Monday, 2 a.m. The refrigerator compressor thuds like a muffled drum. In bed, our breathing stalls, then restarts.
“Honey, Ddalnaemi… do you still like me?”
Sujin spoke first. Minhyuk answered by sliding a hand under the quilt. His fingertips found the gap where a button had come undone, grazed wax-smooth calves one day old, traced the curve of a hip, and circled her waist. The moment his palm met skin, Sujin shivered. Not the after-shower aromatics—just the faint scent of apples.
Ddalnaemi. The pet-name since our wedding day. Now a mournful stranger clinging to the body that has mothered two sons.
When Minhyuk’s breath touched her ear, Sujin was eighteen again. She was back near the rear door of the high-school classroom where they first kissed; the boy in front of her is precisely that boy. A pet-name unspools time. Fifteen slackened years of marriage retighten into the tremor of first love. For that instant he is not the husband of her present but that boy.
In the marital bed, pet-names are cunning skeins of thread. Minhyuk summons his own eighteen-year-old self every time he calls her Ddalnaemi. Listening, Sujin remembers his. Together they eavesdrop on each other’s pasts. Here the taboo begins: a couple holding divorce papers in a lawyer’s briefcase, a father and a housewife with two sons, conjuring each other’s first love under the sheets. It feels as illicit as calling the name of the dead.
Miju’s “Oppa” is still alive
“Oppa, right there…” Even now Miju calls her husband oppa. Mid-forties, their daughter a college sophomore. Yet in bed she hallucinates him as the twenty-something student she first met. Last autumn he accidentally texted their daughter:
You’re still as pretty as the day we met. I’m on my way, oppa is coming.
The daughter must have been startled, but Miju thought the message was for her. That night she called her husband oppa. He flinched, then accepted. They forgot their daughter existed until morning. At breakfast Miju said coolly, “Two p.m. at the lawyer’s. We’re finalizing the divorce papers today.”
Yeonghui’s “Teacher” never existed
Yeonghui started calling her husband Teacher. He had been her high-school PE instructor. Ten years after graduation they met again and have been married five. In bed, the word Teacher carried a different scent.
Teacher, show me here.
At first he was uneasy. One look at her eyes told him: she was the seventeen-year-old in the back row. He wanted that girl, guiltily. Last month Yeonghui ran into one of his former students outside the school gates. The student bowed and said, “Hello, Teacher.” Yeonghui’s body went rigid. That night she told her husband, “Stop calling me that. Our son will be mortified when he grows up.”
Minhyuk whispered into Sujin’s ear.
“Ddalnaemi, tonight I’ll make you eighteen again.”