The Rival Who Killed Me Remembers Too novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: Ten Paces
In a guest annex with a paper wall between us, I prove I remember and he proves he does, and the fight turns into a kiss.
The Iron Crane guest annex had two rooms and a paper screen between them.
From Woo-jin's bed to Mu-yeol's was ten paces.
He knew, because he had counted those ten paces for twenty nights the first time.
That evening he sat on his mat with Cold Crane across his knees and the lamp turned low.
On the far side of the paper, a shadow the size of a doorway set a cloth-wrapped blade against the wall.
The shadow sat down.
Neither man spoke for an hour.
Woo-jin decided that if Mu-yeol was a trick, he would find out in the dark, where he was the better fighter.
He blew out the lamp.
Then he rolled off the mat and crossed the room on the balls of his feet.
He went through the paper screen with the sword drawn.
Mu-yeol was not where the shadow had been.
A hand closed on Woo-jin's wrist from behind, and the blade fell out of his fingers.
Woo-jin was turned and walked backward until the wall hit his shoulder blades.
Mu-yeol's forearm lay across his collarbones, heavy as a beam.
"You go through the screen when you're frightened," Mu-yeol said into the dark.
"I'm not frightened."
"Your heart's going like a fish on a dock."
"Prove it," Woo-jin said. "Prove you're really him."
Mu-yeol thought about that.
His face was an inch away, and Woo-jin could feel the warmth coming off his bare chest through the open robe.
"On the sixth day you eat plum candy before the arena. You say it's for your throat."
Woo-jin's breath caught.
"You hum when you wash, and you're off the tune."
"I do not."
"You cut a second late on the third turn of the Cold Crane form."
"And you think nobody has noticed," Mu-yeol added.
His voice dropped.
"You didn't raise your guard at the end. You were tired."
Woo-jin went very still.
Not that, he thought.
Anything but that.
"Yes," he said. "I was tired."
Mu-yeol's eyes, which Woo-jin could just see now, did something slow that he could not read.
"Is that what it was," Mu-yeol said.
Then he let it go.
"Now you," he said. "Tell me one thing nobody alive knows."
Woo-jin had a dozen answers, and he picked the one that cost him nothing.
"Every year on the first day of spring, you wrote a letter to a temple. You never sent any of them."
Mu-yeol's arm eased a little.
"You burned them," Woo-jin said. "I saw the ash in your brazier, and I never asked."
Neither of them breathed.
"Hm," Mu-yeol said, very low.
Then he kissed him.
It was not a kind kiss.
It was a fight, all teeth and breath.
Woo-jin bit his lip hard enough to taste blood.
Mu-yeol made a sound deep in his chest.
Woo-jin shoved both hands inside the open front of the black robe.
Mu-yeol's skin was hot and hard under his palms and ridged with old scars.
The wooden beads on his wrist were cold against Woo-jin's ribs.
"Ten years," Woo-jin said against his mouth. "Ten years I thought about this."
"Don't talk."
"Then do something about it."
Mu-yeol lifted him.
Woo-jin's feet left the floor, and his legs went around Mu-yeol's waist because there was nowhere else for them to go.
Mu-yeol held his whole weight in one arm and pulled the knot of his sash loose with the other hand.
The robe fell open.
Mu-yeol's mouth went to his throat and stayed there, biting.
Woo-jin tipped his head back against the wall and swore at the ceiling.
"Tell me what you want," Mu-yeol said.
His voice had gone rough at the edges.
"You know what I want."
"I want to hear it." He bit under Woo-jin's jaw. "Say it."
Woo-jin had never said it aloud to anyone.
"Your hands," he said. "Both of them. Now."
Mu-yeol laughed once, low, and set him on his feet with his back to the wall.
The rest of their clothes went to the floor.
Mu-yeol's big hand closed around Woo-jin's hard cock, rough and warm and sure, and Woo-jin made a noise he would never repeat.
"Look at me," Mu-yeol said.
Woo-jin looked.
Mu-yeol stepped in until there was no space left between them, and then both his hands were wrapped around their cocks together, slick with pre-cum.
"That's the idea, Swordsman Gang," he said, when Woo-jin swore.
He stroked them slowly, because Woo-jin asked for it, and faster because Woo-jin begged, his rough palm sliding from root to tip.
Woo-jin got a hand on his stubbled scalp and held on.
"There," he said. "Harder. Fuck, there."
"Say it again."
"There, Heretic, there, there"
Mu-yeol tightened his grip, and Woo-jin came hard across their fists with his head against the wall and Mu-yeol's name caught in his throat.
Mu-yeol spilled hot over his own fingers a moment later, with a groan into Woo-jin's shoulder.
For a long breath neither of them moved.
Woo-jin's legs were useless.
Mu-yeol held him up against the wall with his hips, and his forehead rested on Woo-jin's collarbone.
Then Woo-jin realized, with real alarm, that Mu-yeol's shoulders were shaking.
"Mu-yeol?"
"Give me a moment," Mu-yeol said.
Woo-jin did.
He stroked the back of the shaved head once, and Mu-yeol let him.
When Mu-yeol lifted his face, it was calm again, and a little wet at the edges.
They sat on Woo-jin's mat afterward, wrapped in one blanket, with the lamp relit.
"There's something I need from you," Mu-yeol said. "It can't wait for morning."
"What is it?"
"In seventeen days my brother dies on the river road."
Woo-jin's hand stopped on Mu-yeol's arm.
"You're going to help me stop it."
Woo-jin's stomach dropped.
"Of course," he said.
It was the second lie he told Mu-yeol in the second life.
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