Author’s Note: Please please please let me know what you think. I’m new at this and I’d love to hear any and all feedback.
It takes you a minute to realize that the car never hit you. No. In fact, you can feel arms around you, and no pain. But why? Slowly, you peak up to see glowing red eyes staring back at you from a very handsome, very angry face. He releases you and starts pacing while fisting his hair with both hands.
“Are you stupid?! Why on earth would you willingly walk into oncoming traffic?! Do you have a death wish?!” He’s yelling. He’s angrier than you originally thought.
But why? Why is this gorgeous man with the glowing red eyes, chiseled jawline, and high cheekbones so angry that you carelessly almost got yourself killed?
“It…. It was an accident. I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going.” Your face flushes as you admit that you had, indeed, acted stupidly. “But… why are you so angry? And how did you do whatever it was you did to get us here?”
He just stares at you as if you’ve grown an extra head, which makes you blush even more and your eyes shift away from his handsome face, to stare at the floor by his feet. Wait, why are they moving closer? Your eyes shoot up to his face again, as he slowly comes to stand in front of you. He stares at you as you feel him grab your hand. Your left hand. Your counter hand. You think, for a split second, that he’s going to hold it, thread his long fingers through your shorter ones. No. He brings it up to your face; palm facing you. Your eyes drift from his to your palm, and you watch. Every second ticking up on your counter. Almost a full minute passes before you realize what he’s showing you. That’s why he was so angry… no. Worried. You are in the presence of your soulmate. Your shocked gaze flies back to his.
“But… how? Where? What? Huh?” His gaze becomes amused as your brain struggles to function enough to get the words out. His lips quirk up into a smirk. You shake your head as if it’ll help you clear the cobwebs from your malfunctioning brain. “I still don’t understand any of this. I’ve never seen you before; I would’ve remembered if I had. But, somehow I’ve been in your presence for an hour almost every day for the last two weeks. How is that possible? And how did we get… here? Where even are we?”
You feel as if you’re about to hyperventilate from all the questions and stress. Gently, his hands come up and cradle your face, and your eyes that were flicking around the room settle on his. His hands are warm and large. His gaze has changed again. It’s still amused, but it’s mixed with something else. Something you can’t place your finger on.
“Calm down. I’ll answer all of your questions if you answer just one of mine. Deal?” His deep voice is softer, smoother than it had been earlier. You nod your head as much as you can with his hands on your face, and his smirk turns into a smile. “What’s your name?”
Author’s Note: Please please please let me know what you think. I’m new at this and I’d love to hear any and all feedback.
You are sitting in your lecture hall lightly tapping your pen on your thumb and daydreaming while waiting for your professor to make an appearance. It’s the first day of your first semester as a freshman in college, and it's already off to a boring start. Other students are still flooding into the room, and you catch a glimpse of an older man in a sweater with a white collar peeking out of the top and a blazer out of the corner of your eye. He walks with purpose to the front of the hall and places his briefcase on the wooden desk before turning to the class.
As you watch him wait for everyone to take a seat, you feel heat on the palm of your hand. The hand that holds your counter. Everyone has one. It counts how much time you’ve spent in the presence of your soulmate. You quickly bring your palm up to your face and watch as the numbers slowly increase; seconds turning into minutes. Instinctively, your eyes start to roam around the room taking in every person there. There are quite a few others looking at their hands as well, but you can’t tell if it’s because their counter has started counting or because it’s stopped. You look as closely as you can from your position in the back row, but you can’t see anyone’s face. If you weren’t as shy as you are, you’d probably have the courage to get up and talk to someone; anyone really. But, you are. Shy that is. Extremely so.
Unfortunately, the professor starts his lesson before you can think about it anymore. The class is only an hour long, but the professor’s monotonous droning makes it seem so much longer. You could feel yourself almost nodding off a few times during the hour-long lecture.
As quickly as you can manage without tripping and injuring yourself and others, you beat feet out of the hall and release a soft, dejected sigh when you feel the warmth leave your palm. Your counter has stopped, which means you're no longer in the presence of your soulmate. With your shoulders slightly slumped, you make your way to your next class. Your counter doesn’t activate again.
The next morning is the same. And so is every morning for the next two weeks. You walk into class and try to pinpoint your soulmate in the sea of students that flood through the open doorway, but to no avail. There are just too many people walking through the door at the same time for you to be able to tell for sure which one is your soulmate. After the second week of not being able to pick out who could possibly be your soulmate, you decide to give up. Surely they must feel it, too. Maybe they’ll be braver than you are and come to find you. Maybe they just don’t want to be found.
As you sit in your second class, you look down at your counter. Sure enough, in the two weeks, since classes started, you’ve clocked just over ten hours in the presence of your soulmate. As you stare at it dejectedly, you gasp as it suddenly comes to life again and starts counting. Your head shoots up and you look around frantically trying to see what is different today than it was yesterday. But, nothing is different. Everything is exactly the same as it had been yesterday. So, why is your counter ticking away? Is it defective? It can’t be, though. It’s something everyone is born with; a gene mutation that formed over time. But, what other explanation is there?
Questions plagued your every thought as you robotically made your way through your school day, and then once again on your way home. You were so lost in your head that you didn’t notice you were crossing at a red light. You're brought out of your stupor by the sound of a horn blaring, and you look up in time to see headlights coming straight for you. Frozen in shock, you literally can’t move. The car is meters away when suddenly, there's a flash of black, and then everything is silent.
