SH | Chapter 3.1

‘What the hell is that mad bastard doing right now?’

Middle Gil’s eyes flew wide as he clutched his groin, trying to hold back his arousal. Again and again, Donggu’s image came to him, being swallowed by pleasure until his mind was blank. Each time, his heart swelled and his blood ran hot.

The bodyguards of the Left State Councilor had rotating days off. The guard on duty with him suggested they go outside and take a breather together, but Middle Gil refused, saying he was tired and wanted to rest.

He locked himself in the assigned room in the lodgings provided by Left State Councilor Park Sihak, and grabbed at the waistband of his trousers. He wrapped his hand around the hardening shaft and stroked it. Heat spilled out of him in ragged breaths.

Donggu’s moan struck his ears with just one touch. As he ran his hand over the shaft and stroked, Donggu’s flushed face filled his vision. His breathing grew ragged. Sweat beaded on his forehead. Droplets slid down the line of his face. Donggu’s black eyes, wet with tears, were etched into the center of his pupils.

The moment he bit his lip, his shaft spilled semen. Watching it drip from his hand, Middle Gil’s insides dried out like a heap of straw. That parched, brittle straw was making it hard for him to breathe.

His lips were dry. His mouth was dry. His chest was dry. At this rate, he felt like he might collapse from dehydration. Middle Gil washed the hand Soyeeled with his own semen. Cold water met the heat of his skin and gave off steam. He scrubbed his face roughly. The hand that moved over his face felt like ice.

It felt as though he would melt away coldly, like snow that had failed to stop spring.

Whenever that happened, he found himself sneaking into the annex without realizing it.

His arousal had him in a chokehold. He felt like a mound of dirt trapped beneath the sprawling roots of a tree. Like he was being crushed by something he could not escape. Yet the cold moisture of those roots had already seeped into his mind.

The scent of wood had soaked into the dirt of his body. He wanted to crawl around, groping at the root tips. He wanted to devour the scent itself. So, like a man possessed, he came and went from the annex.

Middle Gil, drunk on Donggu like a tree, widened his eyes at the sight of Yoongong looking like a cruel woodcutter chopping at the tree with an axe.

Before he knew it, his body jerked. The shadow fixed on the ceiling slipped out for a moment, then settled again.

Yoongong’s hand, which had been around Donggu’s neck, stopped. His eyes stared at the floor. The candle flame trembled. No, the shadows in the room trembled.

“…”

“…”

Tension hung in the room. Only Donggu’s breathing could be heard quietly through it. Yoongong’s eyes rolled to the side. A single chopstick that had fallen from the table caught at the edge of his vision.

Yoongong stroked Donggu’s hair and shifted his posture slightly. In that brief moment, he carefully picked up the chopstick from the floor. With his other hand, the one not holding the chopstick, he touched the back of Donggu’s neck.

Middle Gil, perched on the beam above, swallowed hard. Sweat trickled down his temples.

‘Did he spot me?’

No, not if that were true, because Yoongong was far too calm.

Middle Gil, who had been staring down without blinking, was just in the middle of a blink when it happened.

Whoosh!

A razor-sharp gust of wind shot toward him like a blade. Middle Gil twisted away before his eyelids had even fully opened.

Flap!

His sleeves flared as gravity took hold. Losing his balance, Middle Gil fell from under the beam and bit his lip. He steadied himself and landed silently on the floor.

Tap!

The moment his knees hit the ground,

Thud!

Something pierced deeply through the rafters above the beam. Middle Gil looked up at the place where he had been hiding just moments earlier. A thin, silver chopstick had been driven into the wood and was trembling violently.

Middle Gil’s eyes gleamed darkly. His heart turned cold. He lowered his gaze and looked at the person who had thrown the chopstick. Yoongong was holding Donggu tight against his chest, his eyes never leaving Middle Gil.

“…one of the new guards my father selected, I see.”

The candle flame wavered, then steadied. The gaze that had been shaking with the flame now turned to Yoongong. And eyes that held a faint warmth, like the candlelight, moved toward Donggu.

“A guard hired to protect the household, yet he was spying on someone else’s bridal chamber.”

Yoongong’s eyes narrowed at the fact that Middle Gil’s gaze had gone to Donggu.

“Not the bridal chamber, then the bride in it. Why, did you take a fancy to my new bride?”

At Yoongong’s sneering question, Middle Gil’s gaze, which had not left Donggu, shifted direction.

“The new bride who came in a bridal sedan was not some delicate young woman, but a broad-shouldered man.”

Middle Gil also sneered back without losing to Yoongong. Right now, no matter how he looked at it, this was a dangerous situation. Worse, his lust directed at Donggu had been exposed too. Not only the secrets of some powerful family, but he had also set his eyes on those secrets.

But on the other hand, it could be said he had grabbed a weakness.

The Left State Councilor’s son was a sodomite. Together with some country scribe from the back of nowhere, he had turned a male servant into a respectable family’s daughter. Not content with that, he had even made him into the household’s daughter-in-law.

“If this gets out, I imagine the whole of Hanyang would be turned upside down by all sorts of ridiculous rumors.”

“Ha! Who would believe the words of some wandering swordsman!”

“I’ve wandered the country as a drifter, and let me tell you, no one cares about the truth of a rumor. Once something spreads through people’s mouths, it becomes a wildfire. That monster called rumor burns on and doesn’t die down easily, no matter who started it.”

“What makes you think you’ve walked into whose house?”

“The house of Left State Councilor Park Sihak, whose power reaches the heavens.”

“You don’t know that if you say one more word, you might die so completely your corpse won’t even be intact before your mouth has a chance to open.”

“There’s an old saying, ‘Ten people can’t catch one thief’… and this body, modest as it looks, is actually rather skilled.”

“You used all that fine skill just to spy on someone else’s intimate play. Aren’t you ashamed of that so-called skill of yours?”

“I’ve always been the sort of dog that wanders around sniffing for anything interesting because life is boring.”

Yoongong fell silent and looked at Middle Gil again. Even after offending his employer’s temper, there was no trace of fear in him. Just as he had said, it seemed he would not mind dying so long as he found something interesting.

He was like an old wolf roaming the mountain alone, with no pack at his side.

A body made of lean, finely cut muscle, light on its feet, about as tall as Yoongong, with dark, cold eyes. And a face with an oddly strange impression.

It felt like looking at an old, faded beauty painting left forgotten in a warehouse.

An existence that quietly grated on the senses, like eyes frozen in shadow, like dust scattered in the wind. Yoongong found a curious, unsettling interest in the strangely crafted face of the man.

“So that means the thing you found interesting is my wife.”

The crooked line of Middle Gil’s mouth dropped.

‘…Honestly, I’m not even sure myself.’

The image of a man taking a man from behind, a sweat-soaked body gasping with excitement and pain, flickered through his mind. At first, it had been nothing more than simple curiosity.

The humiliating surrender of some lowborn who had to accept a man as his husband had stayed in his mind. It had been interesting, like watching an obscene love story, to see the male bride who spread his legs under threat and coercion collapse under pleasure.

Even in the late-summer heat, the two rarely came out of the room. It was strange to think they had such a relationship, hotter than summer itself.

Curiosity and interest kept Middle Gil’s feet turning toward the annex. After secretly watching them for days, that sticky, wet, brazenly vivid obscenity had started making even his own shaft stir.

Middle Gil tilted his head slightly and came to a conclusion.

“Well now. It is interesting in many ways, but I wouldn’t say it’s all that much fun.”

“You’re saying you only looked into the bridal chamber of Councilor Park Sihak’s son and his wife out of simple interest?”

“Boredom lasted long enough. When something interesting finally comes along, shouldn’t I spend a little time on it?”

Yoongong tipped his head at Middle Gil’s answer. It felt as if his head had been tilted by the weight of crooked thoughts. Thoughts slanted and took shape in a twisted form inside that tilted mind. They stumbled like a drunk walking into Yoongong’s line of thought.

“Hm.”

It was a small sound, impossible to tell if it was a reply or a hum. Yoongong slowly stroked Donggu’s face in his arms. His long fingers moved past Donggu’s jaw and down his neck. Middle Gil’s gaze followed Yoongong’s hand.

“Truly, it’s an utterly ordinary man’s body, nothing special at all.”

Yoongong hooked Donggu’s reddened nipple with his finger and twisted it back and forth. The small nipple stretched taut, playing under Yoongong’s finger.

“…hngh.”

A small moan slipped out from between Donggu’s unconscious lips. Middle Gil’s eyes trembled slightly. Yoongong let go of the nipple he had been toying with. Then, suddenly, he grabbed Donggu by the thigh and lifted him.

“Still, perhaps because he was some lowlife who had worked himself to the bone like an ox pulling a field, the taste of this tight back passage is truly second to none.”

From Donggu’s fully exposed back passage, Yoongong’s semen from moments ago was still trickling out. Because it had been exposed to the air, the opening was slightly parted.

Middle Gil, forced to look at that gaping hole before his eyes, swallowed dryly without meaning to.

“Besides, the more you take him in, the tighter flesh inside starts to soften, almost like the inside of your mouth. The thrill of that is beyond words.”

Yoongong slipped one finger into the half-open hole. As he moved it back and forth as if fucking him, sticky semen inside dripped out in a stream. Yoongong pushed in his thumb to widen the opening. One of Middle Gil’s feet moved forward.

The deep hole in Donggu’s body was hard to see properly because of the flickering candlelight. The other foot followed. He grew restless over that dimly visible opening.

“As you can see, this one is a man. I happened to see him and felt desire. But this Joseon, lowborn though it may be, surely wouldn’t allow a man to take a man. My desire only grew worse by the day, and I thought I’d go mad. So I set the stage and made this lowly servant my wife, and now I enjoy myself with him.”

The cruel content echoed so gently in the night air. Between words, Yoongong’s hand never stopped going in and out of Donggu’s back passage.

Wet, sloshing sounds kept striking Middle Gil’s ears.

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