A Photograph from Happier Days
When he typed sub lifestyle into his phone, the results that came back were people whose usernames ended in "Sub," posting blogs and YouTube videos of themselves going about their daily lives.
No matter how he turned it over in his mind, that didn't seem to be what this was. A regular portal search didn't look like it was going to turn up anything useful.
Then something else caught Yoo Kang-soo's eye — a different kind of message entirely.
A long text arrived on his KakaoTalk, along with a photograph.
I'm just going back and forth between the office and home.
Pil-jun is doing well too.
Do you remember this one?
I think it was from before your mother's condition got worse — that trip to Sokcho, when we took her along and brought Pil-jun too.
I don't love that man. It was never like that.
I never once gave him my heart.
Your mother had it even harder, being alone in her later years.
Kang-soo was pleasantly buzzed — he'd had soju with his dinner — and he looked at the photograph.
Pil-jun, before he'd even started school. Kang-soo himself, hair cropped short: his days as a career soldier. And a face he missed so badly it hurt. His mother, beaming out of the picture.
Tears pricked at his eyes.
Before she passed, his mother had said something to him. They say there's no such thing as a filial child through a long illness — but in her last years, she'd been lucky with her daughter-in-law. She'd gotten through that long sickness well, she told him. She was going happy. Treat Pil-jun's mother well for the rest of your life. That had been her dying wish.
An affair was an affair. That much was true. But the fact that Hye-in had devotedly nursed her sick mother-in-law while raising a young Pil-jun — that was a fact no one could deny, no matter what they said.
It was a photograph he'd forgotten. He hadn't seen it in a very long time. Pil-jun couldn't have been more than five or six. The boy was grinning wide, and his mother — leaning on a cane, supported by his wife's arm — was smiling just as brightly. It looked like they'd taken it at the Sokcho shore, the sea behind them, after a meal of sliced raw fish and fried shrimp.
It had been a paper print, sitting in an album. His wife must have photographed it with her phone and sent it to him.
Kang-soo saved the picture.
In a way, it had been taken during the happiest stretch of his life. Of the four people in the frame, not a single one wasn't smiling. His mother. His son. His wife. And himself — a family photograph of people laughing with their whole faces.
He was fairly sure that had been their last family trip. The following year, as he remembered it, his mother's illness had taken a sharp turn for the worse.
"You've had a long day..."
His wife, Ji Hye-in, took his bag from him with a smile that seemed just a little cautious, a little watchful.
"Where's Pil-jun?"
"He's asleep. His exams finished today, so he said he was going to bed early."
"Have you eaten? If you haven't, have a little more. I'll set the table right now."
"I ate at a rest stop on the way up. I'm gonna wash up. Fill the tub for me while I get these clothes off."
Kang-soo was already stripping as he said it. Hye-in hurried into the master bathroom and started running water into the tub.
He sank into the bath and let the water close over him. The truth was, he still hadn't managed to come to any clean decision about what he was going to do.
He sat there in the tub, staring at nothing, lost in thought — and then the bathroom door opened.
It was his wife.
Ji Hye-in stepped inside. Her upper body was completely bare. Below, she was wearing nothing but a pair of panties.
"What are you doing."
"I was going to scrub your back. You haven't even been able to go to the sauna lately."
"No. You don't need to do that. Just get out."
He even shook his head as he said it.
"Honey. Please... let it go. I am truly, deeply sorry. Whatever else happens — at least until Pil-jun goes to college — don't think about anything else. I'm begging you. I can't get divorced. Not even if it kills me."
Hye-in climbed into the narrow tub and came into his arms. Kang-soo was already lying back in the water; now his wife was draped over him, her body laid along his. The seat of her bikini panties settled against his cock.
Kang-soo squeezed his eyes shut.
It was soft. Everywhere her skin touched him, the feeling was remarkably, unmistakably soft.
The truth was, before Yeom Seong-bong had made that insane phone call, Kang-soo and Hye-in had never really had a serious fight. Even getting properly angry felt awkward. He'd never laid a hand on her — he could barely remember raising his voice. From their dating days on, her voice had always been quiet, gentle, measured.
It wasn't because Kang-soo was mild-mannered that they never fought. Not even close. In the military, he'd been famous for his temper. He'd been known as the kind of military police investigator who, once he had a suspect by the tail, never let go — a bulldog who did not quit.
The reason they never fought was one hundred percent his wife's gentle, meek nature. Whatever Kang-soo told her to do, Hye-in had followed it almost without a word of argument, obedient to the last.
Which was exactly why it left him so stunned. That a wife that meek had cheated on him. For two years, no less.
He thought about their sex life. Whenever he wanted it, they did it. That had been the whole of it. There hadn't even been any need for contraception.
When she'd been pregnant with Pil-jun, the doctor had told them there was a slight problem with her fallopian tubes. It shouldn't interfere much with the delivery at hand, the doctor had said — but conceiving a second child would likely be difficult. At the time, though, neither Kang-soo nor Hye-in had any intention of having a large family. Money had been tight.
Kang-soo had been born a posthumous child to a widowed mother and had grown up poor. He'd dropped out of university halfway through and taken the path of a career soldier. Even after enlisting as an NCO, he'd been recognized in his own right as a military police investigator and had stayed in that posting for his entire service — in no small part because, though he'd never graduated, he had dropped out of law school, and that background had counted for something.
In any case, when Pil-jun was born by cesarean, they'd operated on the problematic fallopian tube at the same time. Afterward, Hye-in had been declared permanently infertile. From then on, there was no need for contraception when they had sex.
In his younger years, the sex drive that came off that dense, muscular frame of his had been a vigorous, boiling thing. He and Hye-in had had sex constantly — anytime, anywhere, it seemed. Period or no period: if Kang-soo had been drinking and the mood took him, they just did it, whenever. Because if it was something her husband wanted, Hye-in had done it. All of it. Anything at all.
But as they got older, as the years of marriage stacked up, the frequency had dropped off sharply. That was the truth of it. Before he left the service, his life had still been regular, and so had their sex. Then four years ago he'd retired, gone straight into insurance work, and the provincial travel had been relentless. There had been stretches where they went months between. Or rather — it was only now, sitting here, that it unfurled across his mind with sudden, startling clarity: he hadn't really been thinking about their sex life at all. He'd just been living.
Even so. It still didn't make sense.
Ji Hye-in's first man had been her husband. Kang-soo knew that perfectly well. That a wife that demure had gone and had an affair with a lunatic like that — he still couldn't quite make himself believe it.
But separate from all those tangled feelings, soaking in the warm water, Kang-soo's cock had gone hard as stone. From above, his wife's ass — covered by nothing but a thin pair of panties — was pressing down on him, light and soft.
"Honey. Listen. From now on... for the rest of my life... I'll be good. I really will. I think I must have been out of my mind. When I think about it now, I can't even understand why I did it. It doesn't make any sense. Not even to me."
She'd been lying against him, draped over his body. Then she turned and settled into his arms. His wife, naked except for a pair of panties.
For a woman of forty-one, Hye-in's body was slim and well kept, and Kang-soo was aroused almost at once. The truth was, he couldn't even remember when they'd last had sex.