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Today is Valentine’s Day. There are sales for chocolates to prove it, restaurants booked for the occasion, lonely hearts weeping in the face of it. Today is special, whether it’s for a good reason or not.
It’s such an arbitrary decision, to choose this sequence of the sun rising and falling to mean something.
Birthdays are like that too. Children don’t choose the day they’re born. It only happens once in a lifetime, but it also happens every day.
Ivan’s birthday, according to his paperwork, is today. But unlike Valentine’s Day, there is no celebration to prove it, no plans for the occasion, and he had stopped crying about it roughly around middle school.
Today didn’t have to be his birthday. All the paperwork had to do was lie, and then he had a birthday. Surely it could have lied again. Lied better. Lied kinder.
Today you start your new life, so it’s like you’re being born anew. Let’s make it today.
“Okay.”
To a boy who never had proof of his birth, never thought of it as a celebration, and had better things to cry over, a birthday meant nothing at all.
Being born was never something special—being surrounded by people who would care about that was. Ivan realized this just in time for it to hurt.
“Happy Valentine’s Day! Here’s a free sample, you can give it to someone special!”
Ivan received the piece of chocolate graciously, smiling in a way that makes the clerk smile back. “Thank you.”
A series of unread messages sit in his notifications. They’re from Till. They were supposed to meet at this station, so Ivan is here.
Till isn’t.
(hey sorry to bail last minute but Mizi needed a catsitter so im tied up for the evening after all)
(just eat w/o me u can have my share)
Their reservation is in an hour. Ivan makes sure not to open their chat and keep the little one in place. If Till notices Ivan hasn’t read his message, will he think about him? Will he message again? Maybe he’ll call.
Ivan stands in front of the ticket gate and tries to hallucinate Till’s figure at the barricade, yelling that he has to watch Mizi’s cat before dashing back to catch the next train.
Ivan would forgive him in this delusion, because then he would have felt like a priority to someone on his birthday, even if it was second place.
The clock says it’s been an hour. The reservation has passed.
The adult in Ivan says he’s perfectly fine spending his fake birthday alone, but it’s with slow, childish footsteps that he ambles back into the station, boards a train going the opposite way of his apartment, and watches life go on despite the fact that today marks twenty-six orbital cycles of the earth that have passed since his father filled out the paperwork that proved Ivan exists.
A poet could beautify the image of a man on his knees by presenting it as holy, inserting God where the figure of worship should be, prayer onto the lips of the sinner. Then, just as beautifully, they could turn God into a man and prayer into cock and when it’s framed so beautifully it can still be called art.
Luka acts the blasphemy out with his body because it doesn’t fucking mean anything.
He still goes to church on Sundays. A bath and the laundry takes care of the dirt on his knees, and he doesn’t do it enough to ache. Just enough to make a point.
Father, today too I ask you to spite me for my sins.
It’s nothing as grand as a war on God. Luka is someone small, insignificant, and inconsequential to a greater higher being—he’s kicking rocks at a mountain and testing when it will cause an avalanche. It probably won’t. But maybe it will.
He’s experimenting with nonzero chances, to prove they exist.
This is the groundwork to his thesis that nothing in this world is absolute. Not God, not Heaven, not Hell, not the Father the Son or the Lord.
Not his father either.
“If you were my son, I wouldn’t want you here.”
Someone said something strange to him, and even if thousands of words pour in and out of Luka’s mind every day, these were so absurd they echoed in the chamber of his skull even years after.
He’s in his old school uniform, smoking a cigarette at a club. If the first person who offers to buy him a drink is hot, he’ll ask them for money and weave a story about tuition, then make some eyes that scream he’ll get on his knees for it.
I’ll make you into God.
A woman approaches him first. She’s not a customer. Luka can tell.
“That uniform is for ⚪︎⚪︎⚪︎ academy, isn’t it?”
Yes, it is. The conversation goes like this for a while, confirming facts and giving affirmatives and negatives. Then she sighs.
“My son went there.”
Luka probably doesn’t know him. He isn’t even in school anymore. He put this uniform on the same way a priest would don his robes to commit a sex crime—in defiance of the irony of it all.
“So?”
“If you were my son, I wouldn’t want you here.”
This woman is a prostitute. She’s what Luka pretends to be to prove that God won’t punish him, and her son is loved.
She buys him a glass of juice, and he downs it in one gulp, wiping the corner of his mouth as he leaves the club immediately. He doesn’t have a point to prove to her, and he stopped being in the mood to experiment.
He goes back to the club many times, and he never sees her again.
If she died, he wishes she would have taken her words with her so they’d stop living in his head.
Normal people go to clubs.
Ivan walks in, and he feels incredibly normal. He’s proud of himself, even, as everyone around him loses themself in the atmosphere and the hard hitting beats while he alone sits in his perfect composure.
He smokes a cigarette, because it’s normal and doing it makes him feel like he’s actually assuaging some of his vices.
Can he cure heartbreak like this? How many packs will it take? What if he dances.
Does he need to work up a sweat and put his hands on someone’s waist to get what everyone else is from this?
He must look so strange, as the only normal person in this room of miscreants.
Ivan slides down, rolling so his back presses against the cushion of the sofa and his eyes are fixed at the ceiling. His arm hangs off one end.
The cigarette drops to the floor. It probably won’t cause a fire; the floor is cement.
He closes his eyes. This place hasn’t changed much.
He’s ended up back here, so neither has he.
“Morning honey.”
Ivan’s eyes snap open, and he’s met with golden ones pinning him down.
“What are you wearing?”
Luka doesn’t hesitate. “My school uniform.”
“Your old school uniform.” They graduated. Ages ago.
“It’s still mine, isn’t it?”
“But why?”
“So I can figure out who it matters to quickly.” Luka smiles. “My age, that is.”
Ivan wrinkles his nose.
“That’s not something the pastor’s son should be doing.”
“I don’t want to hear that from you.” Luka takes off his glasses and slides them onto Ivan’s face. They’re not prescription. “I’m your student council president, not the pastor’s son.”
“That’s even worse.”
Luka gets off of him, and pulls Ivan up with him.
“Glad you think so, babe.”
It’s not like Luka needs the money; he just wants it. He saw an expensive Polaroid camera in the window, and thought that it was an awfully romantic thing to take pictures of moments that you didn’t want to forget. They were over so quickly, after all.
He wanted a stack of them that featured Hyuna. Then he could have something he could lock away in a box, untouched by the dust and grime that sits in the air, and that only he would see.
If he took one of himself, he wondered if she would take it.
She’ll probably throw it away.
But that’s fine too. At least a piece of him would have touched her hands, and her hands are always warm.
She’d never guess how he afforded it. If he told her, would she be worried? Maybe he should tell her, to see her shock and then her concern. She has a good heart, and Luka knows what good hearts ache for.
He could use his card and buy a hundred Polaroid cameras without denting his family’s finances. So he won’t.
To buy just one, he could blow a guy and charge extra to cum on his face if he’s into that, and if not he could probably find another one willing to fork over a handful of bills for something pretty looking up at him. They’re all pretty transparent.
Then Luka can buy a Polaroid, take pictures of Hyuna, take one of himself, never touch it again, and still be the pastor’s son who graduated at the top of his class.
He veers off towards the club, where he’s become a regular.
“Here for a drink?” The bartender knows him.
Luka pulls out a cigarette and lights it. It makes him look approachable and dirty, though the taste doesn’t do anything for him. “No. I think I’m gonna whore myself today.”
“The pickings are a little slim tonight, but good luck. Let me know if you need anything to wash the taste out.”
Luka lets him walk away, and gazes around the bar. It’s not a busy night, unfortunately.
That woman isn’t here again either.
He likes watching the smoke leave his mouth as he sighs, so he can see the breaths he’s taking. Only living things breathe. Cold air will do it too, but then Luka will be shivering and it stops being worth it.
He takes a drag, breathes it in, sighs it out.
He’ll buy his camera after mass tomorrow. The store should be open by then.
“I fucked a guy who said he missed your mom.”
Ivan blanches.
Luka is drinking something on the rocks, and downs it all in one swig, head tilted back and throat bobbing. He didn’t offer to buy Ivan one, and Ivan didn’t ask.
“Then he tried to give me 50,000 less won than we promised. She was right to dump him.”
“My mother wouldn’t be here,” Ivan replies dumbly. No, the distant but perfectly agreeable woman who consented to call him her son would never show her face here.
“That’s not what I said,” Luka counters. “I said your mom. The prostitute.”
Ivan knew three things about Luka before tonight:
He was the student council president.
He had impossibly perfect grades.
He’s the pastor’s son.
None of them give him any reason to know that Ivan’s mom had been staying at a room back here out of good will and the grace of the owner, and that her son too had nowhere else to hang around.
“What are you even talking about?”
“Am I wrong?”
“Are you hearing the shit you’re saying?”
Luka slams his glass on the counter, and Ivan flinches. He shouldn’t feel like he’s in the wrong. This is insane. This is inappropriate and completely out of line for two people who were barely acquainted. The closest they ever got was their names listed in order, for exemplary graduates.
But Luka glares at him like he’s committed some kind of atrocity.
“So tell me I’m wrong and that your mom wasn’t a whore here.”
It would be easy to lie. There’s no legal or documented proof that Ivan was born in a back alley and confined here for years, made into a person only by paperwork and a lot of money.
“…are you trying to use that against me?”
Luka’s stance relaxes, and he’s back to an unreadable neutral.
“No. I just wanted to know.”
“Then ask.”
“I did.”
Ivan wants to say this Luka is unrecognizable despite his largely unchanged features and the nostalgic white button down and sweater vest. However he can’t ignore the part of him that’s strangely vindicated.
So you were like this all along.
Ivan used to grin and needle his president for the antics high schoolers enjoyed, and Luka would frown and bear it unflinchingly. They weren’t really friends. When they were alone, they performed their duties and Ivan had thought in passing that they both play the roles they’re supposed to pretty well.
It looks like they’re both coming apart too.
“How did you know he was talking about my mom?” Ivan asks instead, so Luka will actually give him an answer.
“Who?”
“That guy you fucked.”
“Oh, him.” Luka taps the counter, manages to convey an order to the bartender with hand motions alone, then turns back to Ivan. “I lied.”
Ivan, for the first time that night, feels an uncontrollable urge to bury his fist in Luka’s face.
My son, you have to be normal.
The memories Ivan has of his childhood are vivid only in this. His mom, cradling his body close to hers. A steady, warm heartbeat.
Her son. She never called him a name. When he asked her why, she said that that was something reserved for the people who could raise him.
He hadn’t known what she meant, and his childish heart was always swayed by the rhythm of her arms rocking him, stroking his hair.
Don’t ever call me your mother. Don’t talk about this place with anyone.
He didn’t cry when she let go of his hand and urged him to the sleek and shiny car that pulled up.
He only asked where he was going.
To the people who can give you a name.
As the car rode off, he sat and looked at his hands. He wanted to look back, but he felt like it wasn’t allowed. Mom said to never talk about her. Maybe she didn’t want him to look either.
He never saw her again.
He should have looked.
A man and a woman looked down at him in the big, fancy house the car pulled up to, and their gazes were cold but he never felt them cruel.
“Ivan,” they called him. “Do you have a birthday?”
Ivan blinked. “What’s that?”
The two tall people were silent, exchanged glances, then,
“Today you start your new life, so it’s like you’re being born anew. Let’s make it today.”
So he became Ivan, whose birthday was February 14, and he had paperwork to prove it.
The bartender slid him a drink before Ivan could commit homicide.
He sipped it, Luka said casually, “it’s on me,” and then they returned to something baseline. Something normal. Like one drink could pay for being an inconsiderate asshole.
It sort of can, when you’re already drunk on misery and still so desperately clinging to being normal.
“How did you know my mom worked here?” he asks eventually.
Luka doesn’t answer.
“Did you hear me? How—“
“I didn’t.” Luka won’t look at him suddenly. “You just told me.”
He had been so confident. He’d been such a jerk about it—
“You weren’t sure until now?!”
“I didn’t say that. I was pretty sure; it made sense. You just proved it.”
Ivan is going to punch him for real.
“And what does that mean?!”
“That you were loved.”
Ivan’s anger dissipates.
“Too bad it wasn’t by Till.”
Then it comes back.
He really grabs a fistful of Luka’s shirt, and his free hand is shaking as he closes his fingers together.
“What are you trying to get from me? What’s in all this for you?!”
Luka meets his undoing with infuriating emptiness. Then he smiles.
“You’re crying.”
If Luka could talk to God, and trust that He knows everything and always has the right answer, he would ask this:
Would it have been better to eat the rat?
When his small, grubby hands held the even smaller furry corpse, and his stomach rumbled so loudly it hurt his ears, if he had taken a bite and accepted this as his life, could he have at least lived and died without regrets?
He wouldn’t have lived this long.
But he wouldn’t really call this living either.
Father Heperu gave him a choice.
Eat that rat, or come with me for real food.
Luka dropped the rat immediately, grabbed foods covered in sauces with his bare hands and shoved them in his mouth, and the pastor watched eerily calm.
This is the first and last time you ever act so unsightly in front of me.
That was when Luka became his. The son he can’t have on his own.
Luka was dropped in the church’s orphanage for a year before Father Heperu formally adopted him, and that was how he covered up his humiliating flaw seamlessly. The ever benevolent Father, a father of an orphan his church had cared for.
The ground before Jesus Christ isn’t dirty like the alley, but Luka’s knees hurt from kneeling on it so much.
The requirements to be Father Heperu’s son are as follows:
Always go to mass.
Attend retreats.
Attend events.
Achieve perfect attendance.
Achieve perfect grades.
Become someone important in school.
Do not lose to anyone else.
Do not bring shame to his name.
Do not make him regret picking you up off the street and turning you from a statistic into a human.
Luka sings in the church choir, and the aunties love him. They’re the only ones that do.
Ivan braces his hands on the edge of the bathroom sink. Water drips from the tips of his bangs and down his chin. The mirror in front of him is waiting for him to look up.
What he sees every day looks back at him.
He rubs his face one more time, slicks back his hair, and takes a breath. Then he smiles.
A normal person smiles back.
A perfectly agreeable, unsuspecting human who raises no concerns with his conduct and words. He has the arch of his eyebrows perfectly angled, the exact curve of his smile already muscle memory—this is the face that gets him through every day.
Then the lights turn off.
As he spins around, knocks his elbow painfully against something hard, and quickly tries to differentiate between shock and fear, Luka’s face is illuminated in the darkness.
Ivan hits his other elbow against what he thinks is the sink, or could be the counter.
Then he looks at where the light is coming from and freezes.
Luka smiles when their eyes meet.
“I thought I’d find you here.”
“…you watched me walk in.” Or at least, Ivan didn’t hide it and his path away from Luka had been very straightforward.
“Yes, but you’re still here after ten minutes.”
“Can you turn the lights back on?”
Luka notices his deflection, but he obliges nonetheless. With a flick, the bathroom is illuminated once more and the candle in front of Luka’s face turns out to be connected to a cupcake. Ivan is so busy trying to reason why he’d go through the effort of sticking the candle in a cupcake instead of holding it that the realization comes a beat late.
“What—“
“Make a wish, birthday boy.”
Ivan wonders who’s reflected in Luka’s eyes right now—a normal person or Ivan.
It doesn’t mean anything. Ivan knows there’s a reason for this, that Luka isn’t being nice. But to use his birthday against him, one has to know it’s his birthday (not just Valentine’s Day).
“I hate you,” he warbles, so much more fragile and breaking apart at the seams than he wanted to show. The tears he just finished washing from his face heat his cheeks again.
Luka is unfazed. “Then wish me dead.” He holds out the cupcake.
Ivan lifts his hand to knock it to the ground, but it’s the first birthday gift he’s received today and he can’t bring himself to do it. His fingers curl into a fist.
He blows out the candle, right before fleeing the bathroom and knocking into Luka’s shoulder on his way out.
“I want to be alone,” he mumbles.
“I hope you didn’t waste your wish on that!” he thinks he hears Luka shout after him. But he’d rather believe it was a trick of the thumping of the club music and indistinguishable chatter of the crowd.
Ivan didn’t want to be alone. He ordered himself another drink, paid for it himself, downed it in one gulp, and felt even worse than before.
The misery isn’t the worst part. As Ivan stews in his own loneliness, what he can’t forgive is how he feels like he’s stopped knowing how to be happy.
Being around Till had made him happy. He thinks. In high school, he’d been confessed to multiple times, and each time never failed to excite him because he could respond to them with the sincere truth: he loves someone else.
The occasion written about in comics and movies, something everyone can relate to, finally he could be a part of that without forcing himself into the narrative. Loving Till helped him be normal.
He just couldn’t love normally.
If he did, would Till have loved him back?
No, his drunken thoughts echo to him, he wouldn’t. Because the one he doesn’t love is Ivan, the person. The one thing you can never stop being.
Till would never believe the bullshit Ivan feeds everyone else. He’d been resistant from the start. It used to be refreshing, on top of endlessly confusing. Now, it just makes Ivan vulnerable. He has shown all his cards, revealed his hand, and lost. Meanwhile, Till doesn’t know they’re playing a card game. His are strewn on the floor. Everyone can see them and he doesn’t care, so even if he loses it doesn’t matter.
It makes Ivan feel like a fool for clutching his hand so tightly.
He doesn’t need another drink, but he idly thinks about how hell might be scarier if it was underwater instead of in flames, so he orders one anyways to drown his lungs.
And another.
The next time he has a coherent thought, he’s staring up at a ceiling, and a hand is in his hair. It feels like his mom’s, and he doesn’t even remember how her hand felt.
Ivan’s eyes water again.
Mom, have I been normal enough?
Is this what you wanted for me?
Mom, can I still not talk about you?
He has to ask these questions. He won’t be able to go on if he doesn’t, so he has to find his mom.
Last year, he came here and asked the owner about her. He said she disappeared one day, and never came back.
So Ivan has to go look for her.
She’s probably dead, kid. That’s what he was told, the last time he was here.
Which means he knows where to look for her. If he follows her path and gets his answers, will he finally be able to be happy?
Ivan raises his hand to his neck, and he can’t distinguish if he’s squeezing it in his mind or actually tightening his fingers around his windpipe.
“It wasn’t the right choice to be alone, was it?”
Luka is suddenly in front of him, and his hand cups Ivan’s face so gently Ivan is convinced he’s dreaming. Otherwise, Luka wouldn’t be looking at him like this. He wouldn’t be seeing Ivan so clearly, with open empathy.
“No,” Ivan croaks. “And it’s your fault.”
“I know. Sorry.” Would the real Luka apologize to him so quickly? Can Ivan believe this is a dream?
“For what?”
“For never learning how to be normal.”
Ivan doesn’t know why he does it. He just feels an intense wave of camaraderie, and where someone normal might say me too and smile and make a new friend, Ivan blinks and fresh tears leak from his eyes.
Fuck it.
He pulls Luka down on top of him and kisses him senseless.
“Would you rather be normal, or perfect?”
Luka asked Hyuna this as a child, two kids shoved in the same mass.
“Why are those the only choices?” she’d asked him. “I just want to be me.”
If he had to pick the moment that made him fall in love, maybe it was then. He wouldn’t know to call it that until awhile later. And then, after another while, he’d retract his right to call it that too.
It was a beautiful answer. Hyuna is beautiful.
Luka, on the other hand, doesn’t want to eat a rat.
“Then I’ll have to be perfect,” he decided. Neither himself, nor normal, would guarantee he’d never have to eat a dead rat off the ground.
“Luka, you—“
The Hyuna in his memory is distorted, and his tongue is heavy even though he wants to ask her to continue.
Ivan is sucking on it, and Luka is on his lap. He can’t get a word out, and all his attempts are overwhelmed by the sloppy sounds of Ivan replacing all of the spit in Luka’s mouth with his.
That’s not what he’s doing, but it’s how Luka feels it’s happening.
Ivan’s hands are on his back, Luka’s shirt untucked and hiked up over Ivan’s forearms. Yet despite the pale slivers of his skin exposed, Luka doesn’t get the sense Ivan is trying to strip him. His fingers trace the knobs of his spine, pluck at his ribs as if they’ll sing like an instrument, and one palm rests right behind where Luka’s heart beats.
Luka thinks maybe Ivan just needs proof that Luka is real.
“Ivan—“ Luka pulls away to say, only for Ivan to pin him with a dark, unrestrained glare.
“Do we have to talk?”
They’re not very good at that, especially at each other. Luka swallows, and remembers what went down his throat not ten minutes ago, giving him the courage to come back over here.
“No.” He sticks his thumb in Ivan’s mouth, prying it open, pressed against the inside of his cheek. He stops him from going to kiss Luka again, but only because Luka should be the one kissing this time.
“Just stay like that.”
He retrieves the favor he’d asked the bartender for, pressing the tablet to his tongue. He makes sure Ivan can see, giving him ample time to turn his head or back away, and when he does neither Luka shoves his tongue down Ivan’s throat until he gags.
He pulls away so he can see Ivan’s face clearly, and replaces his tongue with his fingers.
“Swallow it.” He feels around the back of Ivan’s tongue, and he’s pretty sure it’s long since disappeared down his throat. But Ivan gags around his fingers and his eyes burn with fresh tears, so he pushes them a little deeper.
Luka’s fingers come out soaked in spit, and he holds them up to the light because it’s almost obscene when it glistens.
“If I were a high school bully, this is where I’d wipe these on your shirt,” he says. He spreads his fingers, and the saliva stretches like spider silk between them. “But as a lover, these would be going inside you again.” He touches Ivan’s lips. “Just not here.”
He looks down at Ivan, who’s still hacking from being gagged and blinking tears from his eyes, but meets his gaze and relaxes.
You’re so cute, Luka thinks, even if he knows it’s the drugs talking because he doesn’t ever think so affectionately about others.
“Which do you want me to be?” he asks instead.
Ivan pulls his face down, grinning at Luka’s surprise.
“Both.”
They’re supposed to have wild sex while neither of them are in their right minds, and neither of them are with who they want to be. Ivan would lick the blood from Luka’s aching wounds, and it’d taste like his because they bleed the same.
Luka would bend Ivan over this sofa, crudely jam his fingers into Ivan like he’d promised, and it’d hurt the whole time while Ivan was too drugged out to really tell the difference between tears of pleasure, tears of pain, and tears of sadness because he’d feel them all at once.
Then he would black out, wake up alone, and feel like shit but it wouldn’t be his birthday anymore so it’d be another normal day.
It’s not the story Ivan would choose for himself, but in this world he wouldn’t have to think about Luka after tonight. Luka would be an ache, but he wouldn’t be one that lasted.
“Birthday boy!” Luka calls out from across the dance floor, where they’d ended up instead of a hotel. That was where it all went awry, Luka telling him he’d take Ivan somewhere fun and then proceeding to drag him merely ten feet away.
They’d danced together in what a club would recognize as dancing together, and anyone else left sober would see was just two people vaguely moving in sync, jumping to a beat and smiling about nothing. Ivan’s head still wondered when the wild sex was coming, but laughter burst from his chest as Luka tripped and fell into his arms and he let go of his thoughts from there.
Then Luka was gone, drifted off somewhere else in time for another warm body to press up against Ivan’s. It’s not what he wanted, but it was someone who wanted him in some sense, and that felt good. Tonight should be about feeling good. So Ivan didn’t pry their hands away from him, and he thinks he’s just going to have wild sex with some stranger when Luka meets his eye over the shoulder of someone who isn’t Ivan.
Luka is whispering something in their ear, staring straight at him while he does it, and he smiles before he starts dragging the palm of his hand over the stranger’s back.
It’s the drugs—or it’s something in him Till could never love—that makes him look at his partner and then interrupt whatever they were saying with his tongue against their teeth.
He gets a hand in their hair, angles their faces so he can look at Luka.
While the person in his arms catches their breath, he smirks at the stupefied look on Luka’s face.
That was about twenty minutes ago, which feels like twenty years ago, and could honestly have been twenty seconds ago.
Ivan lost track of time after he covered a neck in bruises and watched Luka do the same, forgot every face that wasn’t golden hair and golden eyes tracking him through the room, and finally ended in Luka’s arms like they gravitated to each other by chance instead of orbiting the same axis the entire time.
Luka bit him until he bled, and Ivan watched him lick the blood from his lips.
Except leaving an open wound to fester is not advisable sober, much less inebriated. When he’d said as much to Luka, the other had proclaimed he had just the solution and disappeared into the crowd.
Ivan had been waiting for him, and then,
“Birthday boy!”
Luka appears with a bottle of champagne. Ivan’s neck is still bleeding.
“Huh?”
“Got this for free, for your birthday.” Luka shakes the bottle, and then starts shaking it much more than necessary.
“Don’t―!”
Luka pops it open and it spews everywhere.
“Say happy birthday to Ivan!” Luka shouts, and the drunken masses following the siren song of champagne and give their best rendition of happy birthday that sounds a lot more like just shouting extra loudly.
Luka takes a swig straight from the fizzing bottle, then tilts Ivan’s chin back and pours some down his throat too. Ivan sputters as he swallows, and while he coughs the bottle does a disappearing act and something stings against Ivan’s neck. At first he thinks it’s champagne.
The alcohol wipe in Luka’s hand proves him wrong.
“I said I had a solution, didn’t I?” he says to Ivan’s plainly confused expression. “Stay still.”
He pats a bandaid against the wound, and Ivan doesn’t know what comes next. Does Luka kiss it better too?
“When does the wild sex happen?” Ivan ends up blurting out.
Luka pauses, then doesn’t hesitate. “How much will you give me for it?”
Ivan pats his pockets. “5,000 won,” he thinks he remembers stuffing in his pocket at some point, the change from a purchase at the convenience store he stopped at before here. It might not even be there. He might not even be able to buy 5,000 won’s worth of Luka’s time.
“My rate is steeper than that.”
“I’m letting you use my hole.”
“I’m lending you my dick.”
They stare at each other. Neither of them back down. Ivan hasn’t really caught up with what he asked for.
Then Luka pats Ivan’s shoulder. “Get me hard and we can talk, pretty boy.”
Ivan trails after him as if led by a string, all while thinking that it should be him saying that, pretty boy. Luka is the pretty one.
Luka must mean to lead them somewhere, which is why he walked away from the crowded main floor, but by the time they reach a wall Ivan has convinced himself that if he doesn’t act quickly Luka will change his mind.
He’s on his knees, Luka’s back against the wall, and when he looks up with Luka’s dick tucked against the inside of his cheek, Luka is flushed so red he can see it even in the dim lights of the club.
Luka’s dick comes out of his mouth stiff and slick with spit, just like his fingers had earlier.
“So are you going to stick this in me like a lover, or a high school bully?”
Luka hauls him up and drags him by the front of his shirt, tucking himself back into his pants before they reach the exit.
“Both,” he promises.
At what must be some ungodly hour in the morning, Ivan lays in the wreckage of their night. His head hurts. He couldn’t have cum more than once, with how the first time whited out his brain and he came to with his drool collecting on Luka’s shoulder, dick still nestled in his ass.
“I fucked you like a lover,” Luka informed him when he noticed Ivan had woken up. “So now I get to be a high school bully.”
Ivan looks at Luka’s bare back, and the angry red lines and splotches of purple along his shoulders tells him the path his fingers took, the places his teeth made a home. They live in his memories as pieces, so he likes that Luka’s body will remember it better than him.
If he looks within himself, he’s a little dismayed to find the sadness is still there. Till still canceled their plans on his birthday, because he didn’t seem to remember it was Ivan’s birthday.
They weren’t really big birthday celebrators. Still.
Ivan shifts to sit up, and is struck by pain in places he has to really fight to remember why they would hurt. He wants to look at himself in the mirror, to find what his body will remember that maybe Luka won’t, except he’s poked by something sharp and retrieves a broken necklace. There’s a cross attached to it.
It comes in flashes, the Luka grabs his waist, spears him open and ignores how he pleads, how he’s sensitive and he can’t take it it’s too much.
“So tell me to stop.”
Ivan bit his lip, it bled, and his hand caught something around Luka’s neck before the pleasure took hold of his limbs and jerked them to and fro. Something snapped, and neither of them cared.
“It’s a rosary.”
Ivan looks down, and Luka has turned onto his back.
“...I’ll buy you a new one.”
“It’s only sold at our church. Are you gonna come to mass?”
“Sure.”
“Then go confess for me how I broke my rosary.”
“Okay.”
They share a look.
“Are you going to go back to being normal?” Luka asks.
Ivan glances at the clock. It’s no longer his birthday, at 2AM February 15th.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
Ivan gives up on doing anything productive, falls onto the bed after placing the snapped rosary on the beside table.
“Mom asked me to.”
He rolls to his side. The moon illuminates Luka’s face more beautifully than the club lights.
“Are you going to church today?” It’s two hours into Sunday.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I have to.”
Ivan furrows his brows. “...why?”
Luka blinks, and his eyes go beyond Ivan. “I don’t want to eat the rat.”
They don’t say any more. They leave the unsaid unsaid, unknown and unacknowledged.
There’s a togetherness in that too though; a mutual unknowing.
As they’re picking themselves up and putting back the pieces of the selves they shed that night, they hardly converse. It’s only when they’re on the way out, Ivan’s hand on the door handle, that Luka speaks up.
“You asked me not to talk at some point, last night,” he opens with. Ivan vaguely remembers saying so.
“And?”
“I understand why. I’m not good at talking.”
Ivan is good at saying what he doesn’t mean, but he wouldn’t say he’s good at talking. “Me neither.”
“I know.”
Ivan’s eyebrow twitches.
“I mean,” Luka sighs, “just, for now, while the words mean something. I really meant what I said back then.”
Luka said a lot.
“Which part?”
Luka pulls down the collar of Ivan’s shirt, revealing the bandage that Ivan reapplied this morning. He kisses it swiftly.
“Happy birthday.”