The third: I wonder what it would be like to—

No. Squash. Squash.

Now Kisa is certain her face is midnight blue. Wonderful.

—what—the—fuck—

“Kisa,” Seokga is saying, “are you…”

“Yes,” she croaks. “I’m quite well, thank you.”

“Right,” she hears the god say slowly, as if savoring this bewildering—yet apparently amusing—moment. Horrible. He is simply horrible. “Only that…I heard some very interesting things down the bond.”

It’s not enough to be dead. Kisa wishes to be entirely obliterated into nothingness. Hands falling to her lap, she stares at Seokga in complete and utter horror. The god looks extremely baffled, adequately concerned, and yet also incredibly entertained—all at once.

She can’t blame him.

Oh, yes, Kisa has entirely lost it.

“I,” she attempts to say with a haughty dignity she does not at the moment possess, “have absolutely no idea what you mean.”

He’s smiling now, just a bit. Perhaps he’s even trying not to, in order to spare her feelings, but he’s really failing quite spectacularly. “What’s this about ‘the sensational glide of his tongue’?”

Bollocks. “Er.” Kisa cannot think of anything else to say. She fears she looks like a cow chewing its cud as her mouth works speechlessly.

Seokga tilts his head. “Right. Well. I’m going to the wet spas to…cool off. Maybe you should come with me.” A deliberate sideways smirk that somehow manages to both incense her and befuddle her senses.

“Um,” Kisa manages to blurt, face burning. “We have a mystery to solve, we should get back—”

Seokga grins over his shoulder as he leaves the sauna. “We won’t be long,” he tells her.

Kisa is frozen to her seat.

The trickster winks at her. Winks. Kisa unfortunately feels as if she might take a note from Elsie and swoon. “I’ll be in one of the private baths.”

As he disappears, she sits there, in the sauna, debating with herself for almost five minutes. She shouldn’t. She really shouldn’t. There’s no reason for her to. She should instead scurry back to her cabin and wallow in her humiliation.

Yet she told him—about her dream. Never before has she told anybody…And Seokga listened. He’d teased her, yes, but with…affection. And she’d enjoyed it.

Her hand absentmindedly comes to rest above her chest, where a deep ache, a longing, has lodged itself since Seokga left the sauna.

Perhaps this whole squashing experiment is a mistake.