The Suspicious Woman
A motel room.
Yeonwoo held Ayoung as carefully as if she might shatter at the slightest touch.
They had been dating for six months.
Half a year had passed, and still she felt impossibly fragile and precious in his arms. For six long years he had carried her deep in his heart, never daring to reach for her—and the fact that she was here now, nestled against him, still sometimes felt unreal. Just having her close was enough to make his chest swell until it ached.
Tonight, as always, they had eaten at the familiar restaurant they frequented, then drifted naturally into this motel room.
They were a couple. Yeonwoo… believed that much, at least.
When he lowered his head toward her lips, she closed her eyes. Their mouths met, and he felt the warmth of her body. Ayoung's skin was smooth and warm. His fingers traced lightly across it.
But…
Her response still fell short of anything he hoped for. He could sense neither excitement nor thrill in her. Yeonwoo focused on caressing her anyway. His hand slid along her waist, cupped her breast, swept up from her calves to her thighs.
No matter how hard he tried, her body did not seem to answer his touch. Her breathing stayed quiet. She simply accepted the path of his hands, passive and still.
She did not push him away. She did not turn her head or wear an expression of refusal. But neither did she catch his hand, or arch into him, or offer any active response at all.
Yeonwoo settled between her legs. He brought his cock—swollen to the point of aching—to the damp entrance of her pussy. There was no resistance. Slowly, he pushed himself inside her.
"Ah—! Yeonwoo…"
She called his name in a startled little gasp. It was the biggest reaction he managed to draw from her.
Yeonwoo cried out inwardly. More. React more. Feel that I'm inside you.
He drove his hips hard, desperate to pull something—anything—from her. Every muscle in his body was taut; sweat beaded on his forehead. He longed for moans of pleasure to spill from her lips, for her to tremble with arousal and cling to him.
But she only made faint sounds whenever their bodies collided hard, furrowing her brow as if she were acting out a part.
He tried harder. If he just did a little better, if he just put in a little more care, her body and heart would catch up—he wanted so badly to believe it. But her gaze kept sliding past his face, drifting up toward the ceiling. She looked like someone whose mind was somewhere else entirely, far from this room.
"Hah—! Ayoung… I… I think I'm gonna— Ah—!!!!"
"Mm… Go ahead. Don't hold back… Come inside me…"
At last Yeonwoo came inside her. Even as the hot rush of his semen flooded her body, she only gave a slight shiver at the new sensation—and nothing more.
"I love you, Ayoung! I really… love you…"
Yeonwoo collapsed over her as he cried it out. But Ayoung only held him in a perfunctory embrace. She did not answer.
When everything was finally over, she let out a short breath. Yeonwoo could not tell whether it was the afterglow of pleasure or a sigh of relief that it was done.
After a stretch of silence, Ayoung turned away without a word and pulled the blanket over herself. When Yeonwoo, aching with vague attachment and emptiness, reached out to hold her, her body flinched. Before his hand could even touch her skin, she had already burrowed deeper into the covers, escaping the contact.
"Yeonwoo… I'm a little tired."
That small distance dragged back up the question he had spent six months carefully ignoring.
Does she… really like me? Why is Ayoung even dating me at all…?
Silence filled the room.
The next day, a few hours after they had parted, Yeonwoo's phone buzzed.
A message from Ayoung.
A short sentence. One line that left no room to cling, no gap in which to ask why…
Yeonwoo stared blankly at the phone screen for a long time.
He could not let it end like this. He still loved her. He had to hold on to her somehow. But his fingers would not move. He could not think of what to say—and deep down, he already knew, the way you know something by instinct, that nothing he said would matter.
I wasn't enough. Ayoung was amazing just for dating a guy like me… She was being kind…
No ability. No future. And as a man…
Yeonwoo sent a short reply of his own.
That night, he sat alone in a tiny bar tucked deep in a neighborhood alley and knocked back soju, glass after glass, as if chewing and swallowing his own pride.
He thought he would be fine. Every time he had gotten together with Ayoung and then fallen apart, he had expected a moment like this. He had never once seen her look happy… So this situation, too, was something he had steeled himself for, at least a little.
He downed another glass. It burned like fire in his gut.
Six years of loving her alone, steadily, without wavering—and this was how he got thrown away…
Still… even if it had only been a short stretch of time, he tried to comfort himself that he was lucky just to have spent it with her under the name of lovers. But the harder he tried to think that way, the more a corner of his chest twisted as if someone were wringing it out.
"Fuck… I get that I don't have any prospects, but… was I really that lacking as a man, too?"
He muttered, staring down into his glass.
Come to think of it… he didn't think he had ever satisfied Ayoung. Not once. He hadn't been hoping for the exaggerated reactions of women in porn. He just couldn't remember ever seeing a look of real satisfaction in her eyes. After sex she always turned her back first, always left first, always shut the conversation down with a flat "It's fine."
"If I… if I had at least satisfied her in bed… would she have dumped me this coldly?"
He knocked back another drink. When he set the glass down on the table with a sharp clack, the alcohol hit him all at once.
And then…
A strange presence. Across from him, in the empty chair, he felt something like a shadow take shape. He lifted his head—and someone was sitting there.
A woman so beautiful it was almost dangerous, dangerously alluring. He could not begin to guess her age. Twenty? Thirty? Older still? An otherworldly air clung to her, as if she existed outside the flow of time. He could not place her nationality either.
She watched him with a gaze that seemed to pierce straight through him, the corner of her mouth lifted in a faint, enigmatic smile.
"Who are you?"
Yeonwoo asked in a trembling voice.
"Hmm… who indeed?"
Her voice was sweet and cold at once.
Yeonwoo raked through his memory. A face this beautiful, a presence this strong—there was no way he would forget someone like her. She was definitely… a stranger.
"Got dumped, huh? Like a total dog."
She said it with a smile playing at her lips. It almost sounded like mockery—and yet, strangely, it didn't sting.
"Hah… Is it that obvious?"
Yeonwoo found himself answering honestly before he could stop himself.
"Yeah. Why'd she dump you?"
She was a complete stranger, and he had no idea why she was sitting there—but none of that mattered to Yeonwoo. If anything, it was a relief. Sometimes, when you need to spill your guts, a person who knows nothing about you is easier. And if that person happens to be a woman this gorgeous…
"I don't know. I mean… there's probably more than one reason, right? No prospects… and I don't know anything about women…"
"You don't know about women?"
She asked as if she found that amusing.
"My ex and I… I don't think we were very compatible in bed. I don't think I ever… properly satisfied her."
Yeonwoo confessed, feeling his face burn under the alcohol.
"Is that so? Have you ever satisfied any other woman?"
"Uh… honestly… she's the only girl I've ever dated, so… now that I think about it… I've never satisfied a woman at all."
The smile on her face deepened. She looked at him as if he were almost painfully endearing.
"Then… want to try taking this?"
She opened her hand. Resting on her palm was a small, glittering pill in silver wrapping.
"Huh? What… is that?"
Yeonwoo stared at the pill, unsettled.
What is this? Some shady sales pitch after all? Or is she trying to drug me and drag me off somewhere? Am I about to get my organs harvested?
"It's not a sales pitch, and I'm not trying to do anything to you."
She spoke as if she had read his thoughts exactly.
"Whether you take it or not… that's your choice. But…"
She paused and looked straight into Yeonwoo's eyes.
"This could change your future."
"Change… my future?"
Yeonwoo looked back and forth between the pill and her face with a wary gaze.
In that moment, the headlights of a car passing outside the bar swept across the window glass. Yeonwoo blinked—and in that fraction of a second, the seat where she had been sitting… was empty.
"What the hell? Was she… actually a ghost?"
Yeonwoo shot to his feet and looked around. But nowhere could he find any trace of her. It was as if she had never been there at all.
He looked back down at the table. Right in front of the seat she had occupied… the glittering silver pill lay quietly waiting.
His heart hammered.
Change my future?
He picked up the pill. Ayoung's cold voice, her faintly scornful expression, the quiet distance of that last night—all of it flashed through his mind.
Even if this is poison… it doesn't matter. What could be worse than the life I've got right now?
He filled his glass with the last of the soju and drained it in one go. Then he put the pill in his mouth and swallowed it down with the liquor.
The instant it slid down his throat, heat bloomed from his esophagus to his stomach as if he had swallowed a lump of burning coal instead of a pill. He gasped and slumped against the table.
Fuck… so it really… was poison?
He could feel every blood vessel in his body pounding. Something was beginning.