Chapter 10
The Experiment
What is sex?
Regardless of its meaning or frequency, couldn’t it be described as the coupling of an erect penis and another body?
I was searching for the meaning of sex and the mechanism behind the expression of sexual desire. So, when he claimed that he had become erect because of me, I couldn’t simply ignore it.
I brought Elias into the dormitory.
If my mother found out that I had brought a man into my room at this hour, I would be beaten black and blue.
But for some reason, although it was strange to feel this way toward someone I had only known for a short time, I felt like I could trust Elias.
Perhaps it was because I unconsciously knew that he had a lot to lose.
There was no curfew at the Cambridge dormitories. Outsiders were prohibited from entering without a student accompanying them, and overnight stays by outsiders were limited to twice a week.
Therefore, they were not particularly strict about keeping the dorm rooms clean, either. Elias’s expression as he stepped into my room showed just how free Cambridge was.
“Ugh.”
Elias’s face was more severely crumpled than ever before. Seeing that expression, I couldn’t bring myself to tell him to sit on the bed.
I didn’t particularly want to let him sit on the expensive ergonomic chair I had bought, but I had no choice and pointed at it.
“Sit there.”
Elias walked over hesitantly and ran his hand over the chair. Then he checked his palm. With an unhappy expression, he sniffed it several times.
Apparently, he didn’t like the smell. Wrinkling his nose, he looked around.
I took off my coat and placed it on the bed. Then I picked up the electric kettle sitting on top of the mini-fridge. After going to the bathroom to fill it with water, I came back and saw him sitting awkwardly in the chair.
“Coffee?”
He shook his head at my question.
“Coffee at this hour isn’t good for your health.”
“It’s lunchtime in Korea, so it’s fine. Coffee?”
“That cup. You washed it, right?”
“Yes.”
He nodded reluctantly.
I made coffee in a mug with the school logo on it. After taking the cup, he smelled the coffee.
I sat on the edge of the bed, kicked off my shoes, and asked what I had been curious about.
“What does ‘erection’ mean?”
“Ah.”
Elias, who had been debating whether to drink the coffee, eventually placed the cup on the desk. Then he pulled a sheet of paper from the pocket of his padded jacket.
I tilted my head and unfolded the paper. There was a complicated formula written on it.
[E(t) = E₀ · e^(-kt) + ∫[0 → t]{S(τ)A(τ) – I(τ)} · e^(-k(t – τ))dτ]
“What is this?”
“I came up with this formula because I was confused by the sudden erection.”
“An erection… as a formula?”
He had turned an erection into a mathematical formula? I couldn’t believe my ears.
“Yes.”
Elias looked around, picked up a Post-it note and a pen from the desk, and immediately began explaining the formula.
“E(t) is the erectile response function, and S(t) calculates the value of sensory stimulation entering the brain. On average, my I(t), meaning the inhibition value for an erection, is close to one. It’s quite stable. But when you, as S(t), were input earlier, that balance was broken.”
“When you say earlier, you mean at the bench?”
“Yes.”
“So you’re saying you got an erection there?”
“Yes.”
I remembered Elias running away. Come to think of it, hadn’t he hurried away while bent over, walking strangely and awkwardly? So that had been because of an erection. I let out a hollow laugh.
“Why?”
“It was a very unusual situation, and I don’t know the reason either. That’s why I came looking for you. To verify the formula, I need to conduct an experiment to see if it can be reproduced. I need a variable that I can control.”
“You mean I’m that controllable variable?”
“Yes. I don’t know why, but I need you, don’t I?”
I quietly looked at his face. His delicate features and even more striking blue eyes held certainty, not some perverted desire.
I knew that expression.
Because it was the same look I saw in the mirror every day.
The obsession of someone who had gone crazy in pursuit of knowledge.
“How does this reproducibility experiment work?”
“I want to test various situations to find out whether your presence really affects my sexual response, or whether it was caused by some other factor.”
“How?”
“First, I would like you to accompany me to that bench at the same time tomorrow. Then I want to measure the correlation between the distance from you and my physical response.”
“Why should I help you?”
“You said your graduation thesis is about sexual desire, didn’t you? It’s a similar subject, so I think it could help both of us. And…”
Elias, who had been speaking nonstop, suddenly trailed off. At that moment, the corners of his eyes trembled. His long eyelashes fluttered like the tail feathers of a male peacock in mating season.
“Actually, the erection didn’t go away until choir practice. Even after practice ended and I returned to the dormitory, I became erect again when your face came to mind. As I said earlier, I’m very busy these days. It would be troublesome if this keeps happening. Please help me.”
Was he asking me to become his muse?
There were 93 days left until my thesis submission deadline. Choosing Elias rather than the ambiguous Theodore seemed like the more reasonable choice.
The next day.
Once again wearing shoes that felt like shackles, I got on the nauseating bus.
At the same time as yesterday, I met Elias in front of King’s College Chapel.
“Are you ready to get an erection?”
“Of course. I even wore my robe today despite not having practice.”
“Good. Let’s go.”
We headed to the bench together. He took out antibacterial wet wipes again, and this time he thoroughly wiped my seat as well.
We sat together on the shaded wooden bench beneath the trees. The distance between us was the full length of the bench.
“Please move about 10 centimeters toward me. That’s about the width of one of your thighs, Ms. Sa-rang.”
“Yes.”
The bench experiment was simple. I moved my butt sideways by the distance he specified, and then we checked whether he had become erect. It was basically manual labor.
“Is it up?”
After I moved, Elias seemed to assess his physical condition and remained deep in thought for quite a while.
“No, not yet.”
After answering, he wrote something down in his notebook, probably another part of his formula.
“What about now?”
“Not yet.”
Could such a slow experiment really have any meaning?
Twenty minutes after the experiment began, I finally opened my itching mouth. There was only about two hand spans of distance between Elias and me.
“No matter how much I think about it, this experimental method is too loose.”
He had been thinking with the end of his pen against his chin. He put the pen down.
“Yes?”
“I think the experimental method is wrong.”
“Is that so? I thought it was quite reasonable. Then what method would be better?”
“Yesterday, I was pressed right up against you and exposed my cleavage, remember?”
“You did.”
“Shouldn’t we start with that?”
“But if we proceed that way… Wait, wait a moment.”
Elias, who had been about to argue his point, stumbled over his words.
“Are you saying you’ll press against me and show me your chest right now?”
“Yes.”
Suddenly, Elias’s pale face turned bright red. Then his gaze naturally dropped toward the unfamiliar presence below.
The center of his robe had risen against gravity.
I looked back and forth between the prominent folds of his robe and his face.
“Don’t tell me…”
Worry filled his blue eyes. It was doubt covered in shame and despair.
“…I’m erect.”
“That suddenly?”
Biting his lip hard, Elias opened his notebook again.
“45 centimeters from the end of the bench. Expected point of exposure stimulus. E(t) rising sharply. It’s a nonlinear interaction… This is a difficult problem.”
I patted his shoulder as he held his head and sighed.
Elias turned his head and looked down at me. His eyes were filled with worry.
“Mr. Elias. Isn’t this experiment too inefficient?”
“What?”
Elias blinked in confusion at my opinion. I finally voiced the frustration I had felt throughout the experiment.
“Isn’t the point of the experiment to reproduce whether you become erect because of me or not?”
“Rather than that, it’s about determining what conditions cause me to become erect. If I know that, I’ll be able to respond not only when I’m with you, but also when a similar situation happens with someone else.”
“Then instead of proceeding this frustratingly, why don’t we approach it by taking everything apart completely?”
“Taking everything apart?”
“Yes. I have to write my thesis too.”
Elias’s eyebrows rose at my suggestion.
“Interesting. Please tell me what method you have in mind.”
After finishing the bench experiment, I returned to the dormitory and waited for Elias. At nine in the evening, when choir practice was supposed to end, the Who’s App notification rang right on time.
[I’m leaving now.]
After taking another bath, I put on the exact same clothes I had worn on the day Elias came looking for me because he had become erect. Maybe he had reacted to the smell of my perfume, so I carefully sprayed some perfume as well.
After waiting for thirty minutes, another message arrived.
[I’ve arrived.]
I went outside the dormitory and saw Elias standing under a streetlamp.
“Seriously, he’s ridiculously handsome.”
He was as tall as a streetlamp, with a slender body. Had he lost weight in the meantime? His jawline looked even sharper than it had that afternoon.
When he saw me, he let out a sigh.
“I suffered throughout practice because the erection wouldn’t go down.”
Ah, so he hadn’t lost weight. He just looked haggard.
I patted his shoulder in encouragement.
“Hang in there.”
We went up to the dormitory together. As soon as I closed the door, Elias sighed.
“I don’t know if this is really the right way to conduct the experiment.”
“What would be the wrong way? The subject itself is difficult to begin with.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes. It’s almost like my thesis, don’t you think? Coffee?”
I brought water from the electric kettle on top of the mini-fridge. Perhaps he had already gotten used to drinking coffee at night, because Elias nodded without hesitation.
“Are you making any progress on your thesis?”
I turned toward Elias with the finished coffee. He was sitting in the chair, and he flinched when I approached him.
“That’s why the experiment we’re going to conduct now is important to me, too.”
“Ms. Sa-rang, I don’t think this is…”
The experiment Elias and I were about to conduct was a physical-contact experiment.
I sat down on Elias’s lap as he hurriedly tried to stand up.
The coffee in the two cups in my hands sloshed back and forth. Elias turned his gaze away from me as I sat there with my skirted legs apart, looking directly up at him.
If he was going to be this uncooperative, we couldn’t continue the experiment…
I suppressed my rising irritation and asked with the biggest smile I could manage.
“How is it? Do you think you’ll become erect?”
“Ha…”
His sigh touched my face. He had stretched his neck backward and tightly closed his eyes for a moment.
At that moment, the front of his trousers directly beneath me began to swell like a balloon. His sudden tension in his thighs made my body jolt once like I was on a roller coaster.
“It happened, right? You’re erect.”
“…Yes. It’s all because of you.”
For a moment, he met my eyes and bit his red lips. Then he whispered into my ear.
“Ms. Jeong Sa-rang. So take responsibility. Starting now.”
