Seducing the Married Woman
"Is your husband coming home today? From the way you're talking, it doesn't sound like it."
Jung Na-yeon nodded weakly.
That small gesture carried the weight of countless nights. The dinner table set for one. The living room lights she turned off alone. The bed she lay in alone. Even the front door that never opened.
She set down the dishcloth and gazed out the window.
"That's just too much... leaving a wife this beautiful behind..."
The sun had already fully set, so only her own face was reflected in the kitchen window glass. It was a tired-looking face. But this man said it was pretty. This face.
"I'm pissed off. Want to have a beer?"
Hyun-soo said it as if he were angry.
When the word "beer" came from Hyun-soo's mouth, Jung Na-yeon turned to look at him with slightly surprised eyes. A tenant and a landlady proposing to drink beer at night. Common sense dictated she should refuse. Yet strangely, the words of refusal wouldn't come out of her mouth.
"Ah, I don't have any money."
At the sight of Hyun-soo looking sheepish as he belatedly remembered he had no money, Jung Na-yeon let out her first natural laugh. Who would offer to buy beer after scraping together every last won to pay the rent?
"There are beer cans in the fridge. My husband bought them a month ago when he came home, and I haven't touched them."
A bitterness clung to the end of her words, but she quickly covered it up as she walked to the fridge and opened the door. Cold air flowed out, lightly stirring her bangs. Confirming six beer cans standing in a row, she turned her head to look at Hyun-soo. Under the fluorescent light, the lines of her eyes had softened. She looked like a completely different person from the sharp impression she'd given earlier when she'd come to collect the rent at the door.
"But there's a condition. You said you'd listen to my story—if you go blabbing about it to the other tenants later, I'll really kick you out."
She tossed out the words, half-joke half-serious, and took out two cans, setting them on the table. The cans made a light sound as they hit the table.
"I won't blab. Why would I go around talking about something like that? It's our secret."
"Yeah... our secret."
The relief that she wouldn't have to be alone tonight was easing some of the tension from her shoulders.
And so the meal roughly finished, and they cleared the table.
"At times like this, you have to have a drink."
Hyun-soo popped the tab on the beer can and downed it straight.
"Ahh~ that hits the spot."
Feeling the distinctive taste and carbonation of the beer, Hyun-soo wiped the foam from around his mouth. As they drank beer and chatted about this and that, Hyun-soo muttered.
"At times like this, you need to get revenge..."
"Revenge?"
"Your husband had an affair, right? So you should give him a fitting revenge."
"You mean... having an affair of my own...?"
At Hyun-soo's words, Jung Na-yeon's voice wavered. Holding the beer can with both hands, she looked at his face. Whether from the half-empty beer or from having such an honest conversation with someone for the first time in a long while, Na-yeon's cheeks had flushed a soft pink. Unaware of the beer foam lightly clinging to the corner of her mouth, she let out a small laugh.
"With whom? I've never even thought about something like that."
She said that, but it was true that the word "revenge" had touched something in a corner of her heart.
Jung Na-yeon tilted the can and took another sip. The sound of her throat moving as she swallowed echoed in the quiet kitchen.
"Still... I am angry. I'm human too. There are times when I lie alone every night staring at the ceiling and feel like I'm going to go crazy. Wondering what I did wrong, if I'm not enough..."
"Where are you lacking, ma'am?"
His face lingered over her own—Na-yeon felt it. Their eyes met, those eyes that had been huffing with anger and then suddenly gone quiet. Na-yeon's heart beat a little harder. Under the fluorescent light, she could see her own reflection in Hyun-soo's eyes.
The self reflected in the eyes of a twenty-seven-year-old man was not the worn-out married landlady from the mirror.
Na-yeon unconsciously set the beer can down on the table.
"Why... are you looking at me like that."
It was a slightly trembling voice. She could have looked away if she wanted to. Just turn her head. But Na-yeon's eyes couldn't escape Hyun-soo's gaze. The alcohol from a single can of beer had lightly unlatched the bolt on a heart that would normally have been locked tight.
"Because you're pretty."
Hyun-soo's answer was like knocking once more on that door of hers.
Na-yeon's fingers moved on the table. Only a few centimeters from Hyun-soo's hand. Her lips parted slightly, then closed. Without even deciding what she meant to say, only the sound of the kitchen clock's second hand filled the silence between them.
"That... affair thing... it doesn't have to be done dangerously, you know?"
The air in the kitchen changed.
"What do you mean by that?"
"Instead of meeting some random guy dangerously... you could take revenge safely..."
Na-yeon wasn't so dull as to miss the nuance in Hyun-soo's words.
Safely.
Those two syllables circled in her ears. Her fingers tightened on the beer can, making a crumpling sound. Na-yeon's gaze wandered over the table before finally returning to Hyun-soo's eyes. She couldn't pull free from them. Because that subtle gaze held a kind of heat she had never received from her husband in ten years of dating and marriage.
Na-yeon's lips parted unconsciously, then closed.
"Hyun-soo... do you know what you're saying to me right now?"
Na-yeon's voice trembled as she asked back. She tried to put a warning tone into it, but she couldn't. Instead, only a desperate desire to confirm came through. Na-yeon leaned back slightly in her chair, but it wasn't rejection—it was an instinctive defense mechanism to keep him from hearing the sound of her heart. The alcohol from the beer coursed through her veins, flushing her cheeks and the nape of her neck red.
"I know exactly what I'm saying."
Hyun-soo said boldly, without hiding his feelings.
Na-yeon felt her breathing, the rise and fall of her chest, had grown faster than before, and she was flustered.
"I'm a married woman... the landlady of the villa you live in... and I'm forty-one years old."
The words Na-yeon listed sounded like defenses she was putting up for herself. But those words weren't strong. Because the more reasons she gave, the more she herself knew how powerless those reasons were.
Nights when her husband didn't come home. An empty living room and cold blankets. And right now, sitting before her eyes was someone who sincerely told her she was pretty, that she looked like a young lady, that her husband was a fool.
Jung Na-yeon's hand moved on the table. She downed the remaining beer as if her throat were burning. Then she set it down right in front of the back of Hyun-soo's hand. Close enough to touch, yet not quite.
She lowered her head slightly and looked down at her own fingertips. As her breathing grew shallow and the clock's second hand ticked five times, Na-yeon couldn't say a word, hesitating before that gap of a few millimeters. Neither refusal nor permission—it was the stillness of someone standing at the edge of a cliff.
"What does that matter? Your husband is cheating too..."
Hyun-soo stood up from his seat. The sound of the chair scraping against the floor echoed in the quiet kitchen. The moment Hyun-soo's hand touched her shoulder, Jung Na-yeon's body flinched as if electricity had run through it.
"I'll... comfort you... It's safe, right?"
Hyun-soo wrapped his arm around Na-yeon's shoulder and helped her up.
It was warm. It had been so long she couldn't remember when her husband's hand had last touched her body.
"This is revenge."
That warmth traveled from her shoulder down her spine and spread through her whole body. Even as Jung Na-yeon rose, led by Hyun-soo's hand, she lightly pushed against his chest with her palm. But there was no strength in that hand. Both of them knew it wasn't pushing him away—she just wanted to rest her hand there.
"Hyun-soo... we can't do this... I'm... a married woman..."
Chastity. The purity that a married woman commonly protects. It was also a married woman's fidelity—to allow her body only to her husband. But there was no will to refuse in Jung Na-yeon's voice. Instead, desperation leaked through her trembling tone. The fact that someone wanted her. That someone saw her as a woman. It was creating cracks in a reservoir that had dried up over ten years of dating and marriage.
The word "revenge" was circling in her mind. The image of her husband's back flashed by—coming home every dawn for the past two years reeking of perfume. A husband who no longer answered the phone, who occasionally announced he was on a business trip, or came home once or twice a month.
"It's okay... ma'am..."
Leaving the kitchen and passing through the hallway, Jung Na-yeon's feet hesitated once. The wedding photo hanging on the living room wall was faintly visible in the darkness. Herself in a wedding dress, smiling brightly. Her husband looking happy beside her.
Jung Na-yeon tore her gaze from the photo and looked at Hyun-soo's face. Even in the dark, there were eyes looking straight at her. The heat that had vanished from her husband was now fully contained in this man's eyes.
Na-yeon bit her lip lightly. Led to the bedroom door, she was the first to grasp the doorknob. Her fingers were trembling, but there was no hesitation in the motion of turning it. The door opened, and the air from the dark room flowed out.
Just before crossing the threshold, Jung Na-yeon tugged on Hyun-soo's collar and whispered.
"Just... once. Only tonight..."
That voice was her final excuse to herself.
The bedroom door closed.
In the hallway, only the smiles of the two people in the wedding photo were left in the darkness, and beyond the closed door, rough breathing began to leak out.