The walk to the milk tea store went normal enough.

They were just two regular boys, recent friends, who decided to walk together. They made small talk along the way, too; mainly Hyunjin asking questions and Jeongin doing his best to answer them without tripping over his words, occasionally asking the same thing back and working from there. From any outsider’s point of view, it would have looked normal, but in the younger boy’s head the whole exchange was anything but.

Mainly because the whole way there, Jeongin was painfully aware of the red string that connected them together, ever present even when he tried his best to focus on the rest of his surroundings. It was hard to miss the bright red from the corner of his eyes and even harder to keep his eyes from flitting towards it. Whenever he wasn’t preoccupied with noticing the string, he would end up distracted by Hyunjin instead.

The older boy’s voice, his lips the way his eyes crinkled when he laughed—Jeongin took it all in and hoped he wasn’t so obvious about it.

“What time do you have class?” Hyunjin asked, just as he stopped in front of a quaint little store, soon opening the door for the both of them as Jeongin mumbled a quick thank you, following after him. There were only a handful of people inside, since the time was still too early for most people to decide to get milk tea. There wasn’t a line when they entered which seemed to please the older boy who made a beeline for the counter.

“1PM” Jeongin answered, following after him. He was technically supposed to have class right at that moment, but Hyunjin didn’t need to know that. “What do you usually get here?”

“Roasted milk tea with pearls,” he answered promptly with a bright grin. “You should try it!”

Squinting at the board, Jeongin took some time to survey the menu even if he knew he was going to end up following the older boy’s lead again, anyway.

“I might without the pearls,” he finally said, catching the bewildered look on Hyunjin’s face as he said so and quickly realized the reason why, “they’ll get stuck on my braces, so I don’t get pearls. Maybe when I take them off.”

That seemed to appease the other boy, who nodded immediately in understanding. He went up to the counter and gave their order after Jeongin handed him money. The younger boy also noticed that the girl who manned the cash register was definitely giving Hyunjin heart eyes, even if Hyunjin himself didn’t seem to pay much attention to her, which left a weird prickling sensation in his heart that can really only be described as jealousy.

Well, jealous that the girl could be so open about her attraction.

A part of him also felt glad that Hyunjin didn’t notice, but Jeongin did his best not to focus on that part of himself. Actually, he didn’t want to focus on being jealous, either. It was pretty rare for him to even feel such a thing; he grew up pretty content with life, hardly the greedy kind, but all of a sudden his soulmate shows up and Jeongin is left for the first time just wanting more. The feeling co-existed with how much he didn’t want to feel that way, mentally scolding himself for letting a flimsy invisible-to-most string control him all of