As If Nothing Had Happened
The usual things stared up at him from inside the bag—cosmetics, a wallet, the ordinary clutter of a woman's handbag. But when he unzipped the other compartment, he found a pair of stockings, rolled into a tight ball.
They were the coffee-colored pantyhose she wore all the time, wound up on themselves. They were clearly not new.
And beneath them, panties. Those, too, had been rolled so tightly that at a glance you could have mistaken them for a scrunchie. Just an ordinary pair of white underwear, the kind you saw everywhere.
When he unrolled them, the crotch was soaked through. He couldn't bring himself to keep looking. He rolled the panties back up and returned them to the handbag.
Aside from the panties and the stockings, there was nothing else unusual inside. The truth was, he had gone through her bag on a faint suspicion that she might be smoking. That, at least, did not appear to be the case.
If she had taken off a pair of panties that wet... Yoo Kang-soo found himself wondering what on earth his wife had worn home.
Then again, it was a perfectly plausible situation. Women produced a lot of discharge; if the crotch of a pair of panties got wet, she might well carry a spare and change. That was honestly easy enough to imagine.
He unrolled the pantyhose. There might have been a run in them—that could have been why she'd changed. But even at a glance, that did not seem to be it. They really were not new. It looked as though she had pulled off a pair she had been wearing and hastily rolled them up.
Yoo Kang-soo simply rolled them back up with care, put them in the handbag, and lay down on the bed. This really doesn't feel right. That was what he was thinking.
Yoo Kang-soo had emptied his heart.
He had come into the office first thing Saturday morning to gather the documents related to the lawsuit, and as he worked, those were the thoughts running through his head. It was not that her body had strayed that mattered. Any woman with a conscience would never have been able to say so easily that she had been out drinking with the men, and that one of them had walked her all the way to the door.
There were people who found planning difficult but moved quickly once they committed, and people who planned well but were slow to act. Yoo Kang-soo leaned toward the former. Years as a military police investigator had shown him far too many of life's ugliest faces, and so his plans were always cautious. It was a matter of personal conviction, a private philosophy: that human nature leaned closer to evil than to good. That was why he had always been prone to overthinking the messy business that unfolded between people.
Until now, though, those tangled, murky human relationships had never caused him any real stress. No matter how complicated or filthy they were, they had always been someone else's problem. A fire on the other side of the river. He had been careful, yes—but there had never been anything in it to actually weigh on him.
Not anymore. This was no longer someone else's affair. It was his. The fire was not across the river. It was burning on his side. And so Yoo Kang-soo could not help but feel the stress of it.
He ought to have hated his wife, Ji Hye-in. He ought to have wanted to beat her to death. And yet a part of him felt sorry for her, too. A small worry crept in—that she was too kind, too meek, and that the men had simply pushed her around. But the moment he thought of those fishnet stockings and that green eyeshadow, a fire went up his back. Forgiveness did not come easily.
She was over forty. She had an eighteen-year-old son—a second-year in high school. Even living with her wits fully about her would not have been enough. This was a situation that made no sense at all.
And so, that Saturday morning, he worked in the office, let out a long breath, and tried once more to shake the thoughts from his head.
Whether they divorced, whether they lived apart in name only, whether they went at each other with knives—none of that changed the fact that he intended to keep investigating insurance fraud. He wanted a clean, absolute separation between his work and his private life.
Even if he could no longer exist as Ji Hye-in's husband, that did not mean he would stop being Yoo Pil-jun's father. Yoo Kang-soo himself had been born a posthumous child; he had grown up without ever once seeing his father's face. He was not going to pass that wound down to his own son.
If he was going to get the boy even a single place of his own someday, he would have to work himself raw and earn. His own old age was covered—a military pension that would come until the day he died. That would be enough for him. Everything he saved would go toward his son's future.
If his wife Ji Hye-in could not get her head on straight, he would keep her close, coaxing her along gently, only until their son became a high school senior next year. Once the boy got into university... he would either beat her half to death, or strip her of everything and throw her out. That was what Yoo Kang-soo was thinking. And if she started running her mouth about property division or any of that bullshit, he would take her to some remote island and tie her up—a wild, impossible thought, but one that crossed his mind all the same.
Saturday afternoon, he came home to quite a sight. His son Pil-jun was sprawled in the living room watching YouTube, and his wife was clipping the boy's fingernails, one hand at a time. When she had finished with the fingers, Ji Hye-in went right on to the toenails, clipping each one with care.
"You're home? You had lunch, didn't you? If you're still hungry, I can put something else together..."
"Nah. I ate a lot at lunch."
"While I'm at it, you should get your toenails done too. Take off your socks and come here. Aren't they getting long?"
Last night she had crawled in drunk at nearly one in the morning. And now here she was, as if nothing at all had happened, putting on her devoted-mother, devoted-wife act. Yoo Kang-soo found it almost absurd.
A moment later, though, he was taking off his socks and surrendering his feet to his wife. Clipping his own toenails was a genuine pain. And it occurred to him, then, that for the past nineteen years—from the time they were newlyweds right up to this moment—she had always been the one to clip them. She had always been the first to offer this kind of devotion.
"Mom. I'm going to the PC bang tonight."
"Don't stay out too late."
"Why not? I couldn't even game once on weekdays. All I ever do is go to cram school."
"Ask your father for permission. You're going to try to stay out late again."
"Anyway, they kick all the minors out at ten. I'll only stay till ten, then I'm sleeping at Gyeong-sik's. His mom and dad aren't home today."
"Why... again?"
"I dunno. They had a fight. His dad went fishing, and his mom went to her parents' place."
Yoo Kang-soo didn't say a word. There didn't seem to be a single quiet household left.
That evening, with Pil-jun off to the PC bang, Yoo Kang-soo sat across from his wife Ji Hye-in at the dinner table, just the two of them.
"I'm sorry I was so late last night. It had been a long time since we'd had a company dinner... I think I drank a bit too much."
"Yeah."
Yoo Kang-soo had no desire to have a long conversation. He cut her off with a single syllable. A silence settled between them. The two of them simply ate, saying nothing.
After several minutes, it was his wife who broke the quiet.
"I'd rather you didn't treat me like I'm some kind of strange woman. Dual-income women. Women who work. Almost all of them do at least that much."
Yoo Kang-soo allowed himself a faint smile. Then, once again, he answered in a single short breath.
"Who said anything."
"You're disappointed in me. I can tell from your face. But I've lived hard all this time too... and now I want a little of my own life back. Of course, what happened with Mr. Yeom Seong-bong—that was a hundred percent my fault. I don't want to make excuses about that. I just don't want that one thing to cancel out everything I do."
Yoo Kang-soo made no reply. He did not feel the need to.
It was Saturday night. Pil-jun was sleeping over at Gyeong-sik's, who lived on the next block, and so the two of them were alone in the house. Yoo Kang-soo was lying comfortably on the sofa, watching television.
Ji Hye-in drew all the living room curtains shut. Then she came over beside her husband and, all at once, pulled his pants and underwear down in a single motion. Before Yoo Kang-soo could stop her, she took his cock in her mouth and began to suck.
"Hey. What are you doing."
He was still lying on the sofa, lifting his head to look down at her as he asked. Ji Hye-in let his cock slip from her lips for a moment and answered.
"Just... let's do it here. There's nobody around. Why not?"