Words (TaoXChanyeolXreader fanfic)

Chapter 4: Chanyeol knew where this story ended

Chanyeol knew where this story ended before she said it but she told him the entire story, "He sat down across from my brother and I. D.O was muttering about how much he hated this guy and I didn't want D.O mad at me so I said with my very best fourteen year old sarcasm, 'You aren't a poet, are you?' and he stopped. The whole show ground to a complete and utter halt and all his pretensions slipped and he was just looking at me. I told him that he should write something new instead of just quoting old masters and he ignored me and said those words. I gave him back the translation and he grinned," she smiled at the memory, fond and happy just thinking about it.

"We were the running joke. We were that couple, every school has that couple. My brother despised him, still does. My aunt thought I rushed everything. We got married as soon as I was 18. He went away to university the year before me but I moved down to the city as soon as high school finished. I have never doubted it. Never," she said.

"I've never heard of someone having the same combination twice," Chanyeol said.

"Me neither," she said.

Maybe he had someone else out there. Maybe this was a false start. The idea should have been comforting but with her sitting there, he didn't want that. She was still a stranger but each crack of smile, each new detail he picked up, made him want her. He wanted her undivided attention. He had wanted a soulmate as long as he'd been able to understand it but it had been abstract.

This wasn't abstract.

He didn't want someone.

He wanted her.

"My name is Victoria, you asked for my name before you ran off," she said.

"I'm Chanyeol but my friends call me Yeol," he said and it wasn't quite a lie. He didn't have many friends but most of the ones who mattered called him Yeol. It was Sehun, that friend he'd had for only a week and half a decade before that came to mind as he said that. Sehun had never called him anything else. Never Chanyeol like the kids from his church group or baekhyun like the boys at the private school he'd gone to. Just Chanyeol and so in the years since he'd introduced himself as Yeol with every person he thought might matter. A secret message they would never understand. One that said, this is who I really am.

She was studying him again and the wanting came back. For so long the idea had been good enough, the thought someday he would find his own person, that this new specificity kept hitting him like a punch. Not a person. This person. Her. Victoria. Her eyes were serious, her expression curious and considering. Her hands were folded in her lap below the edge of the desk, he couldn't see them but he wanted to reach out and hold one.

"Your words are on your hip," she said.

He frowned at her and there was a knock at the door before his alarm and his confusion could become words. How did she know that? He didn't have time to ask. She was getting up, answering the door for him while he reassembled his thoughts.

It was one of his students. A real student with the book in her hand and a polite expectant 'about to talk to a teacher' look on her face. Victoria stepped out of the way so she could step into the office. The girl was making apologies and Chanyeol couldn't remember her name though she was the keener in his Thursday discussion group who had an answer for everything and he had called her by name a hundred times since the semester had started.

"I'll meet you back there, at five?" Victoria said and Chanyeol nodded at her and she slipped out of the room. He barely made it through the appointment. He barely made it through the hour between the end of his office hours and five o'clock. After a half hour of pacing through the campus buildings he gave up trying to kill time. He went back to the cafe where they had first met, too early but not caring and waited.

She arrived just a little bit earlier than five and he knew who was with her before he sat down. It surprised him that it had taken him so long to put that piece together. Her match had his words. He'd already met someone else with his words and what were the chances it was someone else? Someone else who was dramatic and poetry obsessed and had eyes someone might describe as incredible. And she knew where his words were. Outside his family the list of people who knew that - and might tell her - was impossibly short.