“Don’t worry—you did the same thing to me.”
His sentence flew across the screen and speared me just below the sternum. I wasn’t your first, was I? That night, and again tonight, someone else pressed a face into a pillow and stroked a nape that wasn’t mine.
Under the dying bulb
March 2013, a rooftop bedsit in Sinchon. Each time the spring rain drummed on the tin roof the standing lamp flickered off. It did again that night. The moment the bulb died I grabbed the wrist of Min-seok’s best friend, Jae-hyeok, and dragged him to the end of the corridor.
This is no accident.
Min-seok knew instantly. Jae-hyeok shoved me away after three seconds, but the end was already stamped between us. I packed before dawn and left the house. Min-seok said, “Since you started it, I’ll finish it.” I never imagined the ending would circle back a decade later.
We all pay for our sins as unobtrusively as possible
Min-seok has now settled into the apartment next door—if “we” can be stretched to include both our marriages. 501 and 502 in the same high-rise. When we meet in the morning elevator we pass each other cradling the other’s spouse. He is my husband’s boss; I joined the gym the same month as his wife. Every time the four pairs of eyes lock, I see that corridor again.
Do you remember too? The air we unsettled at the far end.
Desire returns like a carousel
Last summer his wife, Jung-yoon, invited us to a house-warming. By the third bottle of wine she asked carefully, “I heard Min-seok was badly hurt by someone in college. Was it… you?” My spoon clattered onto the table. I laughed and said, “I wouldn’t know.”
That night, the moment I shut the front door, I buried my face in my husband’s chest. The scent was different—not his shampoo, but Jung-yoon’s cleansing oil. So we are all tamed by the same fragrance.
Two rooms that read like truth
Room One – CCTV, basement garage, 14 February, 02:14
At 02:14 two cars glide in: a black SUV, a white sedan—his and mine. At 02:27 we open our trunks and exchange bundles. Groceries? Gifts? No. He takes my laundry basket; I take Jung-yoon’s trench-coat. While our spouses sleep, we swap the clothes that have touched their skin.
“Is this a game?” a voice asks. “Or the way we pay for what we’ve done?”
Room Two – 3 November, afternoon
Jung-yoon was crying in the gym shower. I pretended not to notice, but the glass door betrayed her. “My husband takes a day off every Wednesday. I know he’s seeing someone.”
That Wednesday I messaged Min-seok.
Me: Shall we start again?
Min-seok: …Yes.
We met in a motel. The sheets matched the ones in his marital bed and I laughed. Every time he stroked my shoulder I pictured Jung-yoon’s face. Will she feel this too?
Why do we repeat the same mistake twice, thrice?
Psychologists call it misguided coherence desire—a warped survival instinct that tries to solve the original sin by replaying it. Min-seok and I betray our spouses in order to reach the ending we fled on that rooftop. But the real longing is elsewhere: we want to meet who we were that night. Twenty-two, soaked in spring rain, holding hands in the dark hallway. Now we parcel that heat out to everyone.
When did your betrayal begin?
Someone flickers in your memory—the day you wounded them first, or the day they wounded you. That memory trails you across beds, elevators, company dinners. When you trespass against another now, is it revenge, or simply the continuation of a crime you never finished?
At which corridor’s end are you longing to seize whose wrist again?