UNENDING

11: Here, Right Behind You

Tempestuous Table Read session continues and Ibanez Wongso unexpectedly unravels another part of his ever-smiling co-star, Sean Sofyan.

MAY 2018
Tempestuous Table Read Session, Jakarta

They had a half-hour break at 10 am and Ibanez was in desperate need for coffee.

Ibanez's resolve had been strong. Unfortunately, Arga of Perguruan Anggrek Biru had not made it easy for him to maintain such determination. Thanks to him, Ibanez had spent the majority of the session feeling floaty after (mostly) listening to people talking and running dialogs.

Arga was a more-action-less-talk type of character, which was awesome on field, because Ibanez had always wanted to do stunts and fighting choreo since, like, forever.

During a table-read, however, Arga sucked out loud in stereo.

After three hours, Ibanez could literally count Arga's major talking line on the fingers of both hands. The minor ones were quite a lot, but they mostly consisted of only three varieties of word, namely 'hm', 'you!' and 'fool!', directed to none other than his co-lead character, Brama.

Speaking of which...

"Why are you still here?" Ibanez schooled his face to look as casual as possible.

Turning his face slowly, Sean gawked at Ibanez's words, looking absolutely horrified. "Were you just... shooing me?"

Ibanez felt his jaw drop in mortification. "Uh, that's not..."

But as the rest of his sentence hung in the air, Sean's youthful face broke into an impish grin, followed suit by a full-blown, high-pitched laughter.

"Ah, sorry, sorry, I was just joking," Sean spluttered as his laughter quieted down.

Rendered rather speechless, Ibanez stared at the man before him in disbelief. For a second, Ibanez had the panic-inducing thought of actually offending his supposed co-star, on their first day of work no less.

He had no idea how "the smiling guy" would express his anger given half the chance to do so, and it got Ibanez's mind reeling for the implication. Especially on his own personal vendetta to his controlling agency.

Instead, the guy had the actual guts to not only smile, but laugh at him.

Sean could probably sensed Ibanez's souring mood, because his smile quickly turned apologetic as he spoke, "Uh... most of your talking lines are coming next, right? Tell you what. Let me get you something else to drink. What about tea? Juice, maybe? I'll see if they have a vending machine outside—"

"What do you mean 'something else'?" Ibanez interrupted, his sour mood forgotten.

Rubbing the nape of his neck, Sean hesitantly gestured at their joined table. Following the motion, Ibanez's gaze met with disproportionately strewn water bottles.

On his side was a single, lonely, barely-touched bottle of mineral water. In contrast, three empty ones were lining up on Sean's side, with the fourth one already half-empty.

But then again, Brama was a noisy bastard and he appeared in every single episode.

"I figured you're not a big fan of mineral water," Sean commented, no judgement nor accusation in his voice, "you still want to keep yourself hydrated enough though."