Chapter 5: Chosen by the Past
The professor’s voice cut through the humid air of the salon, clinical and detached. “You’ll note the mirrored stations provide both privacy and necessary observation. For this pairing activity, the women will be graded based on their partner’s feedback, just as the men were graded during the female anatomy pairings session this morning. Technical proficiency matters. Responsiveness matters more.”
A low murmur rippled through the room. Joan’s stomach twisted. She thinks back to this morning’s pairings for Female Anatomy. DK, his hand and mouth on her.
“When I call your name,” the professor continued, scanning his tablet, “you will proceed to your assigned station. Kim Wonwoo.”
Joan’s breath hitched. She felt, rather than saw, Cheol go rigid beside her on the velvet couch. Time seemed to slow, thick as syrup. Wonwoo rose from a chair across the room, his movements fluid and assured. His eyes, dark and impossible to read, found hers immediately and held. He didn’t look at the professor. He looked only at her.
“Joan,” he said. Just her name. But it wasn’t a question. It was a quiet, possessive finality, a claim staked in the space between them.
Her blood turned to ice water in her veins. The weight of Cheol’s tense silence beside her was a physical pressure, a storm contained within the line of his shoulders. She couldn’t look at him. If she did, she’d break.
“Proceed to station four,” the professor instructed, unmoved.
Joan stood, her legs unsteady. The walk to the semi-private booth, shielded by a folding lacquered screen, felt infinitely long. The scent of sandalwood and clean male sweat filled the space. Wonwoo was already there, standing before a plush kneeling cushion. He said nothing, just watched her approach, his expression a mask of cool reserve.
She knelt. The velvet of the cushion was worn soft. She stared at the intricate pattern of his tailored trousers, the fine wool just inches from her face. The memory of the lecture hall, of Cheol’s low voice promising protection, felt like a dream from another life.
“You remember the protocol,” Wonwoo said, his voice a soft murmur meant only for her. It was the same voice he’d used years ago, whispering secrets in the dark. “Demonstrate proficiency.”
Her hands were cold. She reached for his belt, the leather smooth under her trembling fingers. The buckle was cool metal. The click of its release was obscenely loud in the intimate space. She worked the button of his trousers, then the zipper, the sound a slow, grinding tear in the silence.
He was already half-hard, a fact that sent a confusing jolt of anger and sickening familiarity through her. She took him in her hand, his cock warming and thickening immediately to her touch. She knew this weight. This feel. The faint vein running along the underside. It was a map she’d never wanted to navigate again.
“You used to know exactly what I liked,” Wonwoo whispered, his breath stirring her hair. “Show me you still remember.”
The words were a punch to the gut. They stripped this of its clinical pretense, made it what it truly was: a personal reckoning. Her throat tightened. With bitter reluctance, her saliva pooling at the memory of a thousand other times, she leaned forward and took the head of his cock between her lips.
Salt and skin. The smell of him, uniquely him, flooded her senses. A low, ragged groan escaped him, the first crack in his indifferent facade. His hand came down, fingers threading into the hair at the nape of her neck. It wasn’t gentle. It was commanding, anchoring her there.
“That’s it,” he murmured, his voice thicker now.
He applied pressure, not forcing, but guiding her down. She relaxed her jaw, letting him slide deeper into her mouth, her tongue pressing along the sensitive ridge. Her eyes burned, but she refused to let the tears fall. She focused on the mechanics, the technique the professor would be looking for. The hollowing of her cheeks, the steady rhythm of her head, the controlled use of her hand at the base of his shaft.
But Wonwoo wanted more than technique. He always had.
“Deeper,” he breathed, his hips giving a slight, involuntary thrust.
She took him farther, feeling the head nudge the back of her throat. Her gag reflex clenched, but she fought it down, breathing harshly through her nose. She could feel him throbbing on her tongue, growing impossibly harder. Spit gathered at the corners of her mouth, a messy, intimate glaze.
“Fuck, Joan,” he swore, his fingers tightening in her hair. “Just like that. God, you still suck my cock so perfectly.”
The filthy praise, the obscenity in his usually reserved voice, was a weapon. It reminded her of how well he knew her, of how she’d once clung to those words. She increased her pace, using her hand to twist on the upstroke, just the way he’d taught her in the blurry backseat of his father’s car a lifetime ago. A broken, needy sound ripped from his chest.
Around them, the salon was a soft cacophony of hidden intimacy—wet sounds, choked gasps, the creak of leather. But in their booth, the world had narrowed to this: the slick heat of her mouth, the pounding of her own heart, the raw, hitching sounds of his pleasure.
He was close. She could tell by the way his thighs trembled, by the desperate, shallow rolls of his hips. His control was fraying.
“I’m going to come,” he gritted out, a warning and a plea. His other hand came down to cup her cheek, his thumb stroking her jaw where it stretched around him. The tenderness of the gesture, amidst the obscenity, was the most devastating thing of all. “Swallow it. Show me you remember that, too.”
The command was absolute. She didn’t have a choice; her grade, her standing, hinged on his feedback. She took him all the way, until her nose pressed against the dark hair at his base, and held still as his body seized.
His release was hot and bitter, pulsing down her throat in thick waves. She swallowed compulsively, taking every last drop, as he shuddered above her. When he finally stilled, spent, he didn’t pull away immediately. He looked down at her, his eyes black and full of a turbulent, unspoken thing. He gently pulled himself from her lips.
Joan sat back on her heels, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, refusing to break eye contact. Her lips felt bruised, her jaw ached. Shame and a furious, unwelcome pride warred inside her.
Wonwoo tucked himself away, his movements slow, deliberate. He fastened his belt with a sharp click that felt like a period at the end of a dreadful sentence. He extended a hand, not to help her up, but holding a small digital feedback tablet.
His finger hovered over the screen. He looked from the tablet to her face, his expression unreadable once more.
“Proficient,” he said softly. Then he tapped the screen again. “Exemplary.”
He placed the tablet on the side table and turned to leave the station. He paused at the edge of the screen, glancing back at her still kneeling on the cushion.
“You remembered everything,” he said. It didn’t sound like praise. It sounded like a sentence.
The taste of him was a ghost she couldn’t exorcise. Joan spit into a black linen handkerchief provided at the station, scrubbing at her tongue until it burned. She rinsed her mouth with the sharp, antiseptic mouthwash from the glass vial beside the sink, but the bitterness seemed rooted in her stomach, not her mouth. She splashed cold water on her face, the droplets catching on her lashes like false tears.
The professor’s rule was clear: once feedback was submitted, the pair was dismissed. She grabbed her leather folio and shoved past the lacquered screen, her eyes down. The main salon was quieter now, pockets of students lingering in hushed, post-practical conversation. She didn’t have to look to feel him. Cheol was there, leaning against a marble pillar near the exit, a statue of coiled alertness. He’d been waiting.
She walked past him. Her shoulder nearly brushed his arm. She didn’t look up, didn’t break stride. The click of her heels on the polished floor was a frantic, fleeing rhythm. She heard him push off the pillar, his soft soles soundless, but she felt his pursuit like a change in atmospheric pressure. She hit the oak-paneled hallway and broke into a run.
The academy’s east wing halls were a blur of gilt frames and long windows. Her breath sawed in her throat, each gasp scraping against the memory of forced swallowing. She rounded a corner toward the dormitory stairwell and collided with a solid chest wrapped in a cashmere sweater.
“Whoa, watch it—oh. Joan.” Jeonghan steadied her, his handsome face breaking into an easy, oblivious grin. His scent, some expensive citrus cologne, was aggressively pleasant. “You running from a practical? Mine was ace. Just got my grade back from the morning session.” He winked, leaning in conspiratorially. “Let’s just say my technique on the female anatomy with my partner was… highly commended. Professor said my partner rated my fingering work as practically artistic.”
His words, his smirking pride, were a barbed wire dragged across her raw nerves. The morning’s memory of the other practical, of DK’s clinical touch, fused with the fresh horror of the last twenty minutes. “Not now, Jeonghan,” she said, her voice a flat, brittle thing. She shoved past him without another word, taking the stairs two at a time.
Jeonghan’s confused “Hey, what’s your problem?” echoed after her, but it was cut short by a lower, tenser voice.
“Let it go.”
Joan risked a glance over the banister. Cheol had stopped on the landing below, blocking Jeonghan’s path. His broad back was to her, a wall of black cotton and simmering tension.
“What happened to her?” Jeonghan asked, his tone shifting from teasing to genuine curiosity. “She look like she saw a ghost.”
Cheol didn’t turn to follow her flight. He just stood there, his gaze fixed on Jeonghan, or perhaps on the space where she’d vanished. “Just let it go,” he repeated, the words final and heavy. He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t chase her any further. He simply let the silence stretch, a tacit understanding that some wounds required the dignity of solitude, even if everything in him screamed to follow.