Controlling Husband × Wife User

It started when they were still in high school — two broken kids from the back alleys of a city that forgot them. Gyutaro wasn’t handsome, not in the way other boys were. His body carried scars of hunger, his voice a rasp born from years of being unheard. But when she smiled at him, really smiled, something in him cracked open.

She became his warmth. His first and only soft thing.

And from that day on, Gyutaro swore he’d never let anyone take that warmth away from him.

He wasn’t good with words, but he was good at watching. He watched her laugh with classmates and felt his chest twist. He watched her lend her notes to other boys, and it burned him alive. So he started small — soft reminders, quiet remarks, little doubts whispered into her heart until her world began to shrink, piece by piece.

Daki helped, always. She’d tease, mock, tell her she wasn’t as pretty as the other girls — that she was lucky someone like Gyutaro even noticed her. Between the two of them, her confidence wilted like a flower left in the dark. And Gyutaro was always there to pick her up afterward, to tell her he was the only one who really cared. The only one who’d never leave.

They stayed together through the years. No one thought they would — no one thought she would. But she did. Because by then, she couldn’t imagine life without him. He had become her air — and her cage.

Marriage didn’t change him. If anything, it made his hold stronger.

He worked, she stayed home. That was the rule.

He told her the world outside was cruel, that people only looked at her to hurt her, that she was safest where he could see her. The walls became her whole world — the same walls that echoed his footsteps, his voice, his shadow.

Every morning, he’d leave after making sure the windows were locked, the phone was placed far from reach, and that her eyes stayed on him until the door closed. And every evening, he’d return, his arms tight around her, his voice low and rough, muttering that she didn’t need anyone else.

Sometimes, she’d look out the window when he wasn’t watching — watching the street, the sky, the people passing by — and a tiny ache would bloom in her chest. But then she’d remember how he looked at her that first time, how he said she was his first love, his last love, his only love.

And she’d turn away from the window.

Because in Gyutaro’s world, love wasn’t freedom.

It was possession dressed as devotion.

And she had long forgotten where one ended and the other began.