"Yi Yeon?"
"Yes, yes!"
"If I don't even attend to my wife, I feel like my usefulness as a man diminishes. Yi Yeon, you don't make use of me as a husband at all."
"……."
"Since I'm in this state, you left me alone for a whole week without waking me up. Because I'm not really necessary for living. Am I wrong?"
"……!"
Yi Yeon felt a chill run through one side of her chest. It wasn't entirely wrong, and she felt as though her hidden inner thoughts had been exposed. For some reason, she felt ashamed.
"Th-that's because the doctor said nothing was certain yet, that we needed to observe more. Even when Kwon Chae-woo was asleep, I stayed by his side the whole time...."
Her excuse grew tediously long. Her self-defense, hollow as chaff, sounded flimsy even to her own ears, and as a result, her voice trailed off feebly. The man shook his head as if it didn't matter either way.
"I don't really know, but I just know."
"……."
"Yi Yeon, you are my morning."
As much as the man was this blind, conversely, Yi Yeon appeared insincere. That disparity stirred a strange sense of guilt.
Even conceding a hundred times, an unfaithful wife was an element that fueled his suspicion.
Yi Yeon, busy making her own calculations, failed to notice what expression Kwon Chae-woo was wearing as he looked down at her.
"If Yi Yeon doesn't have the confidence to teach me, then just don't refuse my attempts to act as a husband."
"……Is one of those duties washing me?"
When Yi Yeon asked back dubiously, Kwon Chae-woo, who had frowned instead, rubbed his lips with two fingers.
"That's strange. We probably did even more intense things when we had sex."
"……."
She became mute as if she had eaten honey.
"Maybe the reason we couldn't get interested in sex is because of the habit of buttoning up to the neck. Try being a bit more rude to me."
When he expanded the problem in that way, she had no sharp response. She just wanted to quickly plug up that embarrassing mouth of his.
"……Th-then just wash my back. Only my back."
He lazily lifted the corner of his mouth.
* * *
The sound of water moving, trickling, was as frightening as a dirge.
I'm crazy, crazy.
Yi Yeon, immersed in the bathtub, had thoroughly turned her back.
She was the one deceiving him, but she didn't know why she kept feeling like she was losing out.
—Knock knock.
He knocked on the bathroom door.
"C-come in."
Yi Yeon couldn't decide which made her heart race more madly—witnessing his live burial in the past, or standing completely naked right now.
Is this really okay? Can't someone put on the brakes? The humidity clinging to her skin made Yi Yeon dizzy.
"Yi Yeon."
His voice, now familiar. Though she had been surrounded by warm air the entire time, suddenly a chill touched her shoulder. The chair left outside the bathtub scraped with a rattle.
"Has your body relaxed a bit?"
"……Yes."
"Is just the back really enough?"
"Yes, yes."
Yi Yeon had deliberately added a lot of bubbles to the tub.
From the moment Kwon Chae-woo entered, she had been staring even more stubbornly at the wall. Rather than showing her chest to a difficult and frightening man, sacrificing her back was a hundred times better.
She deliberately even did cupping therapy; this was nothing.
"Did you wear panties?"
A faint laughter could be felt from nearby.
"……Yes?! C-can you see that?"
Yi Yeon flinched and gathered clouds of foam even more abundantly. She didn't know for sure, but his gaze seemed to be fixed below, making her buttocks tickle.
"Did you wear them because you're embarrassed?"
"……Wouldn't Kwon Chae-woo be more embarrassed than me? Since you have no memories, this situation must be your first time too. I-I'm quite used to it, but I was worried Kwon Chae-woo might be shocked to see a naked woman...!"
"Is that so?"
He suddenly plunged his hand into the bathtub. At the sound of water trickling, her spine stiffened. Her words and actions were completely at odds.
"Yi Yeon, you're really cute."
The situation of having to guess his actions relying solely on hearing made her nerves stand even more on edge.
"Are you still doing that kind of thing, calling it consideration?"
He laughed playfully and stirred the water.
Yi Yeon wanted to turn around, but she couldn't bring herself to because of her uncovered chest, so she endured it.
However, Kwon Chae-woo was not in a state where he could laugh comfortably as Yi Yeon thought.
The moment he saw the woman's slender shoulders and hollowed lower back, an impulse surged to suddenly slip his hand between her armpits and grab her chest.
Her narrow body, her smooth skin—there was no part that failed to capture his gaze.
If he became a greedy dog and crushed her beneath him, would she be surprised? Would she burst into tears? Or would she flail her body trying to escape?
He looked at Yi Yeon as if branding her, with eyes far exceeding boiling point. The wet neckline where hair clung, the fragile-looking wing bones, the narrow waist.
Though the front was endlessly billowed with foam, he only glanced at it dryly and left it alone.
The real Kwon Chae-woo would have touched her to his heart's content. Spreading a woman who didn't refuse, sucking, licking thoroughly inside and out, invading to take everything.
Reaching that conclusion, Kwon Chae-woo's face contorted fiercely. He wanted to find his memories. There had never been a moment he craved his lost memories as desperately as now.
"……Yi Yeon, what is this?"
A rough voice flowed low. Kwon Chae-woo's finger slid across her back. Yi Yeon, who had been trembling with each flinch following his touch, cried out.
"You need to use the scrubbing cloth, the scrubbing cloth!"
"……."
But Kwon Chae-woo acted as if he had gone deaf. He was fixated solely on gently touching her old scar. As if intending to absorb every ridge felt at his fingertips, he carefully traced even the sunken edges of the scar.
"Did someone hit you?"
"It's nothing special."
His hand was slippery with the mixture of foam and water. Yi Yeon, feeling strange, subtly twisted her body.
"That wasn't my question, Yi Yeon."
"What……."
She lowered her head onto her knees.
The deeply bent neckline was pitiful. At the same time, a fierce desire arose to bite that deer-like neck hard. An unmanageably hot mass settled inside him. He pushed the chair back with a scrape.
"Who did this to you?"
This scar was a trace of violence.
The clear proposition was inherent information Kwon Chae-woo originally possessed. He felt a strange certainty, as if he had unfolded an answer sheet. A scar like that could only form from being pressed with a pen tip or scissor point for a long time. He frowned at the familiar deductive sense turning like instinct.
"Don't want to say?"
Yi Yeon shook her head.
It wasn't that she didn't want to say—it was because it was the first time she'd received such a question. She had never in her life received such simple worry as "Who did this to you?"
From long ago, when it came to her life, everyone just took it for granted.
That kid can handle it. It's not the child who's pitiful, but the family who has to keep seeing that growing up. If they didn't think that way, the family would all go mad. Everyone empathized and kept quiet about it.
Yi Yeon poured the foam-mixed bathwater over her face. She hoped it would sting her eyes sharply.
"Family."
"……."
Kwon Chae-woo remained silent. But at the same time, an unpleasant hypothesis was sticking damply. The suspicion about 'Kwon Chae-woo' that she had repeatedly claimed was kind and affectionate.
It wasn't just the scar. Whether her body bruised periodically, dark marks were visible here and there on her white skin.
"It's okay, you don't have to believe me."
Yi Yeon added as if it really wasn't a big deal. At that habitual appeasement, Kwon Chae-woo answered as if pushed away.
"I believe you."
This time, Yi Yeon's shoulder flinched.
"That family human must have been quite a piece of trash."
Kwon Chae-woo murmured low, and Yi Yeon responded calmly.
"Well, perhaps there was a reason for it?"
"Where is there a reason for hitting someone?"
He clenched his teeth with a face that showed his insides boiling.
"When you love someone too much, that can happen."
"……!"
The animalistic behavior of lunging at her the moment he woke up, her reactions of fainting, the negative view toward sex. He didn't want to believe it, but he started to roughly guess. Kwon Chae-woo froze as if a gun muzzle had touched his forehead.
"Love turning into anger happens in an instant. People are different from trees—they don't give and give without expectation. So when the fruit forms wrong, people can't endure it."
Her mute voice struck the tiles and returned.
Kwon Chae-woo squeezed his eyes shut. Only then did So Yi Yeon's actions start to make a little sense. Perhaps their marriage had been something terrible for her.