After I was left alone, I lost track of how long I kept sketching. The last ti I checked, it was eleven, and after that my sense of ti went fuzzy. When I actually set the pencil moving, I changed plans a few tis; in the end I narrowed it to three drafts, then got the rough underdrawing of the chosen draft onto the canvas—and was completely wiped out.
I barely managed to wash up, change, and crawl onto the bed; the mont I buried my face in the pillow, the light pinging of rain from outside finally reached my ears. It wasn’t a heavy rain.
Even though my body and mind felt emptied out, a lazy fullness rose instead—a boneless slackness coexisting with satisfaction—and I fought my eyelids so I could send him a ssage.
Late Friday night. What was he doing with his ti?
Whatever he was doing, just being aware that he existed sowhere in this house tugged the corners of my mouth soft. My whole body loosened as if I’d sunk into hot water. With relief, I could slip into deep sleep. Feeling secure about my own state and the environnt around was a sensation I had not had in a long ti.
I’d felt sothing similar when I was holding him on the roof. If I felt like I’d beco the king of the world up there, it wasn’t because of the vantage point, as if everything were spread beneath my feet.
I didn’t even know when I fell asleep. One mont my consciousness blacked out; a long while later, soone adjusted my pillow, steadied my body, and curled an arm around my shoulders—those sensations lightly rippled the still surface of sleep.
Inside the studio the preset humidity and temperature stay constant, so even in midsumr your body heat can drop if you don’t keep the blanket on. The warmth of a bare chest pressing to my cooled skin felt so good that I curled up and burrowed into the firm chest right in front of .
It wasn’t an unfamiliar, strange touch. The scent and heat I knew so well made feel safe. I didn’t even need to open my eyes to check who it was.
It might be a dream, I thought, even as I nuzzled my forehead into the nape of his neck to find the most comfortable position.
But even if it was a dream, it didn’t matter anymore. Even if this was a dream, in the real world there was soone who gave this much fondness and ease waiting for . An arm circled from behind, carefully holding . Lips touched the crown of my head. Sleep well. As if I’d been waiting for just that one line, my consciousness sank back down beneath the waterline of sleep after the low whisper.
■ ■ ■
Waking from a motionless, deep sleep always felt abrupt. As if I’d been shoved in an instant from that world to this one, I needed a mont right after waking to collect my thoughts about where I was.
“Did you sleep well?”
“......”
Lying on my side with my eyelids lowered toward my chest, I blinked slowly, then at the voice from above my head I raised my face off the pillow as I was.
“Mm....”
My throat was still cinched tight with sleep, so I couldn’t get a smooth sound out. My eyes, rolling around in a daze, were standing in for a question about how he happened to be here.
I was clearly waking in my bed downstairs—and at the sa ti, in his naked arms.
He’d stacked two pillows high, added his folded arm on top as a rest, and lay facing ; with his other arm he lightly draped over my shoulder and stroked my cheek with the back of his hand.
“You kept burrowing in like a little mole. I was debating whether I ought to stick a nipple in your mouth.”
Curled one level above , looking down and smiling, he really wasn’t exaggerating this ti, judging by how tightly my upper body was pressed to him.
“When did you get here... how....”
I still couldn’t quite get a grip on the situation; my questions broke off before forming proper sentences.
“Why didn’t you send a ssage?”
“I swear I sent one before I went to sleep....”
I rolled over onto my stomach and propped myself on my elbows. I raked together my hair, surely a ss, and groped near the pillow for my phone. It was hanging by a thread on the edge of the bed; I grabbed it, unlocked it, and the ssaging app popped up at once on the screen.
[Today I’ll stop work here and thn doje ahhhh phew]
Apparently I’d fallen asleep with the phone in my hand; the typo-riddled line hadn’t even been sent and was just sitting in the input field.
“Ah....”
With a mortified little exhale, I swept my fallen hair back and caught it behind my ear. He took the phone from my hand, read the line on the screen, and burst out laughing.
My head was finally starting to clear. Bathed in natural morning light, the sight of him smiling on the bed gradually ca into focus. A mont ago, waking to find him there had startled so much I hadn’t really registered the person in front of . This was the first ti I’d seen him on the bed when we weren’t in foreplay, afterplay, or in the middle of sex.
“Huh? Why are you—don’t send that.”
It looked like his finger was about to send the half-written, typo-stuffed ssage. I reached to stop him, but he easily twisted his body away from .
“It’d be a waste to just delete it. Sothing this cute needs to be archived.”
He lay on his back facing the ceiling, gave my phone back with a satisfied look, then idly played with the rim of my ear as I lay on my stomach beside him.
“Still feels like a waste, though. I should’ve seen Seo Ihyeon struggling to text even when he was dead on his feet.”
All that affection—which you couldn’t call anything but love—made a ticklish line run down my spine first thing in the morning. Starting the day in this kind of tenderness the second I opened my eyes felt... not great for my heart.
“Did we... sleep together? Or did you co in just now?”
I laid my hand over the fingers toying with my ear and asked gently.
“The lights went off around three, I think, but even after that you didn’t ssage for ages, so I ca down to check.”
So the feeling I had in the night—that soone had straightened my bedding and gathered into their arms—wasn’t a dream, but the sign of him getting into the bed. I slid my hand down from his to the clearly defined muscle of his arm and stroked it, my voice edged with regret.
“You should’ve woken ....”
“How was I supposed to wake up soone who worked until he dropped?”
“Still... what a waste.”
“......”
The hand at my ear shifted to cup my cheek wide, asking with his eyes what exactly was a waste. His palm was big enough to cover my whole face, and it always felt so good that I rubbed my cheek into it like a well-behaved cat or dog.
“It was the first ti we slept together, and I didn’t even know....”
His mouth softened. I could read the feeling in his eyes, looking at with such fondness. For soone like , that kind of expression was maybe easier to understand than words—and easier to trust.
He lightly rubbed the pad of his thumb over my lips.
“I appreciate you thinking of it that way, but if you wake up, the chances go way up that we’ll fail at sleeping together again.”
Last weekend, on our way ho after drinking sake, he’d suggested we just sleep without sex—but in the end, we hadn’t kept that promise.
It had been a dood plan from the start. That night we’d had more special conversations than usual and a great ti; to lie there side by side and pretend not to notice bare skin and body heat when the fizzy, dirty tension that had been skimming between us since the izakaya was at a maximum—that was asking too much.
It was as if the promise had never existed; the mont we stepped inside we lunged for each other and started kissing deep, as if the mischievous kisses we’d shared behind the car in the alley hadn’t satisfied us at all.
He had half undressed right there in the entryway. I wanted his naked body too, reached under his shirt, and mussed my way over his shoulders and chest.
If soone had watched us, they’d have laughed and asked why we’d made such a dood resolution when we were going to break before we even reached the bedroom. That’s how quick our surrender was that night.
As my certainty about his feelings grew, I got bolder in bed. Shyness from my basic temperant still lingered, but even so, I kissed him first without hesitation, put my arms around him, opened my legs, and stopped hesitating to let him see shaking with pleasure.
Another change: sex with him, which had been wild, intense, and overloaded with stimulus, had now turned sweet as well.
The exchange of feeling has real power; it seed to lend legitimacy to everything we did together. Once it carried the aning of expressing affection and not just venting lust, even a single kiss felt different than before.
It wasn’t that my body just happened to be aroused with a person nearby. It was a concrete arousal that arose because of the person in front of ; that day too, we joined bodies until the pale blue of early sumr brightened into morning.
The next day I woke, as usual, in his bed, but the space beside was empty. A note on his pillow said he’d gone to a brunch at a VIP client’s invitation. In the end, this was our first ti actually greeting a morning together.
“In your sleep you were mumbling and burrowing into my arms... For a second I thought I should wake you up ➤ NоvеⅠight ➤ (Read more on our source) on purpose.”
He laughed, tapping my nose with the thumb that had been rubbing my lips. If he had, I probably would’ve been too keyed up to sleep properly, but even so, I kept feeling the regret of not having been conscious for the stretch when we lay down together.
“If we have sex... does that really an we can’t be together until morning?”
“......”
When I saw the tiny shift of his eyelids, the delayed realization of how dumb my question was made want to bury my face in the pillow. Sure enough, a mont later he let out a low laugh. Then this ti he took my face in both hands.
“Of course not. As you know, I’ve been pretty busy lately... I often have to head out early. I may have iron stamina, but considering how often we’ve been at it, I do need to mind my sleep a little.”
His gentle explanation only made my face burn hotter.
“I guess... I’m not fully awake yet. Sorry for asking sothing weird.”
He gave my face an exaggerated scrunch with his hands, then sat up and brushed a light kiss to my forehead. After that he leaned his upper body over my back and nuzzled my ear with the tip of his nose.
“I’ll make breakfast. Want to look after the garden in the anti?”
Truly—what a heart-taxing way to start a day.
■ ■ ■
I want to rember August’s heat as it really was: ti in August running slower and lazier than ever, and yet leaving sharper tracks than ever, like a lted, sticky ice bar. I want to rember August’s ti that way.
The garden under the August sun. The rainbow arc hanging over the stream spraying from the hose’s trigger. The cicadas crying from the oaks, as if they embodied sumr itself. The awareness of being alive that ca from the beads of sweat slowly seeping across my bare skin where I’d stripped off my T-shirt.
Just as he’d said, the rain in the night must have been very light; when I ca out to the garden, the fierce sun had already baked the ground dry. It was mid-August now, but the heat was still relentless.
With enough light and water, the plants’ leaves were vigorous even as the daily heat wave turned people limp. The weeds, too, surged with life; after I pulled the new shoots that had poked up in the last few days, I ran the hose to the spigot in one corner of the garden.
[whooshhhh]
Even the sound of the spray made it feel like the air had dropped a degree or two. I aid the stream at the sweetbox I’d clumsily trimd and brought my left hand up to the mouth of the spray gun. The water was cold. The sun beating down on my bare shoulders and back was hot enough to feel like it would burn .
In the haze of cicadas and water, I lifted my cooled left hand to my lips.
With thumb and forefinger I gathered the flesh of my lower lip and toyed with it. In an instant, a wanton feeling skimd over my skin. Even with sunglasses on, the light was so fierce it bleached the world white; under that glare I pictured his lips.
The kind of strong suction that bordered on pain—that was the depth of his hunger for . Rembering the way he drew in, hard enough to feel like he’d bite and swallow whole, I twisted my thumb and forefinger tight. The cicadas’ drone pulled my awareness into a lollipop’s colored spiral. I twisted until it felt like the flesh might pop and bleed. I thought I might get hard.
Ahem. Hm.
At the deliberately staged cough ant to make his presence known, I slowly turned around.
He was leaning in the open doorway with his arms folded, head tipped, looking my way.
Oddly, I didn’t feel sha. For so reason, I wasn’t embarrassed. I kept the spray gun running and didn’t take my eyes off him up on the steps.
With a faint smile, he stepped down out of that white light, unfolding his arms. From behind he wrapped up, stroked the sheen of sweat on my chest and stomach, and rubbed his lips to my ear.
My sumr got a little hotter.
“Since when... do you pinch your lips like that when you’re alone?”
You really do give people a fright sotis, he added, and there was a sweet syrupy scent on him. I rembered him saying he’d make pancakes with fruit for breakfast.
“If you wanted a kiss, you should’ve co out and pounced on .”
I tilted my head to take his mouth on the back of my neck. Two small birds I didn’t know the nas of shot past the top of the tall oak. His hands fondling my chest and his lips kissing my nape felt like the sun.
“Have you always been out in the garden with your shirt off like this?”
I laced my hand over his as it slid from shoulder to upper arm and nodded.
“From now on, give a heads-up. It kills that I’ve missed sothing this good till now.”
He kissed the point where the shoulder slides into the arm, then ca to my side and gently kneaded the back of my neck.
“The sunglasses look great on you. Then again, what wouldn’t.”
I smiled back at him tapping at his own cheekbone and swung the hose from the sweetbox toward the spirea. The farther-reaching arc of water drew a bigger rainbow. The sound where it hit the spirea was a little different from the sweetbox.
“I... think I should go to the hospital.”
“......”
His fingers working lightly at my neck and shoulders gradually stilled.
“I figured it was a mild gastritis, or that I just don’t handle heat well, so it would pass... The boss seems really worried too, and honestly there’s no sign it’s improving, so... I’m going to get checked. It’s nothing major, but trying to tough it out with no change just feels silly.”
No one had ever worried this much just because my appetite was off or the sll of food made a little nauseous, and since I’ve never been the type to enjoy eating, I’d never taken loss of appetite very seriously. This ti, too, habit made want to let it pass without doing anything.
But even when I didn’t say anything, he noticed; and the fact that I was neglecting a body soone else valued that much—it felt discourteous to the person who cherished it.
Besides, even if it still doesn’t feel real, if I’m going to keep working steadily as a full-ti writer, I need to accept that maintaining a certain baseline of stamina and health is part of looking after myself.
“I’ll carve out a little ti next week and... go during the day.”
He’d been quiet for a while; when I looked back, his hand still on my shoulder, he’d drifted into thought. His profile, so motionless he seed to forget to blink, looked even more like a carved figure. Elegant and delicate, like sothing tinted with ivory—yet beneath that thin layer, the rough, feral nature that showed through gave him an irresistible tension and sexiness.
To express that wildness under the elegance—or that elegance sheathing the wildness—was impossible with ordinary skill. He was like a masterpiece born under a master’s fingers. At least, that’s how he looked to .
Maybe he noticed the awe in my gaze, or maybe he finished his train of thought. He started a little, ca back to himself, and turned his face to .
“All right... That’s a good idea. If you don’t feel well, you see a doctor. I’ll book it so Choi Inwoo can take you.”
I hadn’t expected him to suggest Inwoo, so my eyes widened before I knew it.
“He doesn’t look it, but he’s very thorough.”
He smiled briefly without showing teeth. Then, with a sudden sober look, he turned his body toward and stepped in close. His big figure threw a shadow over half my face.
Even after pulling out of his thoughts, his expression was still like it had been—a little distant, as if ti itself had stopped. But it wasn’t that he wasn’t looking at . If it sounds grand, forgive , but his face looked like he wanted to pull into his world and lock there.
He lowered his head and set his lips on my shoulder. His hands slid from my shoulders down my sides; the head of the spray gun wobbled. My other thoughts wobbled apart with it. Haa... a breath like a sigh slipped out thin.
His hands traveled from my sides to my back and clasped my waist hard. His mouth that had co up from my shoulder to my nape slid along my jawline, and I closed my eyes in anticipation and parted my lips.
“Mm, m. Mmm.”
With the first deep press of the kiss I dropped the spray gun. The hose thrashed and writhed like a long eel dragged onto land, then cald, laying its head quietly on the grass and letting the water run.
I want to rember August’s heat—the way his kiss layered sensations onto my lips and tongue I hadn’t known before, each step of it—and I want to rember every sweet, sour, hot, and sotis startlingly strange taste of a sumr day when my first feeling for another person ripened carefully.
They say that in a person’s history, the first falling-for becos the yardstick for all relationships that follow, and the one you can never forget. For , that was—and will be—Lau Weikun.
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