Rabbit Hole Chapter 30

No matter how you looked at it, the amount was far too much for one person to eat and drink. The manager glared at the POS screen, then slowly scanned Geumseo from head to toe. Then he gave a strange smile.

“What? Is there a problem?”

“What do you mean ‘what.’ It’s just good. Raises sales.”

“Ah….”

“You raised it? Ask the boss for a bonus. Or should you ask the customer for it?”

With an uneasy feeling, Geumseo endured the remaining time until the food came out by going around other rooms. Even if the boss had told him to only go to Room 3, seeing the situation of the other employees he occasionally ran into in the hallway, he couldn’t just stay still.

Soon the food and alcohol came out. Contrary to his worries, Heo Sangmuk only looked at his phone during the several trips back and forth. By the time he carried in the last plate, Geumseo’s tension was also gradually easing. He was just starting to think that today, he really had just come to spend money extravagantly.

“Where are you going. Pretty thing, come sit here.”

Of course, it was Heo Sangmuk who caught Geumseo as he was about to leave, thinking that. Grabbing the wrist of Geumseo, who was trying to leave, he sat him down beside him with brute force.

“Customer…?”

“What’s with the cold ‘customer.’ Call me oppa.”

Geumseo pushed Heo Sangmuk, who had said a name wasn’t needed because it was too cold, just as he had repeatedly requested. He hadn’t meant to. It was just that his face had suddenly lurched close, and he could no longer bear his body odor or sticky body heat or the like. It was too greasy and too damp.

“Ah!”

Heo Sangmuk, whose head hit the wall with a bang, instantly changed demeanor, like a different person. Like the face of the terrifying giant at the temple entrance he’d been led to by his father’s hand as a child.

Geumseo’s complexion, too, turned stark pale. Having committed the act, he now grasped the situation. Had something like self-respect, which he’d kept suppressed for years, returned because things had been a bit easy lately? Warning lights flashed shrilly in his head. Geumseo thought of Haeju. The moment he sprang up and saw Heo Sangmuk trying to grab him, Geumseo, turning ashen, spun his body and grabbed the doorknob.

“Haeju hyu…!”

But Haeju’s expression, the look in his eyes that he met—.

It was as indifferent as a person who sees someone fall on the stairs but just walks past, busy with their morning commute. It looked as listless as someone who overslept, was clearly going to be late, but just sat there, not fully awake yet. Geumseo, who had barely managed to get his upper body out, had his hair yanked and was dragged back. It was a force incomparable to when Go San had grabbed and pulled him. He’d heard that if you did drugs, your strength became monstrously strong; was it that? But he hadn’t looked like he was on drugs.

Geumseo didn’t know that Heo Sangmuk had illegally overused steroids to build muscle. He also didn’t know that this had caused his violent tendencies, frequent mood swings, and monstrous strength. In fact, it was an irrelevant issue anyway. What Heo Sangmuk was doing to Geumseo right now was an utterly Heo Sangmuk-like thing, stemming from his true nature, his innate character, rather than steroids.

“When I call you pretty, you should cling to me. Then I’ll stuff your pockets full of money.”

“I d-d-don’t need it.”

Geumseo, pale as a sheet, stammered.

“Ah. Is it because it’s in advance? Oppa didn’t realize.”

Heo Sangmuk pinned Geumseo down on the sofa and clamped his pelvis tightly between his thighs. It hurt as if his pelvis would shatter, so Geumseo flailed desperately, hitting and pushing Heo Sangmuk’s thighs. But it was a useless act. Heo Sangmuk took out his wallet from his pocket and grabbed a few checks. The checks went in between Geumseo’s silly bow tie and his neck, stuck there.

“Here, advance payment. If you go all the way to the end, I’ll pay the balance. The world is just tough, you know. I don’t want to do this either, but you have to go all the way for a relationship of trust to form.”

Heo Sangmuk rattled on as if this were some kind of transaction. Relationship of trust. When he said those four syllables, he interlaced his own fingers and made a rub, rub sound with his palms. So a relationship of trust is like a fart sound. That thought hazily surfaced and then faded in the mind of Geumseo, who had reached a state of panic.

“Are you a virgin?”

Heo Sangmuk said something disgusting. Geumseo’s mind had been turned to mush by Haeju’s expression and the scraping sound between his palms when he said ‘relationship of trust,’ so it couldn’t even process that question.

“Have you popped your cherry? Either in front or in back.”

Geumseo was still struggling. Geumseo’s nickname was little rat, yet like a fish that had jumped out of the water, this air was suffocating him.

“This won’t do. We need to get our pretty thing to relax a bit.”

Heo Sangmuk reached out and grabbed a whiskey bottle from the table. Geumseo frantically turned his head away from the bottle neck coming towards him. Even so, Heo Sangmuk didn’t blink an eye and tilted the neck. The alcohol soaked Geumseo’s cheek, went into his nose, and flowed between his lips. It was so stingingly spicy and disorienting that Geumseo flailed his limbs in any direction he could.

“I d-don’t want this.”

Even as Geumseo struggled, Heo Sangmuk didn’t budge. No, rather, he got more excited. He pressed Geumseo’s cheeks with his hands until they turned red and forcibly stuck the whiskey bottle neck in his mouth. As his own version of consideration, he repeatedly tilted it in short bursts and then pulled it away.

“Drink up. Honey, this is expensive stuff, you know? I’m buying you at an expensive price.”

Heo Sangmuk went so far as to pinch Geumseo’s nose shut. To live, to not suffocate, he had to open his mouth. The strong alcohol entered Geumseo’s mouth without warning and made the world spin round.

“Hooooow iiiiiis iiiiiit. Goooooeees doooown niiiiice.”

The tape in his head had definitely stretched. Heo Sangmuk’s voice suddenly warbled like a cone on midsummer asphalt. Heo Sangmuk still had hold of Geumseo’s nose. His jaw was also held, so he couldn’t part his lips or spit it out. The bottle neck had left his lips, but the whiskey still pooled inside his mouth, so Geumseo had no choice but to gulp, gulp it down.

Since it had even soaked his nasal mucous membranes, Geumseo began to get drunk very quickly. His head was pounding and he felt nauseous.

“Muuust beeee the kiiiind of booody thaaat taaakes alcohooool weeell…”

What? I don’t know what you’re saying.

To Geumseo, Heo Sangmuk’s hand coming towards his body felt sooooooooo slooooow, just like his way of speaking. So he felt like if he just smacked it, he could shake it off, but when he actually reached out his hand, his own hand moved even slower, flailing at the empty air that Heo Sangmuk had already passed.

In the meantime, his vest buttons came undone. His shirt buttons came undone too. The bow tie was all that was holding onto Geumseo’s neck and shirt. The edges of the checks prickled and stung Geumseo’s cheek.

Heo Sangmuk giggled looking at Geumseo’s chest. With his pupils slightly dilated, Geumseo was still slowly flailing his hands. Heo Sangmuk bit what he had been holding to Geumseo’s lips. After gulping whiskey like water, he also took out something that looked like a dried cigarette from his pocket and sucked on it. Smoke that smelled like ammonia flowed from him, making Geumseo cough along with a weak retch.

“I thought you’d be pink-nippled, no kidding.”

He could tell just from the downy fuzz, the lip color, and the flush. Heo Sangmuk patted Geumseo’s cheeks with a smack, smack sound. It was meant to snap him out of it, but only his cheeks reddened, and he stayed the same.

“Not much of a drinker? Don’t do second rounds?”

Geumseo didn’t answer. Even to the question “First time with whiskey?” he couldn’t nod. Heo Sangmuk was thoroughly pleased with Geumseo’s response.

Severely dizzy, with even the strength to fix his gaze on one spot gone, Geumseo’s eyes moved very slowly towards the door. It was slightly open, so the soundproofing couldn’t be intact either. People passing by, Haeju hyung too, could surely hear. No one looked in, and no one came to save him.

Ah, at that moment, he met eyes through the crack in the door. It was that employee who had asked Geumseo if he did second rounds. He could only see the pupils, so he didn’t know what expression it was, but he thought he heard a ‘kick’ sound. It must have been his imagination.

But when he saw that door slowly, pushed by a force anyone could see, closing, laughter began to fill his helplessly lying head. Kick, kick, kick, kick, kick. Geumseo’s eyes widened. Even his eyelids being lifted felt extremely slow. Before he knew it, Heo Sangmuk’s hand was heading towards Geumseo’s pants. Unzipping them, he hummed a tune. It was a popular foreign song. A version with the original sped up fast was trending, but as all sound movements felt slow, it sounded like the original.

“Let’s see if things are pink down below too.”