The Villain’s Recipe - Chapter 17.2
“Then we have to lie down!”
Min-ha immediately made Baek Seok-gyol lie down on the bed.
‘What should I do now?’
He had made him lie down in the first place, but he did not know what he himself was supposed to do. Was it okay to lie next to him? Hesitating for a moment, Min-ha quietly lay down beside Baek Seok-gyol.
“Min-ha.”
A chuckle came from above.
“Didn’t I just tell you about the cases where guiding works even better?”
He had told him. But even though his embarrassment had faded, it was still not an easy action to take.
“Make yourself comfortable.”
That is the hardest part. Min-ha pressed his pounding heart with his hand and blinked. An unusual wave of tension swept over him.
“Is your posture uncomfortable?”
“I-it’s fine.”
“I’m uncomfortable. So let’s make it more comfortable.”
Saying that, Baek Seok-gyol pulled Min-ha up and stripped off his top in one swift motion. Min-ha’s eyes widened once again at having his clothes taken off out of nowhere.
Indeed, he looked a lot like a rabbit.
Hugging Min-ha tightly, who was too startled to even think about covering his body, Baek Seok-gyol rolled right over on the bed.
“This way, the contact surface is wider, right?”
Baek Seok-gyol placed Min-ha on top of his body. In that state, reaching his arms around behind Min-ha’s back to pull him close, the contact surface had no choice but to be wide. Right, it was not a wrong statement, but.
‘I’m embarrassed!’
A level of embarrassment that was on a completely different dimension from when he felt Baek Seok-gyol’s heartbeat with his palm washed over Min-ha.
Thump, thump.
From a certain moment, it became impossible to distinguish whether this was the sound of Baek Seok-gyol’s heartbeat or his own. But he knew this much. How wildly his heart was beating. At this rate, it felt like it was going to pop right out of his mouth.
Does guiding normally agitate a person this much? While thinking that and enduring desperately, his heartbeat also slowly began to return to normal. Warm sunlight leaked in through the large window, and the bed felt cozy, perhaps because the blankets had been thoroughly washed not too long ago.
Baek Seok-gyol was merely holding Min-ha close and doing nothing else. Perhaps because of that. As his mind settled, the scars began to catch his eye again. Hesitating for a moment, Min-ha gently touched one of the sunken scars with his hand.
“Did it hurt a lot?”
The answer did not return immediately.
“I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you know?”
Min-ha seemed to be asking the question “Why?” a lot today.
“Because it was just daily life.”
Baek Seok-gyol answered indifferently, but hearing that made a surge of anger well up inside. Daily life, getting injuries like this on your body. Where on earth was such a thing? Min-ha parted his lips as if he wanted to say something more, but soon pressed them tightly together. And Baek Seok-gyol acutely read that emotional shift.
‘It really is fine, though.’
It was already a past routine. Of course, to some people, it was not. The espers who had been together with ZERO since the early days, including Ma Jin-cheol, were still trapped in the past. That was because some of the figures who had harmed them back then were still surviving.
Even if all of them were killed, could they truly cast off their hatred completely and be liberated? Speaking coldly, he thought not. Because they are human, it is painful and sad. Unless they were emotionless beings like Baek Seok-gyol, nothing would change.
However, Baek Seok-gyol had no intention of confessing that honestly to Min-ha. Instead, he decided to borrow another victim’s emotions to elicit sympathy from Min-ha.
“The first time.”
No answer came back from Min-ha, but he could tell that he was listening intently.
“When I opened my eyes, the whole world was white.”
The artificial esper laboratory. The doctor who founded that laboratory had a terribly bad hobby. It seemed he was not satisfied unless everything was made pure white.
“There were several people like me in that place.”
There were small age differences up and down, but they were all young. Furthermore, though he did not know it at the time, there was a peculiar commonality among the children gathered like that back then.
