The Crevice
The voice that spilled out was shaking terribly.
I still couldn’t believe I’d said it out loud. The fan’s hum drifted through the thin summer blanket, rattling the narrow studio apartment. My eyes caught Jeong-hee’s back as she sat at the edge of the bed, gripping a bottle of water.
She didn’t turn around. The sound of her swallowing hard echoed loudly in her dry throat.
It had been three years since we started dating.
I had landed a job at a small and medium-sized enterprise on the city’s edge, while Jeong-hee handled accounting at a similar trading company, wrestling with receipts every single day. We emptied our savings, took out loans for the rest, and began living together in this twelve-pyeong studio apartment.
To anyone watching, we were the perfect ordinary couple in our early thirties. Weekends meant hauling groceries from the hypermarket and simmering doenjang-jjigae. Sometimes we’d take annual leave and fly to Jeju on cheap flights. After work we’d stop at the subway station for a bag of fish bread, then head home. Simple, quiet days. At night we’d turn off the lights and lose ourselves in each other. We’d grown used to the feel of each other’s skin and the scent of sweat, and afterward we’d stroke each other’s backs with tenderness before drifting off to sleep.
But beneath that peace lay an unfilled, dark pool.
Lacking.
It wasn’t a matter of stamina or skill. Our relationship had always been too cautious, too careful, and therefore suffocatingly dry.
I knew it. I knew the grotesque, sinister desires that crouched deep inside both of us.
The urge to kneel, to be completely controlled. To feel relief only when I obeyed absolute commands without question, stripping away every social responsibility and shred of dignity a man was supposed to carry.
But in early-thirties South Korea, a man simply didn’t reveal that kind of preference. During the day I groveled to my boss at work, eroding my pride, and at night how could I admit I craved to be dominated? It would be like scraping the bottom of a man’s self-respect.
Even more despairing was the fact that Jeong-hee carried the same inclination.
I first noticed it half a year into our relationship. In the dark, after setting the mood, she took my hand and placed it on her neck. The fluttering pulse beneath my fingertips was a silent plea to tighten my grip just a little more.
From that day on I worked desperately to please her. I scoured online BDSM communities for posts, played the “fake dom” by lightly slapping her cheek or delivering embarrassing commands. It was like learning romance from books.
But I was born unable to dominate. Even as I cursed under my breath I worried if I’d hurt her, checking the knot on the tie to make sure it wasn’t too tight. When I slapped her cheek I loosened my palm, always watching her eyes. Such clumsy attempts at dominance only left us both with awkward fatigue and an unquenchable thirst.
Jeong-hee loved even my clumsiness. After the act she pulled me close while I panted and kissed my forehead, whispering, “Thank you. You went through so much trouble taking care of me.”
Because I loved the feeling of being cherished, because my efforts were finally acknowledged, I kept wearing the mask of fake dominator and taking on the role. Every time I performed that awkward act, Jeong-hee’s secret place grew wet, but my own thirst burned hotter, turning into a desert. I wanted to be trampled too. I wanted my entire existence discarded under someone’s merciless hands.
Even though we both knew each other’s thirst, we kept silent. For three years we had grown close enough to share bank accounts and fart in front of each other, but we never brought this particular wound to the surface. Because the only solution we knew was to insert a real master between us.
I thought it was a taboo we could never allow. It would destroy the ordinary, comfortable life we had built over three years.
But the limit arrived sooner and more cruelly than expected.
The harsh reality of the small and medium enterprise gnawed at a person’s soul. Submitting to unreasonable delivery deadlines, being drained by overtime until nine every night, when I finally boarded the subway limp and exhausted, my submissive nature poked its head up like a poisonous mushroom.
I want to give up everything.
I want to be a dog that crawls without thinking, just following orders.
Every time I gripped the subway handrail and swayed, my mind filled with those pathetic fantasies. Whenever that happened I hid in the company bathroom, turned on my phone, and searched the submissive community and overseas sites for videos.
On the screen a man like me, small and pathetic, knelt under the bed with a steel chastity cage locked around his cock. In front of him a real dominator with muscular, overwhelming strength fucked his wife like an animal.
The wife in the video scratched the dominator’s back as if her husband were nothing, moaning loudly. The husband on the floor cried but felt humiliating pleasure in his miserable state, trembling. I always projected myself onto the man on the floor.
If I were in that position…
If Jeong-hee were screaming like that under another perfect man…
Shame and cuckoldry surged through my veins. Every time I pulled down my pants in the narrow bathroom stall and stroked my swollen cock, dirty guilt and indescribable pleasure crashed over me at once. When I finished and wiped myself clean, the face reflected in the mirror looked so pathetic and ridiculous.
Yet the moment I got home after work I always checked Jeong-hee’s expression. Seeing her wet hair after the shower, I unconsciously imagined myself lying under the bed again.
And tonight the suppressed trigger finally broke.
It was Friday night. Both of us were exhausted, emptying canned beer without even showering. The moment the scent of sweat and alcohol hit us, our eyes met as if hypnotized.
We rolled on the living room floor, tearing each other’s clothes off. I slammed Jeong-hee’s naked body against the wall and moved my hips with the most violent force of our three years together. The sound of flesh slapping flesh echoed through the room. Jeong-hee’s nails dug into my back, and I, like an animal, panted and bit her nape.
Harder. Deeper. Rougher.
Our bodies collided as if we were finally real dom and sub.
The sounds of insertion, friction, and heavy breathing filled the room. When we reached climax and poured every last drop of heat inside and outside each other, then collapsed, both of us were drenched in sweat.
From the outside it looked like perfect sex. At least physically we had emptied ourselves completely.
But as Jeong-hee lay on her back on the floor staring at the ceiling with dazed eyes, she muttered in a thin, trembling voice.
“…I was definitely very excited, right?”
“It felt too good… but why is it still not enough…?”
The moment I heard those words my chest caved in with a dull thud.
Seeing the tears at the corners of Jeong-hee’s eyes and her empty, hollow expression, I realized bitterly. Even my violent struggle today had been nothing but a desperate imitation of the “fake dominator.” What Jeong-hee truly wanted was not just rough sex driven by brute force, but a real, perfect control where her soul was completely dominated and surrendered.
And I was the same. Even at the moment I filled her and came, my mind swirled with twisted fantasies of kneeling under the bed, watching the scene, and waiting for punishment. Neither of us could ever fill our thirst within this relationship.
“…Me too.”
Without realizing, the answer slipped out through my lips.
With that, heavy silence settled over the narrow room.
For about ten minutes we simply panted, unable to meet each other’s eyes. Jeong-hee staggered as if trying to cool down, got up from the bed, and walked to the fridge to grab a water bottle. Her slender shoulders trembled slightly as she sat at the edge of the bed and drank.
This silence was a clear signal. It was the final notification that we could no longer endure even one more day with this pathetic fake play.
I leaned back against the bed head, clenching my fists. Amid the pain of my nails digging into my palm, the forbidden sentence buried deep in my heart for three years finally broke through my lips.
“Shall we… look for a master?”
Holding the water bottle dripping with condensation, Jeong-hee slowly turned her head to look at me.
In her trembling eyes swirled an indescribable shock, fear, and an unrefusable deep, hidden expectation. It was the moment the irreversible door of destruction finally opened.