Chapter 58
Seo-ah gasped for breath, her heart jumping at the sudden string of curses. As she instinctively looked up to check on him, the man who had seemed so serene moments ago lunged at her with the ferocity of a storm-tossed sea.
His large hands captured both her cheeks. Her eyes flew open and she sucked in a sharp breath as an unfamiliar scent overwhelmed her. The distance that had briefly opened between them vanished in an instant. The lips that had once touched hers as if merely testing the waters now crashed against hers with a violence that felt as though he intended to swallow her whole.
Unlike his cold gaze, his lips were searing, hot enough to burn. Her breath hitched, and unable to keep up with the frantic rhythm, she instinctively flailed her hands.
The wave that had been pushing against her with suffocating force paused for a moment. Seo-ah kept her eyes closed, exhaling a ragged breath. Clinging to whatever her hands could find like a drowning person, she took the deepest breath she could manage, only for the wave to surge back in.
“Open your mouth.”
It was a strange demand. Open her mouth…?
But there was no need to understand. Even if she had, there was nothing she could have done.
With their noses pressed together, she found herself starved for air, and her mouth parted of its own accord. Through that gap, something she had never dared to imagine pushed inside. Something hot and slick slipped past her teeth, unceremoniously ravaging the inside of her mouth.
“Mmph!”
The wall was at her back, and the man—solid as a mountain—remained immovable despite her struggles.
She was not uneducated.
There were no books she hadn’t read, and from her Teacher, she had learned how to walk silently and how to read a person’s movements.
But she had never been taught anything like this.
Earlier, in that crowded place… had this been what Oscar intended to do?
From start to finish, she was too overwhelmed by everything crashing down on her to think. Then, at some point, the act that felt like it would last forever stopped as if it had all been a lie. The hands holding her cheeks vanished, and the lips that seemed poised to consume her entire being pulled away.
Seo-ah leaned against the wall, gasping for air, while Oscar stood there vacantly, staring up at the ceiling. His firm chest rose and fell sharply beneath his thin robe.
“This is shit…”
Oscar let out a low murmur and looked down at Seo-ah with a laugh.
“Right?”
“…….”
The flickering light made everything look precarious.
The woman leaning against the wall, and the man blocking her path.
Both of them seemed possessed by the moment.
Then, the man turned away first. He turned and stepped away with a chilling composure that made his earlier ferocity feel like a fleeting hallucination. He walked toward the room where a cold draft drifted out.
Beyond that room, there seemed to be not a single speck of light or a trace of warmth.
Seo-ah thought it looked as if Oscar were walking into the abyss. His stride toward the darkness—void of light and heat—looked agonizingly familiar.
She didn’t know why she started walking after him.
Perhaps it was because the darkness visible over his shoulder felt familiar rather than frightening, or perhaps because she had no other choice. Or perhaps, foolishly, it was because she felt as though she were being left alone once again.
When she finally came to her senses, she was already following him into the dark.
She only stopped when the man walking ahead of her came to a halt.
Oscar stood as still and cold as death, lost in thought, before turning only his head to look back at her.
“I guess you didn’t think it was shit?”
He stared at Seo-ah, who seemed at a loss for words, then started walking again with a smirk. Once he was completely submerged in the shadows, he turned back toward her.
Standing with his back to the darkness, he seemed to be warning her not to enter, yet at the same time, he seemed to be luring her in.
The naive stranger finally took a step toward the darkness where misfortune lay tangled. She crawled into that place of no warmth and no light of her own volition.
The moment she crossed the threshold of the darkness, Oscar felt the thread he had barely managed to hold together snap once more.
There are all sorts of ways to ruin one’s life.
But then, what did that matter to him?
The only passage through which light and warmth could leak in was closed.
Exhaling a long breath, he turned around calmly. There stood a woman who didn’t suit this room—a room that felt like a temple of death—in the slightest.
A woman who had walked into his room on her own two feet.
He felt something that had been simmering finally boil over.
The moment he had leaned toward her like a fool felt as though it were finally being resolved. So, wouldn’t it be meaningless to suppress this desire that was growing to a grotesque size?
“You asked me to play with you.”
The master of the temple whispered with a seductive smile.
“Fine, let’s play.”
I’m dying to know how you’ll react, how you’ll change—you, who looks like you’ve lost your soul just from a little kiss.
“Strip.”
It was cold.
The moment Seo-ah entered Oscar’s bedroom, she felt it was colder than the sum of all the winters she had ever lived through. Yet, the bathroom was even colder than the bedroom.
She could see a white frost drifting over the black stone bathtub. Every breath she exhaled broke into a mist, just like in the dead of winter.
Seo-ah instinctively tried to pull her collar tight, then hesitated. In her hands was Oscar’s robe. She stared blankly at the thin, smooth garment as if she were broken.
Could this be a dream?
In truth, nothing had felt real since the moment she met Oscar in that crowd. She felt as if she were floating, her feet barely touching the ground. Wondering if it really was a dream, Seo-ah looked around, and her eyes landed on a large, ornate mirror.
The magnificent mirror, with its impressive gold frame, reflected a woman without the slightest distortion.
Stained shoes, a rumpled skirt, her top… her gaze slid upward until it reached her impossibly disheveled hair and the red danggi barely hanging on.
Seo-ah stumbled toward the mirror. She pulled her gaze away from the ribbon and faced her own reflection for the first time in a long while. Her face was pale as a ghost, but strangely, only her lips were as red as the danggi.
Those deep red lips brought back the moment that felt just as vivid.
“Strip.”
She couldn’t easily grasp the meaning of the words that had pierced her ears.
“O-Oh…”
Should she go to the bedroom first? She moved toward the door she had so recklessly entered. But Oscar, standing like a sentinel, did not move out of the way.
“M-My clothes…”
She stammered like a fool. He let out a mocking laugh from the darkness.
“Why? Are you going to go change into something new?”
Oscar, letting out a laugh thick with derision, moved slowly. He shed his robe, tossed it carelessly onto the sofa, and leaned against the window frame as he lit a cigarette. There was the sound of the tip burning, followed by the acrid scent of smoke.
“Wash up, put that on, and come out.”
Seo-ah looked down at Oscar’s robe in her hands.
The word ‘courtesan’ likely meant a prostitute.
“…….”
Seo-ah raised her eyes again to face herself. She stared into her own dark, hollow eyes before slowly setting the robe down. She began to unbutton her top from the top down, but her hands wouldn’t stop trembling.
She clenched and unclenched her fists. She tried to unbutton them again, but the trembling persisted.
“Why am I like this?”
This time, she rubbed her fingertips against her opposite palm and shook out her wrists. Even so, she couldn’t undo the buttons.
Her fingers slipped again and again.
Why was she trying to undress, what was about to happen, what she would have to endure—even the very purpose of what she was trying to achieve began to drift far, far away.
