he chewed on the pencil for a moment, before explaining,
“I’ve been pondering the correlation of two circumstances which I became aware of. In the first place, I have this phone here in my pocket with some nice pictures on it. It’s a smartphone so it has Internet access, so that I can visit sites like, say, Facebook. We’re friends on there, do you remember? Anyway, and then there’s also you, who has a job newly earned. Just gotten your degree, without a stable reputation at this institute, yet. Hm, so I was thinking, making a logical connection, I’d say it’d be an interesting experiment to post those pictures on Facebook and tag you, and then see how that behaves related to your job. I mean, if there are suddenly a bunch of pictures flooding the internet of the new professor nailing three girls-at once!-what do you think would happen? Of course I haven’t conducted the experiment yet, but my hypothesis is… that you’d most probably lose your job.”
His head was titled to the side as he looked at me-so innocent, so intellectual, so cunning.
He was going to blackmail me. Before that day I would have never thought that my past would come and catch me with a noose around my neck, and especially not through Kibum.
I breathed for a moment, loudly. Everything was always so loud inside that room.
“What… do you want me to do? It’s money, isn’t it?”
He looked at me quizzically. The pencil stuck between his parted lips, he mumbled around it,
“I don’t want money. I would never ask you for money.”
“Then, what? Wait,” I added hastily, “let’s discuss this some place else. Let’s have some coffee and talk about it.”
“Ah, no. I really like it here. It’s one of those buildings whose walls emit the wisdom they’ve witnessed, don’t you think? Anyway, come here.”
I gingerly took the few steps that separated us, stopping directly in front of the desk. I didn’t dare disobey him. He looked at my face as if he was studying it thoroughly. Then he lowered his pencil and let it drop onto the table with a clunk.
“Kiss me.”
I was about to ask, “What?!” but stopped before I could expose myself. Instead, I just stared. It dawned on my, though, that it should have been obvious to me that he’d want that-it made so much sense.
“You’re despicable,” I belched out.
He shrugged. “It’s not like you don’t want to kiss me. So do it, or the pictures flood your Facebook account.”
So I figured there was no way to avoid this. I was used to kissing people, and the act itself had never excited me much, but he was a man, and he was forcing me. As I pushed our lips together, it felt like a grater had been stuck inside my stomach, and that humiliation and disgust were pulling it slowly through my intestines.
I leaned away, but he yanked me back in and whispered against my mouth,
“Kiss me right. Like you kissed all those girls.”
It was impossible to object, so I did as he wanted me to. My heart beat with fear of someone coming in while his tongue dug into my mouth. Suddenly, I heard the sound of a shutter and, opening my eyes, I saw that he’d taken a picture.
“For future reference,” he said, pushing my chest away, and getting up. “I might visit you in your consultation-hour, professor. Have a nice evening!”
With that he was gone, but the noose around my neck remained.
Not to say that I thought that it was over, that he’d give it a rest after a simple kiss, but when I went to bed that night I was relieved that I didn’t have to see him for a few days. I was trying to think of a solution with which I could keep him from spreading those pictures. None came to my mind. Of course, I didn’t expect him to get back to me on the same day he had started this. But before I could fall asleep, I received an SMS from him.
- You know that the last toilet stall in the men’s room is twice as large as the others? Let’s meet there tomorrow. At half-past one.
See you then~
I didn’t reply-there was no need to. Surely, he didn’t care if I wanted to, if I was available or not. I would be there. Still, I was scared of what he’d want from me. The number of possibilities was narrow actually, but I didn’t want to fall asleep with the image of the two of us engaging in sexual activities. Right then, I was still convinced I wouldn’t even be able to get it up with a guy. But I would.
The worst thing about entering the men’s room the next day wasn’t the sight of Kibum’s black vans at the bottom of the last cubicle, or the certainty that I would have to fling my self-respect out the window, it was the presence of the head of the faculty, my boss, who was on his way to a stall.
He was the most knowledgeable person I’d ever known, his field of expertise being historical musicology. I was convinced that there was no question to be thought of that he couldn’t answer.
My respect for him was infinite, but he was very old-as all great professors are-and age had left him with an uncanny likeliness to a mole with his small eyes and long profile. The only real problem with him was that time seemed to flow differently for him. If I set the speed of time as most people feel it to a value of 1, his estimate would be at about 0.7. Consequently, his movements and speech were both as if in slow motion.
Because of that, I knew that he’d be in the men’s room for long while, and the thought of kissing my student right next to him had me one impulse short of throwing up into one of the basins.
“Oh, hello… Mr. Kim,” he said to me then, and I cringed. From the corner of my eye I saw Kibum’s feet shuffling.
“Hello, professor.”
“I’ve heard…” he continued, “that you are doing well… conducting the Stravinsky seminar. Congratulations on that. If you are still in need of materials… please come by my office… I think I have some old essays… about the subjects in my files.”
I nodded and smiled. “That’s very nice. I’ll pick you up on your offer one of the next days. I’m sure I haven’t grasped the subject completely.”
The professor opened his mouth to speak, but it took a few seconds for the words to come out.
“Learning never stops. If you’ll excuse me now…” he said nodding toward the stalls, “Men my age have some inconveniencies… to deal with.”
I certainly had my fair share of inconveniencies as well, even though they were of a different nature. We said goodbye, and I walked toward the last stall. When I turned the knob it was unlocked.
Kibum was sitting on the windowsill. He greeted me with half a smile and his knees spread before him. I locked the door behind me and saw his lips part to speak, so I clamped my hand over his mouth quickly. Leaning in as close to his ear as possible, I whispered,
“Be quiet. There’s a professor in here. Please, let’s wait until he’s gone. Please.”
Kibum nodded beneath my hand. I let it sink reluctantly.
“Come here,” he whispered back, and pulled me in forcefully by wrapping his legs around my hips. I frowned but kept silent.
Just as he was sticking his hands beneath my shirt and I shivered at what I assumed was the cold air, the splashing sounds started from a few stalls over. I felt that I had never been more miserable in my life. Having to listen to my adored professor urinate while a man was feeling me up so that I wouldn’t lose my job was a situation I could have never imagined being in. But I didn’t have a lot of time to drown in self-pity, since Kibum started kissing the side of my neck with long, loud sucks. I flinched and hissed into his ear,
“Shit. Stop it, he’ll hear.”
Of course Kibum didn’t stop. And as much as I tried to concentrate on the nauseating image of my superior urinating, Kibum’s licks and touches were hard to ignore. They incited the grater on my insides, only that the tearing from before was now reduced to a burning tickle.
It made me want to throw up once again, right against the crook of Kibum’s neck, where my head was resting. I wanted the vomit to run down his back to show him what kind of person he was to force me into this.
Yet I did not throw up. Instead, I got an erection.
I willed it down, but it didn’t go away. I had never been good at controlling my libido.
Kibum pressed me up against the windowpane. He must have a nice view, I remember thinking that. Opposite the institute towered a large museum, which featured ancient art and which was so famous that it attracted tourists like an apple slice draws in ants.
“Don’t worry,” Kibum whispered-he must have noticed my constant glancing, “they won’t notice. If you ever want to snipe someone, this is the place to do it from. Those stupid tourists never look at the windows.”
The sound of a toilet flushing washed away my worries, since Kibum used the noise’s cover to squeeze my crotch. The unexpected sensation flatted out my mind completely, and-embarrassingly enough-I moaned out loud.
“You want me to take care of that?” he asked, his voice low again.
I shook my head vehemently. I would not let a man do that to me. But he ignored me of course, sank to his knees before me, and jerked my fly open.
“Sure,” he said, “I’ll do it anyway.”
After that, I bit into my sleeve while he was blowing me, feeling as good as I hadn’t in a long time. I pictured myself imagining that he was a woman, but in fact I was very much aware that the lips around me belonged to a man. And only then did I realize that apart from getting his revenge, what he wanted to achieve with this extortion was breaking me. Still, I was convinced that that would never happen. I was holding onto that thought when he flicked his tongue, and I came to the sound of another flushing toilet.
Afterward, he opened the toilet lid, and spat my semen into it. It splattered loudly-or at least it seemed that way to me-on impact with the water surface. I re-zipped my jeans, mentally preparing for what I assumed he’d want me to do-I’d never had another man’s penis in my hand let alone in my mouth.
Back against my ear to stay unnoticed, Kibum whispered,
“Sadly, I don’t have a lot of time right now, so I guess we’ll need to meet up again one of the next days.”
“Huh?” I breathed, utterly baffled. “You won’t force me to return… that? Is that not what you want from me?”
I could feel his lips smile into the skin beneath my ear.
“Oh, professor, you have so much yet to learn. Maybe you should look yourself up in the Encyclopedia of Gay Men instead of reading so much about Stravinsky.”
He left my ear and kissed me on the mouth, holding up his index finger for me to wait, while slipping out of the door, leaving me yet again. Why was he of all people, I wondered, a person to slip so stealthily through of doors, in and out of scenes and lives. No metaphor, no simile could describe the feeling I had for him better than simply saying that I hated him-I hated him with every muscle fiber of my heart.
Even though I doubted it after he was gone and I went on to spend the rest of the day on research, he really did not contact me again that day. If he kept his word then the next time we’d see each other would be in a few days. Time to get rid of the feeling of him-physically and mentally-and concentrate back on work.
During those days, I managed to get a lot done. I wrote a few hundred words of my doctoral thesis, which had been creeping about as arduously as a snail climbing a rose stem, wrote the script of the next three lectures, and had lunch with an ex-girlfriend (who had turned into an utterly plain, dreary woman). I even went out with some friends one night. It had become rare for me to do that since I’d left the band I had been playing in and given up on my related promiscuity.
Because I was so busy, the day he contacted me again surprised me by arriving so early. He wrote me a text that we’d meet in the library’s backroom, and, even though I felt uneasy knowing about what I would have to do again, I wasn’t scared. When he showed up in the evening, he honored me with two sentences of smalltalk, after which everything went like last time. And once again, I could not think of an explanation for his not wanting any sexual favor from me.
The next day was again the day of the Stravinsky lecture. I thought that it wouldn’t be a problem looking at Kibum from the point of view of my professional self, and it wasn’t at first.
Like usual, he was sitting at the far left of the room, right next to the wall with the essay ‘The Unity of the Senses’ scrawled from top to bottom. Pleased, he looked, like always, and the pencil was back between his teeth. Some faint feeling stirred in my gut, but I didn’t make much of it, decided I’d simply focus on the other side of the room.
So I began the lecture. The subjects of that day’s teaching unit were the French society around 1910 and its reactions to other works that had preceded The Rite of Spring, and whose premieres were related to the Rite’s scandal. Particularly, I wanted to focus on Debussy’s Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un Faune.
What I had not thought of, though, was that that piece would provide Kibum with a target.
Being oblivious to that, I started talking about the composition and its-at that time-unprecedented choreography. I explained the stardom revolving around the main dancer, Nijinsky, and the reactions of the audience to his performance.
“At the end of the ballet,” I said, “the Faun takes the veil he acquired from one of the Nymphs and lays it down on a rock. He descends upon it and performs a masturbatory action on top of it. As you can guess, that small scene shocked the audience immensely.”
I was about to go on talking about Nijinsky’s choreography for the Rite, but from the corner of my eye I saw a pencil lifted into the air. This was a lecture not a seminar, but I couldn’t simply ignore a student-especially not Kibum.
“Yeah?” I said reluctantly.
“Even considering how the times were back then, I feel like the scandal around Debussy’s prelude is a complete overreaction of the audience,” Kibum explained.
I felt that I should probably not ask him why, but again, couldn’t simply remain silent.
“How come?”
“When you look at the recreated version of Nijinsky’s choreography, the masturbation-scene is extremely short and very simplified. It’s just one thrust of his hips, and a silent gasp.” The other students began mumbling quietly-I perceived it as white noise, while I was trying not to fall into the way Kibum was looking at me so smugly from across the room. “As it happens, I read the poem by Mallarmé in another course. I think when you’ve read it, it’s clear that its whole theme-and thus the theme of the ballet as well-is lust and desire. I have the poem here, don’t you think it’d be helpful to discuss it?”
“I don’t think it will be necessary,” I replied as if on auto-pilot. Without noticing, really, I was sucked in by the way he was talking about lust and desire.
“But it would explain a lot about the French society, about the prevailing conservatism. After such a poem, every sane person would expect porn to be enacted on stage.”
Some students laughed, and Kibum continued,
“Why don’t you come here and fetch it so that you could read it out loud? So the other people here know what we’re talking about.”
With a stiff posture, I went and took it. Our fingers brushed. I recoiled.
Back at the podium, I read it out. I knew that we’d dismissed our teacher-student relation the moment Kibum had started talking about masturbation, but now that I was already so caught up in the things I was sure he wanted me to think about, there was no way to focus my mind on anything else. Mallarmé’s words drenched my brain like an aphrodisiac.
“Inert, all things burn in the tawny hour
Not seeing by what art there fled away together
Too much of hymen desired by one who seeks there
The natural A: then I’ll wake to the primal fever
Erect, alone, beneath the ancient flood, light’s power,
Lily! And the one among you all for artlessness,” I read.
The wooden stand in front of me concealed my erection to the students. I felt it hot inside my pants.
“Of kisses that the gods kept so well mingled:
For I’d scarcely begun to hide an ardent laugh
In one girl’s happy depths (holding back
With only a finger, so that her feathery candor
Might be tinted by the passion of her burning sister,
The little one, naïve and not even blushing)”
There was no thought of a woman in my mind, what I saw was Kibum (naïve and not even blushing) naked from the waist up, white feathery shoulders beneath a translucent veil. I could see myself taking that veil and imitating the faun, lowering it into my lap…
“Than from my arms, undone by vague dying,
This prey, forever ungrateful, frees itself and is gone,
Not pitying the sob with which I was still drunk.”
When I finished the poem, my mind was soaked with unthinkable thoughts, my groin pressed against the stand-the feeling of utter wretchedness had overcome me.
“I go to see the shadow you have become.”
I saw a student lifting her hand, frown on her face. I picked on her gladly.
“I disagree. The society at that time could never have expected this to be enacted on stage. Besides, Debussy never intended to recreate a narration in his works,” she said and then continued to discuss the subject with Kibum.
I counted the minutes until I could close the lecture and hoped that my erection would be gone by then.
It was gone by then, but what remained was Kibum. He sat at his desk, waiting until everyone had left. I knew what was going to happen, so I didn’t even worry.
When the sound of trampling feet had disappeared, he said,
“Where are we going to get it on today? I think I’ll let you choose.”
“I believe ‘nowhere’ is not going to be accepted?” I asked.
He glanced at his phone, which was the only thing still left on his desk. Small as it was, it still looked intimidating.
“No.”
“Well, then…”
We ended up inside my office again. “C’mere,” he said, and sat me down on my desk. My fingers were trembling, curled around its edge, as he went down on me yet again. This room had a lot more privacy than the toilet stall or the library, but I was still worried about someone noticing us. And of course, my thoughts circled around how despicable he was. With every one of his sucks, I suffered more from my hatred for him.
Yet in other ways, I didn’t suffer at all. Just like the last two times, he sent me into orbits I had never been in before. My toes curled inside my loafers and one of my hands broke away from the table to delve into his hair.
There was nowhere to spit the semen into, so he swallowed it. A shiver ran down my back that I couldn’t hide. He smirked.
“Do you want to touch me now?” he asked, standing up.
I exhaled lengthily.
“No, I don’t want to touch you. The thought of doing that disgusts me.”
He nodded, slowly, as if he had just grasped the crucial part of a complicated math problem.
“Alright, if that’s the case, then I don’t want you to touch me, either. But I think that we should meet more often. I actually like having your thing in my mouth.”
I kept silent.
“So,” he continued, “how about tomorrow? I have a course from two to four and another one from six to eight. In the meantime I’m free.”
“That’s when my consultation hour is-“
“That’s great, then we have your office all to ourselves again.”
“No,” I cut in, “I can’t. I really can’t. The door is going to be unlocked and there will be students coming in. Choose a different time.”
He sighed but he had a smile on his face. It created dimples in his cheeks.
“Then in the evening. Till when are the practice rooms opened?”
“Till ten.”
“Perfect.”
I dreamt of the Faun and his veil that night, and the image of him kept making appearances throughout the morning. After I’d had a quick lunch in the canteen with my friend Jinki, who was a scientific assistant as well, I went to the media library to search for different interpretations of The Rite until it was time to move back to my office for the consultation hours.
I didn’t expect a lot of students, I had talked to a woman who wanted to discuss the topic of her presentation for my other course with me, but apart from her, I didn’t think anyone else would come.
The woman knocked at my door at around half-past four, and we talked about her presentation, but afterwards I was alone for a long time. Then another student came in to ask me about literature on Stravinsky that I recommended. I printed out a list with book titles and handed it to him. When it was almost six, I was about to leave my office and go down to the library again, but someone knocked at my door. I called them in.
A young-looking boy came inside. His head was a hazelnut balloon of hair and his eyes two black marbles. I recalled having passed him on the staircase once or twice, but I was convinced that he wasn’t in any of my courses.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Kim,” he said politely.
“Good afternoon,” I replied. “Have a seat.”
He complied and I waited for him to speak.
“My name is Lee Taemin and I’m not in any of your courses, if you were wondering,” he began.
“What can I help you with, then?” I asked and he hesitated for a moment.
“I’m here to talk to you about Kibum.”
I inhaled sharply, my fists clenching on top of the table.
“What about him?” I asked, playing innocent, in case this had nothing to do with what I assumed it had. How could he have noticed us?
“Um. We’re friends, Kibum and I. He told me about the… affair the two of you are having. Don’t worry-“ he gushed, probably having noticed my terrified expression, “I won’t tell anyone. I know it’s not your fault. I wish I could make him stop, but I don’t think I can.”
Pausing, he looked at me empathetically. I didn’t know what to reply.
“Well,” he started again, “what I came here to tell you is that he doesn’t do it because he hates you. You think that, right?”
I felt uncomfortable laying my personal feelings bare in front of a student and answered awkwardly,
“Yes, of course I do. He is blackmailing me-what else could I be thinking about that?”
“He told me about that time when you were playing in a band together until you left for the university. That you got along really well, but that you then-“
“Please. That’s my personal past, I don’t think that it’s the right subject to discuss with you.”
“Yes, of course. When Kibum talks about blackmailing you, he says he does it for revenge, but I’m sure that it’s only partly true. That’s what I came to tell you. I’m sure he’s still in love with you.”
I made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a gasp.
“I highly doubt that,” I said, “And I don’t think that it’s of any importance. He’s blackmailing me one way or another.”
The boy shook his head.
“What I’m trying to say is that if you just told him no, I don’t think he would release those pictures.” I flinched at the implication of his having seen them. “He doesn’t want you real harm. He wouldn’t destroy your career. You should just refuse, and it’s going to stop. I’m sure.”
“Well.” Sighing, I stood up. “I appreciate your concern. I will consider what you suggested, but I ask you to keep to your own business. This is only between Kibum and me.”
He looked concerned as he stood up.
“I will. Thanks for your time. Have a nice evening.”
“You, too. Goodbye.
“Goodbye.”
And he’d left.
As promised, Kibum and I met in front of the piano rooms at eight. I let us in and locked the door once inside.
Kibum strode over to the piano, a brown one with a prominent grain, and stroked the lid while I waited near the door. After he’d been staring down on it wordlessly for some time, he said,
“Yesterday, in the lecture, you were really agitated, right?”
“It was a lecture like any other. Let’s get on with this,” I replied, hoping to get him to stop talking.
“Right, but I saw it, your boner, I mean. It’s kind of funny. Do you happen to have a faun fetish, or what was it?” he asked sarcastically, then added, “It couldn’t have possibly been my elaborations on the subject?”
“Could you just… do the usual and then leave me alone?”
Laughing quietly, he drew away from the piano.
“Or,” he said, “I could tell you how hot it was when you pressed your crotch against the microphone stand. Who would’ve thought you’d be such a needy person that you can’t even keep yourself together during a lecture.”
“I wasn’t needy. I just didn’t want the students to see.”
“Well, don’t worry about that, I don’t think anyone saw.”
I didn’t reply to that, and he seemed to have mercy on me, called me over and slid down my pants.
Afterwards, I was slouching against the piano, trying to catch my breath. Kibum was standing close to me, resting one hand on my shoulder, the way you do when you want to comfort a stranger.
“There’s a question I want to ask you,” he began. I nodded, swallowing. “When you were reading that poem and looking up at me, you had that certain flushed expression. Did you think about wanting to fuck me, then?”
Fucking him, sleeping with him, going to bed together, I was insulted by the idea, and had certainly not been thinking about that while reading the poem. The way Kibum’s mouth enunciated the word ‘fuck’ and the sly expression lathered on top of it were replaying in my head. So I went out to a bar that evening, to get drunk.
I had adapted the habit of going to bars that had a respectable clientele: no drunks, no drug-users, no smoke-smothered air or booming basses. But that night, I did not care and went to the run-down kind. Bars in which everyone was intellectually stimulating got me thinking far too much. (And isn’t that absolutely counterproductive?)
The one I ended up entering wasn’t the type with ear-shattering pop, but it featured screeching guitars and screaming singers. I had frequented it some years ago.
Pleased with the cloaked atmosphere, I slid onto a seat in one of the corners. The longhaired bartender came over to me immediately, and I ordered a whiskey on the rocks.
While I was sipping it, I looked around the bar. In the far back, there was a narrow stage with full equipment but without a band. Two women, both dressed in leather skirts, were dancing alone on top of it, shaking their hips to the guitars’ unconventional rhythm.
Suddenly, someone’s hand landed on my shoulder.
“I don’t believe it, man!” the guy called.
It took me a few seconds to recognize him-the hair was black and short and there were new tattoos snaking up his neck. But there was no mistaking it.
“Minho?”
“Yeah, hi!” He let himself drop into the seat next to mine. “How the hell did you end up here, Jonghyun? Last time I heard, you were a renowned professor.”
I sighed, thinking about how improbable it was that two remnants of the very same past came creeping up on me in the time span of two weeks. And why was everyone so obsessed with calling me ‘professor’?
“I just wanted to have a drink in solitude.”
Minho didn’t get the hint so we went on talking. He told me about his several band projects-if I’d followed his (admittedly complicated) elaborations correctly, he was currently a part of three. One of them was the band we’d been playing in together, but as he said, it wasn’t the same anymore since Kibum and I were gone.
“You know,” he mused, “We had real ambitions back then, attempted a new style. It can almost be called pop what we’re doing now, if you know what I’m saying. Of course it’s still loud and somewhat trashy, but it’s the usual 1-6-4-5 crap. Fuck, how I loved the harmonies you wrote, man.”
I had downed three drinks by then and lulled around the fourth one,
“You’re giving me way too much credit, dude.”
“No, I mean it! After you left, everything was such a fucking mess. Kibum turned into a raging bitch and going on without a lead singer was such a pain in the ass.”
“Well, sorry, but studying musicology is my true calling,” I said, laughing out loud. I was drunk.
“You can’t lie to me, man. Squeezing your skinny ass behind a desk can’t be as much fun as playing with us. C’mon. And think about all the girls you fucked. I bet you don’t get half as much pussy now.”
I fell into a fit of guttural laughter at that.
“Well,” he said, grinning back at me, “Speaking of girls, have you heard that Kibum’s back in town?”
This time, we both guffawed as if it were the funniest joke ever told. For me, it was in a way. When the laughter had died down, I said,
“I sure do. He’s my student.”
“No,” Minho made, his eyes looking dangerously close to dropping out of his head.
I told him about it, but of course left out the details of the blackmailing.
“You’re shitting me,” he said as I was done, “That guy… the only nice memory I have of him is of his face when you humiliated him. Honestly, up to this day, I think it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever witnessed. He looked like he’d been slapped. Do you remember that? It was hilarious, man. And he cried his eyes out after that-I’d never seen a guy cry like that. My baby sister used to cry that way when she’d pooped in her diaper.”
He exploded into laughter once more. I silently stirred my drink, watching the ice clink together, unable to hear the sound over the music.
After that, we changed topics, talked about my job, my apartment, his girlfriend (apparently, she had breasts as big as basketballs. I wasn’t very impressed.)
It was almost two when we got up to leave. I was once again struck by how tall he was. When you hold you thumb and forefinger next to each other, that’s us. One short and stubby, and the other tall and lanky.
We walked the small distance to the subway station together. As we parted, he asked for my phone number, saying that we definitely should not lose touch again. I gave it to him and also saved his, but in fact I did not plan on seeing him ever again.
For the first time since reuniting with Kibum, I felt as if I had something with which to spite him. He and Minho had always disliked each other because of incomprehensible reasons. I used to be fond of both. (And how that had changed, I thought. From both to neither.)
So when we got together again two days later, I decided I would tell him about my meeting Minho.
At first, Kibum seemed disinterested. He was sitting cross-legged on top of my desk, face resting in one of his palms.
But I went on recounting the conversation we’d had about him, only that I invented the parts I had supposedly said. He did not need to know that I had actually kept silent when Minho made fun of him.
“I really like talking about mutual friends,” I said. I used so much cynicism-how out of character for me. “He reminded me that you used to call yourself Key back then. Because music…?”
He looked at me with narrowed eyes.
“… is the Key to everyone’s heart.”
“Ah, I remember that now. How nice.”
At least for this short instant, I had turned the tables. Kibum was sitting there, obviously searching for a way to keep the embarrassment from seeping too deeply. It should have occurred to me earlier that his sixteen-year-old self might be his weak spot.
Still, I had forgotten that this wasn’t a battle of wit or of hitting each other where it hurt-in reality he had his boot positioned on my throat. He demonstrated that to me beautifully the next moment by saying,
“You know, I don’t want to talk about that. It’s boring. I’d much rather make out with you. And that’s what we’re gonna do, so if you’d come over here…”
I complied, of course.
I expected aggression, his teeth in my lips and his tongue forced into my mouth to clog my airways. But it was almost gentle, the way he pushed me against the wall. He even touched my face albeit only with the very tips of his fingers, and closed his eyes. I saw it since I kept mine open, watching him until he was done with me.
It did instill something in me, something like the swelling beep of the alarm clock in the morning. Half asleep, you write it off as a remnant of your dream, but then it starts escalating and screaming at you, “Get the fuck out of bed!” and there’s no denying that you’re late and that it is time to get out of your cozy cocoon.
My thoughts followed similar patters when it came to Kibum. Even though I did not like admitting it in front of myself, Lee Taemin’s suggestion had lingered. And Kibum’s sudden want to kiss did not help kick my mind out of the orbits in which it was currently circling.
And what was worst of all was that, after he’d kissed me in my office, he did not show up again. At first I was relieved, then confused, then worried. I went through the last meeting in my head, and it did not need an effort to discern how odd it had been. It felt almost like a betrayal, that he’d skipped the usual sexual favor. (I caught myself using the word ‘favor’ all too often when it should have actually been something along the lines of ‘punishment’.)
After the first week of his absence, my gut was churning so conspicuously that I pulled Lee Taemin aside when I caught sight of him in the hall to ask him where Kibum was.
“He told me he’s sick. I don’t believe him, though. He also said that he made some kind of mistake… maybe you should check on him.”
Mistake. Was it really? Or was it his cunning? If it was the latter, it was working. It had been two weeks since he’d last shown his face at the university, and I had even gone as far as to text him, but there was no reply. At night, I lay in my bed, feeling like an eel on a sandbank, rolling and writhing. It was the sex, as simple as that. I had ran right into his trap, I thought, I was five years older, I should have the experience to know when I was holding my face right into his open maw. But it had happened, and my libido had been switched into high performance. Now I was used to getting laid every other day, even if it was by a man.
I turned and tossed, unable to sleep and unable to stay awake without thinking about everything I did not want to think about. As I threw myself onto my stomach, my arms were squeezed into the mattress. Because my hand was already so conveniently placed, it snuck into my pajama bottoms. I reached over to the nightstand to grab my phone, opening the folder with the porn files. Large breasts, open thighs, butt turned toward the camera, couple on a picnic rug. God, his arms looked strong as he held her to himself and even though my phone’s resolution was bad, I could see the tendons in his neck. I don’t remember through how many pictures I scrolled, who I stared at and who I ignored, but the feeling of coming by my own hand was foreign and utterly unsatisfactory.
Everything ugly was lying in a pile in front of my bed. Each time I climbed inside, knowing that I’d be alone with my thoughts for a while now, I plodded through the bog of unfulfilled sexual desires, of confusion and hatred, and of Lee Taemin’s words. It was like a disease that had spread to me-I felt physically sick. Another few days later, it reached a point, where only the chance of calling every contact with Kibum off and thus also the need and distress I was feeling, seemed that big of a salvation that I was willing to risk falling prey to Kibum’s threats.
At the university, I logged into the system and looked up his address. If you just told him no, I don’t think he would release those pictures. He doesn’t want you real harm. He wouldn’t destroy your career. You should just refuse, and it’s going to stop. I’m sure. I held onto that while trying to convince myself of visiting Kibum and following Lee Taemin’s words.
The day I had finally managed to lay my worries aside and go see him, turned out to be at the end of the following week. It was an afternoon that blinded with its crispness. It was so clear that it appeared as if the clouds had all moved to the upper air-layers.
I arrived in front of the building, a house typical for the city we lived in. Shops of various kinds filled the first floor, above were normal apartments. I found his house quickly, and pressed the button next to his name.
“Yeah?” it came grainy through the intercom after a few seconds.
“It’s Jonghyun.”
Another silence followed, after which he said, “Backyard,” and the buzz of the door resounded.
I walked through the entrance hall, whose tiles were covered in illegible graffiti. Outside in the backyard, the graffiti continued beneath the uncut vines like a dirty ribbon. I found the door (which was almost completely hidden by a bush) and climbed up the staircase. Those buildings were wonderful; I regretted having moved into a modern flat.
Upstairs, I rang the doorbell, but no one answered. When I was about to ring it again, I noticed the door was slightly ajar, so I simply went inside the apartment.
“Kibum?” I called once in the hallway. He did not seem to be there. When I went into the capacious living-room I heard water running. Once again, I called his name, and this time he responded, voice almost completely swallowed by the sound of the water.
“I’m in the shower. I’ll be out in ten minutes!”
Wonderful, I thought. Anxiety had been creeping up my back the whole day; the only thing I wished for was to get this over with quick. I did not want to spend another ten minutes inside his personal environment. Apartments make me feel like I am standing inside a person’s head.
But, well, there was nothing to do until Kibum came out of the shower aside from taking a look around.
The apartment had the typical high walls, all covered in white ingrain wallpaper, and the floor was parquet that was unevenly laid. Overall, it was tidy, with the occasional exception of some clothes flung over the furniture. Two doors were in the wall next to me, one of which obviously led into the bathroom, and the other one had a glass square in the center, allowing me a look into the kitchen. I wondered where the bedroom was but then found a king size mattress in the opposite corner, right beneath the windows. It was a mere mattress; he didn’t even have a real bed. For some reason, that observation irked me. I took a closer look. The fitted sheet was of a faded orange, and below it strangely pattered stains were visible.
I was about to go over to the bookcase to inspect it, when I heard the jingle of an SMS. It was the major triad iPhones have by default. I had been distracted by looking around the apartment, but now the jingle woke me up like an alarm-clock, bringing my nervousness back in a flash. Back to worrying, I went over to the coffee table, on which the phone was lying. I don’t know what I expected to see on the lit-up screen, but not this. Definitely not the picture Kibum had taken on the day of the first lecture.
I gaped at it. There we were, kissing. Our mouths were open, meshed together, my eyebrows furrowed as if I was passionately kissing back even though what I had actually felt was distaste. And Kibum, he was smiling slightly, eyes open by a slit, wide enough for me to see the black behind them. Involuntarily, I thought about the pictures he had used to blackmail me. It seemed like I was a different person in them, the way you look into a mirror and realize that your reflection is a being like everyone else, and they become someone who is not you entirely.
Over our picture, the text message Kibum had gotten was displayed. It was from Lee Taemin and read,
Go talk to him please. You’re making things worse for the both of you.
When I think about it now, I still cannot explain why that message unsettled me so deeply; it simply did. Maybe it was because of the picture I saw peeking through the letters, that it suggested to me that what Lee Taemin had told me concerning Kibum’s feelings was actually true.
I had come here to put a stop to our affair, and God, I still wanted that. But my heart was pounding so loudly through my ears that I almost missed out on the sudden absence of the running water’s sound. Almost.
I stood rigid in front of the coffee table, listening to the faint rustling coming from the bathroom. Then the door opened.
Kibum stepped out of it, not even looking in my direction at first. His hair was still damp, jet black, and he was wearing a shirt that fell loosely around his clavicles, and a pair of boxers.
“There you are,” he said, but I didn’t respond.
It is such a cliché that his wet, makeshift appearance drew me in so much, but also, in a way, I felt the symbolic significance weigh down on me. What I’d seen and felt recently was like being put onto a rack-at some point it only takes another centimeter and your head is ripped off.
Kibum’s newly washed self was that centimeter. And my head was gone.
I mouthed his name, our eyes caught. He looked confused, but when I said, “Come here, now,” it seemed to click.
While I had taken one step toward him, he had already crossed the whole room. And then suddenly I had him in my arms, our mouths melding, sliding past and over and into each other. Somehow, we managed to get over toward the mattress, and I flung him onto it ruthlessly.
There we were in a pile on top of the orange sheet. Kibum’s shirt was yanked over his head as fast as possible so that I could press myself up against him, my nose into his neck. When he’d disposed of my shirt as well, I slid closer and then, then I brushed his hip and felt his erection hard against me. I shivered quietly. All I wanted was to get my hands around it. But we were busy running our fingers over each other, over my chest and over his shoulders. I savored the feeling of his sharp shoulder blades, the way I could feel the muscles firm and strong and solid.
He started grinding our hips together, but I wouldn’t have it, shoved him away once more to get rid of everything still in the way. I wrapped my hand around his penis finally, and when I heard myself sigh loudly, the feeling of wanting to hear Kibum’s voice instead seized me. I squeezed him. And the sound coming from his mouth was more of a sob than a moan, and with his touched out breath it blew the last layer of willpower away. We were reduced to crawling hands and lips and skin, ravishing each other, squirming over the pale orange as if it were liquid sunlight.
I think we both couldn’t take it anymore, at least I couldn’t, so I turned him over, shoved his front hard into the mattress. His face flushed, he gazed at me from the corner of his eye. His profile looked luscious like that when it was pressed into the sheets.
Light from outside was slanting through the window, lying down on top of us. It was that certain rare one which is brought about by an afternoon in the middle of Fall, that is so orange that it surpasses the color of the trees. It dyed Kibum’s skin in its hue, all the way across from his thick neck down to his narrow hips and the beginning of his thighs that I was sitting on. I didn’t have any inhibitions left to tell myself that thinking ‘Beautiful’ was inappropriate, so I thought it. Because it was.
Then he shoved a condom and the lubricant at me, and I applied both, about to hold him down and take him, but he slapped my hand away.
“Wait, wait,” he mumbled hastily. I watched him prepare himself and cursed under my breath, because I wanted my fingers to be his.
Finally, he was done, and I didn’t even care to ask ‘Okay?’ or ‘Ready?’ or any of the like. I simply wanted wanted wanted him.
It went fast then, rushed. Still, I remember thinking that his insides didn’t feel very different from a woman’s, but the sensation of his edgy body, his voice, deeper than mine, made a difference so huge that it threw me completely off center.
It was all a seemingly infinite spiral, a vortex sucking me in. The only things I was focused on were outrunning myself with the speed of my thrusts and the raw sound of our voices so alien, like the melody you don’t recognize because it’s played in a foreign arrangement.
Somewhere half along the way, Kibum’s voice gave out and his body snapped up, almost throwing me off. I didn’t take much notice, only pressed him more tightly to myself, the thought of stopping nowhere on my mind. When I finally came, it was almost brutal, and my mind was gushing out of my head, spilling onto the mattress. The moment you’ve jumped and you’re mid-air, right before you’re pulled back down to the ground and you’re in a state of zero-gravity-thoughtless, weightless.
Then my mind slipped back in and I sank down flat on top of his back and I realized that I had lost myself in him, in the most literal sense of the phrase.
There was nothing after that except for the feeling of Kibum’s warm hand on my forearm, just the blank space of my closed lids. It seemed so serene.
But the moment didn’t last long; after what felt like no more than a minute, Kibum stirred, crawling out beneath me. I opened my eyes, watched him fetch a dishtowel to clean himself off. When he was done, he let it drop to the floor and came back to the mattress, where he lay down without a word.
So there we were, flatted out next to each other in silence. I assumed he expected me to confess what we must have both been thinking about, but I didn’t dare. Kibum used the idleness to lighten a cigarette. Its ashes fell into the broad cracks inside the floorboards.
“Some very few moments ago, just now, basically, I thought of something,” he said eventually. “It was like a déja-vu, only that the surfacing memory wasn’t fiction, but my own real memory.” He took a drag from the cigarette. I was listening carefully.
“I think I should tell you about it. It’s interesting. You’ll like it.
“You know, some years ago, I was playing in a band. I was sixteen then. We were all pretentious as fuck but I liked it a lot, actually. It was an all-guy band, and the other four weren’t easy on me all the time, I was the youngest.” He took another drag. “The guy who wrote the songs and lyrics was also our lead singer. He dyed his hair dark brown, and always wore a little eyeliner around the outer corners of his eyes. I was so infatuated with his eyes, I can’t even tell you. And when he sang, his voice was so soft and special, that the stupid sixteen-year-old me always thought the whole world was upholstered with velvet.” The drag he took now was drawn out, as if he was acting in an old black-and-white movie.
“Well, I was sixteen so I guess I would have fallen for anything that paid me attention and had a dick, but that guy was really something. So yeah, I was head over heels for him.
“We got along well even though we were five years apart. After the practice sessions, we used to stay in the band room together, and he’d make me sing, because he thought I was good at it or something. I’m not, though.”
He had finished the cigarette by now, stubbed it out on the bare floor, and lit another one.
“So I considered him a friend, a real good one. Not the we’re-bandmates-so-you-can-take-my-guitar-and-I-fuck-your-girl kind of friends, but real ones. I was sure he thought so, too.
“Pretty quickly, after the first few meet-ups, actually, he started flirting with me. He had that way of touching me when he was talking to me. It was like he’d memorized a book on how to flirt. And when he made me sing he locked gazes with me and his pupils were huge and I was fucking scared of messing up completely. Even though I kind of had self-esteem issues at that time, after a few weeks I was beginning to believe that he actually liked me back.” The cigarette was burning by itself, the tip slowly turning into ashes.
“All my female friends I told about this, said I should confess. But I was, you could say, tremendously speech-impaired, so I decided it would be best to take some physical action instead.