The Heat Begins
The alarm chimed its cheerful little jingle, and I sat up out of habit.
I'd gone to bed later than usual, and my eyes refused to open properly. Through a half-lidded haze, what swam into view was a woman's figure so lush it barely seemed real. Even a man who claimed to have no libido at all would have felt something stir. Those wide hips, that waist flowing down into them in a single unbroken line — it was close to art. The owner of a body that left everyone around her staring, slack-jawed, was none other than my wife, Yang Jiwoo.
For all that seemingly perfect figure, my wife carried one small complex. Her chest. Smaller than the average woman's, or so she insisted, and she stressed over it more often than I liked. But what did that matter? She was the woman I loved. To me she was nothing but beautiful.
C-cups aren't even small...
Breasts swelling like a doe's, nipples risen like a pair of red cherries.
"Hngh...!"
The moment those thoughts took shape, I realized I was pitching a tent first thing in the morning. Shame flushed through me — lusting after my own wife before breakfast — and I tried to look somewhere, anywhere else, so she wouldn't catch me at it.
H-honey...
We were both naked. Wherever my eyes landed, there was only her: lewd, exquisite, inescapable.
"..."
Jiwoo had finished packing. She left the suitcase standing outside the door and came back in, and our eyes met on the threshold. I got the morning greeting out first.
"D-did you sleep well?"
She just looked at me. I wondered if she had any idea — that those sharp eyes of hers, that prim, chic little expression they produced, made my heart stumble every single time.
"Yeah."
Add that half-beat-late, blunt, almost careless voice on top of the rest, and what you had was a haughty cat who had decided, quite deliberately, to charm every man on earth. Of course, the way her short hair swayed when she moved undercut the whole act, and a laugh slipped out of me before I could stop it.
"Hehe... you're so cute..."
"Hey."
The sunlight pouring through the window might as well have gone out. One word from my wife and the whole room turned cold. A flush looked ready to climb her face; I thought I saw her flinch. Was she angry? I wasn't sure yet, so I smiled at her again, bright and clear.
"Jiwoo~"
"Do you go around smiling like that outside, too?"
The answer came before I'd even finished speaking, sharp as a slap.
"Huh? N-no."
"What do you mean, no. You greet everyone. You smile at everyone."
She stepped into the panties lying on the floor and walked toward me. Her breasts kept their teardrop shape as they swayed, and my pulse kicked again whether I wanted it to or not.
"Hey. Jeon Hanbyul."
"Y-yeah... Jiwoo."
"You planning to go around flirting?"
"Me?"
I blinked at her, eyes wide, the question so absurd I could only throw it back. And then—
Slap.
Her palm met my cheek, light and almost casual.
H-huh?
"This is why I was going to train you before I left," Jiwoo muttered, almost to herself.
If I had to guess — and it was only a guess — some strange new possessiveness had taken root in her the moment the business trip was announced.
"J-Jiwoo..."
Her gaze went flat and dead, like a fish left too long on the ice, and those eyes looked at me as if they meant to drag me down into something bottomless.
"You're going to go around wagging your tail at other women the second I'm gone, aren't you? Huh? Huh? Say it, you fucking bastard. Huh?"
"W-what are you talking about! Why would I do that when I have my one and only wife?"
"Then what was that smile just now."
"That was— you're cute, so I—"
"Mmph!!!"
The second I confessed something that innocent, her mouth crashed over mine. She sucked like she meant to tear my tongue out by the root.
Chup. Slurp. Chuuuup.
"J-Jiwo— stoooph—"
She didn't stop until I was drowning. I flailed, arms and legs beating at her, trying to signal that I couldn't breathe. When that got me nothing, I grabbed her chest — and her eyelids fluttered, and the pressure only got worse.
C-can't breathe...! H-help—
"Mmph! Nngh—!!!"
Tears welled, spilled, ran down my face in helpless streaks. The whole picture must have looked vulgar beyond saving, and Jiwoo watched it with naked greed, drinking it in.
"Nngh————!!!"
Only when the edges of the room started to go dark did she finally let my tongue go.
"Pwah~ Fuck, that was good."
"Hic... hh... hic..."
I came back to myself clutching a white T-shirt that had somehow stretched all the way down past my chest. I bit my lower lip, put on the closest thing I had to a glare, and looked at her like I was actually angry.
"Khh...♡"
Not a flicker of panic. Not a hint of apology. My lovely wife just stood there trembling, a thread of sticky saliva sliding down her chin, and everything that came out of her mouth had far more to do with pleasure than with love.
"God, if it weren't for the flight, I'd fuck you before I left."
"Honey!!!"
The way she looked at me — like I was already a whore — made something in me flare. Granted, I had been staring at her like a degenerate since I opened my eyes, but still.
"Pick up whenever I call."
"...Hmph!"
We were both in the wrong, as far as I was concerned, so I figured we were even and put on a little pout to break the tension.
"Oh?"
That, apparently, only provoked her further.
"Aah!!!"
She fisted a hand in my hair and kissed me again, harder than before. This time she licked my face, greedy and shameless, like she meant to eat me.
"Haah... haah... you're mine. You're mine."
"Honey, seriously, stop!!!"
Every motion cut off at once. She smirked.
I let out a breath I hadn't known I was holding — and then I followed her gaze, the one that looked down at me like I was pathetic, and saw it. The front of me, standing up in a thick, unmistakable bulge.
"This won't do."
"H-honey?"
Hearts in her eyes. Breath coming fast and hot. Alarm bells went off inside my skull. She looked like an animal in heat, and I found myself easing backward without meaning to.
"Hmm?"
She tilted her head the way a cat does when it's playing with something that can't get away, and came toward me one slow step at a time. One hand closed around my ankle. The other took my thigh.
"Hyaah! I-I'm sorry, Jiwoo. I was wrong..."
I gave her the most pitiful look I had. She didn't even blink. She yanked my underwear down and took my cock into her mouth in a single swallow.
"Haahm~"
"Khh...!"
The rough grain of her tongue registered in humiliating, perfect detail.
"I-it's sensitiveee!!!"
The first dizzying jolt of the morning ripped through me, and I clawed at the blanket.
Chyup. Chyuuuup. Chuk-chuk-chuk-chuk.
The suction was close to a vacuum. I didn't last a minute.
"Jiwoooo!!! Nn... nnghiii!!!"
It pulsed, and pulsed, and pulsed.
"Pwah. That was delicious~ I'll be back, 'kay?"
Her mood had clearly improved. She licked the semen off the corner of her mouth, threw on her clothes in a few careless motions, and walked out — Yang Jiwoo, off to catch a plane.
"Ugh... aah..."
Stretched white T-shirt hanging off my chest. Nothing on below. Frog-legged and trembling on the bed. I was a married man named Jeon Hanbyul, and I had been steeped in nothing but pleasure.
"Ah, shit. That's so fucking hot."
The sounds of the couple next door going at it first thing in the morning had already wrung one out of me. I knew it was going to wreck the rest of my day, and I did it anyway.
"Haa. Seriously. When do I get to try that?"
That moan — the exact kind you hear in porn, that wrecked little nnghiii! — would not get out of my head, not even while I was brushing my teeth.
"Ptooey!!! Ah, shit, just wait till I run into him. I'll fucking—"
I'd gotten too loud. I cut myself off, threw on whatever was closest, and headed for campus.
A month since I'd come up to Seoul. All-girls middle school, all-girls high school, and now a women's university — I'd ridden the despair skill tree all the way to the end, and there was nothing left to look forward to about going to class.
"If I'd known it was gonna be like this, I never would've come to Seoul..."
I cursed the past version of me who'd been so proud of getting in. Loser-masturbation before breakfast, a full serving of life regret to go with it, and I slouched out the door hoping, at the very least, that I might run into one other human being.
"Whoa..."
He must have come out to throw away the trash. The married man from next door — the one I'd been catching glimpses of in the hallway for weeks — was standing right there.
"U-uuh... I-I'm sorry..."
The white T-shirt had stretched so far it hung past the bottom of his chest, fluttering, flashing his nipples and hiding them again in the same breath. Tall for a man. A face that landed somewhere between pretty and outright cute. And married.
Yeah. I'm not walking away from this.
I was Seo Yerim, physical education major, and the heat that had been crawling under my skin since dawn had already pushed me past any reasonable limit. There was no time to think it through. I closed the distance in two long strides, right up to the married man who was standing there trembling.
"Hngh...! W-why are you..."
"What do you mean, why. Are you asking because you don't know?"
He went still, which only made those nipples more obvious. They looked so plump, so ready to be eaten, that I just—
"Hhyat~♡"
—pinched one between my fingers.
"W-what are you doing...!!! S-stooop...♡"
It was the kind of scene that belonged in cheap porn, and for a second I genuinely wondered if I was dreaming. Twenty years old, and my life had just turned a corner I was never getting back around.
"W-why are you doing this...!!! I was wrong, so... please, just stop here..."
That pitiful face. That shaking voice. I almost took him down right there on the landing. But maybe it was the fact that I'd already gotten myself off more than once — even this wound up, a crack opened in the heat, and the scrap of reason that shoved through it kicked me hard in the shin.
You crazy bitch!!!
"Alright, then."
I said it in a tone that belonged to some aging actor in a movie I half-remembered, dropped what I was doing, and walked past him like I'd lost interest.
Did I just fuck myself?
Seo Yerim, age twenty. The panic always arrived a few minutes too late.
I went down in a heap.
"Haaaa..."
The stimulation rolled through me again. My breathing went thin and fast, a low fever climbing under my skin, and my legs simply gave out.
They said it was common enough in men in their thirties and forties. The so-called Heat Period.
You could laugh and ask what kind of heat period a human being was supposed to have — we weren't animals. But with the male-to-female ratio sitting at one to nine, it was a phenomenon that had surfaced whether anyone wanted it or not, a last resort for keeping the species going. Something about DNA that had felt the crisis and rewritten itself. I didn't really know. I didn't need to.
What I did know — the one thing I was suddenly, unpleasantly sure of — was this.
Of all the days it could have chosen, this Heat Period had decided to start today. The day my wife left.