Chapter 13: Paper Cut

As Jun-ho entered through the front door of the lecture hall and spotted Min-hyeon, he immediately waved in greeting. Min-hyeon bowed his head.

“Hyung! Today the professor said we should sit together as groups.”

As Min-hyeon shifted one seat over, Jun-ho naturally sat in the spot he’d vacated. Jun-ho’s knee brushed against Min-hyeon’s. Even such a minor contact made his heart pound. Min-hyeon quickly tucked his legs in and cast a slightly resentful glance at Jun-ho’s long legs.

“But why did the professor suddenly tell us to sit by groups? Is he going to make us present? I haven’t prepared anything for a presentation—I’m not confident at all.”

Instead of answering Min-hyeon’s words, Jun-ho stared at him intently. As those dark black eyes examined him thoroughly, Min-hyeon’s pupils wandered, not knowing where to look. Seeing him visibly flustered, Jun-ho chuckled lightly.

“Did you oversleep?”

“How did you know?”

Min-hyeon’s eyes went wide. He’d overslept today and come without breakfast—he wondered if it showed on his face. Jun-ho reached out and touched Min-hyeon’s hair.

“It’s flattened here.”

Min-hyeon awkwardly smoothed down the spot Jun-ho had touched.

“Ah, that spot? It’s always like that there, for some reason.”

“Cute.”

“Ugh.”

At Jun-ho’s unexpected reply, Min-hyeon hung his head deeply. He never knew how to react at times like this. If anyone other than Jun-ho had said something like that, he could have given a shameless reply like “I am a little cute, aren’t I? I know.” But with Jun-ho, he couldn’t. When someone with that otherworldly beauty looked at him seriously and called him cute, he simply couldn’t help blushing.

“Ah, hyung. Please don’t say things like that. I’ll really misunderstand.”

A moment later, Min-hyeon’s voice, pleading as he looked around with a flushed face, grew impossibly small. Jun-ho just smiled as if thoroughly amused.

Rubbing his warm cheeks with his palms, Min-hyeon steered the conversation back to its original topic.

“But they’re not really going to make us present today, are they? I’d better read it over just in case. If I’d known, I would have printed an extra copy. Let’s look at it together.”

Min-hyeon opened his bag and took out the neatly prepared clear file. It was the assignment he’d poured all his effort into last night. Normally, he might have grumbled a word or two if told to print it out instead of just submitting it as a file—but this time, those thoughts didn’t cross his mind at all.

Grateful to the professor for assigning this group project at just the right timing, he’d printed it out, meticulously aligned the edges of the A4 pages, and even carefully considered the angle of the stapler—a perfect assignment.

“Ah!”

Min-hyeon let out a short yelp as he fumbled the papers. The sensation of paper cutting through the inside of his right index finger was eerily sharp. Without even thinking to catch the fluttering assignment as it fell to the floor, Min-hyeon clutched his finger. Pressing down firmly on the joint below the cut, tiny crimson beads of blood welled up along the thin slit. It stung quite badly—the cut was fairly deep.

It was his first time getting a paper cut. It felt contradictory—something so thin yet thick slicing through his skin and digging deep—and the sensation was chilling.

‘That’s a lot of blood for such a small cut. Didn’t the same thing happen last time too?’

It bothered him. For such a tiny wound, the amount of blood seemed somewhat unsettling.

No matter how thoroughly Min-woo had managed things, it was impossible to live without ever bleeding. Like the time he’d fallen in front of Jun-ho, there had been a few minor injuries Min-woo never knew about. But the bleeding had never been unusual—in fact, because the wounds were small, the blood clotted faster and healed quicker than most people’s. He’d never had trouble with hemostasis.

That was exactly why he was curious about what Min-woo meant by his “illness.” When people said you couldn’t bleed, hemophilia usually came to mind—but his symptoms were nothing like that. He began to wonder again if this was somehow related to what Min-woo had told him.

“Hyung, I need to submit this, so I can’t get blood on it—could you…”

Min-hyeon couldn’t finish the request to pick up the assignment for him. Jun-ho’s face, eyes fixed on his wound, was frighteningly rigid. His pupils, dark to the point of seeming blue, gave off an inexplicably chilling impression.

Even as he watched Jun-ho slowly reach out his hand toward him, Min-hyeon couldn’t move a muscle. Those unusually cool fingers, with a force that was far from gentle, pried away Min-hyeon’s other hand gripping his injured finger. Then he pulled that finger toward himself. The touch felt somehow urgent.

“Jun-ho hyung…?”

Just before the blood droplet precariously hanging above the red line could trickle down, a crimson tongue emerged between clearly defined lips and languidly lapped it up. The sight of the large droplet of blood seeping into Jun-ho’s tongue was astonishingly surreal.

After staring blankly at the scene for a moment without any reaction, Min-hyeon finally flinched.

“H-hyung!”

He’d kept his voice low, wary of drawing attention from the other students nearby—but it was certainly loud enough for Jun-ho right beside him to hear. Yet Jun-ho acted as if he hadn’t heard anything, offering no reply. Instead, he pressed down firmly on Min-hyeon’s finger with his grip. A new drop of blood, like a pomegranate seed, welled up to replace what Jun-ho had taken. Still without a word, Jun-ho sucked in the crimson fruit once more.

Jun-ho’s body temperature was always on the cooler side, but right now, his tongue licking Min-hyeon’s wound felt exceptionally hot. The tiny papillae of his tongue seemed to dig into the gap of the cut, stinging and aching painfully. Min-hyeon’s hair stood on end.

Jun-ho didn’t stop at lapping up the droplets that beaded up—this time, he bit down on the finger entirely. The sensation of his finger being sucked deep into a moist cavity made Min-hyeon freeze.

His lips, pursed tightly, constricted around the circumference of the finger and sucked with force. Even though he was seeing it with his eyes and feeling it with his senses, it simply wouldn’t register as reality. What snapped Min-hyeon out of it was the distinctly sharp sensation of ivory touching his fingertip. In reality, it probably wasn’t that pointed—but somehow, Min-hyeon had a premonition that his skin was about to be torn by those blunt teeth.

Min-hyeon roughly pulled his hand away. The sensation of his finger being scraped out against hard teeth was so vivid that he felt like screaming.

“I-I’ll be right back—bathroom!”

Clatter. The chair made a loud noise as it bumped against the desk behind it. The eyes of everyone in the lecture hall turned to Min-hyeon. But right now, he wasn’t composed enough to pay attention to such trivial things.

He scrambled out of the lecture hall and ran to the bathroom. Through that short hallway from the lecture hall to the restroom, he nearly bumped into several people coming and going.

“Sorry. Sorry.”

Min-hyeon frantically threw out apologies as he dashed into the restroom.

The restroom was empty. He was out of breath. Panting as if he’d sprinted the equivalent of a few hundred meters, Min-hyeon’s gasps filled the silent restroom. Standing before the sink, he caught his breath for a moment, then turned on the faucet. The sound of water pouring from the tap mixed with his ragged breathing.

Min-hyeon raised his hand. The bleeding had already stopped completely. Staring dazedly at the wound—which had already begun to heal, leaving only a trace of the thin slit running against the direction of his fingerprint—he suddenly realized something.

His hands were trembling terribly. His fingers, his palms, his entire hand—as if someone were deliberately shaking them—were quivering and convulsing against his will. Min-hyeon gripped his right wrist tightly with his uninjured left hand. But the trembling didn’t stop—he only realized that his left hand was shaking along with it now.

No, it wasn’t just his hands. His entire body was trembling. His arms, his legs, even the inside of his chattering lips—his teeth clacked against each other.

Min-hyeon wrapped his arms around his own body. He couldn’t tell where the tremor running through his whole body originated. Something different from pure fear was enveloping him completely.

After standing still for a while, Min-hyeon suddenly voiced what had come to mind.

“It’s because hyung… because hyung did something strange.”

But was it really strange? Maybe he was just overreacting.

It could be seen as nothing much. When you get a small cut, people often say, “Spit on it and it’ll heal.” Perhaps Jun-ho had licked the wound in a similar context. And if not that, maybe it had some other meaning. Something with a stronger connotation of affection.

On impulse, Min-hyeon put his own finger in his mouth. Just as Jun-ho had done, he sucked it deep into his mouth and bit down. The heat that started at his fingertip raced through his blood vessels toward his heart. The pounding of his chest, audible as if right by his ear, filled his head with dizziness.

Min-hyeon raised his head and stared at his reflection in the mirror. The face looking back at him—flushed red, staring intently—felt unfamiliar.

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