Ghosts

Your life changed when you held her for the first time. In that moment you knew you’d never love anyone more.

Even now, eight months later, that hadn’t changed. It never would.

“She’s been asleep for an hour or two,” Seulgi says, softly, leaning on the doorframe next to you. “She’s pretty tired out after our little trip to the park.”

You close the door to your daughter’s bedroom as softly as you could, twisting the knob and letting it go only once the door was shut to ensure you made as little noise as possible. Only when you finally let go of the doorknob did you realize a soft smile was on your lips the whole while.

“Thanks, Seulgi,” you say, voice barely above a whisper as you both step into the hallway. “Seungyeon and I appreciate you stepping in to watch her last minute. We had to both be at a meeting across town that we couldn’t miss.”

“Oh, no worries,” Seulgi replies. “You know I’d never turn down an opportunity to spend time with my niece.”

Seulgi and Seungyeon weren’t sisters by blood and so your daughter wasn’t technically her niece, but given how close their friendship was they may as well have been related. It was a relationship you’d benefitted from directly - it was Seulgi who introduced you to Seungyeon, after all. If it weren’t for her, you likely wouldn’t have a wife and daughter today.

It was crazy to think that a chance meeting at your local gym could alter your life so drastically. It was even crazier to think that it was your former fuck buddy that would introduce you to your future wife.

“I’ll be sure to transfer you your babysitting fee,” you say as you both continue down the hallway and towards the stairs that led to the main floor of your home. “What was it, seven bucks an hour?”

Seulgi sucks her breath through her teeth in a show of faux disbelief. “Damn, this is awkward. Did Seungyeon not tell you how much my rate was? It’ll be fourty-five bucks an hour, plus gratuities. I’m a certified, professional babysitter, I’ll have you know. I even fed her a restaurant-quality, nutritious, balanced meal to support her growth during this crucial time in her development.”

“Mmmhmmm,” you say, returning her smile with one of your own. “I bet it took some real professional training and certification to unscrew that jar of baby food and spoon feed it to a toddler.”

Seulgi laughs - a laugh that you were once intimately familiar with, one that had meant so much more to you at one part in your life.

Another time. Another life.

You both linger for a split second at the stairs. It is a second that felt a little longer than it should have.

To say your relationship with Seulgi was a complicated one was an understatement. The fuck buddy relationship that you’d established following that fateful poker game had lasted a little over a year or so - a year filled with late night hookups and entire weekends filled with nothing but sex so intense that you’d both woken up on Monday mornings sore, bruised, and utterly drained in more ways than one. You’d both made it clear to each other that it was purely a physical relationship, and that feelings wouldn’t be involved… but you’d always felt, in the deepest recesses of your heart and mind, that Seulgi wasn’t quite satisfied with the platonic nature of your agreement.

And so in an attempt to remind her that you weren’t looking for a relationship, you’d declared, casually, that you were looking to meet someone - hoping that she would catch the implication of such a declaration. She must have, because she soon introduced you to her friend Seungyeon at a party you both attended. Seungyeon introduced you to her sister, who, coincidentally, was looking for an agent to promote her budding art career; and the rest, of course, was history.

And so Seulgi went from being someone who indulged your deepest, most carnal physical fantasies to your wife’s best friend. Her closeness with Seungyeon meant you saw her often. On the surface you were both mature adults, and so you both left the entire fuck buddy era of your friendship a secret between yourselves, pretending it never happened, leaving it in the past where it belonged so as to not complicate the present.

But you couldn’t deny that there was still some lingering awkwardness there, an unspoken, unfinished something that lingered in the air whenever you two were together - and especially when you two were alone.

You knew what it was. She knew what it was. But you were almost afraid to confront it, both of you afraid to disrupt the pleasant little status quo that you’d built for yourselves.

You look up at her, almost afraid at what you’d find there.

She was beautiful, of course, as she always was. She was gorgeous on the day you met her, when she approached you for a spot at the gym - and she was even more gorgeous now, many years later, if such a thing were possible. She is wearing an unbuttoned white shirt over a short blue crop top and loose jeans - an outfit that left those perfect, sculpted abs of hers bare. She knew what she was doing when she picked out that outfit. She knew what it would do to you.

For a split second, the sight of her perfect, toned midsection causes your mind to call up an image of her naked, legs spread as she rode you fiercely, those abs flexing and working as they throw her body over and over against you, taking you in and out of her again and again and again as she cried and moaned and sighed her pleasure. You recall the way her abs looked when they were glazed with your warm, thick cum, the way it dripped down her sides and-

You force those images out of your mind. Those days were long over. You were married now, with a child, and having those thoughts now, as pleasant as they were, just didn’t feel right.

But whatever self-pity you had begun to brew inside yourself disappears when your eyes meet hers. You take in that soft, wide smile she always seemed to have on those soft, round features of hers - a smile that was always so warm and inviting, as though it belonged to a woman who could harbor no ill will towards anyone or anything.

And in her eyes - those round, caring eyes, so often bent pleasantly into inverted half moon shapes with every smile - is a softness, a tenderness that disarms you.

You both linger there for a second, you with one step on the stairs, her with one hand on the railing, eyes looking for something in each other, something that you’d both danced around and avoided for years, but was now there, out in the open, finally waiting to be confronted and addressed.

Her hand slowly inches towards yours on the railing. Your eyes don’t leave her face. You watch as her lower lip slowly curls under her teeth until she is biting it, a sliver of ivory over a soft pink.

Her fingers reach yours. Her touch feels like electricity, a spark of something that you’d long forgotten the existence of. She’s the first to speak.

“I think you know how you can pay me.”

There was a time when hearing such provocative words come out of those lips was commonplace. You’d heard her hiss and scream and moan far dirtier, filthier things into your ears, truth be told. But to hear her say them now, to hear her imply what she was implying, given the new lives that fate had deemed you live  - it was somehow one of the most intensely arousing things you’d ever heard her say.

“Seulgi… I-”

“She won’t be home for a few more hours,” she answers, quickly, the tone beneath her words betraying an underlying desperation. A need. A want long kept buried.

“But she… Seulgi, I’m married-”

“Shhhh,” she replies, and for the first time there is a hushed desperation in her face, evident in the slight upward twisting of her eyebrows and the slightest of quivers in her upper lip. “She won’t know. No one will.”

“But I will, Seulgi,” you answer. “We shouldn’t.”

Almost immediately after you said that last word you knew it was the wrong word to say. Shouldn’t was quite different from can’t. It implied the existence, however slim, of possibility. It gave her hope. It gave her a chance.

“We shouldn’t,” she repeats, taking a step closer to you on the stairs, her palm slowly covering more and more of yours on the railing until she is grasping the back of your hand. “But we can. Please. It’ll be just like old times.”

“Seulgi-”

“Just once. Fuck me like you used to. Just once. I need it - I need you. Just once. Please.”

“We shouldn’t. Seulgi…”

She steps closer to you on the stairs, her hand on yours tracing a path up your arm until it is curled around your neck. She’s close enough now that her scent - one you were once so familiar with - fills your nostrils with each breath. She smells of strawberries and lust and…

She smells like sin.

Her hands play with the hair at the back of your scalp. You shiver at her touch, though whether from anticipation or guilt, you couldn’t be sure.

“Don’t tell me you don’t think about it. About those days when you fucked my brains out until I had trouble walking. About those nights when I went to sleep dripping your cum out of every hole.”

You sigh, a heavy breath through your nose. You loved your wife to death, but how could you ever forget those days? How could anyone?

“Tell me you don’t think about it,” she continues, incessant now, pressing her svelte, tight body against you. Her cheek presses against yours so she can hiss into your ear - you’d never touched her this way, never made any sort of skin contact beyond the odd high five or friendly hug in the last few years.

Her every movement made your nerves dance. Her every touch made your heart leap.

“Tell me you don’t think about my pussy,” she says, voice sharp, low, like the hissing of a snake, every syllable dripping with the venom of ill intent. “Tell me you don’t think about my hot, tight little pussy and how it felt wrapped around your cock. Tell me you don’t think about the way you fucked it again and again and again, the way you used it like it was nothing more than a sleeve for your cock, a place to dump load after load of your cum.”

“Fuck, Seulgi-” you snap, unable to say anything more.

“Come on,” she says, before she says your name into your ear, the syllables of it half breath, half moan. “Don’t you think about that first night we had together? That night after you won that poker game? You fucked me five times. Five loads - one in my mouth, one on my stomach… and three in my pussy. I was sloppy and wet and leaking the whole night. How many times do you think you can fuck me before she gets home? How many loads do you think you can give me?”