While the bead of espresso on the café table dried, I watched the way Ji-su’s lower lip moved—for the third time. She lifted the hand that had been resting against the glass, touched her forehead lightly, then met my gaze. In that instant I realised: this is no dream. I could lay her across this table right now.
A Wineglass and a Lip: A Distance Measured in Math
Forty-seven millimetres still separate us. Between the backs of our hands, between the hot latte and her cool fingers, she keeps the space deliberately. Even when gripping the cup’s handle she uses only the tips, as though she would rather be holding something else.
I now know the count of her lashes: ninety-four on the left, ninety-two on the right. Oddly asymmetrical. So each time our eyes meet I steal a glance at the left first, under the illusion that peeking first keeps me from losing.
Whenever she laughs the tip of her tongue appears. Each time it grazes her lip I tense, convinced it is a signal meant for some man who is not me. Illusion? Or design? After she leaves I lift the abandoned spoon and lick the place her tongue touched. I expected bitterness. It is salt.
Two Ji-sus, Two Lies
First Ji-su: 17 March, 11:47 a.m.
In the office smoking room she drew on a cigarette and said, “I’m sensitive about my lips. It isn’t that I want to kiss; I just want to see someone stop breathing while looking at them.” I began to shrug off my jacket to drape it round her shoulders, then froze. As the smoke streamed from her lips she sighed the words; they still circle my ears. She left without the jacket. That night I slept wrapped not in her coat but in her cigarette haze.
Second Ji-su: 21 March, 2:12 a.m.
A single photo in the group chat: a selfie taken in a club restroom, scarlet lipstick smeared, the tail of one eye still lifted as though mid-dance. Beneath it, one comment: Who are you with? Seven minutes later she replied, Alone. I woke, screenshot the image, zoomed to the forty-seventh magnification and studied the left side of her neck. No bruise yet. No hand but mine—at least for now.
Why We Are Spellbound by Lips
Lips are the skin’s edge and the body’s beginning. Each time I look at hers I fall into the delusion of seeing straight through to her stomach, lungs, heart. Psychologists call it oral-phase regression: the infantile memory of sucking the mother’s breast, sublimated into adult desire for a kiss.
But I believe it is simpler. We merely want to be the first to claim another’s breath—the breath before speech, before a lie, before “I love you.” Ji-su’s lips are neither thick nor thin; simply red, and that red feels like blood she has unknowingly spilled. Whenever I imagine her wiping off her lipstick in a restroom, I torture myself with the thought that the crimson on the towel might include traces left by another man.
The Final Six Millimetres
Today I moved her lips six millimetres closer—inside my imagination. That is the remaining quota of the kiss I allow myself. In last night’s dream I was granted permission to bite her lower lip softly; then I woke. The bead of sweat on my forehead almost convinced me it had been her lip.
When will it be wiser to erase these six millimetres rather than fill them? Or wiser still to leave them empty, without stealing her breath?
By now Ji-su may be on her way home—or drinking with someone. When she drinks her eyelids half-close, making the longing for a kiss unbearable. All I truly know of her lips is the temperature of the breath that escapes when she parts them: 36.5 °C. And my own fingertips, growing hotter.
You have not yet laid a finger on anything. So why do her lips feel like the scene of your crime?