Beauty Beneath Lies
An advertising director and an actress clash between the love on screen and their real-life worlds
Junhyeok finished his twelfth color correction in front of the monitor.
Ara on screen was perfect. Golden-hour lighting wrapped her cheeks, and flower petals falling in slow motion stretched the moment into eternity. A thirty-second perfume commercial. Onbit Creative Studio’s biggest project of the year. Junhyeok had written the storyboard himself from the concept stage, and the shoot had gone on for four days straight.
They first met on the casting day. Ara showed no tension in front of the camera. But after the shoot ended, when he saw her face in the hallway outside the dressing room, lit only by studio lights, Junhyeok felt something different. It was a feeling of incompleteness becoming somehow more vivid.
They spent the nights together throughout the editing period. At first it was because of work. Later, work became an excuse.
“Doesn’t this shot look too fake?”
Ara pointed at the screen. Junhyeok’s hands paused for a moment.
“That’s our job, isn’t it?”
“Making fake look real?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he pressed play. Ara on screen laughed. It resembled her real laugh, but it wasn’t quite the same.
The night the commercial was released, Ara’s message came.
“I’m not actually this pretty. You know that, right?”
Junhyeok started writing a reply, then deleted it. He wrote again. Deleted again. Finally, he opened the editing software. Without color correction, without filters, he watched Ara’s face from the beginning.
It was still beautiful enough.
Language off-screen had always felt foreign to him. Junhyeok stared at the empty reply box for a long time.
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