Peerless Perverted Actor Has a Celebrity Harem?!

By the time Park had walked the length of the corridor back to the curtained bay where his bed still waited, he was riding the high of everything the System had just dumped into him.

The whole thing thrummed deeper in his veins than it had any right to — every sense sharpened, every nerve lit up as though a director had come along and turned every dial in his body a click clockwise.

This was not the old Park’s body, not even, quite, the body he had woken up inside an hours ago.

’This is that body powered on.’

And, unlike the old Park — that spineless mid-tier extra who had made a career out of pretending not to notice — the new him did not flinch from the attention pouring toward him.

The female nurses and patients showered his entrance with hungry, barely-hidden stares, their eyes lingering with the kind of open appreciation the old Park had spent his entire career pretending was aimed at someone else. Two nurses at the station across the corridor abandoned a chart mid-sentence to watch him pass while woman on her phone at the triage desk stopped mid-word, blinked once, and did not resume the sentence.

Cognac-gold eyes flicked over each of them in turn, unhurried, and each of them, in turn, looked briefly away, unsettled by whatever it was they had just been caught wanting.

’Free aura farming. I am going to leave this hospital with a trail of fresh crushes I have not even had time to name yet.’

The men, though — the men were another climate entirely.

Park nearly smiled.

Not all of them hated him outright. That would have been too simple, and life rarely had the decency to be simple. Some only looked uncomfortable. Some looked away too fast or gave him the classic fake-neutral stare, the one men used when they had already judged another man but wanted to pretend they were too mature for jealousy. A young doctor coming out of a bay took one look at Park and set his jaw so hard the muscle jumped, even the janitor with a mop gave him the flat, measuring look of a man who had decided beauty was a crime but did not have the badge to arrest it.

It hit Park like a smell rolling out of a dirty alley.

He made a small, theatrical little dodge to the side, as though the collective resentment were a contagious trash-cloud he could physically sidestep on his way past.

’Easy there, gentlemen,’ he muttered under his breath, the crooked merciless grin of the new mouth curling at the corner. ’Your envy is showing. Tuck that weak shit back in before it stains the floor.’

When Park’s eyes cut ahead — and the grin died.

At the foot of his curtained bed stood a man in his twenties, his thumbs were flicking idly at a phone, all easy fake smiles pointed at nobody in particular. He wore the tired uniform of the low-tier agency grunt — creased chinos, a windbreaker with the agency’s small logo stitched at the chest, sneakers scuffed from too many parking lots. Not too tall, not too short.

His build was screaming how had spent a stretch of its twenties in a gym and had spent the years since coasting on the memory of it. Cheap watch. Cheap haircut. Cheap smile.

And that smile, the moment Park’s cursed presence rolled across the bay and slammed into him, faltered for a split second and twisted into raw, ugly malice, into a hatred that lived in the small muscles under the eyes — before the professional mask snapped back into place a beat too late.

Park saw all of it.

How could he not?

It was the same venom that had poisoned every day the old Park had known this piece of shit.

The memories delivered the file of the man in a single quiet stroke:

Mick. The Runner.

Runners were bottom-tier agency employees whose entire job was to handle every humiliating errand for new or contracted talent — driving them to auditions, picking up scripts, coffee runs, dry cleaning, the whole sad parade of small services that kept a working actor or artist from having to touch the world with his own hands.

Most Runners, at least, pretended to dream of climbing to manager someday; they swallowed the indignities on the theory that a rising actor’s rise was their rise too.

Every road manager on the planet had started somewhere near the bottom of a coffee order.

Mick had skipped the dream and kept only the bitterness.

Mick had been assigned to Park only a few days ago, and in those few days he had done precisely nothing beyond ferrying Park back and forth between the agency and his apartment, sighing audibly at every red light and treating each ride as a personal offence.

Everything else;— Mick had refused flat, on the unspoken understanding that a nobody like Park did not deserve the effort.

The old Park — submissive, cowed, thoroughly domesticated — had let this mid-tier gangster-wannabe walk all over him.

The positions had even reversed the moment they were away from the agency’s line of sight.

It had been Park running the errands Mick was paid to handle. Not willingly. Mick had bragged nonstop about his past as some vague former-gangster CV and how still had connections in the gang, nobody could verify but nobody was inclined to test, jokes with knives in them dressed up as guy talk.

It was Mick’s was of saying of Park dared to report him to the agency and Park would meet the former gang crew.

So the coward had obeyed. Every single time.

’Classic.’

Park’s lips curved into a slow, evil, merciless smirk that had nothing to do with the old Park’s fear and everything to do with pure, cold enjoyment.

’Let us find out,’ he thought, folding its hands behind its back and stepping neatly out to the front of the stage, ’exactly how much of that gangster you really are, Mick. Bitch.’

"Mick."

The name came out of Park’s new mouth with the crisp, authoritative crack of a stagehand striking a match — the kind of tone the old Park had never once in his life been physically capable of producing. Mick jolted where he stood, thumbs freezing on the phone, head jerking up as though somebody had touched an electrode to the base of his neck.

He turned. That greasy smile twitched back into place with the well-practised speed of a man who had, over the years, learned to arrange his face for supervisors on short notice.