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Lan Zhan is already waiting when Wei Ying arrives, only fifteen minutes after the time they’d agreed, which for her is practically early. Though she knows it probably means she’s kept Lan Zhan, who without fail is always actually early, waiting for at least half an hour.
The day is grey — the clouds, the buildings. Even the river is grey, a few shades lighter than the sky, fat and sluggish at high tide. In the other direction the museum building looms, an imposing brown brick industrial silhouette. The day is grey, but not cold. Wei Ying has misjudged the temperature, she arrives sweating and shedding layers, stuffing them haphazardly into her backpack.
She finds Lan Zhan on the Thames path leaning casually against a railing, hands planted firmly in the pockets of her denim jacket, just a slightly different shade of blue from her jeans, which are the kind of cut that some people would call ‘boyfriend’ but not, Wei Ying reflects, if they had ever seen Lan Zhan wear them.
“Sorry I’m late!” Wei Ying says, by way of a greeting, pulling Lan Zhan into a quick, impersonal hug. Lan Zhan allows herself to be pulled into the hug but does not take her hands out of her pockets. She smells really good. “Double denim, nice.”
She looks sharp, Wei Ying thinks, and immediately feels stupid for even thinking it. Who is she, some character from an American teen movie? But this is what Lan Zhan does to her. And she does look sharp today. Has she had her undercut touched up? Maybe that’s it. Wei Ying wonders if she does it herself, imagines Lan Zhan with a buzzing electric razor staring seriously at her reflection in a bathroom mirror and swallows.
“Shall we go in?” Lan Zhan asks, and Wei Ying nods, even though she drags her feet all the way to the entrance.
“Are you sure about this one, Lan Zhan? You know the Shrek Experience is just down the way, I heard it’s surprisingly—” Wei Ying stops when Lan Zhan gives her a look.
“If you don’t want to come with me…” Lan Zhan says, stopping just before the door.
“No!” Wei Ying brushes it off, “no, don’t be silly Lan Zhan, I was just joking. You wouldn’t really go to the Shrek Experience for me, would you?”
“Hn,” Lan Zhan says, and this is one of the rare times that Wei Ying can’t work out whether she means yes or no.
“So, this is the last one on your list, right?” Wei Ying tries for an upbeat tone, feeling a pang of something in her stomach that’s either wistfulness or hunger. She ignores it.
“Yes,” Lan Zhan says, holding the door open for Wei Ying and giving her another look as she steps through, this one almost searching. After a panicked moment in which Wei Ying just stands there, staring at the door Lan Zhan is holding open for her, Wei Ying goes through.
They’ve been visiting museums together for a few weeks now, trips sandwiched between Wei Ying’s work shifts and Lan Zhan’s classes. Some of them have been famous, the usual suspects, places Wei Ying remembers from school trips as a kid. Some of them have been so off the beaten track that Wei Ying, a self respecting Londoner since the age of nine, had only known of their location as distant stops on a TfL map — Walthamstow for the William Morris gallery, Forrest Hill for the Horniman Museum (“Haha,” Wei Ying elbowed Lan Zhan as they went in, “get it Lan Zhan? Because it sounds like—”).
It had started like this: Lan Zhan had sent Wei Ying a list, said she needed to do some ‘pre-dissertation research’ for her museum studies MA, and would Wei Ying like to come along? Wei Ying had said yes, obviously, a little surprised, but also flattered that Lan Zhan would think to ask her. There’s something about Lan Zhan’s aura of effortless cool that makes Wei Ying inexplicably flustered. Around Lan Zhan, Wei Ying is always managing to say the wrong thing, humiliate herself in fun new ways.
But honestly, Wei Ying doesn’t have a lot going on right now apart from picking up extra shifts at work, so after a brief skim of the list, Wei Ying had shrugged, messaged back, sure, why not? And that was that.
They walk past the gift shop into a towering open space that reaches the height of the entire building, light spilling in from huge glass skylights above. There are people milling about — tourists, school kids, old couples — but the scale of the space makes them seem small in comparison. Above them all float unsettlingly-biological looking balloon jellyfish spaceship things, moving around, waving their tentacles. People are pointing their phone cameras at them.
“Huh,” says Wei Ying, recognising them from social media. “I didn’t realise they were that big. How do you think they float like that?” There’s nothing obvious suspending them from the ceiling or guiding them in a particular direction.
“It’s better to see them from the bridge on the fifth floor,” Lan Zhan says, and leads the way. Wei Ying follows.
It has never been clear to Wei Ying what kind of pre-dissertation research Lan Zhan is doing exactly, or what links all the museums they’ve visited. Occasionally Lan Zhan will get her phone out and take a picture or jot something down in a notes app, but mostly she stays at Wei Ying’s side, hands clasped behind her back, an open expression on her face that Wei Ying doesn’t think she’s ever seen on it anywhere else.
She has it when they go up to the fifth floor and look out over the empty space, watching the jellyfish floating and waving in the air in front of them. From this high up you can see a cordoned off section of the ground floor which serves as some kind of pit stop for them, one occasionally lands there and a worker… does something. Fills it with helium, maybe? And then off they rise, floating again. It almost takes the magic away, but then you see them in scale and each jellyfish is almost bigger than the person down there working on them, so somehow that balances out.
Wei Ying loses track of how much time they spend there watching them. If she is standing very close to Lan Zhan it’s only too get the best view.
“In love with the world,” Lan Zhan says, after a long moment.
“What?” Wei Ying stares at her.
“In Love With The Work, Anicka Yi. That’s the name of the piece.”
“Oh,” Wei Ying blinks. Right. “It reminds me of — have you ever seen those videos from deep sea submarines? Where they find crazy looking terrifying things just floating there, minding their own business? And those things have been down there, floating away this whole time and no one knew about it until now?”
“Hn,” Lan Zhan agrees.
“I like it.” Wei Ying glances over at Lan Zhan and unexpectedly meets her eye. She’s giving Wei Ying a strange look. “What?” Wei Ying protests. “Is that basic? I’m sorry for my basic art opinions, Lan Zhan.”
“Being basic is not necessarily a bad thing,” Lan Zhan says, a slight frown on her face. And then she seems to reconsider, “Wei Ying is not basic. I like it too.”
“Ah, thanks Lan Zhan. Don’t worry, you don’t have to complement my taste to make me feel better.”
“Wei Ying has good taste.” Lan Zhan says, firmly, and the burst of warm feeling in Wei Ying’s stomach at this is maybe a little excessive. “If I didn’t want to hear your thoughts, do you think I would have invited you along?”
“…I suppose not.” Says Wei Ying, lamely. She gets it, self-depreciation isn’t cute anymore! But it’s too much of a habit, sometimes it still sneaks out when she lets her guard down.
She meets Lan Zhan’s eyes and maybe they look at each other for a second longer than is acceptable. Wei Ying breaks the spell first, blinking and tearing her eyes away, back to the floating jellyfish.
They stay and watch the creatures for a while longer, neither of them speaking.
They met at uni, undergrad, studying different courses but some of their classes overlapped, and around deadline time they would always bump into each other in the library at 5am, Wei Ying powering through an all-nighter, smoking roll ups outside the main entrance and vibrating from the combined nicotine and caffeine overdose, Lan Zhan fresh faced and starting her day, her heavy backpack full of meticulously organised notes.
Lan Zhan had found her annoying at first, Wei Ying is sure, but in the liminal space of a 24-hour library in the early hours of the morning, somehow they formed a connection that extended into the real world.
Reality hit home, though. Before long Wei Ying was busy crashing and burning out of her degree programme and Lan Zhan had gone back to Shanghai after she graduated and there was a while when all Lan Zhan was to Wei Ying was an acquaintance, just someone seen occasionally in her sporadic, ambiguous social media updates and Wei Ying’s own occasional wistful daydreams about what could have been.
Wei Ying didn’t even realise Lan Zhan was back in town for her MA until they ran into each other on the tube, Lan Zhan recognising her first and catching her arm as Wei Ying marched up the escalator.
And now, here they are.
They move on eventually, by unspoken agreement, to the rest of the museum.
They start from the upper floors and work their way through the galleries and down, Wei Ying drifting through, taking it all in, and Lan Zhan trailing her, reading all the little printed pieces of information beside each artwork, which Wei Ying usually avoids.
“Art is about emotion, right? It shouldn’t need an explanation to be appreciated,” she argues, or maybe it’s the museum fatigue talking. This place is big.
“Hn,” Lan Zhan agrees, and keeps reading.
If there’s any kind of chronological arrangement to the exhibitions it’s lost on Wei Ying. She supposes they’re supposed to be loosely thematic, though the themes aren’t obvious enough for Wei Ying to guess them.
It’s kind of cool, actually. Leave one room for another and you never know what you’re going to get. Maybe it’s dark and dominated by a huge tower of malfunctioning vintage radios, all tuned to different stations and spewing out a mess of discordant sound. Maybe it’s a room of unsettling landscapes. Maybe it’s a series of black and white photographs by a straight white man of an ethnically ambiguous woman in bondage gear.
Wei Ying rolls her eyes at the last one, then stays where she is and waits for Lan Zhan to come through, and rolls her eyes again for Lan Zhan to see.
“Just because you take a picture in black and white doesn’t make it art, Lan Zhan.” Wei Ying complains, shaking her head.
“Hn,” agrees Lan Zhan.
“I mean, who does this guy think he is? The straight… Wait. Who was that guy? The New York guy? The one with a whip in his—”
“Mapplethorpe,” Lan Zhan helpfully supplies.
“Right, exactly. This,” Wei Ying says, gesturing to the room, “is bullshit. Amateur, even. I could probably do better than this with my phone and a bathroom mirror.”
Lan Zhan gives her a look at that. A look that makes Wei Ying’s stomach swoop. She says, “Oh?”
“I mean,” Wei Ying’s brain catches up to her mouth, “uh, isn’t that one of the points of modern art? Like everyone says, oh, a canvas that’s just painted all over in one shade of blue, that’s not art, I could do that! But then, yeah, like, you could! So, go on, do it!” Lan Zhan just blinks at her. Wei Ying can’t stand the silence, she has no choice but to keep speaking. “I mean, where’s the famale gaze? Maybe that’s what you should do for your dissertation.”
“The female gays?”
“Mhmm,” Wei Ying says, somewhat frantically, walking them towards the door to the next room. “Yeah, sure. You could do your own series or something.”
”Hn,” Lan Zhan says, stubbornly, a little smile curling at the corners of her mouth, that bitch. “I believe that you could do better than this. I would like to see Wei Ying try.”
I’d like to see you try. From anyone else’s mouth it could sound mean, but Lan Zhan says it in such a sincere way that Wei Ying has no choice but to believe that Lan Zhan’s deepest wish is to appreciate Wei Ying’s artsy bondage nudes. It almost makes Wei Ying wish she had some. She feels her whole face flush. This is too much.
“Don’t tease, Lan Zhan.”
“Who’s teasing?”
Lan Zhan is still looking at her. Just looking at her, like she could look at Wei Ying for the rest of her life and not get bored. They’ve stopped walking now, somewhere in another room but Wei Ying doesn’t have a spare glance to look at the art on the walls, she’s busy looking back at Lan Zhan. Lan Zhan is looking back at her, steady, standing there with her freshly trimmed undercut and her eyes all big and so sincere they make Wei Ying’s heart hurt.
“Um,” Wei Ying says, hesitating. There are two ways this could go. She could look at the floor and shrug her shoulders and laugh and pretend she misheard. That would be the easy way, maybe, because Wei Ying… is no good. People, relationships, she fucks them all up and Lan Zhan is too good. But then she could also —
Wei Ying steps forward and grabs Lan Zhan’s hand. “Yeah? Do you really mean…”
“Hn,” Lan Zhan says, and a smile breaks over Wei Ying’s face.
They wander through the rest of the exhibition in a daze. Or at least, Wei Ying does. Lan Zhan is holding her hand. Wei Ying feels like a balloon, anchored by Lan Zhan, feet just brushing the floor.
When they get out of the exhibition, Lan Zhan turns to her. “Would you like to come back to my place?”
“Oh,” Wei Ying says, “now?” There are still at least two galleries they haven’t covered yet. “What about your research?”
“I have what I need,” Lan Zhan says.
“Oh,” Wei Ying blinks. “Okay then.”
Lan Zhan’s flat is shiny. Wei Ying has an almost insuppressible urge to run and see how far she can slide in her odd-socked feet. “Do you live alone?” she asks, instead, turning around to marvel at the floor to ceiling windows in the living room and rapidly reassess her estimation of Lan Zhan’s financial situation.
“My sister also lives here when she is in London.”
“Oh, cool. Where is she now?”
“Shenzhen,” Lan Zhan says, leading the way to the open-plan kitchen and handing Wei Ying a glass of water. Wei Ying drinks it all in one go, puts it back down on the marble countertop slightly wild-eyed.
“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan says, taking her by the wrist and gently pulling her onto the sofa, so she’s settled in Lan Zhan’s lap, her legs framing Lan Zhan’s thighs. Wei Ying lets herself be pulled, alarmed for a second but then settling into Lan Zhan’s embrace and Lan Zhan folds her arms around her. They just breathe for a second, or maybe more than a second. Wei Ying can hear Lan Zhan’s heart beating. Or maybe she can feel it, the vibration echoing in her own chest.
Wei Ying brings her hands up to the nape of Lan Zhan’s neck, playing with the hair there, the short, freshly trimmed hair, something she’s wanted to do ever since she first saw Lan Zhan with an undercut and had to do a double take to make sure that was her friend and not some untouchably hot stranger.
Lan Zhan looks up at her. They don’t say anything. Wei Ying looks down, looks at Lan Zhan looking at her. Her eyes are a sweet, warm brown. The kiss happens slowly. Wei Ying moving her face in, experimentally at first, just to see what happens. What happens is Lan Zhan tilting her head up like a sunflower and her eyes slide closed and how is Wei Ying not supposed to kiss her when she looks like that?
They kiss.
Wei Ying’s skin prickles, awareness of her body stretching out, waking up. Lan Zhan lets her hands roam, onto Wei Ying’s neck, her waist, leaving trails of goosebumps in their wake. Wei Ying’s brain goes blissfully blank. Well, blanker then normal. She lets Lan Zhan lead the kiss like it’s the easiest thing in the world, surrenders into it. She feels like a doll, safe in Lan Zhan’s arms. Lan Zhan could do anything to her, Wei Ying would let her. Heat floods her gut. Lan Zhan bites her bottom lip and Wei Ying lets out an embarrassing noise that she has absolutely no control over.
It’s hard to say how long they spend kissing like that. After some time Wei Ying finds herself lying on the sofa with Lan Zhan hovering above her, she has one thigh slotted between Wei Ying’s legs and they’re grinding, still kissing. Like this Wei Ying can feel Lan Zhan’s hunger, the bruising potential in her grip, how much it takes for her not to bite down hard and never let Wei Ying go. Wei Ying lets herself get lost in it.
Then Lan Zhan’s hand is at the waistband of Wei Ying’s black skinny jeans. Wei Ying lifts her hips to help her get them off. Lan Zhan’s face pressed to the place where Wei Ying’s hip meets her thigh, Lan Zhan breathing her in. And then Lan Zhan’s mouth, oh god, her mouth —
Lan Zhan lifts her head, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Stop talking,” she says, and gets back to work.
“I wasn’t talking,” Wei Ying protests. “Was I? Oh fuck—”
After, lying in Lan Zhan’s bed in the middle of the afternoon. They’re both naked, and that’s, that’s a lot. Lan Zhan’s hands roaming under the covers, touching her, running her hands up and down Wei Ying’s back as Wei Ying clings to her. Not in an especially sexy way but it’s sensual nonetheless, skin to skin, so much of it. She’s so warm.
Lying in bed naked in the middle of the afternoon like this feels impossibly luxurious. Wei Ying has a shift this evening, she has her uniform in her bag. She was planning to get there straight from the museum visit. But now the thought of getting up, getting out of this bed, putting on her uniform and leaving Lan Zhan seems bizarre.
She’s here, naked, in Lan Zhan’s bed, with Lan Zhan. Is this real? Does Wei Ying get to have this? She feels so full of feelings she might burst.
“I don’t actually have any cute fetish gear, Lan Zhan,” she mumbles into Lan Zhan’s chest, thinking back to her boast at the museum.
“Okay,” a pause and then, “we can get some, if you like.”
“I’m actually bad at taking nudes. I always look terrible.”
“I don’t believe it,” Lan Zhan says. “Even so, it’s a skill. You can improve with practice.”
“I’ve never actually had a girlfriend before.” Wei Ying screws her eyes up, wishing she could bite her own tongue off. But if that’s not what they are, if it’s not what Lan Zhan wants, Wei Ying doesn’t think she can stand it.
“There’s a first time for everything,” Lan Zhan replies, in the same even tone.
Wei Ying looks up, doing her best to communicate via her face the feeling which she would usually convey via a text made up solely of exclamation marks. Lan Zhan kisses her, hand moving up from the small of her back to the nape of her neck.
“There’s something I have to admit as well,” Lan Zhan says, in between kisses. Wei Ying’s stomach drops. Her tone is so even it’s impossible to predict what is coming next. “I had everything I needed for my pre-dissertation research three weeks ago.”
“Lan Zhan!” Wei Ying squawks. Lan Zhan rolls her onto her back and pins her there, pressing kisses to her forehead, all over her cheeks, the tip of her nose, even as Wei Ying struggles through her giggles. “Lan Zhan, stop. It’s okay, I forgive you. I think you need to make it up to me, though. For being dishonest.”
“Okay,” Lan Zhan pauses, her tone serious. “I have some ideas about things Wei Ying would like.”
And they don’t talk much for a while after that.