STRANGER; 낯선 사람 - taekook; vmin

11. can i someday find my time?

The eldest in the class, bearing grey hair strands next to his temples, raised his hand. I pointed to let him speak, and he associated aesthetica with physical qualities, which was pure nonsense to what we were studying, but I didn't let him know that. I let his answer be, and continued onto the next student that offered something similar and just as equally wrong. Many students spoke, one or two got very close to what we were supposed to be discussing, but none of them got it right.

I let them argue and have the discussion nonetheless, for it was better for them to talk and stimulate their thinking instead of being silent.

"Aesthetica..." I started. "Is not about a handsome man, or a beautiful woman, a beautiful muse, regarding her or his physical appearance. Beauty as we know is limiting when it comes to aesthetics. It's about world perception, sensitive knowledge and the feeling it evokes on an individual", my eyes trailed through the students until they laid on Jungkook. "Vulnerability."

He had his chin resting on his hand, not letting those big dark irises leave me for a second. No one had a greater interest in what I was saying than the one who wasn't enrolled in this class.

"And if you cannot see a beautiful muse through pages, how can you say that's beauty? You won't forget her. Or him. Because what is beautiful is how he makes you feel, how he makes you see the world through his lenses, he pokes you and makes you question yourself, makes you uncomfortable because he's nothing like you've ever seen before... And damn, isn't that beautiful?"

That was the very first time he looked away from me, almost shy all of a sudden. And so I brought my attention back to the rest of the class, with a subtle smirk on my lips and hoping that no one noticed me talking to one person instead of forty. A few women nodded with their attentive eyes on me, and so I carried on with my class feeling a lot more confident after getting my point across, relating Baumgarten's work with Plato's and Kant's as a preparation for their assignment.

"Write a three page essay relating Plato's aesthetics to Baumgarten's, what are their similarities? Where do they diverge? You have two weeks from now", my tanned left hand wrote the deadline on the whiteboard, clumsy handwriting being just enough for them to understand. "Class dismissed."

A disturbance of notebooks closing, pencil cases being thrown into backpacks and duffle bags took over the once silenced classroom, and their youthful bodies moved out of that place as soon as they humanly could while I patiently organized my books and pretended to pay no attention to Jungkook's gaze on me, the only body out there that was immobile. A couple of students came to talk to me, the usual ones that put way too much effort into an optional greek literature course.

The classroom was slowly emptied out, noise following my students out of there, so after neatly piling my books and putting them under my armpit, I looked over at Jungkook. He stayed seated, waiting.

"Coffee?"

He raised his eyebrows suggestively, hiding his lips behind his hand while sitting back relaxed and confident. I walked up the stairs towards the doors and out of that place, being followed right away. Looking at him from up close, he looked younger, sporting shaggy locks, wavy and effortless in a morning that I didn't put on extra perfume. His cologne smelled fresh, and mixed with body soap, it seemed as though he had just gotten out of a shower, with a pretty white shirt that hid his muscles but revealed a few inches of his chest. An embroidered lily decorated the left side, alongside white buttons, delicate details that made an ordinary look seem special, paired with black trousers and boots that weren't fit for our hot weather and almost clear sky if it weren't for the fine dust.

We walked through the excessively green campus side by side, until I suddenly felt my books move under my arm and stopped walking to see what it was. Jungkook took the three books that didn't fit in my bag and I had been carrying around under my armpit and carried them for me without saying a word or giving me a chance to say that there was no need for that.