Witches' Time
After wrapping up our two-week honeymoon, we unpacked and headed straight to my parents' house. My younger brother Jaejin, who had come back temporarily for the wedding, had already returned to his studies abroad. Still, we'd exchanged plenty of texts and calls, and we'd promised to keep in touch often, so the visit didn't feel empty with just my parents there.
Our wedding photos were already hanging on the wall. Seeing the large framed pictures of the two of us in wedding dresses, along with shots of us with my parents, made my nose sting. Changhee's eyes welled up with tears.
"If that thing between his legs had turned out properly, I would've just raised him as a boy..." Mom, never one to hold her tongue, stood beside me while I stared at the photos and said it outright. I reached out and took her hand. She squeezed mine back firmly.
"Mom, thank you. I won't let you down. I'll make sure nothing like that ever happens. We'll both work hard from now on, so please cheer us on."
Tears quickly gathered in Mom's eyes. Mine must have been doing the same, because her face blurred. Before I knew it, Dad had come over and pulled the two of us into a hug. The three of us were crying before we realized it. Changhee stood by the kitchen, wiping her own tears.
The next day we went to visit Changhee's parents. I'd expected things to be cold, but the atmosphere was surprisingly warm. Mira, Changhee's younger sister, played a big part in creating that mood. She said she'd had a long talk with their parents after seeing Changhee in a wedding dress at the ceremony. I thanked her sincerely.
"Try to think of it a little more calmly. It's not like I can convince them on my own, but I'm starting to understand things better now too. The internet helped a lot, huhu..."
I never imagined we'd be sitting in a corner of their small yard having this conversation. When we'd met at the coffee shop before parting ways, I'd sensed she was leaning toward acceptance, but in the short time since, she'd become far more friendly. It made me happy.
"By the way, what should I call you now? If I say sister-in-law, that means I get my brother back, but if I say brother-in-law, that means saying goodbye to him... This is kind of a headache, don't you think? Huhu..."
"Why think of it that way? I was just planning to have you call me Unni and keep things simple... Changhee's your Unni, and so am I. No need to overcomplicate something this small, right?"
She looked at me for a moment, then smiled. I waved away the cigarette smoke with my hand and smiled back.
"Then drop the formal speech. If you do that, I'll call you Unni comfortably too. I grew up without any sisters, so suddenly having two is definitely a blessing, right? Hohoho..."
It was an unexpected win. A warmer welcome than I'd dared hope for. I lightly hugged Changhee's sister after she firmly shook the hand I'd offered. I hoped she could feel how grateful I was without me having to say it.
All four of our employees are lesbians. So when I married Changhee, they'd had plenty to say among themselves. They whispered about why I'd chosen to marry a man who looked like a woman. I told them proudly that there was no woman like Changhee, and before the wedding I introduced her to the staff. After they met her in person, the gossip stopped. It meant they'd accepted that Changhee was a "woman." Since I didn't want to lose any of them after building the company and hiring each one, I was grateful they'd respected my decision and celebrated us so warmly at Delma.
On my first day back at work after the honeymoon, I handed out heartfelt gifts to Jeongsook and the staff, chatted about the trip for a while, then crossed into my office. The moment I sat down, Jeongsook grabbed my arm and pulled me up. We could've talked in the office, but her dragging me meant she wanted to speak somewhere private. I knew exactly what she wanted to discuss. We grabbed canned coffee from the fridge and followed her lead up to the rooftop. It was always the best place for the two of us to talk without worrying about others.
"The fact that you're dragging me all the way up here means you've finally set a date, huh?"
"Hyaah, you catch on quick, huhu... Yeah, you're right. Since your flashy party is over, I was thinking of throwing one of my own. What do you say?"
We sat side by side on the bench smoking. Instead of answering right away, I enjoyed the view of the distant buildings. The high vantage point gave a clear view all the way to the Han River, which I loved most about this spot. I'd come up here whenever I felt suffocated. It had been a while since my last visit. Seeing the unchanged scenery somehow put my mind at ease.
"I don't want any crying or screaming at this party. I'm a little uneasy thinking Changhee might end up in tears."
"Why would there be crying and screaming? Did Changhee say that? Well, Penny cried buckets too, huhu... If we're exaggerating, half the Han River is probably his tears, hoho..."
I made a dumbfounded face but still laughed.
"So his name is Penny now?"
"Yeah, turns out Penny's a foreign girl's name. I was going to go with Penis, but I figured a prettier name would be better, so I shortened it. Cute, right? Huhu..."
I just nodded without replying and took a drag. The water was already spilled. Even if I'd warned her beforehand, stubborn-as-a-bull Jeongsook wouldn't have listened. That was the part of our personalities that matched the most. Maybe it was the witch's qualification...
"After crying his eyes out, he listens to you well now? You sound pretty confident."
"You could say that. Yeojeong Unni was the biggest help in changing him, but I was the one who made his family abandon their son. Realizing he had nowhere else to turn happened fast. Once he understood his only choices were killing me and then himself or living off me, he adapted faster than I'd expected, huhu..."
Through Changhee and Jeongsook, I'd heard Kim Hancheol's family had been quite well-off. His mother had doted on him, the youngest of two sons, to the point the family's fortune nearly collapsed. I could guess how wild he'd been. Then he got hit with a rape accusation. Thanks to an expensive lawyer he reached a settlement without much trouble, but he still got fired from his company. After a few months of self-reflection, he seemed to pull himself together, scraped together money to start a company, and played the proper president for a while. That was when he married Jeongsook.
Jeongsook had always thought she couldn't live according to her own nature. She knew homosexuality and bisexuality belonged in the shadows in this world, and she'd wanted to escape that. She didn't want to trap herself there. But she couldn't completely kill her own inclinations either. So marriage was what she'd come up with. She thought marriage could hide her nature. Since she wasn't inexperienced with men, she planned to use her family's pressure as an excuse and hide behind marriage. Since she was going to do it anyway, she chose the tall, handsome Kim Hancheol as her groom. It was trading money for a cover for her orientation. But the deal didn't last long. Even people who marry for love have rough patches, so how much real chemistry could exist between two people with completely different motives? Still, Jeongsook didn't choose divorce. Like me, she had too much pride, having grown up in a wealthy household where she could do whatever she wanted. She hadn't wanted anyone to see her less-than-a-year marriage end in disaster. After seeing Changhee, that desire twisted in a crooked direction. I could guess that Jeongsook had pushed things even further than my own possessive obsession with Changhee. I'd known since middle school that she was my equal or worse when it came to that kind of thing. Probably, to get compensation for her crushed pride, her family's shame, and the time and money she'd lost, Jeongsook had made a terrifying offer to Kim Hancheol's parents. Their family was already in decline, and after Jeongsook's methodical persuasion, they'd likely given up on their good-for-nothing son. I suspected they'd been willing to trade their son for money.
"When are you thinking of doing it?"
"Soon. With Yeojeong Unni, huhu..."
"What? So Unni's husband too?"
"You mean her ex-husband, right? Hoho..."
I hadn't had a chance to meet Ma Yeojeong separately since the hypnosis therapy consultation. We'd only seen each other again at our wedding at Delma. But that hadn't been the place to talk about her husband, so we'd promised to meet again later. We'd only confirmed that our relationship had settled into the same unni-dongsaeng dynamic as hers and Jeongsook's before parting. Without hearing anything more, the "party" where we'd finally meet both Jeongsook's and Ma Yeojeong's husbands was waiting. I hadn't even seen a single photo of Ma Yeojeong's husband yet. Jeongsook had never shown me her own husband's transformation either. I was curious. And strangely, I was looking forward to it.