Just One Promise
After the match ended, I came home.
When I opened the door, Yoon Arin was sitting in the unlit living room.
She had her knees pulled up to her chest, and when she lifted her head at the sound of my presence in the dark, her face was a wreck. Her eyes were red and swollen. She had been crying for a long time.
She saw me and Seoyeon... going at it on the ring.
Instinctively, I knew I was fucked.
"...You're back?"
Yoon Arin asked, forcing herself to sound casual. But her voice was trembling, just a little.
"...Yeah. I'm back."
I quietly sat down in front of her.
A heavy silence stretched between us for a moment. Arin couldn't look me straight in the eye; her gaze kept sliding away. Then, finally, she couldn't hold it in any longer.
"...I saw it. The match."
"..."
"You and Seoyeon... at the end."
Her voice grew more and more choked.
"That... was it just me seeing it that way? Or was it... real? Was it actually real?"
With trembling eyes, Arin looked up at me.
It was the look of someone begging me to say it was a misunderstanding, that she was wrong.
But I didn't want to lie to her.
"...It was real."
Arin's face went rigid.
"...One thing led to another, and it just... happened."
I met her eyes without flinching as I spoke.
"I'm sorry. It's my fault."
I didn't bother making excuses. A clumsy cover-up would only hurt her more.
I admitted it as it was, and I apologized.
"...I knew it."
Moisture welled up in Arin's eyes again.
"I knew it was true... I was so stupid, hoping it wasn't..."
She dropped her head. Her shoulders were shaking faintly.
"...I was terrified the whole time I was watching. Kang Seoyeon is... prettier than me, and she clicks with you so well. When I'm not around, the two of you spar, and then... I was scared she'd really take you from me. That you'd leave me behind and go..."
All the anxiety she had been bottling up seemed to come pouring out at once.
The woman they used to call the undefeated champion was now terrified of being abandoned by me.
Someone who had feared no one on the ring was shrinking this small over this. Watching her, a dull ache spread through my chest.
I slowly reached out and pulled her into my arms.
"...Yoon Arin."
Her body stiffened the moment I held her.
Tension gathered in her shoulders, as if she might push me away—or might not.
In the end she couldn't push me away at all. She just trembled faintly against me.
It wasn't pure anger, and it wasn't complete surrender either. It was the helpless tremor of someone who simply didn't know what to do.
I held her a little tighter.
With her like this in my arms, none of it mattered—how strong she was, any of that. She was just someone precious I had to protect.
"Listen carefully."
I spoke every word clearly.
"In this world, the first person I ever gave my heart to was you. The first time my heart raced, the first time I thought I wanted to protect someone—all of it was you."
"..."
"Kang Seoyeon is a good fighter. I'll give her that. But that's all. Do you really think one accident that happened in the ring is going to change what I already gave you?"
I pulled her even deeper into my arms.
"...My first love is you. That isn't going to change. No matter who I meet from now on, no matter who I keep by my side—the beginning, the center of it all, will always be you alone."
Arin, cradled against me, held her breath for a second. Then—
"...Really?"
In a voice as small as a mosquito's hum, she asked.
"Really me? Not Seoyeon?"
"Yeah. You. From the start, now, and forever."
I gently patted her back. Only then did Arin break down crying in my arms, the sobs she had been holding back finally bursting free.
She buried her face in my chest and wailed like a child.
How anxious she had been, how scared—all of it was in that crying.
I said nothing and just kept stroking her small back until the tears quieted.
After crying for a long time, Arin looked up at me with wet eyes. Then, as if she had made up her mind, she spoke.
"...Hey. I'm not an idiot."
"...Huh?"
"A guy like you... I don't think even I believe a man like you—the only one of his kind in this world—could ever look at just one woman for the rest of his life."
Arin wiped her tears and gave a bitter little smile.
"Every woman in the world is going to throw herself at you. Accidents like with Kang Seoyeon will happen again. You're a man, and more than that, you're the man I love most in the whole world—the most incredible one. I know that's... just how it is. There's nothing I can do about it."
It was unexpected. I looked at her quietly for a moment.
True to her reputation as the undefeated champion, Yoon Arin was not a woman who turned her back on reality.
Instead of going blind with jealousy and throwing a tantrum—she was trying, in her own way, to accept this absurd situation. It made my chest ache, and at the same time I felt proud of her.
"But."
Arin looked straight up at me with those wet eyes. And in that gaze alone, the empress of the ring was back.
"Just one thing. Promise me."
"...What."
"I don't care who you meet, who you keep by your side, how many of them there are. But... never leave my side."
Her voice trembled thinly.
"I can endure everything else. But you leaving me behind... that, I can't take. So promise me. No matter what happens, you'll stay right here next to me."
I met her eyes. Then I slowly nodded.
"...I promise. No matter who comes to my side, you will always be my first. I will never leave your side."
At those words, moisture rose in Arin's eyes again. But this time it wasn't tears full of anxiety.
"...You mean it? If you break it..."
Arin grinned through her tear-streaked face. But there was something cold in that smile.
"If you break it, then for real... I'll chase you to the ends of the earth if I have to and beat you to death with these two fists."
"Yeah, you can kill me. Because I won't break it."
"...And."
Arin clenched the collar of my shirt tight. Then, in a low voice, she added—
"After I kill you... I'll follow you and die too."
"...Huh?"
"What's the point of me living alone in a world without you. So if... you ever leave me behind, I'll kill you and then immediately follow right after. I'll chase you all the way to the afterlife and stick right by your side even there."
With tear tracks still on her face, Arin beamed. But her eyes weren't smiling at all. They were chillingly sincere.
"...So. Be good and stay next to me. Got it?"
She was saying something bloodcurdling—and strangely, I wasn't scared.
If anything, those words, twisted as they were, sounded like a confession that she couldn't live without me.
The undefeated empress, the woman who had never feared a single person in this world—
was clinging this desperately to me alone.
I huffed a quiet laugh and gently pried her fingers from my collar so I could lace them with mine.
"Got it. I'm not going anywhere, so don't say scary things like that."
"...It's a real promise."
"Yeah. A promise. I'm not going anywhere. I won't even have to go to the afterlife—I'll just keep staying right next to you."
Only then did Arin smile bashfully.
Even with tear tracks still on her face, that bright smile of hers was more precious than anything else in the world.
To find even a bloodcurdling threat adorable... I really was completely gone for this woman.
Yoon Arin roughly stripped Hyunwoo's clothes off him.
The body her friend Seoyeon had coveted only a few hours ago.
Arin's fingertips were trembling finely, but that tremor had already transformed from anger into fierce, burning possessiveness.
Every last trace Seoyeon left behind... I'm going to wipe it all away. Every single one.
As if scrubbing his skin clean, she dragged her lips down over Hyunwoo's body, rough and sticky. Everywhere Seoyeon's scent clung, she smeared her own saliva over it.
She was no longer the lofty queen of the ring. She was nothing but a venomous bitch determined to reclaim her man completely.
"Arin, you're rougher than usual today."
Hyunwoo snagged her by the waist and hauled her up on top of him. Without the slightest hesitation Arin lined his cock up with her entrance. It was the path Seoyeon had already taken, but Arin only clamped down harder around him as she swallowed him whole.
"Aaah...! Hah, haah...!"
The moment Hyunwoo's rough thrusts began, Arin's reason melted away in an instant.
The betrayal she had felt toward Kang Seoyeon, the flame-like jealousy—paradoxically, they became the most potent fuel for her pleasure.
Every time Hyunwoo drove his hips into her, Seoyeon's afterimage burned away inside her head, and in its place only Hyunwoo himself seemed to be carved into her.
"Hyunwoo... haah, look at me... only me... don't think about other women, please...!"
Arin locked her arms around his neck and sealed her mouth to his, thick and greedy.
The kiss was ostentatious, far more relentless and prolonged than the one Seoyeon had shown him on the ring.
Soon Hyunwoo seized one of her breasts in a crushing twist while his other hand mercilessly speared into her sensitive entrance, and a crackling current raced down Arin's spine.
"Aaang!! Nngh, hhk! Hyunwoo, more, more...!"
In the white-flashing blur of pain and ecstasy, Arin could only scream his name as she raked her nails down his body.
Do me harder... wreck my insides more... until not even a scrap of Seoyeon's trace is left...
The hours of sex that followed devoured Arin's stamina like a ravenous animal.
How many times had she blacked out?
Her waist had no strength left in it at all, and her crotch was so steeped in pleasure that even sensation had gone faint. But she couldn't stop. As long as Hyunwoo was filling her completely, she felt the relief of knowing that no one in the world could tear her away from him.
"Haah, haah... Arin, I'm coming...!!"
When Hyunwoo finally poured everything he had, scorching hot, deep into her womb, Arin's body shuddered like a scrap of paper.
"Aaaaah!! Ah, nngh! Hyunwoo...!"
She let out a scream-like moan as gushing fluids soaked his cock and drenched the sheets. Every muscle in her body seized in one last convulsion, and Arin collapsed unconscious into his arms.
Just before she blacked out completely, through her hazy vision she confirmed that Hyunwoo was already fully asleep in her embrace.
...It's enough now. Seoyeon's scent is gone.
Feeling her lower body still dripping with the mix of cum and her own juices, she sank into bone-deep exhaustion and relief.
On the face of the woman who had passed out in Hyunwoo's arms—battered and ruined as she was—there lingered a strange sense of victory, the feeling that she had not been defeated, that she had finally taken him back.
With only Hyunwoo's scent filling every breath she took, Arin finally drifted into sleep at the end of that long night.