Semantic Error

Casually sitting in the vacant seat of a person who had gone to the army, Sangwoo was always exposed to Jaeyoung. His brain gobbled up and stored information about him, and his ears remembered his voice and played it back before he went to sleep. He peeked at his face, glanced at him, looked at him face-to-face, stared at him, made eye contact with him, and kept stealing glances at him every day, so much so, that he thought he could draw him with his eyes closed despite having no artistic skills. Just as he slowly became addicted to heavy metal, Jaeyoung was gradually adding color to Sangwoo.

He should’ve quit around then. It was the 16th day since he began to work with Jaeyoung. Sangwoo couldn’t forget the Friday when things went completely wrong.

On that day, Sangwoo finished small tasks on the project, such as compensation at every stage, level-up statistics, HP and damage, and the design of the difficulty levels, while Jaeyoung finished important UIs. Jaeyoung didn’t even get up for hours, and after he was done with the final product, he went to the wobbly bed and collapsed on to it. If it was like any other day, he would lie down, tell silly jokes, and turn on music while looking at his phone, but on that day, he must have been tired or something, because he lay down on his side and closed his eyes.

Fifteen minutes later, he looked back to call him, but Jaeyoung was still sleeping like the dead. Since he said he’d only shut his eyes for 15 minutes, he should have woken him up, but why would he do that? Sangwoo went back to his work as if he hadn’t checked his watch. Then it became 10 p.m., which was the time to return home.

‘It’s time for me to go.’

There had been no answer. It was clear that Jaeyoung was completely asleep. Sangwoo was wearing his backpack, so he had to leave, but then approached the bed for mysterious reasons.

‘Sunbae, are you asleep? Are you really… sleeping?’

He changed his lines to make sure that Jaeyoung was completely asleep. At the same time, his feet took him closer to him step-by-step.

He approached his face and calmly looked down at him. He couldn’t see his eyes well, since  his bangs were slightly tangled. Sangwoo slowly leaned over and crouched down. As Jaeyoung’s face got closer, a slightly unpleasant pounding increased. The feeling of his heart squeezing resembled motion sickness somehow. Sangwoo unwrapped his fist, which tightened at some point, and sneakily hovered his fingertips over his hair.

‘He’s so pretty’, he had thought. It was simple, incomparable appreciation. Even if he sat there with his butt on the floor all day, he wouldn’t get enough of it. He wanted it. He wanted to touch the eyelids and the tip of his nose. And the lips too. Sangwoo’s gaze remained on Jaeyoung’s slightly open lips.

While quietly watching him, Sangwoo realized his mistake. It wasn’t something he wanted to touch. He was impatient to do something else. It was an act he could never do if Jaeyoung had been awake. It was a small opportunity available only at that moment. It was completely a crime that no one would know of if only he kept his own mouth shut. Sangwoo carried out what he never would’ve done if he had been in a normal state.

He approached the sleeping Jaeyoung’s face and pressed his lips with his own lips and then he ran away.

He only walked a few steps, then he collapsed in the hallway by the studio with his back against the wall. His reason, conscience, self-control, judgment, and humanity, which he had maintained for 25 years without any issues, seemed to have collectively collapsed.

‘It’s fine. No one will know.’

Sangwoo headed home while reciting lines that seemed to belong to the main character of a crime novel. He deceived himself by pretending that nothing had happened, and closed his eyes while ignoring his pounding heart.

However, the trial didn’t end there. The following day, as his mind was falling apart, Sangwoo’s body collapsed, and he fell to his knees.

‘Oh, you’re here? Let’s go somewhere.’

He should’ve realized something was wrong, when his heart dropped upon seeing his smiling eyes and his relaxed face in front of the PC room. Sangwoo always lived with regrets these days. It was clear that there had arisen a serious problem with his judgment.

Printf(“No. I’m really busy and I don’t want to see you, sunbae. Goodbye.”)1

‘Yes. Where?’

The result of that was a huge incident when they went drinking.

He picked up his cap, calmly walked around the folding screen to settle the bill, paid half the amount and left, ran home at full speed, and when he arrived at home, he went under the covers after brushing his teeth, washing his face, and getting changed. However, the mistake didn’t disappear.

With a rough kick, his blanket rose to the ceiling and fell onto his face. Sangwoo trembled in the dark.

‘Am I a slave to lust?’

‘Do I really have to graduate from this school?’

‘Is there any meaning to keep on living this life?’

He suffered from numerous yes/no questions until dawn that day.

A strong sexual desire for a subject becomes expressed in adolescence. Sangwoo remembered a gentle pounding of his heart when he had brushed against girls who smelled good on the bus. When he was in high school, there was a teacher he had secretly found pretty, and he had even had a formal relationship with someone of the opposite sex when he had become an adult. However, he had never before been this overwhelmed by lust (to the point of sexually harassing someone who was sleeping or to the point of losing reason in another person’s workplace).

Besides, Jaeyoung wasn’t a woman. If one was a man, he would have encountered a number of males in middle school, high school, in engineering college, and in the military, but Sangwoo had never once experienced a similar case to this. It was an abnormal phenomenon beyond consideration. Just as his father and mother had gotten married and his aunt and uncle had gotten married, Sangwoo had naturally thought that one day he would join hands with a woman, kiss her, and get married.

However, at some point, that bastard, who was like an error, had suddenly taken a step and taken possession of him.

Footnotes:

In many programming languages, printf is a main output function that stands for “printed formatted.” See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printf_format_string for more details.