PUCKD Ch 38

It was about a 15-minute taxi ride to the night sea. Perhaps because the beach season had started, Anmok Beach was quite bustling.

Passing by cafes and bars that were open late into the night, Ji Minchul, looking at his phone, walked confidently toward a certain spot. After walking for a long while, they saw a solitary figure sitting in a deserted corner of the sandy beach.

It was Yook Doomin. Hojae secretly let out a breath of relief. Hojae and Minchul approached quietly from behind and sat on either side of Doomin, flanking him.

Only then, as if sensing their presence, Doomin flinched in surprise. When he lifted his head, his face was puffy and swollen. He also smelled of alcohol.

They saw a soju bottle at his feet. Minchul and Hojae placed a hand on Doomin’s back almost simultaneously.

“…What is it. How did you get here.”

“Ji Minchul put a GPS on you.”

“…Huh?”

“He might be your stalker.”

“You crazy bastard. When did you even install that.”

Ji Minchul feigned ignorance, just shrugging his shoulders and speaking playfully.

“Why are you being so pathetic by yourself. Your birthday is only four hours away.”

Hojae could feel the consideration in Minchul’s words. It probably meant that if Doomin didn’t want to talk, he wouldn’t ask anything.

At those words, Doomin was silent for a long time. The three of them just sat quietly, listening to the sound of the waves.

How long had they been sitting in silence? Doomin asked in a very small voice.

“…Did you guys see it too?”

It was immediately clear he was talking about the photo. For a moment, Hojae hesitated, wondering if he should lie and say he hadn’t. Although, what Hojae had seen was only half of the picture.

“Of course I saw it. How could I not with all that commotion.”

It was Ji Minchul who answered first. Hojae, at a loss for words, looked at Minchul.

“The lighting was pretty bad, wasn’t it? If you’re going to take a picture, you should’ve used that new light you bought. It was so dark, your abs were all blurred and it looked crappy.”

“…What the hell, you bastard?”

“But it looked good on you. As expected, our Doomin can pull off anything. Should we make that the concept for your next content? I think there’d be a demand for it. Your YouTube subscribers have increased, you know.”

“…”

“Isn’t that right? Hojae-shin.”

“Huh? Uh…”

“…Chul. Don’t you know that Hojae-Hojae can’t lie? Would it have killed you to get your stories straight before you came?”

“Hojae-shin. How can you be so clueless and stammer there. Are you ever going to get a clue?”

“…”

“Doomin, we love you just the way you are. Whether you’re a cross-dressing gay or an alien, you’re our eternal Doomin.”

“…No, f*ck. Are you trying to comfort me or mess with me. Hojae-Hojae, is this bastard drunk?”

“No, for real.”

“…”

“I really think that way.”

Shin Hojae quietly nodded his head beside them.

He was grateful to Minchul for including him in ‘we’ as if it were a matter of course. In truth, he didn’t have the right to sincerely comfort Doomin. Shin Hojae looked out at the inky black sea and smiled bitterly.

Doomin was silent for a long while before opening his mouth with difficulty.

“…Actually, the person I’m seeing isn’t a girlfriend, he’s a boyfriend.”

“Okay.”

“That’s why I couldn’t say anything. I was afraid you guys would think I’m weird. You know you’re kind of precious to me, right? It’s always hard to show your true self to the people who are precious to you.”

“It’s not like you’ve been weird for just a day or two. You worry about the strangest things. Right?”

“Chul?”

“Mmph mmph.“

As Minchul pantomimed zipping his lips, Doomin let out a big sigh. Then he quietly began his story.

When he was a child, while boys his age were crazy about their dads’ cars, Doomin was a boy who was crazy about his mom’s vanity table.

Doomin’s conservative and devout family did not tolerate that side of him. The day he was caught wearing his cousin’s dress and kissing a boy he was close with, Doomin was dragged to a strange prayer meeting by his father.

A scary-looking pastor said Doomin was possessed by an evil spirit and made him pray for three days and nights without sleep. His mom cried a lot, his dad wouldn’t even look at him, and his older brother looked at Doomin like he was an insect.

So Doomin came to think that this part of himself was a disease that needed to be cured.

From then on, Doomin worked hard to show his family a different side of himself. Ice hockey was one of those efforts.

“My mom and brother liked it when I played hockey. I guess it made me look manly. So I worked hard at it. Because I wanted to see my mom’s smiling face.”

Hojae recalled the Doomin he had met at the elementary school hockey club. A small, introverted boy who always kept his distance.

He remembered teasing him after they became friends, asking if that personality had all been an act. Thinking back now, that demeanor was a trace of the battles Doomin had been fighting all by himself.

“Then I got close to you guys, and hockey became really fun. I actually felt like my disease was being cured. When I felt frustrated, I would just mess around in front of the camera, and when I was stressed, I would work out. I thought I could just live like that.”

After speaking up to that point, Doomin paused for a beat and then said, as if vomiting the words out.

“I happened to read a DM that bastard sent me. It said he wanted to know the hidden side of me. Thinking about it now, it was probably just some random line, but of all times, I had to read that DM at three in the morning. Guys, don’t make any decisions after 1 AM. If I had seen it at 1 PM, I would’ve just thought, ‘What kind of bullshit is this?’ and moved on!”

Doomin’s voice, which had been calmly recounting the events, gradually turned playful. Even Hojae, who was clueless about these things, could tell it was a voice forced to sound bright.

Minchul, sensing the same thing, responded quietly.

“Doomin. You don’t have to force yourself to talk about it lightly. Your heart was moved because you were comforted by those words. Because they were the words you wanted to hear.”

“…You’re right. They were the words I wanted to hear. The truth is, all along, I wanted to hear words like that.”

Doomin’s voice, like a monologue, echoed quietly amidst the sound of the waves.

It felt as if self-loathing and guilt were tightening their grip around his airway.

Why did the face of someone born into a chaebol family, who must have grown up without wanting for anything, come to mind? His family couldn’t be like Yook Doomin’s family, and he couldn’t have grown up holding his breath like Yook Doomin.

Why were Doomin’s words replaying in his head in Kwon Junghyun’s voice? Was it because he saw his wounded face today?

“He said he’d let me do everything I’d ever wanted to do. I fell for those words. Like an idiot… I didn’t know he was the kind of guy who would just upload someone else’s pictures when he gets angry.”

“You’re going to break up with him, right?”

“I already broke up with him earlier! That son of a bitch. He must’ve thought I’d kneel if he threatened me with something like that, but he seriously underestimated Yook Doomin.”

“Good job. I didn’t like him from the moment I heard his voice.”

“What. How do you know his voice.”

“Ah.”

“What is it. Tell me right now!?”

With Doomin grabbing him by the collar, Ji Minchul confessed what had happened during the training camp. As he listened, Doomin’s face contorted dramatically.

“Ah, damn it! You should have told me! I didn’t even know Ji Minchul knew, and I was wracking my brain trying to make up lies! I’m telling you, my head was about to explode trying to keep my story straight!”

“You looked like it. I felt so bad for you that I couldn’t say anything.”

“Ugh! Ji Minchul, you bastard, seriously!”

Doomin, still sitting, made a fist and started punching Minchul repeatedly in the side.

“Ow! Ow! Ow, that really hurts. That’s where Na Daeil hit me earlier!”

At those words, Doomin stopped punching and, in a voice as small as a mosquito’s, thanked Minchul. Minchul teased Doomin, saying he couldn’t hear him, and got hit one more time.

“Oh, by the way. I have to contact Hyonghoon. He was really worried about you. You should contact him.”

“Ah, right. I’ll send him a message. He stayed by my side the whole time earlier. Good guy. Though he probably couldn’t even imagine that the picture was really of me. Haha.”

Saying that, Doomin took out his phone. On the screen he glanced at, hundreds of notifications were displayed. It seemed he had kept it on silent. The majority of them were comment notifications from his YouTube channel and social media.

You cross-dressing pervert freakㅋㅋㅋ

What’s so hot about a muscular Alpha like this that you’d even dress him in women’s underwear and fck him?ㅋ The other guy must be a saintㅋ*

I’m so disappointed by this incident. Please refund my paid subscription.

You pretended to be a model athlete living your best life on the outside, but you were doing all sorts of dirty things behind the scenes, huh?

Disgusting.

I got hard looking at Doomin’s picture.

Revolting.

‘Because kissing a man is even more disgusting than I thought.’

It was a natural progression for the words he himself had uttered to come to mind.