“Let’s talk a little longer.”
At the tail end of the company dinner, Min-seo caught the intern Ji-min’s wrist. The bar lights trembled along his jawline, and the pulse under her fingers was racing.
Unnie, here…? His whisper slid into her ear, a mingled scent of soju and raw youth. Earlier that evening Min-seo had bragged that the watch her husband bought for their anniversary cost over five million won. Now that same watch glinted coldly on her wrist.
The temperature of a gaze that strips
Each time Ji-min looked at her, Min-seo felt something that was not mere liking. It was the look a hound gives when instinct makes its tail whip the air.
How do I appear in his eyes? A woman seven years married, childless, whose husband has already gone home?
In that gaze lived the impulse young men often carry—to test their own strength. Min-seo could read it; she had lived too long not to.
Underground parking lot, 2:47 a.m.
“Shall we do it here?” Ji-min asked from the passenger seat of Min-seo’s car. His hand drifted onto her knee; every finger shook.
“How old are you?” “Twenty-three.” “Then I’m eleven years older.” “But you feel…young, unnie.”
His fingers crept beneath the hem of her skirt. At that instant Min-seo remembered her husband’s question last week—“Shall we have a child now?”—and how she had sidestepped an answer.
When young blood moves by instinct
This is a wicked thing. Min-seo knew it. Yet as Ji-min’s hand slipped higher along her inner thigh she became conscious of the subtle widening of her own legs—intentional or not, she could no longer tell.
His breath grazed her nape—hot, restless, ambitious. He grazed her earlobe with his teeth.
“Unnie, I really—” He never finished; Min-seo guided his hand farther up herself. When his fingers reached the most sensitive place, she closed her eyes.
7:00 a.m., Min-seo’s apartment
She stepped out of the shower; her husband still slept. On the bedside table rested his watch—five million won, yet something far costlier had been given to her at dawn.
What have I done? She gazed out the window. What was Ji-min doing now? Probably sleeping like the dead—twenty-three-year-old bodies never know fatigue. But she knew why she herself could not sleep.
The subtle shift of power
Young men, often without knowing, are drawn to older women. It isn’t simple lust; they want to test something.
How strong am I? How potent is my youth?
But the opposite occurs: they find themselves being tested. Min-seo understood. When Ji-min hovered above her, every quiver of her body made him tense. She stroked his hair slowly, the calm of victor.
Yet moments earlier she had been the defeated. Both had lost, both had won—that was the match’s exquisite design.
The tragedy of young blood
This can’t last. Min-seo knew. Ji-min would soon chase other twenty-three-year-olds. Yet he would remember her forever; she was the stage on which he first tried his youth as a weapon.
And she would remember him—the moment she slipped the authority of her husband’s watch. She would remember it in the heat of Ji-min’s body.
A final question
When was the last time you felt desire far younger than yourself stir inside you? And what, within you, did that desire move?