Inspired by Sin

By E.J. Choi


AUTHOR'S WARNING: This is a dark, dark one-shot I wrote in memory of Jang Ja-Yeon & countless other hopeful actresses who took their lives too early. There is CUSSING, and very MATURE content up ahead. 

When she's born, she's not beautiful, but that's okay, because, as her mother lovingly puts it, "beauty isn't always natural and artificial can be a good thing". After a few years of strict diet regiments, a few years of nose jobs and lasers cutting into her skin to form double-eyelids, she's so pretty and maybe a little generic, like the rest of a population obsessed with appearance.

But that's fine, fabulous, because she'll be famous, like those other girls who re-shaped their jawlines and cut lines into their eyelids, lines speaking of fame and adoration and simply, paradise.

----//
She speaks softly, smiles sweetly, even when rough hands graze the skin of her thighs too purposefully for the incidents to be accidents. She doesn't lose her countenance when a bespectacled man sidles up to her after the dinner party and orders her to meet him in the bathroom in five minutes because he's the head of the company that's supposed to introduce her to the world of media and entertainment and fame.

She doesn't let it break her, doesn't let herself think when he's behind her, thrusting her roughly into the smooth quality of the bathroom stall door, hinges squeaking as he pants into the back of her neck. She feels pain, warm liquid, and finds that she can grab at nothing to keep herself standing. 

She had always thought that her first would be in a hotel bedroom, looking into the eyes of the man she was fucking, wanting to be there.

But I do, she says to herself convincingly, ignoring the way his worn hands squeeze her tender hips. I want to be here.

And as he shrieks in an undignified manner near her ear, telling her he's coming, she believes that this is the right way to fame.

And it is.

----//
After one, comes more, and this time, she's on her knees, dress rumpled, hair mussed as she takes him in her mouth, closing her eyes to drown out the sound of old-man-ecstasy. Her tongue is near numb as it works on him, and her thoughts are no longer tangible.

The first fuck got her her first main role in a romance drama.
The fifth fuck got her a supporting role in a movie.
The seventeenth fuck got her a respectable award.

His fingers tangle in her hair and she winces with something more than pain. He demands more, more, bitch, moreand she takes it all, takes it all in, and wonders if she's as bitter as he tastes.

----//
She had never believed in "beauty is a curse" until now. Now, when she's being pushed into expensive covers and her cheap dress is being ripped in half. He looks at her with a perverted gleam that makes her eyes close tightly and her hands tremble as they betray her to him without a fight. His thin lips bruise the neck of her skin, too rough, and his fingers pull her hair, too hard.

She keeps her mouth shut, because now she knows. She knows that no one is ever going to come save her, not when she wanted this in the first place.

----//
She glows in the pictures.

----//
"What did you expect?" says her manager, as he zips up his pants. "Did you think you would live a celebrity's life with your integrity intact?"

----//
She clings onto this kind of life for two more years, two years of empty compliments and fleeting praises. Panic rises in her throat when she realizes she's not as famous as she used to be, not as famous as the younger girl who snagged the role she was supposed to get, oh god.

I need more surgery, she thinks frantically, refusing to admit her steady descent to nothing. Doing my nose should be good, eyes even better.

----//
To her credit, she's not really considering death as an option until she sees the rope on the set of her drama, abandoned in the corner.

----//
The worst thing, she speculates before her neck breaks, that could happen, is if death asks her for a quick fuck in exchange for a ticket to heaven. Because she knows she'd rather go to hell with whatever she's got left than enter heaven with nothing but sins littering her body.