The Faceless Wife

"Haah... s-stop. Enough..."

The husband she was allowed to meet only after nightfall ran his hand gently through Jae-kyung's hair in the darkness.

"Try taking off the blindfold."

His fingertips traced tenderly over the blindfold covering her eyes.

"I can't take it off. ...It's one of the contract terms."

Afraid someone outside might hear her voice, Jae-kyung whispered the words through a tremble.

The husband who had lain beside her, caressing her lush curves, swung himself over her with fluid grace. Thighs like forged steel pinned her down, heavy as an iron weight.

"A contract? Even so, you ought to listen to your husband."

His bare hands drove into her roughly, like a punishment, and yet every touch was maddeningly soft. His face sank between her widely parted thighs. She could hear the wet sound of his lips pressing against her most secret place.

Haaah.

There was no room left for shame. A body long schooled by his relentless hips caught fire without effort.

She had thought that someday, just once, he might ask whether he could see her face — but her husband showed no curiosity about her at all.

She was grateful for his lack of feeling. He had no name, no face, no expression she knew of — and he never wondered about her.

Night came again. Two months remained. The better she came to know her husband's body, the more each night together felt like too little. Anxiety and restlessness crept in as the hour of parting drew near, and her reluctant heart heaped longing upon longing.

On the final night that would complete their ten months, the lights stayed off, as always. But that night, his hands seemed unusually loath to leave Jae-kyung's burning skin.

His broad palm swept down her slender back and closed around her waist as though he meant never to let go.

When the secret place that belonged to only the two of them had grown slick and wanting, his hand pushed deep inside her, insistent, unrelenting.

It was more than she could bear — receiving his savage, clinging rhythm without rest was beyond her. More than once he woke his wife just as she was drifting off, again and again, to drive their fevered peak to its end.

Sweat-drenched, her husband collapsed onto the bed beside her.

"I'm taking medication."

His voice was low, like a man letting a secret slip. Jae-kyung gave her head a little shake, fighting off the sleep that came flooding down.

"What... kind of medication?"

She had heard it once from the servant who attended to her.

"The young master takes medicine — he isn't in his right mind. Never, ever say a single word to him."

Psychiatric medication, they said. Could that be true?

"What's... wrong with you?"

"Later."

"..."

"Even if I can't remember you... wait for me."

Would there ever be a "later" for us?

She had never even seen his face — and he told her to wait? Did her husband, too, grieve the contract that was nearly spent?

Not that he could see her expression in the dark anyway. Jae-kyung nodded, dazed.

Her husband took her hand and pressed it flat against his hard chest. The drum of his heartbeat set her own heart answering.

His body was warm now — no longer ice.

Just as Monk Godeok had said — had her own scorching heat truly cured her husband's Cold Illness, that chill that had once left him cold as a frozen lake? The warmth of him felt like a small miracle.

Her white fingers slid down, slow and smooth, over the sweat-slicked breadth of his shoulders and the lean, hard ridges of muscle.

"Come here."

A gasp caught in her throat as his huge arms crushed her in tight enough to steal her breath — and being held like that was comfort beyond words. Absurd as it was, it felt as though her body, if nothing else, had fallen for him.

It couldn't be love. Surely not.

For one unguarded instant, she ached to know what her husband's face looked like. If she ever saw it, this marriage would truly be over. Jae-kyung burrowed deep beneath the fevered covers.

It's only treatment, she chanted to herself. Only pleasure.

After all, it was his cold body that had cooled the burning fever inside her — the one that had only worsened since her mother fell ill.

As on any other night, she had spent the hours with her husband, then moved to another room to sleep.

"Wake up."

At the servant's call, Jae-kyung opened her eyes. Director Jin was standing over her, looking down in displeasure. She shot upright in bed, startled.

"O-oh. Good morning."

It had been ten months. Since signing the contract in her own home, she had never once come face to face with Director Jin.

"If you have things to pack, pack them now. I'll have the driver send them straight to your house."

Director Jin's gaze was wintry as it fixed on her, cold as a sheet of ice.

"M-my things?"

Had Director Jin found out that she had spoken with her husband? Fear flared up without warning. It was her own fault — she had broken the clause that forbade her to make a sound.

"My son says he doesn't want to see Miss Jae-i anymore."

Director Jin held out a single sheet of paper, just as on the day they first met.

"This is the contract termination and confidentiality agreement."

"...I beg your pardon?"

Only hours ago, she had spent a fevered night with her husband. There was no way to claim nothing was wrong between them.

Director Jin pressed play on a voice recording.

A low voice, so like her husband's, poured from the speaker.

"I hear he said as much many times during his sessions at the hospital. I should have collected these sooner. As for the penalty for the months left unfulfilled — I've put in a sum generous enough that you won't feel shortchanged."

There was still time left. She could not be sent away like this.

"...It's all so sudden. Did I... do something wrong?"

Desperation crept into Jae-kyung's voice.

"The fault appears to be mine."

"I'm sorry? ...I don't take your meaning."

"I regret bringing in the first person I came across. My son hates this arrangement this much, after all. Now if you'll excuse me — I have a business trip."

Checking a wristwatch, Director Jin looked as bored as someone clearing away a trifling chore. Before the frozen, unmoving Jae-kyung, the white paper fluttered like a flag, urging her on.

"Sign. Quickly."

With trembling hands she swayed on her feet and scrawled her name — and the paper was snatched away into the air.

"D-Director Jin... I..."

Speaking aloud was, unmistakably, a breach of contract. If she swore a firm oath never to exchange another word with her husband, might she be forgiven?

Clack, clack. Without a word of answer, Director Jin spun around and walked out of the room Jae-kyung had been staying in.

"Wait — just a moment, please!"

The contract had always promised a parting. But to end it like this? She stared, stricken, at the door left standing empty.

While Jae-kyung stood soul-lost, even her eyes gone still, the servants moved quickly — dressing her, and slipping the pill they fed her every morning between her lips.

"You'd best hurry, before Director Jin loses any more patience."

Thud. The great gate behind Pyeongchang-dong's towering walls swung shut without a flicker of regret.

"Director Jin and the young master have both put up with a great deal, you know."

The servant's parting consolation — you were paid a fortune, and to have it end this cleanly, you should count yourself lucky — rang in her ears.

Cast out beyond the gates, Jae-kyung hugged the shabby white backpack she had arrived with ten months ago tight against her chest.

Kaboom. Kaboom. Thunder cracked the sky.

The downpour came roaring out of a bruised, shadowed heaven. The fat raindrops hardened into ice midair and battered Jae-kyung without mercy, like hail.

Lifting a face plastered with clinging pellets of ice, she looked up at the building.

The bedroom that had felt like a sealed chamber, where they had met only at night — where, somewhere up there, was the room her husband slept in? She couldn't even begin to guess.

Did he really hate me? Does he even know I've gone?

All those worries she had chewed over and over — how she would say her farewell, what it would feel like to walk away — seemed laughable now.

Parting had taken an instant, and it had been easier than the beginning.

Jae-kyung felt as though she had surfaced from a coma. It had been a long, strange dream, like a tunnel without end — impossible to say whether it had been a good dream or a bad one.

Rows of security cameras studding the immense wall glared down at her, as if surveilling an outsider. She half expected a warning sensor to shriek at any second.

Snap out of it! None of it ever happened.

Head bowed against the ever-fiercer blizzard, Jae-kyung ran for her real home.

Thank goodness this marriage was never love.

Her mother had said that love was poison. At the very least, this had been a choice that could never poison her own life.

Jae-kyung's manner of speaking. The sound of her breathing. Even the shape of her hand curled around a water glass in the moonlight. Every detail overlapped with the "faceless wife" in Yu-gam's memory.

That last night — if he had not looked at the face, the one the medication wouldn't even let him keep, would she never have run away?

Terrified of what their bond was becoming — of something real — he had chosen to believe his wife had simply vanished.

Yu-gam gazed blankly at the dark sea caught in the glow of the lights. His throat bobbed.

The conviction that he was right to erase this dangerous, deep-set feeling had governed his every moment. To keep redrawing that boundary, second by second, Yu-gam knew he would have to be colder still.

He turned back toward the living room — and found himself looking at Jae-kyung, who had settled onto the sofa at some point without his noticing. Seated beneath the chandelier's glow, she was impossible to look away from.

"Clothes... that's the only kind you have?"

"Ah, this is..."

Jae-kyung jolted and looked down at herself.

It was a shirt she wore every day; she had pulled it on without a thought. The tension of being near Yu-gam had left her oblivious to even what she was wearing.

The problem was that she had assumed, naturally, she would have a room to herself — and so she had packed the t-shirt she only ever wore at home.

The oversized shirt — printed, no less, with the shape of a bra across the chest — bristled with garish lettering front and back.

Yu-gam's gaze snagged on the words Kiss, mwah, printed beside a pair of painted lips.