I listlessly slid down my seat as I waited for math class to start. I just wasn’t in the mood and I knew my brain wouldn’t be able to process anything. I opted for staring at the whiteboard blankly for a few seconds before grumbling restlessly into my arms. I could hardly even think straight.

“Are you actually sulking?” Taehyung giggled, finally taking the seat next to me. “What’s it to you?” I retorted, sufficiently annoyed by my own brain.

“Oh my god, you’re actually sulking! Was it that hard to do? What did you say?!” I instantly felt his long fingers poking my arms in anticipation. “I’m not telling you,” I replied dispiritedly, secretly basking in the tiny revenge that I could get. “Aw, come on, Jimin!” Taehyung whined, pushing my arms so much he was nearly shoving me off the table. “I didn’t mean to make fun of you…”

“Alright, alright! Just stop trying to push me off!” I straightened up and glared back at the whiteboard while Taehyung leaned over the table to look at me attentively. “Well?”

“I didn’t say anything,” I admitted with a shrug while pouting down at my rings. “What?” Taehyung blurted out disbelievingly. “What do you mean you didn’t say anything? Why are you sulking then?” He eyed me skeptically, leaning back with confusion written all over his face.

My mind was scattered.

My heart was a rioting mess of everything I was feeling.

I had only been partially hallucinating that day at the greenhouse and the way she had hugged me for comfort lingered in my mind and on my skin. It had been the trigger to me understanding exactly how I felt, and it scared me.

And that realization came along with others. Like the fact that I had put her through enough as it was and that I wasn’t any good for her. I knew that much.

But what bothered me from our interaction today was how much we understood each other.

It was baffling.

When did that happen? When did we get to know each other so well?

“Kay, then, I’m calling Ji Eun before class starts. She’ll know.”

I inhaled sharply. “It’s like she knew, Tae. With one single look that I gave her, it’s like she understood everything that I had wanted to tell her. I saw the look on her face when she realized that I wanted nothing to do with her.” I stared at the ring on my thumb that I was rotating, the acknowledgment in her eyes flashing across my mind.

This guilt along with my feelings would be hard to get rid of.

“I hurt her,” I croaked out. “And I feel really horrible abo-”

“You’re telling me that with one look she understood you?” Taehyung looked up from his phone with a seriousness that was rare for him. He searched my eyes and face, his mouth forming a thin line by the time he spoke again. “Are you sure she grasped what you meant?”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure. I just… felt it. Look, what I’m trying to say is that-”

“Jimin.”

“What?”

What was with all the questions and why couldn’t I get a word in? He acted like I was missing something vital and it was starting to frustrate me.

“Do you know how many people can understand each other with just one look? Can feel what the other person is feeling? Can feel their sadness?”

“I assume not that many, but it’s-”

“You’re wrong. All of us feel it at some point in our lives. Do you want to know why?”

“Huh?” I felt so lost. My mind was already so scrambled, and he wasn’t making any sense to me. “We feel that when we find our soulmate, Jimin. I felt that when I reunited with Ji Eun before I got my burn mark.”

“Soulmate,” I mumbled as I stared at him in shock. The world around me seemed to blur and I felt like I couldn’t catch my breath. “That’s impossible.” Taehyung gave me a glance of worry just as the professor came into the classroom, effectively ending the conversation.

“Impossible.”

I shuddered as tears began to well up in my eyes.

It was impossible and something I didn’t need.

I would just have to rip these feelings out somehow.

“Right, Ji Eun-” I began, breathing out the little patience I had left. “Yes, yep. I’ll see you tomorrow on the bus.”

I roamed around the front of my dorm complex, reassuring Ji Eun that I’d tell her everything that had happened. Unlike Hoseok who had easily forgotten his suspicion, Ji Eun latched onto the small coincidence like a leech. She didn’t want to let it go and I didn’t have a reason to hide it from her anymore.

I wanted to trust her.

“I mean, why couldn’t you have told me today!? You’re in so much trouble as soon as I set my eyes on you tomorrow! There’s no escaping me, you hear?!”

“Okay, but stop yelling at me! I’ll see you tomorrow!”

She continued her tirade and my mind was filled with too much bull to keep up. “Bye! Love you!” I yelled into the phone before hanging up.

I huffed out a tired breath into the mid-September air, feeling the cold chill of autumn creeping up on nights like these. Looking up at the sky, I suddenly wondered what Jimin was doing. The stars reminded me of him, even though he was far brighter than any of them.

“Hey, you’re that girl that bumped into me the other day, right?”

Shocked, I jumped at the sound of someone’s voice cutting through my admiration of the sky. I turned in the direction of where the voice came from only to find a tall shadow a few feet to the left of me.

“Sorry, I just heard someone yelling and got curious,” He smiled shyly as he came into view.

It was the guy with a boulder for a chest. The memory sent a twinge up my spine.

He should really be careful of where he takes that thing.

“Ah! You’re that guy that nearly knocked me out cold,” I blurted. “Ah- I mean- You’re just really… sturdy?” I cringed at how appalling my ability to form sentences around people was. The anxiety was a big part of it, but damn was it humiliating and exhausting.

He raised an eyebrow before bursting into a light melodious laugh and I was brought back to the first time I had talked to Jimin.

Jimin, Jimin, Jimin.

I needed to ing stop.

“I’ll just… get going then,” I exhaled, any confidence and pride I had left crushed into oblivion.

“Hey, before you go… You live here, right?” He came toward me and I instinctively stepped back. After all, I didn’t know the guy in the slightest. “What if I do?” I challenged. He raised up his hands as if to say he meant no harm, completely amused at how suspicious I was.

“I just wanted to know if you knew someone by the name of Min Yoongi. He lives here. I’ve been waiting for him for a while, but he hasn’t shown up.”

I thought long and hard because the name did sound familiar, but that had been long ago. I hadn’t heard of or seen him for a while. “The name rings a bell, but I honestly don’t think he lives here anymore. I haven’t seen him around in a long time.”

“Oh, is that so?” The stranger's face fell as he took in the information. “Well, thanks for telling me.”

“No problem,” I replied nonchalantly, waving goodbye without a second glance.

I didn’t have nightmares anymore.

Not a single inkling or sign of them during my sleep. I slept right through the night.

So, when I woke up in a cold sweat for the first time in a while, I began to panic. I tried to remember what could have set it off or what the nightmare had been about, but I kept drawing a blank.

Then the discomfort set in.

Searing, throbbing waves of pain wracked the left side of my shoulder. I was breathing so fast I could hardly catch my breath and my arm was as stiff as a board. “What.. The… … Is going on,” I huffed out in between breaths, searching for any kind of reason my shoulder and arm would be in this type of pain. None of what was happening was making any sense.

When the throbbing dulled the slightest bit, I slid off my bed and stumbled my way to the dorm bathroom. Walking toward the mirror, I got up on my tip toes and slid my shirt off my shoulder to see if I could find any indication of why it was burning so furiously. As soon as I moved my shirt to the side, lowering it to the point where it burned the most, a scream died in my throat.

I fell to the ground as I shook violently, the involuntary sobbing that ensued taking my mind off the pain for the time being.

This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be.

I stared at the plain tiled walls of the dorm bathroom for what felt like hours.

If these were the cards I was being dealt, I didn’t want them.

I’d fold.

After laying on the gross tile floor for far too long, I decided it’d be best to take a shower. As much as I wanted to lay on that floor and not move a muscle, other people would eventually come in.

I didn’t want anyone seeing my burn mark.

I had to stifle my yelps each time the water fell onto my left shoulder. And all I could think of as the cold water ran down the curves of the burn was that I’d much rather have the stranger from yesterday’s name burned into my skin than the one I had. Anything but that name.

By the time I finished, it was nearly 5 in the morning.

And I needed someone.

Just this once, I couldn’t deal with it by myself, couldn’t make it temporarily go away with my usual tactics. I wanted Ji Eun’s comfort, but I didn’t have the heart to interrupt the sleep over her and Taehyung were having.

So instead, I crawled into my bed and wrapped myself in blankets until the fatigue caught up with me and I fell asleep.

“Hoseok, do you know where Yuri is? She wasn’t on the bus today.” Ji Eun was sitting on a bench in the quad, pensive as ever next to an equally concerned Taehyung. I bit my lip in thought, wondering why she wouldn’t be on the bus. Did that mean she ditched? It was unlike her to miss a class. The one thing she seemed to love and keep her at peace was studying.

“No, I don’t have the slightest clue where she could be,” I replied, tilting my head. “I could swing by her dorm later if she doesn’t show. I don’t have anything to do today.”

“That’d be amazing! Thanks, Hobi,” Ji Eun beamed, grabbing Taehyung by the hand and fluttering off to their next class. I stared after them, at the ridiculousness of how they looked. Did Soo Ah and I look like that to other people?

Shaking my head, I decided that I should probably head to class too.

“Today we’ll be diving into Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’ I want you all to open the file that I dropped onto the classrooms drive.”

“That guy was crazy. The horror stories and poems he wrote? No way he was the least bit sane.”

“Insanity or genius? What do you think happens when one is lonely? To some, he was creepy and insane, or as you will find out through this lesson on him, he was a genius before his time.”

The subject matter seemed intriguing enough. My father was a literature professor himself, but he had never gone into depth about