Chapter Text
***Prologue***
Everyone is born with a mole somewhere on their body. When you touch your soulmate for the first time, whether it be a brush of the arm, holding hands, or anything else, a small sprig of pain is felt and a second mole appears next to the original one, creating a heart. This soulmate mark is how people know they are with the right person.
Kevin Price was a relatively happy person. He had a good family, he was well-respected within the Mormon community, he excelled in his classes—always making the Dean’s List each semester, and he was currently dating the most beautiful girl on campus. Life certainly seemed perfect for this young man. Kevin was a sophomore Medical Studies major within the Physician’s Assistant program at Mother Mary University. His parents originally discouraged Kevin from even applying to the small Catholic college on the other side of the United States (Northeastern Pennsylvania, to be exact) but were appeased by the mission statement of the university and the overall friendly and kind atmosphere it had to offer. Mother Mary University had one of the best Physician’s Assistant programs in the United States, which was one of the biggest reasons for Kevin wanting to attend. After all, he was Kevin Scott Price, and he always needed to have the best that could be offered. But in all honesty, Kevin also secretly was happy with the distance, having felt somewhat smothered his entire life. He had always felt that there was just so much expected of him, and while he still maintained high goals for himself, it was refreshing to not have his parents breathing down his neck constantly.
In fact, his parents were originally against him going to college right away, wishing that he would enroll in the Missionary Training Center to be sent on a mission for two years, potentially to another country, to spread the Word and baptize people into the Church. Somehow, Kevin was able to convince them that by becoming a Physician’s Assistant, he would be able to help more people and it was better for him to get a head start on that. It had taken a lot of convincing, but they relented and allowed Kevin to skip the typical Missionary stage of a young Mormon boy’s life. Kevin was all the happier because of it.
Kevin arrived at Mother Mary in 2015 amongst his fellow wide-eyed freshmen. But Kevin wasn’t nervous at all. He was thrilled for the challenges that awaited him. The three days of Orientation flew by, and Kevin managed to make a few friends outside of the three boys he was living with in the residence halls. His roommate, Arnold, was a bit eccentric, but overall was a nice guy. Arnold certainly warmed up to Kevin quickly, declaring him as his best friend within their first hour of knowing each other. The other two guys who shared the room on the other side of the joint bathroom, Chris Thomas and David Michaels, were very nice as well, although one of the boys—Chris—had a strange obsession with PopTarts. On the second day of Orientation, Kevin met the girl who would soon become his girlfriend: Natalia Grant. She was an olive-skinned girl with long, curly black hair; brown eyes framed by long, thick eyelashes, and a perfect smile. The pair began talking due to a shared Biology class that they were eagerly anticipating. After a few study sessions together, Natalia admitted that she was falling for Kevin and that her second mole had appeared when they brushed hands once, forming a heart. Kevin was thrilled, but deep down, he had a rising anxiety that just would not bubble down. Kevin told her that his appeared as well and the pair began to spend more and more time together. The only problem was that Kevin did what no Mormon should ever do. He lied. Kevin’s mole had yet to appear. He did not understand how that could happen. Natalia was a beautiful girl and he was quite a handsome guy. It makes sense for them to be together. Besides, Natalia’s mole couldn’t appear if it was not meant to be. That’s not how it works. So to calm his nerves, he told himself that there was just a mistake on his part, and that his just was not showing for some reason. To keep up with his lie, each day he would draw the second mole on his arm to form a heart with a black permanent marker. Though try as he might, he still couldn’t get rid of the sunken feeling in his stomach.
***Chapter 1: Back Up and Immediately Falling***
Kevin and Natalia had been dating for almost a year and Kevin could honestly say that his feeling for Natalia had not changed one bit. Which would normally be a good thing, but unfortunately for Kevin, it was not. Try as he might, Kevin just couldn’t feel a spark between the two, which confused him immensely. His parents loved her, despite that fact that she was not a nice Mormon girl like they had hoped for, but a nice Catholic girl. When they had met her for the first time, Mr. Price encouraged the relationship, telling his son that she was a very sweet girl and could see the two marrying and having a large Mormon family. But Kevin brushed those words aside; mostly because he really wasn’t sure that he wanted to have a family with Natalia, if he was being honest with himself. It wasn’t that they didn’t get along, or that she wasn’t beautiful. Natalia was easily the prettiest girl in the sophomore class, if not the entire student population, and the two had many shared interests and were always seen smiling and laughing around each other. Arnold would go on for hours if he could about his girlfriend, Naba, who was a delightful African girl who Arnold had met in his English class during their freshman year. The look in Arnold’s eyes and the dopey grin that encompassed his face when he talked about her or just so much as saw her was a foreign concept to Kevin, and he just couldn’t figure out why.
Natalia was the much more affectionate of the two, constantly grabbing Kevin’s hand, giving him quick kisses when they crossed paths, and initiating cuddling while they watched movies. It wasn’t that Kevin was annoyed with the PDA, but he never felt the urge to initiate it himself. Quite frankly, he never really found himself to enjoy kissing, especially making out. Why would he want another person’s warm and wet tongue inside his mouth? Kevin could not see the appeal at all, but Natalia seemed to enjoy it, so he sucked it up and pretended to be into it. After they first kissed, and he failed to feel the spark that apparently everyone feels at a first kiss, Kevin just brushed it off as nerves and was certain he’d feel butterflies at their second kiss. But then that came and after a month of kissing her with no spark, Kevin had given up on the hope of the well-known feeling that supposedly would come. He told himself that it was just an old wives’ tale, but it was difficult to convince himself of that when Natalia was so clearly feeling it and Arnold recounted his experiences with Naba. With the lack of both a spark and soulmate mark weighing heavily on Kevin’s mind, he concluded that there was just something wrong with him. Though, that did not give the ever-perfect Kevin Price any peace of mind either.
Due to Kevin’s strict Mormon upbringing and beliefs, as well as Natalia’s Catholic ones, the couple took their relationship slowly, something Kevin was more grateful for than he’d like to admit. Although, sometimes after a particularly heated makeout session, Natalia’s hands would explore a little too south of the border than Kevin was comfortable. Luckily, she did not get upset when Kevin tensed or verbally stopped them before any further fooling around could occur, accrediting it to Kevin being a gentleman or to his religious beliefs. While Kevin liked to believe those had a part in him saying no, he knew that an even larger part of himself did it because it simply did not feel right.
They kept up a long-distance relationship over the summer between their freshman and sophomore years of college, with Kevin back in Perry, Utah and Natalia in Pennsylvania, not too far from their university. If you asked Natalia, she would say that it was the hardest and most unfortunate three months of their relationship, only being able to see Kevin once during the summer. However, if you asked Kevin, he happened to think it was the best three months of their entire relationship. Since they were mostly only able to call each other and text, Kevin had a relief from the guilt eating away at his stomach due to his lack of emotion for Natalia. But all too soon (for Kevin, at least), they were back at school for the fall semester of their sophomore year.
At Arnold’s insistence, he and Kevin celebrated their first night back as roommates with a movie night. One Star Wars movie turned into three more movies until they both fell asleep during one of Kevin’s Disney movies around 4am. In hindsight, this was a very bad idea, considering Kevin had his first class—Intro to Fiction—at 8am. Having hit snooze on all of his alarms, Kevin woke up with a start, realizing that he was running late for his first class. Kevin hastily put his clothes on and half-heartedly made an attempt at fixing his hair before dashing out of the dorms and running to Helton Hall, where his class was located. In his rush to get to class, he collided with another student when he was turning the corner. Both fell to the ground and Kevin looked up, ready to apologize when his breath caught in his throat as he felt a sharp pain on his arm, probably a result of the fall. In front of him, laid a boy who looked to be around Kevin’s age with auburn hair, freckles dotting his cheeks and nose, and the brightest blue eyes that Kevin had ever seen. The boy looked equally shocked. Kevin scrambled to his feet and help the boy up.
“I’m so sorry. I woke up late and I had to rush to get to class,” said Kevin, sheepishly. The boy’s eyes twinkled with something Kevin couldn’t identify.
“That’s alright. I was in kind of a hurry as well and wasn’t paying attention to where I was going.” Kevin felt very strange, like his insides were twisting themselves around.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it then. Sorry again.” Kevin awkwardly waved goodbye and hurried on to class before the boy could get another word in. He made it just in time, just seconds before attendance was taken. He was glad it was just a day devoted to going over the syllabus because he could not concentrate for the life of him. His mind just kept flashing back to a certain pair of blue eyes and the way his stomach felt when they locked with his, which reappeared with each additional thought. He had never felt this way before and Kevin was mildly concerned that he was coming down with something. He made a metal note to himself to take a Pepto-Bismol when he got back to his dorm room.
The rest of Kevin’s classes for the day were similar, as were his distracting thoughts in each of them. Despite it being the first day back, much to Arnold and Natalia’s disdain, Kevin threw himself into his schoolwork, doing numerous readings to prepare for the next day’s classes. He skipped dinner with his friends and ate in his dorm room in favor of these plans, with promises to make it up to them. But still, his thoughts remained haunted by blue eyes.