“Give me four months”
In the restroom mirror of the bar, Soo-jin’s pupils trembled. He slipped behind her, circling her waist. On his left hand, a smear of lipstick that wasn’t hers.
Just four months. After that, nobody knows.
The sentence stuck to her eardrum. Soo-jin asked the woman in the mirror: What is this?
Dissection of Desire
Thirty-eight-year-old men are peculiar. Not yet forty, yet already teetering on the cliff of late thirties. The last flare of life they can still pack up and leave behind. They know exactly what they are doing.
This isn’t going to last.
Hence the intensity. The shorter the time, the sharper the craving. Four months is perfect: long enough to shed marriage talk, five-year plans, credit-score checks—yet short enough to keep the luggage light.
I want us both to know it ends here.
A declaration. A flare signaling that the antonym of love is not boredom but calculation.
Their four months
Min-ju, 29, publicist
“Four months was just right.” Min-ju sipped her iced water. “Three months blazing hot, one month cooling off. That was our contract.”
She had seen his photo albums—every four-month relationship captured in identical poses, identical smiles. On the back of each print he had penciled dates: 2018.03–2018.07; 2019.01–2019.05.
I wanted to be one line in that list.
Why? Perhaps the seduction of certainty. A relationship with a fixed ending is safe from the start. No failure, no heartbreak—only the script already written.
Chae-won, 35, sommelier
In the storeroom behind the wine bar, Chae-won gripped the nape of his neck. Two divorces already behind her.
Four months earlier he had said, I don’t plan to barge into your life. I just want to be a small island where you can rest.
Chae-won wept at the words. She had needed that island—tomorrowless, questionless. Yet on the first day of the fifth month, he vanished. Coffee mugs waiting in an Ikea cart, film tickets reserved—left behind.
She cried for days. Oddly, what she felt was not pain but hollowness, the calm of watching a foretold death.
Why are we drawn to this?
The four-month gift from a 38-year-old man is a narcotic: brief, intense, and guaranteed to end. We are all chased by clocks—marriage, fertility, career—each ticking louder as it nears. A four-month severance is a sweet refuge.
You have nothing to prove.
Neither do I. Just this moment.
It wasn’t love. Love promises a future. What they offered was a present without a past. The thirty-eight-year-olds knew it, which made them crueler—while pretending they didn’t.
Final question
Soo-jin stands before the mirror, redrawing her lipstick, when a thought strikes:
When I imagine him saying the same words four months from now to another woman, why does my heart race first?
Don’t ask whether it’s love or poison. The moment you swallowed it, the verdict was already sealed.