“Don’t run away, sister-in-law.”
Joon-hyeok stood at the door, breathless. My husband’s cousin, a second-year university student, twenty-three and still carrying campus air.
“Hyung will be back soon,” he said.
Before the sentence finished I was already covering his lips with mine. My fingertips trembled. It was the dirtiest moment of my twenty-nine years—and the hottest.
“Why was it you?”
Three years in, we lived like polite strangers. Ji-hoon came home late; I pretended to sleep. By morning he was gone again.
We were foreigners sharing the same mattress.
Then Joon-hyeok arrived. Ji-hoon’s junior from the university club, invited to stay “just one night.”
Eleven p.m. A fake emergency meeting pulled Ji-hoon out of the house—his usual lie.
In the living room, Joon-hyeok and I collided.
“Hyung isn’t coming back,” he murmured.
I turned away, but his gaze grazed the nape of my neck.
“That night, neither of us knows who moved first.”
He stepped closer. “Sister-in-law… what’s wrong?”
He took my hand—icy fingers. I was shaking.
This is wrong, so wrong.
Yet Joon-hyeok pressed me against the wall. I surrendered to the heat of his breathing.
On the living-room sofa our bodies intertwined. Between kisses at my throat he whispered,
“Does hyung like this too?”
I couldn’t answer. I only closed my eyes.
“This was never simple rebellion.”
Perhaps it would have happened even without him.
“Three years married, I craved anyone’s desperate touch.”
Because it was Joon-hyeok, the guilt blistered. He knew every chapter of my marriage: the first date, the proposal, the wedding march.
So maybe that’s why he asked,
“Did you know hyung was that kind of man?”
“She was the same as me.”
A month later Yujin—another resident of our building—knocked. Married five years, housewife, immaculate façade.
Softly: “Me too. In place of my husband, I chose him.”
In Yujin’s case it was her husband’s friend, a thirty-eight-year-old married man.
“It began as a joke,” she said. “‘Oppa, who’s better in bed—you or my husband?’”
She shut her eyes. “But he answered for real: ‘I want one more night with you.’”
“Why do we sprint toward the forbidden?”
Psychologist Brown writes,
“Marriage, by design, is the graveyard of desire.”
We signed a contract that chooses death—then claw for resurrection inside the very taboo we vowed to avoid.
Maybe Joon-hyeok used me to punish Ji-hoon.
Maybe Yujin needed living proof that her husband no longer loved her.
But deeper still: we refuse to be owned.
“I wanted to be seen not as a wife, but simply as a woman someone still desired.”
“Do you still dream of the forbidden?”
Joon-hyeok still visits—sits beside Ji-hoon on our couch. I never meet his eyes.
Yet when he brushes past me in the kitchen, I ache for the weight of his hand again.
The last thing he said:
“Sister-in-law… we’re not finished, are we?”
I had no answer.
Do you still dream of the forbidden?
Or have you already moved into the house it built around you?