Work Text:
At breakfast, Minjung presents her with a ring. It's a tooth, of course, mounted on a gray metal band.
Jiwoo sets down her coffee mug and looks at the ring, then up at Minjung. "What am I supposed to do with this?"
"Wear it, honey," Minjung says. She sits there expectantly for a moment as if waiting for Jiwoo to try it on. When nothing happens, she gets up and takes her dishes to the sink.
"It came from our recent guest," Minjung says.
Jiwoo could have inferred. After they brought the battered and barely-breathing man home last night and cuffed him hand and foot to the dentist's chair in the basement, Minjung stayed down there all night. Or at least until after Jiwoo's adrenaline finally crashed and she fell asleep.
"I thought you looked tired," Jiwoo says. Minjung doesn't respond.
Jiwoo picks up the ring and looks at it more closely. It doesn't look bad. Minjung's work never does. Jiwoo suspects that if she started wearing it, it would start to feel as much like a part of her as the bracelet does.
But a ring is different. Or at least, a ring could be different.
"What finger do you want me to wear it on?" Jiwoo asks.
The dishes clean, Minjung turns to face her. She's in her weekend house clothes, a pair of black lounge pants and a black oversized, long-sleeved shirt. There's still a hint of bedhead in the way her short bob falls around her face, its soft waves contrasting with her angular features. "It's not sized yet," she says. "Choose any finger and I'll make adjustments from there."
Jiwoo looks at the ring for another moment, then puts it in her pocket. "Is that guy dead?"
"Yes, I'm finished with him," Minjung says. "He's already in a bag. We'll get rid of him tonight."
Jiwoo nods. One of the other women from her boxing class had asked if she wanted to go out for drinks that evening, but she’ll get a Sorry, I already have plans!
It's disgusting and inhuman that this is now how Jiwoo would prefer to spend a Saturday night, but any guilt she used to feel about that has long since passed. She's felt less and less human since that last night at Eden, but in the year she's been living with Minjung, she's felt more and more alive.
Jiwoo finishes her coffee and notices Minjung pointing her phone at her. She puts her mug down, irritated. "Are you filming or taking a picture?"
"Just a picture," Minjung says mildly, as if it's not both creepy and annoying that she does this all the time, as if she doesn’t know Jiwoo hates it.
Jiwoo stands up. "Let me see," she says.
Minjung turns her phone to Jiwoo, but Jiwoo ignores it. "Show me your whole voyeuristic creep-shots album. I know you have one." Minjung is too organized, especially when it comes to freak shit, not to have one.
After a moment of screen-swiping, Minjung turns her phone again, and Jiwoo takes it. Sure enough, there's an album called 자기야 full of pictures and videos of Jiwoo. They were all taken without her consent but are otherwise innocent-looking. They show Jiwoo reading on the couch; Jiwoo eating; Jiwoo editing printed-out pages at the kitchen table; Jiwoo looking at something in the distance with a hint of a smile. The album as a whole would make quite a charming, domestic collage if the viewer didn’t know how delusional the photographer was. Swiping through the pictures reminds Jiwoo of those girlfriend-fantasy POV shoots idols do sometimes.
"You look pretty in these," Minjung says as if that's a reasonable excuse for the sheer volume of photos. How much space on Minjung's phone is taken up by all things Jiwoo-related?
"Not all of them," Jiwoo says. She taps on a picture snapped when she was halfway through a bite of Chinese takeout pork.
"You look cute in that one."
Jiwoo rolls her eyes and hands Minjung back her phone. If she deleted the album, Minjung would just make a new one. 자기야 2, maybe.
"What time are we going to the woods?" she asks.
"Around eleven," Minjung says. Late enough to have the cover of darkness and fewer people around, but not an inherently suspicious time period to be driving in and out of their neighborhood. "Do you have plans, honey?"
"No, I just have… things to organize," Jiwoo says. She leaves the kitchen, walks upstairs to her bedroom, and locks the door behind her.
Once inside, she remembers that she does actually have things she could organize: the files on her laptop. As she reorganizes files into folders, and those folders into other folders, Jiwoo zones out enough to make her suddenly realize what’s really troubling her. No surprise, the trouble is still Minjung. But more specifically, the events of the morning have drawn into focus a weird element of life with Minjung that's only gotten weirder over time.
- - - - -
Minjung came for her in the hospital the day after Jiwoo and her boyfriend officially ended things.
When he broke up with her, Jiwoo’s now ex-boyfriend said he was sorry that he wasn’t there for her enough, sorry that he hadn’t been able to take care of her. Jiwoo, still in her post-Eden haze, with only one foot firmly in reality, just nodded and wondered vaguely if his idea of taking care of her would have involved taking seriously the things he’d called overreacting and being too sensitive, or just finally marrying her. Either way, it was over now, and she wouldn’t see him anymore.
Early the next morning, so early it still felt like night, someone who Jiwoo had been even surer she would never see again appeared in her room. Jiwoo, who hadn’t been able to sleep even though it had officially been Lights Out Time for hours, opened one eye at the unexpected, barely-audible creak from the doorway. When she saw Seo Minjung standing in the shadows, she was too shocked to scream.
Minjung pulled up a chair by the bed. It was the same one Jiwoo’s boyfriend had used. She smiled. “Were you expecting me, honey?”
“I killed you,” Jiwoo whispered. The embers of the rage that had consumed her in Eden flickered, but they didn’t have enough oxygen to erupt into flame. She was too tired to feel that much these days.
Minjung reached a hand out towards Jiwoo’s wrist, stopping just short of touching the bracelet. “You kept it,” she said.
Suddenly, Jiwoo remembered everything.
She had been the one who killed Mrs. Eom. She had been the one who took out that pervert freak from room 313 and the twin whose babyish giggle got on her nerves. She had gotten close to killing Minjung, but had instead, if she now remembered correctly, blacked out in a fit of feverish hallucinations.
Minjung watched Jiwoo closely. “You understand now,” she said.
Jiwoo nodded, having sunk too deeply back into the haze to speak.
Minjung ran a finger over one of the tooth charms, then placed her hand over Jiwoo’s. It was the most Minjung had ever touched her apart from when they were fighting, and Jiwoo was half-surprised to find her hand warm and soft, not cold like that of a corpse.
“We’re going to be together from now on, honey,” Minjung said.
She started to pull her hand away, but Jiwoo grabbed onto it, entwining their fingers tightly. Minjung couldn't just offer her an anchor and then remove it so quickly.
Minjung stiffened for a moment but indulged Jiwoo as she instructed her on what to do and where to go once she was discharged from the psych ward.
Two weeks later, Jiwoo took a bus, a train, and another bus to a stop two blocks away from the house in Incheon. The two-story, red brick structure was nicer than the house Jiwoo had grown up in and infinitely nicer than Eden, but it wasn’t flashy. It wasn’t a self-drawn target on someone who was supposed to be dead.
Minjung opened the door before Jiwoo could knock. "Welcome home, honey," she said, taking Jiwoo's suitcase. "How was the trip?"
Jiwoo peered around Minjung into the house. The living room was dimly lit by one standing lamp. The only other furniture she could see was a coat rack. "Do you own this place?"
Minjung replied that she did, and went on to order takeout with an app on her phone before fielding any of Jiwoo's other questions. Jiwoo grudgingly accepted the terms of "drop your things off in your room and we'll talk while we eat." She realized she was dying for something that wasn't hospital food.
Over dinner, Minjung informed Jiwoo that she wouldn't need to pay rent and shouldn't worry about finding a job. Minjung was working under an assumed name as an oral surgeon and was happy to provide for Jiwoo while she focused on her writing. Of course, they could also send money to Jiwoo's family as needed.
It sounded too good. It sounded too easy.
"What do you want from me?" Jiwoo asked. If she had been able to figure that out earlier, maybe she wouldn't be in this position. Maybe she would still have a boyfriend and a job at her college unnie’s startup and she would have never killed anybody.
Minjung looked slightly disappointed that Jiwoo had to ask. "You, honey. Just you. The real you, exploring your full potential."
Jiwoo wanted to cry for a hundred different reasons, but she held it back until she was in bed later that night, her sobs muffled by the rain. “Is ‘Seo Minjung’ the real you? Or was that an alias too?”
It felt odd to say that name out loud. Jiwoo had learned it from looking up articles about what happened at Eden. She’d only called her new housemate ahjumma, Ms. 304, or 미친년 before. The last one had been the most common by the end.
“The real me can be whatever you want it to be, honey.”
Jiwoo sighed. “Just tell me. What’s your real name?”
Minjung smiled and leaned back in her chair. “Wasn’t ‘I Am’ enough for God?”
“I don’t know,” Jiwoo said. “I never went to church.”
- - - - -
After about a month in the Incheon house, Jiwoo got sick of staying in her bedroom when Minjung was home and only using the kitchen when she wasn’t. She was also sick of looking at an almost-empty living room.
“Aren’t you going to buy more furniture?” she asked Minjung at their first dinner together since the night she moved in. They were eating sushi from a place Jiwoo had picked out while sulking about her own self-inflicted defeat. It was expensive and tasted like it. It had obviously been charged to Minjung’s card.
“I hadn’t thought about it,” Minjung said. She was still dressed in her work clothes, a perfectly fitted white button-down tucked into black slacks that flattered her long legs. “Do you want to be in charge of decorating?”
Jiwoo didn’t really, but she might as well. “Sure. What’s the budget?”
That was when Minjung gave Jiwoo a debit card and the access information for her own account, the balance of which made Jiwoo cough when she first saw it.
It was by far the most spending money she’d ever been able to access, and for the next week, she went shopping-crazy. She’d never thought much about interior design and living space aesthetics, but she bought a printer and made physical image boards of potential living room plans before buying a couch, two chairs, a rug, and a coffee table. She bought stuff for the walls from a couple of local artists. She got a haircut from an actual cool salon. She bought a week’s worth of new clothes. She thought about getting an expensive cream that was supposed to be a miracle cure for dark under-eye circles, then realized she didn’t give a shit about that anymore.
When Jiwoo felt like she had reacclimated to social interaction enough to get back to the gym, she joined one that taught judo and boxing and another with a full-sized weight room. She started working out as hard as she could for the first time in her life, no longer concerned about whether pushing her limits would make her less palatable for a boyfriend.
The first time she came home in a tank top that revealed her increased muscle definition, Minjung couldn’t keep her eyes off her - even more so than usual. “There’s no question you could kill me with your bare hands, honey,” she said dreamily when Jiwoo snapped at her about it.
It turned out to be easy to make Minjung happy without trying (and Jiwoo would never try.) The older woman had reveled in Jiwoo’s suffering at Eden, but now she seemed to get legitimate satisfaction out of seeing Jiwoo explore her potential.
And Jiwoo wasn’t just exploring her potential in the gym and in her ability to spend someone else’s money. After weeks of not being able to face those pages of DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE, she half-heartedly started applying to freelance gigs just to make herself write something, anything. To her surprise, she started to pick up work despite the fact that her most recent non-prose writing samples were from her college newsletter.
The paid writing work boosted her confidence, which led her to take a reinvigorated look at her fiction. She turned her pianist killer novel idea into a short story and, after what seemed like a million rejections, it actually got published. After that success, Jiwoo’s creative juices weren’t just flowing; they were gushing.
One Saturday afternoon, she closed her laptop after a dissociative, intense writing session on the couch and looked up to see Minjung standing in the room. By that point, Jiwoo was so used to Minjung appearing out of nowhere that it no longer startled her. Most of the time.
"What?"
"Are you done for the day?” Minjung asked.
“Uh-huh.” Something in Minjung’s eyes prevented Jiwoo from just closing her laptop and going upstairs.
“Then let’s go out tonight, honey.”
Jiwoo knew exactly what she meant. She never considered turning her down.
- - - - -
Her files sorted as much as she cares to sort them, Jiwoo sighs and falls back on her futon. The cream-colored comforter is soft, smooth, and actually somewhat comforting under her hands.
These sheets were already there when she moved in. Though Minjung had totally neglected to furnish the living room and the kitchen had been pretty sparse, Jiwoo’s bedroom had already looked kind of homey, furnished with not just the mattress and sheets, but a good-quality desk, a lamp, a chest of drawers, and two bookshelves. The only things Jiwoo has added so far are the contents of the drawers, closet, and shelves, and the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling.
Jiwoo looks up at the artificial constellation, a much larger version of the decoration in Eden room 303. She wonders sometimes whether if things had gone a little differently that resident would be laying here instead of her.
It’s not a question that comes to her mind that often, though, because she has so many other, more fundamental things to wonder about the way she’s living - and who she’s living with. Even though they share a living space and part of a body count, Minjung still has something of an aura of mystery. Jiwoo doesn’t know the other woman’s birth name, age (somewhere between thirty-five and forty), place of birth, if she has a legitimate medical degree, or why, of all possible kill trophies, teeth. Jiwoo can’t even figure out when and where Minjung works out - and she must work out because whenever her shirt lifts up high enough her obliques look amazing.
She has learned some things though. She knows that Minjung has an overall disinterest in food and basically regards it as fuel (aside from Mrs. Eom’s cooking, gone forever from this world with no attempt made to replicate it.) Minjung also has no interest in movies or television; whenever she watches something Jiwoo has on in the living room, she has the air of an anthropologist. She seems more legitimately interested in books though; she reads a range of fiction and nonfiction and can discuss them intelligently with Jiwoo.
Jiwoo also knows that Minjung bounces a tennis ball against the wall when she’s dwelling on a problem or undesirable emotion, and no amount of yelling at her will break this habit.
She knows that Minjung goes to a salon for appearances’ sake, but she can cut her own hair.
Minjung wears glasses at work even though she doesn’t need to. Jiwoo suspects this is for vanity reasons because they do look good on her.
Minjung doesn’t like animals and definitely “worked” on them before she leveled up to humans (Jiwoo doesn’t want to hear about it). But she tolerates the strays that Jiwoo has converted to Outside Cats as long as Jiwoo doesn’t complain too much about being filmed while petting them. Jiwoo suspects that the cats are actually growing on Minjung; she caught her feeding the black one, Faulkner, the tongue of the woman they killed a few months ago.
Minjung has her signature method of murder down to a science but never fails to infuse it with the passion of an artist.
But this is getting off-topic. The point is, Jiwoo still doesn’t fully know, nearly a year later, why Minjung chose her. Or, not so much why she chose her, but why she continues to choose her when she’s admitted to previous pattern of killing her other “creations” when they disappointed her.
Is it just that Jiwoo hasn’t disappointed her yet? Minjung would look offended by the question; she’s already been offended by the insinuation. She says she chose Jiwoo because she’s her. Because of who Jiwoo is as an individual, the I Am of her that means they’re meant to be. And because Jiwoo being herself means they’re of each other’s kind.
Jiwoo understands that last part now. She sometimes wonders whether she and Minjung would be better categorized as a subspecies of the human race or as an evolution. But she still doesn’t understand the rest. She doesn’t hate herself, not anymore, but she still doesn’t see what Minjung sees in her that supposedly makes her worth all of this.
It would be easier if she could clearly say that Minjung thinks she’s in love with her or even just wants to fuck her. But despite the pet name and the voyeurism and the unprompted financial support, Jiwoo still just isn’t sure.
She takes the ring out of her pocket and holds it in front of her eye, running her thumb over the ridges of the teeth. She will never memorize what the different kinds of teeth are or how to recognize them - it’s both a dignity and a spite thing. But she wonders for the first time in her life, possibly the first time in anyone’s life, if there’s a tooth love language. Maybe a canine could mean “I love you” and a molar could mean “This is a marriage proposal” and some other kind of tooth could mean “I’ve wanted to fuck you this whole time.”
Jiwoo holds up her bracelet-clad wrist and compares the teeth dangling from it to the tooth mounted on the ring. This tells her nothing. She sighs again and shoves the ring back into her pocket.
This all connects to something Jiwoo has been dwelling on since she started working on her novel about Eden. While reflecting on those events, she has to think about her old boyfriend. That’s a gateway to thinking about dating in general, and that gateway opens onto a short path to the conclusion that Jiwoo can probably never date again – unless she wants to get someone killed.
This naturally leads to the question of whether she’ll ever have sex again. No-strings-attached sex seems less likely to be a death sentence for the other party than a romantic or emotionally intimate relationship, but casual sex has never really done it for Jiwoo. Based on experience, she has zero confidence that a man can get a woman off their first time together, or even find her clit without directions. It took her like a year to finally nudge her last boyfriend’s hand to the right spot. Overall, the idea of some guy from an app who may or may not be days away from being murdered fumbling around on top of Jiwoo is… not appealing.
She can always masturbate anyway (in the middle of the day on weekdays, when she knows Minjung won’t be home for hours.) There’s obviously none of the connection of sex, but at least Jiwoo’s guaranteed an orgasm. Every time she's come during sex has been because she was touching herself while the guy did his thing, anyway.
Really, sex isn't that great. It’s not worth even this low level of occasional angst. But still.
But still.
Jiwoo takes the ring out of her pocket and looks at it again. Whatever the intention behind the piece of jewelry, her relationship with Minjung already feels like a marriage sometimes. If Minjung wants to be more explicit about that, it wouldn’t be a huge change. They’re already probably more “intimate” in a way than a lot of actual married couples. They just don’t have sex.
And Jiwoo doesn’t want to have sex with Minjung, obviously. She just really wants to know, now more than ever, whether or not the other woman wants to have sex with her.
- - - - -
They bury the body near the others, in a heavily wooded area close enough to a road and a trail for convenience, far enough from typical human activity to be found easily. Jiwoo digs the first half of the grave; Minjung handles the second because her legs are longer and it’s easier for her to get out of the hole.
Watching Minjung in the dark always takes Jiwoo back to Eden. The other woman looks less human out here, all long limbs under black clothes, pale skin gleaming in the slivers of moonlight, and dark eyes glimmering with vitality.
Jiwoo gives Minjung a hand out of the hole and they take hold of the body. Minjung gets the arms this time; Jiwoo grabs the ankles. Dead flesh and bone land on the dirt with a heavy but muffled thud. The noise was terrifyingly loud to Jiwoo the first few times she heard it; it still makes her adrenaline spike.
Jiwoo’s heart races as Minjung picks up the shovel and starts covering the body. She’s wearing the same oversized shirt she was that morning. When she angles her body a certain way, Jiwoo can see the curve of her waist through it.
- - - - -
Jiwoo never assumed that Minjung had stopped killing people, but she also didn’t really think about it for the first couple of months that they lived together. She was too busy getting her life together, sulking, worrying about what to do if Minjung suddenly turned on her, overspending on furniture, and so on.
Then one night she paused a late-night drama binge to go to the bathroom and found the door open and the light on. Minjung was standing by the sink, peeling off a black turtleneck that looked like it was drenched in blood. Some of it must have soaked through the shirt too; sections of her torso were stained red. A crimson rivulet ran down the curve of one of her breasts before hiding itself in one of the cups of her black bra.
“How’s your night going, honey?” Minjung asked. She looked and sounded completely unfazed as she began to wring her shirt out in the sink.
Jiwoo realized she’d been standing frozen in the doorway, staring. “Where’s the body?” she asked.
“In the basement,” Minjung said. “Want to see?”
“No, I don’t care,” Jiwoo said.
Minjung nodded. Maybe that was a hurt expression on her face.
“Are you taking his teeth out?” Jiwoo asked.
“Her. And yes.”
Jiwoo hoped her expression didn’t betray that the intrusive memory of being restrained on the fourth floor had jumped to the front of her mind. “I guess I should come watch. I want to describe that in my book.”
Minjung smiled. “I’ll make sure you get a good view.”
- - - - -
The roads are emptier than usual on the way home from the woods, even for so early in the morning. Jiwoo inspects her fingernails for dirt and dried blood while Minjung drives.
“Do you know what day it is, honey?”
Jiwoo doesn’t look up. “I don’t.”
“It’s the one-year anniversary of when you moved in.”
Jiwoo still doesn’t look up, but now it’s a conscious decision. “Oh.”
She knew that date must be coming up, but she never recorded it anywhere. Of course Minjung would know when it was.
“Is that why you made the ring?” Jiwoo asks.
“It is,” Minjung says. “It’s not much, but I wanted to give you something tangible to show my appreciation.”
So it’s not some creepy, pseudo-marriage shit. That’s good.
“Appreciation for what?” Jiwoo asks.
“For starting a life with me, honey.”
Jiwoo clearly jumped to her former conclusion too quickly.
“What else was I supposed to do? It’s not like you left me any other choice,” Jiwoo says.
“You could have gone home to your mother and sister,” Minjung says.
The bracelet of teeth feels heavier than usual on Jiwoo’s wrist. Sometimes she hears it jingling, as if in the distance, when she isn’t even moving her arm. She hears it now, somewhere above her head and a little to the side.
“Yeah, I could have,” Jiwoo concedes.
She doesn’t have to wonder why she didn’t. After Eden, she couldn’t go home anymore. She didn’t even want to be there before Eden; that’s why she moved to the city.
And she doesn’t think of her mom’s house in Busan as home anymore, anyway.
“What’s on your mind, honey?”
Jiwoo swallows. “I don’t know. I was thinking we still have that wine you got at that work thing. Maybe we should drink it tonight to be festive or something.”
There’s a pause before Minjung answers. As much as she lavishes Jiwoo with affection, she seems shaken whenever she gets a hint of it back, even when it’s laced in sarcasm like what she just heard. It’s pathetic. It’s more pathetic if what Jiwoo suspects is true, that she couldn’t actually kill Minjung with her bare hands if the other woman didn't want to die.
"That's a good idea," Minjung says, her eyes firmly on the road.
- - - - -
The wine is a 2017 pinot noir from Australia, and the internet says it should be good. Jiwoo, wrapped in a towel with damp hair, still hopped up on adrenaline from the body disposal, uncorks it while Minjung is in the shower. She heard something about letting wine breathe at some point in the past, so it should be fine for her to leave it while she walks as quickly and quietly as she can up the stairs to her room.
She already knows that she doesn’t have any clothes that scream “seduction,” but after digging through her bottom drawer, she finds the underclothes that do.
In her defense, she was buying underwear anyway and there was a sale, and when she tried on the push-up, balconette, black mesh situation in the dressing room it made her feel sexy, which isn’t a normal feeling for her. She feels sexy when she tries it on now, which is unfortunate given who she’s maybe going to try to have sex with if she still feels like it after they’ve had their dumb “anniversary” drink. Jiwoo had kind of assumed her boobs would get smaller because of all the exercising, but apparently not. She can still see the reason she’s been wearing sports bras since middle school. If anything has changed size, it’s her ass - she doesn’t remember the matching panties (a word that still makes her cringe) showing so much in the back before.
It isn’t long before the sensuality turns into stress. The last time she tried to kiss a girl – more accurately, the only time she tried out kissing with a girl – it was nothing like this. It was with a friend from middle school whose house she often used to visit, and it was really just practicing for when they got boyfriends. That excuse didn’t work when her friend’s mom walked in on them, and they were never allowed to hang out outside of school again.
But Jiwoo isn’t trying to “kiss a girl” now – she’s almost thirty and she’s trying to fuck a woman.
She crosses her arms over her chest as if that’s going to help; it only makes her cleavage more prominent. She sighs and lets her arms fall to her sides. What is she doing here? She’s not sexy and she’s not gay, and sex is not worth any of this.
Before Jiwoo can take off the lingerie, the shower stops running. In a panic, she throws on her pajamas - a giant t-shirt and short shorts - and returns, with affected nonchalance, to the kitchen.
A few minutes later, Minjung enters the kitchen. She’s also in pajamas, her usual all-white set of a long-sleeved button-up shirt and long pants. Jiwoo can tell she's not wearing a bra. That’s obviously the more typical thing to do with pajamas and Jiwoo normally wouldn’t notice, but her own ill-advised secret lingerie situation has her more aware than usual of the twin impressions of Minjung's nipples through the fabric.
She remembers when she saw Minjung in the shower in Eden. Her breasts were small and perky with upturned brown nipples. Probably easy to hold one in each hand. Now that they live together, she knows Minjung wears an A-cup.
Minjung is looking at Jiwoo questioningly. She might have just actually asked a question.
“Aren’t you afraid you’re going to get wine on those?” Jiwoo asks. She’s standing by the table to provide herself with the illusion that she might just leave the room and call everything off.
Minjung doesn’t even answer, just pours wine into each of their glasses. Jiwoo cringes internally as they clink them. At least no one tries to make a toast. Minjung is content to stand by the table with Jiwoo, commemoratively sipping in silence.
"So," Jiwoo says. "It's been a year. How much longer do you think this is going to last?"
Minjung doesn't need to pause to think of an answer. "Until you kill me, honey."
"What if you end up dying of natural causes?" Jiwoo asks.
Minjung smiles a little. "I won't."
It's an odd thing to be confident about, but Jiwoo gets it. She won't die of natural causes either. “What if I don't kill you?”
“Why wouldn't you?”
Jiwoo avoids the question. “I mean, what if someone else gets there first?”
"We'll have to prevent that from happening."
It's kind of a cheap answer, but it gets the point across.
After a moment, Jiwoo asks, "How do you want me to kill you? That's what you used to whisper through the walls, right?"
"That's right."
"So how do you?"
A pause. Minjung's face has gone completely unreadable. "However you want," she answers eventually. "That's the point."
"Oh." Jiwoo hopes her embarrassment isn’t showing. Of course that would be the answer. She still doesn't totally get why, but that's the answer for nearly everything. But really, Minjung should understand that Jiwoo's lack of understanding is why she hasn't even thought of killing her since she moved in.
"It might not be for a while," Jiwoo says. "But who knows."
Minjung smiles slightly. "I'll look forward to it."
Jiwoo nods and drinks more of her wine. Another thing she can't do yet: respond to those kinds of comments as easily as Minjung.
“Did you try on the ring?”
Jiwoo drinks the rest of her wine in one swallow. “Not yet.”
"Show me when you do," Minjung replies without urgency.
Jiwoo nods again. She sets her empty wine glass down on the table and goes to get herself a cup of water from the sink. She stiffens as Minjung approaches her, but the other woman is just putting her own glass in the sink. Jiwoo gets the sense that this is the moment; this is the ideal time to make her proposition.
She doesn’t say anything.
“Goodnight, honey,” Minjung says, and leaves the kitchen.
Jiwoo grabs the edge of the sink and leans on it. She shuts her eyes. She opens them.
- - - - -
The first time they killed together, Jiwoo completely lost control. The only thing she remembers about it is the sensation of her knife piercing through flesh, once, twice, then over and over again.
Her more substantial memories begin during the aftermath. She came to in the basement to the sound of a zipper. She was standing over Minjung, who was closing up a body bag.
Minjung grinned up at Jiwoo. There was blood splattered across her clear plastic surgical gown and on her face. “You were inspiring, honey.”
“I was?”
“You were.”
In the dim half-light, Jiwoo realized something was on her hands. She didn’t need to look to know it was blood, but she did anyway. There was more dark crimson visible than there was bare flesh.
When she lifted her head, Minjung was standing in front of her, looking at her hungrily. She tilted Jiwoo’s chin up and examined her - examined what about her, Jiwoo couldn’t tell. She felt very small and volatile, like an atom about to be split. Her lips parted unconsciously.
The next thing she knew, Minjung was kissing her hard, so hard that Jiwoo tasted blood and couldn’t tell whose it was. She was too shocked to respond.
The kiss ended and Minjung peered down at Jiwoo again. The hunger faded from her eyes.
“Sorry, honey. I don’t know what came over me.” She began to remove the plastic coat, acting as if nothing had happened.
Jiwoo didn’t say anything.
Neither of them ever brought the moment up, but at least one of them thought of it often.
- - - - -
With forced confidence, Jiwoo knocks on the door of Minjung’s bedroom for the first time. She’s wondered what the room looks like before, but in the past, she stood firm and didn't even peek when the door was partially open.
When Minjung opens the door, she has a micro-expression on her face that Jiwoo has learned to identify as surprise.
“Let’s sleep - in here,” Jiwoo says. “Let’s both sleep in here today.”
Minjung blinks at her.
“Tonight,” Jiwoo corrects herself. “Let’s both sleep in here tonight.”
Minjung silently opens the door wider and steps aside to let Jiwoo enter. Her room looks almost identical to how Jiwoo’s did when she moved in - lamp, dresser, desk, closet, floor mattress in the middle of the room. Even the sheets are the same. The bookshelf is a little smaller, and at a glance, many of the volumes on it are related to medicine. On closer inspection, Jiwoo spots her old copy of The Metamorphosis.
Minjung’s futon is a size meant for one person. Jiwoo stares at it and considers leaving.
Minjung sits down on the mattress. “Do we need to fix something in your room, honey?” she asks. The delivery is impressively neutral, even for her.
Jiwoo is so close to retreating. She really is. But just then, undoubtedly aided by the anniversary wine, her adrenaline from the burial crashes. A dramatic yawn escapes her.
“Goodness, you’re tired.”
Jiwoo’s attempt to respond is interrupted by another yawn. Minjung gets under the covers, and as she does so, pushes the pillow to the side of the mattress closer to Jiwoo.
Jiwoo admits defeat. She’ll figure out whether she wants to try something with Minjung in the morning. For now, she’ll stop halfway there.
She gets under the covers, her head on the pillow. She barely registers the quiet “Goodnight, honey” before she falls asleep.
- - - - -
Hours later, a noise wakes Jiwoo. She sits up to see Minjung framed in the shadowy doorway, probably returning from the bathroom. She lays back down, her pulse racing.
Minjung gets under the covers beside her again. They lay like that for a while, neither acknowledging that the other is awake. Until Minjung does.
With her eyes closed, Jiwoo only hears the other woman turn over on her side to face her.
“Honey.”
Jiwoo stays still, her heart pounding.
Minjung speaks again, her voice softer but more penetrating. “Honey. Why did you come here tonight?”
Jiwoo couldn’t answer if her life depended on it. She keeps her eyes closed.
Minjung lets out something close to a sigh, and Jiwoo feels what’s going to happen before it happens. The older woman shifts closer to Jiwoo, close enough that their bodies overlap a little, and wraps one arm around her.
“Did you want something like this?”
Jiwoo squeezes her eyes shut tighter. The warmth and weight of Minjung’s body partially on hers is affecting her in ways that are undeniable. Her heart is still racing.
“You can do whatever you want in this world, honey. You can have whatever you want. You know that.”
Jiwoo opens her eyes and turns to look at Minjung beside her. They’re face to face now, almost nose to nose. And then they are nose to nose, close enough to feel each other’s breath. Close enough to kiss.
Jiwoo still can’t bring herself to close the final, tiny distance between their lips. Minjung takes pity on her.
It couldn’t be more different from the first time. Minjung presses her lips softly against Jiwoo’s and Jiwoo immediately responds. They hold back from escalating further than that until Jiwoo slides her tongue along Minjung’s lower lip. Then the older woman lets out a muffled moan, buries a hand in Jiwoo’s hair, and things escalate quickly.
Jiwoo grabs Minjung by the waist and pulls her closer as their tongues eagerly explore each other’s mouths. When Minjung hooks a leg around hers, Jiwoo unthinkingly slots her thigh between Minjung’s. Feeling the heat between Minjung’s legs does something to her brain, and even Minjung seems surprised when she pushes herself further toward the other woman’s groin.
Her confidence boosted, Jiwoo slides her hands under Minjung’s loose pajama shirt. Her breasts are perfect, an addicting combination of soft and firm, and they really do fit easily under Jiwoo’s hands. Minjung’s nipples are already hard when Jiwoo touches them, and she soon learns they’re sensitive. The muffled noise that Minjung makes against Jiwoo’s mouth the first time she pinches them is higher-pitched than she would have expected. It’s kind of cute and insanely sexy.
They have to stop kissing for an urgent moment to take their clothes off.
Minjung clearly did not expect the black mesh bra.
“I was going to…” Jiwoo starts to explain, but she doesn’t totally have an explanation. “I don’t know, do something in the kitchen? I don’t know.”
Minjung responds by burying her face in Jiwoo’s cleavage. Jiwoo gasps as the other woman pulls down one flimsy cup of her bra and sucks close to her areola hard enough to leave a mark. Jiwoo rolls onto her back, and Minjung, without missing a beat, begins to massage her still-covered breast while licking and biting at the opposite nipple.
At some point during all this, Jiwoo’s inhibitions disappear. She grabs Minjung’s free hand and shoves it between her legs. “Please,” she half-begs, “Touch me…”
Minjung doesn’t have to look down at what she’s doing in order to quickly find Jiwoo’s clit.
“Fuck,” Jiwoo moans. Minjung is just rubbing circles on her clit with one finger and it’s as good as when Jiwoo touches herself. Is it really this easy with another woman?
“Do you like something inside?”
“Yeah, fuck, oh my god…” Jiwoo barely recognizes her own voice. “Two is good, just don’t stop touching me…”
A pair of Minjung’s pale, slender fingers enter her, easily navigating her sopping wet channel. The heel of Minjung’s hand presses against Jiwoo’s clit as she fingers her, and that’s what pushes her to the edge. When Minjung latches down on her breast again, Jiwoo is gone, falling off a cliff into an ocean of ecstasy.
Minjung starts to take Jiwoo’s soaked panties off while Jiwoo is still gazing at the ceiling, processing her climax. She barely moves her legs to help Minjung out. A moment later, she looks down to see the other woman’s head between her legs just before she feels the pressure of her warm, wet tongue against her clit.
“Wait, wait,” Jiwoo gasps, propping herself up on her elbows.
Minjung tilts her head up just enough to meet her eyes.
“I already came, so you don’t have to…”
Minjung smiles. “I think you can come again, honey.”
Jiwoo shakes her head. It feels like a minor miracle that someone else could give her an orgasm, but she’s never even made herself come more than once in a day.
“Let me show you, honey. Let me taste you.”
“Okay,” Jiwoo says, and lays back, her head on the pillow. She’s not going to argue very hard against something that feels so good.
Soon everything feels even better. Jiwoo doesn’t know whether or not having a pussy makes someone automatically good at eating it, but either way, this is by far the best head she’s ever gotten. Minjung’s tongue never does the same thing for too long; it’s like she’s experimenting to see what affects Jiwoo the most. The answer is kind of everything, but it’s the firmer, longer licks on her clit that make her believe she can come again that night. By the time Minjung starts tonguefucking her, Jiwoo is so wet that it almost feels like the other woman is drinking her up.
“Fuck, this is…”
Then Minjung pushes two fingers inside her again and Jiwoo is beyond words. She can already feel her next orgasm building up in her lower abdomen, an amount of pressure and pleasure that seems like it should be paired with her first orgasm in months rather than minutes.
“I’m so close,” she says, and Minjung hums with satisfaction against her clit. She pushes a third finger in, and Jiwoo is practically floating.
She can’t tell what she’s babbling anymore, but if it’s “suck on my clit,” Minjung obeys. It’s half the added stimulation, half the slurping noise that sends the built-up climax inside Jiwoo crashing down on her body in a wave. She hears her bracelet chime as she braces herself by grasping the sheets.
Minjung keeps sucking on and fingering her as Jiwoo’s cunt involuntarily squeezes around her digits and aftershocks roll through her body. She breathes out a laugh as she realizes that Minjung isn’t going to stop. Fuck it, maybe her body is a perpetual orgasm machine.
She wraps her legs around Minjung’s shoulders and bucks up her hips up, grinding onto the other woman’s fingers and tongue. Minjung responds by moaning into Jiwoo’s pussy.
“How am I supposed to kill you now?” Jiwoo asks. She’s smiling. When did she start smiling?
Minjung stops was she’s doing and takes a breath, her face resting against the inside of one of Jiwoo’s thighs. “However you want, honey,” she says. She’s smiling too.