Day 27: Passion

The heart dies a slow death.

The sunset was beautiful, painting the sky in all the shades of Hyunjin’s soul, and you were still pretending you weren’t about to die in three days’ time. Maybe if you pretended, that day would never come. Maybe if you pretended, you could somehow wake up from this nightmare in the bed you shared with Hyunjin, and he could hold you tight in his arms until your heart was no longer heavy. Maybe he could caress your hair and peck the crown of your head, telling his night sky it was just a dream and it had passed. That everything was okay and he was right there with you. That he was going to kiss you to sleep again.

“You will not believe what happened today, darling.”

You were cross-stitching in the backyard when Hyunjin’s voice woke you up from your solemn haze, suddenly making the daisies around you release their fragrance. He sat right next to you on the white bench, his arm around your shoulder, and started telling you all about his professor’s proposal to work with him and the offer of an actual salary in addition to a scholarship for outstanding achievement.

“That is fantastic!” you flashed him a bright smile, one of the rare genuine ones as of late.

“It is, but…” the fireworks of his excitement dimmed into a barely alive candlelight. “It’s out of town.”

“Oh.”

Well, it was… It was better this way actually. So he would be gone, too. With his bride. It would make things easier, right? Out of sight, out of mind. There was no way you could cross paths in case you ever had to return here. 

“It does not matter. I am still so proud of you,” you placed an innocent peck on his cheek. He seemed taken aback for some reason.

“R–Really?”

“Of course.”

His cheeks turned rosier as he averted his eyes from you, unable to help the smile growing bigger on his beautiful lips. He reached for your hand with his idle one and pressed you closer from your shoulder.

“How was your day today?”

“It was fine, my lord.”

It was so not fine, he could tell. You weren’t looking at him as you answered, and that playful tone he was used to being caressed by was nowhere to be found. Something was clearly bothering you.

“I have been told I should never settle for ‘Fine’ as an answer,” he lowered his head to try and hold your gaze. “Tell me what’s on your mind.”

During every young lord’s apprenticeship, there came a time where they had to prepare for the biggest promise they were going to make in the presence of God. You wished you could feign ignorance for this, too, pretending that it wasn’t one of the elephants that needed to be chased away from the room, but you had quite literally run out of time to postpone it.

Nevertheless, those words required Atlassian strength to verbalize. 

“Your wedding is in three days.” 

A boulder fell on Hyunjin’s chest out of nowhere. What wedding? He was already married. Why were you even bringing this up now?

“Darl—”

“There is one last sermon I need to give you,” you uttered in as much of a stoic voice as you could, your gaze still refusing to meet his. “We need to write your vows today so that you can practice. A wedding vow is not something to take lightly. This is a verbal contract that eternally binds you to your lady, and you shall honor each other for as long as you live.”

He examined every inch of your face, trying his hardest to understand what you were trying to do. It was just the other day that you had devoured each other until the first lights of the daybreak, and now… this? Why were you being this cruel to him? Did your affection for him fade away in only two sunsets?

Did you not love him anymore?

“Is this a piece of prose?” he asked equally frigidly. 

“It is a piece of declaration. However you wish to compose it is up to you,” you rose to your feet to make your way to the kitchen. “I will leave you to clear your thoughts. You can come back down once you are done, and we will go over it together.”

You watched Hyunjin through the kitchen window for some time, sitting all by himself with furrowed brows. He looked confused. He looked upset. He looked heartbroken, and you wanted to burn yourself alive for being an unintended cause of it. When he eventually left for his study, you threw yourself out in the yard again, desperately gasping for air. The night had fallen onto the beautiful garden when you took your seat again. You watched the fireflies dancing in the distance. You thought about the vows you would write for Hyunjin if you were to be a pure bride within three days. You recited them in your head to the ghost of Hyunjin, imagining how he would look at you with each word you uttered. Maybe he would smile, but knowing his delicate soul, he would definitely cry a few tears, wouldn’t he? His shadow in the far left caught your attention, and you watched the most beautiful man on earth walk towards you.

“Have you finished?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s hear it.”

He had a few pieces of ripped parchment in his hands, blotches of ink smeared on his fingers. He stared at them for a couple of moments, then placed them on the table in front of you.

“Are you not going to read it for me?”

“I don’t need to.” 

He kneeled before you and held both your hands, finally able to look as deep into your eyes as he wanted.

“All my life, I have been told many things,” he began to recite the words he had penned from memory. “To have faith that everything is going to work out in the end. To stop with my frivolous indulgences. That there were certain qualities to a gentleman as well as a lady and that we shall live and die by them. I was taught order. I was taught manners. None of that could have prepared me for the most beautiful disease that I would be riddled with.

“If I want one thing from this life, it is to live and die by my lady, the woman who enables all my frivolous indulgences. I wish to keep learning about the disorderliness of life with her hand in mine. I strive to be as degenerate as I can be, enough to write volumes after how violently I desire her and how I always will. I will dedicate my life to carrying out my husbandly duties to the fullest. I swear on my honor that I will protect her from all harm, be her lifelong confidant, and a reliable father to our children.”

When he kissed your hands, his lips lingered on your skin for a while like he wanted to brand himself on you.

“I love you, my night sky,” he flashed that devastating smile turning your entire existence into a mere dust, “and I will live to be the full moon that rises in your heart for the rest of my life.”

You thought you were sitting still, listening to this piece with perfect composure, but the tears falling on your hands alerted you that you had been crying the whole time. Every letter, every comma, every period… It was perfect. No adjustments needed. Nothing more to be mentioned or no excess words to be removed.

Except for the fact that it needed the proper addressee.

“I believe your learning is complete, my lord,” you smiled through your tears. “I have full confidence you can write an appropriate set of vows tailored to your lady.” 

His face instantly changed. What lady? You were his lady. He had written them for you. What the hell was so difficult for you to understand about this?!

You pulled your hands to yourself and stood up, impatient to reach your chambers so you could cry your misery out.

“Where are you going?” Hyunjin grabbed you by the wrist. 

“To start packing,” you avoided him.

“There are still three days!”

“Not all learning lasts for the entirety of a month. Some learn faster than others. Such as yourself,” you forced a straight face as you lacerated your own heart. “Now, if you will excuse me, I wish to be by myself.”

“Darling, pl—”

“DON’T!”

As he watched you leave, Hyunjin had never felt so helpless in his life. There was no one he could talk to in this estate. No one that would understand him. No one that knew what being devastatingly in love was like, and the soul-crushing weight of not being able to do anything about it. 

No one… In this estate…

He suddenly charged towards the front gate as if a whip cracked on his back, frantically looking for the carriage that would take him to the only place he needed to be right now. He wasn’t exactly sure how long that ride lasted. He was so engrossed in the nauseating whirlwind of his thoughts that it could have easily been an hour or five minutes just the same. 

Hyunjin was a gentleman—he knew better than barging into that manor at that godforsaken hour, but he could only hope that the residents of this estate would be familiar with desperate times calling for desperate measures.

“Hyun?”

“Swear on our brotherhood that you will help me,” Hyunjin threateningly pointed at the young man clad in nightwear. “Swear to it!”

“Slow down!” Christopher placed his hands on his shoulder, trying to calm him down by simulating deep breaths. “Tell me what’s going on.” 

What wasn’t going on?

The second Hyunjin opened with ‘The woman residing with us…’, he actually didn’t need to say any more. Christopher had already listened to this entire plea, albeit while witnessing beautiful iridescent pearls forming in the heartwrenchingly bloodshot eyes of a lovesick woman. 

And Hyunjin still didn’t seem to be aware of a looming trip to the south, scheduled to take place in exactly three days.

“These are the last days she is my wife. I’m losing her,” he held his head in his hands, then looked up at his brother with eyes stripped of pride to the bone. “I’m begging you, please help me. I am willing to do anything Lord Bahng may ask of me.”

“Nonsense. You know he loves you like his own, but I’m afraid we cannot deliberate on this tonight. He is on his way from his trip,” Christopher regretfully informed. “Don’t do anything stupid and sleep on it tonight, okay? I will talk to him first thing tomorrow morning, and we will discuss what we can do.”

And Hyunjin would accept it with open arms. He now at least had a sliver of hope to hold onto rather than a whole bunch of nothing. All he had to do was get through the night, and came the morning, he was going to rush back to the place where he felt more at home than his own.

Because when he got off the carriage, he saw the last thing that reminded him of home descending the steps in front of the main gate of the manor with a suitcase in her hand.

“No.”

It was the middle of the night. Dead silent other than the cicadas screaming in the distance. Hyunjin’s entire world crashing down made his ears ring so bad that he was categorically going deaf. Couldn’t this wait at least until the morning?

You couldn’t wait to get rid of him that bad?

“No, please.”

That was the absolute last straw. Pride, manners, composure, poise… he threw it all. He threw it all away so that he could be two ounces or two tons lighter. So that he could hold you tight in his arms and carry you back to his bed. He lost all sense of logic.

What logic in the presence of such earth-shattering love, destroying everything that stood in its way?

“Please don’t go,” he held onto your hands tightly. “I love you. You are my wife.”

“Hyunjin, please…”

“I want to start a family with you. I want you to be the mother of my children,” his trembling voice shattered your heart into a million pieces. “I want to be with you till death do us part.”

“Please,” you begged him with eyes welled up to the brim. “This is so hard as it is. Please don’t make it worse.”

“HYUNJIN!!!” 

Byeol’s screams pierced your ear enough to make it almost bleed. The entire town was definitely thinking young lord Hwang had been murdered, the way his mother’s wails reverberated throughout the entire neighborhood.

“You…” she pointed at you, eyes frantically wide like she had gone insane, “You bewitched my son!” She rushed down the stairs, ready to charge at you as if it was her life in danger. “This is my son! It’s not some rich man you can seduce at your brothel, you whore!”

“DON’T TALK TO HER LIKE THAT!!!”

You might have been living a different reality for the past twenty seven days, delusionally convinced you were happily married to a passion incarnate wordsmith, but an enraged mother’s insults suddenly reminded you of what you were again. Not good enough to take the last name Hwang. Not good enough to stand right next to her son. Wasn’t that what Hyunjin called you once upon a time, too? A glorified prostitute. Giving a lot of sermons.

You took advantage of Hyunjin shoving his mother back inside, and ran out of there crying. You didn’t need a carriage; if you could run for five minutes without stopping, you were going to make it to Bora’s. You ran. You ran. You ran. You ran like you wanted to choke your pain with a sting in your lungs. You ran like you wanted to unleash a permanent drought in your eyes. You were so sick of crying because it didn’t work. It didn’t erase even a grain of your burden.

Because the heart died an unbearably slow death.

As you frantically knocked on a door at the end of a cul-de-sac, Hyunjin stopped and hid at the entry of the alley, memorizing everything around the house you just walked into, from the door number to the pile of pebbles at the doorstep. Christopher had told him one thing, and that was not to do anything stupid. Tonight wasn’t the right time because there was absolutely no room for mistakes, but he was going to come back to this place. He was going to knock on that door, and no matter who stood behind it, he was going to demand to see his wife. He waited until you safely made it inside, then turned around to leave for the most restless night of his life.

The second you stepped foot inside Bora’s house, you threw yourself into her arms, barely breathing through your crying fit.

“Oh, good god, poor thing, what on earth happened to you?!” she hugged you as tight as she could, softly caressing your back to calm you down. “Why are you back early?”

“In–Insane…” you stammered, gasping for air. “He went insane, Bora.”

“If that brat tried to lay a finger on you—!”

“He says… He says h–he loves me,” you tried your utmost best to suppress your hiccups. “He says he wants to marry me.”

Unfortunately, this wasn’t the first time Bora was witnessing this. It wasn’t uncommon in this business for young lords to confuse their feelings with something else. Very very few of them felt genuine love for the ladies from whom they learned the intricacies of a marriage, and even fewer of them had the guts to deny their last names along with all the money, power, and prestige that came with it. That was why women like her knew what to expect from life and what not to even dare hope. A happy home, a husband to lean on, children to shower with love…

These were never a part of a makeshift wife’s fate.

“Shh, shh, shh, it’s okay,” she caressed your hair as she softly rocked you back and forth in her lap. “It’s passed now. It’s passed.”

You were so exhausted that you didn’t even remember passing out on that couch. It was the middle of the night when the blocks of lead piled on your chest woke you up. You poured yourself a tall glass of cold water to appease your heart as well as your parched throat, and for whatever reason, your feet started dragging you towards the door. You wrapped yourself in a shawl and walked into the chilly night, making your way two streets down.

Hyunjin was going to take someone else as his wife that weekend. Would he remember you one of these days? Would he think he saw you when he was in a large crowd? Would his heart sizzle if he remembered your face? Would he think about the nights you sheltered each other at all? 

Father Seojoon had to be fast asleep that late into the night. You didn’t want to inconvenience the man just because you felt heavy. Instead of the confessional, you headed towards the altar, brightly lit with candles of all sizes, some molten away just like your soul, and kneeled on the marble floor. There was an exquisite karmic beauty to confessing at the very place where your gallows tree was going to be erected.

In exactly three days.

“Forgive me, Lord, for I have sinned,” you quietly spoke, unable to stop the sobs ripping from your throat. “I loved a man I shouldn’t have.”

Every memory you ever had of Hyunjin flooded your mind and broke free of their chains to flash before your eyes. The very first time you laid your eyes on him. The day you shared cognac together. The night his touched irreparably charred you. The first time he called you his night sky. His first I love you. His embrace. His silky locks. His velveteen kisses. His scent the most. His ambery scent that became denser when he was happy. When he was excited. When he was aroused. 

And no, all of that was going to belong to someone else with God’s signature under it.

“Dear God, please,” you let your tears run as free as they wanted for the last time. “Please give me the strength to endure it. This pain is killing me…”

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