“Mm, mm... hah, ngh.”
The moment he pressed in so close that my knees touched his shoulders, someplace deeper inside opened. I ran my hands over his arms, feeling the delicate muscles writhe, as if tearing at them, and lifted my chin. His face twisted to the rhythm of his own motion—pulling back, then driving in a little deeper than where he’d just been, over and over. I let go of his arm and traced up over the broad, thick shoulders, along the taut, long, hard neck pulled tight.
Those dark brows that always slanted suddenly down toward the bridge of his nose whenever things turned serious, or when something displeased him, and sometimes when mischief struck; the gray-blue irises set deep with only a short gap from the brow line, as if proclaiming his somewhat complicated bloodline; the straight nose with its masculine span and height; and then... the voluptuous mouth that was sexy whether at rest, parted slightly, or especially when he pronounced the English F and L—I followed all of it slowly with my fingertips.
He was breathing so deep his shoulders rose, surrendering his face to my touch as he focused on pushing deeper into me. When my fingers traced over his mouth he pursed his lips and kissed them. Looking up into his eyes while he widened and lifted my lower lip, rubbing my inner, wet mucosa with my fingertips, I forced out a voice from a throat clamped tight.
“Awi’s pheromones... I sometimes wonder what they smell like.”
“......”
Maybe it caught him off guard; his eyes narrowed a shade more. He wetted his lower lip with his reddened tongue and briefly slowed the pace with which he was spreading me inside.
“It must be... a really good scent, right?”
“......”
“I... can’t ever know it, though.”
Looking down at me, he began to move his hips fluidly again. He bent his arms, leaned his whole torso over me, and drove his alpha deep enough to choke off my breath. I couldn’t say anything more, couldn’t think. All I could do was feel him, hold him, breathe in his cologne rather than pheromones, and merge with the rhythm he set.
Pressing his mouth into the hollow of my nape, hidden deep beneath my hairline, he sucked until he left a mark, and urged himself on. The mattress surged with the shake of him tunneling into me.
“Haah, ngh... mmph....”
I raked my fingers through his hair and slowly lowered and raised my eyes; his face had moved right up to mine.
“Did you forget I’m Golden?”
“......”
“I won’t let anyone smell it....”
So don’t make that face, he meant. He would let no one know that scent. I hadn’t asked him for it, but he promised first.
I nodded. I tugged his sweat-wet nape to me and kissed him first, whispering for him to keep it from anyone else. I didn’t want to think about whether this urge—to claim even a scent I could never smell and lock it away as mine—was a healthy kind of love.
I couldn’t carry the thought any further anyway, not with the heat he raised in my body as he pushed and withdrew and pushed again.
He held himself in check—slow, sticky, restrained—until my inner wall fully adapted to his size, then came at me like he was starting a fight, swallowing my mouth and working his hips as hard as he wanted.
He didn’t use only his hips or only his cock; as always he carved curves through his whole body, splitting me with that force. It demanded huge energy and poured out just as huge a pleasure.
He pulled back scraping my inner wall, then in one tight, heavy thrust drove in so deep the pooled fluids splashed outside. My toes, braced on his shoulders, flared and curled again and again.
“Hah, h—h. Hh. Nngh.”
Sensing the oncoming knot the way you feel a distant tidal wave roll in and stir your blood, I grabbed his shoulders hard and panted.
If the knots until now had felt like accidents that happened while he was completely ruled by arousal, this time was different. His eyes above me gleamed with pleasure, but they were clear. Eyes fully aware of what he was doing. It was so calm, so cool, you wouldn’t believe the vicious friction happening below.
Taking his knot in my belly, in my body—pulsing strong as if to prove to me that he was alive—I came without a hand anywhere near my cock. But the earlier release no longer mattered. Even after I finished, the pleasure and orgasm kept going. My cock, sensitized past any limit, kept leaking fluid—whether semen or Cooper’s, I didn’t know—and reacted on its own.
After a deep kiss, he rubbed his face against my cheek hard enough to flatten the tip of his nose and called me between ragged breaths.
“Seo Ihyeon....”
“......”
“I love you.”
“...Me too.”
Whatever might happen from here, I wished at least the truth of this moment wouldn’t be doubted or damaged. Brows drawn tight toward the bridge of his nose, he took my lower lip and let it go as he spoke.
And then, in a voice that sounded clamped shut by something, he added:
“I’ll do... really well.”
I remembered hearing that from him before. I wrapped his neck and kissed those hot lips, thinking of how he could give this much and still think only of what he hadn’t given.
Whether it was the pleasure of feeling the knot inside me, or something else—I stroked his twisted face, kissed his eyelids, nose, cheeks, and mouth, said his name, said I loved him. The words he’d said—that even at the very moment he was knotting inside me he was actually afraid—stuck in my chest.
Maybe he caught my intent; he looked down at me with a blurred smile. He stroked my hair, smothered me with kisses, branded me with marks, clasped me tight, and—swollen to a knot that stretched my inner wall to the limit—he held hot inside me and came. Even the feeling, the instant the knot ebbed, of a huge volume of semen streaming out between my legs—that too felt like an extension of the sex.
We skipped dinner and clung to each other past midnight. Sweat and semen, fluids that soaked the sheets as if a two-liter bottle had been dumped out, and a single naked body covered in the red and purple traces he left—those were all that remained on his bed after.
I didn’t even have the strength to stand for a shower; as always, he—untired in the least, still hard—ran a bath for me. I didn’t feel like eating anything, but he brought me a banana and a glass of milk to the tub, where I soaked and went slack.
After bathing—just enough to wash away what we’d left behind—we went to my room to sleep together, instead of to his wrecked bed.
It was the first time we were sleeping together after sex, and I was giddy. And, for once, it was hard to hide. Sharing one big pillow, facing each other, we stroked each other’s bodies as if savoring the afterglow.
He bent the arm he’d tucked under the pillow into the hollow between my neck and shoulder to wrap my shoulder, and with the other arm he circled my waist and lazily played along my side.
With my arm around his back and my thumb brushing his skin, I tipped my chin to look up at him and asked:
“When we wake up tomorrow, you won’t have turned into a toad or a beast, right?”
He smiled with his eyes closed. Stroking the round curve of the shoulder he held, he said:
“Isn’t the story that you start out a toad or a beast and turn human when you discover true love? I think we’ve got the order wrong.”
It felt so far away I wondered if any of it had really happened—that he’d asked me to marry him, that we’d allowed the word love between us—but the arm that tugged me closer as he shifted, and the kiss he set on my brow, were proof of it all.
He said it was time to sleep; he kissed my forehead and brushed my hair, and I closed my eyes. The deepest sleep was in his arms.
■ ■ ■
The closer we got to the lake, the stronger the wind, but the sky was so clear it looked unreal, impossibly blue.
“It’s Sunday and I was wondering where everyone in Chicago had gone—turns out they’re packed into Navy Pier.”
My sister muttered as she pulled her hands from the pockets of her leather jacket, closed it inside to keep her scarf from flying away.
It wasn’t a crush of people, but compared to the relatively quiet downtown, there were quite a few around the pier. Families and tourists in particular were crowding toward the rides like the Ferris wheel and the carousel.
My sister and I looked for a place where we could enjoy a quieter view of Lake Michigan, moving toward the side that faced the big wheel on a diagonal. Everything looked close enough with the view so open, but when you actually walked, the destination didn’t come as easy as it looked. I’d thought we’d get there in two or three minutes; it took almost ten to reach the bench we’d picked out.
“All right, let’s taste.”
As soon as we took a seat on a backless bench under what looked like a conifer, my sister opened the popcorn with a face full of anticipation. She’d been excited about it before the trip—said even if she was busy, she had to try Chicago’s famous popcorn.
We opened the cheese and caramel bags we’d each bought, and she popped a few caramel pieces first. She grimaced immediately.
“Wow, that’s really sweet! Is this even meant for humans?”
Curious at her verdict—that it was sweet enough to melt your brain—I tried a few. Ah... it was really sweet. For me, it felt like my teeth would melt before the sweetness even reached my brain.
“Quick, eat the cheese one, the cheese one.”
Like emergency treatment she shoved cheese popcorn into my mouth, and a few mis-aimed kernels rolled down into my jumper or between my legs. We both broke into laughter.
After a long laugh over nothing, we kept reaching into the cheese and caramel bags in turn and chattered about little things. She told me about the oddballs she’d met on this trip; I talked about the paintings I’d seen in galleries and museums.
“Anyway, it’s really vast. It’s so endless you don’t even think ‘wide.’ Not many people look at the sea and think ‘it’s wide,’ right?”
Looking at Lake Michigan in front of us, my sister spoke. The breath she drew deep enough to lift her shoulders went out just as long; it sounded more like a sigh than a deep breath.
She was right. The blue view with a horizon, no boundary, was like the sea in that the very idea of applying the concept of breadth felt awkward. Just as no one talks about the breadth of the sky, the sea was the same.
When I stayed at my grandfather’s, the sea was part of life and the everyday. Like sky and land are the default premises for people inland.
The sea was always there—as wind, as the brine mixed into that wind, as the corrosion that quickly rusted every gate and car, as the blue and white glitter that met your eyes wherever you turned, as an everywhere presence.
And my father was still there.
I wondered if my father had felt abandoned by me the way I had by him.
I thought of that night when my brother and I left that house, and of my father’s silence—how he hadn’t stopped me, how it felt like he saw me as nothing but part of the dark.
He probably hadn’t felt what I felt.
In my father’s world I was already excluded—or rather, everything was excluded—so even if the world turned its back on him instead of me, there would be no need to feel loss or abandonment.
It looked as if I had started painting again thanks to his persuasion and favor; that I’d been stimulated by visiting cities I’d never imagined, like Hong Kong and Chicago; that, just as he’d predicted, stories I wanted to paint again had sprouted; that I’d confessed the past to him and overcome something—but in truth, inside the safe boundary called his love, I’d merely been pedaling a bike with protective gear on while he steadied it from behind, and the real reality I’d left behind on the other side—where my father was—hadn’t changed at all.
Maybe that—nothing other than that—was the cause of the anxiety he felt because of me.
What I hadn’t fully shown him—in other words, the problem I was avoiding about myself—would ultimately be there, where my father was.
The whispered I love yous we traded last night, all the words brimming with affection, the quiet smile I made in his arms at the happiness of falling asleep and waking up together—that wasn’t a present the two of us had created through shared effort.
I knew it. Just like with my father’s silence, I was only pretending not to.
He’d said Chicago would be colder than Seoul... even this jumper I had on now was something he’d prepared for me before the trip. No—everything on my body right now, from the sunglasses blocking the sun to the single pair of underwear, was a gift from him. In the studio closet in Seoul, striped tees—the brand Picasso supposedly liked—hung by design and color.
There wasn’t any light I had made myself, anywhere. It wasn’t only about money. What he’d given me wasn’t just clothes, a place to stay, a luxurious trip. I had looked at my own hands by the light he shone on me, looked ahead and around me by that light, and by that light I had reached for things.
I dropped my eyes to the coffee in my hand as if running from the sight before me that reminded me of the sea. The surface of the iced cup was beaded with droplets. The coffee was from Starbucks, where we’d stopped for a present for Inwoo. Without my noticing, more than half the ice had melted.
