But my feet were stuck to the floor and refused to move. Shamelessly, I racked my mind for any excuse that might spare me from sharing a bed with the man.

“My lord, your illness runs deep. I fear that spending your precious energy on me will harm your noble body.”

For now, I feigned concern for his health and tried to poke at the contradiction by using his own excuse against him. Baek Seungjo’s eyes narrowed.

I thought he might find it insolent that I was trying to avoid serving him, but he looked less offended than baffled by the absurdity of what I had said. I wondered what was so absurd about it, and then…

“I have no intention of spending my energy on you. I mean to draw some of yours.”

“…Pardon?”

Did he plan to siphon my energy dry through the union of yin and yang and wither me to nothing? He looked at my face, which had already gone as withered as a dead leaf, and let out a quiet laugh.

“Not in that sense.”

“…Then what do you intend to do?”

“I simply need the warmth of another person. All you need to do is keep this blanket warm.”

Did he think I would say ‘Is that so?’ and obediently crawl in? I would sooner sleep in a tiger’s den than trust a man under the same blanket.

My suspicion must have shown plainly on my face.

“Haah, how heartless.”

Baek Seungjo let out a sudden groan and collapsed onto the bedding.

“To leave a man this gravely ill alone in a cold room all night. I suppose you are waiting for my breath to give out in the middle of the night so you can deal with a corpse come morning.”

Not a single thing he said was right, just as he himself had once put it.

The man now sprawled out flat on the bedding looked far from drawing his last breath tonight. He looked sturdy enough to take down a tiger with his bare hands.

And cold room, he said. Nansil had stoked the underfloor fire so generously that even the far end of the room where I stood was scorching hot.

But I turned his transparent scheming into an excuse of my own.

“Then I will go out right now and tell them to stoke the fire more.”

Before I could even take hold of the door latch, Baek Seungjo caught me by the ankle again.

“That will not do at all. This chill that seeps into my bones every night will not lift without the warmth of another person.”

Had he said it with a gaunt, hollowed face, I might have believed him. But coming from that fine, radiant face, it was nothing but nonsense.

Yet the look on his face as he watched me was so desperate and desolate, so much like a puppy that had lost its home and been left out in the rain, that I found myself confused.

…Was he truly chilled to the bone?

Seungjo had never been one to complain, not even as a young child. He was a man who never let on that he was in pain even when he was. If even he was saying something so vulnerable, perhaps he truly had fallen into deep, bone-deep illness.

In the end, I pushed my doubts to one corner of my mind and asked.

“Do you truly promise to only sleep and do nothing else?”

A courtesan demanding that the man she served not lay a hand on her. Any ordinary nobleman would have had me rolled up in a mat and beaten for it.

“I give you my word.”

But Baek Seungjo promised without a trace of displeasure. And because that only made me trust him less, he offered an even bolder proposal.

“It will not come to that, but if I do lay a hand on you, stab me with that silver knife.”

“Good heavens, my lord! That is too far, even in jest. If you truly intended to overpower me by force, you could easily take the silver knife from me whether I drew it or swung a great sword. What use would a little blade be?”

I kept saying things that deserved a beating. He still showed no sign of wanting to punish this insolent courtesan.

“Ha, why would I make an enemy of the woman who could put poison in the food and drink that goes into my mouth? I intend to live a long life. So stop your fussing and come here. I am freezing.”

I had drawn out the argument for nothing. When he put it that way, I could not simply keep refusing.

I decided in the end to let myself be fooled, just this once, and spend the night here. Still thinking that a tiger’s den would be preferable, I hesitantly made my way to his side.

Baek Seungjo lay propped at an angle in his sleeping robe, waiting for me. The moment the lamp’s flame swayed and swept over his body, my breath stopped entirely.

Why was that white ramie inner robe so thin? It was nearly transparent, and the warm tone of his skin showed through. And why was the front so loosely fastened? The firm, well-built plane of his chest lay exposed through the gap without reserve. I flinched and turned my head away.

In truth, it was not the first time I had seen Baek Seungjo’s bare skin. In my thoughtless younger years, I had once watched him bathe or wash his back, his torso bared to the waist.

Even seeing that unripened body had made my face flush. How much more so a man’s fully matured form.

My earlobes burned. I had already looked away, yet the image of that solid body refused to leave my mind, and my heart lurched beyond my control. I wanted to flee, yet for some reason my feet moved on their own, steadily carrying me to the foot of his bedding.

“Lie down here.”

Baek Seungjo patted the empty space on the bedding between his body and the folding screen. I turned my head stubbornly to one side, determined not to let my gaze brush over him again, and shuffled into the spot and sat down.

The look Baek Seungjo fixed on me was distinctly strange. Something like flustered, one might say.

“Why… are you looking at me like that?”

He clearly had something to say. He cleared his throat as though the words were difficult to get out, then turned his head slightly to the side and spoke.

“Are you… planning to sleep in all of that? It must be uncomfortable…”

He had told me my role was to warm the blanket, so it seemed he felt awkward telling me to undress.

He was right that it was tremendously uncomfortable. But those stifling layers of clothing were my armor. Lying down beside a man in nothing but a thin undergarment was absolutely out of the question.

“I am fine.”

But the hair ornaments were nothing but uncomfortable and served no purpose here. I pulled out my hairpin and set it neatly beside my pillow. The braided coil wound in layers came tumbling heavily down over my chest.

He must have seen a woman let her hair down countless times. Yet Baek Seungjo watched in silence as I loosened my hair, as though it were something rare.

I finished preparing for sleep and looked directly at him. He stared back blankly, not understanding what I wanted, then came to his senses a moment later and turned his back to me.

Huff. The breath he used to blow out the lamp in one go was unsteady.

The room plunged into darkness thick as ink in an instant. Only the faint moonlight seeping through the window cast a dim outline over the sharp ridge of his nose and the line of his jaw. The man, who looked like an ink-brush painting rendered in bold strokes, slowly turned and lay facing me.

“Lie down too.”

I pressed my parched lips together and lowered myself reluctantly. Then, just before my head touched the surface, I realized I had forgotten something.

“I will go and fetch another pillow.”

“Not a chance. Did you think I would not see through that excuse as a way to slip out?”

That was not my intention at all, but he scoffed and slid his arm under my head.

“Use my arm as your pillow.”

When his arm goes numb, he will pull it back on his own. For now, I obediently rested my head on his arm.

I thought this much would be nothing, but I was wrong. The firm muscle of his forearm against the back of my neck tickled. The tendons that kept shifting and tensing beneath the skin made it worse, pulling at my attention.

Come to think of it, this was the first time in my life I had ever rested my head on a man’s arm. So this is what it feels like.

At first it was nothing but strange and uncomfortable, but my body grew accustomed to it faster than his arm could go numb.

As I lay quietly with my head on his arm, a sudden sting rose behind my eyes. We were almost like a husband and wife. If only that one thing had never happened, we might have spent every night together like this, warmly…

“You would do well not to think about sneaking out without my permission.”

And so Baek Seungjo’s sharp warning was all the more welcome. It snapped me out of that hollow dream in an instant.

“If you do, from tomorrow night on, I will tie you up before putting you to sleep, just like last night.”

I had thought it strange that he had me lie between him and the folding screen, that it looked rather like being caged, and as always, a bad feeling never fails to prove itself right.

…But more than that, did he mean I had to sleep like this every night? Good heavens.

I blinked up at the ceiling, as dark as my future ahead, with nothing else to do, and kept finding my gaze drifting to the side without meaning to. The high bridge of his nose hovered at the edge of my vision, and there was nothing I could do about it.

Unable to hold out any longer, I pretended to shift in my sleep and slowly turned my body toward the folding screen. If I could not see him, perhaps my mind would settle.

It was a miscalculation that had thrown me straight into the tiger’s jaws, as it turned out.