Smoke in Her Hair
Yoo Kang-soo was so floored he couldn't get a word out.
His wife paid his silence no mind. Ji Hye-in simply took his cock back into her mouth and went on sucking him with the same devoted, painstaking care as before.
A moment later she was gathering up the dress she still had on. The fabric rose, and her slender body came into view. She wasn't wearing a bra — they were home, so she hadn't bothered. She pulled the dress off over her head and pushed her panties down her legs.
Every light in the living room was on. In that unforgiving brightness, his wife Ji Hye-in's naked body was laid out with nothing left to hide.
One hand closed around her husband's cock. She guided it into herself. Kang-soo lay sprawled on the sofa in genuine comfort, not moving a muscle. His wife was doing everything herself.
Her face was bare of makeup, and she was lovely. She had aged well — beautifully, even. That this woman was the mother of a son in high school was almost impossible to believe. She looked so young. You could have taken her for a bride in a newlywed apartment; her bare face was that fine, that clean.
Watching a woman like that work herself on top of him, hips rising and falling in earnest, sent a sudden, violent rush of heat crashing through him.
Hye-in reached back and gripped his thighs, driving her hips faster, slamming down and lifting off. A moment later Kang-soo's whole body jerked, and he came inside her.
His wife, not a stitch on her, went into the bathroom, soaked a towel in warm water, wrung it out tight, and came back holding it. Then she wiped around her husband's cock until he was clean.
That Saturday, late at night, the two of them lay side by side in bed.
"You had a company dinner on Friday?"
"No. It was a gathering among acquaintances I know through the association — people I usually get along with."
Saturday morning, at the office, Kang-soo had sworn to himself he wouldn't ask a thing. But then his wife had sucked him so devotedly on the sofa and led them into easy, comfortable sex, and the tension in him had loosened all over again.
The truth was, he had started to think that maybe — even if it wasn't the whole truth — some of what she was saying might actually be right. Once you shifted your thinking even a little, toward how many men would make passes at a woman the moment she set foot in the working world, her position became, if only slightly, understandable.
The affair with Yeom Seong-bong, of course, was something he could never understand. That had crossed the line completely. But as his wife had said, just because she had cheated didn't mean he had to put on tinted glasses and look at every other part of her life the same way.
Maybe, from the very beginning, because Yeom Seong-bong had blown himself up first, Kang-soo had given that man's version of events too much weight. A flicker of self-reproach moved through him. Looking at it now, perhaps he should have dug deeper into how Yeom and his wife had met in the first place. A thin thread of regret came with the thought.
"Hye-in. Listen. I know this is coming out of nowhere, and it's a little awkward, but... why did you see Yeom Seong-bong for two whole years?"
"I-in calendar years it's two, but... the time we actually met was a little over a year. And... I know how this sounds now, like an excuse, but... the first time was almost forced. He took pictures that day. And then he kept threatening to show those pictures to you. I had no choice. I kept letting him have my body. It was never... it was never love, or even liking him, not from the start. That man obsessed over me the entire time we were seeing each other. He threatened me the entire time."
"And even so, that guy got a divorce?"
Kang-soo's voice carried a note of genuine puzzlement.
"I think the way he felt about me was real. He liked me a lot. He was obsessed. He wanted us to live together. I think he was completely convinced that if he blew himself up to you, I'd divorce you and go live with him. Later on I stopped giving in to the threats. I just kept refusing to see him, kept avoiding him, so he actually went and told you. I don't even want to think about that man anymore. I was the one who got used. I was blackmailed, and I was stupid enough to let myself be led around by it."
"If you were being blackmailed... why didn't you think to tell me?"
"Because I was ashamed. Even that first time, when he forced himself on me — it happened because I believed he was such a good person. I trusted him completely. I let my guard down. That's why it happened. I felt so pathetic. And I thought if you found out, you'd be so disappointed in me. I think I was just desperately trying to stop the crisis right in front of my face. I regret it so much. That immature way I handled it... I regret it a great deal, even now."
Kang-soo wanted to believe his wife. And yet, something in the way she talked kept calling up the distinctive speech of certain old women — the ones who, after pulling an insurance scam, piled excuse upon excuse, each lie feeding a bigger one. He couldn't have said why. But the feeling would not leave him.
He drew a breath, then opened his mouth again.
"That male acquaintance you mentioned before — the one you had dinner with, the one you went to karaoke with. Was he at Friday's gathering too?"
He had changed the subject without warning, tossing out a question from nowhere. It was a method he had used often as a military police investigator, questioning suspects in firearms incidents. You didn't hammer one topic into the ground. You kept several threads going and tossed them out at completely unrelated moments, just enough to keep the questions themselves slightly confusing.
"He... he was there, yes..."
His wife hesitated a beat before she answered.
"How many people at the gathering?"
"Fi... five... no, six including me..."
"Did you go to karaoke too?"
"Yes..."
"So you drank, went to karaoke, sang... that kind of night. How many men. How many women?"
He gave her no room to breathe. The questions came one after another, the way you interrogated a suspect.
"Th... that's..."
A look of faint hesitation crossed Ji Hye-in's face. She couldn't answer right away.
"What? You don't remember?"
"No... it's not that. Um... I was the only woman. Everyone else was a man."
Kang-soo felt it in his gut. Something was wrong — not a little wrong, but badly, deeply wrong. From the moment Yeom Seong-bong had appeared until now, something enormous had been off, and he had the distinct sense that he still wasn't seeing it clearly.
He didn't let any of that show. He went straight to the next question.
"Doesn't it feel awkward, going out drinking with just men? You said you were the only woman."
"I-it's fine. They're all people I get along with. And they're respectable gentlemen, so... there's nothing awkward or uncomfortable about it..."
"I see. Let's just sleep. I'm tired."
He cut it off. Pushing the conversation any further tonight, he suspected, wouldn't turn up much. On that thought he closed his mouth and shut his eyes.
His wife seemed to be genuinely trying to sleep. Kang-soo, though, could not. Maybe it isn't that nothing more would come out. Maybe I'm afraid something shocking would come out — and I'm hesitating to face it.
A few days later, they were talking in bed again.
They had been having sex more often. At least once a week, without fail, it seemed. After Yeom Seong-bong's exposure — whether the man had vanished into the sky or sunk into the earth, nobody could say — one thing had become a hard fact: from the moment of that sudden phone call onward, the frequency of their marital relations had gone up.
"There's a faint smell of cigarettes in your hair."
"Is there? I had lunch with an acquaintance... maybe the smell clung to me then?"
"You smoke while you eat?"
"Ah... no. That's not it..."
"You have lunch with a man too?"
"H-honey. The office I work in is almost entirely men, you know. I'm the only woman there — I handle the clerical work."
"The acquaintance you had lunch with today. He's not the same guy from karaoke last time, is he?"
"Th... that's..."
They were lying down. The lights were completely off; the room was dark. Even so, Kang-soo could feel it clearly — the way his wife's face shifted, just slightly, into a look of panic.