I chuckled at his nonchalance, and our lips met again. This time, the back of my neck tensed at the sensation of his warm tongue licking my lips. From his tongue, which tickled my lips, I could taste the fruity aroma of sake and the sweetness of the ice cream we’d had for dessert.
“You really do smile a lot when you’re drunk. If you were to visualize the word ‘beaming,’ it would be this exact face.”
He spoke, lacing his fingers together behind my waist.
His voice, lowered to a whisper, made me nervous even though no one was passing by. No, because no one was passing by and our surroundings were excessively quiet, he had no choice but to lower his voice.
“Do you… like it… when I smile?”
“I do. You don’t usually beam like this.”
He said, rubbing the tip of his nose against mine.
At the sound of a car coming up from below and the glare of its headlights, my body stiffened with a start, and I instinctively pressed myself closer to him. He pulled me into a tight embrace as if to hide me in his arms, though I was neither small nor slender, and buried his lips deep against my temple.
When I was with him, whether in the living room, his bedroom, the kitchen, or the studio downstairs, there had never been any restrictions on physical contact, so this felt different.
He was a man who could, if he wanted, instantly secure a space completely shielded from the eyes of others, even when not at home. And right now, his house was a mere five-minute walk away, so there was no need to hide in the dark shadow behind a parked car, lowering our voices and lamenting the short-lived kisses and hugs that could be discovered at any moment.
But I didn’t dislike it.
I looked up at his face, thinking that this was probably similar to the kind of romance most people my age experienced—lingering for a long while even after arriving home, reluctant to part, sneaking into a deserted spot to whisper to each other.
Our eyes met, and another silly laugh escaped me. Conscious of my own intoxication, I was about to hide my face, but then I recalled his words about liking my smile and didn’t look away. He was looking at me with a gaze that seemed to meticulously caress every corner of my face.
“I should keep making you… smile like this.”
As if wavering between the trivial joys of romance (at least, one similar to his) and the worries and concerns it brings, I wanted to erase the shadow from his eyes that darkened from time to time.
“Um, then… you can just… kiss me… again….”
I had no idea where in my head that line had come from… I wanted to chalk it up to the alcohol.
Seeing his blue eyes widen, a mortal sense of embarrassment and regret pushed its way through the gaps in my intoxication. If I was going to spout such nonsense, I should have drunk more.
“If that’s all it takes to make you smile, I’d do it for you all day.”
His eyes curved into a gentle crescent as he pulled my waist in tighter. I placed my hands on his chest and leaned into him more, and he tilted his chin to press his lips against mine more deeply.
A deep kiss followed, where we repeatedly parted and closed our lips, sucking and releasing the other’s. Beneath our thinly slitted eyelids, we never lost each other’s gaze.
My hands, which had been stroking the broad, firm muscles of his chest that curved gently, traveled up over his shoulder and neck to cup his cheeks. He grasped my wrists, turned his head, and rubbed his lips against my palm. I could feel his hardened cock against my lower body.
I, too, wanted deeper contact. I instantly grew impatient, thirsting for his scent that tantalizingly lingered at the tip of my nose before drifting away.
“Tonight, I’d like for us to sleep together without having sex.”
“……”
He whispered calmly, rubbing his cheek and lips against my palm.
At first, I didn’t immediately understand what he meant. As I stared up at him with a question mark on my face, he smiled and flicked my forehead lightly with his finger.
“Ah.”
He pulled down the hand I had raised to rub my forehead and kissed the spot, laughing in a low voice.
“When did you get so used to sex?”
He was teasing me for having come to accept that this kind of atmosphere leading to sex was a matter of course. But it was only natural, considering we had been having sex… almost every day recently.
Right after I moved into his house, we had been a little more careful, sometimes stopping at petting or foreplay, but recently, our post-dinner kisses leading to sex had become something of a formula.
That change had definitely started after that night of the barbecue party and the lace underwear. I, at least, had come to understand the reason for the change as us deciding to no longer hide the seriousness we felt for each other, crossing a line we had only hesitated and circled around before… As time went on, I was gradually becoming certain that he was no different from me.
During the day, when I was painting alone, it was fine. But after we had dinner and talked together… once I was exposed to his gaze, conscious of me and wanting me, and to his heavy, provocative scent, self-control became impossible. Lately, it was hard to say who initiated it first.
That’s why I didn’t immediately understand what he meant. Even now, his cock was hot and hard. It wasn’t that he didn’t want it.
He rubbed my forehead for me, then lifted his chin to look into the air and muttered playfully.
“Once we start, it’s impossible not to have penetrative sex… and if we do, I’ll end up knotting, and that puts a lot of strain on your body, Seo Yeehyeon.”
“Um, but… we’ve been knotting almost every time, lately… And, we’ve even knotted twice in one night before….”
“……”
I hadn’t meant for him to feel sorry about the knotting, but he looked down at me again with a complicated expression. It wasn’t that I wanted him to stop knotting, either.
“Even though we did it so often… my body was fine. That’s what I meant….”
He cupped the back of my head and pulled me in. As I drew closer to the nape of his neck, ‘that scent’ mixed in with the smells of several perfumes became clearer.
The force of his embrace was so strong that my torso ached, but it wasn’t the least bit uncomfortable or unpleasant. My ear, where his lips touched, felt warm.
“I want to be with you so badly, too, Seo Yeehyeon. I always want you. I do. But… just once. What it’s like to have you next to me when I wake up in the morning… I won’t ask for much. Just once for me, too….”
I still couldn’t fully understand his words, what not having penetrative sex, or not knotting, had to do with staying together until morning. But thinking about it, even though we had spent so many passionate nights together, we had never actually fallen asleep together.
As much as I loved… having sex with him, I was just as curious about what it would feel like to go to bed together without sex and wake up together in the morning.
“Okay, I will.”
Leaning against the wall, I couldn’t fully wrap my arms around his back, but I gently held the back of his arms and whispered toward the nape of his neck.
I wanted to ask why we couldn’t just sleep together after having sex, but the alcohol made clear thought difficult. My thoughts would start to take shape, only to crumble away before long. They melted away in the thick heat of his scent.
“Seo Yeehyeon.”
His voice whispering my name in my ear overlapped with the voice that had called out to me when I was looking around for him. I hoped that even if I were to lose him, he would find me and call out to me just like that. And that I, too, could do the same for him.
I answered his call by pressing myself deeper into the nape of his neck, quietly feeling the beat of his heart against my own chest.
○
There was no trace of the awkwardness from the first day in my brother’s poses or expressions.
In the quiet space, as if submerged deep in water, Jeff Beck’s ‘Blow by Blow’ album, which Juhan had introduced me to, played at a low volume. We filled the time without boredom, exchanging only the minimal conversation necessary for the work.
Today, the fourth session in this garden, my brother, sitting nude on a rock in front of a juniper tree whose branches stretched out crookedly like a wild tree, turning his head toward me, looked beyond comfortable—he looked free.
That energy was transmitted directly to me, and through the work of the past few days, the image of the composition and colors had almost completely taken shape in my mind.
I recorded my brother’s pose in several photographs and filled an entire drawing notebook with sketches. It seemed the preliminary preparations were more or less finished.
I once more seared into my eyes the complex straight line that ran from his shoulder to his arm—a line that was extremely thin, and therefore looked aggressive and sharp, yet at the same time precarious, sensitive, and vulnerable—and moved my hand quickly on the folding table easel.
“You’ve worked hard, hyung. You can relax now.”
Even after I put down my pencil and said that, Juhan didn’t move right away. He had been like that for the past three days as well. It was similar to an actor who can’t immediately snap out of a scene after an emotionally intense take.
Unlike when he was posing, he simply relaxed his back and sat there for a moment, then first pressed his hands firmly around his eyes, stretched his neck to both sides, and then stretched his arms and legs as if yawning. Then he slowly stood up and picked up the shower gown he had tossed onto another nearby rock.
By the time he did all that and walked over to me with a smile, he had finally returned to his usual self.
I stopped tidying up the tools scattered on his outdoor table set, which I had arranged for work, and handed Juhan Hyung a cold beer fresh from the icebox.
“I might have to ask you again later, but for now, I think today will be enough.”
“Really? This was surprisingly healing. A bit of a shame.”
My brother’s face, as he plopped down on the opposite bench and scratched the tip of his nose, felt much more familiar than before we had started working together. It wasn’t that I had gotten to know him better, but rather a familiarity that came from erasing the parts I thought I knew and leaving them as blank spaces.
“Just sitting still among the trees, completely naked, it felt really good.”
As he drank his beer, my brother, who was staring blankly at the spot where he had been sitting so serenely just moments before, looked like someone who had just woken from a long, deep sleep.
“I enjoyed painting because you felt comfortable, hyung. I think I’ll be able to enjoy the rest of the work, too. Thank you.”
“Besides Old Future, I’ve modeled for a couple of fashion magazines before, but it wasn’t very fun. The vibe of the people on set didn’t really match with mine. But this time, ah… it was good.”
It was clear that my brother, tilting the beer can as he spoke, was not just saying empty words.
This work, which I had only perceived as the act of me painting my brother, had, during the actual process, faintly awakened a long-forgotten sensation engraved deep within my body—a communion with the subject being painted. The memories of understanding and loving the subject while looking, observing, and drawing.
“What, it’s over already?”
At the appearance of a familiar and welcome voice, Juhan and I turned around at the same time. Yuni, with a look of clear disappointment on her face, was standing at the door connected to the parking lot. He was with her.
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