After my shower, even on my way to the second-floor study, my brother and my sister were still deep in conversation. Their voices were a little more animated than usual, but the way they talked about study-abroad plans was so specific it was hard to call them drunk.
So I wouldn’t interrupt, I quietly went to the living-room window and looked out. Empty beer cans were piled high on the table. With music playing from a phone, the two of them were clearly, just as he’d said, finding hope rather than anxiety even in an uncertain future.
It wasn’t reckless optimism. Because they didn’t know what awaited them, the future, for them, was something to prepare for and plan for with expectation.
He had defined their ages as a time when you especially want to explain yourself and be understood. Had he, in the past, ever felt that kind of desire for someone?
I left the questions—widening their range the more I thought about them—untouched, slipped out of the living room, and went up the stairs.
The second-floor hall was completely dark, but thanks to the moonlight pouring through the living room’s floor-to-ceiling front windows, the corridor to the study wasn’t very dim.
I knocked, and a voice told me to come in.
He was sitting at a large desk positioned to face the door. The study, lit only by two standing lamps—one on the desk and one beside the sofa set where we’d talked—was as dusky as the day I’d come here to ask for his help. But it wasn’t so dark I couldn’t make things out. A cozy orange light, like candlelight, lay softly over the room.
“You’re here? Sit over here.”
He indicated the long seat in front of the desk. It was a wide leather bench without a back, the kind whose angle at one end could be raised like a beach chair.
I perched on the bench and rubbed my arms, and he soon set aside what he was doing and came over. In the meantime, he must have showered too; the scent—like a deep summer blue that his shower gel called to mind—felt cool and clean.
As he sat beside me, he held out a slim, rectangular object. The wrapping—so sleek and beautiful it felt a shame to undo—caught my eye.
“Congratulations on the move. It’s a new start, so it seemed like something to celebrate.”
“...Thank you.”
“Say thanks after you open it. You might not like it.”
Listening to his low laugh, I slowly untied the ribbon and took off the wrapping. My hands paused in front of the simple box that appeared inside the paper. Biting then releasing my lower lip, I carefully opened the box, which was made to unfold to both sides.
“...”
Inside was a pair of sunglasses.
Unless my eye was wrong, they looked like the same design as the pair I tried on in his car a few days ago.
“It was a bit inconvenient in Hong Kong without these, right? I thought it’d be good to have one. Summer’s still got a long way to go.”
Propping an elbow on his thigh and his chin on his hand, he looked up at me and said it.
“Ah... uh...”
Frozen by surprise, I couldn’t respond quickly to the gift in front of me; my mouth opened and closed, speechless.
He gave a light laugh. Though it was only the two of us in the room, he straightened his back, leaned his upper body toward me, pressed his lips right up to my ear, and lowered his voice.
“But were you maybe... expecting a different gift?”
“...”
Was he teasing me on purpose, knowing full well? Heat flushed my skin from the roots of my neck upward.
No—rather than expecting it, there was something I had predicted, or braced myself for. He’d kept talking about “that.”
But that it wasn’t didn’t mean I was disappointed. Because it differed from my expectation, this gift, which contained no sexual meaning at all, felt even more like a gift.
Sunglasses, always tucked in his left chest pocket. Of course the design was almost always different.
It was true that in the car from Hong Kong Airport into the city, I was the only one not wearing sunglasses. Maybe he even remembered that moment, along with the impulsive way I’d snatched his and tried them on a few days ago. He might not know it, but to me it meant a lot.
When I shook my head over and over, he gave a low, collapsing laugh right at my ear. His high nose tip rubbed my ear softly.
“Open the right-hand drawer.”
“...”
When I turned my head, the tip of his nose brushed mine. At a very close distance our eyes pulled at each other, and in that moment he tilted his head just a fraction and placed a kiss so brief the surfaces of our lips barely touched. Short but slow—so careful it was cautious—the kiss made my eyelids tremble.
The moment his body touched mine, tension and excitement locked me rigid; I swallowed so audibly it clicked, but this time he didn’t laugh.
As he indicated, I reached out and opened the drawer of the sofa table in front of the bench. Another wrapped box lay at a slant in the otherwise empty drawer. Maybe because of that one brake, my hands were calmer than I expected as I unwrapped it and opened the box.
Nestled neatly atop fragrant potpourri and finely shredded decorative paper was a pair of thin, delicate black-lace underwear.
He leaned his chin to my shoulder as if to press it down. Together, we looked into the box resting on my thigh.
“There’s something I want to make clear. It’s definitely for men.”
His voice was even serious. Now that he’d said it, I noticed there was extra room in front to accommodate a certain amount of volume. Even so, by any measure it wasn’t undergarment meant to comfortably secure a penis. Rather than everyday underwear... it was closer to an adult toy meant to draw out a different kind of excitement between two people.
When he’d brought up sexy underwear, the most I’d imagined was a small triangle brief in a smaller size. Maybe a groin cut a bit deeper than usual. If I pushed my imagination further, at most a men’s thong.
What was in front of me did count as a men’s thong, but things like the material that would obviously show the contours and even the color, the design meant to make it slip off the instant you tugged the long strings at both sides without even needing to pull your legs free... the extremely narrow width at the crotch that looked like a testicle could slip out... all of it leapt far beyond my bracing.
Was my imagination just poor, or were the imaginations of the people who made this—and of the man who found it—just that rich...?
“You’ll put it on, right? You promised.”
He propped his chin on my shoulder and whispered in a small, wheedling way.
I didn’t think I’d actually promised, but I knew it was as good as a promise. I might not have felt excitement or anticipation, but I think I had braced myself unconsciously. Maybe the resolve had been growing bit by bit from the moment on the bed when he said, “It would suit you.”
Looking back on the sex we’d had so far, it felt more ridiculous to refuse to wear this underwear. Like saying you could kiss but were too shy to give a peck.
We’d crossed that line long ago.
I let out a short breath and then exhaled. He lowered the chin resting on my shoulder and pressed a kiss over my T-shirt. His lips moved little by little toward the tip of my shoulder, planting kisses, then lifted away; he gently took my jaw in his long fingers and turned my eyes, fixed on the box, back to him.
Then, stroking upward with his thumb as if to tickle my jaw, he kept lightly flipping my lower lip inside out and letting it go.
As in the garden, the friction on my lips kept on, enough to bring a sting. I wondered why, when it was just the two of us, he was replacing a kiss with a pinching rub like this, but there was no questioning that this new kind of touch was as dizzying as a kiss.
“Mm...”
While I was admiring his inventiveness—creating an act that wasn’t a kiss but suggested one and drew out arousal from it—a moan slipped out, cutting a tingling line of pain.
His eyes narrowed as he looked at me.
He looked slowly, deeply into my left eye, then my right, back and forth, as if searching for something inside me. He’d sometimes stared at my eyes and face this way before.
As if I were an utterly unfamiliar being; as if he felt both distance and curiosity toward me and, confused, couldn’t look away and just hovered there because the secret of that gap made him wonder.
But to me, the way his eyes flashed blue and then shattered white—the eyes that questioned my existence while wanting to explore it—was far stranger and more mysterious.
With the faintest smile, his face came closer. His lips settled over the finger on my lower lip, and for a while lips and fingertip traced the surface together.
It was like a kiss yet not a kiss, like another kind of caress. Spellbound by the new form of stimulation he applied, I surrendered my lips entirely to him. The finger that stung sweetly and the soft lips that warmly enclosed them called to mind a harmony of sweet and salty.
But tonight he hardly slipped his tongue inside; he lingered long only on my lips. Different from usual, his way of kissing at a glance looked like an act just for stimulation, but as many times as our bodies had lain together, I could sense his hesitation.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to come in. Beyond the barrier he had set for himself, I could feel, clearly, his desire to invade, to churn, to wring me out.
Even though he’d gone so far as to prepare underwear like this...
Whatever my sister and my brother had said (though the two of them had been aiming at Inwoo, not him), experience or age aside, it wasn’t that “naive Seo Ihyeon who knows nothing” had been swept here by the mood and technique of a seasoned man he was led by.
I wanted it first.
I flicked my tongue over his lips first, which had been moving side to side and brushing over his fingers. His big body tensed for a heartbeat, and he gripped both my shoulders hard.
But the refusal-like stillness lasted only a moment.
As if tearing down the barrier he’d built himself, his tongue parted my mouth and came in, and the two fingers that had been rubbing my lips pushed inside with it. As he pressed his tongue and the fingers steadily, back and forth, the moans grew deeper.
“Uh... uhm... mm.”
His fingers and tongue, and my tongue—like three people tangling their bodies, a messy kiss rolled and pitched. The farther it went, the bolder the arcs his tongue traced; my shoulders and chest rose and fell irregularly. When his hand slipped under the short-sleeved T-shirt I wore as pajamas and toyed with the small of my back, I flared up in an instant and wanted his bare skin too.
I pressed my chest tightly to him as if leaning into his body and gazed at him with blurred eyes. I didn’t hide my ragged breathing.
His fingers, soaked with my saliva, slipped from my mouth and slowly drew across my lips. At a sweet, brushing distance, he looked at me and shook his head.
Hesitating, pausing, shaking his head in refusal.
It wasn’t like the deliberate distance he kept before, meant to coax out honesty by making me ache for it. I set the precariously balanced box back where it had been and asked:
“Why are you...”
Even if it was framed passively, it was probably the first time I’d demanded an explanation from him.
“...”
He looked at me in silence and stroked my waist where he held me; something in his eyes was different, as expected.
“If you... don’t want to...”
With a frown that said he didn’t want to hear that kind of thing, he clapped a hand over my mouth, then, as if apologizing for that brief roughness, stroked my lips softly with the same hand. With a sigh mixed in, he whispered to me.
“More saliva... will you give me?”
“...”
Wrapping his arm inside my T-shirt around my waist and pulling me tight, he slipped his tongue behind my upper lip and tickled the mucosa.
“Don’t swallow... let it all spill in. Into me.”
The way he whispered sounded desperate, like the withdrawal of an addict reaching for drugs or alcohol to forget pain.
“Because I want it all... because it’s mine... not a single drop left, I want to swallow all of it...”
As soon as he finished, he wrapped his hand around my neck with a slightly rough motion. Gripping the very top of my throat just below the jaw with one hand, he tilted my chin up and, by pouring his own saliva into me, demonstrated what he wanted.
“Hngh— ngh... hnn...”
Chin tipped up, I «N.o.v.e.l.i.g.h.t» gulped down the saliva he poured and looked up at his face through vision blurred by the pressure in my eyes.
The scent dissolved in the saliva he let flow into me was stronger and richer than usual. Because I swallowed that scent—already hardened for me into a symbol of sex—in excess, arousal began to vibrate through my body.
As the strength slowly left the hand on my neck, he lifted his lips away and touched his forehead to mine. He rubbed his nose tip to mine and joined our lips again. Angling my chin diagonally, he deepened the contact, and, urging me on, slipped his tongue in to touch my palate.
So long as I didn’t swallow, saliva naturally pooled in my mouth. Without my needing to try anything, the instant my tongue grew slick with it, he drew every bit of moisture away with his suction.
“Mm— mm. Mmm... hnh.”
His suction felt like he might pull me myself into him... like a person ravenous and parched for my saliva. The sensation of being held firm by him and pried open piece by piece pulled moans from deep in my throat.
Tightening the arm around my waist, then pressing harder with the hand that had cupped my nape and sliding it down, he set his brow and the bridge of his nose in focus. In the blue eyes filling my view, excitement and hesitation and guilt pushed hard against one another. It was a look I had never seen before.
