Chapter 1: Prologue

　　“It’s Won.”

　　That was how K opened, with no preamble. It had been so long since we’d last spoken that even a formal greeting would’ve felt awkward. Five years? No, maybe longer. I was so busy trying to pin down the last time we’d talked that I lost the thread of whatever she was saying on the other end of the line.

　　“Are you listening?”

　　Her voice had gone a little sharp.

　　“Uh, yeah.” At my mumbled answer, she let out a deep sigh.

　　“What do you mean, out of nowhere?” I asked the second the sigh trailed off.

　　Now it was her turn to go quiet. She started to speak, stopped, started again, then stopped again. Another long sigh followed. Had she always sighed this much? I tried to picture her talking back then and came up blank.

　　Meanwhile, one more slow, heavy exhale warmed my ear.

　　Years ago, K and I had met through the club, drifting through a handful of casual meals and coffees before the connection quietly dissolved. Like all those countless people you cross paths with by chance in the sprawl of ordinary life, only to inevitably forget, ours was nothing remarkable. Which made it nearly impossible to remember at all.

　　Honestly, it was close to a miracle that I recognized her voice at all when this out-of-the-blue call came in.

　　“Are you still the same?”

　　She asked it after a long silence. A question with a whole world left unspoken inside it. Even so, cold sweat broke out along my skin. I knew exactly what she was asking. There was no need to play dumb, no need to ask what she meant.

　　I switched the phone, hot now against my ear, to my other hand.

　　“If you’re still the same, you should go find her. She’ll suit you.”

　　“Won. Is that the name of the person you’re talking about?”

　　“It’s not really a name. More of a handle. A scene name, I guess. Anyway.”

　　She cut herself off with a small cough. Then, instead of sighs, she dissolved into a ragged coughing fit.

　　Bad enough that I felt I ought to ask if she was okay, but it kept going, a scraping, grating noise that seemed to claw at my eardrum. The sound throbbed through my skull until I finally had to pull the phone away from my ear.

　　Why was K calling me? Why was she telling me any of this? Was she feeling me out? Trying to do me a favor? Was she sick?

　　And since when were we close enough to be having a conversation like this, over the phone, in the middle of a lazy weekend afternoon?

　　My mind was a tangle. But what got under my skin most was the fact that she still remembered my preferences. She remembered clearly enough to call out of nowhere and hand me a scene name like Won. That memory of hers made me uneasy.

　　The second my thoughts reached that point, I wanted to hang up. I wanted to block her number. I wished I’d never picked up at all, and the regret came thick and fast.

　　“Look…”

　　“She’s a good person.”

　　“What?”

　　“This person, Won. She’s a good person, so I wanted to introduce her to you.”

　　“I don’t get why you’re doing this so suddenly. Seriously, out of nowhere… this kind of call is making me a little uncomfortable.”

　　“She only takes partners by referral. You’ll never get in to see her without one.”

　　She pressed on, relentless, like someone who’d made up her mind before she even dialed. I only grew more confused. I didn’t know what to say. Hanging up would’ve solved everything, but that word she’d dropped, referral, held me in place. It was the most promising thing I’d heard in a long time.

　　My heart, caught on it, suddenly started to pound.

　　“Are you listening?”

　　“Yeah.”

　　The same question she’d asked before, but this time I answered clearly. The moment the word left my mouth, a strong certainty settled over me, that I shouldn’t hang up, that I needed to see this through to the end. The lazy urge to escape the whole vague, frustrating mess by simply ending the call burned away all at once.

　　“Hey, are you okay, though?”

　　Only then did I ask the question any decent human being should’ve asked first.

　　“It’s been a while.”

　　Instead of answering, she offered a simple greeting. She sounded a little smaller, somehow, maybe even shy about it. Catching her hesitation, I echoed it back, said it had been a while too, and added a polite little how have you been.

　　She’d been the one to cut off the meetings we used to actually enjoy, and she’d done it in the worst way possible, by simply not showing up. I’d been stunned by the break, no warning, no explanation, and eventually I’d gotten furious. I’d always thought ghosting was something that only happened between people who were dating. Experiencing it firsthand, I learned there was nothing more infuriating.

　　After she vanished, I’d spent nearly a week calling and texting her with no reply. A clean, total disappearing act.

　　“You cut me off. K, you were the one who cut contact.”

　　“I know.”

　　From across the line, an apology drifted through, faint, on the edge of breaking apart. It meant nothing. Numb would’ve been the more honest word for what I felt.

　　I couldn’t summon a single emotion at her apology. The wound was too old to be soothed now. And it didn’t help that her absence had made zero difference in my day-to-day life. For all the white-hot rage of that one long week, the truth was that until she called today, I’d forgotten K completely.

　　“I’ve been really sick.”

　　“Have you now?”

　　I couldn’t stop myself from answering coldly, without an ounce of warmth, to what came out of her like a confession. Still, lingering guilt made me tack on more.

　　“Are you feeling any better now?”

　　“It’s terminal. They said I’ll be dead soon.”

　　She said it in the most matter-of-fact tone, her voice stripped of even a shred of pity or self-sympathy, like she was relaying a stranger’s story that had nothing to do with her.

　　I regretted every cold word I’d just spoken. My face flooded scarlet. Shame and panic hit me, and above all a sickening drop in my chest that made heat pour off me in waves.

　　“Uh, I mean, um…”

　　As I stumbled, groping for something, anything, to say, K let out a low laugh.

　　“I didn’t call to have you comfort me.”

　　My face burned even hotter at the laughter threaded through her words. In a slightly livelier tone, she went on to tell me what had happened right before she’d blown off our meeting.

　　She’d gone in for the results of a routine checkup and walked out with a cancer diagnosis. When the doctor told her, she’d forced herself to stay composed. But as she left the hospital, the shock crept in and spread until she couldn’t move an inch.

　　All she’d wanted was to go home and rest, she said, so she’d had no choice but to break our plans. Surgery couldn’t wait, so she hadn’t been able to take my calls. And then the chemo came, fast and brutal, and the little bit of a social circle she’d managed to hold onto simply vanished.

　　She laid it all out, logical and articulate, like she’d rehearsed it. She finished by saying she hadn’t wanted to sit there explaining her illness to people one by one, like filing some kind of report. I nodded the whole time she spoke.

　　“So that’s what happened.”

　　“Enough about my tragic backstory. How’ve you been?”

　　“Me? Oh, you know. Getting by. Not much different from when I used to see you.”

　　“Then how about you take me up on my offer?”

　　“You called me out of the blue just to recommend her?”

　　“Yeah.”

　　“Why me?”

　　“Call it atonement. For flaking on you that day.”

　　At that, we both burst out laughing, so hard it made me forget, for a moment, that she was dying. I wondered whether it was okay to laugh like that. But her laughter through the phone was so vivid, like I’d heard it just yesterday, that I couldn’t help joining in. Listening to that big, bright sound, her impending death felt like some ugly, tasteless lie.

　　The club that had brought us together was a gathering of people who shared one common interest: BDSM.

　　Unlike me, who never knew how to fit in and always lingered at the edges of any group, K was as bright as her laugh. The kind of person welcomed everywhere she went, someone who could slip naturally into any company. That was K.

　　She’d joined the club a few years ahead of me and was fairly well known there. She was a masochist, an M, with preferences much like mine, and she loved spanking exactly the way I did. In a place like that, matching preferences made for the perfect conditions to get close. And since we were both women, getting close was maybe an easy thing after all.

　　K was kind, warm, and above all far more experienced than I was. In truth, ours was a lopsided sort of relationship, K leading and me trailing after. I’d had nothing but curiosity and desire, no actual experience with BDSM play at all, and she was the one who midwifed me into someone who knew what she was doing.

　　My first SM play was with a partner K recommended, and that first time came close to perfect. The only reason I never became the subject of one of those endless first-time horror stories that made the rounds in the club was K’s recommendation, plain and simple. It was a soft, abundant stretch of my life.

　　A recommendation from K carried a guarantee. Trustworthy, the way it always had been, the way it always would be. Which meant that when she called out of nowhere and said referral, I, of course, wavered.

　　“Won’s specialty is spanking. I’ll say it flat out, she’s the best. And she’s a woman, and incredibly gentle.”

　　Her voice trembled faintly on the word gentle. She would never again get to live the life she’d wanted. I rubbed at my dry, stiff eyes, sore from laughing so hard. It was only when I wiped the wetness away that I realized I was crying. And realizing it, I sobbed a little harder.

　　“I wanted to do one good thing before I die.”

　　Her voice, steady until now, began to fracture piece by piece. The sound of sniffling came from both ends of the line, an echo bouncing back and forth. Sniff, sniff.

　　“Isn’t it strange? I’m going to die soon, and the second the doctor said it, all I could think about was how much I missed you.”

　　She pushed the words out, thick and choked. A bizarre, gasping sound, like she might stop breathing any second, swallowed up half of what she said.

　　“In this whole world, is there anyone else who’ll really remember me… Seunga, anyone besides you?”

　　“Unni…”

　　She hung up. No goodbye, abandoning me as completely as she had the first time she’d vanished.

　　Staring at the number that disappeared from the screen and the display going dark, I slumped forward against the sofa. Something I couldn’t hold back crashed over me, an emotion like a natural disaster, and it kept me crying for a long, long time.

　　The old conversations I’d shared with K rang loud in my ears. One of the few genuinely bright, precious stretches of my life, and the person who’d shared it with me was about to disappear. Forever.

　　I hated her, I missed her, and I hated her again. And the plain, undeniable truth that even this feeling, the one crushing me right now, would fade to nothing given enough time made me ache with grief.

　　Being a person is such a miserable hassle. It’s exhausting, I thought, tears streaming down my face, as my chest felt tight.

　　Just as my head began to throb, the phone in my hand buzzed. A text from K. The number of the person called Won, and the address where I could find her.

　　And at the very bottom, one line: Show this text to Won. That was all.

　　A shiver ran through me as I became convinced this was the last thing I would ever hear from K.

　　My teeth chattered and the tension that had held my whole body taut suddenly drained out of me.

　　The phone slipped from my hand and hit the floor. K’s message about Won glowed there, sharp and bright, inside the glaring screen.