An empty underground car park. Jun-yeong, 46, pauses with her hand on the door handle.
– Why did you do that? – Do what? – You reached for the door first.
She clamps down on Jae-woo’s wrist, the 32-year-old who had just tried to open the door ahead of her. Bone creaks under the pressure. Jae-woo smiles—a smile so dark it swallows the fluorescent light.
‘No more innocent love. I don’t need a well-behaved man. Be a con artist if you like—just be one in front of me.’
The moment my hidden claws come out
After forty, the men Jun-yeong seeks have changed. In her twenties she hunted the “good guy,” the “reliable guy.” Past forty, the reason her chest burns is different.
‘Would a good guy really protect me to the end?’ ‘Or is he just… boring?’
Now Jun-yeong looks for the wolf in hiding. A man who runs alone, but who can bare sharp fangs in an instant. That possibility feels as searing as bare skin under a noon sun.
The nameless darkness in you
She first met Ji-ah at a friend’s party. Forty-three, works at a neighborhood salon, twice loved married men and ended up alone.
– I think I wanted to fall into a deeper pit without knowing it. – Deeper? – A place with no guarantees. I wanted to die there, just once.
The first man was a stockbroker. Playing the part of the “good husband,” he vanished the moment Ji-ah got pregnant. The second was a grad student. He sought her like a lost child, then slipped away at dawn. At 3 a.m., Ji-ah lay in the bed that still smelled of his cigarettes and bit her own finger.
‘Why is this scent sweeter than any promise?’
The hour that waits for danger
Every Thursday night, Mi-seon, 45, meets him at the same café, same time. Min-su, 39. She knows he has a wife. She meets him anyway.
– He says he’ll be a little late. – Again? – Says his wife is sick.
On the nights Min-su doesn’t come, Mi-seon imagines his wife’s expression.
‘Is she smiling through pain? Or clenching her eyes shut?’
The imagining scalds her. The humiliation of Min-su lying beside his wife, unable to speak Mi-seon’s name, boils her desire until it hisses.
Why do we hunt this wolf?
Once we become mothers, responsible adults of society, safety loses its flavor. A woman’s desire at forty carries the dark gloss of aged wine.
‘People think they know me. I pretend I know myself. But we don’t. I still want to be dragged away by someone.’
The hidden wolf reminds us we have been lying to ourselves. That is why it burns.
The back of the wolf’s hand
In the end Jun-yeong gets into Jae-woo’s car. She sees the scar on the back of his hand—a mark left by a woman in her twenties, he says. Jun-yeong presses her lips to the scar.
– You told me no one’s ever done this to you. – Not yet.
Jae-woo knots a fistful of her hair.
‘Now I want the wolf that might wound me without knowing. Beneath his teeth, I want to ask who I really am.’
Who are you waiting for right now? The innocent man who will guard you to the end, or the wolf that might look away—even for an instant?