Badminton Partners
Straight out of undergrad, I got a job teaching English in South Korea. I ended up being assigned via the government program I taught for to teach in a small town called Gochang, about three hours south of Seoul. I'd teach at different elementary schools around town and then retire to my little studio in a squat apartment building on the outskirts of town.
I moved to South Korea in August, and in the Spring, I was assigned to teach every Friday at a preschool not far from where I lived. I'd circulate around the small school, teaching first the three-year-olds, then the four-year-olds, and then the five-year-olds. In one of the classrooms of four-year-olds, the teacher had a teacher's assistant, a girl roughly my age. I'd say hi to her if I saw her in the hallways. Once I saw her at the bus stop in town. I turned and saw her looking at me and I bowed in her direction, but she didn't bow in return. She just looked back at me.
One Friday, after I'd been teaching at the preschool for a bit, she came into the small office where I'd be stationed when I wasn't teaching classes. She stepped in the doorway and stood there and looked at me, then withdrew, then stepped forward again.
"What is your number?" She asked. "I have something I want to ask you."
I wrote down my number on a post it and gave it to her and then forgot about the incident, assuming she'd give me a call or text later asking for English lessons for herself or someone else.
The next morning I awoke to a text message from an unknown number:
"Where do you live?" It said. I responded. My phone vibrated again.
"I want to come visit tonight."
That night she came over. When I opened my door she was dressed in heels and a short dress. She was cute, cuter than I remembered from seeing her around the school.
She kicked off her shoes in the entryway and walked across the room and took a seat on my bed. We shot the shit for a little bit as best we could with her minimal English and my even more minimal Korean. After a while of what felt to me like flirtatious banter, I leaned in to try to kiss her. She pulled away. I retreated from the bed, embarrassed.
"Why did you try to kiss me?" She asked. I shrugged. It seemed obvious enough to me. I expected her to leave, but she stayed on the bed, occupied with her phone.
After a while she said, "Is it ok if my friend comes over." I said sure.
"My friend is a guy," she added.
A little while later there was a knock at the door and a tall, lanky, tan Korean man entered my apartment. He had a plastic bag of beer bottles in one hand and a bag of snacks in the other. We made introductions, and we started eating and drinking soju and beer on the floor of my apartment. We had a good time, playing music and drinking and laughing and joking.
The story they gave me was that they were badminton partners. They played together at the local gymnasium. He worked as a chicken and egg farmer outside of town. He also had many tattoos. His arms, his legs, his chest. Everything was covered. I remember he had the face of a woman on his leg stretched open in a grayscale rictus of horror, the Latin phrase "Aut inveniam viam aut faciam" on his arm. Apart from that and his greasy windbreaker, I can't remember much about him.
She kept asking him if he liked me. If he thought I was cool. If he thought I was handsome. He answered in the affirmative.
Periodically he would use the bathroom or step outside to smoke. Every time this occurred, she would advance on me, rubbing my groin, rubbing my back. Effectively groping me every time he left the room, and not withdrawing herself from me until he was damn near back in it. I didn't understand how he didn't notice, but somehow he seemed not to.
After a while he announced that he was tired, that he was going to take a nap on my bed. He lied down on my bed and seemingly fell immediately asleep.
She started groping me again. I gestured towards his sleeping back on the bed just beside us, but she assured me that he was asleep. We ended up having sex on the floor beside the bed. She still didn't let me kiss her still. At certain points when she was on top of me, I noticed that she was looking over at him, eyes transfixed. I assumed it was to make sure that he was still asleep.
After we finished, she woke him up and they left the apartment shortly thereafter, him giving her a ride home in his car.
The next day she texted me in the afternoon and asked if she could come over. I said sure. She arrived in an oversized t-shirt and shorts. She had either just come from the gym or was on her way there. I can't remember. She kicked off her shoes in the entryway and sat on my bed.
"We had sex last night," she said. I agreed that we had.
"Do you think [he] saw?" she asked. I shrugged. Then she added, "I like it when [he] watches."
She invited me to the bed and told me to take down my athletic shorts. For the next I'd say hour and a half, she took pictures of and with my penis. I lied there, allowing this to happen. She would take photos, then tap on her phone for a bit, then resume taking photos. In some of the photos, she posed alongside my genitalia. Then when she had her fill, she stopped taking photos and left.
The next weekend she texted me to ask if she could come over. I said sure.
She came over, and she hadn't been around long before she asked if he could come over as well. I said sure. He came and we ate and drank together, just like the previous time, but this time their plan was crystal clear. He asked me what I liked about her. He told her to take her top off. I stood up at one point and he told me to sit down. She suggested we take a nap together, so we lied down side-by-side on my extra long twin mattress.
She turned to me and told me she wanted a threesome. I sighed and said ok.
The threesome started. I felt like we needed music so I went to YouTube and started playing Kind of Blue by Miles Davis.
He lied on his back on my bed, with her on all fours blowing him while I was supposed to be standing at the base of the bed and fucking her from behind. But I couldn't keep an erection. I'd never had a threesome before, let alone with two people who didn't speak my language and in a foreign country. I was anxious. Too nervous to get into things. Plus, I didn't want a threesome. I think I just wanted an interesting story.
I indicated that I was having problems and he and I switched positions, with me now lying on my back with my semi-flaccid penis in her mouth and him fucking her from behind at the base of the bed. Unlike me, he had no difficulties performing in these circumstances, and she moaned "Oppa" loudly as my dick grew even limper. As she came she kissed me. The one and only time.
After they both finished, I said that I didn't think I wanted to participate any longer, and I went and sat at my computer chair in the corner. Unfortunately, this only excited them further. While I could tell they were assessing me on the first visit, what I didn't pay as much mind to until writing this now is the way that they were assessing the layout of my apartment as well. It was the perfect theater, the perfect staging for their cuckold scenario, and as a dumb twenty-three-year-old expat who had been motivated to go to South Korea largely by a desire to be a writer and a lack of anything interesting to write about, I was more than happy to oblige. I needed stories. But I lost control of the narrative, as it were.
They had sex twice after I removed myself from the proceedings. The second time, feeling awkward just sitting there in the corner in my computer chair and not knowing what to do with myself, I got up and started picking up trash around my studio apartment. Cleaning up the scene.
After the second time they finished, I went over to the bed and told them to leave. They obliged.
I left Gochang in August to start a new job teaching at a hagwon, a private after-school academy, in Busan. Until I left, she would text me and come over to my place periodically to hang out. I didn't mind her company. I was lonely that first year, and while I had met two fellow North American teachers that I'd regularly hang out with, they were a forty-minute bus ride away from me and I didn't get along well with the other expat teachers in my small town.
She was company. She was in university in the city of Gwangju and back here in Gochang, her hometown, during her practicum at the preschool. She stayed with her parents in a large apartment tower I could see from my place. We never left the apartment together, apart from venturing once to the small park out back. But we never went out together. Our relationship was confined to the walls of my studio.
Sometimes when she came over we'd have sex, or she'd just sit there on her phone on my bed. Sometimes she'd tell me to go down on her. She didn't let me kiss her ever again after that one time during the threesome. She said that she only kissed boys she loved.
"Do you love me?" she asked. I shrugged. Maybe I did. She certainly wasn't like any woman I had ever met. Maybe admiration was the word.
Sometimes when we had sex or I went down on her she'd be playing games on her phone, something that turned me on immensely. In fact I found her entire aloof demeanor incredibly hot. I would try to fuck her good enough that she'd put her phone down, but I could barely last with her.
In the summer, it was incredibly hot and humid in Gochang. Although my apartment was on the ground floor and kept relatively cool, and I had survived with just a fan since moving in, around June I caved in and went to an appliance store near the bus terminal in town to get a wall-mounted AC unit. I had the unit installed that evening.
The next day she came over and, after we had sex and she was dressed and about to leave, she approached me and started rubbing my groin and explained that she needed to borrow some money. Although I said no, I did think it was funny, and I admired her temerity. When I told an expat teacher friend of mine, he speculated that she saw my new AC unit and "assumed I was Daddy Warbucks."
Another time she told me that she wanted to meet one of my expat English teacher friends. I told her that I didn't want a threesome.
"No threesome, no threesome," she said. She just wanted me, her, and a male friend expat friend of mine to meet at my place and drink and hang out. I invited a Canadian guy in town that I was semi-friendly with. I gave him a bit of the scoop beforehand about who she was and my relationship with her thus far. He showed up at my door wearing an ascot.
She was tickled to meet him. They sat on my floor giggling and flirting and laughing. Bored and a little annoyed, I went to take out the trash. They both stopped what they were doing and turned to look at me as I opened the door to re-enter. Not long after I returned, she said she had to go check in on her sick aunt. She left, and he explained to me that while I stepped out, she had said she wanted to meet after this at his place. She told him not to tell me, but he was telling me because we were friends and "bros before hos."
"It's fine," I said, even though I was annoyed. Then he said that in that case actually needed to leave right away, because she was waiting for him at his place on the other side of town.
He left. I was fuming. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't even stand to be in town anymore, knowing that she was over at his place at that very moment. It surprised me how much this one hurt me, how angered I was. I walked to the bus terminal and hopped on a bus to Seoul, where two of my friends were partying that evening. Not long after leaving Gochang and getting on the highway to Seoul I got a text from my ascot-wearing friend.
"Well that was weird," he wrote.
"What happened?" I wrote back. "Did you have sex?"
"No," he said. "She just took pictures of my penis and then left."
The last time I saw her, she came over and we actually left my apartment. I'm not sure what made this visit different, what motivated this. We walked to the small park behind my apartment building. We sat there on the edge of a gazebo in the park. She started touching me and we went into the public bathroom, a squat brick building in the park. She gave me a hand job in the men's room and was started on a second when we heard footsteps not far off in the park and scampered out of the bathroom building.
We walked to the edge of the park and turned to walk back to her apartment building. I told her that I was leaving town the next day and that this would be my last time seeing her. She shrugged and turned around and walked off.
That night, some guys from the gym I worked out at in town took me out to dinner. Hammered on soju, I texted her while one of the guys from the gym who lived near, an employee of SK Telecom, gave me a ride home.
"Come over. I want to see you before I leave town," I wrote. She didn't respond.
Hungover and on a bus to Busan with my belongings the next day, I was feeling remorseful and decided to text her.
"I'm sorry about last night." I wrote. "That was not cool of me."
"Ok," she wrote back. "Do you have any other foreigner friend in town?"
"You're amazing," I replied.
"Why amazing?" she wrote back. I didn't respond. The bus carried me on to Busan, and that was the last I ever heard from her.