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Daeon’s in an outside world. Everything that’s happening around her is reduced into nothingness. The air that surrounds her is frazzled; tingling with electricity, and the emotions that are enveloping her body and her soul are magnified in a degree that makes the living world just a fragment of an abstraction. Where she is and what shes doing is not of importance, because the only thing that’s really entrapped in her being is the vision of those blank eyes at the clubhouse devouring hers and demanding answers to questions he hadn’t yet asked. Why’s she thinking so badly about him that everything else is removed from the touch of reality? Simple, it’s because he’s her soulmate, the person she’s destined to spend the rest of her fragile world alongside.

She remembers that things hadn’t been like this with Chanyeol. He had been shy and introverted and tender to the point that made her feelings feel warm. But he has always been there around her; he’s always been in a place where she can reach and touch him, so her emotions for him had been gentle, like a soft blow of a breeze in a summer day. But with this new one; her emotions were hazardous, lit up with fire and other tangible feelings that made the light that engulfs her feel like it’s surrounded by uproarious flames. How come they’re both her soulmates but they give out totally different feelings?

Daeon’s unsure if she can ever release herself from the clutches of these foreign yet familiar feelings that she’s doused in. She doesn’t know if she’s feeling like this because he’s not around and she has no means to contact him and that the feelings will shift around and become softer when he’s near her; or the emotions are connected to him in general and she’ll always be a pawn in their sanitized transparency. Whatever it is, she finds herself disliking the emotions wrapped around her because of that man. Chanyeol never made her feel nervous; he never made her feel electrocuted with tension — unless they were touching — and he never made her values seem so delicate in comparison. Why’s he so difficult? Why’s he so magnifying?

“Baby?” She hears the warm baritone of Chanyeol’s voice calling out for her, and she snaps out of her daze to look at him with wide, unfocused eyes. Chanyeol gives her a worried look from where he’s sitting beside her on his home couch, having been talking to himself for the last five minutes because his girlfriend is suddenly not responding to his immature jokes.

Daeon’s face softens significantly upon seeing the worry in Chanyeol’s face, and she uncrosses her legs from the couch so she can crawl towards him, pressing their thighs together. “Yeah, Yeol?”

“I’ve been calling you for a while,” he furrows his eyebrows, his large hand falling on her inner thigh and moving in soothing circles. Her tension leaves her right away, and she sighs in relief when her frazzled emotions soften down. “What’s wrong?” Chanyeol asks, his low-pitched voice sounding lower than usual; warmer. His eyes are the most beautiful pair of coffee brown and the constant twinkle in them whenever she’s around him doesn’t fade from them. “You’re not usually in your own world that long.”

She blinks. “How long since I’ve been sitting still in this couch without doing anything?”

“Half an hour?” He crawls closer to her and pulls her legs up so he can puts them on his lap, caressing her exposed skin and producing delicious shudders all over her body. “Tell me what’s wrong, Daeon. What are you thinking of?”

She sighs. She has been prolonging this for a while now and she hadn’t thought about when or how she’ll tell him about the incident of the other day. But she guesses that she can’t ignore the subject for too long. “Okay. Promise me you’ll take it lightly.”

“Depends,” Chanyeol instantly fires, his frown of worry shifting into a frown of curiosity. “Would I normally take it very negatively?”

She thinks about it. “I don’t think so. But it might make you a little... standoffish?”

“Lets hear it, then.” 

She’s not sure if Chanyeol’s words bring her comfort or not, but she’s sure Chanyeol would not like what she’s about to spew. He has been telling her all these days and nights they’ve been together how happy he is she hadn’t yet found her other soulmates and that he’s content in having her all to himself. Chanyeol’s definitely not the possessive type as he’s much more mature in showing his feelings, but he wouldn’t be over the moon when he knows she found her second soulmate so early. 

A part of her also knows that he isn’t going to blow things out of proportion. That he’s kind. That he’s gentle, and that he’d never act in a way that’d create dents in her heart. But she’s still glowering in nerves. She has no idea how to say this without breaking his heart even for a little. Her gentle giant. She loves him so much she’s afraid she might bleed from all of that love; and she’d rather she gets thrown into fire if it’d save him from unwanted news. 

She swallows thickly, articulating her massively erect heartbeats. “I... I found my other soulmate.”

The cup he’s holding slips off of his fingers and crashes to the ground. The sound it echoes is massive and she winces. Thankfully the cup doesn’t shatter into prickly shards. Chanyeol stares at her as if she grew another head in her neck, and she looks back only so that she doesn’t crumble, hoping that her eyes would convey all of the emotions that she’s feeling inside, that she’s not doing this to hurt him, that she didn’t choose this just as much as he didn’t, that if she can protect his heart from all of this mess then she would. She wants to tell him a lot of things but her lips are shut sealed. 

Chanyeol looks at her more, for a few minutes; just trying to gauge her expression. Then, he groans out loud, flopping himself on the couch like a starfish and hiding his face against the armchair. When he speaks next, his voice comes out muffled. “Couldn’t this wait a couple more years?”

Her lips tilt slightly, glad that he’s taking this a whole lot lightly than she thought. “I’m so sorry.”

He lifts his eyes from the tuffs of hair that obscure them, his chin resting on the armchair and making him look like a rundown house. She looks into his eyes really closely and she notices that he looks sad, his eyes droopy but still trying to see the light in the situation. Her heart constricts. “Don’t be sorry. It was bound to happen.” He sits up to his long height and fixes his hair so it doesn’t hide his eyes. He’s still sitting close to her and the heat that emerges from his body to hers makes her feel delicate; loved. Chanyeol clears his throat, and maybe in this gesture he hoped to clear himself from all negativity, too. He gives her a curious look. “Where did you find him? And when did this happen?”

She tells him everything, starting from Jieun’s reasons to be in the club and when she met eyes with the beautiful stranger. She, of course, makes sure to hide her true emotions regarding the man because she doesn’t wish to cause any distress to her boyfriend’s heart. She refrains from describing his beautiful eyes and the breathtaking way he held himself or the face he pulled upon seeing her, so confused yet filled with numbers of emotions that she knows reflected in her own eyes, too. She tells him about the obscene way he held himself. She tells him about his corrupt ways with girls and stressed that it was only from Jieun’s perspective. She makes sure to give him everything he needs to know and answers every question of his. The only thing she managed to hold to herself is the kiss that seemed to destroy her; deteriorating every alive cell in her body. She doesn’t tell him about the pain, or how the kiss made her feel. She knows it’d destroy Chanyeol, too, to know that she has gone through something so horrible the first thing she met that soulmate of hers, and if there’s something that she knows about her boyfriend in all of these months that she spent with, it’d be his absolute loathsome to her hurt. 

“Seems like a .” Chanyeol’s first comment is after she finishes retelling the whole thing, and he says it so casually and so abruptly that she can’t help but smack him on his thigh.

“Hey! We don’t know anything about him yet besides what Jieun said. That’s not enough information.”

“Don’t tell me this,” Chanyeol waves her off dismissively, his eyebrows still tilted together in a frown. “I’m supposed to be the jealous soulmate that hates every other one of your other soulmates, am I not?” His face turns ridiculously smug. “When I say he’s a he probably is.”

A huge prick like wall demolishes from her body at his playful words, and she feels delighted to know that Chanyeol hadn’t taken the whole matter as seriously as she thought he would. A laugh bubbles in , and the next smack she delivers his thigh is full with equal amusement. “You’re such a .”

The mood quietens down after this, and Chanyeol’s eyebrows flatten over his forehead, his expression clearing away; but she can still tell that he’s thinking about everything that she told him, whereas all she can ever focus on is those gurgling emotions that she felt at the bar when she met her soulmate gobble her down again. It seems that in a moment of silence, she’d recollect all information about what happened that night, and her body would easily respond to them and instantly recall the emotions; making them burn against her skin again. She really hopes that once she meets him again, those feelings would not attack her again. 

Chanyeol’s voice is quiet when he speaks again; serious, but it still causes her eruption to fade away. “What are you going to do, then?”

“I don’t know,” she says just as quietly, looking down at her chapped fingernails in disdain. “A part of me is scared of what Jieun said and how it might be true, but a part of me can’t stop thinking about him.” She fixes her position on the couch so she can stare at him directly in the eyes, expression painted in awe that she doesn’t know it shows on her face. “It’s like when we were just introduced and I couldn’t help but think about you all the time. It was like you were kept in my mind as a part of my unchanged thought process. I couldn’t stop thinking about anything different and I was swallowed by you, but not in a hindering way that bound my hands together. I feel this way towards him, too.”

Chanyeol’s face is set in stone. “Is it too late to hate him?”

She raises a single eyebrow up. “I think you already do.”

Chanyeol raises his eyebrow too, challengingly. “No, I don’t. I’m a very responsible young boy and wouldn’t hate people for no reason. But I want to find a reason to hate him and you just gave me one.”

She allows herself to laugh, because even though her boyfriend sounds semi serious in his words, he couldn’t be anymore cuter. She pokes his fluffy cheek with a sharp finger. “You’re twenty nine, Chanyeol, you’re way past being a ‘young boy’,”

He bounces on the couch like a puppy and engulfs her in a hug, squeezing her in between his arms and gasping, the words she said to describe her feelings for the ‘stranger’ echoing in his head over and over again. “My baby’s found her other soulmate who is fairly less compared to my awesome self and I’m proud of her!”

“You sound like my mom, but with more sarcasm.” Daeon responds back, laughing again and wrapping her arms around his slim waist, hugging him back. She takes a deep whiff of his perfume and sighs in relief. He’s with her and he’s hugging her tightly. That’s the only thing that matters right now. 

“No, but for real,” he removes his monstrous clutch away from her and stares at her, eyes serious. “What are we going to do? It’s been a few days since that incident and I don’t think you’ll magically stop thinking about him. We have to find him and drag him to this love pentagon whether he likes it or not!”

She likes that he said ‘we’ instead of you. “You got any planes?”

He smirks. “Maybe I do. Get your spy getup ready, babygirl, we’re going on a mission!”

-

Daeon thinks about what things she should allow Chanyeol to do and things that she shouldn’t. His spy mission is easy enough: they’d keep going back to the club where she first met her soulmate and search for him in the ant village that is the club house. He made sure she understood that they wouldn’t stop coming back here to search for him over and over again until he appears, and despite liking the support her boyfriend is showing her; she still feels like he’s lost half of his brain. 

She looks around her at the busy, heavily crowded clubhouse which she practically loathes as if now, and then looks down at her casual clothes, a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. She clearly stands out, and so does Chanyeol, who’s wearing similar clothes but with a lot more confidence than her. She glares at him and he smiles widely.

“I hate this mission very, very much.” She iterate, staring down at her outfit one more time and then at the busy and loud clubhouse. 

“Oh c’mon!” Chanyeol wraps a cheeky arm around her shoulder and squeezes her to him, still bearing a wide grin on his face. “I look damn good in those jeans!”

She whips her head towards him with a heavy glare still gracing the corners of her face. “Did you really just agree to be a part of this ‘mission’ so you can wear those pair of jeans?”

He looks at her in disbelief. “What else is there? Did you not hear me? I said I look dashing in these pair!” He lower