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It starts like this.
Kim Taehyung is twenty-three and halfway through his MFA program when he feels his soulmate's warmth for the first time.
The soulmate experts had always advised against metropolitan areas when it came to finding your warmth, but Taehyung had lived in San Francisco before moving out to get his masters at NYU. His best friends had found each other in San Francisco, so what was New York City to him?
It was crowded to him. So fucking crowded. Like everyone was forced to live here in close quarters and bumped shoulders and god, the guy next to him on the subway couldn't have at least tried to put some deodorant on before shoving his armpit right in Taehyung's face?
Taehyung knows he chose to be here. So did the reeking man next to him. New York City is just... well, it's New York City. The city that never sleeps. The city that never warms.
That's just for Taehyung, though. His hands are always cold to the touch, just a little cooler than comfortable, like he has bad circulation year-round. It sucks in the winter when his gloves don't do him any good. It's nice in the summer when he can use the palms of his hands on his cheeks for a momentary cooldown.
But overall, it sucks. Being without a soulmate is that, typically. When your own body temperature depends on the distance between you and your soulmate, it more than likely isn't great until you track them down.
Taehyung is only in New York for the next year. On particularly windy days, he wishes he were already on a plane home. He's spent twenty-two years overlooking the Bay, and sometimes his fingers itch to be back there. His MFA is only a two-year long program. Considering the fact that he intends to live in California for the rest of his life, the thought of finding his soulmate in New York doesn't even cross his mind.
Until it's Fall, and his bag is heavy with his notes and tattered books with scribbles in the margins and more dog-eared pages than should be allowed. And he's stepping off the subway uptown. It's a relief when he finally gets up to street level and takes a breath of relatively fresh air - it is New York, after all.
It's a Thursday, which means he'd been done with class early. He knows he needs to spend the next three days working on his thesis and flipping through his books until his eyes strain, but Thursday's are nice because they vaguely resemble something like a day off.
Thursday's are nice because Taehyung spends the other six days of the week drowning in prose and poetry, but on Thursday's he gets to drown in whatever else he likes. Some weeks it's sleep and the way the sun pours into his studio apartment downtown just past two in the afternoon; it hits his bed just right, and Taehyung can pretend like his hands aren't quite as cold as usual. This week though, he's taking the trip uptown to meet Jimin for a day at the Met. He's been standing on the subway for a half hour, and he's just happy to feel the autumn wind against his cheeks.
He doesn't come uptown often. It's easier to stay in Greenwich Village, close to his apartment and close to NYU. But the Met has this new exhibition about the Golden Age of Dutch art, and Taehyung's been itching to explore the visiting Rembrant and Vermeer paintings.
He's in the upper east side when he steps off the subway. A few blocks south and he'd find himself at the Asia Society Museum. He'll pass the Met Breuer on his way to the Met on Fifth Avenue, and if he keeps walking down Fifth past the Met, he'll be on the front steps of the Neue Galerie.
A part of Taehyung almost wishes he'd applied to Columbia so he could be closer to the dozens of bigger museums uptown, but he always thinks that when he leaves Greenwich Village. And when he goes back downtown, he passes the little grocery store by his apartment run by the elderly Korean couple that always says hello when he passes by, and the wife always insists on pushing fruit into Taehyung's cool hands and chattering off his ear in quick Korean that Taehyung loves to fall into step with. Because for all the hours he spends with his head swimming in English, there are countless more hours that he spends missing his first language.
The way Taehyung sees it, his parents had taught him Korean because it was their own first language, and of course they felt that their son, their first child on American soil, would carry that language with him. He learned English soon after, and then his two tongues were racing against each other in a tangle. And then he'd been rifling through his local bookstore and had happened upon an old copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and it had been over for him.
Four years of undergrad in San Francisco had sealed the deal. Taehyung liked to return to that tattered edition of Whitman every now and again, but his favorite lines he had memorized anyways.
Someone shoves past Taehyung, a hard shoulder digging right into his back without so much as an "excuse me". Taehyung stumbles forward a bit but catches himself with a huff.
New York. He'll never get used to how rude the people are here.
He turns towards Fifth. His phone vibrates, probably with a text from Jimin asking where he is.
And then he feels it.
For a moment he thinks that it's heat from his phone. Sometimes his iPhone overheats for no reason, the way they tend to do when they sense a new iPhone model on the horizon. It'll probably conk out oh him by the time he moves back to California, and he's sort of dreading that trip to Verizon without his dad to make all the adult decisions for him. Such is life in a capitalist-driven marketplace at the beck-and-call of technology.
But it's not his phone. His fingertips touch the screen, and it's cool. It's not the phone. It's him.
It's barely there, but his fingertips tingle. Like he's just come in from the snow and run his hands under a hot stream of water; the heat is so foreign and creeping hat he doesn't even register it as warmth at first. But it's there.
He keeps walking towards Fifth. The heat in his hands doesn't change. It's just enough of something that Taehyung knows exactly what it means, but it's not quite enough to work its way up to his wrists or arms. When he turns right on Fifth to walk along Central Park, it starts to fade as he gets closer to the Met. By the time he meets Jimin on the front steps, his hands are cold again, and Jimin's scolding him for forgetting to wear gloves.
It's been a week since he felt his soulmate's warmth for the first time, and he'd be lying if he said he'd gone even an hour without thinking about it. About him.
It has to be a him. He has to be tall, taller than Taehyung, which might be asking a bit much given Taehyung's latest growth spurt. He has to love reading. Maybe not poetry, because Taehyung knows poetry isn't for everyone, but at the very least, he hopes his soulmate loves reading. Loves curling up for hours on end, just getting lost in the page turns.
Taehyung's musings are spilling from his pen onto the page. He writes about who he thinks his soulmate might be, about who he thinks he deserves, about the men he's loved in the past and how they loved him with hands as cold as his.
He writes mostly about warmth, though. About what it might feel like to be anything but cold for once. About the way the sun pours into his apartment just past two in the afternoon, and the way it hits his bed just right, and the way it might feel when he's glowing with love. He writes about how hot he thinks he might get, about what it might feel like to have fire humming under his skin and fire humming under his soulmate's skin when they touch.
His phone goes off. His alarm. Taehyung's surprised to realize he's already spend an hour writing. The pages in his journal are covered in what looks like nothing more than scribbles and chicken scratch, but the mess looks pretty to Taehyung. There's a certain beauty in his own chaos, in the knowledge that no one knows their way around it like he does. It's vaguely comforting.
He wonders if his soulmate might like the mess he makes of his journals and thoughts.
The experts against seeking out soulmates in metropolitan areas, simply because of the difficulty in attempting to find one single individual in an urban area where millions live and where millions more are merely passing through.
Everyone knows this. Taehyung knows this. Taehyung, however, finds that he doesn't particularly care.
On Thursdays, Taehyung begins to venture further and further our of Greenwich Village. It's nice, in all honesty.
He walks from his apartment through Washington Square Park and into Noho. He finds a little café on East Fifth that he settles in one particularly nice afternoon, and he sits out on their terrace writing poetry with a frozen hot chocolate since he doesn't like coffee all that much.
He ventures south a lot, because in lower Manhattan he'll find Chinatown and Little Italy and sometimes when he walks down Canal Street, he'll pass little shops and storefronts plastered with K-Pop idols and their latest cosmetic collaborations, and he'll feel a little closer to home. Some of the handwritten signs in Hangul look a bit like his mother's handwriting. Taehyung doesn't get much work done on those days.
He ventures, most often, uptown. He walks his way up to Chelsea. He likes Chelsea. Its the home of FIT, and he sees students in gorgeous ensembles walking down the sidewalk as if it's a runway, and Taehyung is always toting his little camera in his bag, and sometimes if he's feeling bold, he'll ask them if he might be able to take a picture of their clothes. He finds the Rubin Museum of Art during one bitterly cold afternoon, and he ducks into it and spends the rest of his day there.
The days are getting colder as winter inches closer and closer to Manhattan. Taehyung finds it more and more difficult to make the walk from Greenwich Village uptown. On nicer days, he can span fifty city blocks in the span of an hour, and that's not even if he's in a rush, On less-than-nice days, Taehyung takes the subway instead, and he finds little coffee shops that he can hunker down in for the afternoon. His bag is always filled with a mess of books - there are the ones he needs to read for his thesis, the ones the professors at NYU had recommended, and the one's he's been picking off of shelves for the past few weeks. New York has no shortage of hole in the wall cafes nor of tiny bookstores owned by people who love books just as much as Taehyung, especially now that he's venturing so far out of Greenwich Village. He makes it a point to duck into any local bookstores he comes across and walk out with a purchase or six.
So he always has something to read, something to mark up. Not to mention the journals he never leaves home without; all he needs is something to lean on, and Taehyung can write.
It's hard to write in gloves. There are a handful of particularly messy pages in his journals from days when he'd been holding a pen between gloved fingers. On those days, he writes about how he wouldn't need those gloves if he could find his soulmate already.
His soulmate lives uptown. He's sure of it, two months into his exploration of Manhattan. He's only ever felt the moments of warmth when he's north of 42nd, but it's never steady. He'd felt it up by the Met all those weeks ago, and then again when he'd been studying at the New York Public Library, then once more the evening he'd been at Lincoln Center to watch one of Jimin's choreographies being performed.
It's always the same. The same little tingles at his fingertips like he's holding them over a candle, just far enough to feel the warmth but not close enough for it to be satisfying, not really. But it's there. Just as Taehyung is starting to think this is stupid, that he should know better than to try and look for one (1) person in this city of more than eight (8) million, he feels that warmth again. And it's enough to keep him going.
There's a list of Taehyung's favorite poems and poets somewhere in one of his journals, and every time he adds something to it, he can't help but grin at the thought of sharing it with his soulmate. There's Walt Whitman, of course. "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" feels incredibly cliché given the setting, but Taehyung has a soft spot for Whitman and the cliché, which would probably explain why Whitman's "Song of the Open Road" is on there too. "Tulips" by Sylvia Plath is on the list. There are a couple Plath poems there, but Tulips just strikes a particular chord with Taehyung. Who could resist the feminist commentary of a woman who feels confined by her roles as both a wife and a mother and who only feels free when she gets bedridden post-op and is finally rid of her husband and child, if only for a little while? Rosemonde Gerard is on the list too, because English isn't the end-all-be-all of poetry, and there's plenty of gorgeous poetry in other languages . The amount of translations that Taehyung's read of Gerard's "L'Eternelle Chanson" is well into the double-digits, and Taehyung's 2% fluent in French (it would probably be more if he listened to that Duolingo owl more often) so that he can stumble through a translation of his own one day. He's determined, because poetry is always so gorgeous in its original, something he knows from Chungmi Kim and Kim Hyesoon's works that he's read dozens of times in both Korean and English.
There are a handful of other poets and pieces. There's "Movement Song" by Audre Lorde, a New Yorker that had once described herself as a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet" and of course that had etched itself into Taehyung's brains for days and weeks after he'd first heard it, and it had stuck around for so long that Taehyung almost wished he could grow sick of it. Of course there's Maya Angelou, because when Angelou hadn't been writing award-winning prose, she'd been writing gorgeous and charged poetry. "Still I Rise" had been a favorite of Taehyung's from the first time he'd read it back in undergrad, and it's retained its spot on his list all these years later.
There's one Ross Gay poem that Taehyung loves to absolute pieces: "A Poem in which I Try to Express My Glee at the Music My Friend Has Given Me". He'd hated it the first time he'd had to read through it, had hated all thirty-some-odd lines of jumbled words that felt more like a mess than anything. And then he'd read it out loud to Jimin one night. They'd just gotten back to Taehyung's apartment after a night out, and their cheeks had been red with alcohol, and Taehyung had rummaged through the papers on his desk and yelled something about "Listen to this terrible poem I have to read for my Advanced Poetry Workshop" and then proceeded to read those thirty-some-odd lines out loud and a little drunk. And it had read like such a train wreck of syllables that it felt familiar to Taehyung. Sort of organized in its chaos. It had felt like the chicken scratch from his own notebooks and journals. Taehyung had written the excruciatingly long title into his list of favorites and hadn't looked back since.
Taehyung knows it's asking a lot, but he really hopes his soulmate likes poetry enough to love Taehyung's poetic heart.
Taehyung spends Thanksgiving in California. He puts up with the relatives that he hasn't seen in literal years who ask about his MFA program and who can't seem to understand what in the world Taehyung can do with an MFA, and shouldn't he be job hunting for something worth his time soon? It's almost a relief when he's flying back to New York the first week of December, all the way until he steps off of the plane and gets hit by a wall of frigid wind leaking through the gap between the plane and the passenger boarding bridge in JFK International Airport.
And then he takes the train back home to Greenwich Village and he's pulling his suitcase through the slush on the sidewalk and he swears he's wishing for the warmth of his apartment so badly that he can feel it. And he's walking past that little Korean grocery store on his block, and the elderly man whose wife typically greets Taehyung is there instead.
The man looks happy to see him, his smile reminding Taehyung of his grandfather in South Korea that he hasn't seen in a few years. He pushes clementines into Taehyung's hands, and the orange rinds feel so cool against his skin that he jumps.
He hears the familiar voice of the man's wife up ahead, and he looks up to see her speaking to-
Taehyung stops.
There's a warmth creeping up his neck that he can't blame on his blush alone, because there's no way he should be able to feel that blush in his hands, in his toes, right at the tip of his nose, in a New York City December.
The elderly woman catches Taehyung's eye and perks up. She waves, gesturing to him as she speaks to the young man who looks just as red and flushed as Taehyung. She moves to introduce the two of them, but the man beats her to it.
"You must be Taehyung," he says, and his full lips tug up into a gentle smile that reaches his eyes.
It also starts like this.
Kim Namjoon is twenty-four and suffering through his PhD at Columbia when he feels his soulmate's warmth for the first time. It's on a Thursday in Autumn, which is practically synonymous with a Good Day in Namjoon's book.
He loves Fall in New York City. He'd grown up in the suburbs in Connecticut, about a half hour from New Haven where the trees had truly taught him what a "New England Autumn" was. He hadn't even realized how much he loved the season until he'd gone to school in Washington, D.C. The trees were different there. More reds and deep oranges than he'd been used to. Connecticut trees had had more green leaves, more yellows, more everything. But then he'd come to New York for grad school and taken a single walk through Central Park on a crisp early-Autumn day and had fallen head over heels in love with the season.
Thursdays are his favorite because it's the day he teaches Intro to Literary Studies. It's one of those courses that English majors take early on in their undergrad, but also one of those fluffy classes that count towards gen ed requirements, so he has a handful of freshman who took it for the core curriculum credits and nothing more. He'd gotten lucky this semester. His section is a group of only twenty-some students that seem genuinely interested in the material he'd been assigning, and their recitations are fun. Namjoon likes to think that his students like how close in age he is to them and the fact that he tries to make the more boring material less so. There are so many literary opportunities in the city, so he takes advantage of them. Thursdays are the days when he teaches outside the classroom.
This particular Thursday he's dragged his students out to an event just a few blocks south of campus to meet Kaveh Akbar, the poet Namjoon had met during undergrad. It's a poetry masterclass with Kaveh as the guest of honor, and Namjoon had promised that if his students attended, he'd drop their lowest reading quiz grade.
It's unmistakable.
Something in him just knows that it's his soulmate. Yoongi had described it exactly like this when he'd first met Hoseok. Namjoon had mulled over Yoongi's words for so long afterwards that he'd almost driven himself crazy. He'd thought he felt the same warmth, the same tingle in his fingertips dozens of times in momentary thoughts of "did I just feel-"
But this makes Namjoon wonder how he could have ever mistaken those moments with this. The real thing.
Namjoon doesn't come off as a romantic. His favorite novels are philosophical and socially conscious and charged. Back in high school his reading list had essentially consisted of every banned book from the last century. He could parrot off Marx and Nietzsche on the spot, and he had half a mind to become a politician just to help dismantle the corrupt capitalism systems in place. He'd gotten arrested for political marches at least four times.
But he melts into a puddle at the mere thought of finding his soulmate.
"Melts" is a good word for it.
Namjoon had grown up with cold hands in New England. He'd shoveled snow with the thickest gloves he could find, had spent his winters skiing in Vermont wearing three pairs of socks. His desk drawer back at home was always stocked with handwarmers for him to grab on his way out and stuff into his pockets. One winter when he was twelve, the neighborhood kids had packed him with snow and effectively turned him into a snowman in his front yard to scare his mom. He'd fought his way out of it just minutes later when she'd walked past, but he thinks maybe he'd never truly shaken off the ice around his edges.
One Thursday in Autumn, he feels the ice begin to thaw.
"You're insane," Yoongi tells him the next day. His lips are wrapped around a straw as he takes another sip of his iced americano.
"I bet I could find them, hyung," Namjoon insists. "That's basically the whole point of the soulmate thing. It's like a radar system to find each other. It's a game of hot and cold."
Yoongi rolls his eyes. "A game of hot and cold in the biggest city in the United States. That's not a needle in a haystack, Joon-ah. It's a drop of water in an ocean."
"You found Hoseok here," he reminds.
"I found Hobi in my econ class junior year. He'd walked into our lecture hall after a dance class and thought he was having a heat stroke," Yoongi says.
Namjoon deflates, feeling his shoulders slouch as he leans over to sip at his coffee. "Yeah," he says. "Yeah, I guess you're right."
While Yoongi is absolutely not right, Namjoon finds that he has to put his large-scale game of hot and cold on a hold as his first wave of midterms appear out of nowhere and smack him across the face. Suddenly he's drowning between his dissertation and the exams and papers he has to grade, and he has to push pause on the soulmate hunt.
Thursdays get ugly. He has to spend them carefully - he teaches in the morning and then coops himself up in the library to get work done because the rest of his week is a mess. He goes days without seeing Yoongi and Hoseok. His sleep schedule gets so erratic that he gets addicted to caffeine again; the last time he'd been drinking this much coffee, he'd been a sophomore with too much time on his hands that he'd just killed in his favorite café in DC. When he isn't hunkering down in libraries, he's looking for cafes that boast particularly strong brews.
And things get dreary. There are days when Namjoon's been staring at his papers, at his computer screen, at his books, for so long that he can practically feel his eyes sinking into his head as if just to escape the strain. Every ounce of determination seeps out of his pores little by little, and he catches himself wondering if grad school is even worth it anymore and if he can make a living just lying in bed and never moving again.
He reaches for his red-eye coffee one particularly dreadful Thursday afternoon in a basement coffee shop tucked just south of 53rd, and the mug warms his hands. The ceramic cup leaks heat into his palms, and he holds it in both hands and brings it up to his lips, mildly surprised when he drinks because the coffee isn't all that hot anymore.
When he puts the mug back down, his hands retain their warmth. Hours later when the coffee shop finally closes and he leaves to head home, he still feels warm when he presses his palms to his cheeks in the evening New York chill.
He walks home, and the heat dissipates somewhere between 7th and Broadway. Namjoon gets a better night's sleep that evening than he has in almost two weeks. He wakes up and thanks the universe for pushing him just close enough to his soulmate that he doesn't give up all hope.
When he'd been organizing his lesson plan for the semester, Namjoon thought it would be nice to have his students hand in their second papers before Thanksgiving so they wouldn't have to deal with assignments over that well-deserved break, but then the semester had taken off in a sprint and his deadlines and due dates had all somehow piled up in a hellish three-day window the week of Thanksgiving. Yoongi texts him right in the sweet spot before Namjoon has to bear down and tackle that mammoth of a workload.
yoongi
come have dinner with me and hobi tonight
Namjoon stares at the text. In theory, he has the time. Realistically, though, he shouldn't. He knows it'll start with just dinner at Yoongi and Hoseok's apartment, but that's how it always does. And it always leads to Yoongi insisting on refilling Namjoon's wine glass, because isn't this such a good red and doesn't it just go so wonderfully with the meal he'd slaved over?
And Namjoon always ends up getting wine drunk and having to spend the night on their couch after falling into a heated discussion with Yoongi about the failings of their capitalist society and how the country should be run and also have you listened to the latest Kendrick album?
But then he thinks back to the last month and how he'd almost been crushed in the workload and he thinks, fuck it, and texts Yoongi that he would be more than happy to join them tonight.
Three hours later, he's sitting at their dinner table in their apartment that overlooks Central Park and laughing as Yoongi pours him a second glass of red wine and he feels a bit flushed. His whole face is warm, and his blood is humming.
It takes him a moment, takes until he puts his elbow on the table to rest his chin in his hand. And he's so warm and content and it can't be the wine because he's only one glass deep and he startles at the warm touch of his palm.
Hoseok catches Namjoon jump, raising an eyebrow.
Namjoon smiles in response. "Nothing. I can just feel my soulmate a bit."
Hoseok perks up, ever the romantic, and his lips lift into a heart-shaped smile that feels more appropriate than usual.
"Really?" Hoseok leans forward, a hand reaching for Yoongi. "Hyung was telling me you've felt them a few times now? I hope you find them soon, Joon-ah."
Namjoon can feel himself grinning, can practically feel his cheeks dimpling. The conversation drifts to the inevitable as Hoseok asks what Namjoon thinks his soulmate is like, and the dam breaks.
He spends the next two hours gushing. He admits that he's nervous. That he thinks he'll never find his soulmate, that he doesn't even know what gender they might be considering he's pansexual and could see himself loving anyone. He's a bit scared that they might not love literature the same way he does, that they might love it but not enough. He's afraid they won't love New England autumns like him. That they'll think Rupi Kaur is the pinnacle of poetry. That they won't understand his academic choices, that they'll be something rigid and immovable. He admits that he hopes they aren't ruled by their left brain, that they aren't the sort of person to fall asleep when he's in a particularly passionate mood about the symbolism he'd just noticed in a book he's rereading. What if they don't have the patience to listen to him have an existential crisis over one of Frank Bidart's poems? What if they think Marilyn Hacker is too radical of an author? Namjoon doesn't even ask what if they've never read Toni Morrison, he can't bear the mere thought.
His hands are warm the entire time. Hoseok just smiles and tells him not to worry.
Namjoon's mountain of work comes and goes. It's not Mount Everest, but a mountain nonetheless. By the time he goes home for Thanksgiving, he's drained and exhausted and ready to be with family. It feels like slipping into something familiar and comfortable. There's a turkey, but it's really more there for the holiday than the crowd. His mother and her friends pull out all the stops and prepare a feast in all meanings of the word.
He falls back into Korean with ease. His extended family consists of few immediate relatives, instead being made up of his parents and their friends that he had grown up calling family. He puffs up a bit when he says that he's in a PhD program, because it wouldn't be Thanksgiving if he weren't asked what he's doing with that college degree, if he's putting that high IQ of his to good use.
His mother introduces him to one elderly woman who asks "do you remember me?" and then proceeds to say that they'd met when Namjoon was barely two, as if he'd remember her from back then. Namjoon smiles and says "no, sorry" and she waves him off with a "oh that's alright".
She's small in the way that older women are, and Namjoon towers over her. She chatters away in Korean, asking about where he goes to school, and perks up when he says he goes to Columbia.
"My husband and I own a little grocery store downtown," she says with a smile. "If you ever get homesick, you should pay us a visit. I'll cook you japchae that'll put your mother's to shame." She tells him the name and the address, which he saves in his phone and promises to come by. She asks him more about Columbia, about what he's studying, and Namjoon launches into his typical elevator pitch about his program, which she interrupts.
"There's this nice boy that always comes by our store. A good Korean boy," she adds, in that way that mothers say when they're hoping you'll hang out with the company of their choosing, coupled with a raising of her eyebrows. "He's studying at NYU getting his masters. Taehyung's his name. Such a nice boy. You'd love him."
She chatters about this Taehyung character, about how she worries that he isn't eating enough so she likes giving him fresh produce when he says hello. He's from San Francisco, just in the city long enough for his studies before he plans to go back home, and oh Namjoon you'd be putting me at ease if I knew you'd be looking out for him, he's so far from home, I'm sure you'll be good friends.
Namjoon laughs lightly and says "okay, okay". She smiles and squeezes his hand before going to find one of the younger kids that she insists she needs to pinch the cheeks of.
Namjoon forgets about this conversation entirely until a week later when he opens the fridge in his studio apartment with a craving for japchae, and then immediately remembers that he'd already finished his leftovers from Thanksgiving.
He deflates as he surveys the barren fridge, and then he recalls the dinner invitation the elderly woman had extended towards him. He looks out his window, and then decides the thought of a homecooked meal is worth braving the slushy sidewalks - a result of the scattered snow that had been falling all week.
He bundles up, gloves and heavy coat and two layers of socks before pulling on boots because New York is cold when you haven't found your soulmate yet, and then he's off. The subway is crowded with people avoiding the weather, and he's sweating when he finally gets to Greenwich Village. The woman is standing in the storefront, and her face lights up when she catches the sight of Namjoon walking up the block. She grabs his gloved hands, and she's beaming so brightly that Namjoon swears he can feel her radiating heat through his gloves and up his arms, and it's probably just the sweltering subway that's making his chest feel warm and -
The woman looks past Namjoon just as she's asking what he wants her to cook, and her question falls short. Her grin widens, if it's even possible. She waves at someone behind him, and he turns around to see her husband speaking to a young man and he's -
She pulls Namjoon as she approaches him, his ears turning bright red.
Namjoon doesn't even hesitate when he says, "You must be Taehyung."
It goes like this.
Soulmates are, well. They're soulmates. Taehyung falls into Namjoon just like Namjoon falls into Taehyung. They fold into each other. Taehyung finds that there's nothing quite like laying in bed with Namjoon until three in the afternoon, because they curl into his comforter and into each other like tendrils of smoke. There's a hum under Taehyung's skin when the sun pours in through his window just after two and covers them in light and it's so funny to Taehyung that he used to think laying alone in his bed when the sun hit him just right was the pinnacle of happiness. When a whole Namjoon was uptown, when a whole Namjoon was out there just waiting for Taehyung to melt his edges away.
Namjoon's hands are warm like glowing embers when they cup Taehyung's face, his eyes screwed shut to block out the offending sun that's flooding his bed. Namjoon pulls Taehyung close and drops a lazy kiss on his lips. And then he's murmuring lines from some cliché Shakespeare sonnet, and Taehyung is shrieking at the cheesiness of it all. But he pulls Namjoon back in again anyway, just so he can finish the sonnet lines because of course he knows them just as well.