Her first kiss.

The kiss that she had imagined. With Joshua. AND with… well, some blurry imagined boys that might’ve had similar eyes or hair or height or whatever as him. But wasn’t that just her preference?! It wasn’t too weird was it?! Mingyu couldn’t have been right. That she had been SAVING her first kiss, as if it was her actual ity. Like she wasn’t going to kiss anyone until it was Joshua at the end of some wedding aisle. She had a crush and it gave her panic attacks but she wasn’t crazy?!

Right?!

“I’m not crazy, right?” Amira said, shaking Eunha.

“Uh… Considering I don’t know the context of this question and you’re shaking me seemingly out of nowhere, I hope you’ll understand that I won’t answer that because I think you might not appreciate the answer.”

“Mingyu!” Amira huffed, stomping down the patio steps and onto the thick green grass, letting her sneakers squeak against the late dew.

“Hey! I’m not walking home. At least give me time to call an Uber,” Eunha cupped her hands, making sure her friend, now yards away, could hear her.

Amira turned quickly back around, her hair flinging in the air.

“I can’t believe I kissed him. For what?” she wanted to laugh and/or smack herself. The disbelief was bubbling to a proportion her body couldn’t contain and Eunha had to get them out of there fast, before Amira’s self-monologue got loud enough to make a scene.

“Alright, let’s just chill out for a couple of minutes. The Uber’s on its way. Then we’ll be back at my place and everything will be fine,” Eunha tried to console her friend, hoping that her hand gestures (that sort of mimicked petting a standing bear) was enough to calm Amira down.

“Who is he to me? I don’t even talk to him! We aren’t even friends. He’s just another person I’ve known my whole life and I kissed him like… Like… Like it meant something?” Amira, felt herself coming to conclusions she hadn’t known she could make. What was that kiss? Why had it felt easy?

Every time she looked at Joshua, it felt like she’d been hit in the head with a baseball but she flung to Mingyu like a damn lifeboat.

Amira shook her head. This had to be a side effect of something.

“Am I drunk?” she asked Eunha, pushing her friend's palm to her forehead.

“Oh, great, other questions I either have no answer to or don’t want to answer,” Eunha said, weakly, rocking back and forth on the heels of her feet, impatiently searching for the license plate of her saving grace. “Also, this method only works for fevers, I think.”

“I think I’m drunk,” Amira nodded. “Or I’m high. What does being high feel like? You do stupid things right? You kiss people you don’t mean to kiss? Should I Google this?”

Amira reached into her back pocket to pull out her phone, but nothing.

“Where’s my phone?” she asked. Eunha was unsure if Amira was asking her or if she’d reached a state of saying anything aloud.

Before Eunha could answer, Amira was walking quickly back into the house. All Eunha knew was that whatever had happened to them in that room needed to be reversed for the sanity of her best friend.

“Yeah, yeah, excuse me. I know I just passed, guess what I changed my mind. I’m back, thanks,” Amira said uncharacteristically bold to the hallway standees, before climbing up the stairs.

Her tunnel vision focus on retrieving her phone, and maybe the shock of everything, seemed to have created a sense of amnesia or disassociation with the previous events which meant she had no problem opening the 7 Minute room and asking very clearly to everyone “where the is my phone?”

Just as Woozi was scolding his friend.

“Joshua, you HAVE to participate. You’re in the room, those are the rules.”

“You know I only come in here to sit on the window seat.”

“Listen, pretty boy-”

They looked over at Amira’s commanding presence.

Before they got a good look, Mingyu was in the way, blocking them with his broad back.

He was close enough that Amira was backing up just to keep him from towering over her and next thing she knew, they were both outside the closed door.

“This brings back memories,” Mingyu joked, but it came out like he wasn’t sure if it was too soon or why everything had felt weird the second they had broken apart.

Amira stared at him, waiting for the panic but… It didn’t come.

Mingyu took that stare as anger? Disgust? Offense?

“Your phone,” he coughed, holding it up.

Amira glanced down, seeing her phone but then noticing his watch again.

“Hey, that’s not- I don’t think it even works,” she said, head tilted and pointing out the lack of movement from the small clock hands.

“Yeah, it doesn’t,” Mingyu confirmed, smiling with a particular kind of glint in his eyes.