Arin felt the same butterflies in her stomach when she took the potion and had to be intimate with Jun or Jeonghan. The only difference was that this time, it was real. There was no subdued icky feeling in her chest about how this was fake and manufactured to farm magic. It was so much better, and so it made her feel so much more alive.

A ringing phone caused both of them to pull back from one another, red-cheeked and breathless. It was Woozi’s phone. Arin glanced at his screen: ‘Eyes.’

Woozi sighed when he saw the name and turned off his phone again.

Earlier that day, when Eyes had called, Arin had not asked about her, thinking it was none of her business. Now, things had changed. It was her business, and she needed to ask about it.

“Your ex, ‘Eyes’... Is there anything between you?” she asked.

Woozi looked agitated all of the sudden. It was a look which told Arin that things weren’t quite settled between the two of them, whatever it was.

“I see,” Arin said, looking down.

“You don’t have to worry about her,” Woozi said quickly. “I’m done with her. I… I’m done.”

There was hesitation in his voice. “I don’t think you are.”

“I…” Woozi trailed off. “Give me until tomorrow. I’ll be done with her for good then.”

Arin nodded. “Okay.”

She felt a little embarrassed about having an intimate moment with someone who seemed to have unfinished business with someone else. She wished he would have been more open about that relationship from the start so she didn’t have to feel guilty about it now, so that she could have revelled in the magical feeling of being close to someone for a lot longer.

Woozi took her hand in his own and held it, but she pulled her hand back. “I’ll wait until tomorrow,” she said.

He nodded and retracted his arm. He then smiled at her. “In that case, would you go out on a date with me tomorrow night, Arin?”

Arin blushed and nodded.

“I know the outside world makes you anxious, so we can just order dinner and watch a movie together or something.”

“That sounds perfect.”

It would be the first date she had since the disastrous Chilli concert that ended in the worst possible way, with the death of her mother, her idol, and the boy she was dating.

Usually the memory of that night would trigger her, but now, she was happily looking forward to a future that would drown it out. She would silence that memory with the happy ones she was going to make. Tomorrow night could not come fast enough.

-

The next morning, she went to MRS for the regularly-scheduled extraction session. She didn’t know what to expect that morning given that the potion was not going to work anymore. She was afraid that she had disappointed them, and was anxious about meeting Hoshi to discuss what they were going to do.

She found Hoshi sitting outside the extraction area, looking through some of his notes. Jun was standing over him.

“Hey! Look who’s here!” Hoshi beamed when he saw her. “How was your night?”

He had a suggestive wink on his face that made Arin blush. She was glad to see that he had taken the whole thing lightly. She had half-expected to see him disappointed or even angry at her.

“I think she had a great night,” Jun said, smiling at her.

“Well then,” Hoshi said. He put down his notes on a nearby desk and looked over at her. “Now we have to come up with a new strategy. The good news is that not all is lost. Even if the potion won’t work, it’s not just romantic love that your curse interacts with. You love other people, too, right? Yoonsa told us that it’s especially strong with Jeonghan, so...”

“If you’re going to use Jeonghan, that doesn’t mean you’re going to use Larali too, right?” Jun asked.

“No. We don’t need to. It will just be Jeonghan, Arin, and Yoonsa. Jeonghan will be a jerk and all, but Arin still loves him, even when he is a jerk. It won’t be as strong, but it’s all we got.” Hoshi turned to her. “All you have to do is look at him, talk to him, and bear his obnoxious for as long as possible. We’ll try to find ways to boost it, but for today, can you just do that?”

Jun narrowed his eyes, pensive. “Look, in my experience doing extraction sessions with Arin, it helps boost the magic when the love is mutual. So maybe it could be boosted if Jeonghan gets a dose of the love potion?”

“Why waste it on him? He’s already in love with her,” Hoshi stated matter-of-factly, like it was so obvious to him.

“He is?” Jun asked. He narrowed his eyes, then nodded his head. “Of course he is,” he added added as a statement.

Just like that, the conversation moved along. But Arin was still stuck on that, and if she could speak, she would have reminded them that Jeonghan did not not love her, that his confession in the Extraction Room was because they had given him the potion, and not because of any real feelings he had for her.

At least, that was what he had said, and she had taken his word for it.

She fumbled for her phone and quickly began to type. “Jeonghan does not love me.”

When Hoshi read the message, he scoffed. “Arin, he confessed.”

“That was because you gave him the potion?”

When Hoshi read that, he shook his head. “Arin, I don’t know where you’re getting this from, but we never gave Jeonghan the love potion.”

“He told me that you did.”

Hoshi shook his head. “Then he lied. We wouldn’t waste potion on him. If he was ever under the influence, it would be from the traces in your mouth, and that’s it.”

Hoshi was talking about it like it was no big deal, but for Arin, it was a big deal. If Jeonghan really did have those kinds of feelings for her, then that meant she did not understand him at all.

Why would he lie? Why would he say he had feelings for Hyojung? Why would he say all those things to hurt her like that if he didn’t mean them? She had so many questions, and she wanted him to answer them.

-

She waited in the glass room until Jeonghan sauntered in, arrogant as always. “Hello Missy,” he greeted obnoxiously with a snide scoff before flicking his hair out of his eyes.

His voice made her blood run cold, as it always did. It was the voice that criticized her, laughed at her, made her hate herself, but it was also the voice that told her he loved her. It was confusing.

“I hate that bed,” Jeonghan murmured as he looked at it. “Can we get better furniture in here please?” he yelled outside before taking a seat on the floor against the wall.

Arin glanced at her bracelet. It was purple, even if being with him made her raise her guard, even if she was bracing herself for his malice.

Yoonsa came in and stood in the corner like always, the door closed, and the extraction began.

“Why isn’t your y boyfriend in here with you? Aren’t you supposed to be exchanging spit right about now?” he scoffed as he looked over at Arin.

Arin took out her phone and began to text him. “The potion faded away. You’re the extraction partner today.”

His phone vibrated in his pocket, and he took it out to read the message. He scoffed. “Jumping from man to man like a true .”

Arin’s mouth went tight and she lowered her head. He knew exactly what to say to make her feel terrible. Lately, she did really jump from man to man, and have intimate moments with all of them. When she reflected on it, she felt dirty and hated herself, even if the only reason it happened that way was a love potion she took as part of her job.

She shook the self-deprecating thoughts out of her head and focused on responding to him.

“It’s different with you,” Arin texted. “I’m not taking the potion with you.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Well, that’s good for me. Don’t need your nasty lovesick claws groping at me!” He then turned to Yoonsa, “if she doesn’t love me, then what the are we doing all this for? I don’t wanna waste my time here if it doesn’t mean you’ll get this ed up curse off my back!”

“From my end, there’s still magic when she looks at you,” Yoonsa replied. “No potion necessary.”

Jeonghan winced. “What the hell does that mean?”

Yoonsa shrugged. “She knows better than I. Ask her.”

It was a question that Arin didn’t want to answer, because she was afraid of how he was going to react. How could she tell him that she loved him, which was why the magic was seeping out of her and holding up the air in ? Still, he expected an answer, and she needed to give it to him.

“It’s because I love you,” she typed out. She stared at the message and it felt wrong, so she went back and edited it. “It’s because I care about you,” she wrote, “and I don’t need the potion to do that.”

She expected him to gag or wince or something, but he didn’t. The text was only a few words, but he stared at his phone for many seconds, as if he was reading a whole paragraph.

Arin took that pause as her chance to ask her own questions. As he fixated on that message, she typed out another. “Be honest. Did you really take the love potion when we did our earlier sessions together?”

“What, do you think I really meant all those words I said to you before, Missy? You think so highly of yourself! Like a true !” he said with a scoff.

There was a slight, barely noticeable hesitation in voice as he said it, hesitation that she would not have caught onto before. However, she was getting used to the way that he spoke, to recognizing the patterns in his voice that revealed the truth of how he was feeling. Before she knew that he was cursed, she took his words at face value, not realizing that those words were just a pretense, a fulfillment of his curse. Now, she could sense when those words were empty. When he was lying. And right now, he was lying.

“I’m sorry I believed you,” Arin said. She meant it. She was sorry for not understanding him. Of all the people in the world, she was probably the only one who could understand him, and she felt guilty for letting him down. If only she had not believed him that time, if only she had been smarter and doubted him, maybe he would have been happier now. Maybe he wouldn’t have needed this strange rehab arrangement at MRS. Maybe he would not have fallen into so much despair that he needed to threaten her life like he did the day before.

“What the does that mean?”

“You’re my friend, Jeonghan,” Arin typed. “Nothing you say will ever hurt me anymore, because I know how you really feel.”

“, you’re self-obsessed, aren’t you?”

Arin ignored his snide remark. “Why did you lie?” she asked.

What possible motivation did he have to lie to her? Larali was there when he said it, so he didn’t need to be mean or unpleasant. It was not like he did it for Larali, because he knew he was hurting Arin. Arin just did not understand why he would tell her that he loved her on three different occasions then deny it in one fell swoop, only to reopen a fresh scar about her involvement in Hyojung’s death. Why hurt someone he supposedly loved?

“I did not lie, Missy!” he claimed, but Arin could tell he was lying from the way he hitched his breath.

“So were you really in love with Hyojung?”

“It’s none of your business!”

But it was her business. She wanted to know how he felt about her, because she wanted to see if she had the power to make him happy or unhappy. If he really did love her, then…

She didn’t know what she would do if he was in love with her. At the end of the day, her heart was set on Woozi, her soulmate, and Jeonghan’s feelings would not change that.

Maybe she should just let it go. Maybe she shouldn’t push him.

She put her phone down, not having anything more to say to him. She expected him to just scoff and end the conversation there, but he didn’t.

“The reason I’m here and not your boy toy, and the reason you’re not taking the potion… it’s because the potion doesn’t work on you anymore, right?” Jeonghan asked.

Arin did not pick up her phone. She didn’t want to answer that question on the chance the answer to that would hurt him.

“I knew it!” Jeonghan scoffed. “It’s that eighth floor tenant, isn’t it? That’s why he isn’t here, because your curse doesn’t work on him.”

Arin lowered her head. She didn’t expect the interrogation to turn on her like that. She was the one who had wanted to get answers from him, not the other way around.

He then took his phone and began typing. A couple of minutes later, Arin received a message on her phone from him. “You wanna know why I lied, Missy? Because I wanted you to hate me. I wanted you to come back to the building so I control you like I always did. I wanted things to go back to the way they were before, because I was happier then. But now, it’s clear nothing can ever go back to the way it was before. I can’t control you anymore. I can’t even see you outside this ing purple hellhole anymore.”

Arin read the message and lifted her head from her phone to look at him. He was sitting with his head down, embarrassed and very unhappy. Arin’s chest felt heavy. She could feel the darkness bearing over him. She could feel how much he hated being there, out of his comfort zone in his fancy tower apartment.

She hated that building and the whole arrangement she was forced to endure for over three years, but she never really considered what it had meant for Jeonghan. To Jeonghan, that place was his home and his sanctuary, and in it, he was relatively happier. She was one of the reasons he was happy, but now she was gone, and it tipped the scales and made him lose his balance.

“I can still live in the building,” Arin wrote, trying to lift his spirits. “I’m getting an operation so I won’t ever speak again. I’ll come back and live with you in the building.”

Jeonghan read the message. He had a blank expression on his face. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking. “I don’t need you to feel sorry for me, Missy!” he said.

“I’m not offering because I feel sorry for you. I’m offering because I want to support a friend.”

Jeonghan read the message and then turned off his phone completely, essentially silencing her. He glared at her as he did it, then crossed his arms and stared at the wall.

Arin wanted to know what was going through his head, but there were so many barriers to communication between them right now that a heart to heart conversation was impossible. Not only could Arin literally not speak, but he could not speak his truth if that truth would please her. It placed so much distance between, a distance that was simply impossible for Arin to ignore.

Whatever feelings Jeonghan had for her were impossible for Arin to reciprocate, because her feelings for him had always been shaped and filtered through a curse that made him hateful. Now, she could only approach him from a place of empathy, care, and understanding. She knew what his curse did to him, so she could never hate him for it. But at the same time, she didn’t think she could love him the way he seemed to love her - the kind of love that burns in your chest in longing for the other person. The kind of love that made you want to be with someone forever.

Jeonghan knew that too, Arin realized. He knew that Woozi was her soulmate, and also that claiming to love her only put distance between them. It softened Arin’s heart towards him, and that meant Arin could never be with him outside MRS. She could never return to the building like he wanted.

That was why he would have rather lied to make her hate him than tell the truth and make her love him.

Arin had to leave MRS at one point because of the strain in . She yelled Jeonghan’s name to the sky and stretched her vocal chords before going back to carry on with the extraction. She didn’t find Jeonghan there when she returned.

“He said he was tired and left,” Hoshi told her.

Yoonsa emerged from the glass room. “We got some magic,” she said. “But it’s not the same as we got from the love potion. At this rate, it might take years before we have enough to reverse Larali’s curse.”

Hoshi sighed and sat pensively.

“I’ll look into why it doesn’t work with Woozi,” Hoshi said. “Arin, could you see if he could come in for a day? Either today or tomorrow. I can test a few theories and go from there.”

Although she understood why they were so concerned, it was alarming how they treated Woozi’s immunity to her curse as a bad thing that they had to fix. To Arin, it wasn’t a bad thing, and Arin did not want it to change. She did not want to find out what she needed to do to make the curse work. It felt like she and Hoshi were thinking about these issues through completely different lights. Hoshi was thinking about her curse like nothing more but a tool to extract magic; he wasn’t really thinking about how it affected her and her real-life relationships.

Still, it felt awfully selfish for her to refuse to try and fix this problem that was prolonging Larali’s lifelong suffering just so she could go on dates with Woozi.

She reached out to him through text message to ask him if he could come in for the tests, but he did not reply immediately like he usually did. Arin figured he must have been busy.

-

Chilli’s comeback was that day. Arin had almost forgotten until she checked social media and remembered. She felt guilty as a fan for not being on top of their promotions and releases, but her life was too tumultuous these days for her to spare much time for her usual social media activities.

Usually, during comebacks, Arin would be so busy preparing her streaming strategy and fangirling through her pseudonym “scoups4eva.” She would spend every passing minute thinking about Chilli and talking about them with her online friends. Things had changed so much since then, and her priorities were different now.

She thought that maybe this signified her growing out of fandom and getting over Chilli. However, whenever she did have the chance to catch up with Chilli updates, she felt just as happy as before, and she remembered just how much she loved them, how happy they made her.

To her luck, her shift at MRS ended early that day since Jeonghan ran off, and she was able to go home and do what she wanted. She watched the music video and listened to the album, and felt the love for the members of Chilli deep in her heart.

She saw what other people in her fandom were talking about. She saw the big, rich Chilli account EyesCreamScoups had bought 10,000 albums and was distributing them out internationally.

They were selling limited edition albums in one of the stores. The albums looked so beautiful, and Arin was eager to get her hands on one of them as soon as possible before they sold out. The albums were expensive, but now, Arin had the money, enough to buy multiple albums, and support them even more.

She was excited to finally get her hands on the new album. She was too impatient to wait for a delivery, so she decided to go out and buy them from the store.

She was rarely out in public by herself, and she was afraid of the prospect of loving a stranger or running into someone she already loved, but she decided to take the risk, just this once.

-

There were a lot of people, and Arin felt out of place and anxious. To Arin, every voice around her, every body, was another potential death she could bring about if she wasn’t careful. She kept her head down and covered with a facemask and only looked up to see the products.

She headed towards the only store selling the limited edition Chilli album, so of course it was bustling with other Chilli fans eager to get their hands on it.

Arin’s hands were shaking as she entered the crowded record store. She felt the overwhelming urge to pick at her fingers again, but the gloves stopped her and she tried to deal with the anxiety by taking deep breaths instead.

She spotted the setup where they were selling the albums in the distance and pressed onward to grab some copies and buy them.

As she walked, she heard the high-pitched screams of excited fangirls in the distance, screams that got louder and greater. A crowd began to form in the distance of the commotion. Curious, Arin turned to see what everyone was screaming about.

Arin gasped. It was Mingyu, before her very eyes.

Instantly Arin’s eyes were glued to the star that she loved with her whole heart. He was greeting fans, signing autographs, and throwing sweet smiles at the fans that began swarming around him. Arin didn’t need to get closer to see him. He was so tall that he stuck out from the crowd.

Arin felt the magic almost immediately. It suffocated her and took control of her body, made her open to enunciate the name that she knew would end his life. Arin desperately tried to fight back against it with her willpower, but to no avail.

“Min…”

A hand from behind covered before the word could come out. Aggressively, the hand tightened around her head and forced her to look away from the enchanting celebrity.

The curse made her fight the stranger who covered , which was itching to say the rest of the name. She tried to pull the hand away, but it stayed firm over until the person forced her out of the record store, against the waves of people pouring into the store to see Mingyu.

Once the stranger forced her out of the store, they suddenly let go, leaving Arin in the middle of a stampede of fangirls trying to get close to their idol. She turned around to see who it was that had covered , but they had disappeared into the crowd.

At this point, the magic had dissipated, and Arin could control her own body. She ran in the opposite direction of the crowd, putting as much distance between her and Mingyu as possible.

Whoever it was that covered , they had saved Mingyu. They had saved her too, from guilt and despair that she didn’t know she could have ever recovered from.

She didn’t know who it was, but she caught a brief whiff from his hand. She could have sworn it resembled the scent of Jeonghan’s perfume.