One Year in the Dark
What would her eyes look like — how beautiful were they? He wanted to see them.
Should he wake his wife?
He wanted to remember. He had tried to engrave her image into his mind like a photograph, but he knew all too well that the vicious medication he was on would only blur his wife's face further away.
And so, the day after he had gazed and gazed at her sleeping face, tracing it over and over with his fingertips —
His wife was gone.
The drug's side effects sent a savage fury surging through him at her absence.
If only he had captured even a single photograph of her asleep. Unable to remember her, unable to find her, Yu-gam had gone on blaming himself every day since Jae-kyung left.
The hours of the past refused to stand still.
"Hoo…"
As the scenes ran on endlessly behind his eyes like a screen that would not cut away, Yu-gam held his breath and stared down at the bed, neatly made.
This room, too, resembled the one from back then. The only difference was that the lights were on.
Yu-gam left his room and walked toward where Jae-kyung was staying. Before he could stop himself, his gaze landed on the closed bathroom door.
Click.
Jae-kyung stepped out in a bathrobe, a snow-white towel wound around her head, and flinched at the sight of him.
"Wh-what is it?"
Trying to smother the tremor his sudden appearance had put in her voice, Jae-kyung cleared her throat. The towel slipped loose and fell, and damp droplets ran from her unbound hair.
"Why… why all the way here? Do you need something?"
So late at night, the light that slipped in between them felt strangely unfamiliar.
The memory of the nights they had once held each other deep made Yu-gam's fist clench tight. If Jae-kyung ever sensed the impulse in him — the urge to reach out and touch her — she would bolt on the spot.
Yu-gam turned his deep-sunk eyes away.
"So the boss is the one left waiting?"
"…I'm sorry."
"Wash up and come out. Tomorrow's schedule — even if I can't remember it, the secretary should have everything ready and be waiting."
His tone was as cold as ever.
Even if I can't remember you… wait for me.
A tone that stirred déjà vu cinched tight around Jae-kyung's chest.
"…You said that back then, too. Just like this."
Yu-gam's steps toward the living room stopped.
"What did you say?"
"N-nothing. I'll hurry."
Feelings she must not allow herself to wonder about drifted through the room.
Door shut behind her, Jae-kyung hurriedly shed the bathrobe, yanked open her suitcase, and dragged the first T-shirt her hand found over her head.
The married life she had wiped away — no, the countless nights she had spent in Yu-gam's arms — was waking inside her, one after another.
She had to quiet the hammering, about-to-burst heart, and fast.
Five years ago.
Managing Director Jin Hee-yeon of KE Group came looking for the shantytown home where Jae-kyung lived.
"Miss Seo Jae-kyung. I am Jin Hee-yeon, Chairwoman of the Eui-tae Foundation."
The Eui-tae Foundation's crest was stamped into the single business card she offered.
To Jae-kyung, the dignified woman who had appeared before her looked like a heaven-sent benefactor — the one soul who might pull her out of the pit she had fallen into.
KE Group's founder, Chairman Do Eui-tae, lay unconscious.
With the Chairman down, his daughter-in-law — Managing Director Jin — had become the household's de facto mistress.
Jae-kyung was a graduate of the international high school run under KE Group's banner, and it was there, in the faculty office, that she had heard the teachers speak of Managing Director Jin.
Now that woman stood at her battered front door, sweeping a glance over the shabby one-room home with her brow pinched in distaste.
Managing Director Jin was a beauty of rare, unworldly grace — and that beautiful face was crumpling.
She held out a single sheet of paper before Jae-kyung's eyes.
"The contract term is one year. There is only one condition. You must not look at my son's face — and speaking to him is forbidden as well."
Marriage to the grandson of Chairman Do Eui-tae, a man hidden behind a veil of secrecy.
If it was a dream, she should have woken up and bought a lottery ticket. It was something that could never, ever happen in a life like Jae-kyung's.
"Why… why me, of all people?"
They weren't merely rich — they were chaebol, and marriages into a house of that magnitude weren't for just anyone, or so everyone said. Without a scholarship granted as an act of charity, Jae-kyung would never even have come near the Eui-tae Foundation, and she found it hard to accept whatever reason had brought this woman to seek her out.
"Monk Godeok chose you, Miss Jae-kyung. My son is… unwell."
Monk Godeok?
Her mother had said so, back before the coma took her in that hospital bed — that she had once owed her life to Monk Godeok. That when the spirits had descended on her and she had nowhere left to go, it was his temple that had sheltered Jae-kyung's mother.
"When Chairman Do collapsed, it was Monk Godeok who pulled him back from death's door, more than once."
The marriage, she said, was for the sake of her ailing son — a boy stricken with a cold illness whose cause no doctor could name.
Managing Director Jin thrust the papers right up under her nose.
"Miss Jae-kyung. Your mother is unconscious, is she not? There's no time. Sign here."
"Jae-kyung, just one year! You and I only have to suffer through one year."
This was the father who had raised her alone for over a decade in place of the mother who had walked out the door when Jae-kyung was seven, saying a spirit had come down to claim her — but this was beyond the pale.
"Dad, are you in your right mind? Who gets married without love?"
After graduating high school, Jae-kyung had lurched from one part-time job to the next. Her father, who worked at a host bar, crowed that he would multiply everything tenfold — and swept even the college tuition she had saved from her convenience-store shifts into his little venture.
In the end, it was a scam, of course.
Loan sharks hounded her father. Her mother teetered at death's door with an incurable disease. And Jae-kyung had become the head of the family.
Could it be she had inherited whatever the spirits had left in her mother? Burning with fever, Jae-kyung held on, propping herself up with part-time work.
In the Muak-dong redevelopment district, where the houses stood without so much as a fence, that one crumbling home was their only hope.
"If I really do just marry him… they'll pay Mom's hospital bills, clear the debts. …Will they even set Dad up with a job?"
A contract marriage — the kind of thing she had only ever seen in dramas — was Jae-kyung's last option.
"The young master will be in shortly. Please lie down on the bed."
A servant eased Jae-kyung down onto the mattress, a long strip of cloth bound over her eyes.
A soft rustle.
When the whispering blanket of an unfamiliar bed met her back, Jae-kyung swallowed drily, every nerve drawn tight.
How much time had slipped by?
She wanted to check the clock, but the cloth across her vision let her see nothing — the blindness was stifling.
Click.
The door opened and shut.
Heavy footsteps sounded, and someone came toward her, unhurried.
The bed dipped, and skin cold as an ice floe pressed against her body, skin to skin until gooseflesh raced across her. His was a body of lean, corded muscle.
W-wait. Just — hold on.
Nothing in her was ready to receive the man's clumsy, rough movements.
"…Hah—"
Before she could even feel the shame of how dangerously their chest and stomach met, an alien pain bit sharp into her soft flesh.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Her heart felt ready to burst.
"…Does it hurt?"
At the man's low voice, heard as if through a haze, Jae-kyung shook her head fiercely.
She could not be thrown out after a single day and made to pay the penalty.
Jae-kyung clapped her palm over her lips to dam the moans spilling out of her.
You must never make a sound. Not ever.
"Hoo…"
The man's ragged breath poured down over her face.
As if in some small mercy, his body moved slowly — but her whole skin flared as though it had been plunged into fire.
Gritting her teeth, Jae-kyung seized the crumpled hem of the blanket.
A husband whose name she did not know, whose face she had never seen.
They had signed the contract and even filed the marriage registration; on paper, there was nothing improper about the two of them lying in one bed.
The man who had become her husband in a single day drove her to the very edge of her senses.
"Nnh… hahh…"
A bead of the man's sweat slid down onto the forehead of Jae-kyung, her eyes bound in thick cloth.
Her body bowed like a drawn arc beneath the strange, piercing ache.
Even as she strangled the moans that tried to break from her, the man's panting breath sounded at her ear.
"Get up."
The whisper drew Jae-kyung upright from the sleep she had fallen into as though collapsing.
A robe soft as silk was settled over skin that stung like an open wound. Still swaying, the cloth still bound across her eyes, Jae-kyung left the room leaning on the servant's arm.
What time was it, even?
"Take this. It's a supplement prescribed by the house physician."
The medicine slipped between her lips was down her throat before she could taste it.
With no chance to tell time from place, Jae-kyung was moved to another room, and she sank into a heavy, heedless sleep.
"Mmh…"
The brightness made her scrunch her face.
How long had she slept?
She flung a frightened glance around the wide room.
A meal had been laid out on the table beside the bed. Hunger gnawed at her, but her whole body throbbed too fiercely to move.
In the mirror across the room stood a stranger — a woman with tangled hair and a washed-out face.
God — there were even red marks on the nape of her neck. She was not her usual self.
That senseless first night.
Remembering the man's rough movements, the sounds they had made, made shame scald her. Jae-kyung buried her burning face between her damp knees.
It had been a contract marriage, and yet the fingertips of the husband who came to her every night were careful, and his breathing was calmer than she had feared.
Tell me if it hurts.
It felt strange, when all they had ever exchanged was a signature on one sheet of paper. It frightened her, lying in bed through nights that whirled her up, with a husband bound to her by documents alone.
But as the months went by, the fear turned, one moment, into anticipation; the anticipation turned, before she knew it, into joy; and the joy slipped, almost unnoticed, into pleasure.
Even her surrender to that pleasure squeezed at Jae-kyung's heart. And so, in the end, she never once looked at her husband's face. To see it would be to make the marriage real — and so this, too, was a choice she made to protect herself.
At twenty, Jae-kyung had already lost so much. Wariness and indifference toward her husband, she believed, would be what kept her safe.
I'm fine.
It was what she said not to her husband, but to herself. Every night, Jae-kyung pulled the edge of the blanket toward her own side, covering her bare body and her bare heart alike. That line was the last boundary she could allow herself.
Ten months later.
The sun was sinking beyond the window. Ten months since she had entered this house — the time had flown like an arrow, and she could hardly believe it.
The crimson dusk brought back her husband, who only the night before had pulled her into his arms and teased her until dawn.
For all the talk of treatment, the nights she spent with her husband were sweet and scorching enough to make a mockery of that word.
"You like it when I bite you here, don't you?"
Tracing idle paths over the fine down of her skin, over her delicate flesh, her husband teased her like a mischievous child.