***Author's Note***
This story is a companion piece to my earlier story "Wish Granted" and any stories in the "Wish Granted" series.
You don't have to read those to understand this story. They are all meant to make sense individually, as well as together.
The main character is initially reluctant to deal with the genie, but willingly and happily participates in the sexual activities with a different character.
This story mentions an abusive relationship.
Relevant content warnings apply.
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The slim thirty-three-year-old Su-jin had a ruffled red-orange dress on olive skin, hair a coconut shade, and sandals.
It'd been just under a month since her divorce was finalized.
She'd agreed to the false notion that she cheated on him, and she didn't try to fight for assets of any kind. Anything and everything for him to willingly divorce her, to not contest things and make it all harder and longer. It'd already been too damn long being with such a nasty man... or a man at all, but that was more complicated.
And after months of little eating and staring at the ceiling from that bed she was always in, her friends effectively forced her to go somewhere β anywhere β that week, and she'd chosen a festival in Goseong-gun.
But Su-jin had only just turned around from getting lavender ice cream for both herself and friends only to see absolutely no one at all.
"Yumi? Hyeon?"
No response.
She looked all about the place. Everyone had disappeared.
"Yumi..." she breathed deeply and deliberately, her gut aflame. "Hyeon?"
"They didn't leave you."
Su-jin whipped around to the unknown voice.
A pearl-skinned woman with dark hair lounged in a nearby chair. She wore a sheer robe of fiery red at its fluffy ends and held a fan the same shade.
"Whatβ"
"Your friends didn't leave you. Time hasn't passed for themβ"
"Thatβ what?!" Whoβ"
"You actually get more answers when you don't interrupt."
"But you keep interrupting me! This doesn't make any sense. How did you get all... this?" she gestured about the place. "How did you, and who are you, where isβ?!"
"I'm a genie! I'm here to grant your wish. Time is meaningless. Realms are complex. You're in a realm fusion. The details really aren't that important."
"What are you talking about?! None of this makes any sense!"
"It does. You want to fuck a mermaid."
...she hadn't told anyone that. She barely admitted it to herself.
"What?! No, Iβ"
"I know a mermaid who'd love it."
"...and why should I believe that you're a genie?"
The stranger yanked her own head off and kicked it like a jegi, laughing in her decapitated state before it reappeared in place.
She stared wide-eyed at the pearlish woman before her.
The ice cream was suspended in the air.