Chapter 25

“Just soak your body.”

Gyuhan looked back and forth between Jio—who was holding cheongju and salt—and the bathtub. When he repeated this back-and-forth several times, Jio tilted his head and asked, “What.”

“Why are you holding those?”

As far as Gyuhan knew, cheongju was used to eliminate gamey odors in cooking, and salt was also a culinary staple. But seeing him hold them before a steaming tub with Gyuhan standing there stark naked made him feel thoroughly bizarre.

“Salt and alcohol. Both are used for purification. People throw salt after returning from a funeral. It should work on curses too. Think of it as the exact same principle.”

“…”

“You’ve thrown salt on me before too. Aren’t you getting in?”

When Jio asked briskly with a tinge of impatience, Gyuhan couldn’t back out.

He was already buck naked anyway, so suddenly putting his clothes back on would be ridiculous. Besides, backing out on the grounds that rice wine and salt made him feel like a cooking ingredient made even less sense.

Seeing Gyuhan step in with a reluctant expression, Jio sat down beside the tub and began stirring the water with his hand.

The ripples tickled his skin. Gyuhan noticed his pubic hair swaying with the current—or more accurately, realized that his friend, Gong Jio of all people, was watching it—and discreetly cupped his hands between his legs to cover himself.

“What are you doing?”

“Just… well… it tickles. Because of the hair.”

Listening to Gyuhan’s awkward reply, Jio lightly bit his lower lip before releasing it. Then, with a casual, nonchalant expression, he offered advice. “Want to shave it, then?”

“Huh?”

He said it so casually that Gyuhan thought he had misheard.

“Should we shave? The hair might be tainted with bad luck too. If you shave, I’ll shave mine too.”

“Hey, no. That’s crazy. Hey! How the fuck am I supposed to use the bathroom then?! If a real man is bald down there, is he even a man?” Gyuhan barked in outrage.

Jio merely shrugged. If masculinity was determined by the presence or absence of hair, nothing could be more flimsy.

Yet to him, the hair didn’t matter either. Present or absent, it made no difference. What mattered was the body it was attached to.

Pretending to be deep in thought, Jio kept stirring the water. The tickling sensation made Gyuhan repeatedly flex and relax the soles of his feet. He had returned here to get it up again, yet right now, the strange sensation that it might stand was so unnerving that he couldn’t stop obsessing over it. Gyuhan felt completely adrift, his mind and body operating on entirely different wavelengths. A fierce, deep crease formed between his brows, and his expression was grim. Watching him, Jio asked in a subtle, quiet voice—sounding, once again, completely nonchalant, “It really isn’t getting hard, though.”

“Hey, I told you it was real! I’m not faking—wait, what?! Y-You, right now, your h-hand—”

“Ah, move your hands. I need to get a proper look to know whether it’s completely dead or if there’s a little life in it. How else will we check how much of the curse has been exorcised?”

Whether a grandiose, plausible word like exorcism was appropriate here was questionable, but Jio tossed it out without a care. Even if Gyuhan had ever opened a dictionary, the only words he would have looked up were wife, bride, or spouse. And above all else, he had never opened a dictionary in his life anyway.

Lightly batting Gyuhan’s hands away, Jio wrapped a firm grip around the shaft. The weight, thickness, and size were all as honest as they looked. It was just like Cha Gyuhan, transparent inside and out. A cock shaped exactly like the image his face conjured. Quite different from Jio’s own.

“Doesn’t look a hundred percent cursed, does it?” Jio muttered as he kneaded Gyuhan’s member.

Gyuhan was struck speechless. Gripping the rim of the bathtub, he gritted his teeth. All the pent-up energy from his involuntary abstinence—accumulated in this vigorous, over-fit, ignorantly healthy body—was rushing straight to his lower abdomen. It felt as though a horde of furious citizens had reached the limit of their patience, screaming to get out while having nowhere to go, flooding the office with uncontrollable complaints.

“Ugh, uuuugh…!”

“Oh, did it get a little harder? Ah, never mind.”

Jio’s touch was insidious, seasoned, clever, and cunning. Twisting around the shaft, scraping the tip with his fingernail, rubbing the ridges with his whorled prints, gripping the base firmly on the downstroke, then lightly stroking back up. To any observer, it was blatant foreplay with an unmistakable objective. Only Gyuhan remained blind to it. Right now, Gyuhan was like a novice parking attendant, sweating bullets trying to appease an obnoxious customer refusing to pay the fee while staring in horror at the endless line of honking cars backing up behind them.

“Ugh, G-Gong Jio, Jio-ya. Ah, fuck, I… ah, this is torture. Hngh…!”

Watching Gyuhan grit his teeth with his eyes squeezed shut, Jio slowly slipped his arms out of his robe. When he released his grip on Gyuhan’s cock to strip off the underwear beneath his robe, Gyuhan stared blankly at him with wet, glistening eyes. Jio fixed an unrelenting gaze on that utterly vacant expression.

“Y-You’re getting in too?”

Relieved that he had caught a brief reprieve, Gyuhan asked stupidly with a thick tongue. “I told you mine won’t get hard either. We agreed to break it together. Are you saying you want to be the only one cured, Gyuhan-ah?”

Failing to remember that whenever Jio addressed him this sweetly by name, it was usually right before he got so goddamn pissed off that they ended up trading punches, Gyuhan merely thought, Ah, right, of course, and nodded. What a magnificent friendship this was. Even sharing a curse together. It should have been enough for just me to suffer. This was all my fault—I threw away our friendship for a wank, yet you…

“Guh!”

Gyuhan’s sentimental reflections were severed without warning. Water sloshed over the tub’s edge as Jio stepped in, and almost simultaneously, Gyuhan was hauled tight against him. Then, Jio wrapped his hand around both their cocks together.

“Ha, fuck.”

Jio bared his teeth in a grin. For a comrade struck by the shared curse of erectile dysfunction, his smile was far too confident. Gyuhan swallowed hard against an inexplicable surge of tension. Jio’s light-colored eyes shone translucent under the bathroom lights; once locked onto them, Gyuhan found it impossible to look away.

“It’s quite different when you’re awake, isn’t it.”

Before Gyuhan could comprehend the meaning behind Jio’s muttered words, his waist was seized, hauling him onto his knees. His chest rose above Jio’s forehead. Jio rubbed his forehead against the lower curve of Gyuhan’s well-developed pectorals. Then, tilting his head back, he pressed the tip of his nose firmly against a nipple before parting his lips…

“Aaaagh!”

He bit down.

While Gyuhan shrieked in shock, Jio’s hands swiftly settled on his buttocks. Gyuhan couldn’t even see whether Jio’s dick was erect or stubbornly lying limp like his own. His body was pressed flush against Jio, looking down only revealed the crown of Jio’s head, and worst of all, Jio’s hands were trying to pry his ass cheeks apart.

N-No!

Gyuhan squeezed his eyes shut, oblivious to how disastrous a move that would turn out to be.

At this rate, he would recall that mind-blowing masturbation session from before. He had shut his eyes out of desperation, but instead, the image of Jio he had conjured back then materialized vividly behind his eyelids.

“Haa, Cha Gyuhan… Rub against mine and cum. Got it?”

In his fantasy, Jio had straddled him, holding their two shafts together while violently bucking his hips. It was a vision so vivid it felt as though he had truly been pinned beneath Jio and viewed this angle in real life. Never having realized his imagination possessed such power, Gyuhan had felt his own precum as if it were Jio’s, rubbing them together even more roughly until…

No!

Gyuhan snapped his eyes open. He had to shove Jio away. He had the gut feeling that if he didn’t push him off right now, he would cross a river of no return forever. That powerful intuition—his animal instincts, which usually made him wonder if Jio was the true beast, finally doing their job—was just about to spur him into motion. But when his vision cleared to push Jio’s shoulders away, it wasn’t the crown of Jio’s head before him, but those pale, light eyes.

“Why? What were you imagining, Cha Gyuhan?”

Jio smiled, Gyuhan swallowed dryly in a daze, and Jio licked his lips as he slid a finger into Gyuhan’s hole.

“Gah!”

“Haha. That moan. Fucking disgusting.”

Jio laughed fiercely. It sounded less like amusement and more like genuine fury.

Gyuhan couldn’t tell which it was. Using fingers from both hands, Jio alternated plunging them into Gyuhan’s hole. Once inside, he hooked them like claws to scrape the internal walls, and as he withdrew, he stretched the entrance apart in opposite directions. Gyuhan’s mind went completely dizzy. Even when meeting fuckbuddies, he was the type to prep his own rear beforehand. He preferred to get straight to business, see the results, hit the main points, and leave; lingering over all sorts of foreplay made him cringe in embarrassment. In other words, Gyuhan’s backside was rather shy around other people’s fingers.

“Th-This feels weird.”

Worse, the owner of those fingers was someone terrifyingly familiar. Overcome with panic, Gyuhan stiffened and trembled, barely managing to plead, “L-Let’s not do fingers. I feel weird, Jio-ya…”

Jio thought to himself, Is Cha Gyuhan truly a walking man of ambition?

He couldn’t have said it intentionally, yet how could he utter the single most erotic thing possible in this situation? Jio felt his cock—which had been rock hard for a long time, aching to ram itself into Gyuhan this very second—throb with a sharp, painful heat. Biting his lip, Jio spoke in a low, raspy voice, “Kiss me.”

That was nothing. Didn’t the mob bosses kiss each other on the lips in The Godfather? Gyuhan believed that level of physical affection was something anyone with true friendship could do without hesitation—a privilege of real men who didn’t need to be needlessly squeamish.

So he did exactly as he had seen. Just like in The Godfather Part II, he cupped Jio’s face firmly and planted a forceful Smack!

At that very instant, Jio’s fingers sank deep inside Gyuhan, and the curse was lifted.

“W-Wait a minute!”

Gyuhan shoved Jio back. Jio yielded obediently. Looking down at the newly resurrected second Cha Gyuhan standing tall at attention, Gyuhan was swept away by a surge of emotion, awe, and sheer joy. Cradling his cock in both trembling hands, he completely failed to notice Jio licking his lips with dark, sunken eyes.

“U-Ugh.”

A lump rose in his throat. Gyuhan unconsciously wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. Fortunately, it was only a bead of sweat, but its emotional weight was no different from tears.

Jio checked his fingernails, patiently waiting out this touching reunion. They had grown out a tiny bit, but this much shouldn’t cause issues. Just as he made a mental note to trim them even shorter next time, he looked up to find Gyuhan staring intently down between his legs.

“Ah.”

Though it had cooled slightly while waiting, there stood another Gong Jio—boasting outstanding rigidity, endurance, and patience.

Jio shrugged and tossed out an indifferent lie. “Looks like I’m cured too. The salt works wonders.”

“…It looks way too fine, though? Are you sure yours wasn’t getting up?”

Surprisingly perceptive for once. Flicking the surface of the water with his fingertip, Jio asked in a leisurely drawl. “So, since you’re cured, is that it? You’re going to stop?”

“Well… if we do more, what else would we do?” Gyuhan mumbled his question.

Jio smirked, recognizing that Gyuhan was already looking for a way to slink away.

His guess was spot-on.

It wasn’t that his feelings had changed between getting in and getting out. If anything, it was the opposite. The curse being lifted meant Jio had forgiven him, but if things continued like this, Gyuhan feared he would soon have to beg for forgiveness all over again. Jio’s glistening chest, his parted thighs, and the cock nestled between them—everything before Gyuhan’s eyes was excessively stimulating. What was worse, Jio was kneeling before him. The angle, the posture, and everything they had been doing right up until now were dangerous.

I need to run.

Gyuhan was gripped solely by the command of his instincts, screaming at him to get the hell out of here without offering any explanation.

Yet the reason he couldn’t simply bolt was that Jio’s silence and slightly lowered head pricked sharply at Gyuhan’s conscience.

Gyuhan lightly covered his chest with his hand. Caressing his pectorals—which, despite his recent neglect of workouts, admirably retained their solid, thick shape—he tried to soothe the phantom ache, only to freeze at Jio’s words, or more precisely, the tone of his voice.

“So you’re just going to leave.”

It sounded almost like a mutter to himself, yet Gyuhan felt compelled to answer.

“Wh-What more are we supposed to do here? We’re both healthy now…”

“I wanted to do more.”

Jio slowly raised his head. Startled by the clear, light-brown eyes staring up at him, Gyuhan sprang to his feet before he could stop himself.

That was the mistake.

While his chest ached like the second day after an intense bench press session, his semi-soft member was now positioned directly at Jio’s eye level. The height, the angle—everything was perfectly set for someone to take it into their mouth. And the moment Gyuhan realized that… Jio’s gaze slowly traveled up toward it. A shadow began to fall across Jio’s face, and…

“Cha Gyuhan.” Pulling his eyes away from Gyuhan’s cock, Jio looked up into his face. “You didn’t just get cured. You got hard because of me. The reason you couldn’t get it up all this time was because I wasn’t there.”

“Hey… don’t say such crazy shit. If a guy c-can’t get hard without his friend, does that make any fucking sense…? What, am I supposed to live with you even after I get married?”

Jio let out a smirk at Gyuhan’s stammering retort. The smile was chillingly cold.

“That damn marriage. Do you really think you can get married?”

“Wh-What?”

“When getting your ass prodded makes you instantly rock hard, and you get off just looking at me?”

Jio dragged a wet hand down his own chest. Over his pectorals, down his abs, and then wrapped his fingers around his cock. Without taking his eyes off Gyuhan, he curved his eyes in a smile and began stroking himself as if shame didn’t exist.

“Haa.”

At that wet exhale, Gyuhan’s erection hardened even further.

This is wrong.

Though he was barely submerged in one-fifth of a bath rather than a half-bath, Gyuhan felt his entire body burning up. He scrambled to get out, only for Jio to catch him by the wrist.

“Where are you going.”

Even as he spoke, Jio’s hand never stopped stroking.

“I-I’m trying to give you some privacy, you bastard. I, I’m…”

“Going to another room to do it? Just do it in front of me. Why, what’s wrong with that? You said we’re childhood friends. Let’s drop our balls out in the open, huh?”

Was that what being childhood friends meant? Gyuhan’s head spun in confusion. Yet all that remained was that single word—friend. Only that word could snap him back to his senses. Squeezing his eyes shut, Gyuhan resolved to be cruel—all for the sake of that eternal value of friendship.

“F-Friends don’t do this with each other!”

Spoken by the very man who had suffered erectile dysfunction after reaching a monstrous climax while fingering his own rear thinking of that exact friend.

Jio stared blankly at the hand that had been shaken off, then let out a dry Ha. It was utterly parched yet searing, and simultaneously freezing cold and razor-sharp.

“That fucking ‘friend.'”

Jio stopped stroking himself and rose to his feet. Water cascaded loudly around him as he pushed past Gyuhan—who had been trying to leave first—and stepped out of the tub. Picking up the robe discarded on the floor, he wrapped it around himself. Then, wearing a frigid expression as though he had never masturbated in front of his friend seconds ago, he looked back at Gyuhan.

“I’m sick of it. That endless ‘friend’ babble of yours. Never growing up, never changing. I’m sick to death of it.”

There was neither consideration nor sugarcoating.

No, perhaps the absence of sugarcoating was the true consideration. Because even with a head spinning in confusion, Gyuhan could understand it in an instant.

Gyuhan scrambled after Jio. It felt as though a bucket of ice water had been dumped over his head. They had fought countless times, plenty of which involved trading bloody fists, but this time, he sensed that this was truly the end.

But why?

Gyuhan asked himself.

“Gong Jio!”

Chasing after the unrelenting Jio, Gyuhan kept asking himself. It wasn’t just his chest; his whole body ached, pierced by a razor-sharp chill. It couldn’t be just from stepping out of the warm bathroom. That alone wouldn’t make him feel as though he were standing stark naked in the snow-covered courtyard in the dead of winter, being punished by his father as a child.

“Gong Jio! Hey!”

The bedroom door locked with a sharp click, but Gyuhan couldn’t accept it. He rattled the doorknob frantically and banged on the door, but no response returned.

“I’m sick of it. That endless ‘friend’ babble of yours. Never growing up, never changing. I’m sick to death of it.”

Jio’s voice echoed ceaselessly through his head, battering his entire body.

Ah, so that’s why it hurts.

Clutching his chest with one arm, Gyuhan continued twisting the knob.

He was hurt. Having never suffered psychological, mental, or emotional wounds in his life, Gyuhan had no idea how intensely invisible damage could physically hurt the body.

Having never suffered such an affliction, he possessed zero immunity. The pain, arriving so late in life after failing to experience it when he should have, was excruciating enough that even a paragon of physical health like Gyuhan could barely endure it. It was a pain and shock he had never received from anyone in the world.

And so Gyuhan, thoroughly vulnerable and panicked… punched a hole straight through the door.

“Jio-ya!”

Gyuhan called out in a desperate wail. Honestly, even he hadn’t expected to smash the door. He had assumed the lock would give out first, but…

At any rate, Gyuhan pressed his face against the splintered opening and peered inside, but in the pitch-black room, Jio was nowhere to be seen. That fair skin, looking stunning against the wine-colored silk robe… It had resembled so closely a scene he had vaguely imagined—a wife walking toward him, saying the kids had gone to their grandmother’s for the night…

“Gong Jio! I’m coming in!”

That fantasy was swiftly replaced by the muscular figure of Gong Jio before vanishing entirely. Gyuhan tore away a bit more of the splintered gap and shoved his arm through. The wood scraping and gouging his skin was nothing compared to the shock and agony he was experiencing for the first time in his life. Groping around with his inserted arm, Gyuhan found the inner lock and clicked it open.

“I-I’ll fix the d-door later…!”

As he threw the door open, the faint glow from the small lamp left on in the living room spilled thinly into the dark bedroom. At the edge of that sliver of light lay the tips of Jio’s bare feet.

In stark contrast to how violently he had breached the room, Gyuhan froze the moment he saw those pale toes. His own toes twitched. Did the soles of his feet feel ticklish…? Maybe…

“You have plenty of other friends besides me. Do you really need to go this far?”

“…How could they ever be the same as you, Jio-ya.”

“You rarely say things like that. You usually spout textbook platitudes about how all friends are equal.”

“D-Did you hate that?”

“I was sick of it.” In the darkness, Jio assaulted Gyuhan without lifting a single finger. “I was sick to death of it. But seeing you treat me differently among all those ‘equal’ friends was kind of cute at times. Made me feel smug, even.”

“Yeah. Even so, to me, you were…”

“But at the end of the day, still just a friend.”

“…”

“I’m so sick of it I can’t do this anymore.”

Jio took a slow step forward. Stopping where the faint light rendered everything visible, he stared straight at Gyuhan, piercing right through the childish, unrealistic, and laughable notions Gyuhan had nurtured since childhood without growing up in the slightest.

“Do you know why I slept with men? Because I knew that if you ever brought home a woman to marry, I would steal her from you. That’s why I only ever slept with men. I picked guys who shared traits with you, and I thought of you every time.”

Gyuhan was left dazed, as if struck by a heavy blow to the head. Before he could even ask what the hell that meant, Jio took another step closer.

“That was the only way I could protect this pathetic relationship, but let’s quit now. It’s over.”

One, two, three…

Gyuhan counted to three in his head. Someone had once told him to count numbers to suppress rage.

Three wasn’t enough, so he counted to five. And then to ten…

Yet the more he counted, the louder his heartbeat thundered in his deafened ears, his body burning up until his fist clenched on pure instinct. Gyuhan raised his fist high.

“You son of a bitch, a three-way relationship is a crime…!”

And he slammed his fist into Jio’s face.

“You call yourself an attorney?! How can a legal professional advocate committing illegal acts?! Is that what they taught you in school?!”

Having no education to speak of, Gyuhan hurled whatever random words came out.

Knocked to the floor, Jio’s head snapped violently back and forth under Gyuhan’s punches, until his palm suddenly shot up and caught Gyuhan’s incoming fist.

“What I learned? Yeah, I’ve got something.”

Even in the dark, Jio’s eyes gleamed with a predatory sheen. Wrapping his legs around Gyuhan’s waist, Jio twisted with fluid precision and flipped him onto the floor in an instant. While Gyuhan specialized in striking martial arts like kickboxing and Muay Thai, Jio had practiced Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

Gyuhan thrashed as Jio’s arm clamped down hard across his neck and shoulder. Jio’s thighs pinned Gyuhan’s waist to the floor. With Jio’s knees spread wide, his robe fell open, exposing muscled thighs that looked like lethal weapons. Baring his canines in a savage grin, Jio reached down into his robe and pulled out his fully erect cock.

“I had it wrong from the start. Seducing your spouse wouldn’t have worked anyway because you would’ve just claimed it wasn’t destiny or whatever and refused to give up. I should’ve just fucked you from day one. Trying to satisfy myself with the role of a supportive friend by your side? Settling for that pathetic joke of a role is why my cock won’t go down and it’s driving me fucking crazy. You went nuts because you couldn’t get it up? I spent every single minute of every day feeling like I was in heat because of you! You have no fucking clue how many times you’ve been bent over in my head.”

Jio let out a sinister laugh. Pinned by the arm crushing his neck and completely overwhelmed by the madness radiating from Jio’s words, Gyuhan could only feebly flail his arms and legs.

Staring intently at the pinned Gyuhan, Jio leaned down and dragged his tongue in a long, wet stripe up his cheek.

“You’ve been fucked raw in your office alone…”

At the end of that whisper, Gyuhan let out a sharp scream.

“Agh! My cheek!”

Jio had bitten his cheek!

Spurred by the pain, Gyuhan unleashed superhuman strength. The positions reversed once more. Jio crossed both forearms to shield his face, so Gyuhan drove a brutal punch into his ribs. Jio burst into a ragged mix of coughing and laughter. The sound of Jio—a man who rarely showed emotion—laughing while taking a beating was truly, chillingly bizarre.

Curling inward to protect his ribs, Jio waited until Gyuhan’s punches slowed slightly, then flashed a predatory gleam in his eyes and surged upright.

“Fuck, cut it out, Gyuhan-ah. Your bones need to stay intact so I can fuck you senseless in a minute!”

“Gah!”

The reversal happened so fast that Gyuhan had no time to dodge or block. With a sharp whoosh of displaced air, Jio’s fist flew straight at him. Squeezing his eyes shut at the sound, Gyuhan braced for the crushing impact or the sweet relief of a blackout, but it never came.

His adrenaline was off the charts. Listening to the violent thumping of his heart, Gyuhan remained curled tight as every pore on his body constricted. When nothing happened, he slowly peeled his eyes open. As if he had been waiting for that exact moment, Jio offered a faint, chilling smile.

“That’s it. Keep your eyes on me.”

“…You crazy bastard.”

“You only realize that now? Even after all your friends warned you?”

Jio had deliberately held the strike just to wait for him to open his eyes… The moment Gyuhan realized that, the outcome of the fight was sealed. The instant Gyuhan resigned in defeat, Jio reached back and clamped a tight grip around his cock. As Gyuhan gasped in shock, Jio struck with his other fist—with flawless, surgical precision.

A blackout or a whiteout. Either way, as his consciousness unraveled into the void, Jio’s voice drifted faintly through the haze.

“Who said you could lose focus? I told you to pay attention to me.”

Fuuuck… When the hell did you ever tell me to focus…