“I still tremble when I remember the first moment I saw you—the man you were kissing behind my back.”
Jae-hoon whispered this against the rim of a cold beer can. It was the first night we had sat face-to-face since our marriage promise two years earlier. Six years into the affair, the word us no longer thrilled anyone.
Where She Truly Began
The first kiss was not mine; it began on the nape of my friend Min-gyu’s neck. He told me how, past the starched collar of his shirt, her quivering breath leaked out like steam. That day Min-gyu tore a page from his diary and recorded the beginning—never to hand it to me.
Four years later, by chance, Jae-hoon found that page.
12 October. First kiss with Ji-eun. In the back seat. While Jae-hoon had his back turned.
The interior of that day is still vivid. Min-gyu’s silver Hyundai Starex was parked in the alley behind campus. The air-conditioning was broken, so a cracked window let in the mingled scent of Rain Musk cologne soaked in cigarette smoke and Yoon Jong-shin’s “To You, Still Shining Today” drifting from the radio. The leather rear seat was cold, yet the moment their breaths touched it burned.
Ever since, whenever Ji-eun fell asleep, Jae-hoon pictured that back seat. Lips someone else tasted first. And for six years Ji-eun’s eyes had hidden it.
The Weight of a Hidden Beginning
Little by little, Jae-hoon began to look away whenever Ji-eun faced Min-gyu. Min-gyu still showed up at gatherings; Ji-eun still smiled at him. To Jae-hoon, that smile looked like the afterimage of a kiss she had left on Min-gyu’s neck.
“So, how was your first date?” someone asked.
Ji-eun answered first. “We met in front of the cinema.”
Jae-hoon laughed inwardly. Not in front of a cinema—inside Min-gyu’s back seat. She had erased that day. Or rather, she had erased it only inside her own mind. The truth lived on, immortal, in Min-gyu’s diary.
A Second Tale: The Rear Seat Begins Again
I am Su-jin, thirty-two. After a five-year relationship ended, the man I met was already entangled with someone else. Just before he met me, he had been kissing another woman in the back seat.
“At first I felt guilty,” he said. “While you were sitting right in front of me, I was touching someone else’s neck.”
He spoke while gripping my hand, as though the moment could never be rewound. From that night on, Su-jin pictured the back seat of his car—the moment another woman bit his neck before she ever did. And from that same back seat, he had come to meet Su-jin.
Why We Cling to the Beginning in the Back Seat
Betrayal is not a simple, complete lie. It is an original infidelity at the starting point. To whom was the first kiss given, the first glance, the first secret breath? We want to own that origin because a relationship can be absolute only at its beginning.
So Jae-hoon asked Ji-eun again and again:
“The moment you first saw me, you were on Min-gyu’s neck.”
Ji-eun replied, “But I’m with you now.”
Yet Jae-hoon knew: it is not now that matters; it is the beginning. Someone had already been betrayed at that beginning, and that betrayal still breathes quietly inside Ji-eun.
Final Question
Knowing that the six years you believed in never once began in front of you—can you still embrace the love that started in her back seat? Will the front seat of the present ever feel larger than the past’s back seat?