Look Me In The Eye [Solangelo]

Chapter 1

Somehow Will had managed to make it to twenty-four without finding his soulmate. Okay, he was being melodramatic, but compared to all of his friends it seemed like a hell of a long time to wait. Honestly, though, it could be worse. He could be Percy. He'd known Annabeth for his entire life—and her eyes were gray. Gray. The color that apparently replaced the color of your soulmate's eyes in your own vision until you saw them for the first time. It was almost painful that it took her so long to realize she hadn't been able to tell what color her father's favorite tie was until her first day of pre-school, when she was sent home early after being bit. By Percy. It was an interesting story if nothing else.

Apparently his soulmate's eye color was brown. A lot of things in life were brown, but Will had a pretty hard time telling them apart from things that were gray. Tree bark was brown. Hair and skin and chocolate could be shades of brown. A predominant amount of his life was gray because of this, he supposed, but it didn't bother him. Gray was beautiful. To be honest he wasn't sure if he was ready for half of his life to snap into some weird color that would probably give him a headache.

He tried not to think about it, mostly. Tried to just get on with his regular life as best he could and ignore the fact that there was someone out there who thought the sky was gray. That one day their whole world would be thrown out of wack and...And Will just couldn't figure out how he was supposed to fall in love with anyone.

The idea that one day everything would be normal and then it wouldn't, that that in a second a color he couldn't even imagine would swarm his vision and he'd be expected to fall in love with a person whose eyes were the trigger of it—the idea kept him inside most of the time. Kept him from making eye contact as often as possible. His friends understood. For the most part. He was lucky, they only ever asked him to come to parties when it was something really important. Which it was. Hazel had finally finished her degree in computer graphics—and if Will was being completely honest, Hazel was his favorite. She was the little sister he never had and he would do anything for her. Even if that included meeting her actual older siblings and making awkward small talk with her parents while he waited for an appropriate amount of time pass before their friends all bugged out and left to get fall-down drunk. Which he also didn't do much of, because the prospect of waking up with a hangover and the ability to see a new color was just too much to handle. He might really have a breakdown if that happened. He liked to think his anxiety meds were working but...there were just some things they didn't help with.

"Listen," Hazel said, gray fingers loose on the steering wheel. She was driving slow enough that the gray of the trunks and the budding green nubs on the trees didn't even blur together. The sodas were buckled into the seatbelts of the backseat—Percy and Jason decided they needed to have a contest to see who could chug the fastest and Leo couldn't stop them. Now all of their snapchats had screenshots of Jason mid-belch. Kinda worth it. "I know that you don't like meeting new people," She said.

He scoffed. "Understatement."

She rolled her eyes. "The only new people there will be my parents and my brother and sister. Somehow I seriously doubt that any of them are your soulmate."

"I know," he groaned. "I just—"

"I get it. It's scary. And everyone in my family does have brown eyes—but hey, so do I," She said. "And I'm not your soulmate."

"Good," He said. "You snore." Her fist landed on his shoulder and he rubbed the sting out if it, laughing.

"You know what I mean." She pulled into the driveway behind an unfamiliar car that hadn't been there when they left. Her deep gray eyes stared into his when she turned. What would he do when they changed? "Besides. You don't have to stay with your soulmate—a lot of people are doing it now, it's 2018. Live a little. Fuck the system."