I had to lie face down on the sheets for a long while, like someone who had just returned home after hours of strenuous exercise. No, it was closer to the feeling of having been severely beaten than having exercised. The inside of my body trembled, and my entire skin ached.
Even after the knotting subsided, he didn’t pull out right away. He remained on top of me, slowly caressing me, stroking my hair, and kissing my face and upper body for a long time. Only after confirming that some focus had returned to my eyes and my breathing had stabilized did he, with a languid groan, withdraw his still-not-fully-wilted cock and get off me.
Unlike me, who was a complete wreck, he showed no signs of fatigue. He left the bedroom and returned with a towel and some water to drink. The outline of his erect cock stood out distinctly over the towel wrapped around his waist. It was after two consecutive knotting sessions with only a short break in between, but subduing his erection with sex was, once again, a failure today.
The potent afterglow of sex still lingered and flowed through every corner of my body, but I tried my best to ignore it as we sat side-by-side on the edge of the bed, gulping down the water he had brought. We both definitely needed the hydration. It felt as if every last drop of fluid had been wrung from our bodies.
3:13. 5:37. One was 12:02.
Beside me, as I mentally tallied the runtimes of each video in my phone’s video album, he was kissing his way across the marks he had left. Because he had left the studio lights on, a not-too-bright, not-too-dark light seeped into the bedroom. It was no longer pouring, but the rain was still drizzling.
“This one’s too dark. It must have hurt when I did it.”
Staring at the video thumbnails that I was afraid to touch made me thirsty, so I drank some more water before turning to look at him.
He was pointing to a particularly dark, bruise-like hickey just above my collarbone, speaking apologetically, but his face couldn’t hide a smile. He had occasionally left a mark or two in unseen places, but this was the first time he had branded me with so many across my nape, collarbones, shoulders, and chest.
Since this was the sex that followed our unfiltered display of jealousy, I wondered if he had wanted to claim ownership, even through the meager means of leaving his sexual traces on my skin. Seeing him kiss the marks on my body seemed strangely cute. Though, it hadn’t been cute at all when he was marking that ownership.
A weak laugh escaped me. I looked down at my mottled torso and tried to make a joke.
“Are you pleased with it?”
He, who had been turning my shoulder to kiss a mark above my nipple, furrowed his brow and looked up at me. Then he pulled his lips away, leaned back to put some distance between us, and scanned the red traces his sex had left on my body.
“Very. I’m thinking of submitting it as a work of art somewhere.”
His flawless good looks already made him seem serious just by his appearance. It was a face that could not look frivolous. When he made such jokes with an even more serious expression, I still wasn’t quite sure how to react.
“Though, to be honest, I have no intention of sharing it.”
He moved closer to me and kissed my bare shoulder, smiling as he spoke. He looked so lovely, curling his large body and letting his arms hang between his legs as he rested his cheek on my shoulder, that I smiled too.
Embarrassingly, every time I laughed, the fluids he had thickly sprayed inside me during his knotting trickled out. In truth, it was more of a gush that I couldn’t stop. The towel I was sitting on grew damp. I tried to hide the sensation that made me instinctively straighten my posture by fiddling with the water bottle and phone in my hands.
“Having a job where I don’t have to go into an office… is nice at times like this.”
His eyes twinkled playfully as he smiled, and he fiddled with my waist, rubbing the tip of his nose against mine.
“Are you saying it’s a good job for having sex? Seo Yeehyeon, you’ve gotten so lewd.”
I felt no need to deny it. It was the truth, after all. Responding to his lips as he kissed me lightly, as if enjoying the afterglow, I let out a leisurely moan from deep in my throat. Then, it suddenly struck me as a little bittersweet that my first visual record with him was a sex video. I didn’t feel guilty or uneasy about those videos, but separate from that, I wanted to have at least one piece of evidence that our relationship wasn’t all about sex. It was an impulse without context.
“CEO.”
“……”
His twitching eyebrow seemed to convey his displeasure at my return to the formal title after sex, but he didn’t try to voice his thoughts.
“Would you like to… take a picture together?”
His eyes widened, as if it were an unexpected suggestion. But he soon smiled and, as if he’d been waiting, quickly moved to sit behind me and wrapped his arms around my waist. While he got into position for the photo, pressing his cheek against mine as if resting his chin on my shoulder, I opened the camera and flipped the lens.
The screen, which had been showing the messy table outside the open door, changed to a bust shot of the two of us. It had already been about a month since we started spending every day stuck together, but we’d never had the chance to see ourselves together, so it was a refreshing two-shot.
The framing, which captured us down to our bare chests, made the photo feel a bit risqué. I tried adjusting the angle by extending my arm, but a frame filled with just our faces wasn’t much better.
“Come to think of it, this is my first selfie.”
“And me? Do you think it’s my second?”
He hugged my waist a little tighter and looked back at me. Now that I thought about it, I couldn’t imagine him holding a phone and searching for the right angle to take a selfie, and a small laugh escaped me.
Unlike him, who looked natural, I looked at my own stiff self on the screen, then lowered my arm and bowed my head.
“This is awkward… Should we just not?”
“Why? I was already looking forward to it.”
His genuinely disappointed voice made me hesitantly raise my arm again.
“Since we’re both shirtless, it doesn’t look all that wholesome.”
He tapped our image on the screen and laughed, then pressed his lips to my cheek. His right arm crossed my chest to wrap around my left shoulder, and his handsome face, which was photogenic to boot, moved in close on the screen as if to kiss me.
“Try to smile more.”
He whispered in my ear, stroking my side to ease my tense expression.
“Though no matter what we do, we’ll still look like a couple screaming, ‘We just had sex.’”
Click.
Our image was preserved in a 4:3 ratio, along with a slightly awkward and bland smile.
Couple. I didn’t know if he’d said it consciously, but the word left an impression as striking as the aftereffects of the knotting.
Watching his profile as he sent the photo he’d just taken to his own number, I was suddenly struck by a feeling of missing him, even though he was right beside me. Even though he had just knotted inside me twice, I felt like I hadn’t had enough of him. It wasn’t a hunger I felt because he was keeping his distance from me. Unable to even explain it to myself, I simply buried my forehead in his shoulder.
○
It would have been pointlessly stubborn to refuse his kind offer to clean me up when I was in a state where even standing still was a struggle.
While he gently scooped out my insides, I tried to somehow pull myself together by grabbing onto the showerhead holder, but it wasn’t easy. Telling me not to resist and to just lean on him comfortably, he kissed my temples and cheek several times with a voice full of pity, washing me out with a practiced hand.
Even though a lot had already leaked out on the bed, the amount of cloudy fluid that was sucked down the drain with the stream of water from the shower was immense. It was amazing to think that so much semen could have been pooled inside my body.
Only after I had finished cleaning up and sat in the tub did he start his shower. He roughly toweled off, threw on a robe, and went out to return with two cans of cold beer.
He sat down across from me and handed me a beer.
“This is the first time we’ve bathed together in this room.”
It was also the first time we’d had sex downstairs where I was staying. Though it was smaller than his bathroom upstairs, I liked this bathroom, with all its walls, floor, and ceiling finished in tiles of various shades of blue. It was also fun to watch him look awkward, his movements restricted in the narrow, tile-finished tub, which wasn’t a fancy whirlpool model.
“This might sound obsessive, but….”
“……”
“What did you talk about? With Choi Inwoo.”
He seemed embarrassed to be asking the question himself, as he couldn’t quite look me in the face.
“Just… about paintings.”
“You mean about how you were going to promptly hand over Seo Yeehyeon’s first work to another man?”
Leaning his elbow on the edge of the tub and tilting his head, he twirled his wet hair with his fingers, his face full of dissatisfaction. He looked like a boy in his early teens… I thought that this was the kind of moment I wanted to capture in a photo, but my nearly dead phone was on the bed.
“He did say he wanted to buy it, but… I told him I didn’t think it was at that level yet.”
He let go of the hair he was twirling and straightened his head.
“Then you must have felt wronged when I said earlier that it would be a problem if you entered into some kind of reservation.”
“It wasn’t to the point of feeling wronged….”
He said he was worried that because I was so gentle and used to keeping my mouth shut even in situations where I was misunderstood and wronged, I might go out into the world and get hurt.
But I wasn’t the kind of person who kept quiet because I was gentle and kind like he said. I was just a coward, more accustomed to resignation than ordinary people, afraid of problems coming to the surface, my body conditioned to avoid them.
Instead of confessing my true nature to the man I liked, telling him that this was the kind of person I really was, I was the kind of coward who drank my beer and silently basked in his worried gaze.
“The wine Choi Inwoo brought. Do you know it’s a wine people often order when they’re trying to seduce someone?”
Earlier… when he came down from the first floor. Was that what he was checking when he was reading the label? I wiped away the water droplets trickling over my eyelids with my hand and shook my head.
“Seduction… there was nothing like that. Nothing at all.”
“I know. And I know that even if that bastard had tried to seduce you, you would have been firm.”
His voice was resolute, leaving no room for doubt.
“I don’t know why I couldn’t control myself, even knowing that.”
As he said that, he picked up the beer he had placed on the edge of the tub and took several large gulps, seeming ashamed of his own jealousy. The sound of rain was still audible through the small window set high up near the ceiling, different from the one in the studio.
He set the beer can back in its place and said,
“About Chicago.”
“……”
“I said it while I was knotted, so it might have seemed like something I blurted out impulsively. But please know that’s not the case.”
I recalled the moment of fulfillment I felt when I first called his name, and the invitation that had come back to me like a confession afterward. My mouth was dry, so I drank more beer.
“To be honest, I’d been thinking about it on my own ever since you moved into this house and started painting again… but watching Kwon Juhan’s painting near completion… I started to specifically hope that it would be good to introduce your work on this trip, too, even if it’s just at an unofficial party. And aside from your achievements as a painter, a trip would be stimulating. For a creator, there’s no more important material than experience.”
He smiled faintly and swept back the strands of hair that had clumped together and fallen across his forehead. Then he looked into the air and chuckled, as if recalling a funny memory.
“To be even more honest, now that you’ve seen all my uncool sides.”
Contrary to the shy words he uttered, when his gaze shifted to me, his eyes were intense, without a trace of hesitation. He was clearly conveying that he had no doubt about his feelings.
“It’s also because I… don’t want to be apart from you, Seo Yeehyeon. Not even for a few days.”
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