Kill Your X Chapter 101 - EXTRA - #BEWARE OF DOG

I woke up to the feeling of someone stroking my body.

“Umm….”

Sleep clung to my limbs, refusing to let go. My heart wanted to fall back into a sweet slumber, but the touch that subtly grazed even my private parts eventually made me wave the white flag.

“Good morning, Sunbae.”

When I opened my eyes, Seo Seunghan greeted me with a light smile on his face. Warm spring sunlight streamed in through the ajar blackout curtains, about a handspan’s width from the side of the bed.

“What time is it.”

“8:20 AM.”

No wonder it was so hard to open my eyes properly. It was still too early for me to get up.

I looked up at him with a hint of resentment. After gently brushing back my bedhead, Seo Seunghan tapped his own neck with his fingers. Only then did I realize why he had woken me up.

“There’s still a mark.”

“It’s faded. I can’t go out like this.”

“Hah… Come here.”

When I gestured, he obediently leaned his upper body toward me. I supported the back of his head with my hand and pressed my lips to his neck. The newly imprinted kiss mark was in a slightly different spot from the last one, making him look all the more debauched.

“There?”

“Yes.”

My job done, I flopped back down onto the bed. I leisurely watched him as he checked his reflection in a nearby mirror.

Today, Seo Seunghan was wearing dark-colored jeans and a gray sweatshirt. It was an outfit I had gifted him about two weeks ago.

There was a time when I intentionally tried to dress him only in bright and cheerful colors. It was because, in the past, he always wore black to hide the bloodstains from his work. He said it had been that way since the onset of his puberty, for as long as he could remember.

His heart-wrenching story led me to a period of color-biased shopping, but that didn’t last very long. It was because I finally had to accept the fact that, regardless of his dark past, Seo Seunghan looked best in neutral colors.

“Seunghan.”

“Yes.”

He turned his head slightly to look down at me. With his bangs neatly down, he looked a good five years younger than his age. His first impression was still far from friendly, but compared to before, he looked much closer to an ordinary citizen.

It would be even more so if it weren’t for the kiss mark openly displayed on his neck.

“Don’t you think the rumors you wanted have spread all over campus by now? The way I see it, even the multifunction printer in the central library probably knows you’re taken.”

“You never know. There might be students who are slow to hear rumors.”

Seunghan, a late bloomer who entered B University at over thirty, became the hottest topic on campus that year.

Given his exceptionally superior looks, I had expected him to receive a lot of attention, but I thought it would naturally die down once people found out his age. The other freshmen were in their early twenties on average, and at that age, a man over thirty would usually just seem like an old man.

The problem, perhaps, was that Seo Seunghan’s looks far surpassed the usual standards. From the beginning of the semester, he was constantly getting confessed to by strangers. He said he’d made it clear that he had a partner, but for some reason, people didn’t seem to believe him.

‘Can’t I just act the way I normally do?’

Faced with an unexpected hurdle, he expressed his struggles. He said he wanted to live a normal college life as I suggested, but the people around him were not being very cooperative.

I considered just telling him to go ahead, but I was worried about the poor lambs(?) who would be met with a murderous glare after confessing to someone they liked.

When it came to expressing himself, Seo Seunghan still had no middle ground. I didn’t want his reputation to be ruined before even a single semester was over. After going through hell to finally get into college, enduring four years of sharp whispers would surely be torment.

‘Let’s find another way for now.’

As an alternative, we hurriedly got couple rings made. We completely ignored both our tastes and went for a design that anyone could tell was a couple ring. But the effect was less significant than I thought. Other students seemed to think Seo Seunghan got the ring as a trick to ward off people who clung to him.

‘This is tricky. I can’t just put a picture of us as your messenger profile picture.’

Seunghan was receiving so much unwanted attention that his school life was becoming uncomfortable.

In the midst of the chaos, a kiss mark presented an unexpected solution. At first, it was purely due to my carelessness.

During one of our usual intense nights, I was particularly aroused that day and left a dark mark on the nape of his neck. It happened to be in a very noticeable spot.

The next day, Seo Seunghan strolled around campus without any thought of covering the red hickey on his neck. The whispers of others were never his concern.

To a classmate who mustered up the courage to ask what the mark was, he said just one thing.

‘My lover is very possessive.’

Seunghan felt the way people looked at him change drastically at that moment.

After that, he would often go out with a kiss mark on his neck, and the number of people confessing to Seo Seunghan decreased in inverse proportion. The male students admired him, saying that the romance of a real adult(?) was something different, while the female students began to subtly keep their distance.

‘But Seunghan hyung, a ridiculous rumor is going around campus that you don’t have a lover and just enjoy one-night stands. A kiss mark on the neck is one thing for a day or two, but you do it way too often, hyung. Someone said that even if you really had a lover, who in their right mind would do that to someone who goes to school every day….’

I put my hand to my forehead at the vivid news Hyun Jin delivered. Seunghan had gone from being a mysterious freshman with otherworldly looks to the History department’s resident man-whore.

“You have a full day of classes starting this morning, right? Have a good day at school, Seunghan. Go and listen well in class.”

“Yes.”

He placed a light kiss on the corner of my lips, then quietly closed the door and left. As silence returned, I snuggled deep into the cozy blankets. The pleasure of sleeping in, a habit I’d learned late in life, was truly sweet.

✽✽✽

I woke up at noon and went to the exercise room set up inside the house.

Work out three times a week, for at least an hour. It was a promise I made to myself because my physical condition was noticeably deteriorating without any upkeep. Seo Seunghan seems to work out in a similar pattern to me, but I don’t know why the state of our muscles is so different.

He, who had never been formally taught how to lift weights, took personal training sessions outside for a few months after I suggested we work out together. After that, he was literally flying. Once he learned how to train different muscle groups, his body became bulkier by the day.

His skin is firm, so he’s fun to touch, but if my body is too different from my lover’s, that’s also a bit…

“Hmph! Haaah….”

I struggled to put the barbell down and looked in the mirror. My mind told me to do one more set, but my body was strongly protesting. I justified ending my workout by telling myself to take things step by step, that I shouldn’t be the crow-tit that tears its legs trying to follow a stork. The fact that my way of thinking had become slightly cowardly was also a change in me, if you could call it that.

I took a light shower and went to the kitchen to press the button on the coffee machine. While the coffee beans were brewing, I habitually admired the side of the refrigerator.

Polaroid pictures holding our memories had already completely filled one side. At first, he was as awkward about having his picture taken as I was, but now Seo Seunghan was at a point where he could show a faint smile toward the camera lens. In the photos taken at various places and various times, we looked truly happy.

It’s a secret known only to us that I once caught Seo Seunghan trying to take a picture of my butt while I was sleeping and stick it on the wall, and I scolded him harshly for it.

‘We agreed to put up pictures where we both look pretty. So why isn’t this one okay?’

‘Are you kidding me? Obviously, because it’s too obscene.’

‘It’s just the two of us living in this house anyway. You need to know that your butt is pretty too, Sunbae. It’s white and soft, and it marks up so well whenever I squeeze it tight, which is so lewd. If I could, I’d want to bite it every morning and night.’

No matter what nonsense he spouted, the picture in question was never proudly displayed in our home.

I took a sip of the steaming coffee and opened the refrigerator. When I took out the prepared container and opened it, I found a neatly made sandwich.

Seunghan, who had been unacquainted with an ordinary person’s daily life, especially cooking, started learning to cook one by one after settling in Korea. His reason was that he couldn’t keep making only me prepare the meals.

But as they say, you have to eat well to cook well. As someone who naturally had little appetite and didn’t know the joy of eating, his initial results were extremely bewildering. Ordinary dishes would turn into delicacies in a bad way when they passed through his hands. He was especially terrible at seasoning; I would often feel my mind go blank at the balance of flavors I had never experienced before in my life.