Peerless Perverted Actor Has a Celebrity Harem?!

At this cruel apex of the year, winter had filed its teeth to a razor’s edge and decided the world needed reminding who ruled the board.

Snow fell not as gentle flakes, but as a relentless white siege, blanketing the city beneath a merciless shroud of ice, silence, and indifference.

The horizon had surrendered completely and nothing remained but an endless pall of white, broken only by the skeletal fingers of bare trees clawing at a sky too cold to care.

Streetlights burned through the storm in weak yellow halos, their glow smothered almost as soon as it was born, while traffic crawled through the slush below like a procession of tired beasts being led toward slaughter.

It was as if winter itself, finally bored with humanity’s endless whining, had exhaled once and decided the city deserved punishment.

One cruel breath, and the world froze in its glittering white chokehold.

Braving this weather without two coats, three if a person had any love left for their own organs, was foolish:

Tantamount to spitting in winter’s face and daring it to finish the job properly with witnesses:

Humiliation was one of the season’s lesser hobbies.

Cars drifted past like ghostly ships, roofs crowned in snow, tires whispering over the dirty ice gathered at the edges of the road. Their wipers slapped back and forth with exhausted persistence, clearing the glass only for the storm to blind it again.

Inside, the fortunate ones gripped heated steering wheels and paper cups of lukewarm coffee, faces pale in the blue glow of dashboard screens, safely annoyed by traffic and the inconvenience of being alive.

Outside, the rest shuffled along like half-frozen spectres, collars flipped up, scarves pulled high, arms rubbing together in that pathetic little ritual for warmth the wind always mocked with their faces blotched red; eyes wet from the cold.

Mouths open because breathing through the nose had become an act of bravery no one sane wished to attempt.

But not everyone had even that threadbare luxury.

A ragged circle of people had gathered on the road near the curb, their boots planted in the slush, their bodies leaning forward with that ugly hunger people mistook for concern with phones held aloft like modern talismans.

Some were recording the spectacle because civilization had apparently spent thousands of years crawling out of caves just to arrive at portrait mode while others were calling emergency services, their voices trembling, their words overlapping into a frantic little chorus.

"A young man."

"Hit by a car."

"Yes, he’s still breathing."

"No, I don’t know."

"Please hurry."

From a dozen tinny speakers, the operator’s voice floated into the cold, calm and trained and soft.

"Help is on the way."

"Help is on the way."

"Please stay on the line."

"Sure."

In weather like this, even death moved at a leisurely crawl.

In the center of their morbid little theatre lay the boy.

Park.

His body had been thrown across the road like something discarded by an impatient hand.

His one arm stretched toward the pavement with his fingers curled as though still trying to hold onto a life that had already begun slipping from him.

The other of his hand lay bent beneath him at a wrong angle, hidden partly by the dark coat twisted around his frame.

Park’s legs had folded strangely but his shoulder sat too high, his ribs too still, his breath too thin.

A gash split the skin above his temple, and blood pooled beneath him, warm at first, then cooling fast beneath the snow’s greedy tongue. The crimson stain spread slowly across the asphalt in defiance, bright and obscene against all that white, almost beautiful for a moment before the fresh flakes began smothering it layer by layer.

Winter covered his breeding with the patience of a guilty hand hiding evidence, as if the city wanted no record of this small, pathetic tragedy.

Park drew a shallow cold rattling breath.

Pain existed everywhere and nowhere at once, too large to arrive as one clean thing. It came in pieces. His skull. His ribs. His shoulder. His hip. His mouth full of iron. His lungs scraping around the cold as if the air itself had grown teeth.

He tried to move but nothing obeyed.

Not even his tongue.

That frightened him more than the pain.

The cold pierced through the fleeting heat of his own blood, picking his pockets clean of warmth like a thief in an alley too tired to run afterward. His cheek lay pressed against the road, and the asphalt bit into his skin with a cruelty almost intimate as snow gathered on his eyelashes. It landed on his parted lips before it slipped beneath his collar and melted there for only a second before the warmth beneath it began failing too.

’Life, the fickle whore, has never yielded to desperation alone.’

And Park had been desperate for a long time.

Desperate in audition rooms where the chairs were always too hard and the smiles always too polite.

Desperate in cracked mirrors under cheap bathroom lights, practicing lines until his own reflection seemed bored of him.

Desperate in cheap rented rooms with failing heaters, cheap instant noodles, unpaid bills, and the sour little dignity of telling himself that tomorrow might be different.

And tomorrow had been different for the fisrt time in many years, indeed.

’Tomorrow has killed him.’

Around his ruined form lay scattered pages from the audition script he had carried only minutes earlier. Dog-eared sides, wrinkled at the corners from being read too many times by hands pretending not to shake.

The pages had spilled from his bag when the car struck him, then scattered across the road like mocking confetti. Snow and blood blurred the ink, lines of dialogue he had practiced that morning dissolved slowly into the white, as though even the role had decided to leave before the actor finished dying.

One page rested face-up near his outstretched hand.

[INT. CAFÉ, DAY.]

{He enters, nervous.

He notices her across the room.}

The irony was so heavy-handed it was almost insulting.

Park had rehearsed that line in the bathroom mirror before leaving his apartment, three different deliveries because apparently dignity had abandoned him but professionalism had not.

Soft and shy. Awkward but charming. Quietly intense. He had leaned closer to the cracked mirror, adjusted his expression, tested the angle of his beautiful smile, and tried to find the version of himself a casting director might finally not hate.

The bathroom light had flickered above him.

The sink had dripped.

His neighbor had screamed at someone through the wall.

Still, Park had smiled at his reflection like he meant it.

’That ’s acting, isn’t it?’

Lying beautifully enough to even yourself until someone else paid attention.

The audition itself had lasted less than five minutes.

A director who never looked up properly. An assistant with a clipboard. A room that smelled faintly of coffee, wet coats, and old carpet. Three people sitting behind a table with the collective warmth of unpaid parking tickets.

Park had entered, performed, smiled, breathed carefully through the silence afterward, and waited for the little miracle every desperate actor learned to beg for without moving their lips.

Then the assistant had given him that polished, professional smile.

"Thank you. We’ll be in touch."

They would not be in touch.

They never were.

He had known it the moment she said it, but he had still nodded. Still bowed slightly and thanked them, as if rejection deserved manners. He had still walked out holding the script pages just like always like they were proof that he had been close to something.

’Close enough to touch. Close enough to imagine.’

He had not even made it two blocks from the building before the world decided the role of living boy was being recast.

No dramatic warning or mercy of a slow-motion cruelty.

Just a horn.

A scream.

Tires slipping uselessly over snow.

Then impact.

Then sky.

Then road.

Then blood.

Now the crowd kept its distance.

Phones up.

Mouths open.

No one stepped into the empty space around him. They hovered instead at the edge of it, forming a perfect, polite half-moon, the kind of space a body claimed for itself the moment it stopped being entirely a person.

’There is something almost elegant about that cowardice.’

A social instinct sharpened over centuries. Come close enough to witness tragedy but stay far enough away to deny responsibility.

Someone was crying.

A woman, young by the sound of her. The sort of stranger who would tell this story for years to come, perhaps over wine, perhaps on a late-night call, voice lowering whenever she reached the important part.

"I was there".

"I saw him."

"He was so young..."

"...So handsome."

"There was blood everywhere."

She would say it with horror. Maybe with guilt. Maybe with that faint shimmer people got when they realized they had stood near something dramatic enough to become a memory worth keeping. She would never quite explain why she had not moved closer.

People rarely could.

"Is he breathing?" someone asked.

"I don’t know," another voice answered. "I think so."

"Don’t move him," a man said quickly. "You’re not supposed to move him."

"Then do something!"

The words cracked through the cold.

No one did.

Park heard them all from far away, as if the snow had packed itself inside his ears. He wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it. Wanted to tell them not to bother and ask whether anyone had at least seen the car properly, because dying nameless was bad enough without the driver getting away clean too.

Park wanted to ask if someone could pick up his script before the snow ruined it completely.

Stupid.

Ridiculous.

Even now, some miserable little part of him cared about the script.

’A failed actor to the end.’