With an anxious voice he said that, then settled behind me. Both arms slid under my knees at once. He lifted me so my hips floated a little off the tub floor; his chest and shoulder touched my back.
I didn’t expect myself to be as calm and adept as he was—just, at least, I didn’t want to look like some lacking fool. Maybe even that was too much to wish for... My eyes squeezed shut at the pitiful sight of myself, legs forced open by the strength hauling me up from behind.
He hooked my right leg over his raised knee so I couldn’t clamp shut, then felt around below.
“To help it come out well, I’m going to touch you a little at first.”
“......”
What could I say.
I shut my eyes, bowed my head, bit my swollen lip, and just wished this time would pass quickly.
“Hngh, hh.”
But it wasn’t easy to keep silent while his fingers explored the hypersensitive inside. Touching my anus for cleanup after sex heated my ears and face even more than the filthiest position during sex had.
Maybe he noticed my mortification; he kissed the nape I’d lowered, soothingly.
“Mmnn...”
The fingers that had been lightly raking along my inner walls carefully parted the entrance, and a slick spill poured out from inside. The sensation made my skin crawl. When I opened my eyes, I could see the cloudy ribbons of semen spreading through water we hadn’t drained or disturbed. What the...
I bit my lip again at the unmanageable sight. I didn’t have to look back to know his gaze was fixed on the murky bloom leaking from my hole and clouding the water.
It was certainly his semen, and yet... it looked like a secretion my body had produced. I felt strange, like I’d become something else. My face—and even the nape exposed to him—had to be red.
“Don’t look....”
I muttered in a small voice, and he laughed low with his lips still on my nape.
“Why not? Shame to miss it. It looks good.”
Then he pressed a firm kiss to the back of my neck and slid his mouth along my shoulder line.
“Tense and release, a little at a time. Repeat.”
Telling me to bear down, in this posture with legs spread and lifted. If I did that... hah...
Even when he’d lifted my groin to his chest and licked my anus right in front of my eyes, I don’t think I’d been this ashamed. My face burned fit to burst, but the only way to get this over with as quickly as possible was to accept the situation and follow his instructions. There was no choice.
As if to encourage me, he rubbed kisses over my skin and used index and middle finger to spread my entrance to either side. It was surely to help evacuation. But whether because the lips at my shoulder felt like they were smiling, or because his fingers were slyly adding unnecessary friction, my thoughts kept drifting toward the sexual.
“It’s already a lot. Do you do everything this quickly this well?”
“......”
There was a faint smile in his voice, but I, with no composure to spare, had nothing to say—same as before.
I’d been bold enough in bed to beg for knotting and push him until he lost the hold on his reason, yet the moment we climbed down I turned into a greenhorn; even I found myself odd. But this me was the one I was more used to.
“Relax and sit a little longer.”
He helped me up and set me leaning against the rim of the tub, then walked to the opposite shower stall. Without seeming to register the presence of another person in the space, he showered quickly—or at least he looked that way.
Maybe I was the one being excessive in my awareness. Given he was thirty-two and the way he showed smooth, practiced post-sex manners, he didn’t seem like someone who would shrink awkwardly under a partner’s gaze every time.
Once again, I thought: in every way, I’m still short on experience. When he was gentle or smiled at me like I was cute, sometimes I wondered if that proved he saw me as a little special. But when I saw how calm and unruffled he stayed—unlike me—I felt again it might just be my illusion, and only his ingrained manners.
It wasn’t easy to get a handle on someone ten years older. And when that older person was Lau Weikun, all the more so.
When it had first streamed out, the water went cloudy; now the dilution had gone clear again. While I looked down into it, he toweled off with a big bath sheet and left the bathroom.
I sat a little longer, then got up and did a rough wash on legs that still wouldn’t take proper strength. He soon came back into the bathroom, sat me on the step made for perching, and washed my hair.
“Close your eyes.”
I obediently shut them, and warm water poured over my head, rinsing out the shampoo lather. His big hands threaded through my hair to rinse more thoroughly, more carefully.
By now it felt pointless to notice every little thing and be stubborn about it. When the stream stopped and I rubbed at my eyes with a small, involuntary smile—feeling like a big-bodied child—he stood in front of me, gently held my chin, tilted my face up, and washed away the last of the suds clean.
It was all so natural, as if we’d always been like this—or as if he always spent the time after sex like this.
Just as when we’d come in, he practically carried me—though my legs weren’t injured—back to the bedroom.
In the meantime, the sheets had been changed. On the clean fresh ones, underwear and pajamas had been laid out for me.
However I was the one who’d been penetrated, and however his body may not have been strained as much as mine, if we asked whose stamina had been spent more, of course it wasn’t me. Whether because he was a Golden Alpha or his own personal ability, his stamina was impressive. He still looked not the least bit tired.
“I only have my size at home, so... it’ll be a bit big.”
“Okay.”
My lower back felt heavy and throbbed; honestly, even standing was hard. I sat on the bed to dress; he pulled on underwear and track pants too. Maybe he sleeps shirtless in summer by habit—he still didn’t put on a top, and stood by, looking down at me slowly dressing.
It was embarrassing how loose the underwear hung overall, but especially in front. It wasn’t a matter of pride as “the same man.” From the start, grouping Golden Alpha men and Beta men together as “the same” was forcing it. There’s no scientific proof for genetic superiority like physical ability or superior brains, but the fact that Alphas’ reproductive ability is exceptional is proven.
“I should buy a few sets in your size too, Seo Ihyeon.”
“......”
He said that as he turned and walked toward the fridge. I looked up in surprise without meaning to, but he was no longer looking at me. He bent and took out a bottle of water. My fingers, fastening the pajama buttons as I stared at his back, stopped.
His whisper in bed—that I could have him anytime—overlapped in my mind. Stocking underwear and clothes in my size... was that confidence I’d come back? Or was it his way of saying he too intended to continue this relationship, this sex? It was hard for me.
He drank almost the whole bottle standing at the fridge, took out a new one, twisted the cap, and walked back toward me. I dropped my gaze awkwardly and started buttoning again.
“Like a kid in his dad’s underwear, so that’s...”
He said that and handed me the bottle, his gaze lingering on the loose underwear. It wasn’t a tone flaunting his own size to belittle me. If anything, even as he said that, there was a covert stickiness in the way he looked down at the underwear, and my thighs tucked in on their own.
I drank a few sips, set the bottle on the nightstand, and, sitting, pulled on my bottoms. He lit a cigarette and perched on the edge of the bed. A simple white ceramic ashtray sat between us.
“I mentioned it... like a throwaway, earlier.”
With his feet up on the solid bed frame, elbows on his bent knees, he let smoke drift and spoke.
“From now on, if anything becomes a problem, you can come to me like today. That wasn’t just talk.”
It was like he’d read my thought—my suspicion that it was something people say in the heat of the moment.
He sat facing the sofa, so from the head of the bed I could easily see him in profile. He drew the next drag a little quickly, frowned, and sighed out a long line of smoke.
“I know you’re not the type who likes leaning on people, asking them for things—but at your age it’s perfectly natural not to have the power to solve certain real problems... and relying on and discussing those parts with people who are more adult doesn’t make you weak or dependent....”
I was surprised how well he knew me. What I worried about; what I hesitated over. I’d never told him, but he knew clear as day. Was ten years that significant?
I’d acted precocious, but at decisive moments I had to face that I was only a kid—like a self-conscious adolescent. It embarrassed me. But more than that, I was grateful for what he said.
Maybe it was exactly what I’d wanted so badly to hear from someone stronger and wiser than me—what I needed to get back on a proper track. That I could consult and lean. That doing so didn’t harm anyone or make me dependent.... Since I couldn’t be sure on my own, maybe I’d been waiting most of all for someone I could trust with a big presence to say that.
Even so, something pressed on my chest; it felt tight.
I needed to say thank you, but a surge of tangled feelings made it hard to open my mouth. My lips mouthed as if to speak, then I bit down on my lower lip.
In the room with no wall clock, only the sound of his breathing as he smoked continued quietly for a long time.
“That painting... you asked me last time if I liked .”
“......”
My gaze, which had been fixed on a spot on the sheet, lifted on its own. My eyes widened; my pulse sped. I hadn’t known he’d remember that question till now.
“My parents divorced because of me.”
And I hadn’t imagined a question about liking my painting would lead in this direction.
I’d pegged him as someone who kept his own story buried deep; but his voice, preparing to confess a piece of his past, was even—like he was reading aloud.
“It’s complicated—it would take too long to explain, and it’s not something to tell in detail to others, so to put it briefly... they had no problems, but divorced on paper to protect me. They kept seeing each other out of public view, but how could I not feel guilty about that situation.”
He tapped ash into the tray between us, then ran his free hand through his hair.
“No one ever said it was because of me, but growing up, I naturally came to know. That I was the reason a set that could only be complete together was unnaturally split.”
His once-dry tone wavered a little, but he quickly recovered his balance.
“People would just call them an ‘ideal couple.’ But as their only child, what I felt up close was something beyond that. They didn’t fight; after a long marriage they still looked at each other with a lover’s sweetness; they enjoyed dates that were just for the two of them... It went beyond that kind of relationship....”
He was struggling to choose a word that could carry an uncommon meaning. I cut in.
“I think I know.”
He hesitated, scraping his lower lip with his upper teeth, then looked back at me. The cigarette between his fingers had burned short.
He didn’t jump on me—What would you know? How? Instead, the stiffness in his face loosened; he gave a small laugh. A tolerant smile, accepting that the listener would receive and understand in their own way.
Considering how most people are objective and rational about others’ pain but resent it when even a splinter under their own nail is taken lightly, that slightly lonely, resigned gentleness made me think he wasn’t just a prince who had always reigned by the power of circumstance and achieved everything easily.
But from my side, it wasn’t some easy fake of empathy.
I couldn’t be perfectly sure that what he wanted to say matched exactly what I understood, but I too knew a couple who shared a relationship beyond what people generally mean by an ideal marriage.
“My father was a worshiper of my mother’s world of work and all the spirit that composed it—her artistic comrade—and my mother considered my father the perfect understander of herself and her work, literally her soulmate. People think there’s no such thing as a perfectly balanced relationship with no tilt to either side... especially that the relationship between an artist and their supporter is an unequal one weighted toward the artist—but your parents weren’t like that.”
He crushed the cigarette out to the filter.
“It wasn’t a bond that depended on romantic feeling between opposite sexes or the affection that accumulates with time. To plant more than basic subsistence into life—to plant meaning beyond food, clothing, and shelter—each of them was indispensable to the other... and those two had to be torn apart, because of me.”
He asked for almost no shared feeling from me as listener. Pausing, eyes on empty air like he was revisiting a point in the past, he kept his feelings to himself alone. He was just letting me hear it as a story, as information.
Maybe he thinks it’s shabby to intoxicate yourself on feeling and turn the other into an audience for your misfortune.
Even though I agree that that kind of distance is the “general” meaning of maturity—and even though I too feel uncomfortable exposing myself—part of me suddenly wanted to see him reveal his weakest point, to boil over ❀ Nоvеlігht ❀ (Don’t copy, read here) and force his feelings onto me. But that was greed, simply.
After thinking for a while, he stood, fetched the pack and lighter from the table, came back, lit a fresh cigarette, exhaled with practiced ease, and spoke.
“Growing up, I had to ask myself many times. Whether I... was worth it.”
I felt the urge to answer in his place. But of course I had no standing to answer. I wasn’t the person he needed the answer from.
“It’s strange. They sacrificed their most precious bond for me—so why didn’t I become someone saturated with love, and instead ended up doubting my existence? I knew they didn’t do it to make me feel guilty... but as time passed, my feeling toward them was more sorry than grateful... and since I knew that if I wasn’t fully happy, their project would become a failure, the guilt swelled... I grew up in that kind of vicious circle.”
He deliberately handled the last sentence lightly and took a short drag. Resting his elbows on his knees, he hooked his hands together loosely, cracked his knuckles one by one—thuk, thuk—then glanced at me and smiled.
“So when I saw that painting, I doubted it. What is this? Did I paint something like this at some point?”
But I couldn’t even twitch, let alone smile back. He was talking about one of the cells that made him up—about the secret I, at least right now, wanted to know more than anything in the world—and by bringing up , that cell was moving to connect with me.
An alienation he had to carry for uncommon reasons.
Parents who loved each other ideally, and the sacrifice they chose out of love for their child. The child who, within that fence, had to be “necessarily” happy.
It wasn’t a perfect match, but even if I thought it was quite similar to my story, it didn’t feel like a forced illusion born of my impatience to find common ground with him at any cost.
He took the cigarette back up.
“That’s how much it resonated. The things I wanted to scream at my father and mother—or at the world—were all in there just as they were. I could just know immediately what the artist wanted to say.”
He looked at me as if asking to be confirmed that he’d read the painting right, but I’d never thought about how to receive another’s interpretation of my work.
If that’s how he felt, and if it was a very strong certainty, then for him that’s what the painting was. Maybe that’s enough. That was my vague guess.
“Everyone said that since I was born to two great, gifted people and raised in sacrificial love, of course I should be happy. So why wasn’t I? Is it me that’s wrong for not being happy? Later I got angry at the people who tried to force happiness on me.”
The forcing of happiness. Of a perfect, storybook/film-ending kind of happiness. I knew something of that suffocation too.
When I painted , my friends were all chasing only what they didn’t have. A friend with neglectful parents envied a friend with doting parents; a friend with doting parents felt it as interference and envied freedom. That age.
I didn’t paint because of some desperate knot, like people think.
I loved my parents, and I was happy. It just wasn’t flawless, complete happiness—just as some people had forced on me with sullen faces simply because I had what they lacked.
They had already told me, when I was already grateful and already happy: you should be more grateful, more happy.
The heat we’d spilled hadn’t fully cooled; the room air was still warm, and yet I slowly stroked down my pajamaed arms, as if someone feeling a chill.
He took another drag, then pushed his hair back with the hand holding the cigarette and looked at me with his head tilted.
“But that painting was saying something else. ‘You’re not the only strange one. I’m strange too.’”
I couldn’t tell whose style he was borrowing, but his theatrical joke made me let my shoulders drop and laugh—a laugh I hadn’t managed since we started talking.
As the laughter faded, I remembered Sukhee Kim’s words.
That was comfort to him.
Not only because he valued my talent as a collector or dealer, but because he personally found resonance in my work—only because of that could hang in his living room. Only now, I was hearing that clearly from his mouth.
The fact that at least part of the alienation he’d had to carry had been with my painting... stirred something special I’d never felt before. Believe it or not, it was more alluring than the sex we’d had just now. I wanted to know more about him.
“So I want you to paint again, Seo Ihyeon. I want to see the next work from that artist.”
“......”
His eyes said it as they looked at me. That he wanted to see what I painted.
Even if he’d said he wanted to see my naked body, my soul couldn’t have trembled more than this.
“Your question was simple, but my answer... went on too long, right?”
Maybe he felt belated embarrassment after laying out his story at such length; he rubbed his eyes with a slightly wry smile. Maybe he was finally a little tired. Why wouldn’t he be? For hours... holding someone not small like me, spending so much strength.
“Could I... have one?”
“......”
He looked at me in silence, then handed me a cigarette without comment. He didn’t pass the lighter; when I looked at him, he jerked his chin for me to hold it in my mouth. I clumsily bit the filter; he brought the flame to the tip.
I twitched and leaned back for a second, then met his eyes beyond the flame and slowly leaned in. He too did not take his eyes off mine as he lit it.
It didn’t trigger as much rejection in my body as the cigarette I’d smoked staying behind in his room in Hong Kong. I didn’t cough; the rasp in my throat and lungs wasn’t too bad. If anything, this level of ache felt like what I needed right now.
But I still couldn’t take in even half the smoke I drew. The rest drifted upward, spreading slowly. Ridiculous as it was, I found myself thinking it looked like the way the fluid had spread out of my body into the bathwater a little while ago.
I was the one who broke eye contact first.
“Sukhee Kim... is your mother, right?”
It was just a confirmation, since he didn’t seem to have any intention of hiding it from me anymore.
He’d been watching me smoke like it was fascinating; he gave a small laugh and turned his head, then drew on his cigarette with the ease of a body part.
“Yes. I don’t bother to publicize it—I dislike the envy that says it’s all because of my parents as much as I dislike flattery.”
Even if his mother had Korean blood, he was from Hong Kong—and no close family seemed to be settled in Korea. Still, given what he’d said earlier, I could vaguely guess why he’d started a gallery in Seoul where he had no roots.
“Everything that makes me up has always been a benefit of background; to pretend, now, I’ll decline the benefits of influence... is just childish stubbornness. Honestly, I’m embarrassed even talking like this.”
Half to himself, he said that with a self-mocking smile and bit the filter.
“They’ll whisper it’s a thin, staged show from a prince who also wanted the ‘self-made’ title. Even if some of that’s true, it’s never the whole truth... and I was sick of being fodder for people who like to flatten and judge other people’s lives.”
Having gone that far—as if he’d revealed more than he’d planned—he looked a bit discomfited and drew on the cigarette again, as if to cover his mouth.
It isn’t shameful to try to push against the inertia of the orbit that keeps your current self. Even to shift a little from your original place—to make or change even a single habit—takes effort with all your strength. So the intent to try a new experiment through yourself shouldn’t be taken lightly.
A thousand things drifted through my head, but none of them could pass my lips.
Would it look like mere polite empathy? Coming from a coward who hadn’t tried any effort to break inertia, would it feel sincere? The fear of that froze my tongue.
“Ah—my mother—don’t tell the kids. Chief Han knows.”
Unexpected.
It might have simply turned out that way; maybe he hadn’t particularly meant to keep it secret from my sister and brother. He wasn’t the type to trumpet his own story unasked. He didn’t add a request that I keep it quiet. But the sheepish smile he gave me delivered the message all the same.
I didn’t feel any sense of superiority that he’d told me something he hadn’t told my sister and brother.
When he played the decisive card of “Sukhee Kim” to persuade me to paint, he probably expected I’d figure out the mother-son relationship.
Considering how he wanted to be just Lau Weikun, apart from his origins and background, it felt like a bold choice. That was why it struck me.
He’d taken the risk of revealing to me a part of himself he hadn’t wanted to show—just to get a brush into my hand.
Not only because of a business mindset to discover an artist as a dealer or collector, but because I was the person who’d painted the picture that had resonated with him and comforted him for a long time.
He knew, and was sure, that if I didn’t paint I’d drift like a gray mote lost in generality with no particularity. As if he’d known me up close for a very long time.
After the first drag, the cigarette lay between my fingers; bewitched, I slowly brought it to my lips.
Leaning back with his hands on the mattress behind him, he looked at me and, at the same timing, put his cigarette to his mouth. We were just each smoking our own cigarettes—but maybe because of his gaze and the mood directed at me, it felt like I could feel his lips and tongue through the cigarette. My skin tingled with a sharp sweetness, like we were physically in tune.
His scent drifted—not the suffocating intensity that blocked breath during sex, but a subtle, drowsy one.
He exhaled a slow stream of smoke and spoke quietly.
“Back in front of Shushu’s work, you said it—you felt like painting.”
I had. But he’d seemed to have almost no interest in me then—I hadn’t imagined he’d remember that talk to this day.
“......”
“Do it.”
Boiled down to the core. Stripped of grand reasons and persuasion, what he wanted to deliver to me was that kernel.
“I don’t know what made you unable to paint anymore, but... for someone like you... the only way to walk and run and breathe again is to paint—so like your life depends on it, think of nothing but taking back your language.”
Like last time, when he told me to eat for myself even if I had no appetite, his words—paint like your life depends on it—gripped my heart like the striking bar of a song’s most memorable bar.
The more I learned, the more he seemed like someone who wanted me to pick up a brush not for his business or for Phantom, but for me. His words, the seriousness in his gaze at me, said so.
Sukhee Kim’s line—that he pretended to see only the economic value of painting—meant, in other words, that he was exactly the kind of person who could never weigh painting only by economic value.
Maybe he was someone who couldn’t help but treat each artist’s particularity and their work itself with pure artistic sensibility.
He had said that recognition without marketing was hard, and he grasped the most worldly media without hesitation to promote—but that wasn’t the whole of his attitude toward paintings and artists.
Maybe I was erring too far toward defending him—but it felt like he was suppressing his pure love for painting with the businessman’s posture.
I knocked the ash—already long—from my barely smoked cigarette and mustered the courage to ask him:
“How can you be so sure—from just one piece—that I’m someone who speaks by painting?”
He stared at me, then looked away and ran his hand up through his hair several times. The faint smile on his face made him look shy, like a boy about to tell a secret.
He looked down at the cigarette, burned short without my noticing, and said:
“You might have noticed there are almost no paintings hung in this house. But —I’ve had it hanging at home since before I came to Seoul. It’s been five years of living with that painting—staring at it every day. Not just the theme and composition—down to the brush touch and texture... If it were a film, I could recite all the characters’ lines. At this point, I probably know that painting better than you do.”
It felt like heat rose from inside me and reddened my face.
When I read his review of Shushu, his high evaluation of her as an artist and his talk of the personal power her work had over him felt like an ardent confession—but this, this was even more...
He suddenly tilted his head and looked at me; I dropped my gaze, dodging. I brought the cigarette to my lips like I was fleeing and inhaled.
“So there’s no way I don’t know that the author of can only live if he paints.”
But I couldn’t resist the curiosity about his expression as he spoke of me and my painting. When I exhaled and raised my head, his eyes held a heat different from what I saw during sex.
Seriousness with swagger and lies stripped away; frankness revealing his inside so you couldn’t brush it off with a smile.
“I’m not someone who speaks by painting, but I was born from someone who can’t live without painting. Genes? You can’t ignore them.”
He joked and smiled, but I couldn’t.
“Something died in me, so I thought I couldn’t paint anymore... but one day, I thought maybe it was that because I wasn’t painting anymore, I had died.”
His line—paint like your life depends on it—aligned with what Sukhee Kim had said. As he said, you can’t ignore the power of genes.
I remembered clearly—as if I’d recorded it and listened every day—how she once said there was a time she put down painting for about two years, weighing priorities between painting and not-painting, thinking if there was something more important than painting she should set it aside for a while.
Maybe those two years had to do with the process of divorcing on paper to protect him—but that was only a guess.
Just as I couldn’t talk about why I’d stopped painting, I couldn’t ask what his weakest point was.
He stared at me smoking, then reached out and touched the surface of my lips—swollen, sensitized by our deep kissing.
In the dim light, his irises looked paler than usual as they traced my face carefully. Sometimes he looked at me like this. For someone who liked him, it was a gaze hard to meet head-on. If it was a habit, he should break it. Especially if he didn’t want mistaken jealousy and messy love fights.
“Did it hurt.”
“......”
His fingers were on my lips, so maybe he meant my lips; or maybe he meant inside, where the knotting happened; or the sex overall—the scope was vague. But whichever it was, my answer would be the same. I shook my head.
He tugged my lower lip down slightly as if to flip it, then withdrew his hand—but kept looking at me for a long while. Like taking in a face before a long journey, to keep it in memory.
His gaze and expression were calmer than when he spoke, but the wavering current of mood that escaped him conveyed agitation.
Vaguely, I felt the urge to tell him everything. If confessing myself would let me hear of him, it felt like a bargain to my benefit.
Had I ever wanted to know someone this much? Especially the most private, cruel wounds locked in their darkest places.
As if he’d sensed I’d noticed his agitation, he forced a smile and squeezed my shoulder.
“It’s been a very long day—sleep. I do need to go somewhere... I’ll get ready and head out in a bit, but don’t worry about it—sleep as much as you want.”
He rose from the bed and made the covers ready for me to pull up. Maybe the fatigue was finally catching up—he pressed the inside of his wrist to his eyelid several times as he moved.
I felt sorry that I’d been so fiercely tangled with someone who had somewhere to be early, but saying I was sorry for asking to have sex now didn’t fit the situation.
Outside the window, a deep violet light had crept in before I knew it. It was still raining, but less than in the dead of night.
Maybe he didn’t have even a moment to close his eyes. I asked him, apologetic, as he drew a second blackout curtain—but he just smiled like it was fine, came over, and pressed my shoulder lightly, telling me to lie down.
“I’ll put your phone here. I’ll call, so even if you’re sleepy, pick up.”
He probably meant a call about the progress of the favor I’d asked—but even so, “pick up” sounded like a small promise between lovers... sweet for a moment, and more frightening than that.
I wasn’t ready, outwardly or inwardly, to do something like dating or love without a hitch.
It was ridiculous—no one was offering to feed me tteok, and here I was talking about whether I was ready. My own cup-before-rice-cake was bitter and laughable, so I pulled the covers up to my lips and nodded.
It was hard to believe that only hours ago I’d been shaking with terror from the moment I saw my uncle’s face at the front gate. If he said it was okay, it felt like everything would truly be okay.
That might be as great an ability as actually fixing something. Thinking that, I closed my wavering eyes.
