"I can’t tell if you’re really here or if I’m dreaming"
Kim Jun-yeong’s voice was steeped in soju. At a plastic table outside a convenience store in front of a Sinchon motel, we were chewing on 2 a.m. over two cans of beer and half a bottle of soju. His fingertips brushed the top of my knee—half a second, maybe three-tenths. Long enough to pass for coincidence. I didn’t flinch.
In that instant, the mere fact that I was drinking at two in the morning with my ex-boyfriend’s best friend felt impossibly thrilling.
Thinking of him, while sitting with him
My ex, Do-hyun, is still blocked in my contacts. Seven months since the breakup, and I’ve only run into his best friend, Jun-yeong, twice—so why here, why now? I caught the tattoo on Jun-yeong’s left hand: “H-97,” the class ring scar he and Do-hyun had etched together in high school. They had even shared their first sexual experience.
I imagined Jun-yeong tracing the same spots Do-hyun had once memorized on my body—and imagined him knowing exactly what he was doing.
A back alley near the Han, our clocks three minutes out of sync
“Why did you and Do-hyun break up?” Jun-yeong asked.
The question was so ordinary it was terrifying. I set down my glass and pulled out a cigarette. He lit it for me. For two flickering seconds the flame revealed us staring straight at each other’s mouths. My heart pounded like it wanted out.
Exhaling smoke, I said, “I don’t really know. I just…stopped being drawn to him.”
A secret map of desire
Psychologists call it proxy desire: the urge to trespass a taboo through someone—or something—else. Jun-yeong was an extension of Do-hyun; his touch was vicarious compensation for the caresses Do-hyun had withdrawn. But a deeper layer pulsed underneath: the thought that Jun-yeong wanted me, perhaps more than Do-hyun ever had, thrilled me.
Two nights recounted as if they were fiction
Case 1. Subway Line 2, Mangwon Station, 11:47 p.m.
Ahn Hyeon-ji, twenty-nine, ran into her ex’s best friend, Park Seong-min, on the train. He spoke first.
“After you two split, Do-hyun wouldn’t shut up about you—drove me crazy.”
Hyeon-ji gave a dry laugh. “So what are you saying—you want the same thing he did?”
Instead of answering, Seong-min took her wrist with a pressure neither forceful nor weak. That night, Hyeon-ji checked Do-hyun’s Kakao profile seventeen times. Unread. The last message she saw from Seong-min: [Tonight was just whatever.]
Case 2. A motel-front convenience store in Gangnam
Lee Seo-yeong, thirty-one, had been exchanging glances with her ex’s best friend, Choi Jae-hyeok, for three months. He had never once laid a hand on her. Then, last Saturday, he brushed the nape of her neck.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“You already know,” he said. “This can’t go all the way.”
That night Seo-yeong drafted and deleted four messages to Jae-hyeok. What she wanted to type every time was: What if Do-hyun sees us?
Why is the forbidden so sweet?
When we cross a line, we feel two things at once:
- The thrill of transgression—the delusion that we are someone special.
- Simultaneous dread—the whisper that we are irredeemably bad.
Where those emotions intersect, we taste double satisfaction. Through me, Jun-yeong empathized with Do-hyun; through Jun-yeong, I took revenge on him.
Do you even know what you really want?
We parted at six. On the staircase, our last exchange:
“See you tomorrow?”
“Let’s not tell Do-hyun, either way.”
We avoided each other’s eyes and boarded separate trains. At home, I checked Do-hyun’s Instagram stories: he was traveling with his new girlfriend.
The moment I felt Jun-yeong’s touch, had I finally left Do-hyun?
Or had I simply wanted his attention all along?
A night when his touch still feels possible
When you locked eyes with your ex’s best friend,
did you truly crave love?
Or were you merely desperate to prove to someone that you are still a woman who can be desired?