If Arin’s heart was healed for one night, it was easy to batter it again.

She began to ask herself why she was the one who got Yoonsa’s blessing, when Larali needed it a lot more.

Larali was kept holed up in one of the rooms at the Procreation Unit. Happy mages were watching her. They had to be happy, because if they weren’t, it only made Larali feel worse.

Arin was kept away of course. Even Jun couldn’t see her. He was too heartbroken to see her.

He was not only heartbroken, but he was also angry. He was not even speaking to Hoshi or Dasinai. He was even angry at Arin for letting Larali into the Extraction Room that previous day when Arin had said she wouldn’t.

She texted him an apology. He ignored her.

But he couldn’t ignore her anymore when it came time for Extraction. With Jeonghan on the lam and unreachable, Jun was the one asked to be her extraction partner that day. Jun agreed to it, but only because he wanted to help in securing enough magic for Larali’s curse reversal. She was next in line after all.

However, it was clear that Jun did not want to be there.

Still, she took the potion and fell in love with him. After some reluctance, Jun made himself kiss her, and she kissed him back. It was awkward for them at first, but then, at one point in the middle of their uneasy lip movement, Jun’s body shook the same way she shook when she took the potion. They both realized that he had probably digested some tiny remnant of the potion in her saliva, and was now under its effects as well.

He loved her too, so the intimacy became so much easier for him, and kissing became so much more natural. The magic teemed out of her for the whole time, and much of it stuck in . Larali was not there to ease that feeling like she usually did.

The making out ended when the feeling in became unbearable; and she felt like she couldn’t even breathe. She had to run out of the Extraction Room, out of the MRS building, and yell Jun’s name at the top of her lungs, just to undo that pent-up tension from the curse wanting her to say Jun’s name.

Besides that tension in , it felt good to kiss Jun when she loved him. However, when she woke up the following morning after the potion’s effects had faded away, she felt so uncomfortable and sick about the whole thing. It was even more uncomfortable than when she did it with Jeonghan, or even that brief moment with Woozi, simply because there was something so incredibly fake about it.

Jun did not even like her at the moment; he was angry with her. At least with Jeonghan, she had thought he actually loved her.

Woozi had come to visit her that morning, and he noticed that something was bugging her. He had to ask about it, and she explained how being physically intimate with Jun made her feel so uncomfortable.

“Would it have felt the same with anyone?” Woozi asked.

“No,” Arin said. “It didn’t feel that way with Jeonghan.”

“Because you like him?” Woozi asked

“No… because he’s less of a stranger, maybe.”

“What if it were me?” Woozi asked.

“I don’t think it would have felt that way either.”

Woozi nodded.

“I really do wonder why the curse doesn’t work on you,” Arin said.

“I wish I could tell you, but I’m not sure how the curse even works or what it is,” Woozi shrugged.

“Have I ever told you my curse?”

“I didn’t even know you could ‘tell’ it to me.”

“Every curse is made up of words. I can recite it to you, if you like.”

-

Saying her curse out loud and watching Woozi react to it felt like baring the most scarred part of herself before him. It was like exposing her inner demons, and hoping he would accept them.

She felt closer to him because of it.

He seemed fascinated by it. So fascinated that he asked her to say it again, and even recorded her voice when she said it.

“It sounds like magic,” Woozi told her. “It really does. Even your voice changes when you say it.”

It was true. It was Yoonsa’s voice that echoed through her with that curse, and so Arin recited the curse with Yoonsa’s vocal habits - the cracks of her voice, the intonation, the pauses and the reverberations.

“I still can’t tell you why it doesn’t work on me. But I’m glad it doesn’t. I wouldn’t be able to speak to you like this if it did.”

Arin nodded in agreement.

-

Arin was worried about Jeonghan. She considered going up to the building herself to check on him, but she quickly realized that she couldn’t. She wasn’t sure if she loved him, but there were certainly positive enough feelings there that she could never risk seeing him outside of MRS.

She called him multiple times, but he would never pick up, so she asked Woozi to check up on him.

When she was on her way to MRS, Woozi texted her: I went to his door and knocked. He told me to go away and to remember to pay my rent on time.

Arin was just happy to know he was alive.

-

The next MRS Extraction was the same. She took the potion and fell in love with Jun.

Jun was still angry with her, so he was cold and his kisses were awkward and bitter at first. But then the same thing happened: he got the dose of the potion and fell in love with her.

They made out with him until she had to scream his name, when she ran out the building and let her constrained voice run loose where it could not hurt anyone. She then came back into the room and made out with him again.

She loved Jun, and she knew he wanted to collect the magic, so she bore through that strain in , for his sake.

“Thank you for bearing it,” he told her. “I’m sorry if I was an to you.”

-

MRS was paying her a full-time salary for the work she was doing. It was more money than she ever had.

Arin didn’t know what to do with all the money. Chilli’s comeback was coming and she was definitely going to buy some albums. But this time, she wanted to do even more for her favorite group that got her through so many hard times.

She had always been jealous of all those rich fanccounts who sent the boys expensive gifts and did fansupport and supported ads all over the city. She remembered how one particular famous rich fan, EyesScreamScoups, rented this whole entire outdoor area, hired fans to run it, and gave random people passing on the streets a copy of Chilli’s albums. As a big account herself, Scoups4eva was invited to attend this event, but of course, she could not do that.

She looked forward to the time when she would lose her voice for good. Then she could attend these events, and maybe even make some of her own. It felt like a dream, but it was a dream slowly coming to fruition. She just needed to hurry Hoshi into arranging it.

-

The next day, Jun had brought her bouquet of roses. He gave it to her in the Extraction Session with a note saying he was sorry for blaming her for what happened to Larali. It made her happy, and not just because she was in love with him. It was probably the first time that she had ever received a bouquet of flowers since Minghao.

That night, Woozi came and saw the flowers.

“And who are these from?” he asked

“Jun.”

“You’re smiling very wide. Are you… in love?”

“Of course, I took the potion, remember?”

“Right. I almost forgot. How long does the potion last, by the way?”

“It’s usually gone by morning.”

Woozi hummed in response, then sighed.

“Remember when I accidentally took the potion and fell in love with you?” he later asked.

“Yeah?”

“It’s weird, but, for me, it wasn’t gone by morning. The intensity of it was gone, but the core feelings never really went away.”

“Until when?” Arin asked him. “Hoshi told me they take longer for some people…”

“No, you don’t understand,” Woozi interrupted. “They never went away.” He looked at her with an intensity that sent chills down her spine.

“What do you mean?” she managed to ask. “Are you still… um… in love?”

Woozi nodded, and then went on an unexpected ramble: “I have these feelings for you, and I tried so hard to control them, to stop them, but they’re just stuck like leeches and I can’t deny it anymore. I come here every night, every morning, whenever I can, because I really want to see you, because seeing you makes me feel so stupidly happy. I don’t want to feel like this, Arin. I really don’t, but it’s come to a point where I can’t hold it in anymore. It’s so embarrassing. I wanted to tell you before, but then I learned about your complicated relationship to love and romance, and your thing with Jeonghan and now Jun… and… , my blood boils from jealousy every time I hear about it. And it’s just stupid. And embarrassing. And…”

Woozi trailed off, and looked at Arin with this earnest look in his eyes.

Arin was still trying to process it. She stood there idly, anxiously fumbling with her gloved fingers, unsure of how she was supposed to react.

Before she could even think, he lunged toward her, brought her closer and kissed her lips.

Arin deeply felt the passion in the way that he held her, and the way that he gradually loosened the tension in her lips until he could get a taste of .

When he did, he stumbled back as he trembled and shook. It was the potion. He had gotten traces of it from .

“It’s the same thing,” Woozi said when he looked at her again. “With or without the potion, it’s the exact same feeling.”

He held his head, as if to ease a mounting headache. “ me. I’m in love with you.”

-

A/N: I’m updating twice this week at the request of a lovely reader on Wattpad, enjoy! :)