○
He brought a new sheet from the dressing room inside the bedroom and covered my crouching naked body with it. My voice was so hoarse when I thanked him that I was embarrassed, but I didn’t even have the strength to clear my throat.
It wasn’t as if I was screaming out loud, but my voice always got hoarse after being with him. It seemed that the effort to artificially suppress my moans was also straining my throat.
Just as my voice was cracking as usual, his penis was still stiff even after he had ejaculated. I suddenly wondered if he had ever had sex until it returned to its pre-erect state, and if so, with whom, what kind of sex, and for how long. But I didn’t have the courage to ask.
Unlike last time, when we had sex for a very long time, ejaculating several times including knotting, this time it ended relatively quickly, but the feeling of weakness, as if my spine had become limp, was the same.
I don’t know about him, who was doing the knotting, but it seemed to be a very physically demanding act for the one receiving it. There was still a tingling residual sensation inside, and my body trembled intermittently.
Maybe the reason I was so drained was because I was a beta. After all, an alpha’s knotting wasn’t meant for betas.
After covering me with the sheet, he left the room and returned with a large cup of water.
“There’s no bottled water because it’s an empty house, but it’s water from the purifier, so drink some.”
I thanked him in a rough, cracking voice, sat up, and took the cup. His trembling arm seemed uneasy, and he didn’t let go of the cup until I brought it to my lips and drank properly.
It was awkward to know where to look because his penis, standing next to me and watching, was still hard and glistening. The traces of intense insertion and ejaculation were starting to dry white on his penis, which he hadn’t wiped off after coming out of me.
“Shall we rest for a bit, just enough time for a cigarette?”
He took the cup I had finished drinking from and placed it on the bedside table, then walked around the bed to the opposite side. He moved with his legs clenched to prevent the cumbersome swaying of his penis.
It was a movement that was so commonplace that it had no sexual nuance at all, but the fact that it was a large penis that was uncomfortable unless held and moved was already too sexual.
As he bent down to pick up the jacket that had fallen on the floor, his scrotum was visible between his legs. Glancing at the heavy scrotum’s elastic swaying, I had to secretly rub my thighs together inside the sheet. To hide my penis, which was about to get slightly erect, I slid down from the headboard and lay face down on the mattress.
Looking down at me, he took out a cigarette from his jacket and lit it while standing.
It was a profile that seemed to embody the word “perfection” in human form.
The thickness of his chest and the degree of muscle swelling, the sharp waistline that bent sharply down from his back, his firm, raised buttocks, and his long, firm legs. Even the penis, which reminded me of the champagne bottle that I had once found in a magazine and that Yuni and Juhan had giggled about, stuck between the legs of a foreign model.
His thick, yet always lightly fluttering black hair, and his gray-mixed blue eyes that seemed to change color and temperature depending on his emotions.
Even if the reason I liked him was 100% because of his appearance, I couldn’t help but agree that he was beautiful.
However, it wasn’t the confident, flawless, beautifully crafted and displayed in a showcase, almost inanimate beauty that I had seen in him when we first met.
He, too, had a past that weighed on his heart, and he was a person who was sometimes dominated by that past. He also had clumsy sides, sometimes rambling because he didn’t know how to comfort.
The beauty that he showed now, with his own distortions and flaws, reflecting light and causing distortions, felt incomparably more attractive. I wanted to know more about his curves and flaws, and if he wanted to, I wanted to tell him about myself as well.
Not only about the things that someone might dismiss as common occurrences in the world, but that had such weight to me, the person involved, that they distorted my existence to the point where I couldn’t know my original self, but also about the trivial, silly, and laughable little things.
It was the first time I had felt the desire to talk about myself to someone else.
In the great kindness that soothed my anxiety, and so naturally, my feelings deepened as I overlapped my body with his.
It was amazing how Juhan and Yuni could be exposed to such kindness and not like him as a romantic partner.
He took the ashtray that was on the table in front of the armchair and sat on the edge of the bed, brushing back his hair, which had become quite disheveled, and took a drag of his cigarette.
As I watched his profile as he stretched his arms up as if yawning and lightly loosened his body while holding the filter in his mouth, I muttered without realizing it.
“…Thank you.”
“…”
He stopped moving and looked down at me with surprised eyes, then slowly lowered his arms and moved the cigarette he had in his mouth to his fingers.
“Was it good enough to be thankful for?”
His voice and expression, laced with laughter, were talking about satisfaction with the sex.
I thought about adding an explanation that it wasn’t that, but it didn’t seem necessary. His hand, which wasn’t holding the cigarette, reached out and brushed back my hair, which was still lying on the mattress with my cheek pressed against it. With a smile as if he knew that wasn’t what I was talking about.
Because the glass door leading to the garden was open, the sound of rain pattering on the wooden deck was close. The rain was heavier than when we left the airport. The thin, see-through curtain rose and fell irregularly in the air. His figure touching me in the sunken gray background seemed to be engraved in my eyes with a special texture.
After taking his hand away from my hair, he tapped the cigarette ash into the ashtray he had placed on the left and opened his mouth in a calm tone.
“Actually, I expected you to be uncomfortable living in this house. It was Plan B that I suggested just in case, even though I knew it… I have a separate Plan A. The order of the suggestions has changed, though.”
He pointed to the mattress with the hand holding the cigarette, turned his body towards me, and met my eyes.
“Chief Han also said that he would feel more at ease if Seo Yeehyeon lived with me rather than living alone. I think so too. I think you’ll be a bit anxious for a while, but it’s not like I can ask you to contact me in advance every time you go in to take a shower, right?”
He shrugged his shoulders and said that with a playful tone, then took a short drag of his cigarette. My whole body was languid and it was difficult to put strength into my back, but I thought it was a story I had to listen to seriously, so I raised my body that had been lying down and gathered the sheets to cover my lower body.
From a position where our eye level was much more similar, he gave me a fragmented gaze. Then, as if avoiding it, he turned his head and took a drag of his cigarette.
“I want to give you space too, but… as you know, the situation is like this. Securing your safety is the top priority, so I can’t give in either. Please understand.”
There was an earnestness mixed in his voice as he said that, which didn’t match the content of nailing down that he couldn’t give in without leaving room for compromise.
It was strange that he, a stranger, was appealing to me for understanding for the sake of my safety.
Whether it was because of loyalty to the person he had shared a body with, a sense of responsibility for his exclusive artist, or something else with other trivial affections added… His strong concern for my safety and his determination to make it impossible for me to refuse his proposal was a clearer comfort than the proposal for a life of luxury in a villa, more than alcohol or shopping.
If admiration, interest, and affection were developing into love, it was a red light for my future self.
In the air, which had calmly sunk into a gray color due to the relentlessly persistent monsoon rain, I was looking at his profile as he narrowed his brows and took a drag of his cigarette, when a clear impulse suddenly touched me, like hunger, a natural desire.
I didn’t force it, and I didn’t force myself to do it. Like the water level that slowly rose to saturation and overflowed over the levee, the occurrence of the desire to draw him in front of me was extremely natural.
I tried to focus on the flickering feeling that the senses I had given up on as completely severed would be revived, and fixed my gaze on his profile.
“What’s wrong?”
He looked back at me, who had stiffened my body with anxiously trembling eyes, and asked worriedly. I avoided his gaze and mumbled an awkward answer.
“No, it’s just… I’m sorry…”
He chuckled, saying, “Are you still talking about that?” and reached out and ruffled my hair.
I had thought that the game of discovering myself in the cracked cracks of a mug, in the cement bags abandoned in a construction site that had been halted, in the face of an old woman sitting sullenly in front of a stall, was like a privilege I had given up on myself. That as a price for putting down the brush for a long time, I would never find an object I wanted to draw in that way again.
But he was right.
Before going to Hong Kong, when I was talking on the phone outside the entrance of the rooftop room. He was sure that I would have something else I wanted to draw. It was true.
The pulse throbbing above my head seemed to pound all over my body. Just like when he was knotting inside me.
○
Leave a Reply