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The eyes—as a unit, a concept, not necessarily the organs—are fascinating.
Windows of the soul is poetic, but it’s not what Ivan imagines when he gazes at his lover’s awestruck face, alight at merely sitting across the table from him. They’re his fan, so he shouldn’t be here with them.
He also shouldn’t love, so the moral of the story is that Ivan feels most human when he does what he’s not supposed to, because the hubris of man is the closest he ever gets to feeling like he belongs here.
If he were in a novel, he knows what kind of character he would be.
His fantasy would have him reaching across this table, to the adoring eyes fixed on him, then digging his fingers in to pluck them out in the case that they really do hold love in them and he can take it.
They’d be warm, because they’re an organ attached to the skull of a perfectly normal human.
But they wouldn’t let him hold love in his hand—they lose that once they’re disconnected from their host.
So where is the love?
In the eyes—the concept—that Ivan can see but still can’t quite understand.
He wonders what people see in his. He’d like to know if they can find love there too.
This too starts with eyes.
시선.
視線。
视线。
Line of sight.
Humans are ruled by threads. Destiny is woven, fate is intertwined, love is a red string, Ivan’s line of sight is drawn to his lover on the arm of someone else.
Maybe they hadn’t found love in his eyes. Maybe he should have looked harder.
These are the lines that intersect, meant to cross and become entangled as they follow the inevitable path laid out for them which, when drawn in a map, are just another set of threads.
To connect at a point requires being at the same place at the same instant, colliding. This is a miracle, and it is also unavoidable. It’s a miracle that happens every second.
To see a line that runs parallel, one has to look to the side with no intention of turning, lest it become another intersection. Then, the longer you look, the more you may realize that your lines have been side by side for a very long time.
Ivan looks to his side for no particular reason. Something caught his eye.
The genius of the acting world, the man everyone claimed he was succeeding, who disappeared from the spotlight five years ago, stands close enough to identify, but too far to call out to comfortably.
He’s watching the same couple as Ivan. Ivan looks at them again, in case he’ll see something new.
It’s the same tangled ball of string he intends to part from.
“Are you angry?”
Ivan startles, and Luka is standing right next to him.
“That’s your partner, isn’t it?” Luka prompts him.
“…yeah.” He reconsiders. “Maybe not any more.”
Luka’s blank face cracks into wry amusement. “Are you going to storm over and break up now? I’ll watch.”
Ivan shakes his head. “The press wouldn’t be worth it.” He’s not actually hurt, so maybe this is the price he pays. He turns towards Luka. “Are you going to storm over instead?”
Luka considers it like he hadn’t thought of the idea, despite being the one to suggest it first. “I could.”
Then he stalks towards them and Ivan’s feet carry him in step—led on a string.
“Wait, I wasn’t—“
He’s not in time to stop Luka from slapping his cheating partner, and then—
“Did you think I didn’t know? If you were going to betray me, at least keep it a secret. I followed you all the way from your apartment—I watched you answer my text with a lie and then put your phone away when I called next…”
Ivan slinks away as a crowd starts to gather and the argument escalates, but he glances back one more time.
Luka meets his gaze in that split second, as the police haul him away. His nose is bleeding.
To notice a parallel line is a coincidence. To swerve and make it into an intersection is a choice.
Luka’s eyes don’t hold love, but they’re searching for it. Ivan knows, because he sees this gaze every time he looks in the mirror.
He breaks through the crowd, reaches out and grabs Luka’s arm.
“Sorry I’m late, sir, is there a problem here?” He turns his actor’s smile on the cops trying to lead Luka away.
Public assault, several eye witnesses, but nothing that Ivan’s agency can’t stop if he asks them.
He walks Luka away as a free man.
Ivan, too, walks away as a free man.
He looked at his former lover, as if he’d forgotten something behind. “If you come to my apartment uninvited from now on, it will be as a stranger. I’ll file a report.”
“You’re all over the headlines.”
This is usually a good thing. If there are threads all around you, the safest place to be is at the center, holding the knot of their leashes so they don’t end up choking you.
“Why did you do that where so many people could see?”
The lines all converged on Ivan, and he still won’t know what a single one of them saw.
“I apologize.”
But he won’t be dismissed over something like this. The company profits from him too much, and his manager knows it.
It felt more important, in the moment, to choose to stray from his path and force a convergence. Even if his agency did drop him, Ivan wouldn’t be the one losing something.
His colleagues call this industry brutal and the occupation fleeting, but when Ivan commiserated with them he wasn’t thinking of his job rather than the relationships he had to manage because of it.
Isn’t it easier when you can judge exactly what people want from you, then deliver? If he said that, they’d probably have held reservations about him. That part is always more tiring, the acting without cameras around.
If Ivan messes up on camera and the director yells at him, they just have to reshoot the scene and the final product will raise Ivan’s worth.
At a casual dinner amongst select colleagues, Ivan gets one chance, and he has to be perfect before it all falls apart.
So Ivan likes his job, and if it chews him up and spits him out, at least he’ll know exactly why. He’d rather be a failure of an actor than a failure of a human.
Which brings him back to the office, facing his boss, and knowing exactly what the man sees when he looks at Ivan. The profits just his face and brand will make, versus the cost of shutting down the press of this incident—
Ivan isn’t nervous at all. He knows which is higher.
・❥・
“Do you think they met like this?” Luka asks him suddenly, from behind him in line to get coffee.
Ivan doesn’t even have a chance to blink. “Huh?”
“Our exes. Do you think it was by chance, just like this?”
Ivan just wanted a coffee.
“Why does it matter?”
“I’ve been thinking.” Luka cuts in front of him, and Ivan is too stunned to stop him in time. “They found love strong enough to cheat; so how did they do it?”
“Is that what you would call love?” Ivan looked at the unfaithful couple, and they didn’t strike him as something that monumental.
“I don’t know what love looks like. That’s why I was thinking about them.”
Ivan pauses. Luka turns his back to him and recites his order.
Ivan isn’t really listening, until Luka points behind him and says, “He’s paying.”
A quick glance over his shoulder shows no mysterious man waving his wallet for Luka to pluck money from.
The cashier looks at him expectantly.
“Wh—”
“Thank you so much,” Luka enthuses, with a tone of voice that does not at all match the blank expression he gives Ivan. “I’m so lucky to have a friend like you.”
Ivan checks the cashier’s expression—ah, she’s buying it. Luka’s act. So now Ivan looks like the asshole if he doesn’t follow through.
He grits his teeth. “So am I.”
They get their drinks, they walk away, and Ivan follows Luka because he expected to be paid back. If not in cash then something else worthwhile.
Instead, Luka waits five minutes to ask, “Why are you following me?”
He’s got to be kidding. “Didn’t you want me to?!”
They stare at each other, and then Luka smiles. “So you understood.”
He shouldn’t have gone along with it.
Ivan doesn’t know how he got here.
Logically, he can follow the progression, he remembers everything that happened, but he can’t wrap his head around how Luka, in every moment, managed to string him along all the way to the point where they’re on a date.
But they’re not being themselves.
“Aren’t you curious about love?” Luka had asked him. Ivan remembers this clearly.
“I know what love is.”
“I wonder about that.”
And Ivan had taken offense, because what does Luka know about him—
Then Luka continued.
“Not you—love. I wonder if it’s something we can know.”
“As opposed to…?”
And Luka caught him in his gaze, with eyes that continue to be mirrors instead of windows. “What if it’s something we’re only meant to feel?”
Ivan’s chest constricted, and he refused to think about why. “So what?”
Luka raised an eyebrow like it was obvious. Like Ivan was a window for him. “Don’t you want to feel it?”
So they’re on a date. Except if they go on a date as Ivan and Luka, then they won’t accomplish anything. Two idiots stumbling in the dark aren’t any less lost than one—two people who struggle with love won’t find it by being together.
“You’re an actor, aren’t you? You’ll be more comfortable playing the role of someone else instead of yourself.”
It sounds stupid the longer Ivan thinks about it, but right in front of the restaurant Luka sounded very convincing.
“Don’t worry; I am too. What I’m proposing is just making use of both of our strengths.”
The restaurant doors opened, the waiter asked if they had a reservation, and the show began.
“It’s our one year anniversary,” Luka croons to the waitstaff that doesn’t even care. He holds Ivan’s arm intimately—which Ivan knows, because he was trained in the same way how to show intimacy to an audience that only watches—and Ivan puts on an easy smile.
“It’s embarrassing if you keep saying it to everyone we see.”
“Aw, but you like when I’m embarrassing. I just say what you can’t bring yourself to.” Luka nuzzles him affectionately, and Ivan swallows at how uncomfortably true the lie feels. This is acting. It’s all fake.
“Is this your way of telling me I don’t speak up enough?” he teases instead. “I’ll say as much as you want at home.”
They’re approaching their table, elegantly set for two.
Luka tsks, shaking his head. “There you go again,” he sighs, as if they’ve known each other longer than an amount of meetings Ivan can count on one hand. “Not everything I say secretly means I’m unhappy with you. Maybe I like speaking for both of us.” He flashes a bright smile to their waiter. “Thank you!”
Ivan is sitting across from Luka, who’s browsing a menu, not quite cognizant of how he got here. This is different from acting, but also it’s the same. Instead of slipping into another skin like it’s his own, Ivan just feels like he's having an out of body experience.
“When did you even have the time to book this place?” he asks. It’s reservation only by the looks of it, and they hadn’t planned to come here.
“I didn’t.”
Ivan blinks. “What?”
Luka turns another page of the menu. “These prices are exorbitant.”
“What do you mean you didn’t book?” Luka gave a fake name smoothly at the door.
“Exactly what I said.” Then he smiles at Ivan. “I’m waiting to see how long it takes for the real Wang Lizhen to show up. He’d had a very loud argument on the phone when his car broke down awhile ago.”
Ivan remembers, suddenly, the strangely detailed story Luka provided at the door.
“We had some car troubles, but luckily we were able to make it on time after all. Sorry about the call, is the reservation for Wang Lizhen still valid?”
“You’re insane.”
Luka waves over a server, like a madman. Then he murmurs under his breath, “Actually, I’m an actor.”
They end up leaving before they could get their food, money abandoned on the table as they evacuated it upon the arrival of the real Wang Lizhen. The money had been on Ivan’s insistence—Luka just wanted to leave.
“Such a good boy, but for what audience?” Luka had commented.
Ivan ignored him.
It wasn’t because Ivan is a good person. But for what audience indeed. A part of him, the portion that had been media trained to death, whispers about what will happen if this gets out to the public.
“Who are we even pretending to be?” he asks eventually, after some aimless walking and no direction from Luka himself.
“Who said we’re pretending?”
Ivan nearly sputters. “You!”
Luka makes a great show of thinking. “Did I? Well, take it to mean no one, and anyone. We’re whoever we want to be.”
“You said we didn’t have to be ourselves.”
“Exactly.” Luka grabs Ivan’s hand and links their fingers together, pressed against him like a lover. “We only have to be who we want to be.”
They’re cheating on their lovers. Who are themselves. Yet, they are drifting in a space very far from anything they have ever been.
Drifting, because they’re in a boat. It’s not stolen, like Ivan assumed. Luka just owns one, bought it cheap from someone who didn’t need it.
(“You could buy a yacht with your money.”
“Exactly.”)
It’s a rowboat, two oars, pushed into a lake that’s murky enough Ivan doubts his body would be found if he sunk into the depths of it. They drift above that uncertain death, precariously rocking atop surface tension.
Luka’s head is on his chest, and Ivan isn’t thinking about the grime and muck getting on his clothes every time he shifts and reminds himself he’s touching wood with the paint peeling in several places. He’s trying not to, anyways.
What do cheating lovers talk about that makes them different from normal ones?
“Break up with your boyfriend for me,” Ivan says, to test the waters.
Luka links their fingers together, and Ivan closes his hand around his like it’s natural. Luka kisses the back of Ivan’s hand.
“No.”
“Why not? Don’t you love me enough to cheat on him?”
“Just like you give me things he can’t, he gives me things you can’t too. You said you understood.”
Ivan certainly did not. But nor is he cheating on anyone, and nor is he in love.
“I believed you would realize you wanted me more, and leave him for me.”
It’s not the act of the century. It’s not even B reel worthy. It’s hollow—so it comes from somewhere more genuine than Ivan meant.
Luka twists around, and because he’s on Ivan’s chest he perches there like a cat.
“Don’t be sad,” he says, like Ivan is actually his illicit lover, desperate for Luka’s attention. He’s not. But the real ache in his chest is because his heart lives in the cage of someone who has always known what it is to crave this, from anyone.
Luka leans in, face angled up. “I still want you.”
Ivan thinks Luka is going to kiss him, and he’s about to let him. They’re not themselves, even if they are.
Then Luka whispers, “If I kissed you, would you believe me?”
In this moment, against his will, Ivan is transported to a world where he really is cheating on a partner with Luka, where he stays with that partner so Luka feels like he’s with someone he can’t completely have. In this imaginary world, Ivan doesn’t have the confidence that he alone could be enough for someone to want him; there has to be a catch. Like something that makes him forbidden. Like being taken.
In that world, and this one, Ivan replies, “No.”
Luka, for the first time, breaks character. His expression is a little too raw to be a perfect performance. “That’s a shame.”
Then they have to sit up, and Ivan rows so they don’t hit a rock and capsize.
They meet irregularly, sometimes fleetingly, and always as someone else. They build who they are as they go, just like Luka said: no one and anyone, only who they want to be.
It should be perfect. Ivan has no boundaries being crossed, and he likes being someone else. Except recently, that fear that began in the depth of his stomach threatens to crawl out of his throat. It began as a suspicion, so he pushed it down into the pit of his stomach where he hoped he could break it down and digest it before it became trouble.
Now it’s on his tongue.
Should he call it greed?
“Why did you disappear from the acting world?”
Or is this self immolation?
Luka actually pauses. It’s the first time, in months, either of them has talked about anything that is definitely real.
“The company knows where I am.”
It’s a form of curiosity, except dangerous.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Why do you suddenly want to know?”
It’s a form of curiosity, except vulnerable.
“…no reason.”
Luka doesn’t believe him, but that doesn’t matter as long as he doesn’t ask further.
They’re studying in a library. Luka has glasses on that Ivan couldn’t judge were fake or not. So, on principle, they have to keep their voices down.
“They say you’re the next me, don’t they?” Luka replies instead. When it’s turned on him, coming from Luka, something real is actually quite jarring.
“Yeah,” Ivan concedes. “I don’t think I’m as good as you though.”
“No, you’re fine,” Luka waves off his humility. “You’re very fitting to be my successor.”
“What makes you say that?” Ivan imagines Luka has watched his works. If not out of interest, out of curiosity—out of lack of anything else to fill his time. He would actually like compliments on his professional work. Or advice. He can handle that too.
Instead, Luka taps a pencil on the table idly. He’s not even taking notes. “I see it in your eyes.”
Ivan blinks. He wants to look in a mirror and peer into his face, to guess what Luka sees. He knows better than to ask for love, but if not that, what does live in his eyes, the organs? His eyes, the concept?
“What do you see?” he asks, his heart knocking against his chest, blood in his ears.
Luka looks at him. “Someone like me. Except while they made me like this, you did it to yourself.”
Luka prattles on about exams, picking up their charade where it left off, but Ivan is no longer following. He can produce a suitable response, keep up a light conversation, but he’s not present in any of it.
If Luka notices, he doesn’t acknowledge it.
Luka apologizes when Ivan least expects it.
That is, he apologizes at all.
“By the way,” he begins, as they sit together on the shore, the tiding rolling towards them. Ivan watches it recede.
“Hm?”
“Sorry for before.”
Before? Ivan can recall at least five instances he’d have liked an apology for. Including, but not limited to, the first time he was forced to buy a drink for Luka and never got around to asking for repayment.
“I got surprised when you suddenly asked about me.”
Oh. That. The fear that had made it back up to his ribs jumps into his throat. Not again.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m not.”
Ivan narrows his eyes in confusion, and then gets caught in Luka’s gaze.
Spiderwebs, he recalls, could be considered threads too. They’re the kind that don’t need to be tangled to get messy; they’re designed to trap.
“Since I apologized, you should make it up to me too.”
“I don’t think that’s how it works.” It isn’t how it works. Ivan thinks he has solid ground to claim Luka’s saying bullshit. Bullshit Ivan will play along with, regardless, doesn’t stop being bullshit either.
“It is.” He says it so confidently. “I get to ask you something real too.”
That, at least, Ivan can concede. At this point, he wants to say there’s no need for the pretense; they’re far enough along to just ask these things.
(Or are they? What exactly are they far along in? Meeting each other? Maybe. Knowing each other? Ivan can’t lie about that.)
“Okay. Ask me something real.”
Luka stares at the horizon. The sun will set soon; they chose this time for the romance after all.
“What happened to your love?”
Ivan’s heart stutters. “What do you mean?”
“No one wants love as badly as you do without failing in it at least once. So what happened?”
Ivan doesn’t want to answer this. Suddenly, he doesn’t want to be real anymore.
“You said my eyes are like yours,” he manages. It sounds normal to his ears.
“They are.”
“So what happened to your love?”
Luka smiles. “Do you think I’m that easy to redirect?”
No. Ivan just needs to stall for time, so he can get his affairs in order, pull out the strings that aren’t tangled in a ball in his chest so it looks like he has them neatly arranged.
“I’ll go first, if it makes you feel better.” Luka lets out a small sigh. He pulls his knees to his chest. “It ran away from me. So I ran away from my job to chase it.”
Ivan almost asks, did you catch it?
But Luka said their eyes are the same, and Ivan has always seen mirrors in him. He doesn’t ask, as a mercy. He knows the answer.
“Now yours,” Luka cuts in, leaving no room for further commentary.
Luka’s explanation was succinct. How can Ivan describe the gaping, hungry void in him that will never be satisfied, and aches nonetheless? How will he explain he reached for stars that were never his right to have?
Ivan can’t simply say it. He has to say it in a way he won’t be embarrassed for his greed. His fantasy.
“I let it pass by. That’s all.”
I did nothing is more palatable than I yearned.
Both end with nothing gained, but only one was foolish enough to hope for it.
Ivan hasn’t seen Till in years.
For some reason, Ivan expects Luka to see through him. He expects, inexplicably, for Luka to watch his entire history with Till unfold, and then pity him for his ambitious feelings that burned a hole in his heart for lack of anywhere else to go.
When he glances at Luka after a few moments of silence, Luka is only looking at him.
Parallel lines not meant to intersect, a proper observer.
Then—
“Have you ever tried chasing it?”
“Huh?”
Luka stands up, starts dusting the sand off his clothes.
“What are you doing?!”
“Hurry up,” Luka says, stretching his arms above his head. “Chase me.”
Then he really turns heel and jogs along the sand.
Ivan could leave. He could stay rooted here, or go back home, and Luka will be running on the beach like a fool with no one coming after him. How long will it take for him to look back and realize no one is coming? What will he do when he looks around, and finds himself utterly alone with only his own shortness of breath for company?
In the end, it turns out the fear Ivan keeps trying to swallow is both something he never wanted to want again, and wants more than anything.
He watches Luka’s retreating back.
Then he gets up and chases after him.