When his thumb grazed my cheek, his gaze settled on the curtains far across the room—as if studying a single mote of dust clinging to the duvet. At that instant I understood: though his skin pressed against mine, the garden of his warmth lay elsewhere.
“Did I come too soon?” he asked.
The words were handed to me, yet the punctuation belonged to someone already gone.
A Fiery Cold
What is she doing right now? Each time the thought surfaced, my body swallowed his hand more ravenously. It was strange: the more his unfocused eyes sharpened, the deeper I burrowed into his flesh—like overwriting the comma left by a vanished phone number.
We all know, of course, which blank remains on a lover’s body. The moment we scramble to fill it, we are already making love to a stranger’s shadow.
Nameless Perfume
Last winter, Eun-jin met a man atop white snow. Arriving as quietly as the first flakes, he whispered, “It began the moment I first saw you here.” She let herself be deceived. In truth, three days earlier he had kissed Yerin at Incheon Airport’s arrivals gate. Yerin flew on to New York; he chose Eun-jin’s arms to wash away the scent.
When Eun-jin closed her eyes, the chameleon fragrance on his fingers was vivid. Each time it tunneled into her chest, his own eyes were shut. She knew whose face hovered behind his lids. So she moved more violently.
Look at me—look at me. The cry soon warped into It has to be you.
Snow fell thick that night; they devoured each other. Yet Eun-jin sensed that, at his climax, the name slipping between his trembling lips was not hers.
An Unfinished Score
Kyung-min’s arm encircled his wife Yuri’s waist. The moment his phone screen went dark, he pressed a kiss to her lashes. Yuri felt for whom that kiss was truly meant. His single transgression—a kiss with colleague Hye-jin a month ago—still clung to his tongue like red confetti.
Yuri pretended not to notice. Instead, she placed his hand on her breast, wishing it would replay the score he had once performed on Hye-jin.
Follow her rhythm, not mine. I don’t mind.
That night, lying behind Kyung-min, Yuri closed her eyes and summoned Hye-jin’s face. No—Yuri had not forgiven the affair. She wanted to inhabit it. She longed to hear the overture he had written for Hye-jin played upon her own skin.
What We Crave Is Trace
Psychologists say we wish to possess our partner’s past. More precisely, we covet the trace that past leaves behind—sometimes the temperature of a kiss, sometimes the texture of fingertips, sometimes a nameless scent.
Thus, the moment we hear another’s name spill across a lover’s body, we call it sacred—for in that instant we imagine we own all their time, even the strangers who once lived inside it.
Whose Ghost Stays on Your Skin?
If you are reading this, you have felt it: footprints left by someone else inside a lover’s caress. Perhaps you tried to carve your own name over those prints. And perhaps, even now, you are pressing your scent—someone else’s scent—onto another’s skin.
So whose name, then, does the mouth resting on your body whisper?
And knowing that name is not yours, why do you still refuse to let those lips leave?