Chapter 2.1

To Dan, Christopher Paul was more familiar by the man’s family name ‘Paul’ than by Chris, the name Brian and his employees called him affectionately, or ‘CP,’ the fans’ nickname for him.

The cry of Paul, called out more than a thousand times over the course of a race by the commentators and casters of his home country, rang clear in his ears.

Paul’s performance is absolutely outstanding today. That’s some corner work that shows Paul’s fighting spirit. Paul is completely dominating this race. Paul keeps pushing even with a crumpled rear wing. On a rainy day, Paul doesn’t lose to anyone.

Dan could find fault with every single one of those comments, but that wasn’t the point. Recently he had come up with a name for his employer Christopher Paul.

Paul of Wonderland, where there is no sugar, no salt, no alcohol, and no nicotine.

In this case, since it wasn’t just employer Paul but his brother too who qualified, it should have been the Pauls are strange, but since the strange one in Dan’s eyes was specifically Christopher Paul, Brian Paul was defined as ‘strange Paul’s older brother.’

By the same logic, Daniel Paul the alcoholic was ‘strange Paul’s father,’ and Layla Paul the heavy smoker who behaved as though she was about to buy up department stores was ‘strange Paul’s mother.’

A few days earlier Chris Paul had said something similar to when he had handed over the team clothes. He had urged Dan to carry his phone with him at all times, whether sleeping, eating, working, at home, going out, or even going to the bathroom.

Dan’s work phone vibrated and spread Darth Vader’s theme. He has arrived!

This was how strange employer Paul summoned people. Over the past week he had been called like this dozens of times.

Starting with Brian Paul’s Monday call coaching him on his duties, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday including strange employer Paul’s early morning summons, he had received dozens of calls. He had been summoned in the early hours of Sunday as well.

Strange employer Paul’s early morning summons had started from that first early morning.

Just as he had gone with great curiosity the first time wondering what had happened, a few times Dan had quickened his step thinking something might be wrong. But from Wednesday he had given up entirely.

In the quiet early hours, strange employer Paul would call Dan to his room and ask for water every time. With a quiet sigh Dan would pour water into a glass and hand it over. Then strange employer Paul would pull Dan’s wrist and ask ‘aren’t you sleepy?’

Dan would say he wasn’t sleepy because he didn’t want to wake up again with his employer’s erect penis rubbing between his thighs, and turn around.

‘I am not your body pillow.’

Words that couldn’t be said out loud piled up deep inside. And since that early morning, phone bombardments had come raining down at all hours like now.

“Yes.”

“Come to my room.”

Strange employer Paul’s summons were supremely brief and direct. Come to my room, come to the first floor, come to the front entrance, come to the study, come to the bathroom, he would state only the location and hang up.

He wanted to appeal to someone, anyone. But thinking about his first weekly pay going into his account after this weekend, he felt he could swallow any irritation. Dan was in a state close to self-hypnosis.

‘In 62 days I’ll be a millionaire too. Let’s become an ordinary member of society who doesn’t cause trouble. I am a diligent and steady ordinary member of society.’

He put himself under self-hypnosis once more and knocked on the door.

“Come in.”

Inside the open door it was dim. Chris Paul, for all his money, was stingy about turning on lights. The sun was setting and the room was dark but he showed no intention of switching on a light.

“Is something wrong?”

The atmosphere was different from usual. Dan, who had been standing in the open doorway to avoid getting entangled in anything unnecessary, went inside and looked over Chris, who had his left hand hanging over the table. Something different from usual came through in the sight of the man sitting in the dimness.

Dan switched on the light without asking permission. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] A thin trickle of blood was running from Chris’s left hand on the table.

Dan walked over to the table and looked around.

“You’re hurt?”

“A little.”

“Where’s the first aid kit?”

“Never mind.”

Chris turned the hand so the small scratch wasn’t visible and said:

“Hand me that handkerchief.”

The handkerchief he was looking for was sitting at the end of the tea table.

“…”

Of course the man was sitting at the opposite end from where the handkerchief was. But it was well within reach if he stretched out the long arms that looked good but were of no particular use in F1.

“Tifosi.”

Chris called to Dan, and Dan ignored it and responded:

“There’s no first aid kit?”

“There isn’t.”

“Wait a moment.”

“Tifosi.”

Chris tilted his chin toward the handkerchief at the end of the table.

“There’s no first aid kit?”

Dan asked once more.

“There isn’t.”

Chris cast his eyes back to the handkerchief again.

“Should I call the personal physician?”

“Tifosi.”

Dan calmly collected the handkerchief and put it in his back pocket.

“If you don’t want the physician, should I call Brian Paul?”

“Right side table, first drawer.”

Dan pressed down his lips, which were about to let a small smile of minor victory slip out, and asked:

“We don’t need to call the physician?”

Chris didn’t answer. Dan shrugged once as if to say understood and took out the first aid kit from the first drawer of the side table.

Fortunately it wasn’t a serious wound, but it was bleeding and the skin was thinly torn. It would sting when the wound was wiped with antiseptic, but throughout the cleaning and applying of medicine, Chris didn’t so much as twitch an eyebrow.

The man who had quietly held out his injured hand was asking for something unrelated.

“The handkerchief.”

Dan put the first aid kit away and handed over the handkerchief. Chris grabbed the hand holding the handkerchief whole. Dan tilted an eyebrow watching his hand get completely engulfed in the large hand. He tried to focus only on the thought that large hands weren’t of much use for an F1 driver.

‘Don’t let the temper flare. Violence is bad. Yanking your hand away from a patient’s grip in a fit of temper is also bad.’

Dan soothed himself. He gently withdrew his hand from Chris’s and repeated what he had said before.

“We don’t need to call the physician?”

Chris pulled up his lips.

“We don’t.”

“How did you get hurt?”

“Scratched myself pressing the folding key.”

Chris answered and handed over the folding key. The folding key was reminiscent of a jackknife. It was designed so that pressing a button caused the key blade to spring out.

What the man had handed him was a Mercedes emblem-engraved key, commonly known as a smart key. (Keyless ignition: technology that allows starting the car simply by having the key on your person, rather than inserting a key and turning it.)

Rather than thinking his employer had been practising deploying the smart key’s blade in preparation for emergencies, Dan sent him a suspicious look wondering what kind of trouble this person was planning to cause on a public road that he was grimly training for emergency situations.

“What?”

Chris met his suspicious gaze.

“Nothing.”

Dan denied it reflexively.

“Changed your mind?”

Dan couldn’t laugh or frown at his employer’s clinging words and just stood there blankly. As if asking Dan to pick up a handkerchief within arm’s reach wasn’t enough, the strange employer spoke about matters below the waist in an everyday tone.

Dan had his suspicions that both calling him in for trivial things and physically tormenting him, and saying these strange things to torment him mentally, were nothing more than mischief.

“You’ve never done it with a man, have you?”

So he said, as if stating a fact.

“…”

He continued in a tone that said he already knew everything.

“You’ve never even held hands with a man in bed, have you?”

Dan remembered that morning precisely. When he had opened his eyes his employer’s leg had been tangled with his, and his employer’s erect penis had been rubbing between his thighs.

He had been startled by the gap between his legs caused by the thick penis, but had made no fuss about it. True to the Korean sensibility of being bold and unconcerned about sleeping arrangements between members of the same sex, he had let out one ‘oh, for god’s sake’ in irritation and gone about his work.

Going by the size of the penis that remained in his forcibly suppressed memory, Chris Paul had more than earned a double slap across the face from any man, or any person for that matter, to whom he might propose anal sex. If there was anyone generous enough to permit penetration in spite of that size, you could easily predict they would have been torn by several centimetres front and back.

If he had witnessed scenes involving buckets of tears and bowls of blood and was still coming at his employee asking for it, then the man was proving himself to be either a beast wearing a human face or something below human.

It made no sense to be doing this having seen such things, and above all.

“Men don’t have breasts.”

Dan said flatly.

“I know.”

Chris, who had been unusually quiet, replied in a tone that said he was stating the obvious.

“You like women enormously.”

At the man’s obtuse response Dan thought it was he himself who ought to be obtuse about it. Seeing him like this, it was clearly just mischief and harassment. Knowing all that, he still felt a strange sensation every time that remarkable face got in his face.

Dan whispered “madly” to Chris, who said nothing further. Going by the countless scandal articles he had seen up to now, it was hard to deny that Chris Paul liked women madly.

Chris listened quietly to Dan’s murmuring. Taking courage from it perhaps, more followed.

“Women with very large breasts.”

Chris smiled and frowned at the exaggerated words. When ‘enormous, enormous, enormous’ was added, the furrowed eyebrows tilted further.

This was no simple joke.

The women who claimed to have been with Chris Paul without exception boasted enormous breasts. Among them, where nationality, ethnicity, face, age, and figure had not a single thing in common, the one consistent point was that their breasts were at minimum about the size of a baby’s head.

If one were to classify them, Chris Paul’s casual scandal partners had large breasts in common, and those who became girlfriends had the basic specification of large breasts with one additional option: an unusual background, a strong personality, or a notable family name.

Chris’s consistent standard for choosing women was something even people who didn’t know F1 knew about. And yet here he was.

At Dan’s continuing grumbling, Chris opened his mouth.

“And has Tifosi ever done it with a man?”

Dan didn’t answer and just dangled the folding key.

“What should we do about this?”

“Not going to answer?”

“That’s private.”

“What privacy does a Tifosi have?”

Chris answered with a smile, narrowing his eyes. It was an expression similar to the one he wore in interviews after finishing a race where he had knocked a competitor in the back of the head, saying there had been no ill intent.

Even as that face stared at him persistently with an expression that demanded an answer, Dan maintained his silence. He didn’t get angry, didn’t let irritation out, just stayed quietly still.

“Give it to Shane tomorrow.”

Chris said, wiping the expression from his face.

“I’ll get dinner ready.”

Dan nodded and left the room. Before the door closed Chris called to him.

“Tifosi, was that man good?”

No emotion showed on the handsome face, it was indifferent and flat. It might have been because the dim window outside had gone completely dark and the fine details of his expression were no longer visible.

But there was no tremor in the man’s voice. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] Dan stayed silent instead of answering and switched off the light. Dan, who had been about to close the door, held the door handle and looked at Chris sitting still in the darkness.

“Why?”

“Were all those women’s breasts real?”

At Dan’s question Chris burst out laughing.

“My girlfriends were all natural.”

Dan let out a weak groan at Chris’s revelation.

“So you really have never done it with a man.”

Dan drew a strange conclusion and closed the door. He headed to the dining room thinking it might be worth some money to sell the scoop that the difference between Chris Paul’s scandal partners and his girlfriends lay in the distinction between enhanced and natural.

Caught up in a thought that even made him forget the risk of breaching the contract, he didn’t hear what Chris said as the door closed.

“You’ve done it with a man?”

A firm fingertip tapped the tea table sunk in darkness.

“With who?”

No answer came back.

“When?”

A vagueness lingered in the voice spreading softly.

“Surely not.”

Chris’s voice, laced with laughter, rang out in the room that had been cast in deep darkness by the fully set sun outside. A long silence followed the resonance of that low voice. Chris sat motionless in the darkness until he received the message that dinner was ready.

A new morning brought a new routine. Dan was in the dining room preparing a meal. A cry of ‘Tifosi!’ rang out from in front of the first floor living room.

He stopped the hand that had been about to separate the yolk from a boiled egg and place only the white on the salad plate, and headed to the living room.

Strange employer Paul was standing at the top of the stairs. The man looked at Dan once without a word, then looked at his own feet.

Right in front of strange employer Paul’s feet lay a key holder that had fallen. Strange employer Paul stood stock still as if a steel rod had been driven into his spine.

Dan swallowed a ‘tch’ and picked up the key holder and handed it over.

Strange employer Paul had told him to carry his phone at all times wherever he was. He checked his phone and found seven missed calls.

‘Lazy bastard.’

Dan grumbled and changed the names saved in his phone, using strange employer Paul as the reference point: strange Paul’s father, strange Paul’s mother, strange Paul’s older brother. It was nothing much but it eased the ‘ugh’ feeling somewhat.

He had finished the morning routine busily and was well into the afternoon routine. It was one of employer Paul’s days off from training. He had thought that as long as Chris was home all he had to do was prepare meals, but strange employer Paul summoned Dan by text. He had been in the middle of cleaning at the time.

He wanted to ask whether it was urgent but couldn’t do anything that complicated with a phone that could only receive calls.

He very much wished he had the tablet PC he had left in his room. With the work tablet at least he could send messages to people on the contact list. Troublesome as it was, he made a note to bring it with him everywhere.

When he went out to the front entrance, a horse taller than an adult person was standing there.

Strange employer Paul handed him the horse’s reins. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] The man was the owner of an abnormally small head, so the horse’s face, far longer than several of his heads stacked together, stood out all the more. Dan faltered slightly, startled by the long horse face.

Whether Dan faltered or not, strange employer Paul told him to take the horse to the stable. Dan asked whether he could take it over a little later since he was in the middle of cleaning, to which the man said no, because if he did, this one, which seemed to be the way he referred to the horse, would ruin the garden and the gardener and stable manager would fight again. Strange employer Paul kindly offered that if Dan wanted, he could ride the horse to the stable.

‘What, you idiot.’

Dan thought that inwardly while saying understood out loud and heading to the stable.

‘Huh?’

That was the stable manager Jack’s first reaction upon seeing Dan appear leading the horse. He went on to explain that Chris’s horse would cause a scene the moment anyone other than Chris laid a hand on it.

He laughed heartily and said it must be that the horse had taken a liking to Dan given that Dan had somehow managed to bring it all the way here. At that moment, strange employer Paul’s horse rubbed its head against Dan’s arm.

His expression went back and forth between a frown and neutral as the indescribably strange feeling hit him.

Not just that day but the next and the day after that too, Chris let Dan hear ‘He has arrived!’ to avoid lifting a single finger.

He wanted to tell him that he could do it himself with the same energy it took to press the call button, but he couldn’t. Strange employer Paul was literally his employer and he was the employee.

Dan decided to endure. Even if he brought it up gently it would end in curses and wanting to hit someone.

There was no other option.

After that the reasons Chris summoned him went roughly as follows.

Waking a sleeping person to come pour water from the tea table beside the bed. Making them pick up a key holder that had fallen at his feet.

Calling someone out of the middle of meal preparation to choose a shirt colour. Saying the one chosen was dull and making them choose a different colour. When it seemed all done, making them choose trouser colours.

When that was finally done, saying he thought he should wear a tracksuit and making them choose a tracksuit. When that seemed done, making them recommend trainers by considering design, colour, and function.

Every recommendation Dan made was met with objections: this one won’t do for this reason, that one won’t do for that reason.

Ultimately, making him fetch the ones he had been wearing anyway.

When it finally seemed over, making him choose underwear. Laying out briefs, trunks, and boxers by type and having them choose by design and colour within each type, then saying he himself didn’t wear underwear and smirking ‘shall I try putting some on if you want?’ Calling him away from cleaning to return the ill-tempered horse he had ridden over.

The reasons Chris summoned him were trivial, far too trivial. Each and every one dripped with mischief.

Dan thought strange employer Paul disliked Tifosi, so he thought it was not strange for the man to torment him, and even knowing to expect it, the trivial summons that had been going on for days were setting his nerves on edge.

‘What is it this time, you idiot?’

Strange employer Paul summoned Dan without pause.