The Night Before the Hunt
Seoul's nights were always wet.
The city after a passing rain was especially so. Neon signs glistened, the air in the alleys hung cold and damp, and the sirens wailing from afar indifferently announced that someone's night had already been ruined.
People laughed with drink-flushed faces, then suddenly wore frightened expressions. They knew all too well that anything could erupt at the end of an alley. Tonight, too, someone's spilled blood had likely soaked the city's outer walls and pavement.
Kang Hayul liked nights like these. More precisely, she liked the moment when night stripped away the daytime shell from people.
Bars during such hours made people strangely honest. A few drinks in, music pulsing through the body, the right silences and exchanged glances, and eventually people leaned toward what they truly wanted.
Desires they hid during the day. Fatigue. Emptiness. Loneliness. Even the feeling of wanting to be devoured by someone.
Hayul leaned back in the deepest seat at the bar, slowly rolling her glass. Two buttons of her black shirt were undone, her long coat draped over the chair behind her. The tendons on her wrist stood out faintly each time she lifted the glass. As always, she wore few adornments. Instead, the heavy presence of cold weapons hidden somewhere at her waist described her far more clearly than any flashy accessory ever could.
The bartender gave her a familiar look.
"Straight again tonight?"
Hayul tilted her head slightly.
"Something strong."
The glass arrived. She took a sip. As the liquor slid down her throat, the heat still simmering inside her body seemed to pull back a little. She hadn't gone hunting today, yet the night always left her hypersensitive. The smells of the street, the heartbeats of strangers, the sweat and perfume and body heat drifting through the bar.
Her keen senses were less a blessing than a troublesome burden, and Hayul had learned long ago how to manage them.
By holding someone. By drinking. Or by doing both.
That night, her eyes found two women.
They sat in a curved sofa booth a short distance from the bar. One had a short bob that fell from her shoulders. She wore a thin jacket over a black slip dress, and the way she crossed her legs drew the eye. The other had long, wavy hair. Soft curves showed subtly beneath a silk-thin blouse, and she had a habit of slowly tracing the rim of her glass with her fingertips.
They could have been friends, longtime lovers, or accomplices who had only become partners for tonight.
She hadn't been watching them from the start.
But her senses caught the shift before her gaze did. The awareness directed at her. The way their breathing had quickened. The brief fracture in the rhythm of their conversation. She noticed it all instantly.
She tilted her glass once more, then slowly raised her head.
Their eyes met.
The short-haired woman smiled. The long-haired woman followed a moment later, but held Hayul's gaze longer. It was the look of someone appraising exactly what kind of woman she was.
Hayul didn't gesture first. Usually the other party moved.
And, as expected, they did.
The short-haired woman came to stand beside her.
"Drinking alone?"
Hayul set her glass down.
"For now."
"Then maybe not for long."
Her voice was low and smooth. Slightly drunk but not sloppy, a carefully calculated seduction. Instead of answering, Hayul glanced at the long-haired woman standing behind her.
The long-haired woman tilted her head slightly.
"Were we staring too obviously?"
"A little."
"Did it bother you?"
Hayul gave a faint smile.
"Not at all. Thanks to you, I wasn't bored."
The short-haired woman laughed silently at that. She slid naturally into the empty seat beside Hayul and crossed her legs. The long-haired woman took the seat on the other side. In moments, Hayul was nestled between them.
"Do you come here often?" the short-haired woman asked.
"Sometimes."
"Liar."
The long-haired woman laughed.
"You look way too comfortable for someone who only comes sometimes."
"Sharp eyes."
"How do you feel about being watched?"
Hayul shifted her gaze slowly. The long-haired woman's pupils looked darker, softened by drink.
"Depends on who's doing the watching."
The short-haired woman rested her elbows on the bar.
"How do we look to you?"
Hayul didn't answer right away. Questions like this were better met with a pause. It made the other person wet their lips again, shift in their seat, let anticipation build.
"One of you is the type who opens the door first."
She looked at the short-haired woman.
"The other gauges whether to step all the way in, and once she decides to come, she goes the deepest."
The long-haired woman let out a soft chuckle.
"Dangerous mouth you've got."
The short-haired woman added, "And you talk well."
"Eyes are windows to the heart. They say more than mouths do."
"Then what are our eyes saying right now?"
Hayul lifted her glass, then set it down again.
"They're saying we should leave."
This time both women laughed, unable to hold it back.
The three of them left the bar together.
On the way to catch a taxi they exchanged names, but whether the names were real didn't matter. They'd likely never see each other after tonight anyway.
Work stories, dating stories, unnecessarily honest talks about preferences; light topics flowed between them.
The taxi they eventually boarded was warm. Outside the windows, the city stayed wet. Lights slid along the road, washing over their faces in turn. The short-haired woman rested her head on Hayul's shoulder. The long-haired woman quietly stroked the knuckles of Hayul's hand. Words were scarce. In a night where everything had already been silently agreed upon, even silence felt intimate.
Hayul's home was tidier than expected.
There was little trace of daily life, few possessions, and the lighting was low. The walls and shelves held more practical items than decorations. Yet within that practicality lingered a strange mix of asceticism and decadence.
The clean room only made the bed, sofa, and liquor bottles on the table stand out more blatantly. It wasn't a place meant to keep someone for long, but it was an incredibly seductive space for a single night.
The three drank in the living room before moving together to the bed.
What began as playful kisses quickly grew deep and heavy. As their breaths drew closer, the air itself thickened. Someone's laughter brushed an ear. Someone's hand traced down a waist. Someone's hair slid across bare skin.
Hayul was slow and precise. Rather than rushing, she moved like someone who already knew exactly where to touch to draw out which sounds. The two women, with Hayul between them, played at competing at first, but soon they were mixing their own breaths and body heat with each other.
The room only fell quiet when dawn light began to seep through the gaps in the curtains.
And when the line between dawn and morning had blurred. Hayul woke in a familiar, if not particularly welcome, sensation.
It felt less like waking and more like quietly surfacing from shallow sleep. She had never been someone who slept deeply. A body that had survived long years as a hunter was trained to react to even the smallest sound in the night. Footsteps in the hallway, the low vibration of the refrigerator motor, the subtle change in the breathing of the person beside her.
The weight of someone's leg draped over her. The breath brushing her ear.
The two women were still asleep beside her.
The short-haired woman slept with her cheek pressed against Hayul's arm. Her face, now drained of last night's excitement, looked surprisingly serene and young. Disheveled hair clung to her forehead and cheeks. Her lips were slightly parted, letting slow breaths escape. A few faint red marks lingered on the shoulder and collarbone left bare by the blanket.
The long-haired woman hugged Hayul's waist from behind. Her black hair spread long across the sheets. The blanket had slipped low, faintly revealing the curve of her hip and the outside of her thigh. Even in sleep, one of her hands rested near the short-haired woman's wrist, as if unwilling to let go even unconsciously.
Hayul watched them for a moment. She remembered their names. She'd heard them somewhere in the middle of last night's drinking. The laughing introductions, their jobs, who had met whose eyes first, who had brushed the back of whose hand first; those trivial details remained in fragments. But none of that mattered now.
The night was already over. Mornings always brought a different kind of silence. Especially when someone else's body heat still lingered in the sheets.
Hayul rose without a sound. The mattress sank only slightly before settling again. The short-haired woman stirred faintly but didn't wake.
The curtains hadn't been fully drawn. Thin, immature light leaked between the window frames, faintly tracing the messy shapes scattered throughout the room. On the floor lay the shirt and underwear discarded the night before, a belt flipped halfway over, empty glasses, a tilted bottle, stockings, a fallen earring, and a single high heel. The air still carried faint traces of alcohol, excited body heat, perfume, and skin.
Even after the night had passed, her body refused to rest completely. Was it because of the sex? That wasn't it.
It was the feeling of the boiling inside her subsiding, just a little. The heat in her blood that never fully died. It wasn't as intense as right after a hunt, but there was a kind of fever inside her that only eased when she spent the night holding someone's flesh. This morning was relatively better than most.
She stepped into the bathroom and closed the door, cutting off the warmth and scent of the room behind her.