Chapter 2

　　Accepting K’s offer was, in a way, inevitable, like a moth beating its wings frantically toward a flame.

　　The moment K first spoke the name “Won,” Won became my true north. I couldn’t escape that presence. No, that isn’t quite right. What I wanted was to exist inside it.

　　Won’s phone number. Won’s address. And K’s message: Show this text to Won.

　　I treated those three pieces of information like holy scripture. I memorized them, wrote them out, recited them until I’d absorbed them completely. And still I kept opening K’s text just to look at them again. It was like a fatal addiction, one I couldn’t begin to control.

　　I went to the address K had written down for me. It was a seventeen-story mixed-use building, tastefully finished in black tile. It had nearly everything you could want: a convenience store, a karaoke place, an internet cafe, restaurants. And it stood right where you emerged from the subway stairs.

　　What surprised me was that the place where Won existed sat in such a bright, crowded, well-known corner of the world.

　　Maybe I’d carried some prejudice that a kinkster ought to keep quietly to the shadows. Since I’d only ever felt at ease in places like that myself, maybe a space so glaring left me uneasy. Yes, I had always kept my distance from anything that shone.

　　I hesitated at the entrance for a long time. Longer, probably, than I’d hesitated before deciding to accept K’s offer at all.

　　A mixed group of men and women came surging up behind me like a wave. They knocked against my shoulders, my back, my sides as they pushed toward the doors. Beneath the wall of chatter, I caught someone whining about being hungry, so they were headed for one of the restaurants inside, I imagine.

　　Honestly, I don’t know if my feet moved on their own or if I was simply swept along. Only once I’d stepped into the cool lobby did I realize that I’d finally crossed the threshold, that I was drifting calmly into the elevator, camouflaged as one of them.

　　If I hadn’t been swept up in that current, I’d probably still be standing frozen at the entrance. Not that I was actually ready. By the time I thought, Wait, and moved to step back out, the doors had already slid shut.

　　“Hey. Miss.”

　　It was a voice calling to me. I knew instinctively it was aimed at me, but I didn’t turn and didn’t answer. I stood stiff as a board, glaring at the changing numbers on the display.

　　“Miss, can’t you hear me?”

　　The trick is to believe you can’t hear it. Not pretend to be deaf, but genuinely become someone who cannot hear. It’s how I protected myself through countless ordinary moments. Better to be a person who doesn’t exist than an easy mark.

　　Nine times out of ten, they call three times or so, and when I really don’t answer, they give up. This trick, this way of never wasting words on people who aren’t worth them, sometimes makes me look like a crazy bitch. But being a crazy bitch beats being an easy target a hundred times over.

　　That’s just what living has taught me.

　　“What, is she deaf?” the man I’d ignored grumbled, sounding almost wronged. His friends hushed him, shh, shh, scolding him to drop it. For a moment, the cramped car buzzed with their agitation.

　　They all seemed desperate to know whether I actually couldn’t hear. Watching me stare relentlessly at the numbers, they finally let out a long, resigned sigh. A pitying sigh, probably.

　　They got off. Only then did I realize I hadn’t pressed a single button. My face went a little hot. Remembering K’s text, I jabbed the button for the seventeenth floor.

　　The elevator shuddered and rose. It climbed slowly toward the sky, toward the crown of the building. The higher it went, the more the noise from the world outside thinned away. Only when it reached some airless height where no sound survived did the doors part with a soft chime.

　　“Oh…”

　　The instant I stepped out, what overwhelmed me was an enormous iron gate sealing off the entire entrance. Thick, solid, and silver, imposing enough to pass for the mouth of a prison, it looked like a vast window opening onto a hole no one ever crawled back out of.

　　I couldn’t have come to the wrong place. And Unni wouldn’t have sent me to the wrong place either. What kind of sick joke is this? While I stood there frowning at the bars, the elevator slipped quietly back down behind me.

　　The top of the building was more than cool. It was cold. I pulled my thin cardigan closed over my chest and let my eyes rove for a buzzer, anything. There was nothing. Walls, iron bars, and me. Those were the only things here with any shape at all.

　　Screech. Creak. A metallic groan sounded somewhere in the gate, like a jeer aimed straight at me.

　　I thought maybe I should go back down. But I stared stubbornly at the long, empty corridor stretching away beyond the bars. It felt as if Won might step out of the shadows somewhere down that darkened stretch.

　　I reached out and closed my hand around one of the bars. Cold. My fingertips came away coated in old dust, the kind that meant no one had set foot here in a long, long time.

　　I felt tricked. A curse climbed the back of my throat. Breathing hard, I dug out my phone and tapped in Won’s number one digit at a time, a number I already knew by heart. You never agreed to this. You never made any promise, the voice inside me shouted as I finished dialing.

　　Normally, to do a play scene, you were expected to arrange everything in advance. Settling on a time and place was the bare minimum, and it wasn’t unusual to lock down the rules, even the wardrobe, at the very first meeting.

　　So yes, showing up at Won’s door out of nowhere and calling out of the blue was rude. If I’d been thinking straight, the proper move would’ve been to contact Unni and take it up with her. But my rush of anger had burned through whatever reason I had left.

　　“Oh, no.”

　　This was a disaster. I sagged against the bars. Clouds of dust lifted into the air, riding the ripple my body sent through the metal. So much dust.

　　“Hello?”

　　The tickle of the dust set me coughing, so I missed the sound of Won answering on the other end. By the time I realized I’d heard something and lifted the phone to my face, the call had already dropped.

　　What do I do? My mind went blank. After making an impression like this, I’d have no ground to stand on if she refused to play with me. If I was going to call, the least I could’ve done was explain myself. I hadn’t even managed that much.

　　I felt mortified, thinking of Unni. She never in a hundred years would have imagined me botching this so completely. To Unni, I was someone who never crossed a line, who wouldn’t even dream of it. Someone obedient to the core.

　　I pushed myself away from the bars. I had to go. No one welcomes a rude stranger who turns up without a word.

　　I pressed the button to go down. In that same instant, footsteps sounded behind me. Even, measured footsteps, growing steadily louder as if someone were turning up a dial.

　　An invisible hand seemed to grip me by the hair and pin me in place. My whole body went rigid, and I couldn’t even draw a proper breath.

　　Coming closer. The footsteps. Belonging, maybe, possibly, to Won.

　　“May I ask who you are?”

　　The person had finally come close enough to ask. My shoulders jerked. The phone slipped from my hand and hit the floor, the screen splintering apart. Unni’s text! The thought struck me like a blow.

　　“Um, I, I’m…”

　　I dropped into a crouch, mumbling as I scrambled to salvage the ruined thing.

　　“Did you get the wrong floor?”

　　“No. It’s not that.”

　　I lifted my head and looked at the person standing beyond the bars.

　　Slowly, I took her in from the ground up. Black boots, black trousers, a black turtleneck. She was covered as though not a single inch of skin could be permitted to show, her long, straight black hair falling all the way down over her chest. The small face visible between those strands was startlingly pale.

　　She looked like someone who had never once, in her whole life, stood in sunlight.

　　“There’s someone I know. She told me to come find you. Or, someone named ‘Won’…”

　　The woman’s face gave nothing away. She looked like someone who’d never heard the name in her life, watching me steadily with large eyes that didn’t seem to blink.

　　“She gave me the number and address for someone called Won. That’s why I’m here.”

　　I barely got the sentence out. It cost me. The shattered screen flickered on and off in my hands. There was nothing to be done about it.

　　“Did she tell you anything else?” the woman asked.

　　I shook my head. Sweat dripped down my face as it flushed a deep red. She kept her eyes calmly on me, watching in silence as I turned red. Her fuller red lips moved with care, as if she were choosing each word.

　　“And who was it that gave you the number and address?”

　　I told her Unni’s name. And I added that Unni had said to show Won the text.

　　“Is that all?”

　　“Yes. That was all.”

　　“And on the strength of that, you simply came here. Like this.”

　　“…I’m sorry.”

　　She wasn’t overbearing. And yet she carried enough authority to make me want to be the first to say I was sorry.

　　She was neither tall nor short, thin to the point of looking slight, with a face young enough to seem almost girlish. I thought her more than a little beautiful, but her authority didn’t come from her face.

　　“Then you should kneel.”

　　Ah, yes. Her authority came from something closer to nature itself, from a calm that never once hesitated. That cold, unblinking expression herded me into a corner without a single raised word. Without even asking whether she was Won, I knelt right there.

　　“Take your clothes off, please.”

　　“…Sorry?”

　　“You heard me.”

　　I swallowed. My throat had gone bone dry. I had to strip. I could strip. The problem was where.

　　I was right in front of the elevator. Anyone might open those doors at any second and step out onto this floor. And on top of that, I still wasn’t certain the woman in front of me was Won at all.

　　But I had to take my clothes off. Instinctively, I understood it was the only way I’d be forgiven for barging in like this.

　　“Please take off your clothes. If you make me say it again, everything ends right here.”

　　I started undressing. I flung the broken phone and my shoulder bag to the floor. Then I stripped off everything I was wearing, fast, my shaking hands working without pause.

　　Cardigan. Blouse. The long skirt. I peeled off every last piece, down to my underwear, and stood before her barefoot and empty-handed.

　　No. I knelt again.

　　We were quiet. Cursing the hammering of my heart, I clenched my teeth and forced my body to stop trembling.

　　“Please lift your head.”

　　I lifted it. I looked at her face. I followed the slow track of her dark eyes as they inspected my body, up and down, side to side, thorough and relentless.

　　“In this place, your name is ‘Daisy.’”

　　There was no need to ask whether she was accepting me. Being given a name was answer enough.

　　“Come inside, Daisy.”

　　She took hold of the bars and drew them toward her. That heavy, forbidding gate swung open with ease. It had never been locked at all. She held it there and waited for me to rise. I began gathering the clothes strewn across the floor, one piece at a time.

　　“Those don’t belong to Daisy. Leave them.”

　　She turned and walked back the way she’d come. Yes. The moment I crossed those bars, I would no longer be myself. I would be Daisy. And so I had to enter as Daisy.

　　Naked, exactly as Won had made me.

　　Wearing nothing at all, I followed the woman as she walked slowly ahead of me. The lightless corridor was dark. It felt like hurling myself, willingly, into the drooling jaw of some hungry wild animal.

　　But I wasn’t afraid anymore.