Ha. A short laugh slipped from Mok-young’s lips. It came out as his strength drained away. There Hae-gang was, still buried inside him, making such a stricken face over a single remark. Should he call that innocent, or absurd?
“You… it was your first time. Truly.”
Hae-gang took Mok-young’s hand and pressed his face into the palm as he spoke, and Mok-young’s insides tilted further toward disbelief. But it wasn’t a bad feeling. Wispy as the laughter was, more of it kept spilling out.
*He drove me that hard and he was a virgin?* His eyebrow twitched at the thought, but he was hardly in a position to judge — especially since taking a man from behind was something he himself had never even imagined — so there was nothing to scold Hae-gang for. He knew Hae-gang had only moved on instinct. A man is born knowing… a man’s duty, after all. And as an extreme yang person, how much more so. Though he did seem to have quite a talent for it.
In any case, Mok-young couldn’t deny the strange satisfaction that stole over him at the fact that this wedding night had truly been his wife’s first. An eumin taking a man’s member — even so, a man was a man, and who knew possessiveness would rear its head over such a thing.
“How can I not worry, when you’re this reckless?”
Mok-young spoke, moving the hand Hae-gang held. His touch drifted slowly over Hae-gang’s cheek, then traveled upward, and reaching his hair — pinned up neatly as always today, though a few strands had already slipped loose — he stretched a little further, caught the tie, and pulled it free. Hae-gang’s black, silk-like hair came undone and spilled down. It meant the wedding night was not yet over.
By “reckless” he had meant: how could someone who had never mated before throw himself in so readily, not knowing what would happen when his yang energy was spent? But that recklessness had given them both the keenest pleasure, so it was no longer something to blame him for.
“Just don’t give me too much grief.”
The words carried both worry and willingness, and Hae-gang, understanding, recovered his usual bright smile and lowered himself.
“I can’t promise that. Didn’t I say I’d make you regret snubbing me?”
He’d only just learned the pleasure of union and already his mouth was alive. Watching his wife, Mok-young thought so — and yet it struck him as endearing too, and he wondered if he was slowly growing used to his wife.
Mok-young said nothing more. He simply raised a hand, seized the nape of Hae-gang’s neck, drew him in, and pressed their lips together. Heat rose between them once more, and both knew instinctively that a fiercer passion than before would sweep them up this time.
As the day waned and darkness settled over everything, the snowfall grew heavier. While snow piled softly over all of Bukanseong and bitter cold swept through, deep inside Yeolliwon, atop the bed in Danmok’s room, a heat hotter than any season built and built, hazily, all night long.
Early morning, dawn just beginning to break. Mok-young opened his eyes as usual. After passion that had lasted into the small hours, he could have slept only two hours at most. Even so, his body and mind woke at their appointed hour, out of habit.
His body wasn’t so uncomfortable. There was a strange sense of wrongness lingering below, and a muscle ache tugging at his thighs, but nothing severe. Our general’s body was as sturdy as ever — taking a man for the first time, and a rather rough act at that, but bearable.
That he couldn’t quite bring himself to call it “fine” was purely because of the awkwardness welling up in him.
He hadn’t disliked it. Surprisingly, he hadn’t even felt much revulsion. But… that was why it felt so strange, as though his body had adapted in an instant. The feeling that his body was no longer his own had been a mire he’d thrashed in wretchedly all night, and it seemed to linger on, smoldering, even now. Unease rippled at the edges of that unfamiliar mire, and he even felt as though he might not be able to face Hae-gang.
“Not… like this,” he had said.
He had said that, and yet last night he had given Hae-gang everything, as though he’d been waiting for it. He had told himself Go Hae-gang was a strange man who made one accept anything without quite noticing — but the realization circled in Mok-young’s mind that even that might be a hollow excuse.
Was it attraction — this constant indulging of Go Hae-gang, this wavering before him? He knew well enough that the man was one whose yang energy he coveted, but there was still so much he didn’t know about the human Go Hae-gang, and one corner of Mok-young’s heart felt heavy. If this was attraction, then just as he had feared, he felt like a beast craving nothing but yang energy.
He could have simply taken it as fate — that Hae-gang’s scent had come to him, he who could scarcely even catch a hwain’s scent — but alas, Mok-young was not so simple a man. Yet that was also his refusal to use his wife as a mere vessel for replenishing his yang energy. If Hae-gang knew this tangled heart, would he only smile? — *My bride is more innocent than he looks, with such endearing little thoughts.*
“…”
In the stillness of early morning filling the room, Mok-young slowly sat up. The blanket covering him to his chest slid down, and his gaze flicked downward. His chest was a mess. As it naturally came to mind how it had gotten that way, his face flushed crimson. And without thinking, he raised a hand and needlessly swept it down his own nape. His touch grazed over Hyeonmu’s mark engraved at his nape.
“It’s beautiful, like waves breaking.”
Hae-gang had said that, looking at Mok-young’s back. His impression of the broad back engraved with Hyeonmu’s mark — too intricate to easily describe — was utterly simple and direct. Which was why it hadn’t felt like flattery.
Only, he couldn’t quite tell whether Hae-gang had said it merely drunk on excitement, or whether it had truly looked that way to his eyes. Would Hae-gang still say so once all the heat had cooled? Curiosity, unease, and needless expectation tangled and shimmered within him — proof enough that Hae-gang’s single remark had left a strange aftertaste in Mok-young’s heart. He who couldn’t easily show even the small bit visible at his nape, who went about hiding it under a leather guard — to have shown it all to his wife, and to hear such words from that wife who had been devouring him in such a moment — no wonder his heart was in turmoil.
Was he a cunning one, or one with atrocious taste? Thinking such needlessly spiteful thoughts, Mok-young turned his head to look down at Hae-gang’s sleeping face beside him. The morning’s stillness and silence had settled whole upon that deeply sleeping face.
“My, my… sleeping so soundly all by yourself.”
Leaving him adrift in this tempest of tangled feeling, no less. Well, it wasn’t as though Hae-gang had told him to be, so there was nothing to blame him for — but this urge to find him needlessly provoking, to scold him a little: was that the afterglow of the wedding night, which even our gallant general could not escape?
Mok-young recalled a morning not long ago. While one of them had tossed and turned all night groaning through his heat cycle, the other had appeared alone with a clear face, saying he’d slept refreshingly well, smiling brightly — that Hae-gang. It had been provoking enough that Mok-young, who had forced himself up early to see him off, had treated him coldly… but in truth, he hadn’t hated him.
He must have been trying to flee on instinct. He couldn’t deny he’d already known, even then, that any more contact with Hae-gang would lead to this. A soft laugh slipped from Mok-young’s lips. Still, he thought it rather fortunate that he wouldn’t have to meet the eyes of his wife — that wife with a talent for flustering people the moment they opened their eyes — right away.
Hae-gang lay with the blanket covering him only below the waist, his upper body fully bared. And from the way he lay facing Mok-young with an arm outstretched, it was clear that until moments ago, Mok-young had been using that arm as a pillow.
They must have clung to each other so sweetly when they finally sought sleep in the deep of night. The sensation of his body naturally leaning toward Hae-gang’s warmth was vivid — he couldn’t go so far as to call it affection, but he had to admit they’d stayed pressed together all along. Mok-young raised a hand once more and swept it down his nape, and felt heat flush hot at the back of his neck. The marks he had left were plainly visible on Hae-gang’s upper body too, and tangled feelings and all were swept hazily away again.
Mok-young leaned slightly toward Hae-gang and reached out a hand — to pull up the blanket that barely clung to his hips and cover him properly. The sight of those eye-dizzying marks was needlessly embarrassing, and he worried Hae-gang might be cold. But the moment he caught the edge of the blanket, Mok-young stopped. He had been worrying as though it were the most natural thing in the world, and only now remembered that Hae-gang’s body was no ordinary one.
The body that had touched his all night had been a ball of fire. Shaming his doubts over how Hae-gang could possibly bear his yin energy, the yang energy flowing in from him was like the blazing sun of midsummer. With that lava-hot yang energy pouring ceaselessly into him, Mok-young understood why Hae-gang always went about so thinly dressed he looked cold.
*This man’s yang energy is certainly no ordinary thing. Is that the cause of his illness?* Could it be… gnawing away at your lifeline?
A heavy question settled on Mok-young’s chest. The next time he faced Hae-gang, he resolved, he would finally ask just what it was that ailed him so.
Giving up on pulling the blanket over him, Mok-young was about to turn and get out of bed when he stopped again. Rustling, he had just moved his legs out from under the blanket when his head turned back toward Hae-gang once more. His gaze, tracing slowly up over Hae-gang’s waist and arm and along that forearm, came to rest on his face.
He’d said Hae-gang slept soundly all by himself, but looking now, he slept all too much like the dead. Not even the sound of breathing could be heard, and the moment he realized it, Mok-young felt his heart drop.
Mok-young froze, unmoving, for a long moment. To anyone’s eyes, Hae-gang’s face was the very picture of peace, the face of one deep in sleep — but the thought that this “peace” might be excessively deep brought a tightening tension to his chest before he knew it.
Damn it. He said he wouldn’t make me a widow. It’s only been one wedding night and my heart is pounding like this.
Mok-young blamed Hae-gang inwardly and needlessly for the strange unease rushing in, then belatedly, slowly, reached a hand toward him.
And the moment his fingertips touched beneath Hae-gang’s nose, feeling breath there, however faint, he let out a long sigh — “haa” — before he knew it.
“Were you worried about becoming a widow?”
Just as he was about to withdraw his hand, Hae-gang’s voice sounded suddenly, and Mok-young started violently. On the battlefield, crossing the line between life and death, he never startled like this in any situation — yet before Hae-gang, he had lost count of how many times his heart had leapt. But Go Hae-gang was a kind of obstacle he had never encountered in his life, and before that utterly unheard-of onslaught, Mok-young was helpless every time.
The one mercy was that he was trained not to show agitation outwardly, so even now his expression barely changed — but his body, trying to pull back, wobbled. Our general’s body was sturdy, he’d said this much muscle ache was nothing, but in a moment like this it proved the creaking factor after all.
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