The Unconscious Gap
I had fallen asleep after drinking...
“(In a slurred, drunken voice) Brother-in-laaaw… You toooo… So it’s because of the performance pressure… It must be sooo haaard for you… I gueeess…”
My wife’s dreamy voice, thick with alcohol, drifted through the humid air inside the tent and burrowed into my ears. I had been curled up asleep beside the drinking table, but the sound jolted me awake in an instant. Beyond the crackling of the campfire, Hyung’s damp, moist voice followed.
“Living… is all… like thaaat… But you’ve been working so haaard taking care of Junseok. He’s a good kid, but… sometimes he passes out like this without reading the mood… I worry Sujung must feel lonely…”
“Aigoo… Don’t even say thaaat… It’s not like it’s once or twice… Look at him right now… Snoring away… He’s out cold…”
A faint sigh threaded through my wife’s words, followed by a brief silence. Eyes still closed, I focused every nerve on my hearing. Then came the scrape of a camping chair dragging across the ground. I couldn’t see, but it sounded like someone was standing up.
“(With a heavily twisted tongue) Aah… I must’ve drunk too much beeer… Brother-in-law, I need to use the bathroom… I’ll be right back…”
Another pause. The clink of a glass being set down, then Hyung’s heavy exhale.
“(Equally slurred) Ah… Me too… I’ve been holding it since earlier… Let’s go together!!”
Soon after, the sound of a zipper—ziiip—clack. The tent fell into a crushing, severed silence.
At that moment, my mind spun wildly and a hot flame surged up from the pit of my chest. Going to the bathroom together? At this hour? The two of them that drunk??
Uncontrolled rage flooded my veins. I wanted to kick the tent open and grab them both by the collar. But as the crunch of their footsteps on the gravel faded into the distance, I paradoxically grew colder and calmer. It was dangerous for my wife to go alone at this hour with no one around, and there was still no proof they had done anything. I told myself this situation had only arisen because I had rudely passed out.
As the anger slowly sank beneath rational thought, bizarre, tingling fantasies began to seep into the empty spaces left behind. The animalistic acts two drunk people of opposite sexes might commit in an empty space—and the fact that the target was my wife—made my heart hammer as if it would burst.
They must have reached the makeshift bathroom down the hill by now.
In a silence so complete that even rustling leaves sounded loud, if my wife relieved herself with only a thin partition between them, how would those sounds reach Hyung waiting outside? The shame of my wife having her most private noises overheard by a man who wasn’t her husband, and the predatory gaze that would capture them like a hunting dog. That perverse composition drove me insane with arousal.
It was clearly rage, yet at the same time it was a taboo pleasure I had never felt before. The terror that my woman might crumble beneath another man’s touch paradoxically returned as an overwhelming excitement that paralyzed my brain. Before I could even define the feeling, the heavy pleasure crushing my lower abdomen forced a confused groan down my throat.
Unable to endure the razor-tight tension in my nerves, I eventually slipped back into a terrible emptiness.
Hyung’s rough, heavy snoring pierced the thin tent fabric and mercilessly shook the quiet dawn air. The sound hit me like a thunderbolt and my eyes flew open.
Just how long… did I sleep?
The moment consciousness returned, I was struck by a crushing void and a self-loathing so fierce I wanted to tear myself apart. I had been wide awake, listening to the zipper as my wife and Hyung left. I had sworn to jump out and follow them immediately—or at least stay alert and guard this bizarre night until she returned.
“Ah…”
A hollow despair rose in my throat that wouldn’t even let me moan. Was it the alcohol, or the brain-numbing taboo fantasies? In the brief instant I had lost consciousness, time had flowed on without mercy.
During that ‘unknown time’ when I had plunged into the abyss of sleep and snored defenselessly, what destructive things had been completed in the silence outside the tent?
My heart began to pitch like a ship that had lost its anchor. Anxiety flowed through me like poison. When did my wife come back? How far did Hyung walk her? Or… was it really just walking her?
Just imagining the expressions they might have worn while facing each other in the damp shadows of that makeshift bathroom on the dark forest path—without even a streetlight—left me breathless.
You pathetic fool. You couldn’t even hold out and fell asleep?
Disgust for myself boiled up. The sense of loss from missing the decisive moment went beyond mere curiosity; it was pure terror. The fact that I had no way of knowing how my wife’s chastity had been shredded—or whether she had thrown it away herself—during those thirty minutes, or one hour… that short yet eternal stretch of time while my eyes were closed, was driving me mad.
Was the woman lying beside me now truly the wife I knew? While I slept, when the tent zipper opened again and she came back in, had her clothes been disheveled? Had the makeup around her mouth been smeared?
The anxiety of having thrown away the chance to confirm every ‘truth’ into the abyss called sleep tightened around my throat. Like a man standing at the edge of a cliff, I slowly reached out toward the cruel truth I both dreaded and needed to face.
Using Hyung’s snoring as a landmark, I slid my right hand deep beneath the blanket. The temperature of my wife lying beside me was strangely, unnaturally hot.
When my finger finally reached her most secret place, I drew in a sharp, horrified breath.
“……!”
The sensation traveling up my fingertip was bewilderingly damp and viscous. This can’t be… No way? My mind went white. My wife suffered from severe frigidity. She had always been dry even when we were together. So why was she this abnormally wet now, at the end of that ‘unknown blank’ while I had been asleep?
My heart slammed against my ribs as if trying to escape. No, it must be sweat. My brain desperately denied it, but the thick, sticky texture on my fingertips mocked my reason. The suspicion that, during the time I couldn’t remember, Hyung had completely shattered my wife’s iron wall of defense took hold of me completely.
Feeling that hot, sticky fluid fully with my fingertips, I began to slowly circle her clitoris. While Hyung’s rough, heavy snoring swallowed the silence inside the tent, I used that noise as cover and pushed my finger into my wife’s deepest, most hidden place.
The hot, sticky mucus coating my fingertip. The texture of that strange liquid—never permitted to me in all our years together—shot straight to my brain. As if searching for any trace of another man that might be mixed in that dampness, I rubbed my wife’s clitoris slowly, persistently, obsessively.
Twitch.
Even in her completely drunken state, her body reacted on instinct. But it wasn’t pleasure. True to her usual modest nature, she unconsciously clenched her thighs tightly in a defensive motion. That stubborn rejection only drove me further into madness.
I said nothing. In the damp darkness beneath the blanket I simply crushed her resistance with silence. Instead, I forced my way between her tightly closed thighs and stirred the hot wetness inside even deeper.
Outside the comforter the dawn air was cool, but beneath the thick layers it had become an entirely different world—filled with the heat radiating from my wife and the obscene scent of her juices.
Her eyes remained closed, but her violently heaving chest betrayed her turmoil. Every movement of my fingers produced a blatant, wet squish that filled the space under the blanket. Unable to tell whether the man behind her was her husband or the ‘Hyung’ who had broken her earlier outside, my wife was being devoured by nothing but the primal stimulation traveling across her skin.
I lifted my head and glanced toward Hyung and his wife, passed out drunk on the opposite side of the tent. The moment I confirmed they were completely asleep, the last shred of reason inside me burned away into ash.
I withdrew the right hand that had been violating her and moved it to her tense backside. Grabbing the waistbands of her training pants and panties together, I yanked them down in one swift motion.
“……! Ngh, huu……”
Beneath the darkness of the blanket, my wife’s white, burning lower body was fully exposed. At the sudden cold and sense of release, she bit down on the edge of the comforter to stifle her voice and arched her head back.
I poured my now-rough breathing against the nape of her neck and drove into her wet flesh without the slightest restraint. Instead of closing her legs, my wife twisted and writhed under the unbearable stimulation, accepting my touch. Too drunk to tell whether the reality before her was dream or truth, she was pathetically casting aside her chastity beneath the hands of an unknown man.
In that wordless, silent violation, her breathing grew steadily rougher and hotter. That obscene passivity of not even asking who the man behind her was. Using Hyung’s snoring as a backdrop, I felt every vivid throb of my wife’s corrupting body with my fingertips and sank deeper into the dizzying, tingling abyss of pleasure.
The heat beneath the blanket had reached its limit. My wife lay on her side, curled tightly into herself like a fetus. Her pants and underwear had been shoved mercilessly down past her knees, yet she kept her legs pressed together, locked tight, as if guarding the final fortress of her modesty. I pressed myself close against her back.