Hazardous Concentration Chapter 7

‘S-stop, I don’t like it.’

‘You don’t like it?’

‘…I, I don’t like it.’

The voice pleading with sobs was full of terror. Yeo Taejun pulled up the corners of his lips. The sound of him crying was incredible.

‘I thought only your face would be horny.’

He whispered, gnawing playfully on the collarbone.

‘Your crying voice is quite something, too.’

When Yeo Taejun said that, the crying grew a little louder. Perhaps because of the drugs, he flared up with a maddening pleasure.

That was why he sucked on his flesh even more relentlessly. It was a first. Since he had never been short of women in his life, there was no reason to hold onto someone who explicitly said they didn’t like it. But that day was different.

“This is pathetic.”

At first, there was only darkness, but as time slowly passed, several scenes surfaced one by one. Which led to one question: Did I really fuck him in the hole that day? It was certain that I had buried my nose in his skin or bitten and sucked on him, but there was no feeling of having thrust him into a hole and fucked him.

Yeo Taejun furrowed his brows. Both the blurry remaining memories and the CCTV footage gave him a strange sense of déjà vu. How should I put it? It felt as if I had seen it somewhere before. I felt a sense of familiarity. So, I carefully tried to think if it was someone I knew, but no specific person popped into my head.

“Fuck, my head is still pounding.”

It’s confusing even just trying to look at it, and the memories were even more hazy, perhaps because I swallowed that much drug.

‘P-please.’

Even when he was still, the sound of whimpering mixed with sobs would occasionally surface. For a guy, his waist was slender, and his neck was also thin and soft.

‘Hng. Ng.’

Above all, those particularly light brown pupils were stuck deep in his memory and wouldn’t disappear.

“…”

Even now, just thinking of those eyes made his molars itch. He felt the heat in his lower abdomen, which had barely subsided, flare up again. He couldn’t distinguish whether it was because of the drugs or that memory.

“Phew, damn it.”

Yeo Taejun swept back his well-groomed hair. He was at the point where his body heated up just from the thought.

“This is why I hate drugs.”

They leave a nasty aftertaste.

Even though 24 hours had passed, the headache and the tingling in his fingertips remained. The anger toward President Jeong surged up. He pondered whether simply slitting his throat wouldn’t be enough and if he should torture him before killing him, when he arrived in front of the hospital room right on time.

“Tsk.”

The two guards guarding the front of the hospital room bowed politely toward Yeo Taejun. He opened the door and entered inside.

Then, the guards began to report. Yeo Taejun took long strides, listening to them half-heartedly.

As expected of a VIP hospital room, the air inside was not bad. Passing the reception room, he headed toward the bed where the patient was lying.

Unlike a general hospital bed, Chairman Yeo Seung lay on a king-sized bed with his eyes closed. At one time, he had boasted of a physique as robust as Yeo Taejun’s, but over the past three years, he had gradually wasted away to the point where he even looked petite now. His hair, which had been black, had turned white.

His younger brother, who had just entered university, had heard the news of his father’s accident and said, weeping:

‘Hyung, what do we do if Father dies like this?’

With his mother and now his father both meeting with accidents, Yeo Gijoon was completely terrified and in a panic.

‘Can’t you leave the company to the uncles and live comfortably? We have as much money as we need.’

With funds that had continued since the Taegang days, and with TS—which his grandfather had ruthlessly inflated in size—being the company with the highest cash holdings in South Korea in both name and reality.

‘Hyung, please. Hmm? I’m scared.’

However, Yeo Taejun’s thoughts were completely different from his younger brother’s. Unlike Yeo Gijoon, who had grown up being coddled as the second son and the late-born child, he had been raised being thoroughly educated as the successor. Above all, Yeo Taejun resembled his grandfather, who had made a name for himself with his looks in his younger days, while Yeo Gijoon resembled his mother, who was as soft-hearted as his personality.

While sitting in the chair next to the bed, Yeo Taejun asked. There was something that bothered him in the guard’s report.

“Who visited?”

“The Vice President visited.”

Yeo Taejun’s eyes narrowed as he listened to the report. Out of habit, he took a cigarette case out of his pocket, but stopped, realizing it was a hospital room.

“When?”

“He came around 11:00 on the 2nd and stayed for about 30 minutes before leaving.”

The 2nd was that day. The day Yeo Taejun was high on drugs and out of his mind…

If it were the Vice President, he was pro-family. Even so, Yeo Taejun felt strange. That the Vice President had sought out his father at that exact time.

From a long time ago, there was a feeling that he was strangely hiding something from him, a prickly feeling, but he didn’t know exactly why. It was when Yeo Taejun narrowed his eyes. The phone he had put in his shirt pocket rang. Yeo Taejun’s eyebrows twitched as he pulled it out to check the number on the screen.

It wasn’t a domestic number, but an international one. And it was a number Yeo Taejun was very familiar with. It was the number of Chief Seo, whom he had sent along with Yeo Gijoon when he went to study abroad. He was a person who would unfailingly inform him of Yeo Gijoon’s news every two or three days.

“Yes, Chief Seo.”

Thinking it was just the usual report, Yeo Taejun’s face stiffened not long after answering the phone. Chief Seo’s voice, which was thoroughly rigid, came through the phone.

—Director, we have a big problem. The second young master…

A moment later, like the extension of his pitch-black pupils that didn’t have a single speck of light, Yeo Taejun’s eye corners sank gloomily.

∞ ∞ ∞

Tak, tak, tak.

The sound of chopping was lively.

The kitchen of [Songlim] was always frantically busy. On one side, bamboo shoots and chili peppers to go into the wheat wraps were being thinly julienned, and on the other side, oil was being poured into a large pan to fry jeon.

The kitchen, about an hour before opening for business, was at its busiest. Eunhoo had been working at the Korean restaurant [Songlim] since last year. As he was the youngest, he only handled chores, but there was a lot to learn just by watching.

As one can tell from the Chinese characters, the name [Songlim (松林)] originated from a pine forest. They said it was because the area around the main branch was entirely a pine forest, but Eunhoo had never been there.

The place where Eunhoo worked was a branch. The branch was located among general residential areas, even in the heart of Seoul.

The restaurant, made by remodeling a 50-year-old hanok, was both vintage and luxurious. Not sure if it was the owner’s taste, but both the main branch and the branch didn’t have separate signboards. Even so, reservations from customers never ceased, as if they knew how to find this place.

[Songlim] was a high-end restaurant where one could taste Korean cuisine. The menu changed daily depending on the ingredients, but there were several fixed side dishes. One of them was the jeon and the wheat wraps.

“We’re out of lard. Where’s the new one?”

Returning after taking a short half-day off in the morning because of the hospital, the kitchen was already in the middle of preparing for the lunch business.

On large bamboo trays that he only ever saw during ancestral rites, the jeon were placed in layers. The ingredients for the jeon changed every day, but today it was beef liver.

“Is this all the sliced beef liver?”

Unlike the serene exterior, the kitchen sounded as if his eardrums were going to burst with the high-pitched yelling and the sound of dishes clashing.

“Someone check if the rice is fully steamed.”

Today’s special dish was lotus leaf rice. Glutinous rice, lotus roots, red beans, soybeans, and chestnuts were mixed together in a lotus leaf and steamed thoroughly. The chewy yet sweet rice, subtly infused with the scent of the lotus leaf, was delicious.

“Where’s the mackerel?”

And the main dish was mackerel. Common, but not easy to cook without it being fishy. Because the freshness was good, some of it was going out as sashimi and the rest as braised mackerel. Next to it, cucumber garnish (oisun) to refresh the palate was also prepared. Adding kimchi, salted seafood, and side dishes to be served on the side, the number of side dishes to go on one table alone exceeded a dozen. Since it was served as a course meal rather than a single table, he couldn’t let his guard down until 2:00 PM when the lunch hour ended. Finally, adding well-aged alcohol made it perfect.

“Do we have enough Dogyeonju (Azalea Wine) to serve today?”

[Songlim] was famous for its food, but also for its delicious alcohol. Among them, liquors made using pine needles, bamboo leaves, azaleas, and chrysanthemums—such as Songjuk-Dogyeonju, Jangsongju, and Pine Needle Wine—were famous. They said it was because they could obtain better quality pine needles since the area around the [Songlim] main branch was all pine trees.

“It’s a bit tight. But since it’s an aperitif, wouldn’t it be okay?”

“Still, just in case, let’s pass on that and serve Jangsongju instead. Since we received some recently, we should have plenty.”

“Yes!”