“Yes, I’ll tell you. Seventeen.”
She said it before the café mocha cooled. Outside, rain smeared the neon signs. When I looked up, her eyes didn’t blink. She simply scooped whipped cream with a small spoon and spoke as if remarking on the weather.
Seventeen. Some of the stories are more savage than you’d imagine.
Seventeen Black Holes That Sprouted Inside Me
After that day I went mad. Was Number One a senior from college? What positions did Number Seven prefer? Did Number Thirteen ever skip the condom? The digits moved like living tissue. I painted her past on a canvas. The men’s faces were black circles. Seventeen voids, and I slipped into each one. Night after night I mapped her body by touch. Here the hollow of her neck where Number Three once kissed. There the soft inner thigh that Number Eleven wet with his fingers. Every place my lips landed had already been someone else’s territory.
What’s filthy isn’t the past. It’s the way you resurrect it.
Min-seo and Jae-hyuk, and Whether I Was Ever Number Zero
Min-seo, twenty-nine, a designer. Jae-hyuk had been her first. “He really was,” she insisted. But Jae-hyuk refused to believe. Every night he sifted through her high-school photos, analyzing the glint in every boy’s eye. This one? Or this bastard? He built an Excel sheet: dates, places, possible males. He even logged her menstrual cycle. “Could there be someone who got you pregnant and paid for the abortion?” Min-seo cried. Jae-hyuk took even those tears as evidence.
Joon-su chose a different method. He pre-decided his girlfriend Su-jin’s acceptable number: five. Cross that line and they were finished. Su-jin said four. Joon-su exhaled. That night, however, he found a reunion photo: a man’s arm around Su-jin’s waist. For three sleepless days he trawled the man’s social media. November 2016: Su-jin’s post—“Feel like getting drunk tonight.” Joon-su confronted her. “Four, right?” Su-jin looked away. That day he revised the limit to three. The number kept shrinking, the future narrowing with it.
Why We Turn the Traces of Another’s Desire into Possessiveness
Numbers pretend to be transparent, yet they are the coldest language we own. We use them to weigh a lover: one gram, one centimeter, one body. They masquerade as fair, but they never are. Psychologists call it historical possessiveness. We try to haul a lover’s past into the present as if time travel were possible. But the past stays past, so we imagine it—sharper, crueler.
Right now you’re picturing me whispering into someone else’s ear, aren’t you?
Which Number Do You Long to Be?
You, reading this. Have you ever asked a lover, “How many?” And after the answer, did you erase the figure—or carve it deeper? She told me, “You’re special. Words can’t count you.” But I had already engraved the number 17 in my skull. And so I became the eighteenth. Yet the real question is this:
Could you ever be the zero? Or are you, too, merely someone’s seventeenth? She may be laughing somewhere right now—either as one among the seventeen, or as the keeper of an eighteenth. And I, on every rainy day, still sit before that cooling café mocha, counting numbers.