Chapter 47: Holding Breath

I should have gone home.

I want that on the record.

So-yeon was expecting me at dawn in the pig yard. Ayla was probably waiting up with a jug of plum wine, tapping on the wall. I owed one woman eight hundred sword forms and another one five hundred and fifty. I had a hole in my ceiling and a duel in eighteen days and two Boar men lying unconscious in the alley behind this exact building.

"I promised someone I’d be back tonight," I said.

Mi-rae’s hands stopped in her braid.

Half of it was undone. Half wasn’t. Thick black hair falling over one shoulder, still twisted over the other. She looked at me for a long moment.

"A girl?"

"...Something like that."

"One girl?"

I didn’t answer fast enough.

She laughed. That big belly laugh.

"The whole dock district knows about you, Baek Mu-jin," she said. "The physician. The foreign swordswoman. The guild bookkeeper. The Gu wife, hiding with the washerwomen. The steward who threw her seal in the canal." She counted them off on her fingers. Ran out of fingers. Started on the other hand. "You don’t have a girl. You have a navy."

"It’s not a navy."

"It’s a fleet." She went back to undoing her braid. Slowly. Watching me. "So one of your fleet will miss you for one night. She’ll survive." The last twist came loose. All that thick black hair fell down her back. "Or you can walk home through the dock district at the third bell with a fresh-stitched arm, past every alley where the Boar keeps his boys."

She tilted her head.

"Your choice, mainland boy."

I looked at her.

At her hair down. At the lantern light on her sun-gold skin. At the abalone shells glowing like little rainbows on the windowsill behind her.

At her hands. Rough. Calloused. Steady.

"I’ll stay," I said.

Her whole face lit up.

The bath was a big wooden half-barrel behind a hanging fishing net in the corner of her room. She’d filled it that morning with seawater carried up from the harbor in two buckets on a shoulder pole. It was cold now. She didn’t care. She lit a little charcoal brazier underneath and dropped in three hot stones from the stove, and the water started to steam.

It smelled like the ocean. Salt and something green.

"Clothes," she said. "Off. All of it. You smell like a pig wrestled a wine barrel and lost."

I took my clothes off.

She watched. Arms folded. Not even pretending not to.

"Hm," she said, when I was done.

"What does ’hm’ mean?"

"It means the gossip is accurate." She jerked her chin at the barrel. "In. Keep the stitches out of the water."

I climbed in. It was salty. It stung the cut on my elbow like fire. I held my arm up over the edge like a drowning man waving for help.

The salt felt incredible everywhere else. All the bruises. All the sword-form aches. All the mud and pig slop and wine, melting off into the water.

I closed my eyes.

When I opened them, she was taking her top off.

She didn’t tease about it. Didn’t go slow. She pulled the black sleeveless shirt over her head and dropped it. Then the red silk band underneath. Then the red sash at her hips, and the dark trousers, kicked into a corner.

She stood there in the lantern light like she was standing on a rock at the edge of the sea, about to dive.

God.

Island women don’t hide. That’s what she told me later. You can’t hide your body when you’re diving into cold water in nothing but a thin cotton shift fifty times a day. You learn your body is a tool. Strong legs for kicking. Strong lungs for breathing. Strong arms for pulling yourself back up the rope.

She had all of it. Thick strong thighs. Broad shoulders. Round, heavy breasts. That soft little curve of belly. Old pale scars on her shins from coral and rocks. And a fading, ugly mark on her upper arm, like a burn. Old. Very old. From a long time ago.

I didn’t ask about it.

I knew whose it was.

She climbed into the barrel facing me. The water sloshed up over the edge and hissed on the hot stones. It was way too small for two people. Her knees ended up on either side of my hips. Her breasts were right at my chin. She had to put her hands on my shoulders to keep from slipping.

"Now," said Ko Mi-rae. "The breathing test."

"...You were serious about that?"

"I’m always serious about breathing." She leaned in. Her lips almost touching mine. "When I count three, we both go under. First one up loses."

"What do I lose?"

She smiled.

"If you lose," she said, "you do whatever I say for the rest of the night."

"And if I win?"

"You won’t."

"But if I do?"

She thought about it. Ran her thumb along my jaw.

"Then I do whatever you say."

"...Deal."

"One," she said. "Two."

She kissed me.

Right on three. Her mouth on mine. And then her weight pulled us both down, and we slid under the salty water together, still kissing.

That’s the trick. I figured it out about three heartbeats in.

You can’t hold your breath when somebody’s kissing you like that.

I lasted maybe twenty breaths’ worth. Maybe less. Her mouth on mine underwater, her hands in my hair, her whole body pressed against me in the warm salt dark, and every part of my brain screaming air air air while another part was screaming don’t you dare stop.

I came up gasping.

She came up a full breath later. Laughing. Water streaming off her hair. Her face lit up like she’d just won a fishing contest.

"MAINLAND," she crowed.

"That’s cheating! You kissed me!"

"I never said no kissing."

"You never said kissing was allowed!"

"Island rules." She wiped her face. Grinned at me. "You lose, Baek Mu-jin. Rest of the night. Whatever I say."

I looked at her. Wet, laughing, triumphant.

And underneath the laugh, something else. Something sitting very still behind her eyes. The same thing I’d seen in all of them. Yeon-hee. Seol. Jin. Ji-yeon.

She wanted something she’d been too scared to ask for.

"Okay," I said. "What do you say?"

The laugh faded.

She looked down at the water. At her own hands on my shoulders.

"Hold me," she said quietly. "Not like he did. Not grabbing. Not like the boys who come to break my jars." She looked up. "Like a fisherman holds a net he mended himself."

I didn’t know what that meant.

But I thought I could figure it out.

I put my arms around her in the salt water. Gently. One hand on the small of her back. One hand in her wet hair. And I held her. That’s all. Just held her.

She made a sound against my neck.

Then she was crying. Silently. Her shoulders shaking against my chest. Hot tears in the warm salt water, so you couldn’t tell which was which.

I didn’t say anything. I just kept holding on.

After a while, without letting go of her, I put my palm flat on her back. Between her shoulder blades. Where all the tension was. Every knot she’d ever gotten from hauling seawater up those stairs and wine jars across that shop.

And I pushed the thread. Cha’s thread. The steady one. Into her back. Slow. Warm. Circling.

She gasped. Her whole body went soft against me. Like a knot coming undone.

"What—" she breathed. "What are you doing? That’s—"

"Something an instructor taught me."

"Teach me later," she whispered. And then she pulled back. Just far enough to look at me. Her eyes were red. Her lips were trembling.

She wasn’t crying anymore.

"Second thing I say," said Ko Mi-rae. "Don’t stop."

[Target: Ko Mi-rae.] [Desire +30.]

She kissed me.

Not like the breathing test. Not a trick. Slower. Deeper. Like she was diving all the way down this time, to the bottom, where the abalone are.

The barrel was way too small. We didn’t care. Water went everywhere. Over the edge. Onto the hot stones in steaming hisses. Onto her floor. Onto the fishing nets. The barrel creaked like an old boat in a storm.

Somewhere in the middle of it, I forgot my stitched arm and dunked it in the salt water and it hurt like the fires of hell, and I yelped, and she laughed so hard she slipped and dunked us both under again.

This time I held my breath for a full three minutes.

I’m not going to tell you what we were doing down there.

But I won that round.

[Target: Ko Mi-rae.] [Desire — MAXIMUM.]

[Harmony formation: locked. 12 days remaining.]

When we came up, gasping, laughing, half the water gone from the barrel and the rest sloshing around our knees, she grabbed my face and pressed her forehead to mine and said, out of breath:

"Three minutes. Island time."

"I learned from the best."

"You learned in one night."

"I’m a fast learner."

"You’re a liar." She kissed me again. "Do it again. Third thing I say."

There was a fourth thing. And a fifth.

I lost count after that.

I think that was the point.

The man who sells grilled squid on the stall next to her shop banged on her floor at the fourth bell with a broom handle. Three times. Very loud.

Mi-rae banged back on the floor with her heel. Twice.

The broom stopped.

"He’s seventy," she explained, lying across my chest on her sleeping mat with her wet hair everywhere. "Island man. He knows. He’s just jealous."

"Of me?"

"Of his own wife. She’s been dead twenty years. He says nobody’s made that much noise in this building since she died." Mi-rae smiled with her eyes closed. "He’ll bring us squid in the morning. Island men always do."

She fell asleep like that. On top of me. Smelling like salt.

I lay there looking at the abalone shells on her windowsill glowing in the last of the lantern light, and thought about nets, and breath, and men who send their boys to break wine jars because they’re too proud to come themselves.

I left at dawn. She was still asleep. I covered her with a blanket and left the squid man’s two coppers on the counter, for the jar the Boar men stole.

The alley behind her shop was gray and quiet. Wet from the night. Empty barrels stacked against the wall.

The two Boar men I’d dragged out last night were gone.

In their place, someone was sitting on an overturned barrel.

Big. Huge. A wardrobe of a man. Neck like a tree stump. Little pig eyes. Wearing an expensive silk robe that didn’t fit him. Eating a roast duck leg with his bare hands. Grease on his chin.

Pyo Gwang-chul.

The Boar.

Himself.

He didn’t get up. Didn’t reach for anything. Just chewed. Slowly. Looking at me. At my stitched elbow. At my wet hair. At the stairs behind me leading up to her room.

He swallowed.

"So," said the Boar. "You’ve met my wife."