... And Other Ships

TaeGi: Morning Class

My literature class was three days a week at seven in the morning. It was easily my earliest - and emptiest - class; I had to wake up at the ass-crack of dawn to be at the literature building before my professor started teaching. Plus, I had to make coffee so that I could grasp the concept of reality, let alone actually focus in class. 

Although, this morning, I just couldn't wake up, so I chugged half a Monster energy drink before making a cup of hot cocoa, - and possibly slipping a shot of Monster in that - grabbing my Looney Toons blanket and dashing out the door, backpack hanging off of my shoulder. 

Our class was very tiny; the classroom could easily sit over two-hundred people, but there was only twenty-four of us. None of us preferred to sit anywhere near anyone else - well, other than me and the kid who sat right next to me. 

I didn't know much about him, other than that his family name was Min, he possibly didn't own a hairbrush, his poetry was depressing as fuck, and he had an obsession with caffeine. 

Now that I think about it, didn't every college student have an unhealthy relationship with caffeine? 

The guy always had a huge thermos of coffee sitting next to him. It was insane that he didn't have any heart issues by this point in his life. 

Still, even though we never said anything to each other, - other than the time we had to peer edit, and he bashed his head on the table and started to cry because he couldn't find anything wrong with my writing, while I turned his page green with critiques - I still took a liking to him. 

I think we only got along because we were the only two kids from Daegu - besides the point that he was a city boy and I was a farmboy - in a room full of Seoul college students. Whenever we asked questions on notes, we spoke in our dialect, which confused the other students in our class. 

That morning, our professor didn't feel like teaching, so he let us use our class time to free-write or work on other assignments for our other classes. 

I pulled out a large stack of essays from another writing class that I was enrolled in; I was the instructor for that class, and the professor paid me to edit the students' essays instead of write one myself. I had to finish them by Friday, but since this literature class was three hours long, I took this time to my advantage so that I could rest a little when I went back to my dorm. 

Halfway through editing my first essay, I heard the pop of a can and looked over just in time to see the Daegu boy pour a Monster into his coffee. He shook his head and huffed, "I'm gonna die," before chugging it. 

I raised an eyebrow at him as he looked at me out of the corner of his eye, frozen like he was caught committing a crime - which he was, in my opinion. 

"It ain't that deep," I deadpanned, speaking to him in our dialect, "This is a literature class." 

He shrugged and took another big gulp before setting his cup down. "I'm committing literary suicide," he simply replied before turning back to his laptop, which displayed the film analysis that was due in two days. 

I tilted my head to the side, admiring - and hardcore judging - his side profile. "That's not how that works."

"Then I'm committing actual suicide." 

My eyes widened at that statement. "That's... not good," I mumbled slowly, wrapping my blanket tighter around myself. 

The guy didn't look at me, he just kept typing. "Neither is my grade."

I went back to my work after that, occasionally sipping my hot cocoa as my hand flew through pages, covering nearly every page with purple ink. I felt bad for the fifth person; - I marked her paper up to the point where I couldn't even see the words she wrote - it was just so bad. 

My professor told me that he picked me to be the instructor because I was the harshest editor out of the one-hundred-fifty-seven people in my writing class. I took pride in that, considering that this class was now just a job for me instead of an actual class. 

Around the seventeenth paper, the guy next to me distracted me once again. 

"Uh, what's your name, by the way?" he asked me, scratching the back of his neck nervously. 

I gave him a short smile and hummed, "Taehyung." 

He seemed to blush a little before he stuttered, "I'm Y-Yoongi." 

Min Yoongi: what a pretty name. 

I only winked at him and went back to my work. 

-------

"Taehyung?" Yoongi whispered to me about a month later. 

I leaned a little closer to him, not taking my eyes off the poem I was editing - his poem, to be exact. "What's up, hyung?" I asked, finally lifting my eyes to see him staring down at my poem with tears in his eyes. 

"This is so fucking beautiful," he whimpered, looking helplessly at my poem. He hadn't made a single mark on mine, while I left a few comments and suggestions in the margins of his paper. My cheeks heated up as I curled in on myself. "Mine is so horrible!" Yoongi whispered, glaring at the ink on his paper. 

I patted his shoulder reassuringly, shrugging a little. "Poetry is my major, hyung. I've been doing stuff like this for a very long time. Yours is actually really good, too," I tried, giving him an encouraging smile. 

Yoongi nodded and fell silent for a few more minutes, but then he asked me something so blunt and off-putting, that I would remember it as vividly as him pouring Monster into his coffee. 

"Who do you love?" 

"What?" I choked out, voice breaking just a little, displaying how taken-aback I was. 

Yoongi tapped my poem with his red pen. "Who is your love? You wrote about someone you love. You said that he was your first love," he explained gingerly, flinching when I snatched the paper out of his hands. 

"That wasn't the poem I wrote for this class," I grumbled, trying to shove down my inner panic as I searched for the poem I actually wrote for the assignment. 

Yoongi wasn't supposed to know about that poem; no one was ever supposed to know that poem even existed. 

From that horrifying Monster-coffee-incident, we spent a lot of time outside of class together. On days we had this literature class, Yoongi would often spend the night with me so that he wouldn't be late.

We had gotten close this past month, and as we did, my heart did, too. 

I wrote that first-love poem about Yoongi and how I felt about him. My confession in that poem was very subtle, but a smart man like Yoongi would have figured it out. I prayed that he actually wasn't as smart as I knew he was. 

I slammed the poem that I had written for the assignment down in front of him, my heart hammering in my chest. 

"Taehyu-"

"Leave it, hyung," I gritted out, going back to Yoongi's poem. I was so embarrassed that my bottom lip started to tremble and my eyes burned, so I bit my lip and tried to regulate my breathing through my nose. 

Suddenly, I felt a tender pair of lips brush against my cheek. 

"I may not love you, but I do have feelings for you, Taehyung," Yoongi whispered, and I could feel his lips forming the words on my burning cheek. 

I turned to look at him, finding a gummy smile on his face. I told you it was beautiful. You even got me to cry," he chuckled, wiping a tear off of my cheek. 

I was so happy that I couldn't even speak. I could only smile like an idiot as he found my hand, lacing our fingers together. 

We stayed like that for the remainder of class.