Soulmarks mean you're destined to be with someone whether you want to be with them or not. In fact, refusing a bond is medically inadvisable and downright dangerous.
Not that that stops one girl's fear of being the soulmate of someone she never expe...
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Knew it when I saw her face, I just thought that she could be the one.- Martin Garrix, Summer Days
Having a soulmate meant vulnerability. Just 'cause someone was your best match genetically didn't mean they were going to treat you well, and after nearly two decades of watching her mother struggle with the fallout of having a domestic abuser for a soulmate (and subsequently having her soulmark removed), twenty-year old costume design major Lea Blanchard wanted nothing to do with the whole business.
It meant relying on someone emotionally and physically as soon as you touched them after the age of twenty and your soulmarks appeared. To make matters even worse, you were pretty much guaranteed to fall in love with them within a few weeks. Having a soulmate would mean someone else having more power over her than she was willing to give up.
The notion of having to tailor for a man when one had only sisters and had attended all-girls schools all one's life was daunting enough, but when that man was alarmingly, startlingly, devastatingly, disarmingly beautiful and an Academy Award nominated actor, things started to get more than a little terrifying.
So you can imagine Lea's horror when on Friday, September 3rd, 2021, her fingers accidentally brushed against Timothée Chalamet's skin when she was checking the fit of his suit. Her wrist burned briefly before cooling into a strange tingling sensation.
Lea froze for several seconds before slowly looking down at her wrist with wide, horrified eyes, and there it was, stenciling itself on the skin of her inner wrist.
A one-of-a-kind iridescent tattoo —an outline of a star made up of little dashes— that she'd never paid for, let alone wanted.
"Huh," the man of her nightmares mused quietly, and she looked up at him to find him studying her with interest, glancing down at her name tag again. "Look at that, I guess we're-"
At that exact moment, Lea remembered her older sister's stories of how miserable her mother had been, having to rely on her father so much; having to rely on a man who was always drunk and never kind or gentle. The thought helped her to regain the use of her muscular system, and she cut her apparent soulmate's words off by turning on her heels and running as fast as her legs would carry her.
She barely heard him call out to her as she snatched her purse from behind the counter, hastily telling her best friend-slash-coworker-slash-roommate, Sam, that something had come up and she had to leave immediately.
"Wait a sec," her friend cut in as Lea scrambled out around the counter, hoping desperately that Timothée would have difficulty weaving his way through the maze of clothing she knew so well. "Is that a soulmark? Holy shit, is he—"
"Shut up!" Lea hissed. "Don't say a fucking word."
At that, she exited the store and deliberately got swept up in the sea of New Yorkers bustling about their day.
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Lea had always thought soulmate withdrawal couldn't be as bad as people said. They were exaggerating, she was sure.
As it turned out, they were not exaggerating. In fact, they were understating the severity of things.
And the dreams, good god.
At first, she only saw them when she slept at her newly irregular hours. She couldn't very well go back to work, now could she?
They were... intense, too.
She saw him touching her, kissing her, telling her how perfect she was, how good she felt, that she was his and his alone, that they belonged to each other. She saw him make her beg for him before he thrust himself inside her. She saw him holding her close, her head on his bare chest as he brushed a kiss into her hair.
She saw him smiling at her, laughing with her, kissing her nose sweetly and telling her he loved her. She even saw —to her utter horror— herself completely naked as he kissed her pregnant stomach and reached between her legs to touch her.
She saw a small child with his face and her eyes laughing and getting hoisted up onto his shoulders.
The worst part of it all, she thought, was the amount of joy and— and love that the dreams seemed to be steeped in.
This is what you could have, they seemed to say. This is what you were always meant to have.
She woke up lonely and aching and, perhaps most of all, afraid.
Afraid because of how desperately she found herself wanting what she was seeing; this life with a man she had barely spoken to, had only just introduced herself to.
Sam had filled her in on plenty about him the second she'd returned home that day. Lea had even been made to watch many of his movies, telling herself she had no right to be jealous of anyone he kissed on screen or off it.
But still, despite her recently acquired knowledge, she didn't know him. She didn't know any men, really, and that was how she'd always liked it.
And now she was expected to just— just have the standard I-just-found-my-soulmate sex-a-thon with one? That didn't seem fair, no matter how pleasant he was to look at. Or how tall he was. Or how soft his hair looked. Or how sharp his jawline was. Or how alluring his eyes were. Or how dazzling his smile was. Or how talented he was. Or how intelligent he sounded. Or how—
Okay, that's enough, she spent the next several weeks telling herself as she did her best to focus on her schoolwork and thanking every deity she could think of that her professors filmed the lectures anyway and had been willing to send her her assignments digitally.
