“What’d they take from you?” Mina asks, while staring at her knobby knees. Her eyes feel heavy and she can’t bring herself to look up.

“You don’t need to know,” he tells her, waving her off.

“I’m not going to help you,” Mina says, her voice small and weary but still put together, “unless I know what I’m helping you for.”

Yoseob almost laughs. He shuffles around a little and the soft fabric of his plaid shirt grazes her bare shoulders. The feeling is fleeting but burns her skin either way. He notices as she flinches and that’s when his laugh escapes him. He leans in close and watches as her eyes go wild, not knowing where to place them. She’s nervous – nervous. He chuckles inwardly and thinks that the girl isn’t as strong as she wants to seem.

“My heart,” he answers airily. He tells her this because she has her arms draped over her knees lifelessly, with her pink eyes downcast and lips so dry and chapped. He shouldn’t tell her this, but he does. “They took my heart – ridiculous, yeah?”

“Did they... really?”

He laughs; it’s a soundless laugh. “Yeah, they did.”

“Really-“

He doesn’t want to linger on this subject, and so he cuts her off.

It takes about a second for her to register the fact that his hand is holding her wrist. It takes about two seconds for her to realize that she has her palm against his chest, with her fingers spread across his white t-shirt. It takes about five seconds for her to react.

“What-“

She tries to pull away, but he keeps her there. His eyes are on her. Her eyes are on their hands. “Do you feel anything?”

Mina doesn’t understand at first, but then she feels it. She feels it – nothing. “No,” she says, letting out a small gasp. “I don’t.”

She lets her hand fall limply to her side. When it’s quiet, she starts to hear her own heartbeat; it’s repetitive and calming and grows louder and louder in her ears. The sound caresses her soul and murmurs tiny little nothing that remind her of her fragile existence. She slides her hand over to the left of her chest and presses into her skin gently. It skips against her fingertips slowly.

“How does it feel,” he starts, while looking at her press her lips together, “having a heart?”

And Mina doesn’t really know what to say. She wants to shrug. She wants to tell him that it doesn’t really feel like anything. Alive. Normal. She feels like how she has felt for the last eighteen years of her life. But when she looks to her side and sees the genuine curiosity in his eyes, she can’t bring herself to say any of that. It feels wrong. Instead, she gives him a weak smile. She forgets that he’s part of the whole ‘soul stealing’ world and sees him instead as a boy who lost his heart.

“You don’t need me to tell you,” she says, “because you’re going to get it back, aren’t you?”

Yoseob rather likes her answer.

---

Mina walks up the stairs, trailing after Yoseob. The stairs are wooden and dusty and creaky and old and sound like they’re on the verge of collapsing. But it holds together long enough for the two of them to reach the top. The walls upstairs are hardly decorated. They’re a pasty yellow and the floor is wooden and creaky, just like the stairs. When they reach the end of the hall, he pulls open a large door and nods his head inside.

“This is your room.”

It’s a spacious area. A large, white bed sits in the center and when she steps inside a little, she feels the soft, wooly carpet underneath her toes. A window covers the entirety of the opposite wall of them and if she looks outside, she can see the same green meadow that she tried escaping into the prior morning.

“Thank you,” she says, before walking in and turning around, her hand on the knob of the door. “Well-“

“My room is right down the hall,” he speaks up.

“Oh, okay,” she replies, a little taken aback at his sudden words.

“If you need anything, just come over and ask me,” he continues, scratching his head.

“Alright,” she murmurs, and when she tries to close the door, he stops her again.

“I just – um, I-“ he struggles to find his words. He hasn’t ever really tried to get along with his assignments before, but he’s trying to. “I just want you to know that – that I’m here for you. I mean, we’re going to be working together. So – so just know that we’re not… we’re not enemies, yeah? I want this to-“

“Don’t worry,” she says, shrugging. “Whether I like you or not, we need each other to help us both, don’t we?”

“Yeah I just-“

“I won’t screw you over,” she says, and she says it firmly, shifting in her spot, “as long as you don’t screw me over. Okay?”

He looks relieved at her words. She lifts her hand up and it catches the moonlight from the back window. He takes it, and they shake hands. A deal. They shake on the deal, and Mina ignores the fact that his hand burns the insides of her palm and ignores the fact that his hand is large and warm and inviting. She tries her best to seem confident. She doesn’t want to seem like the weak one; she doesn’t want to seem like someone easy to use.

A firm handshake. Mina pulls away her hand, a little bit satisfied. But then Yoseob leans forward, close enough to smell the vanilla of her hair, and says close to her ear, “it’s a deal,” and when he flashes her one last grin and walks towards his own room, it takes a little while for her to calm the small little fluttering inside her stomach.

He makes her nervous, and she hates it.

---

She can’t sleep that night.

Mina twists and turns in the darkness of her sheets; she’s restless. The room she’s in tonight is darker and emptier and scarier and she just wants to go to sleep and make it all go away, but she can’t. The sheets are too thin and the pillow is too big and her mind is too busy.

The feeling of his hand in hers washes over her and she sighs, rubbing her head. She doesn’t really know what to think of him and his offer. Was he lying? Was he telling the truth? Mina hardly knows him enough to trust him – and what she knows of him isn’t really enough, either. In her mind, he’s only a blur of playful smiles and getting too close. He’s not trustworthy; he’s playful and carefree and rebellious and everything else that an untrustworthy person was. She doesn’t want to trust him. She doesn’t. But she doesn’t really have any other choice.

Mina buries her face into the pillow and tries to screams.

Notes

feedback is loved c: