Silence pooled between us again. But it was a silence far less tense than the one right after Jayne had left the room.
As if he had something to say but was hesitating, he lowered his gaze and lightly bit and released his bottom lip.
“And. Why would you say something like that?”
He seemed to be trying not to show it, but his voice was petulant, laced with disappointment and complaint.
“What….”
“That stuff about someone else becoming my lover. Even just imagining it is a little….”
He was so cute, pouting over something like that, that I finally relaxed and started to laugh. It felt like I’d been lightly sucker-punched when I least expected it. A pleasant attack, of course.
The old me would never have thought he’d lose his composure over such a trivial matter in a relationship.
I didn’t know how he felt, but it was precisely in moments like this that I truly felt I was in a ‘relationship’ with him.
Like all other lovers, though perhaps to varying degrees, we would feel hurt over trivial things and demand a more delicate affection…. Moments when even a person who is generous, relaxed, and so-called ‘cool’ to others could become a little stubborn in front of one person, breaking down their own solid habits to reveal gaps and imbalances—such moments were becoming the meaning of a relationship to me.
He bent his large frame and buried his lips in the nape of my neck, hiding his face.
Don’t laugh, he was being serious, he said, accusing me of trying to brush it off with a laugh. He rubbed his lips against my nape like a child wanting attention, and when I still didn’t stop laughing, he eventually bit me as if to say I was being mean.
Suppressing my laughter, I lowered my head to look down at him. Then I caressed his cheek. He reached out his free left hand and stroked my right arm.
“Just a little. Would that be okay?”
At his pitifully cautious question, I silently wrapped my arms around his waist and pressed my lips to his eyelid. He straightened up to face me. He cupped my face with both hands, his thumbs gently stroking my cheeks. With my eyes open, the inside of his thumb lightly brushed over my eyelashes. I laughed a little at the tickle, like the brush of a feather, and our lips met.
His soft but dry lips moved slowly, changing angles, taking my lips in, pressing down firmly, and tracing them with his tongue. His large hand moved from my cheek to my ear, his palm pressing close as if to block me from the sounds of the world.
It was a wonderful thing, to feel only his body heat, his lips, and his scent in a world filled only with the sound of flowing air, as if submerged in deep water.
Instead of his usual bold invasion, conquering and sucking painfully until they swelled, it was a slow kiss that gently rubbed our mucous membranes and mingled our tongues, a kiss that seemed to slowly kindle a fire from deep within my body, until a sweet breath finally escaped me.
It felt dangerous to let the kiss go any further, so I gently pushed against his chest and lowered my head. His hard chest, where my palm rested, was also rising and falling rapidly, swelling with an excitement that had begun to build. My whole body, intoxicated by his scent, ached as if I had caught a fever. Not just my exposed skin… but deep inside as well.
The truth was, we hadn’t been able to have proper penetrative sex for several days before coming to Chicago. He had been very busy. The night two days before our departure, neither of us could stand it any longer, so we’d cut our usual hours-long session down to a quick thirty-minute one; that was the only sex we’d had in the last five days. Even then, there hadn’t been time to knot.
What I learned from that thirty-minute session under the bathroom shower was a new fact: I could no longer be fully satisfied with such an abbreviated act.
Even though he hadn’t knotted, he had definitely been inside me, rubbing against my prostate and making me come, yet I had to suffer from a heat that wouldn’t subside. Because he had always approached me with heated eyes and satisfied me to overflowing before I was even conscious of my own desire, I hadn’t known I had become so accustomed to the pleasure of sex.
I had even thought, to some extent, that he was a person with a very vigorous appetite, and that I was usually just swept up in it, my body responding when he, the person I liked, approached me exuding a sexy vibe.
But while that may have been true up to a certain point in the past, it wasn’t anymore. Despite having just come, I was shocked by my own thirst for more of him, by the sight of myself touching my own body, twisting my hips, and putting a hand down below in search of him even after he had gone back to finish his remaining work.
Therefore, I was, frankly, in a state of sexual frustration. Just being in a quiet space, surrounded by his scent and absorbed in a kiss with him, was enough to make me feel the impulse to pounce on him, rip off his shirt, and press our bare skin together. Ending it with just a kiss was, and this might be a poor analogy… as difficult as stopping mid-urination.
Though he had pulled away from me, he still held onto both my arms, his eyes wanting more as he let out a breath of longing. Thinking I shouldn’t steer the mood in that direction, I cleared my throat a couple of times and changed the subject.
“Your Noona… she seemed really shocked.”
“……”
“I think more than anything… she was probably flustered to learn so many things at once. I don’t know if I should be saying this, but… you’re going to talk to her, right?”
I asked cautiously, glancing at him. He slid his hand from my upper arm and gripped my wrist.
“Of course.”
And he bent his head deeply to kiss me once more.
“I think I’m going to die right now.”
At his pained whisper as he pulled his lips away, I felt like I was going to die, too. Just hearing that voice, filled with such desire for me, made my insides tremble. The lust was so intense it went past unfamiliar and into bewildering, and I felt a sense of shame, needlessly clutching at my chest. It felt less like a healthy sex drive and more like a lecher’s greed for carnal pleasure, and that was something I couldn’t quite be honest about.
“I’ll go out first, so you stay here for five, no, ten more minutes before you come out.”
“……”
“Right now, your face is….”
I knew what he meant, so I didn’t ask. He gave an awkward laugh and stood up first.
Only after slowly finishing the now-cold glass of water did I leave the room. Despite the commotion, the party was still in full swing. In fact, it seemed to have gotten even more lively with the uninvited guest’s departure. He seemed to be surrounded by people, apologizing. Instead of approaching his group, I decided to look for his Noona.
She was by the poolside beyond the terrace windows, which resembled a glass conservatory, talking with Reed Rogers. Though they followed each other on social media, it was their first time meeting in person today, but judging by their expressions, it didn’t seem like they were just making light small talk. It seemed best not to disturb them.
I stopped awkwardly on the terrace between the hall and the pool and turned back. He had already returned to his cheerful and relaxed self from before the commotion, mingling with people.
He wasn’t the type to actively lead conversations, yet he was a person who always seemed to be at the center of a group. A man standing diagonally across from him was telling some story with grand gestures. People laughed lightly, and when he showed a smile, everyone’s laughter instantly grew bigger. Being far away from the group made that dynamic even clearer to see.
I remembered the first VIP opening party I had attended as a temp staff member, not long after we met. Back then, I had stood with Juhan-hyung at the information desk, watching him as he was surrounded by people, laughing. I had tried to imagine his desperate side, the one who, despite appearing to have everything easily, was paddling furiously beneath the surface, gritting his teeth.
I wanted to get some more fresh air, but I didn’t want to be seen and interrupt his Noona and Reed’s time. I moved to the inner part of the terrace, behind a garden tree with lush leaves, into a shadow untouched by the lights, and sat quietly on a wrought-iron chair.
I could see his face better than from where I had been standing before. I watched his face as he burst into laughter, playing along with someone’s joke, and then realized I was smiling along with him. Once I became conscious of it, my smile stiffened awkwardly.
A lot had changed since that first VIP opening, and there were times I had felt him, who had seemed like a person from another world, as close as a second self watching me from outside my own body… but in this moment, watching him through a pane of glass in a foreign land on another continent after a thirteen-hour flight from Seoul, I felt like a spectator, laughing and crying at the words and actions of a character on TV who had nothing to do with me.
The heat left by our earlier kiss already felt like a thing of the evaporated past, and I touched my lips. I pinched them hard enough to hurt, just like he always did, but there was no pleasure in it.
Unable to approach either his Noona or him, I watched from the shadows of the terrace as the moon over Chicago, shrouded in a thick fog, appeared hazy and blurred, like a mirror that could reflect nothing.
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