Moss’s Rot @mossandink - Tumblr Blog

CATAMARAN

Chaewon x m!reader

18k words

She's somewhere on that terrace behind you. You can feel it the way you always can, this low awareness at the back of your skull whenever she’s in the same space. You wonder if she feels it too, If somewhere across the party she’s standing there, thinking about you with the same inconvenient frequency.

Put like that, it almost sounds like infatuation.

It isn’t.

More like a stupid situation.

The terrace sits cantilevered over the cliffs of Ravello, and the Tyrrhenian Sea is performing its slow transformation at this hour, slipping from blue into burnished copper in lazy stages, a glow that polishes faces and smooths edges until everyone seems faintly cinematic, almost worth a second glance.

White tablecloths. Wine poured by the glass at prices that could cover a month's worth of groceries. The annual Ravello Literary Festival - nominally a celebration of literature, though in practice it functions as an elaborate excuse for publishing people to sunburn elegantly on the Amalfi cliffs while pretending, with great conviction, to have read each other's latest releases.

(You are not in this scene yet. Give it a minute.)

Right now, the opening belongs to Kim Chaewon.

She's standing near the center of the terrace in a cluster of three, and even from across the crowd you can tell she's the axis the group orbits around - not because she's the tallest (Chaewon is actually kind of tiny; she stands at five-four, but the heels put her around five-six, super slim, almost fragile-looking. Her stylist plays that up well) but because she holds space the way certain people do. The ones who learned to take up room with presence when they couldn't do it with height.

Tonight it's a white linen dress, thin straps, the neckline cut just low enough to show her collarbones without tipping into obvious. Her brown hair is cropped into that short bob she's been wearing all year: blunt bangs, clean edges, the kind of haircut that reads effortless and costs four hundred dollars. She's tan. Not too much. Just enough to make the white dress pop against her skin.

(Everything about Kim Chaewon is just enough. That's her entire brand.)

The woman to her left is Irene - thirty-four, silver jewelry catching the last of the light at her wrists, the composed stillness of someone who has spent nearly two decades running a publishing house and stopped being impressed by anything roughly around year five. She owns the imprint that publishes Chaewon's novels, and the relationship between them operates on several frequencies at once; business partnership, maternal mentorship, quiet mutual exploitation, and something resembling genuine affection buried under layers of professional pragmatism.

To Chaewon's right: Sana. Twenty-eight. Japanese-born. A novelist whose debut collection of interconnected short stories landed her on every "writers to watch" list last year and earned the kind of critical goodwill that Chaewon's sales numbers have never quite translated into. There's this loose, comfortable energy about her - she laughs easily, touches your arm when she's making a point, and none of it ever feels performed. She's holding a glass of prosecco and wearing a slip dress in pale ivory, and she's currently mid-sentence, telling Chaewon about the Italian translation numbers.

"Eleven days," Sana repeats, squeezing Chaewon's wrist. "Sold out. First print run. Eleven days. That's not normal, Chaewon, that's genuinely insane."

"It's the Italian market," Chaewon says, waving her glass. "They love anything with a coastal setting and a messy love story. I basically wrote bait."

"Oh, stop it." Sana laughs. "Take the win."

"I am taking it. I'm just contextualizing."

Irene, without looking up from her Barolo, interjects: "You're diminishing it. Which is what you do when you're performing humility. Don't. It's unbecoming."

"I'm not performing—"

"You are. You've been doing it since I met you." Irene's gaze flicks up, brief and precise. "Your numbers are exceptional. Say thank you and move on."

Chaewon opens her mouth, closes it. Smiles - tight, acquiescing. "Thank you. Moving on."

Sana grins and clinks her glass against Chaewon's. "For what it's worth, my Italian publisher still hasn't returned my email from March. So I'm choosing to live vicariously through you."

"Your book is literary, Sana. The translation pipeline is slower. They'll get there."

"You keep saying that. 'Your book is literary.' You know that's just a nice way of saying it doesn't sell."

Chaewon tilts her head: "That's not what I—"

"It's fine. I've made peace with my niche." Sana takes a sip. "I sell modestly to people with graduate degrees and tote bags. You sell millions to everyone else. We both have our lanes."

"Your lane is the one with the Pulitzer at the end of it."

"And yours is the one with the villa in Provence."

"I don't have a villa in Provence."

"Yet."

Laughter breaks between them, genuine enough that Sana touches Chaewon's wrist again. There's something easy in it, a honesty that acknowledges yes, our careers exist on different planets, and no, we're not going to pretend otherwise, and somehow that's fine. Irene observes from her position at Chaewon's left, Irene watches them with the faintest trace of a smile - by her standards, anyway. In her two decades running the imprint, she's seen plenty of these literary friendships curdle the moment sales figures enter the chat. This one seems to be holding.

The prosecco moves in Sana's glass. Small, idle circles. But there's nothing idle about the way she's watching Chaewon right now. That particular brand of attention that precedes bad news delivered kindly.

Her voice, when it comes, has dropped half a register: "Speaking of the Italian market, actually. I saw the whole… thing. Online. About the review."

Chaewon lifts her glass and takes a long, measured sip, letting the moment extend past casual into something pointed, before setting the glass back down. "Which thing? There were several things."

"The TikTok discourse. The Reddit threads. My agent forwarded me the sales memo - the one that got leaked."

"That memo was taken completely out of context."

Sana nods. "Oh, totally. I know. I'm just saying… it must be exhausting. Dealing with the fallout from something like that."

Irene cuts in, measured: "Sana, maybe we don't need to—"

"It's fine, Irene." Chaewon sets her glass on the table with a clink that says it is not, in fact, fine. "It's not exhausting. It's infuriating. Exhausting is a long flight. Infuriating is watching one single, self-important, pseudo-intellectual review turn into a referendum on whether my writing has merit. As if merit is something a fucking critic gets to define."

Sana exchanges a quick glance with Irene. Irene's expression says: here we go.

"Suddenly every twenty-year-old with a BookTok account and a ring light is an authority on literary value." Chaewon's cheeks are flushed (not from the wine). "Kids who have read maybe fifteen books in their entire lives are writing thousand-word threads about how my prose lacks depth. Because he told them it does. Because he wrote it in that specific way he does - that surgical little style where he pretends he's being objective while he's actually just eviscerating you. And people eat it up. They think they're reading criticism, but it's really just someone being cruel and dressing it up with fancy words."

"The review cycle will pass," Irene offers. Patient. Rational. The voice of a woman who has talked authors down from ledges higher than this. "They always pass. Three months from now, nobody will remember."

"This one didn't pass. This one metastasized."

"Chaewon—"

"Do you know what my analyst projections looked like last quarter?" Chaewon turns to Irene fully. "Because you should. You publish me. Seven percent dip. That's not a blip, Irene. That's a shift. And it started the week his review went viral."

Irene holds her gaze. Doesn't flinch. "I'm aware of the numbers."

"Then you understand why I'm not going to just wait it out."

"He is good at what he does, though," Sana says quietly. "I mean… setting aside what he did to you - his actual criticism is—"

"He's a frustrated artist who can't write fiction, so he tears apart people who can! That's all critics are. Every single one of them. People who wanted to create something and couldn't, so they appointed themselves the arbiters of everyone else's work. They sit in judgment because the alternative is admitting they don't have the talent to participate. And this one—" She presses her finger against the table. "—this one in particular has made it his personal fucking mission to convince the world that I'm literary fast food."

"You're not fast food," Sana says.

"I know I'm not."

"You're more of a—"

"Sana, I swear to god, if you finish that sentence with a food analogy—"

Sana closes her mouth. Hides her smile behind her prosecco.

Irene sets her glass down with finality and gives Chaewon a look that carries the full weight of their professional history: "Here's what I'll say. Once. He wrote a review. It hurt. It went wider than it should have. But you are still the bestselling author on my list by a factor of three, your book is still in the top twenty, and this festival invited you, not him. So take a breath. Drink your wine. And stop giving him real estate in your head that he hasn't earned."

Chaewon stares at her. The flush is still high on her cheeks, but something in Irene's calm has landed, and for a moment she looks less furious and more tired.

Then Sana, who has been quiet for about four seconds, ruins it.

She's not looking at Chaewon anymore. She's looking past her shoulder, toward the far end of the terrace where the crowd thins out near the stone parapet. The polished limestone floor gives way to rougher stone at the edges, where the terrace meets the original cliff face, and the last stragglers have drifted into loose pairs and solo contemplation. Sana's eyebrows go up.

"Chaewon."

"What."

Sana nudges her elbow and tilts her chin toward the parapet: "Isn't that him over there?”

Chaewon turns. And yes. It is indeed you.

You're standing at the edge of the terrace, one hand resting on the parapet, the other holding a glass of champagne you've barely touched. You're not engaging with anyone. You're just - there, looking out at the beach below, where the last of the daylight is catching the white hulls of two catamarans moored in the harbor. You look unbothered. Comfortable, even.

Chaewon reacts before she can hide it. She looks caught off guard, then angry, and then there’s a third emotion she locks away immediately.

She hands her glass to Sana. "Hold this."

Irene's hand lands on her forearm. "Chaewon. Don't."

"I'm just going to talk to him."

"You're going to make a scene."

"I'm going to talk to him. At a party. Where adults talk to each other." She's already pulling her arm free. "That's all."

"Chaewon—"

But she's already moving. Shoulders set. That walk she does when she's about to be very, very unpleasant to someone.

You don't see her coming. You're watching the catamarans - two of them, side by side, their twin hulls catching the copper light. There's something about the geometry that holds your attention. Parallel lines that never converge.

"Hey. You."

You don't turn around. You take a sip of champagne. The sea is really doing something spectacular right now, and you'd rather not.

"Hey! I'm talking to you."

Louder this time. Loud enough that two people at the nearest table glance over. You let the moment sit for another beat - not to be rude, not exactly, but because you know the pause will cost her - and then you turn. She's closer than you expected. Close enough that you can smell her perfume - gardenia, you think, warm and sweet from her skin. Five-six in heels and radiating enough hostility to fill a space twice this size.

You greet her. First name. Calm. Pleasant. The way you'd greet a colleague at any professional function.

"You have a lot of nerve showing up here. Half the people at this party hate you."

"I don't think that's entirely true."

"It is."

"Sana spoke to me earlier, actually." You let that sit for a second. "She thanked me for the review I wrote about her new collection. The short stories."

"Of course she did. You were nice to her."

"I was honest. She didn't need to thank me. I was just doing my job."

She takes a step closer, and you can see the flush on her cheeks, the tension in her jaw. She's been drinking - not a lot, but enough to loosen whatever restraint she might have exercised sober.

"Your job," she repeats, stressing it just enough to sting. "Your job cost me a seven percent dip in projected first-quarter sales. Your job made my publisher schedule an emergency marketing call at six in the morning. Your job turned my book into a meme, you understand that? There are teenagers on the internet making edits of my cover with clown emojis because of what you wrote. How do you just— how do so many people listen to someone so dumb?"

You look at her for a moment. Unhurried. "Your book is selling well, Chaewon. Extremely well, actually. It debuted at number three on the Times list and it's still in the top twenty. I genuinely don't understand the fuss."

"The fuss is that it should have been number one. The fuss is that I had momentum and you killed it."

"I didn't kill anything. I wrote a review. You’re experienced enough to know that once you share your work publicly, you’ll be exposed to all sorts of feedback and opinions.”

She's breathing hard. Her fists are clenched at her sides, knuckles pale against the tan. "Say it to my face, then."

"I'm sorry?"

"The review. Everything you wrote. Say it to my face. Right now. You were so brave behind your keyboard - be brave in person. Tell me what you really think."

You set your champagne glass on the parapet ledge. Carefully, so it doesn't tip. "All right."

And you do. Very politely.

"The premise is built on a foundation that's been used so many times it's essentially public domain at this point. Two strangers reconnecting after a shared tragedy - it's been done by Nichols, by Munro, by half the MFA programs on the eastern seaboard. That's not automatically disqualifying, but it means the execution needs to justify the retread. Yours doesn't. The plot follows a structure so predictable I could map the emotional beats by page number before I'd finished the first fifty pages. The second act complication arrives on schedule. The romantic false defeat happens exactly where you'd expect it. And the resolution - Chaewon, the resolution is the same resolution you've written in your last three novels, dressed up with different proper nouns."

She's staring at you. Very still.

"And then there's the dialogue," you continue. "Which is actually the most frustrating part, because you clearly have an ear for how people speak. You do. But you push it too far. You overwork every line until it sounds rehearsed. There's this compulsion to make every exchange feel hyper-naturalistic, and the effect is the opposite - it draws attention to the craft in a way that reminds the reader they're reading something constructed. You're trying so hard to give the story authenticity that it ends up feeling synthetic. Polished on the surface. Plastic underneath. Comfort food dressed as cuisine."

Chaewon steps closer. So close you could count the lashes framing those dark, furious eyes. "You're an asshole." Quiet. Steady. Then not quiet, not steady: "You're a fucking asshole! You sit up there in your little ivory tower writing your little poison pen columns and you have never - not once in your miserable career - produced a single page of original fiction. You've never built a world. You've never made a reader cry. You've never stayed up until four in the morning bleeding onto a page because the story demanded it. You destroy. That's your entire skill set. And you're proud of it."

"Are you done?"

"I'm nowhere near done. You know what every critic in the history of criticism has in common? They couldn't do it themselves. Every single one of you. Failed writers. Frustrated artists playing judge because the alternative is admitting you don't have the talent to—"

"You're making my point for me."

That shuts her up. She blinks at you, mouth still half-open on whatever cutting response died in her throat.

You straighten up. Hands in your pockets. Relaxed. Almost amused, and you can tell the almost amused is what's making her fingers twitch toward a drink she no longer has. (Because she handed it off to Sana. Which, looking back on it, was probably not her smartest move.)

"You came all the way across this terrace to yell at me, and you haven't refuted a single thing I wrote. Not one point. You've attacked my character, my career, my motives - but the actual substance of the review? Nothing." You let that breathe. "You only go after me because you have no arguments to counter mine."

Her lips part. Nothing comes out.

"But I actually like it," you add. Your expression changes subtly - not a smile, but the ghost of one, living somewhere behind your eyes. "The anger. The theatrics. Coming over here with your fists clenched. It's cute, Chaewon."

Her whole frame stiffens. The word “cute” lands with force, cracking straight through the composed façade she’s built piece by piece.

An Italian terrace, sunset light, white linen dress, and you reduce her to cute.

She stares at you, and the flush creeping down from her cheeks has reached her chest now, you can see it above the white linen, spreading across her collarbones. Her mouth presses into a hard line. Her hands won't stop shaking, and it's sure as hell not fear making them tremble.

"You have no idea how much I hate you." She says it with her whole chest. Eyes wet - not from tears, from fury, from the kind of heat that builds behind your face when your blood pressure spikes and you can feel your own pulse in your temples. "You have absolutely no idea."

"Hate is a strong word, Chaewon."

"It's the right one."

You consider this. You pick your champagne glass back up from the parapet and hold it loosely, rolling the stem between your fingers. Below, the catamarans sway in the harbor, their hulls turning gold in the dying light.

"Sometimes I think about you too," you say. Not warmly. Not cruelly either. Something flatter than both. "I think about your mediocrity. About how someone with your instincts actively chose to write at half capacity, and still makes millions doing it. That irritates me. I'll admit that."

She opens her mouth but you're not finished.

"It irritates me because it proves something I don't want to believe." You wave a hand at the terrace, the whole scene. "That none of this has a future. Look around: beautiful people, expensive wine, conversations about absolutely nothing." You pause. "This generation either drowned in nihilism and can't feel anything real anymore, or they bought into capitalism so hard that selling out became the entire aesthetic. Either way, same result. Mediocrity sells. Sincerity doesn't.”

You place the champagne glass back on the parapet, turn, and start walking toward the stone staircase at the far end of the terrace. Narrow steps carved into the cliff face, descending toward a lower landing where the staff keeps extra chairs and folded tablecloths. Nobody goes down there during events.

"I'm not done talking to you." Her heels click behind you. Fast. "Hey. Hey! I said I'm not—"

"Enjoy the party, Chaewon." You don't turn around. You take the first step down. "Isn't that why you write? To be surrounded by your own kind? The same breed of self-congratulatory artists, clinking glasses and telling each other how brave and important they all are.”

Her footsteps stop for a second - then resume, faster, following you down the stairs. The sounds of the party recede with each step. Glasses clinking, polite laughter, someone telling an anecdote about their Parisian editor. All of it fading.

"That's rich, coming from someone who—"

"Go back to your friends."

"—who thinks standing alone at a railing makes him interesting. And don't you dare say I surrendered to capitalism.” She's two steps behind you now, her hand gripping the iron railing. "My latest book literally critiques capitalism. The entire third act is a structural dismantling of—"

"I read it."

"Did you? Or did you feed it into ChatGPT and ask for a summary so you could fake your way through another hit piece?”

You nearly smile at that. "Yeah, that would've been smarter. Could've skipped three hundred and fifty pages of freshman political theory arguments.” You take another step down. The stone is rough under your shoes, worn smooth in the center from centuries of feet. "Capitalism critique is everywhere now, you realize that? Publishing houses do it. Streaming services do it. Billion-dollar brands build entire marketing campaigns around how capitalism is failing. Writing a novel that critiques capitalism doesn't make you brave or superior - it puts you on the exact same shelf as every other pseudo-intellectual writer who thinks pointing at the problem counts as solving it."

She's quiet for three steps. You can hear her breathing.

"Here's what you're not getting," you continue, reaching the bottom. "Capitalism doesn't fight back against criticism. It doesn't need to. It just absorbs it. Packages it. Sells it. Your book retails at twenty-eight dollars hardcover. Two hundred thousand first print. Your publisher made a product out of your critique, and everyone profited - including you." You step onto the lower landing. "That's not rebellion. That's a business model with a conscience sticker on it.”

The stairs deposit you into a curved alcove cut directly from the cliff - a pocket of stone that tucks beneath the terrace overhead. The rock arcs above you where the terrace floor sits, forming a natural canopy that makes you invisible to anyone standing up there. They could lean on the parapet, scan the harbor, nurse their prosecco six feet above your head, and never know.

Unless you step to the left. That's where the stone ceiling ends and the open air begins - a gap where the architecture gives way to sky, and the sightline from the terrace parapet drops straight down to where you're standing.

It's cooler here. The party compresses into something distant and soft - laughter, the clink of stemware, a fragment of someone's sentence about translation rights - all of it reduced to murmur.

Below, the sea.

Chaewon follows you down the last step, breathing hard, and she's not done: "People are debating my book at universities. There are actual academic discussions happening about the themes I—"

"Is that supposed to impress me?"

"It means my work has substance.”

"People write theses on Taylor Swift's lyrics, Chaewon. Anything can be dissected if you apply enough academic framework to it. There are peer-reviewed papers on the semiotics of fast food branding." You lean against the stone wall, arms crossed. "Academic attention doesn't equal literary merit. It just means someone needed a dissertation topic. And while I'm sure your book provides plenty of material for a second-year cultural studies course, I don't think there's anything in it that's really worth the effort."

She's standing in front of you with the sunset at her back, and the copper light does something unfair to her - catches the edges of that bob, the loose strands the wind has pulled free, the bangs she keeps pushing out of her eyes that won't stay put anymore. The walk down the stairs and the argument and the salt air have undone about forty minutes of whatever she did in front of a mirror before tonight, and the result is better than the original. She looks wrecked and gorgeous at the same time, flushed and furious, and you clock it the way you clock everything: at a remove, converting sensation into observation before it has a chance to become something inconvenient.

You turn back toward the sea.

Which is exactly why you miss her hand until it's gripping your shoulder, spinning you. Suddenly both her palms are pressed flat against your chest, fingers curling into the fabric of your shirt, pulling it tight. Her knuckles have gone completely white from the pressure. When you focus, her face is inches from yours.

"You're a piece of shit." Her teeth are clenched. Every syllable pushed through them. "A smug, self-satisfied, worthless piece of shit."

"And you're a crybaby who craves validation." You don't remove her hands. You don't step back. "The worst kind of writer. The kind I genuinely can't stand. Not because you're bad - because you're needy. You need every single person in every single room to tell you you're brilliant, and the second one person doesn't, you come unraveled. And the worst part? Everyone around you lets you. Your publisher, your agent, your little entourage up there—" You tilt your head toward the terrace. "—they all just nod along and validate whatever tantrum you're throwing this week. Nobody tells you no. Nobody pushes back. They just pat you on the head and tell you the mean critic doesn't understand your genius, and you eat it up because it's easier than actually sitting with the possibility that maybe - maybe - your work has problems. And if you really can't handle it, Chaewon - if one review is enough to send you spiraling across a terrace to grab a stranger by the shirt - then maybe you should seriously consider doing something else. Because this industry is going to keep hitting you, and the hits are going to get worse, and if this is how you cope, writing might not be for you.”

Her grip tightens on your shirt. Her jaw is trembling. "Take that back!”

"What are you going to do? Hit me?" You look down at her fists, bunched in the linen. Then back up. "Go ahead. But it won't make your writing any better."

She holds there for a full second. You're seeing everything in slow motion: her knuckles against the fabric of your shirt, her arms shaking, her eyes wet and furious and searching your face for something - a flinch, a crack, any sign that you're not as calm as you're pretending to be. The party hums above you. The sea moves below. You can feel her pulse through her fists where they press against your chest, hammering, and you genuinely think she's about to hit you. Or shove you backward into the parapet.

She moves.

Her weight shifts onto her front foot with every muscle in her body coiled toward violence, and you brace for it - the slap, the shove, whatever she's winding up to deliver.

She kisses you.

There's zero tenderness in it. Zero romance. This is violence, just happening to involve her mouth. She surges forward on her toes and crashes into you, lips first, and her teeth catch your lower lip immediately - not a nibble, a bite, sharp enough to draw blood. You taste copper. Her hands are still fisted in your shirt and she's pulling you down to her height, and the kiss is angry, graceless and wet, and between the collisions of mouth against mouth she's still talking, still spitting words into the space between breaths:

"I fucking hate you—" Another kiss, harder. Her tongue against yours, then her teeth again. "You ruined my launch—" She bites the corner of your mouth. "You ruined my year—" Her nails dig through the shirt fabric into your chest. "Arrogant—" Kiss. "Pretentious—" Kiss. "Piece of—"

You kiss her back.

Not the way she's kissing you. Not frantic. You take her by the waist - both hands, firm, your fingers pressing into the linen where it sits against the curve above her hips - and you turn her. Smoothly. She makes a small, involuntary sound against your mouth as her back meets the stone wall, and her shoulder blades flatten against the rough surface, and you lean into her, and now you're the one setting the tempo.

You slow it down. You deepen it. Your hand comes up to the side of her neck - thumb against her jaw, fingers in her hair, tilting her head back. She goes with it. Hates that she goes with it. You feel the war happening in her body, the way she's simultaneously pulling you closer by the shirt and pushing against your chest with the heels of her palms.

She separates just enough to breathe, her lips swollen and still grazing yours, and her eyes are glassy and fierce at once - pupils blown, lashes wet, that flush crawling down her neck into her collarbones. Her fingers still twisted in your shirt. She swallows hard.

"If I let you fuck me—" She licks her lower lip. Tasting you. Tasting herself. "—will you write a better review next time? Is that what this is? Is that how you operate?"

You pull back an inch. Study her face.

She doesn't wait for an answer. The words are already loaded and she's pulling the trigger: "Because I've been wondering about Sana. That glowing review you wrote. Four thousand words of praise for a debut short story collection - from you, the man who hasn't said a nice thing about anyone's work in half a decade." Her jaw tightens. "You said she thanked you. She thanked you. So I'm asking. Did she get on her knees for that review? Was that the price of admission?"

"Careful, Chaewon."

"Did you fuck her in some hotel room and then go home and write about how luminous her prose was? Is that the pipeline? Because if that's what it takes, fine, here I am. At least I'm being upfront about it instead of pretending—"

You kiss her. Once. Brief. Hard enough to cut the sentence in half. You pull away slightly and look at her, and for the first time she can’t read your expression. "I would never do something that low," you say. Quiet. Measured. "Not to her. Not to you. Not to my own work."

"Bullshit. Men like you always—"

"Men like me what? Say it. Finish the sentence."

She falters. Just for a beat.

"Here's what just happened, Chaewon. Pay attention, because I know how much you value close reading." You hold her gaze. "A woman - a young woman, a first-time author, someone who spent three years writing a book in a studio apartment in Osaka - received a positive review based on the quality of her prose. And your immediate response, your gut instinct, wasn't to consider that maybe she earned it. That maybe she wrote something genuinely good. Your first thought was that she must have spread her legs."

Her lips part, yet no sound escapes.

"You didn't question my integrity. You questioned hers. You took a woman's professional achievement and reduced it to a sexual transaction. Not because you have any evidence. Not because anything about Sana's behavior suggests it. But because the alternative - that a peer of yours might simply be more talented - is so unbearable to your ego that you'd rather tear another woman down than sit with it."

"That's not what I—"

"That is exactly what you did." Your thumb traces along her jaw. Slow. Gentle, which makes it worse. "You, Chaewon. The woman with the feminist book club recommendations on her Instagram. The one who posted that essay about women supporting women in publishing. Who put sisterhood in her bio last International Women's Day." You tilt her chin up. "And the moment another woman's work gets praised, you assume she fucked for it. Because in your mind, there's no other explanation for a woman succeeding where you didn't."

She swallows. You feel it under your fingers.

"So where's the sisterhood? Hmm?" You lean closer. Your lips nearly brush hers. "Where did it go? Or was it always just content?"

Her eyes are wet. Not from sadness - from the specific, burning shame of being seen doing something ugly and knowing you can't walk it back. Her mouth works. Her fingers clench and unclench in your shirt.

"You're arrogant, Chaewon. Not in the fun way. Not in the way that drives ambition or fuels good work." Your thumb settles on her lower lip. "In the corrosive way. The kind that eats talent from the inside out. The kind that makes you tear down other women because their success feels like your failure."

She stares at you. The flush on her chest has deepened three shades. Her breathing is shallow and rapid, and she's gripping your shirt so hard the fabric is stretched beyond recovery.

Her chin trembles once. She steadies it. "Sana is talented," she says eventually. Costing her something visible.

"Yes. She is."

"And I'm—"

"Still pinned against a wall with my hands on you. So maybe save the self-reflection for later.”

You feel her swallow against your thumb. Her pulse hammers under your fingertips where they rest on her neck. Her chest rises and falls in these short, uneven breaths. Her lips are swollen from all the biting, parted slightly, and the look she's giving you is trying desperately to be pure hatred but can't quite commit.

"But," you say, your gaze dropping from her eyes to her mouth, down to her collarbones, following the way that white linen drapes against her skin in the dying light. Your hand slides from her neck down to her collarbone, thumb tracing the delicate ridge of bone. She doesn't move. Doesn't breathe. "—the one thing I'll give you, Chaewon, is that you're unfairly fucking gorgeous.”

Her pulse is hammering so fast you can see it in her throat, her pupils are blown wide, she's breathing through her mouth, and every single one of these details contradicts what comes out of it next.

"So what's the plan here, huh?” She tugs at your shirt, pulling you closer even as her mouth pushes you away. “You're gonna fuck me? Right here? Where anyone could just walk down those stairs and—" Her gaze drops to your mouth for a half-second. Snaps back up. She shakes her head. "Jesus Christ. You're a fucking pervert."

"Is that what you want?"

"That's not an answer."

"It wasn't meant to be. I asked you a question."

She glances toward the staircase - calculating distance and risk in a single look - then back to you. Her fingers haven't released your shirt. She hasn't stepped back. Hasn't created a single inch of separation between her body and yours.

"I want—" She stops. Starts over, harder this time. "I need to get this out of my system. This frustration. You have no idea how the past few weeks have been for me. What this entire month has been because of you and your little hatchet job."

"So get it out."

"I will." She straightens up. There it is: the defiance snapping back into place, the bratty architecture rebuilding itself in real time, brick by brick. "But let's be honest with each other for once. You're not going to make me cum."

"No?"

"No. I'm going to stand here and let you fumble around for a few minutes, and then I'm going to walk back up those stairs more frustrated than I already am. And you'll have another mediocre performance to add to your résumé." Her eyes narrow, and the corner of her mouth curls. "Which is kind of your whole thing, isn't it? Big buildup. Lots of tension. No payoff. You write reviews the same way."

"Interesting theory."

"It's not a theory. It's a prediction." She tilts her head. "Prove me wrong."

"I don't perform on command, Chaewon."

"Of course you don't. That would require actually delivering on all that confidence you walk around with." She pats your chest twice - condescending, calculated. "It's fine. I've learned to manage my expectations when it comes to you."

You look at her. She looks back. Defiant. Steady. Daring you with every molecule of her five-foot-four frame.

"You're still holding onto my shirt," you point out.

Her grip tightens reflexively. She glances down at her own fists.

"Force of habit," she says. Doesn't let go. “So, what are you going to do about it?”

"Are you finished?"

"I'm asking you a question. What are you going to do?" She tugs your shirt again. Demanding. "Because if your plan is to just stand there looking constipated while I do all the—”

You don't answer. You let your hands do something instead. They start at her waist - where they've been resting against the linen - and they move upward. Slow. Over the curve of her ribs, feeling each one through the thin fabric, feeling the way her breathing stutters when your thumbs graze the underside of her breasts. She's not wearing much beneath the dress. You can tell. The linen is light, almost sheer in the fading golden light, and her nipples are already hard against the fabric, two small points pressing through the white.

Your palms settle over her breasts. She's small but full in a way that fits her frame perfectly, that perky firmness that you feel shift against your hands as she inhales sharply. You squeeze. Gently. Testing. Her eyelids flutter, and she bites down on her lower lip, and she's trying so hard not to react that the effort itself is a reaction.

You slide the straps of her dress down. One at a time. Left, then right. The white linen slips to her upper arms, and underneath there's a bra - simple, cream-colored, slightly sheer. Her breasts sit perfectly in the cups, the swell of them pushed together slightly by the cut, and you can see her nipples through the thin material, dark and stiff.

You lean in and kiss her while both hands come up to cup her breasts over the bra. She makes a sound into your mouth - involuntary - and you swallow it. You squeeze, firmer, rolling your thumbs across her nipples through the fabric, feeling them harden further under the pressure. She arches into your palms. Her hands come up to your shoulders, nails digging in, and her hips shift against the wall.

You take your time. You thumb the lace edge of one cup, pulling it down just slightly, exposing the upper curve of her breast. Kissing her jaw. Kissing the spot just below her ear. Feeling her pulse under your lips, rapid and heavy. She tilts her head back against the stone and her eyes close, and you drag your thumb across her bare nipple and she gasps, this tiny sharp intake that she immediately tries to smother.

Her patience shatters in under a minute.

"Are you serious right now?" Her eyes fly open and she snatches your wrist. "Do it quickly or don't do it at all. Someone could walk down those stairs any second and I'm not getting caught because you want to play out some slow-burn fantasy." She glances pointedly at your hands still cupping her chest. "What even is this? Are you savoring the moment? Writing mental notes for later?"

"I'm—"

"Oh my god, have you literally never felt tits before? You're acting like a virgin who just got to second base. Either fuck me properly or get your hands off me.”

You stop. You pull back enough to look at her face. Then your hand comes up and catches her jaw - not roughly, but firmly, your fingers pressing into her cheeks, tilting her face up toward yours. Her eyes widen. Her lips compress between the pressure of your thumb and forefinger, and for a second she looks genuinely startled.

"I don't like being rushed," you say.

She tries to respond but your grip on her face makes the words come out slightly compressed: "Then you shouldn't be doing this in a—"

"But fine." You release her jaw. "You're right. Let's get this over with quickly. I don't want to spend another second near you."

She opens her mouth to reply but you're already moving.

Your hand drops from her breast to her thigh. You gather the hem of her white linen dress - sliding it upward along her leg, the fabric bunching in your fist, her skin warm and smooth underneath. Your knuckles graze the inside of her thigh and her legs part, just slightly. The dress rides up past her hips. Simple white underwear. Cotton. A damp spot already darkening the fabric between her legs.

You slide your hand inside.

She's soaked. Not damp, not slightly wet - drenched. Your fingers slip against her folds, hot and slick, and the contrast between the venom coming out of her mouth for the past twenty minutes and the state of her cunt right now is so pointed it's almost funny. You cup her, letting the heel of your palm press against her clit, and her whole body jerks. Her hand flies to your forearm and grips it, nails leaving half-moons.

"Fuck," she breathes. Just that. One word. Raw.

You rub her slowly. Two fingers dragging along the length of her slit, spreading the wetness, circling her clit with a pressure that's just shy of enough. She rolls her hips into your hand, seeking more, and you pull back just slightly, keeping her at the edge of satisfaction, never quite landing where she needs you.

Then you push two fingers inside her. She gasps against your mouth and her hand tightens on your forearm. You feel her clench around your fingers - tight, wet, hot - and you curl them upward, pressing against that ridged spot on the front wall, and her legs nearly buckle. She grabs your shoulder with her free hand to stay upright, her heels sliding on the stone.

She kisses you. Desperate now, her teeth catching your lip again, her tongue pushing into your mouth, and it's messy, urgent and she's moaning against your teeth as you start to move your fingers in and out. Slow strokes. Deep. Curling on every withdrawal, dragging against that spot, and your thumb finds her clit and applies a steady, circular pressure that makes her thighs shake.

You pull your mouth from hers. Your lips brush her ear: "You're so predictable, Chaewon."

"Shut up—"

"This whole performance tonight. Coming all the way across that terrace, getting in my face, making your little scene." You thrust your fingers deeper and she chokes on a moan. "You didn't come over here because you're angry. You came over here because you needed attention. My attention. And this was the only way you knew how to ask for it."

"That's not— I didn't—" She's struggling to form sentences. Your fingers are working her steadily, a relentless in-and-out rhythm with your thumb circling her clit, and her hips are moving against your hand in tight, involuntary rolls. "I came over because you're a piece of— ah— piece of shit who ruined my—"

"You're a brat." You say it simply. Factually. Your fingers don't stop. "That's all this is. You came here tonight, found me minding my own business, started running your mouth, pushed and pushed and pushed—" You curl your fingers and she whimpers, her forehead drops against your collarbone. "—all because you wanted me to do exactly this."

"No—"

"I bet in every possible version of tonight, you do the same thing." You press your thumb harder against her clit and she bucks against your hand. "Every scenario. Every outcome. You find me, you pick a fight, you act insufferable, and then you end up exactly where you are right now - pinned against a wall with my fingers inside you, pretending you didn't want it." Your lips move against her ear. "In every version of this, Chaewon, you're doing the exact same thing. Being an insufferable, bratty little nightmare until someone finally fucks you into silence."

She makes a broken sound against your neck. Her hips are grinding against your hand now, chasing it, and you can feel the tension building in her body - her thighs clamped around your wrist, her stomach muscles trembling, her walls fluttering around your fingers in that telltale rhythm.

"You're not—" she starts, and her breath hitches. "You don't get to— fuck— you don't get to psychoanalyze me while you're—"

"While I'm what?"

"While you're fingering me, you arrogant— oh god—"

You increase the pace. Your wrist aches, but you don't care. You fuck her with two fingers, fast and deep, curling against her g-spot on every stroke, your thumb working her clit in tight circles, and she's falling apart in stages - first the insults dissolve, then the sentences, then the words, until all that's coming out of her mouth are these short, punched-out sounds, each one higher and more desperate than the last. Her nails rake down your forearm. Her head tips back against the stone wall, exposing the long line of her throat, and her eyes are shut and her mouth is open and her whole body is wound tight, trembling on the edge.

"Come," you tell her. "Since that's what you came here for."

She shakes her head. Stubborn. Even now. Even here, with her dress around her hips and her underwear shoved to the side and your fingers buried in her cunt, she's fighting it. "I'm not going to give you the— the satisfaction—"

"You're dripping down my wrist, Chaewon."

"That doesn't mean anything—"

"It means your body already made the decision your mouth is too proud to."

She grabs your collar and yanks you closer, teeth bared: "I've faked it with better men than you. Don't fucking flatter yourself."

You curl your fingers against that spot and her grip on your collar falters. You press your forehead to hers, look directly into her glassy eyes and say: "Then fake it. Go ahead. Put on a show for me. That's what you're good at, right? Performing?"

"Asshole—"

"You're clenching so hard around my fingers right now you can barely breathe. Your thighs are shaking. Your clit is throbbing against my thumb." You twist your wrist and she chokes. "But sure. Tell me again how this doesn't mean anything."

Her head falls back against the stone. She's panting through clenched teeth, her chest heaving, and the defiance in her expression is crumbling at the edges but she holds it — jaw set, eyes burning. "I won't cum for you. I refuse. You don't get to have that."

"Babe, you're about thirty seconds from falling apart whether you give yourself permission or not."

"Don't call me babe, you pretentious piece of—"

You press your thumb flat against her clit, and she breaks.

Her whole body seizes. Her thighs clamp around your wrist and her back arches off the wall and her mouth opens in a silent cry that stays silent for one, two, three seconds - and then it's not silent anymore. It comes out of her in a long, shuddering moan that she tries to muffle against your shoulder, her teeth sinking into the fabric of your shirt, and you feel her clench around your fingers in rhythmic, involuntary pulses, wet and tight and relentless. Her hands are fisted in your shirt so hard the seams are straining. Her hips jerk against your hand in short, helpless thrusts. The orgasm rolls through her in waves, each one drawing another broken sound from her throat, and you keep your fingers inside her through all of it, still moving gently, dragging it out, making her ride it until she's twitching and gasping and pushing weakly at your chest.

You slow down. Stop. Hold your hand still, your fingers still buried in her, feeling the last tremors fade. She's breathing in ragged, uneven pulls, her forehead pressed to your shoulder, her entire body slack against the wall.

You withdraw your fingers slowly. She shivers at the loss.

And then you bring your hand up to her mouth.

Your fingers are slick, glistening in the last traces of sunset, and you press them against her lower lip. She opens her eyes - hazy, wrecked, furious - and stares at you. You don't say anything. The instruction is clear enough.

She holds your gaze. Defiant even now, even flushed and trembling and ruined, even with the taste of her own arousal shining on the fingers resting against her mouth. Her lips part. She takes your fingers in, slowly, her tongue sliding between them, and she sucks, hard enough that her cheeks hollow, her eyes locked on yours the entire time. She tastes herself and doesn't flinch. Doesn't break eye contact.

(She's Kim Chaewon. She'd rather choke than look away first.)

"I still hate you," she says.

"I prefer it this way." You say it against her temple, your lips brushing her hairline, her perfume mixing with the salt air and the faint musk of what just happened. "The more you hate me, the more I want to fuck you. It's a problem."

"It's a sickness."

"Probably."

Her eyes are black. Not brown anymore - the pupils have swallowed everything, blown wide, and the expression on her face lives somewhere in the space between wanting to tear your face apart and wanting to fucking consume you.

Without prior notice, her hand drops between you. She finds you through your trousers, already hard, straining against the fabric, and her fingers close around the shape of you, squeezing, measuring. Her eyebrows lift, and there's something almost clinical about the assessment, the way she traces the length of you through the cloth. Then her other hand moves to your belt.

She tugs at the buckle. "Prove it, then." Her fingers work the leather through the loop. "Show me how much you hate me."

You watch her struggle with the belt for two seconds. Then you take over - batting her hand away, pulling the leather free in one smooth motion, the metal clinking. She steps back half an inch to give you room, her shoulder blades finding the wall again, and her eyes track your hands as you unfasten the button, lower the zipper.

But you don't finish undressing. Not yet.

You grab her by the hips and turn her around.

She makes a startled sound - half gasp, half indignant yelp - as her palms hit the stone wall. The rough surface scrapes against her hands and she braces herself, and now she's facing the wall with her back to you and the white linen dress bunched around her waist. The view is nothing short of spectacular.

(Henry Miller once wrote that the best of life is lived with the brain below the navel, and while you've spent your entire career disagreeing with that sentiment on principle, right now, at this specific moment, staring at what's in front of you, the man makes an embarrassingly compelling case.)

Chaewon's ass is perfect. You've known this. You've noticed it before, in settings far more appropriate than this one - press photos, television interviews, that book signing last spring where she wore a charcoal pencil skirt that should have been illegal. Those tight, short evening gowns she favors for award ceremonies, the fabric clinging to the curve of her hips, her round ass always prominent and impossible to ignore. You've caught yourself looking more than once, and hated yourself for it, because acknowledging that a writer whose work you consider mediocre has an incredible ass felt like a concession you weren't willing to make.

And now she’s here, slightly bent forward, hands braced on the stone. Her waist is so slim it makes the curve of her hips feel exaggerated. And her ass, round and tight, is framed by the bunched white fabric above and the smooth lines of her thighs below.

You push your pants and underwear down just enough - mid-thigh, functional, not bothering with more - and you step forward. You reach down and push her panties further aside with your thumb, and you press the head of your cock against her entrance.

She inhales sharply. Her fingers curl against the stone. But you don't push in.

You hold there. The tip of you resting against her, nudging between her folds, slick with how wet she still is. You rock your hips forward - just barely, just enough to slide against her without entering - and she clenches, her ass tightening, her thighs pressing together.

"Ask me," you say.

Her head whips around, brown hair catching the breeze. "Excuse me?"

"Ask me to fuck you."

A sharp bark of laughter escapes her, echoing off the cliff face. "You're out of your mind. You think I'm going to stand here and beg you? I don't beg. I've never begged for anything in my life and I'm certainly not starting with a man who uses the word dialectic in casual conversation."

You press forward another fraction of an inch. Not inside. Just there. Right at the edge. She pushes her hips back, trying to take you in, and you pull away. Matching her movement. Denying her.

Her palms slap the stone wall. "Oh, you think you're cute with that? You think this little game is— just put it in. Stop being such a fucking tease and—"

"That's not asking."

"I'm not asking. I don't ask. People ask me for things. Publishers. Agents. Producers. They line up and they ask me." She grinds her hips backward again and you retreat the exact same distance. A frustrated growl tears out of her throat. "God, you are insufferable. Even now. Even with your dick out you have to make everything a power trip."

You lean forward. Your chest against her back. Your mouth next to her ear, and she can feel you - hot, hard, pressing against her entrance without breaching it, and your breath is warm on the side of her neck as you say:

"If you don't ask, I'll leave you right here. In a public space. Dress around your waist. Panties pulled to the side." You press the head of your cock against her clit and she shudders violently. "Arousal running down your thighs. Without coming again. And I'll go back upstairs and finish my champagne." You drag yourself along her slit, slow, agonizing. "And you can fix your dress and go back to the party, dripping wet and unsatisfied. And everyone will see the flush on your face and wonder what happened to Kim Chaewon."

"You wouldn't."

"Try me."

"You're bluffing. You want this just as bad as I do. I felt how hard you are. You're not walking away from—"

You pull your hips back. One inch. Two. Creating distance. Her eyes go wide.

"Wait—" She catches herself. Clamps her mouth shut. Her jaw flexes. She slams her palm against the wall. The war's written all over her face: pride versus desire, ego versus desperation. Six years of hating you and the unbearable emptiness of you pulling away.

Three seconds of silence. The sea crashes below. A burst of laughter from the terrace above.

She squeezes her eyes shut. Her nostrils flare. When she speaks, the words come through her teeth, ground down, every syllable costing her something she'll never get back:

"Fuck me." Low. Guttural. Furious. "Fuck me, you piece of shit. Are you happy? Is your little ego satisfied? Fuck me good. Fuck me until I can't think about your stupid fucking review or your stupid fucking face. And if you ever tell anyone I said this I will end your career, your life, and your bloodline. Now put it in before I change my mind and—”

You thrust into her.

No preamble. No gradual easing in. One firm, deep stroke that buries you to the hilt, and the sound she makes is incredible; this raw, punched-out cry that she wasn't prepared for, her fingers scrabbling at the stone, her back arching sharply. She's tight. Swollen from the orgasm, drenched, and the heat of her clenches around you in a way that makes your vision narrow for a second.

You don't give her time to adjust. You pull back and drive in again, establishing a rhythm that's hard and steady from the first stroke - not frantic, not sloppy, but intentional in its force. Each thrust pushes her forward into the wall, and she braces herself against it, her palms flat, her arms trembling with the effort of holding herself up.

Her hair sways in the sea breeze. That short brown bob, disheveled now, the bangs plastered to her forehead with sweat, strands catching across her parted lips. Her heels scrape against the stone beneath her, struggling for purchase - the angle is wrong for four-inch stilettos and she keeps sliding, her left foot stuttering, and she compensates by leaning harder into the wall, pressing her forearms flat against the rough surface.

You grip her hips. Both hands. Fingers digging into the soft skin above her hipbones, pulling her back onto you with every thrust.

“You can be loud," you tell her, your breath coming harder now. "The sea. The music up there." Another thrust. Deep. She chokes on a moan. "Nobody can hear you."

She takes you at your word.

"Harder— Is that all you've got?! Fuck me harder, you miserable— every fucking review you wrote— every word— I hope you were jerking off to this because this is the only— ah— the only honest thing you've ever—"

You pull her hips back sharply, changing the angle, and the next thrust goes deeper, hits differently, and her sentence dissolves into a strangled moan.

"Keep talking," you say. "I want to hear you run out of words."

"Fuck you—" She grits through her teeth. "Fuck you and your— your pretentious fucking column and your— god— your superiority complex and your—" Her head drops between her arms. You feel her clench around you, hard, involuntary, and the filth pouring out of her mouth is getting less coherent by the second. "You think this means something? You think because you can fuck me that— that you were right? About my books? About—"

"I was right about your books regardless of this."

"Shut up and fuck me—"

"I'm already fucking you."

"Then do it better—"

You snake one hand from her hip to her hair. You gather the short strands at the back of her head - there's barely enough to grip, but you find purchase and you pull, arching her neck back, and a moan tears out of her that's so loud it bounces off the cliff face.

"Oh my god—" Her eyes are glassy, unfocused, her mouth hanging open. "I hate you— I hate you so— fuck— don't stop— don't you dare stop—"

You fuck her against that wall and the Mediterranean goes dark beneath you, slow and indifferent, the water shifting from copper to ink while the terrace hums above with clinking glasses and polite conversation and people who have no idea what's happening fifteen feet below them. The heels are useless now, her ankles buckling with every thrust, and the only reason she's still upright is because your hand is locked on her hip and your fist is tangled in her hair and the wall is doing the rest.

You're holding her together and taking her apart at the same time.

Her ass meets your hips on every stroke, that round, perfect curve you've spent years training yourself not to look at - in press photos, across crowded rooms - and now it's right here, bouncing against you, bare skin under bunched-up white linen, and the sight of her braced against centuries-old Italian stone with her designer dress shoved around her waist and her knuckles scraped raw from gripping the rock is fucking devastating.

"Make me cum." She says it suddenly. Her hand reaches back and grabs your wrist. "You hear me? Make me fucking cum. Right now."

You don't change pace.

"Are you deaf? I said make me cum, you useless piece of— after everything tonight, after all that shit you talked, the least you can do is—" She chokes as you thrust deeper, but recovers, teeth bared. "—the least you can fucking do is finish what you started. You owe me that. You owe me that."

You release her hair. Your hand slides around her hip to the front, finding her clit, and you press two fingers against it - rubbing in fast, tight circles while you keep thrusting. The dual sensation hits her immediately. Her whole body goes rigid, her walls clamping around you, and a high, thin sound starts building in her throat.

"Oh— oh fuck—"

"There it is."

"Shut up— don't talk, just— keep doing— shit— right there, right fucking there, don't you dare move your hand, don't you dare change a single— god — why are you so good at this, why— it's not fair—" Her hips buck against you, chasing it, greedy. "Come on. Make me cum. Make me cum, you selfish fucking— I swear if you stop I'll— I'll ruin your whole—"

She can't finish the threat.

It hits her in a wave.

Her eyes roll back (not a figure of speech), you see it happen as her head tips back onto your shoulder, her eyelids fluttering, her irises disappearing, and her mouth opens in a silent scream that finally breaks into a ragged, shaking moan. Her cunt locks around you in rhythmic contractions so tight you have to grit your teeth, and her legs give out entirely. You catch her - one arm banded around her waist, holding her upright while she shakes through it, her whole body seizing in pulses that seem to come from somewhere so deep that she probably doesn't even know where it came from. Her hand shoots back, seizing your neck, nails biting into your skin while she clings as if she might sink without you.

You keep fucking her through it. Slower now. Feeling every flutter and clench, her walls still spasming around you in the aftershocks, her thighs trembling against your hips. Your forehead is pressed to the back of her neck and your breath comes ragged and uneven and you're close - dangerously close - the pressure building at the base of your spine in a way that's becoming impossible to ignore.

"Where," you manage, and your composure is cracking, splintering at the edges, "where do you want me to—"

"Are you seriously asking me that right now?" She shoves her hips back into you, grinding, swallowing you deeper. Her hand reaches back and grabs a fistful of your hair. "Where do you think? Inside. Cum inside me. Deep. Don't you dare pull out."

"Chaewon—"

"What, you're going to get shy now?" She clenches around you - hard, purposeful, a squeeze that makes your knees buckle. "You fucked me against a wall in public and now you want to be responsible? Cum in my pussy. Fill me up."

"We shouldn't—"

"Breed me." She yanks your hair, pulling your mouth to her ear. "I know that's what you want. I know that's what this whole thing has been about. You want to mark me. You want to own something I can't take back." She rolls her hips in a filthy, grinding circle. "So do it. Pump me full. Breed this pussy. Put a load so deep in me I'll feel it for days."

"Come on—" She's panting, shoving herself back onto your cock with short, vicious thrusts. "You had so much to say about my books, so much fucking commentary, but now you can't even cum when I'm telling you to? Breed me, you coward. Knock me up. I want every drop. I want it dripping out of me when I go back to that party and shake hands with my publisher."

"Fuck— Chaewon—"

"That's it. That's what you sound like when you're not being a smug piece of shit." She clenches again, rhythmic, milking you. "Give it to me. Stuff this little pussy full. I want to be leaking you. Breed me, breed me, breed me—"

You bury yourself to the hilt and let go.

The orgasm rips through you, not gently, not gradually, but all at once, a slamming, full-body release that has you pressing her into the wall, your forehead dropping against the back of her neck, your hips jerking in short, involuntary thrusts as you empty yourself deep inside her. She moans at the feeling - the heat, the pulse of it - and clenches around you, milking every last spasm, her hand still gripping the back of your neck, her nails breaking skin.

You stay there for a long moment. Both of you breathing. The sea below, the party above, the darkening sky turning purple at the edges.

You pull out slowly. She shudders at the withdrawal.

And then - before you can step back, before you can reach for your belt - Chaewon drops.

She sinks into a squat right there on the stone, her white dress bunched around her waist, those ridiculous heels somehow still on her feet - balanced on the balls, stilettos angled against the rough surface - and your cum is already leaking out of her. You can see it in the dim light, a thin white trail sliding down the inside of her thigh, and she doesn't even seem to notice or care. She just takes the head of your cock into her mouth and starts cleaning you off with her tongue.

(It's genuinely hard to reconcile this image with the woman on the bestseller lists. The one teenage girls post about on TikTok with heart emojis and queen in the caption. Kim Chaewon, literary darling, squatting in a public place with cum dripping out of her pussy, sucking a man's cock clean while the party carries on above her.

If her fans could see her right now.)

She's thorough about it. Tongue swirling around the tip, tasting both of you, her dark eyes looking up at you through those messy bangs. Her lips are swollen and slick, and she sucks gently, almost lazily, with this expression that sits somewhere between contempt and satisfaction. Then she lets you go with a wet sound and wipes the corner of her mouth with her thumb.

"Chaewon."

"What."

"I came inside you."

She looks up at you from her squat. Blinks once. "Yes. I was there."

"That's— are you—"

"Don't be an idiot." She stands, tugging her dress down, her legs still shiny and slick. "It was dirty talk. I'm on the pill. I've been on the pill since I was nineteen." She reaches between her thighs and adjusts her panties, pressing the cotton back into place - your cum held against her skin by a thin strip of damp fabric. "You don't need to worry. The last thing I need is a pregnancy from a man who gave my book two and a half stars."

"It was two."

"Even worse." She tugs her bra strap up. Pushes her bangs off her forehead. Takes one breath, then another, and in about thirty seconds she's pulled herself together enough to pass inspection from a distance. Up close, though - the flush that runs from her cheeks to her chest gives her away. The swollen lips. That brightness in her eyes, wet and electric, that no amount of composure can disguise.

"I need to go." She straightens the hem of her dress without looking at you. "People will notice I'm gone."

She takes a step toward the staircase and your hand catches her wrist.

She stops. Looks down at your fingers circling her arm, raising an eyebrow.

"This isn't over." You hold her gaze. "I want you in my room tonight."

A beat. The corner of her mouth twitches - and the brat flickers back to life behind her eyes, bruised but not broken, her cutting tongue is quick to respond: "Already desperate for more?" She twists her wrist free, slowly, letting your fingers drag across her skin. "That's embarrassing for you. Don't get your hopes up." She takes a step back, toward the stairs. Then another. "It won't happen again."

She turns and walks up the stone steps. Her heels click against each one, steady, measured, the rhythm of a woman reassembling herself with every stride. Her thighs press together slightly as she climbs - holding everything in, and your mind goes straight there: she's full of you. Your cum inside her cunt, trapped by her underwear, leaking into the fabric with every step. You're absolutely certain she's fucking loving it. That she'll be at that party feeling you leak inside her panties, getting hornier by the minute, thinking about how you filled her up.

Chaewon doesn't look back.

(She'll be at your door by midnight.)

•••

The reality with Kim Chaewon is this: you don't hate her.

You know she thinks you do. She's built an entire narrative around it - the bitter critic, the failed artist, the man who made her his personal punching bag because he couldn't create anything of his own. It's a clean story. Sympathetic protagonist versus petty antagonist. Very on-brand for her, actually.

Very commercial.

But hate requires a kind of emotional investment you haven't made. What you feel is closer to disdain. Contempt, maybe, on your worse days. Not for who she is - you barely know who she is - but for what she's become. For the distance between the writer she could have been and the product she chose to be instead.

Her first two books weren't bad.

They weren't good, either - not in any way that would survive serious critical scrutiny, not the kind of work you'd hand to a colleague and say read this, something is happening here. But there was raw material in those early pages. An instinct for emotional architecture that hadn't yet been sanded down into formula. She had this way of structuring interior monologue that felt genuinely intuitive or accidental, as though she stumbled into moments of real clarity before the commercial instincts kicked in and smoothed everything over.

The first novel had this one passage. Chapter eleven. The scene in the laundromat.

You still think about it sometimes, which irritates you more than her sales numbers ever could. The protagonist is alone, folding clothes that belong to someone who just left her, and the prose does something unexpected: it slows down. Gets quiet. Stops trying to impress. For about four pages, Kim Chaewon wrote like someone who had forgotten she was being watched. The sentences got shorter. The observations got sharper. There was a detail about the way dryer sheets smell when they're warm, and how the character associated that specific scent with domestic failure, and it was precise in a way that nothing else in the novel managed to be. Four pages of a writer writing for herself instead of for the crowd.

And then chapter twelve started and the machinery kicked back in. The manufactured tension. The recycled emotional beats. The relentless, suffocating need to be liked by the reader, to be accessible, to never challenge or alienate or demand. But those four pages stayed with you. They're the reason you kept reviewing her. They're the reason her mediocrity feels personal.

You've never told her any of this. You never will.

(Credit where it's due: you've been editing this story as you tell it. Leaving out the part that doesn't fit the narrative. The part that came first, chronologically, and that you've spent six years pretending is irrelevant to everything that followed. It's not irrelevant. You know it's not. And since tonight has already stripped away every other pretense, you might as well lose this one too.)

The first time you met Kim Chaewon, you weren't interested in her books. You didn't even know who she was.

It was some event in New York: one of those publishing-adjacent cocktail things where everyone wears black and pretends to have read the longlist. Early in her career, probably her first or second time at something that size. You were standing near the bar, talking to an editor from The Atlantic, and she walked past. That's all. She walked past.

And you lost the thread of whatever you were saying.

She was - god. Too beautiful. That's the phrase your brain produced at the time, and it still holds. She didn't look like anyone else at that party. Not a writer, not an editor, not an actress doing press, not a journalist working a source. You genuinely couldn't place her, and that was rare for you - you could usually categorize everyone at these events within thirty seconds. But she resisted the taxonomy. She seemed a bit out of place, actually, standing near the bar with a drink she wasn't really drinking, watching the room with these careful eyes that were taking in everything while pretending to notice nothing. She was wearing a black dress that night, simple, nothing expensive, and her hair was longer then, past her shoulders, and she kept tucking it behind her ear in this gesture that was either nervous or calculated, and you couldn't tell which, and that ambiguity was what got you. You didn't know who she was, but you wanted to find out.

(And she is still beautiful. That’s what really bothers you about her. How beautiful and perfect she is. Your exact type, down to the specifics you'd never list aloud. And as a consequence, everything else about her - the commercial instincts, the Instagram aesthetics, the careful curation of a literary persona that prioritizes brand over craft - becomes something you don't just critique professionally. You resent it. Because it would be so much easier to dismiss her completely if she weren't the most attractive woman you've ever seen.)

That night in New York, you talked to her for a while. Twenty minutes, maybe. She was funny, sharper than you expected, quick with references, a little nervous in a way that made her more interesting rather than less. You asked her what she was working on. She said something vague about a novel. You asked if she wanted to get a drink somewhere quieter. She said sure, let me grab another one first - and disappeared. You scanned the room for her twice, then gave up. She'd simply left.

It was months later that you made the connection. You were halfway through her debut, reading it for a review, already taking notes, already identifying the structural problems that would become the backbone of your critique, and you decided to look up the author. The photo on the jacket. The bio. Kim Chaewon. And you stared at the name for a long moment, because it looked familiar, and then the memory surfaced: the bar, the black dress, the way she tucked her hair behind her ear, the way she said sure, let me grab another one first and vanished.

That girl wrote this.

She doesn't remember you. You're certain of it. In all the years since the public feuds, the review cycles, the festival encounters, the viral TikTok debacle, she has never once referenced that night. Never said we've met before or I remember you from New York. You were a stranger she talked to at a party and immediately forgot. A non-event. It took your first published review of her debut, almost a year later, for Kim Chaewon to become aware that you existed at all.

Your second encounter - which was, from her perspective, the first - happened at a reading in Brooklyn. You spotted her across the room and waved. Casual. Collegial. She looked at you, recognized the byline photo she'd presumably been seething over for weeks, and gave you the middle finger.

And no - you didn't start disliking her books because she rejected you at a cocktail party. That's the version she'd write if she ever fictionalized this, the version where the male critic's professional animosity is really just wounded ego, just a man who couldn't handle being turned down. It's reductive and self-flattering and exactly the kind of easy psychology she'd deploy in one of her novels. The truth is less dramatic: you already didn't care for the story before you knew who the author was. The prose had problems that existed independently of the woman who wrote it.

(But did finding out make you like her less? Did the memory of being dismissed at that bar curdle something that might otherwise have remained purely professional?

You've never let yourself answer that. Over the years, you've gotten really fucking good at not answering it.)

What you will say - what you've said in print, repeatedly, and stand behind - is that her writing suffers from a fundamental misunderstanding of psychological depth. Where Hemingway had his iceberg theory - the conviction that the dignity of a story depends on what's been cut, on the vast architecture of meaning that lives beneath the surface - Chaewon operates on the opposite principle. She over-explains. Every character's interior life is excavated and displayed with the thoroughness of an autopsy report. She narrates motivation, deconstructs emotional responses, maps the psychological terrain of every decision until there's nothing left for the reader to infer. It's not depth. It's annotation.

And worst of all: she writes about the mundane. Breakups, reconnections, the circular emotional arithmetic of modern relationships. No dragons. No galactic empires. No murder mysteries or geopolitical thrillers where the plot does the heavy lifting for you. Just people in apartments, making the same mistakes on repeat, trying to figure out why they keep wanting things that hurt them. And that should be commendable, because writing about the ordinary is exponentially harder than writing about the extraordinary. When you set a novel on a spaceship or a battlefield, the setting generates its own tension. The world does work for you. But when your entire narrative takes place in coffee shops and bedrooms and the passenger seat of someone's car at two in the morning, the prose has to carry everything. Every sentence has to earn its oxygen. There's nowhere to hide.

Chaewon knows this. On some level, she understands exactly how difficult the terrain is that she's chosen to work in. The problem is her solution to that difficulty, which is to explain. Relentlessly. Exhaustively. Every flicker of interior life gets excavated and mounted on the page with museum-grade lighting. Her characters don't just feel things - they feel things, then think about why they feel them, then contextualize those feelings within the broader pattern of their emotional history, then arrive at a thesis statement about what the feeling means, all while the reader sits there thinking yes, I got it four paragraphs ago, thank you. The excessive detail doesn't deepen the analysis. It drowns it. The weight of all that psychological annotation collapses onto itself until you can't feel anything underneath it anymore, because she never trusted the reader - or herself - enough to leave something unsaid and let the silence do the work.

The ambition is there. The restraint isn't. And restraint, when you're working with the mundane, isn't optional. It's the whole game. The banality of the subject matter demands that the prose do less, not more - that it trusts a well-placed detail to carry the emotional freight that three paragraphs of interior monologue can't. Hemingway understood this. Carver understood this. Chaewon understands it in theory and ignores it in practice, because leaving space means risking the reader not getting it, and Kim Chaewon cannot bear the thought of not being understood.

And that's the real tell, isn't it? That need to be understood. Because once you see it, you can't unsee it - the fingerprints are everywhere. Chaewon's characters don't exist independently of her. They're not autonomous people navigating their own messy, particular lives. They're vehicles. Projection screens. Every protagonist she's ever written is a thinly veiled apparatus for Chaewon to demonstrate how perceptive she is, how deeply she gets the human condition, how exquisitely she can map the interior landscape of a woman in crisis.

The characters don't drive the story. Chaewon drives the story, and the characters sit in the passenger seat while she narrates the route. You can feel her behind every monologue, every overwrought epiphany, every moment where a character arrives at some devastating self-knowledge that's a little too clean, a little too eloquent, a little too convenient to be coming from a fictional person rather than from the author showing off through them.

Her stories aren't about her characters. They're about Kim Chaewon, and how badly Kim Chaewon wants you to know that Kim Chaewon understands. The novels are mirrors she built for herself and then hung in public, and every reader who praises the depth of her characterization is really just praising Chaewon's reflection and calling it art.

And you know why.

You looked into her background after the identification. Before the debut, she'd been writing fanfiction. Prolifically. Tens of thousands of words posted on platforms you'd never visited, accumulating followers and kudos and comment threads full of heart emojis - and it confirmed something you already suspected: fanfiction writers learn to give readers what they want, and Chaewon never unlearned it. She carried that training into her professional career and it made her millions, and it also made her incapable of producing anything that genuinely costs the reader something. She reinforces your long-held theory that anyone whose foundational craft was built on fanfiction is, at the structural level, writing to satisfy rather than to challenge. No amount of applied artistic intention or pseudo-intellectual framing will ever fully purge those instincts. Chaewon is the proof.

(You're aware this is an uncharitable reading. You're aware that plenty of serious writers emerged from fan communities. You don't care. The theory holds for her, that's what matters.)

•••

It's twelve-seventeen in the morning and you're sitting on the edge of the hotel bed in a t-shirt and trousers, barefoot, reading a paragraph by Bolaño on your phone that you've already read three times without absorbing a single word.

She messaged thirty minutes ago through Instagram. Which means she opened the app. Typed your name into the search bar. Scrolled through whatever results came up. Found your profile. Tapped the message icon. Composed four words and hit send. The mental image of Kim Chaewon actively hunting you down on social media does something quietly devastating to your ego.

What room are you in?

You stared at it for ten seconds. Typed back your room number. Sent it.

omw

That was twenty-eight minutes ago. You put the phone down. Picked it up. Put it down again. Brushed your teeth. Sat on the bed. Opened Bolaño. Read the same paragraph about the Mexican poets three times while retaining absolutely nothing.

(In a normal situation you'd already be asleep. You keep early hours. You like mornings. You like the quiet discipline of a ten-thirty bedtime and a six o'clock alarm and the smug superiority of being awake before the rest of the world. This is not a normal situation. Whatever is happening now does not belong to the orderly life you’re used to.)

The knock comes soft. Two quick raps. Businesslike.

You cross the room. Open the door.

There she is: the white linen dress from the party is gone. She's wearing a loose cream-colored top, thin cotton, sitting off one shoulder in a way that could be intentional or could just be the cut. A dark skirt that falls just above her knees. No heels. Flat sandals. Her hair is different too; the precise, expensive bob from the terrace has relaxed, the humidity and coastal air coaxing a slight wave into it that she hasn't corrected. The bangs are pushed sideways, slightly tousled. No earrings. Minimal makeup. She looks like she got ready in a hurry and then spent fifteen minutes undoing evidence of the hurry.

Chaewon doesn't wait for an invitation. She shoulders past you through the doorway, her arm grazing your chest, and walks straight into the center of the room with the energy of someone inspecting a rental property. Her eyes sweep the space - terracotta tile, white bedding, shuttered windows cracked open to let the night air in. The half-empty bottle of mineral water on the nightstand. Your phone screen still glowing with a page from The Savage Detectives.

She turns. Leans against the desk. Crosses her arms.

"So. What do you want?"

You close the door. The latch catches with a clean click. "You came to my room, Chaewon."

"Because you told me to."

"I mentioned it. You made the decision."

Her chin drops and her eyes roll skyward. "Wow. Semantics. Groundbreaking." She drums her fingers against her own bicep. "I'm here. Get to the point."

You stay where you are. Leaning against the closed door, arms loose at your sides. She's standing with her weight shifted to one hip, jaw set, chin angled up in that particular tilt she defaults to when she wants to look unbothered. The posture reads as boredom. The details don't. Her foot is tapping an uneven rhythm against the terracotta. Her fingers keep pressing into her arm, kneading the muscle there. She doesn't realize she's doing either.

"You changed," you say.

"Obviously. I wasn't going to parade through a hotel hallway at midnight in a cocktail dress." She pauses. Looks away for half a second. "And I had to change everything I was wearing. After earlier."

"You changed your hair, too."

Her hand lifts - instinctive, self-conscious - and her fingers touch the wave sitting at her jaw. She catches herself doing it and shoves the hand back into the crook of her arms, fast, annoyed. "It's the humidity. It does this. I can't control it."

"It suits you."

She shrugs. One shoulder. Barely a movement. "Okay. Cool."

"You look pretty."

"I heard you the first time." Clipped. She starts picking at a thread on the sleeve of her cream top, suddenly fascinated by it. "You don't need to keep stacking compliments. I own a mirror. I'm aware."

"Fine."

"And I didn't come here for—" She waves her hand, a gesture that encompasses you, the room, the compliment, the full scope of whatever this situation is becoming. "I came because you said it wasn't over. So." Her palms spread open. "Finish it. Say whatever speech you've been rehearsing so I can go back to my room and pretend tonight didn't happen."

You push off the door and walk past her to the nightstand. Pick up the water bottle. Pour a glass. Take a sip. Set it down. Everything unhurried. You can practically hear her teeth grinding. "You messaged me," you point out. "You opened Instagram. You typed my name into the search bar. You found my profile and you wrote me a message. That was all you."

She shoves off the desk. "You absolute prick, I know you did that on purpose. You said come to my room and didn't give me a room number. What was I supposed to do, knock on every door in the building? If you brought me here just to run another psychological evaluation—"

"I didn't bring you anywhere. You practically ran."

"I did not run."

"Twenty-eight minutes. That includes changing your outfit, changing your underwear, doing something with your hair, finding my profile on Instagram, navigating a hotel you've never been in before, and walking here." You take another sip of water. "That's efficient, Chaewon. That's someone who wanted to be here."

"I just want this to be over already."

"Then come here."

She doesn't move.

She stands three feet away, bathed in the amber glow of the bedside lamp, her jaw tight, the pulse visible in the hollow of her throat. The wave in her hair catches the light. Her chest is rising and falling a fraction too fast for someone performing indifference.

You sit on the edge of the bed. Lean back on your hands.

"Come here."

Something behind her eyes gives way, just a small structural collapse somewhere deep in whatever internal argument she's been losing since she knocked on that door. She closes the distance in two sharp strides. Her knees bump yours. This close, you can smell her. Not the gardenia from the party, something different, lighter, softer. A private scent. The salt air is still caught in her hair.

She looks down at you. You look up at her.

"You're insufferable." She says it quietly. Gently almost.

Your hand finds the back of her leg. Bare skin, smooth, warm from the walk. She tenses — one quick contraction that runs up her thigh — but she doesn't move away. Your fingers drift higher, tracing along her calf, slipping beneath the hem of her skirt. Slow. Giving her every chance to step back.

She doesn't step back. Her hand lands on your shoulder instead, fingers curling into the cotton of your t-shirt, gripping loosely.

"Kiss me," you say.

Her expression doesn't change. She holds your gaze with that stubbornness that defines everything she does — writing, arguing, standing in hotel rooms at midnight refusing to admit why she's there. Her fingers tighten in your shirt. Her thumb moves against your shoulder, almost absently.

"No."

"No?"

"You do it." She says it plain. No coyness. "I kissed you first on the terrace. I'm the one who started this. So it's your turn." Her chin lifts, just enough. "Unless you can't."

"You bit a hole in my lip."

"And you loved it." Her free hand comes up between you. Her thumb finds the small cut on your lower lip — tender, still slightly swollen — and she traces it. Gently. So gently it catches you off guard, the careful attention she gives the mark she left, studying it like she's reading her own handwriting on someone else's page.

She holds her thumb there. Against your mouth. Her eyes on yours.

"So kiss me back."

You don't stand up. You hold her waist and pull her down toward you instead. A compromise. So neither of you has to fully give in.

She lets out a sharp breath as her knees land on the mattress on either side of your thighs, straddling you, and your mouth finds hers before she's fully settled. Your hand slides up to the back of her neck, fingers threading into the damp, wavy hair at her nape, and you kiss her properly; slow, deep, taking every second she'll give you. She responds immediately. Her lips part. Her tongue meets yours. Her hands slide up your chest to your jaw, tilting your head where she wants it, and the kiss deepens as her weight settles fully onto your lap. Warmth and pressure through the fabric of her skirt, through your trousers.

She shifts her hips - a small roll that presses her down against you - and your hands drop from her waist to her thighs. Bare skin under the hem of her skirt. Smooth. Warm. Your palms run down the outside of her legs, feeling the taut muscle there, then slide back up. Under the skirt this time, fabric bunching against your wrists as your hands travel higher.

You find her ass and squeeze. Both hands. Full grip. She's not wearing the same underwear from earlier. Something thinner. A different texture (lace, probably), you can feel every curve of her through it, that round, perfect shape filling your palms completely, and you pull her tighter against you. She gasps into the kiss and catches your lower lip between her teeth. Gentle this time. Just pressure. Testing the cut she made earlier.

She pulls back an inch. Her lips are wet, slightly swollen. She says: "You're obsessed with my body."

"And you're obsessed with me."

"Those aren't the same thing."

"It's worse, actually. I'm obsessed with something I can actually touch. You're obsessed with a man who gave your book two stars."

"Don't flatter—"

"You're in my lap at midnight, Chaewon. I didn't come find you."

She grabs a fistful of your t-shirt and twists it: "Don't act innocent. Don't you dare. You've spent years building this. Every review. Every time you showed up to an event I was at and stood in the corner watching me with that fucking look on your face." She leans in, her forehead nearly touching yours. "You put yourself inside my head, review by review, takedown by takedown, until I couldn't go a single day without thinking about you. You engineered this. And now that you've got exactly what you wanted—" She grinds down against you, one slow, filthy roll of her hips that makes your grip on her ass tighten hard enough to leave marks through the lace. "—you get to live with it."

Her hands drop to the hem of your t-shirt. She grabs it and pulls upward, and you lift your arms to let her strip it off. She tosses it somewhere behind her and then presses both palms flat against your bare chest, fingers spread, and pushes.

You go down. Back flat on the mattress. She's straddling you, looking down with the lamplight behind her, and her expression is focused now, intent, the anger still present but running alongside something hungrier. Her nails drag lightly down your chest, not scratching, just feeling, tracing the lines of your ribs, the plane of your stomach. Cataloging.

"Lie still," she says.

She slides off your lap and repositions herself between your legs, her knees on the mattress, her hands going to your belt. (This isn’t like the terrace, where she struggled. Now her hands are steady. Buckle first, then leather, then button, then zipper. Each movement controlled, practiced in thought before action.)

"This time I want to do it properly," she mutters, tugging your trousers down your hips. You lift slightly to help. She pulls them to your thighs, then your underwear, and your cock springs free hard, fully hard, straining upward, because how could it not be with Kim Chaewon kneeling between your legs in a hotel room on the Amalfi Coast at midnight.

She wraps her hand around you. Firm grip. Her fingers are small but strong - a writer's hands, you think absurdly - and she strokes once, base to tip, watching your reaction with those analytical eyes. Her thumb swipes across the head, spreading the bead of moisture there, and she strokes again. Slow. Steady. Not teasing, just assessing.

"You're pretty," you say.

Her hand pauses mid-stroke. She looks up at you. "I know."

"I mean it."

"I said I know. You don't need to say it." She resumes stroking, her grip tightening slightly on the upstroke. "Don't be romantic. It doesn't suit you."

"I'm not being romantic." You prop yourself up on your elbows to look at her properly, kneeling there, her wavy hair falling across her forehead, one strap of her cream top sliding off her shoulder, her small hand wrapped around your cock. "It's a fact. The same way I find you beautiful, I find you fuckable. Those two things coexist in my head without any romance between them."

Her eyebrows rise.

"And I knew—" You watch her hand move. "—sooner or later, you'd end up with my cock in your mouth."

She stops stroking.

"Because this—" You nod toward her hand, her position, the whole arrangement. "—is the closest you'll ever get to pleasing me. You can't do it with your prose. You certainly can't do it with your plotting. But this, you might actually be qualified for."

Silence. Her jaw tightens. Her grip on your shaft tightens too, not painfully, but enough that you feel it, a warning transmitted through her fingers.

"Those are brave words," she says, very quietly, "to say to a woman who currently has your dick between her teeth." She leans forward and her lips graze the head of your cock, parted just enough that you feel the edge of her incisors. "One wrong sentence and I could end your whole evening. Your whole career, frankly. Hard to write scathing reviews when you're in a hospital explaining to a nurse how you lost—"

"Okay, you make a fair point. Please don't bite my dick off."

She laughs, caught off guard. Then she composes herself. Bites her lower lip. Her gaze drops to your cock in her hand and she studies it the way she probably studies a first draft: measuring, appraising, already planning what she's going to do with it.

"I think I'd rather keep enjoying myself." She strokes you. Base to tip. Slow. Her thumb sweeps across the head and her grip tightens on the way back down. "I'm not going to compliment your personality. Or your professional integrity. Or your hideous fucking opinions about contemporary fiction." Another stroke. Firmer. Her wrist rotates at the top and your hips twitch. "But this I can work with."

She lowers her mouth onto you.

Her lips part around the head, stretching, and the warmth hits you first - wet, encompassing, her tongue pressing flat against the underside as she takes you in. Not rushing. Just the first couple of inches, her mouth adjusting, learning the shape of you. She pulls back until only the tip remains between her lips and swirls her tongue around it in a slow circle. Then sinks back down, taking more this time, and you feel the ridge of your cock drag across the roof of her mouth.

Her cheeks hollow as she sucks. One hand wraps around the base of your shaft, her small fingers not quite meeting, and she strokes in tandem with her mouth, down when her lips descend, up when they rise. The coordination is precise. She finds a rhythm and settles into it, her head moving in smooth, unhurried bobs, her eyes falling shut.

You exhale. Slow. Controlled. Your hand comes to rest on the top of her head, fingers sinking into the soft waves of her hair. Not pushing. Not guiding. Just there.

She hums around your cock, and it's a low, satisfied sound, kinda casual, and the vibration runs through you from root to spine. Her free hand slides up your thigh and her nails drag lightly across your skin as she takes you deeper, her lips stretching further down your shaft, and you feel the back of her mouth, the beginning of her throat. She holds there for a beat, breathing through her nose, then pulls back with a slick, sucking drag that makes your fingers curl in her hair.

"You're quiet," she murmurs against the head. Her lips brush you as she speaks, shiny and swollen. She kisses the tip. Soft. Then her tongue slides out and laps at the slit, tasting, and her eyes open to watch your reaction. "Usually you have so much to say."

"I'm letting you work."

"How generous." She takes you back in. Deeper, her jaw opening wider, and you feel yourself slide past the back of her tongue. She gags (barely, a small contraction she controls immediately) and pulls back to a comfortable depth, sucking hard. Her hand twists at the base. Her tongue does something against the underside, this rolling, pressing motion, and your thigh muscles go taut.

She pulls off. A thin strand of saliva stretches between her lower lip and the head of your cock, catching the lamplight before it breaks. She licks her lips and strokes you with her wet hand, spreading the slickness.

"You know what's funny?" She presses her lips to the side of your shaft. Not sucking. Just resting there, talking against your skin: "You spend all this time critiquing other people's technique." A kiss, halfway down. "Their pacing." Another kiss, near the base. "Their execution." Her tongue drags all the way up, flat and slow, from root to tip. "But you won't say a word about mine."

"Your execution is fine."

"Fine." She squeezes your cock. "I sell thirty million copies and you call it comfort food. I suck your dick and it's fine." Her mouth wraps around the head and she sucks, hard, cheeks caving in, then releases with a wet sound. "You're going to have to do better than that."

"What do you want me to say?"

"I want you to be honest. You're always telling me to be honest." She takes you into her mouth again, and this time she goes further than before - past the halfway point, past the place where her gag reflex kicked in, pushing herself, and you feel the tight ring of her throat resist and then yield, and a groan escapes you before you can catch it. She pulls back, eyes watering, a triumphant glint cutting through the gloss. "There. Was that fine?"

"That was—"

She doesn't let you finish. She's back on you, both hands now, one wrapped around the base and the other cupping beneath, and her mouth is working you with a new intensity. Faster, wetter, sloppy in a way that's less about technique and more about hunger. She's moaning around your cock, these small, muffled sounds that she's either performing or can't help, and either way they're sending jolts through your nervous system. Spit is pooling at the base of your shaft, running down her fingers, dripping onto the sheets.

She pulls off, gasping. Wipes her chin with the back of her hand. Looks up at you from between your legs with mascara starting to feather at the corners of her eyes and her lips puffy and glistening and her chest heaving under the cream top.

"You can fuck my mouth." She says it simply. Directly. No preamble.

"Chaewon—"

"I mean it. Stop being polite. I'm not fragile." Her tongue traces the vein running along the underside of your shaft. "I can feel you holding back. Your hand's been sitting on my head for five minutes doing absolutely nothing." She wraps her lips around the tip, sucks once, releases. "So grab my hair and fuck my throat. I want you to. I want to choke on it."

"I was admiring the view before things get rough."

"Things got rough on that terrace six hours ago. We're way past admiring." She takes you deep again, all the way, her nose pressing against your stomach, her throat convulsing around the head, and holds herself there until her eyes stream, then pulls off with a ragged gasp and a string of spit.

You thread your fingers through her hair. Gather the short damp strands at the back of her skull, finding enough to grip. Her eyes widen slightly (anticipation, not fear) and her hands come up to brace against your thighs.

You push her head down.

Her throat opens and she swallows around you. You pull her back up by the hair and push her down again. Setting the pace yourself now. Each stroke burying you in the tight heat of her throat, each withdrawal drawing a gasp from her that she barely gets out before you're pushing in again. Her nails sink into the muscle of your thighs. Her eyes are watering freely, the mascara smudging into dark crescents beneath her lashes. Spit is running freely down her chin, dripping onto the sheets, and every time you thrust into her mouth she makes this muffled, desperate sound, half gag, half moan, that she'd be mortified by if she could hear it from the outside.

You fuck her mouth with deep strokes with a rhythm she can anticipate but not control, pulling her hair to tilt her head at the angle you want. She gags on a particularly deep thrust and you hold her there, feeling her throat constrict and flutter around the head of your cock, her fingers scrabbling at your thighs, tears spilling down her cheeks. You hold for one second. Two. Then pull her back.

She gasps, a broken sound. Drool slips past her lower lip and gathers on the sheet between your thighs. Her chest rises and falls in sharp pulls of air as she looks up at you, eyes glazed and unfocused, lips swollen and wet, hair knotted tight in your fist. Spit streaks her chin, her neck, even her hand. She’s completely undone, staring at you like she’s daring you to even think about stopping.

"More," she rasps. Her fingers dig into your thighs so hard they'll bruise. "Harder.”

You drag her back down onto your cock and give her exactly what she asked for. Harder now. Each thrust draws a low creak from the bedframe, her choking sounds steady and hungry, fingernails scoring your thighs as the room becomes saturated with slick, unrestrained rhythm.

(Somewhere above you, through the ceiling, someone is playing classical piano. Debussy, maybe. The juxtaposition is nearly absurd.)

(God, the sight of her. Kim Chaewon: bestselling fucking author, Instagram darling, the woman whose sales you supposedly tanked by seven percent - on her knees with your cock in her mouth. Mascara streaking down her cheeks, spit dripping from her chin, tears gathering at the corners of her eyes every time she gags. And there's something almost worshipful about the way she's working you.

She'd absolutely kill you if you said that out loud.)

You maintain the same pace, steady and deep. Fingers tangled in her hair, palm firm against her jaw to keep her in place. Each stroke presses farther, and you feel her throat tighten before she forces it to relax, swallowing, tongue sliding along you. Saliva spills freely, messy and unfiltered, coating you in wet heat.

Good. Let it run. You want every inch soaked. There’s more coming.

"Get it wetter," you tell her.

She moans something unintelligible around your cock and redoubles her effort, her mouth producing obscene, sloppy sounds as she works you with her throat and her tongue, twisting, stroking, spitting on the shaft and spreading it, and the sheer enthusiasm of it makes your stomach clench. She's performing - of course she is, she performs everything - but the performance is so committed it becomes indistinguishable from sincerity.

You hold her down one final time. Deep. Her throat spasms. Her nails break skin on your thigh.

Then you let go.

She pulls off gasping, coughing, one hand flying to her chest as her lungs expand. Strings of saliva hang between her swollen lips and the head of your cock, catching the lamplight. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and sits back on her heels, panting. Her eyes are streaming. The mascara has migrated to her cheekbones in dark smears. Her hair is a disaster, the careful waves twisted and matted from your grip.

You sit up and reach for her. Your hands find the hem of her cream top and you pull it upward, over her stomach, over her ribs, over her head. She lifts her arms to let you, and the top comes free and drops to the floor, and she's bare from the waist up.

No bra. Just her.

Small and firm breasts, proportional to her frame, the kind that don't need support, that sit high on her chest with a natural perkiness that her designer outfits always hinted at without confirming. Her nipples are dark, already stiff, and her skin is flushed from her collarbones to her sternum.

You lean forward and press your lips to the center of her chest. Right between her breasts. You breathe her in - salt air, residual perfume, the faint musk of sweat and arousal, something warm underneath it all that's just her, just skin. You stay there for a moment. Inhaling. Your hands resting on her waist.

Then your mouth moves to her left breast. You drag your lips across the curve of it, feeling the soft weight against your mouth, and her hands fly to your head the moment your mouth closes around her nipple. Both of them, fingers plunging into your hair, gripping hard, pulling you in - not guiding, not suggesting, but trapping your face against her chest with a possessiveness that contradicts every word she's said tonight, pushing the soft swell of her breast further into your mouth, and the exhale that escapes her is shaky, thin and completely involuntary.

"Harder," she breathes. Her nails drag across your scalp. "Suck harder. You weren't shy when you had your fingers inside me, don't get shy now—"

Your cheeks hollow around her nipple, tongue pressing the stiff peak against the roof of your mouth, and the sound she makes is small and desperate and cuts off mid-breath. Her legs shift against the sheets. Her hips roll once, searching for contact that isn't there.

"You're really obsessed with my body." She says it through her teeth, her fingers tightening in your hair until it stings. "Aren't you? You pretend it's about my writing - all that intellectual bullshit, all that criticism - but this is what you actually think about. My tits in your mouth. Fucking pervert."

You graze your teeth across the nipple. Light. Just enough.

She gasps - sharp, startled - and her spine curves, pressing her chest against your mouth. "Oh— god. Do that again."

You do it again. Slower. Letting her feel the edge of your teeth drag across the sensitive peak before you close your lips around it and suck, hard, and her grip in your hair turns vicious.

"You've been staring at my chest for years." She's panting now, her ribcage expanding rapidly beneath your mouth. "Every event. I always caught you looking and you always— ah— you always pretended you weren't. At least now you're being honest about it, you depraved piece of—"

You switch to the other breast. Your mouth drags across her sternum - the flat, warm plane between, her heartbeat hammering beneath the bone - and then your lips find the right nipple, already stiff, already flushed dark and swollen from arousal, and you close your mouth around it and bite.

Not gently.

"Fuck—" Her legs jerk. Her heel digs into the mattress. "Careful with your— no!" She stops herself. Her fingers rake through your hair and press your face harder against her breast. "No, don't be careful. Bite me. I like it. I can take it."

You bite again. Harder. Enough to leave the faint impression of your teeth in the soft skin around her areola. She whimpers; this breathy, broken sound that doesn't belong to the woman who called you a piece of shit on a terrace six hours ago.

"You like that?" you murmur against her breast.

"Shut up— Just— use your mouth. Less talking, more—" She pushes your head down, back onto her breast, and you take the nipple between your lips and pull, sucking with a slow, steady pressure that makes her toes curl against the sheets. Her head tips back. Her eyes flutter closed. Her thighs press together, squeezing, and you can see the tension building in her stomach, the muscles in her abdomen flickering.

"You could make me cum from this," she whispers. There's something almost accusatory about it, as though this is another grievance to add to the list. "From just this. From sucking on my tits. That's how wound up you've got me. Are you happy? Is this what you wanted?"

You drag your tongue in a slow circle around her nipple. She shudders head to toe.

"Look at you," she murmurs. Her fingers comb through your hair, almost tender for a moment, before her nails scrape down to the base of your skull. "The big important critic. Mr. Intellectual Integrity. And here you are with your face buried in my chest, sucking on my tits in a hotel room in Italy, making little sounds you don't even realize you're making." Her thumb traces the shell of your ear. Her hips roll again, restless, needy. "If your readers could see you right now. If the editorial board could see you. On your knees for the woman you said writes comfort food." She lets out this breathless, mean little laugh. "What would they think?"

You pull back. Look up at her. Her nipples are swollen and slick, glistening in the lamplight, flushed a deep, bruised pink from your mouth. You kiss her. Hard, brief, your hand gripping her jaw, tasting the small shocked sound she makes against your teeth.

Then you're moving, making room for her. "Lie down.”

She kneels on the mattress, watching you. Processing the shift in spatial dynamics. Then she stretches out on her back. You start at her feet. Her sandals. You undo the left one, slide it off, set it on the floor. Then the right. Her toes are painted a muted pink. Your hands travel up her calves to the waistband of her skirt. You unzip it at the side, and she lifts her hips as you pull it down her legs and off. Underneath: black lace panties, just as you suspected. Different from the cotton pair on the terrace, and the implication of that choice - standing in front of her suitcase, selecting these, for this - for you, is very flattering, thank you.

You hook your fingers into the lace and pull them down. Over her hips, down her thighs, past her knees. She kicks them free and they land somewhere near the sandals.

She's naked now. Completely. Just a body. Slim, toned, those improbable curves that start at her narrow waist and swell into hips that seem designed to fill your hands.

"On all fours."

She holds your gaze for a beat. Then she rolls over and rises onto her hands and knees.

You move behind her, ositioning yourself on your knees, your still-hard cock heavy between your legs, slick with her spit. You take a moment. Just looking.

She glances back over her shoulder. Impatient. "Why are you just sitting there? Are you going to fuck me or write another review?"

"I'm going to fuck you." Your hands settle on her hips. Slide backward. Cup her ass. "But I was thinking of something different this time."

You grip both cheeks and spread them. Wide. Exposing everything: the wet, swollen folds of her pussy, and above them, the tight pink ring of her asshole. Completely visible. Completely vulnerable. She feels the air against her and goes very still.

Your thumb finds her asshole. You don't press, just drag the pad of it across the tight ring, slow, spreading the slick wetness that's already dripping from her pussy. She shivers. A full-body thing, starting at the base of her spine and rolling upward through her shoulders, and her thighs clench together, the goosebumps rise across her lower back in a wave you can actually see in the lamplight.

She's so sensitive there. Every nerve ending lit up and screaming.

"No." She says it immediately. Reflexively. Her head whips around. "Absolutely not. You're out of your fucking mind if you think I'm letting you—"

"You want it too." You circle her hole again. Feather-light. Her hips buck forward, then push back - contradicting her mouth before she can catch herself. "I can feel it, Chaewon. The way you're reacting to this. You're shaking."

"I'm shaking because I'm angry—"

"You're shaking because you're curious." Your other hand grips her hip, holding her steady while your thumb keeps its slow, maddening orbit. "And because you know how good this is going to feel. All that anger. All that frustration you've been carrying around for months..." You lean forward, your chest close to her back, your mouth near her ear. "I'm going to fuck every bit of it out of you."

She makes a sound. Something caught between a moan and a protest that dies in her throat. "Not a chance." She tries to pull forward, crawling up the bed, but your grip on her hip holds firm and she barely moves an inch. "I would never give you my ass. Of all the men on this planet - you? The man who ruined my book launch? Not in this lifetime."

You slap her. Open palm, sharp, right across her left cheek. The crack bounces off the hotel walls and her whole body jolts forward. She yelps - surprised, indignant, aroused in a way she can't disguise because her back arches and her ass pushes up and her fingers claw at the sheets.

You squeeze where you just hit. Kneading the warm flesh, watching the pink bloom spread under your palm. "This ass is perfect." You spread her cheeks apart again, wide, thumbs pulling her open. "You already know that. I already know that. Everyone who's ever watched you leave a room in one of those tight little dresses knows that." You run your thumb across her hole one more time and her entire body breaks out in goosebumps again, her skin prickling under your hands. "And you know exactly what I want to do with it."

"You're a pervert," she whispers. But her hips have stopped trying to escape. They're rocking, subtly, pushing back toward your hand.

"Maybe." Your thumb circles. Slow. Patient. Tracing the tight ring, never pressing in, just suggesting. The wetness from her pussy is everywhere - coating your thumb, dripping down the crease between her legs, making everything slick. Her thighs twitch. "But this is what I want. This or nothing. I'll get dressed, you can go back to your room, and we'll pretend tonight was a bad decision at a festival."

"Or?"

"Or you stay."

"Even if I—" She swallows. Her bravado is crumbling at the edges. "I don't have any lube. You can't just— it doesn't work without—"

"You spent the last ten minutes getting my cock as wet as it's ever been." You reach down and wrap your hand around yourself - still drenched, coated thick with her spit, glistening in the lamplight. "Trust me. That's not the problem."

She drops her head between her arms. Her words come out muffled against the pillow: "It's going to hurt. A lot. It's going to hurt a lot and I—"

"Yes." You don't lie to her. She'd know if you did. "At first."

She turns her face to the side. One eye visible, blown and wide, searching your face for something she can hold onto. Her lower lip is caught between her teeth. "And after that?"

Your hand leaves your cock and finds the small of her back. You slide it upward. Slowly. Over each knob of her spine, between her shoulder blades, up to the nape of her neck where the short hair curls damp against her skin. Then back down. The same path. Slow. Your palm warm and steady against her, tracing the architecture of her body, and you feel the tension start to loosen - not all of it, not even most of it, but enough. A fraction of the rigidity melting out of her muscles. "After that, it's going to feel incredible. And I'll go slow." Your hand settles on the curve of her lower back. Resting there. Warm. "I would never hurt you, babe."

"Promise me." Almost inaudible. She's not looking at you anymore - she's looking at the headboard, at the wall, at anything that isn't your face. "Promise you'll go slow. Promise me."

"I promise."

She buries her face in the pillow. You watch her back rise and fall. Once. Twice. Three times. Deep, shaky breaths, the kind you take when you're gathering every scrap of nerve you have left. She faces you again, cheeks blazing. Tears gather in her eyes, but her gaze is unyielding.

"Okay." She exhales hard through her nose. "Fuck it. Okay. Go slow. And if it hurts too much I'm kicking you in the balls.”

You position yourself behind her. One hand on her hip, steadying. The other guiding your cock upward - past her dripping pussy, past the slick crease between her legs, until the head rests against that tight, clenched ring. She tenses immediately. Her entire body locks up, every muscle going rigid, and you feel the resistance before you even begin to push.

"Breathe," you tell her. Your thumb strokes her hip. "Relax. Push back against me."

"Easy for you to—" She cuts herself off. Inhales. You feel the effort it takes her to unclench, the conscious relaxation of muscles that every instinct is telling her to keep tight.

You press forward. Just the tip. The head of your cock pushing against her hole, stretching it, and the resistance is extraordinary. Hot and so fucking tight, her body fighting the intrusion even as she tries to let you in. She makes a sound into the pillow, high and muffled.

"Fuck—" Her hand shoots back and grabs your wrist. Not pulling you away. Just holding on. "That's— oh god, that's—"

"I know." You hold still. Giving her time. The first half-inch is inside her and the pressure around you is almost unbearable, this crushing, clenching heat. "Just the tip. That's all. Tell me when."

She's panting. Quick, shallow breaths. Her thighs are shaking visibly. The hand on your wrist squeezes, releases, squeezes again.

"More," she manages. "Slowly. Slowly."

You push in another inch. Her back arches sharply and a moan tears out of her, deeper and rawer. Her asshole stretches around you, gripping, and you can feel every fraction of progress, every millimeter of her yielding.

"Talk to me," you murmur. "Tell me what it feels like."

"It feels—" She gasps as you shift slightly, adjusting the angle. "—it feels like you're splitting me in half. Fuck. Fuck. I can feel every— I can feel all of you, every—" Her sentence fractures. She buries her face in the pillow.

You stop. "Too much?"

"No." Muffled. Immediate. "No. Don't stop. Just— give me a second."

You wait. Your hand moves in slow circles on her lower back. You feel the tremors running through her, the way her body oscillates between tension and surrender. Her asshole clenches rhythmically around you - involuntary spasms, her muscles trying to accommodate something they weren't built for.

"Okay," she breathes. Her grip on your wrist loosens. "Okay. More."

Another inch. She cries out. Her fist pounds the mattress once, hard, and her toes curl against the sheets, and the sound she makes is so raw and exposed that it barely sounds like her, this polished, curated, camera-ready woman reduced to animal noise by the pressure of your cock slowly opening her ass.

"You're doing so well," you say.

She laughs. Choked, incredulous, wet. "Don't patronize me while you're— ah— while you're literally inside my—"

"I'm not patronizing you."

"You just said you're doing so well while your dick is in my ass. That's—" She gasps as you slide another fraction deeper. "—that's the most patronizing thing anyone has ever— oh god—"

"Should I stop?"

"If you stop I'll kill you." Her nails rake the sheets. "I mean it. I will literally— nnh— murder you and bury you under this hotel. Keep going."

You push the rest of the way in. Slow. Inexorable. And when your hips finally press flush against her ass, when you're buried to the hilt in the impossible tightness of her, she goes completely silent. Her arms give out. Her chest drops to the mattress. Her mouth is open against the pillow, eyes squeezed shut, and her whole body is trembling in one continuous shudder.

You stay there. Fully seated. Not moving. Letting her feel the entirety of it - the stretch, the fullness, the overwhelming, inescapable presence of you inside her in a place no one has been before.

"Chaewon?"

"Don't—" She holds up one finger. "—don't talk. Just. Give me a minute."

You give her a minute. Your hands rest on her hips. The trembling slowly subsides.

When she speaks again, her words come thick and dazed: "I can feel your heartbeat. Inside me. I can actually feel—"

She doesn’t finish the sentence. The words dissolve as she turns her head against the pillow, cheek flattened into the cotton, hair clinging to her damp forehead. When her eyes find yours, they’re glassy and dark, pupils blown so wide there’s barely any brown left. She swallows, breath hitching, and the plea slips out fractured: “Fuck me,” she whispers, broken. “Fuck me hard. Make me scream. I don’t care anymore, I don’t care about any of it. Just move."

You pull back. Slowly. An inch, then two, and she whimpers at the drag, her hole gripping you, clenching involuntarily around the shaft as it withdraws. You push back in. Same pace. Measured. Controlled. Feeling her stretch around you, feeling the impossible tightness yield, accommodate, accept.

Then you do it again. Faster. And again.

Her moan starts low in her chest and climbs. By the third stroke it's something feral, bouncing off the hotel walls, and her fist pounds the mattress as you establish a rhythm - steady, deep, each thrust pushing her forward on the sheets. Her ass clenches around you with every stroke, this vice-grip heat that makes your jaw clench.

"Oh my god—" She buries her face in the pillow. Her shoulder blades flex beneath her skin. "Oh my god oh my god oh my—" The words blur together, becoming less language and more sound, this continuous stream of half-formed syllables muffled by cotton.

"You like this," you observe, a little petulantly, your hands grip her hips and pull her back onto you with each thrust, forcing her to take the full length. "You like me."

Her head snaps up from the pillow. "No—"

"Then why are you here, Chaewon?"

“Fuck you—" She chokes on a moan as you thrust deep, grinding your hips against her ass. "—I hate you. I've said it— I've said it so many times— how many times do I have to—"

"You've said it plenty." You pull almost all the way out and drive back in, and the cry she makes rattles the windows. "And yet."

"And yet nothing—"

"And yet you're in my hotel room." Another thrust. Hard. Her arms buckle. "At midnight." Harder. "With my cock in your ass." Harder still, and she screams into the pillow, this ragged, torn sound. "So I'll ask again. Why are you here?"

She groans. Grumbles. Her fists twist the sheets into knots and her body rocks forward with each impact, the mattress creaking beneath her knees. "I don't know." The words tear free. "Damn it, I don't know. I don't— I can't explain it, I can't rationalize it, I just... It's good. Too fucking good. Don't stop. Don't you fucking stop, fuck me hard, motherfucker—"

The restraint dissolves. You give her what she's asking for. You fuck her ass with a force that shoves her forward on the bed, her knees sliding on the sheets, her hands bracing against the headboard to keep herself from being pushed into it.

You raise your hand and bring it down on her right cheek. The crack echoes through the room. Her flesh ripples from the impact - that perfect, round ass jiggling from the force of it - and Chaewon cries out, sharp and surprised and electric.

"Fuck— yes—"

Another slap. Left cheek. Harder. The pink bloom spreads across her skin, visible even in the dim lamplight. Her toes curl. Her back arches deeper. "You want me to mark you?"

She moans against the headboard, her forehead pressed to the wood. "Yes, yes! Hit me harder. Be a man for once in your miserable fucking life—"

You hit her harder. Open palm, full force, right across the center of her ass while you're buried inside her, and the dual sensation - the sting outside, the fullness inside - rips a sound out of her that's barely human. The handprint blooms red and vivid on her skin.

"Harder—" She's not even forming complete thoughts anymore. "—harder, motherfucker, is that all you— fuck— you spent six years ripping me apart in print and you can't even—"

Another slap. Her flesh bounces. She screams and pushes her hips back into you, grinding, taking you as deep as her body will allow.

"Every fucking review—" She's ranting now, the words pouring out between moans, between the sharp cracks of your palm on her ass. "—every snarky little sentence— you smug— condescending— you don't know shit about my writing— you don't— fuck, right there— you don't know what it costs me—"

"Tell me what it costs you." You don't slow down. Each thrust punctuated by the slap of skin, by the wet sounds of her body taking you, by the creak of the mattress. "Tell me, Chaewon. Since you're finally being honest."

"Everything—" The word breaks on the way out. "—it costs me everything, you asshole, every book costs me everything and you sit there and you tear it apart in— oh god— in five thousand words and you make it sound so— so fucking easy to—"

She can't finish. Your hand comes down on her ass again and her sentence dissolves into a moan so loud she claps her own hand over her mouth. You reach forward and pull her hand away.

"I said I wanted to hear you scream."

"The people in the next room—"

"Fuck them."

She laughs - this wild, unhinged, desperate laugh that breaks into a groan as you snap your hips forward. "You're insane. You're absolutely— you're a fucking— god— why does this feel so—"

"Say it."

"No—"

"Say it feels good, Chaewon."

"It feels—" She grits her teeth. Fighting it. Even with her ass in the air and her face pressed to a pillow and handprints blooming red on both cheeks, she's fighting you for every inch of ground. "—it feels like I'm being fucked by the most arrogant man I've ever—"

You spank her again, mid-thrust, and she breaks: "Good— it feels good, you piece of shit, it feels so fucking good and I hate that, I hate you for that, I hate that you're the one who— who makes me feel—"

Her voice is climbing. Getting thinner. More fractured. Her thighs are shaking violently now, the tremors visible in her calves, in her feet, in the way her toes keep curling and uncurling against the sheets. You recognize the signs - the same ones from the terrace, from the wall, the tension building in her core, her body winding tighter with every stroke.

"Make me cum." She says it clearly. Cutting through the moans, the panting, the chaos. A command issued from somewhere beyond pride. "Make me cum with your cock in my ass, you fucking— I need to— I'm—"

You grab her by the hips and thrust hard, burying yourself inside her with no restraint. The pace loses any pretense of control. It's raw, it's frenetic, it's two people who have spent years building walls against each other and are now demolishing them with the crudest tools available. The sound of flesh on flesh fills the room. The headboard knocks against the wall. Her ass is red and hot under your palms, the skin radiating heat where you've marked her.

“Come on,” you tell her, though you’re falling apart now, breath ragged, chest slick with sweat. “You want to scream? Then scream, Chaewon.”

Her right hand shoots backward and grabs your forearm. Her nails sink in deep enough to draw blood. Her mouth opens - and then she's gone.

It hits her all at once. No warning. Just impact. Her body snaps tight, every muscle seizing. She clamps down around you so fiercely it makes your head spin. And the noise she lets out, fuck, it starts low in her belly and climbs its way up, breaking out of her in this deep, animal groan that just keeps going. Her back bows, chest lifting, head thrown back as she convulses. Her eyes roll until there’s nothing but white, and when the sound finally dies her mouth stays open, breath gone, body still jerking in sharp, rhythmic spasms around you.

She comes from her ass. Untouched. Nothing against her clit, nothing inside her pussy, just the fullness of you in her ass and whatever psychological alchemy converts years of hostility and a kiss against a stone wall into the most intense orgasm she's ever had. You feel it in the way she clenches - rapid, desperate contractions, her body milking you - and in the way her thighs give out, her knees sliding on the sheets.

"I can't—" She's sobbing. These dry, breathless heaves. "—I can't believe I— you— fuck—"

Her arms collapse. Her chest hits the mattress. She goes down face-first into the pillow, her ass still raised, still impaled on your cock, trembling through the aftershocks. She shudders one final time. Then she goes still.

Breathing. Just breathing. Shallow and rapid, gradually slowing. Her back rising and falling. The red handprints on her ass vivid against her skin. Her hair plastered to the side of her face, one eye visible, half-closed, glazed over.

You pull out slowly. She winces, a small sound escaping through her teeth, and her hole clenches at the emptiness, and she buries her face deeper into the pillow. The room is quiet except for breathing. Hers. Yours. The distant sound of the sea through the shuttered windows. Somewhere down the hall, a door closes.

Kim Chaewon lies face-down on your bed, naked, trembling, marked, and silent for the first time since you met her.

Her hand reaches back blindly. Finds your knee. Rests there.

You lean down and press your lips to her shoulder. Then the ridge of her spine. Then the space between her shoulder blades, where a thin sheen of sweat makes her skin taste like salt. She doesn't move. Just lies there, face-down, breathing. "How are you doing?" you murmur against her back.

Silence. Then, muffled by the pillow: "You fucked my ass."

"I did."

"Don't be grumpy about it."

"I'll be as grumpy as I want. I just came from getting fucked in the ass by a man who called my book comfort food. I'm entitled to whatever emotional response I—"

You turn her over. Gently. One hand on her hip, the other on her shoulder, rolling her onto her back. She goes willingly, though her expression says otherwise, and her hair fans across the pillow in damp waves, her body is flushed from her cheeks to her navel, and the handprints on her ass must be pressing against the sheets because she winces slightly when her weight settles.

You kiss her. There’s nothing showy about it. Your hand slides to the back of her head, holding her there, your mouth moving with an unhurried softness that isn’t calculated, isn’t tactical. It’s just there. Her lips are warm and slightly swollen. She opens without hesitation, her tongue brushing against yours, and for a second the tension dissolves. No edge. No bite. Just mouths. Just heat

You shift your weight, guiding her as you move - rolling onto your back, pulling her with you until she's on top, straddling you, her thighs bracketing your hips. Her palms rest flat on your chest. The kiss doesn't break. It adjusts, finds its new geometry.

She grumbles against your mouth. Pulls back half an inch and says: "Stop it."

"Stop what?"

"Being sweet." She says the word the way most people say disgusting. "I can't handle you being sweet. It doesn't fit. It makes me feel—" She inhales, then exhales. "I prefer it when you fuck me angry. When you're mean. This… this soft shit makes me want to throw up."

"I was buying time." Your hands settle on her waist. Thumbs tracing the jut of her hip bones. "Letting you rest."

"Rest? I don't need—"

"Before I continue."

You reach between you. Her mouth clicks shut. Her eyes flicker wider, and her body tightens over yours, a subtle wave of tension rolling up from her thighs to her chest. Your cock is still rigid, aching, wet, and you press the tip against her asshole. She's looser now, still open from before, but the contact makes her gasp.

You thrust upward. She grunts. Her nails dig into your chest and her back curves, her head dropping forward, hair falling around her face. You're inside her again - that same devastating tightness, but easier now, her body remembering, accommodating. Her arms loop around your neck and she presses herself against you, chest to chest, skin to skin, and you grip her slim waist and hold her there.

For a moment neither of you moves. Just breathing. Her heartbeat against your ribs. Yours against hers.

She speaks into the crook of your neck, her lips brushing your skin: "Have you thought about this before?"

"About what?"

"This. Me... Having me. Did you ever imagine it? When you saw me at events, or in interviews, or—" She swallows. "—when you were writing about me. Did you think about what it would be like?"

You stare at the ceiling. Her weight on your hips. Her breath on your throat. It takes a few seconds, but you finally reply: "Sometimes.” And then, because the honesty is already out and there's no retrieving it: "When I'd see you at events. Or in an interview. I'd wonder what it would be like if things were different."

"Different how?"

You don't answer. You roll your hips upward instead. A slow and deep stroke that pushes the full length of your cock into her ass, and she inhales sharply, her eyes fluttering, her fingers tightening behind your neck. You pull back and push in again, setting a rhythm that is unhurried. Her body rocks gently on top of you with each thrust.

She starts to moan. Soft, almost reluctant sounds that she breathes against your jaw. Her hips begin to move, matching your rhythm, grinding down onto you as you push up.

"I don't understand this," she whispers. Her forehead presses against yours. Her eyes are open, inches away. "I hate you. I know I hate you. I feel it. It's real. But at the same time I want to—" She kisses you. Brief. Subtle. "—I want to kiss you. I want to stay here, exactly like this, with you inside me, and I want to kiss you and I want to feel you and… and I also want to tear the skin off your face with my fingernails. Both things. At the same time. What the fuck is wrong with me?"

"Nothing." You brush the hair from her eyes. Your hips don't stop moving. "Hate and love sit closer together than people think. Same intensity. Same obsession. Same inability to stop thinking about the other person." You thrust deeper and she bites her lip, suppressing a moan. "The line between them is so thin it barely exists. You've been on one side of it for six years. Maybe tonight you're standing on the line itself. Looking both ways."

"That's so fucked up."

"It is."

"Then why does it feel so good?"

"Maybe that's why."

She presses her mouth to yours and moans into the kiss as you grip her ass with both hands and spread her cheeks wide, driving up into her. The angle shifts. The depth shifts. And the noise she makes turns thick and needy and almost painfully beautiful.

You start fucking her harder.

She breaks the kiss and her head falls back, her throat exposed, and her hips slam down to meet each thrust. "You're right," she manages. "You're right and I hate you for being right. The only thing that matters is that this is fucking good. It's—" She rolls her hips in a grinding circle that makes you both groan. "—it's addictive. You're addictive. Your cock in my ass is addictive. Your stupid fucking criticism is addictive." She laughs - breathless, slightly unhinged. "It's humiliating. It's degrading. And I can't get enough of it. What does that make me?"

"Human, I guess.”

"Fuck off." She’s grinning when she says it. This wild, feral grin with her hair in her face and her cheeks flushed and her body bouncing on your cock. "Don't stop. Don't fucking stop, you greedy little fuck.”

She rolls her hips in a slow, grinding circle and looks down at you. Sweat on her upper lip. Hair stuck to her temples. Her palms flat on your chest, nails leaving half-moons in your skin. And she asks, plain as anything, no filter left: "You want to cum in my ass, don't you?"

You don't answer fast enough.

"Don't bullshit me." She clenches around you - tight, purposeful, punishing - and your hands fly to her hips. "I've known since the terrace. No. Before the terrace. Since you started writing about me. Every nasty, obsessive, over-analytical word you ever put in print - it was always about this. Getting me underneath you. Getting me on top of you. Getting inside me." She drops her hips down hard and your cock sinks deeper into her ass and she hisses through her teeth and keeps talking: "You wanted to split me open and fill me up and watch it leak out. That's the real review, isn't it? That's the one you've been drafting in your sick little head for six fucking years."

"Chaewon, you don't—"

"Shut up. I'm talking." She grabs your jaw. Squeezes. Forces your eyes to hers. "You already came inside my pussy tonight. On a public terrace. Against a wall. You made me feel like some cheap whore. You pumped me full and I walked back to that party with your cum dripping into my underwear and smiled at people while it ran down my thigh." Her grip tightens on your jaw. "So now you're going to do the same thing to my ass. You're going to flood this tight little hole until I'm leaking. Until I can feel it when I sit on the plane tomorrow."

You hold her hips firm, fingers pressing deep as you drive upward. She inhales sharply, her restraint cracking for just a moment before it seals shut again. "I want to hear you say it." She bends closer, lips grazing yours, heat spilling from her mouth as she whispers: "Tell me you want to cum in my ass. Out loud. Use your words, Mr. Critic. You're so good with words."

"Fuck—" You can barely get the words out. "I want to pump your ass so full it comes pouring back out. Want to see it dripping down your legs, see you soaked with it." Your grip tightens on her. "Is that enough? You satisfied?”

"There he is. There's the real you. The filthy fucking pervert hiding behind all those big vocabulary words." She sits up straight and starts moving, not gentle, not tentative, but mean. Slamming herself down onto your cock, her small body generating a force that shouldn't be possible from a frame that size, the headboard hitting the wall in sharp, rhythmic cracks. Her abs flex with each drop. Her thighs work. Her ass takes you to the hilt on every downstroke and she doesn't flinch.

She looks right at you when she says it: "Breed my ass. Every drop. Every fucking drop you've got. I want it deep. I want to be so full of your cum I can taste it."

"Fuck—"

"You bred my cunt, now wreck my ass. I want both holes stuffed. I want to go back to my room dripping from everywhere." She's panting, sweat running from her temples to her jaw, dripping onto your chest. "Ruin me. You've been ruining me professionally for years - might as well do it physically too, you miserable piece of shit."

She slams down again. And again. The rhythm is savage, relentless, her body moving with this violent intensity that feels like it should belong in a fight, not this. But god, it works. "I'm going to think about this every night—" She grabs her own hair with one hand and pulls, arching her back, changing the angle, taking you impossibly deeper. "—every single night in my apartment when I can't sleep, when I should be writing, I'm going to think about your fat cock stretching my asshole and your cum filling me up and I'm going to hate myself so much and I'm going to touch myself until I'm shaking and it's your fault. All of it. Every orgasm I have for the rest of my life with my fingers in my ass thinking about tonight is on you."

Your hands clamp onto her waist. You plant your feet flat on the mattress, bend your knees, and drive upward - meeting her downstroke, doubling the force - and the sound she makes isn't a moan. It's a scream. Raw. Shattered. Ripped from somewhere beneath language.

"Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck—" Her rhythm breaks. She can't maintain it against your upward thrusts so she stops trying and just takes it, her body bouncing on your cock, her hands braced on your chest for balance, her mouth hanging open. "—give it to me, cum in my ass, please, I need it so bad, I need you to fill me up, I need— I fucking need—"

Her sentences collapse. She's babbling now, fragments, pleas, profanity strung together by desperation. Her thighs are trembling so badly she can barely hold herself up. Tears streak from the corners of her squeezed-shut eyes, cutting through the flush on her cheeks.

"—please please please cum in my ass, I want it, I want every fucking drop, make me yours, fill me, breed me, I can't— I need to feel it— I need to feel you cum inside—" She opens her eyes. Looks down at you. Tears and sweat and something beyond either. Her small hands find your face and hold it, and she says - quiet now, wrecked, a whisper against the chaos of her own body: "Give it to me. I want it so fucking much."

You cum. It tears through you - this massive, rolling wave that starts at the base of your spine and detonates outward, and your hips stutter upward, burying yourself as deep as her body will allow, and you feel yourself pulse inside her. Once. Twice. Again. Each spasm pumping thick, hot cum deep into her ass, and the sensation is surreal, this impossible tightness gripping you, milking you, and the warmth spreading inside her.

The feeling crashes over her all at once. She freezes on top of you, completely still, and her eyes go wide. Her lips part. "Oh my—" The words die. She's feeling it, every pump, every throb, the warmth spreading inside her, and her expression just... breaks open. Shock bleeds into euphoria bleeds into something that looks almost like relief. "Oh my god—" she breathes. "—I can feel it. I can feel all of it. You're so— there's so much— oh god, oh fuck, don't move, stay, stay—"

You stay. Buried to the hilt, still pulsing, still emptying yourself into her, and she sits perfectly still on top of you with her eyes closed and her lips parted and this expression of devastated bliss, feeling every twitch, every throb, every hot spill of cum filling her ass. "I love it," she whispers. Not to you. Not to anyone. Just a statement released into the dark room. "Fuck. I love it."

The last aftershock fades. Your muscles go slack. Your hands fall from her hips to the mattress.

Chaewon collapses. She folds forward, her full weight dropping onto your chest, her face pressing into the crook of your neck. Her arms tuck between your bodies, her fists loosely curled against your ribs. She's small. She weighs nothing. Her heartbeat hammers against your sternum.

"Don't pull out," she murmurs into your neck. "Not yet. I want to stay like this for a minute. I want to feel you." You wrap your arms around her. One across her lower back. The other between her shoulder blades, your hand cradling the base of her skull. "Tighter," she breathes into the curve of your neck. Quiet. Nothing like her.

You tighten your arms. Pull her closer. Her body presses flush against yours, every contour matched, and she burrows into you, her nose against your throat, her damp hair tickling your jaw. Her breathing is starting to slow. Evening out. Her fingers uncurl against your ribs and flatten, palms warm on your skin.

Neither of you moves. The room settles, radiator ticking, waves crashing softly somewhere beneath the window, a pair of footsteps trailing down the corridor. Her breathing has slowed to something deep and steady against the side of your neck. You can feel the warmth of each exhale on your skin, followed by the cooler absence when she inhales. Five minutes pass. Maybe more. You're not tracking it.

Then she speaks: "You're right."

Your hand pauses on her back. "About what?"

She doesn't answer immediately. She shifts, lifting her head from the crook of your neck, and looks at you. (There's a tear sitting on the rim of her lower lash line. Not falling. Just sitting there.) "I know," she says. "I know I'm a fraud." Your mind is still swimming. Dopamine-flooded, hazy, that post-orgasm fog where thoughts form slowly and arrive already half-dissolved. You blink at her. "Everyone praises me. My publisher. My agent. My readers. Everyone at that party tonight. They tell me I'm brilliant. They tell me I'm the voice of a generation." She laughs, small, bitter, directed inward. "And you know who doesn't even read my books? The critics who actually matter. The ones at The New Yorker, the ones at the London Review. They don't bother. I'm not worth their time."

The tear moves. Slides down her cheek slowly, tracing the line of her jaw.

"You're the only respected critic who actually reads my work. Cover to cover. Every single book." Her lips press together. "And then you destroy it. But at least you read it. At least you cared enough to—" She stops. Swallows. Her fingers curl tighter against your ribs. "Teach me how to be better."

You stare at her. This woman - naked in your bed, marked and flushed and undone, mascara smudged under her eyes, a tear tracking down her face - asking you. Asking the man she's spent six years despising, the man she called a frustrated artist and a failed writer, to teach her.

Your thumb comes up and catches the tear at her jawline. Wipes it away. "Don't cry."

"I'm not crying. I'm leaking. And it's your fault."

You almost smile. Then you sit up slowly, easing her off your chest, your hands finding her waist. You lift her and set her down beside you on the bed. She sinks into the white sheets without resistance, her hair fanning across the pillow in dark waves. The lamplight paints her in gold. Every part of her is bare and small against the wide expanse of hotel linen, collarbones catching shadow, the soft rise of her stomach moving with each breath. Chaewon's looking up at you with those dark, wet, searching eyes.

She looks so beautiful. And so completely lost.

(This is a moment your systematic mind never prepared for. You had a framework for tonight - she'd come, you'd fuck, she'd leave. Transactional hostility with a physical outlet. Clean. Contained. You did not account for Kim Chaewon lying naked in your bed asking you to make her a better writer. You don't know how to solve this. You're not sure it's yours to solve.)

"I can't help you," you say.

Her expression fractures. "Why not?"

"Because I can't change the way you write. That's not—" You pause. Choose your words the way you choose them in print. "That's not what I want. And I promise you, it's not what you want either. You don't need someone else's voice telling you how to use yours."

She sits up. "But I want to be better. I win awards. I sell millions. My books get translated into thirty-six languages. And sometimes—" Her hands twist in the sheet. "—sometimes I lie awake at three in the morning wondering if I actually deserve any of it. If the awards are for the writing or for the sales. If the translations happened because the prose is good or because the IP is marketable."

"Chaewon—"

"Do I deserve it?" She asks directly. Looking at you. Demanding an answer she knows you won't soften.

"You need to find your own way to that answer." You hold her gaze. "Not mine. Not your publisher's. Not BookTok's. Yours."

A small change passes over her face. Whatever flickers behind her eyes draws inward, restrained, almost private, yet you catch it. The moment she realizes you're not going to hand her what she came for. That you can't, and that the distinction between can't and won't doesn't actually matter when you're the one left empty-handed.

She holds your gaze for another second. Then she's moving; swinging her legs off the bed, bare feet on the cool terracotta, bending to pick up the cream top from where it landed near the nightstand. The dark skirt next, crumpled by the foot of the bed. The black lace underwear tangled in the sheets, which she extracts without looking at you. She presses it all against her chest - this bundle of fabric held tight against her bare skin, arms crossed over it - and walks to the bathroom. Her spine is very straight. The red marks on her ass are visible for one more second before the door clicks shut behind her

You sit on the edge of the bed. Stare at the far wall. Run both hands through your hair.

(You could have given her something. A reading list. A structural critique. A paragraph of actionable feedback. You've written thousands of words about what's wrong with her prose - surely you could have offered one concrete sentence about how to fix it. But that's not what she needed to hear, and giving her a prescription would have been its own kind of condescension. She doesn't need a teacher. She needs to stop being afraid of writing something that won't sell.)

The shower stops. You pull on your underwear and trousers. Sit on the edge of the bed, barefoot, waiting for the act to conclude.

The bathroom door clicks open.

She steps out dressed, hair damp, face clean. All that smudged mascara washed away. She doesn't look at you. Just moves toward the door with her sandals dangling from one hand. Her fingers find the handle.

"Chaewon." She stops. Doesn't turn around. "There's a chapter in your first book that I really liked."

Now she turns. Slowly. Her expression is guarded, braced for another blow. "Which one?"

"I'm not going to tell you."

"What?"

"You can figure it out yourself. Read it again. You'll know which one it is. It reads differently from everything around it." You meet her eyes across the room. "I really enjoyed it. And I think you know why." She stares at you. Processing. "You're smart enough. You've already proven yourself to the world. So stop trying to prove yourself to the world. Write what you think is best. Not what sells. Not what your publisher wants. Not what your analytics suggest will perform." You lean back on your hands. "That's how you started in the beginning, isn't it? Everyone around you had a hand in shaping who you are"

"Maybe," she says. "I didn't really know what I was doing back then." She looks down at her feet on the terracotta tile. "I think I still don't."

"Maybe it's time to find out."

She lifts her gaze. Holds yours. Something passes between you. (Not tenderness exactly, and not the hostility that's defined every other interaction you've had.) Something adjacent to respect. Something that might, with enough time and enough distance, grow into understanding.

“Maybe,” she says once more.

She opens the door. Steps through it. Pulls it shut behind her without looking back.

•••

It’s an absurdly beautiful morning, pure Amalfi Coast perfection. The sky is a seamless blue, the sun skipping light across the sea, the cliffs glowing honey-gold above the harbor. You move along the beach in linen and white, sleeves rolled, unhurried. Your flight from Naples isn’t until later, which means there’s time.

You spot her from about fifty feet out. She's standing near the waterline in a floral dress - loose, light, some kind of wildflower print in pale blues and greens that the breeze keeps pressing against her legs and then releasing. Flat sandals. Her hair is doing its own thing today, the short bob wavy from a night of coastal humidity, unstyled, bangs pushed carelessly to one side. No makeup, or none that you can detect from this distance. She's squinting at the water with one hand raised to block the sun, and she hasn't seen you yet.

You cross the sand toward her. Your shoes are wrong for this - leather soles on loose ground - but you don't slow down. She turns when you're about ten feet away.

"You came."

"You asked." She folds her arms across her chest. A barrier, or the performance of one. "So what's this thing you wanted to show me? I don't have much time."

You start walking along the waterline, and she falls in beside you without being asked. The sand here is firm, packed damp and dark by the retreating tide, and her sandals press clean outlines into it with each step. The breeze tugs at the hem of her dress. Pulls at her hair. You reach down and take her hand.

Chaewon looks at your fingers laced through hers. Studies them. Her thumb moves - a small, almost unconscious stroke across your knuckle - and she doesn't pull away. You walk together for a full minute without speaking. Just the water folding over itself at the edge of the sand, and the distant clank of rigging from the harbor, and her hand warm and small inside yours.

You stop. Let go. Point toward the harbor.

She follows your gaze, scanning the moored boats, the white masts, the slow rocking of hulls against fenders. Turns back to you with one eyebrow raised.

"You dragged me all the way out here to look at boats."

"Catamarans."

"Those are boats."

"They're catamarans."

"They float. They have sails. Boats." She gives you a sideways look, the corner of her mouth twitching. "Have you seriously never been to a beach before?"

"Yesterday," you say. "Before you came to yell at me on the terrace. I was watching those catamarans. I'd been looking at them most of the evening." She waits. The breeze shifts, carrying brine and a faint trace of engine oil from somewhere in the harbor. "Actually - that's not entirely true. Before the catamarans, I was watching you. From across the terrace. You were with Irene and Sana, and the sunset was behind you, and I thought... I thought you were the most beautiful thing on that terrace. Including the Amalfi Coast. And then I turned around and stared at the boats instead."

She doesn't respond. Her eyes stay on the harbor. On the two white shapes rocking gently in the morning swell.

"A catamaran is a twin-hulled vessel." You say it the way you'd say anything to someone standing next to you on a beach - easy, unhurried, pointing out something you find interesting. "Two separate bodies running parallel, held together by a rigid frame. They never merge into one hull. The gap between them - that distance - is what makes the whole thing work. Push the hulls together, force them into a single body, and it stops being a catamaran. It gets slower. Less stable. Less itself." You look at her. She's still watching the harbor. "I've spent six years reviewing your books. You've spent six years hating me for it. And all of that: the reviews, the public fights, the Reddit threads, the TikTok wars, every single ugly thing between us, that's the crossbeam. That's the rigid frame connecting the two hulls. Same water under both of us. Same wind filling both sails. The space between us isn't emptiness, Chaewon. We hold each other steady in this strange way that’s only ours.''

The breeze moves through a long silence. Chaewon stares at the catamarans, her lips pressed together, the floral print rippling against her shins. The morning sun catches something at the corners of her eyes. Moisture. Not tears (she wouldn't allow tears after last night) but the precursor.

She turns to face you. Holds your gaze. "That's really beautiful." No sarcasm. No edge. Just the words, offered plainly, and for once she doesn't immediately armor them with a qualifier. Then, after a beat: "You should write something. A real story. Not reviews. Not criticism. Fiction."

"The world doesn't need more writers."

"That's a cop-out."

"It's not. Everything that needed to be said has already been written. Centuries ago, most of it. The same countries are still fighting the same wars over the same borders. The same political cycles repeat on thirty-year loops. The old solutions are still valid and still ignored." You watch the catamarans sway. "Every novel published this year is a copy of a copy of a copy. Every manifesto. Every campaign speech. Every piece of art hanging in every gallery in every city on earth. We're not generating new ideas anymore."

"And yet you spend your entire career reading new books."

"Reading them and confirming exactly what I just said."

She tilts her head. "That is genuinely the most depressing thing anyone has ever said to me on a beach. And I once got dumped in Jeju-do." A pause. "Drop the nihilist act. It doesn't work on me."

"I'm not being nihilistic. I'm being—"

"You're being a coward." No malice. No heat. Just a clean, quiet observation, delivered the way you'd note that the tide is going out. A fact about the landscape. "You've convinced yourself nothing new can be said because that exempts you from ever having to try. You get to sit in the critic's chair permanently, holding everyone else to a standard you've never once applied to yourself, and you never have to risk producing something that someone could tear apart the way you tear apart everyone else." She uncrosses her arms. Lets them hang at her sides. Open. "You're afraid of being judged. That's the whole thing. That's all this has ever been."

It lands. You feel it land - a clean hit, center mass. You consider reaching for something evasive, something clever and deflective and safe, the rhetorical equivalent of turning away to watch the boats. But she's standing there in a floral dress on a beach in southern Italy, and eight hours ago she was in your bed with her walls down and her defenses stripped and her body open, asking you to show her something real. The very least you owe her is a fraction of the honesty you've been demanding from her writing for six years.

"It's not exactly fear. I'd just rather not find out. I've spent too long being the stone. Turning into glass at this point feels—"

"Same thing. That's fear in a nicer suit." She studies you. "The great critic. Terrified of his own medicine."

You exhale. Nod. Barely, but enough. She sees the concession, the tiny crack in the parapet, and she has the grace not to push her fingers into it. She just lets it sit there between you, acknowledged, unexamined, a small honest thing resting on the sand.

She turns back toward the water. Bites her lower lip. The catamarans rock gently, their white hulls bright against the deep blue of the harbor.

"Can I use that?" she asks. "The catamaran thing. In my next book."

"Be my guest. I won't charge royalties."

"Wow. First nice thing you've ever done for me."

"Second."

She turns away fast, but not fast enough, you catch the twitch at the corner of her mouth, the smile she's physically fighting down, her teeth pressing into her bottom lip to contain it. She reaches up and tucks her hair behind her ear. The same one from the first night you ever saw her. She doesn't know you remember it. She doesn't know there's anything to remember.

"I have an idea," she says after a moment. Still facing the water. Her sandals are at the edge of the tide line, the next wave lapping close enough to darken the sand near her toes. "A dynamic between two characters. Something I've been working through since last night." She pauses. Picks her next words with the same care she'd use on a difficult sentence in a third draft. "But I think I'll need to meet with you. From time to time. For... research purposes."

"Research purposes, huh?”

"Inspiration." She turns her head just enough to catch your reaction from the corner of her eye. "I need to understand the dynamic from the inside. For authenticity."

"Ah. Authenticity. Your favorite thing."

"Do you have a problem with that arrangement?"

"None whatsoever."

"Good." A short nod. Brisk. Professional, as if you've just agreed on deliverables and timelines rather than a series of encounters that will inevitably end with her clothes on your floor and her fingernail marks on your back. "So we'll be in touch."

"We'll be in touch."

The waves roll in. Retreat. Roll in again. A gull cuts across the harbor, banking low over the catamarans, and the morning sun lays a bright strip across the water that reaches all the way to the beach.

"One last kiss," you say.

Her eyebrows go up. "You're very demanding for someone who just told me nothing new exists under the sun."

"I'm requesting. Not demanding."

"Whatever." She's turning toward you, her weight shifts forward onto her toes, and her chin lifts. "Be quick about it. I have an interview in an hour and I need to fix my face."

"Your face is fine."

"My face is a disaster. Quick."

You step into her. Your hands find her waist through the thin cotton of the dress - warm from the sun, warm from her body underneath - and you settle them on the curve above her hips. She doesn't step back. Doesn't fold her arms. Just stands there looking up at you, dark eyes steady, the wind moving through the wildflower print and through her hair and through the small space between your mouth and hers.

You lean down and kiss her. She hesitates. Her lips stay closed for a breath; one final negotiation with herself about what this is and what it means and whether she can afford to let it mean anything at all. Her body is still. Her hands remain at her sides.

Then her mouth softens. Parts. Her hand rises to the side of your neck, fingers sliding up into your hair, and the kiss deepens past whatever boundary she'd set for it. Slow. Unhurried. Soft in a way that would have been impossible twelve hours ago, when everything between you was teeth and heat and skin scraping against stone. Her fingertips trace the line of your jaw. Your thumb maps the ridge of her hip. The sea exhales behind her, and for a suspended moment the world contracts to a very small radius. No reviews. No bestseller lists. No discourse. No audience. Just her mouth and your mouth and the sound of the water doing what water does, over and over, indifferent to everything.

She pulls back first. Her hand stays on your neck for an extra second. Then drops. "I need to go." She steps back. Steady. Composed. "I'm going to be late."

"I know."

"This doesn't mean I like you."

"Understood."

"And I still think your reviews are reductive, mean-spirited, and occasionally grammatically suspect."

"I'd be disappointed if you felt otherwise."

She almost smiles. Catches it at the last second, presses her lips into a line, and turns on her heel. She starts up the beach toward the coastal road, quick strides, the floral dress swaying against her legs, her sandals leaving sharp impressions in the wet sand. With every step she's putting herself back together. Becoming Kim Chaewon again - the bestseller, the brand, the woman who doesn't need anyone's approval and certainly not yours.

Twenty feet away, she stops. Turns around.

You raise your hand. A wave. last time you tried this gesture, she responded with her middle finger and an expression that could peel paint off a wall.

Chaewon looks at you across the sand. The morning light is full on her face now, catching the slight wave in her hair, the wildflower blues and greens of her dress, the flush that still hasn't faded from her cheeks.

She waves back with a barely-there smile she'd deny under oath and in front of a jury. Then she turns and walks away. The floral dress rounds the curve of the coastal road and disappears behind a low stone wall covered in bougainvillea.

You stay on the beach. Hands in your pockets. Sun on your face. The morning settling into itself around you - the heat building, the tourists beginning to appear on the far end of the sand, the faint sound of a cafe opening its shutters somewhere up the hill.

(Sometimes you let yourself think about it. What would have happened if she'd stayed. If she'd actually gone to the bar and come back with that second drink and sat down next to you and decided - for whatever private, unknowable reason - that you were someone worth talking to for another hour. If you'd gotten her name that night, heard it from her own mouth instead of reading it months later off the spine of a book in your apartment at two in the morning with a red pen in your hand and a sinking feeling in your stomach.

You wonder if knowing her first as a person instead of a product would have changed the way you read her. You wonder if you would have been kinder. Or if she would have made that impossible too. You wonder, occasionally, in the specific quiet of a late night when your critical faculties are offline and something less disciplined takes over, whether the two of you were always going to end up here - hostile, entangled, orbiting each other at a distance calibrated to cause maximum damage - or if there was a version of this where she came back with the wine and sat down and everything that followed was entirely different.

She didn't come back, though. And you'll never know.)

In the harbor, the two catamarans rock gently in their moorings. Twin white hulls catching the light. Running parallel. Connected. The rigid frame between them holding everything in place.

Same water. Same wind.

(Maybe it's better this way.)

The space between them isn't emptiness.

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