KAIROSCLEROSIS || lee mark

chapter 1

a mystery; that's what she was.

...at least in mark's eyes.

there were only two things he knew about the girl with the black curls he'd always see sneaking around campus (aside from purely physical details, of courses).

one of them, was the fact that she was a fire shifter — something her flaming orange eyes gave away.

the second was that she was taken.

now it may seem pretty weird to you that he knew about her relationship status while not even knowing her name, and believe me, he thinks it's weird too, but it wasn't like he had asked about it.

yet mark could still clearly remember that one specific school trip his whole grade had gone on two years ago.

the overnight-trip had been requested by their trainers, with the reason of having them get a different kind of exercise than all the shifting-training they did with them in school.

so they took them to the beach for two days to do all kinds of different things: paddle surfing, canoe, kayak, scuba diving and snorkelling ... literally anything you could imagine.

but at the end of the day, they were still just a bunch of seventeen year old, hormonal kids on a school trip, and you should know what that means.

at night, once the trainers were sleeping, more than half of the students snuck out and went back to the beach.

it was still a mystery to mark how they got away with it, but apparently none of the adults noticed, despite all the noise they made.

this girl from their grade had then packed out a beer bottle that she claimed to have snuck into her room and drunk just before sneaking out.

and i'm sure you aren't surprised that her friend then came up with the fabulous idea to play spin the bottle.

mark loathed that game, he really did.

but what choice did he have, with more than ten other kids there pressuring him?

exactly.

however, he did remember very well that there was one person who refused to join the game. 

"i'm not playing. i have a boyfriend, there's no way i'll go around smooching random people." the girl had deadpanned, not believing that her friend had actually been about to make her play.

her raven locks were still wet — though he wasn't sure if it was because of showering or because of the day they spent at the beach — and her amber orange eyes glistened with a hint of anger as she glared at her friend.

mark was pretty sure that she wasn't all that shorter than him — or maybe she just didn't look like it because of her strong presence.

'why couldn't i stand up for myself too...?'

afraid to get judged for it, he had stayed quiet during the game, simply praying that the bottle wouldn't land on him. which it didn't — luckily.

but still, he watched in both awe and jealously as the girl stomped away from them, back towards the beach cabins they were staying at.

yeah, that all was two years ago.

mark was about to turn nineteen now, and pretty sure that he was perfectly capable of standing up for himself.

about the girl... he still had no idea who she was.

sometimes he'd see her around school, walking to class, and she'd get paired up with his friends for training sometimes — just never with mark himself.

as far as he knew, she wasn't in any of his classes either.

it was as if the universe didn't want them to meet at all, no matter how interested in her he was.

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is there even anyone here who didn't read adomania?