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Jimin first hears her soulmate’s voice on a Thursday, six months after moving into her off-campus apartment.
It’s midterm season. Her room is a warzone of color-coded flashcards, half-empty coffee cups, and the tragic remains of a microwave burrito. She’s two energy drinks deep, her stomach protesting every swallow, her brain sluggish and crumbling under the weight of abnormal psych definitions she swears weren’t this hard in lecture. Her eyes glaze over the phrase “dissociative identity disorder” for the fifth time.
And then—
“No no no, if I fail this quiz I’m going to die and then haunt Yizhuo for not waking me up in time—”
Jimin jerks upright, pen flying out of her hand. Her chair creaks dangerously beneath her as she spins in a full circle, heart hammering like she’s been caught in a jump scare.
The voice isn’t loud. It’s soft. Familiar in a strange, delicate way. A little high-pitched, breathy at the edges, threaded with frantic panic and the kind of despair usually reserved for Shakespearean deaths or burnt ramen. And somehow—completely sincere.
Jimin blinks at the empty space of her bedroom like it might explain something. But there’s no one there. Just the hum of her desk fan and the gentle fizz of her drink.
The voice faded as quickly as it came. Like it never existed.
She stays frozen for a moment, pen on the floor, body tense.
Then she very, very slowly reaches for her highlighter like she didn’t just have a mild supernatural experience.
Jimin tells no one.
Not Aeri, who would scream and demand names, dates, zodiac signs, and an emergency group chat for theories.
Not her mom, who already thinks Jimin’s behind in life for not hearing her soulmate at sixteen like her annoyingly perfect cousin. ("Love runs early in our family," her mom had said on the phone. "You should’ve heard something by now, sweetie. Maybe try thinking louder.")
So Jimin says nothing.
She just… waits.
Because it doesn’t happen again.
Not for days.
Not for weeks.
Jimin starts to think maybe she imagined it—some hallucination cooked up by caffeine and a neglected sleep schedule. The brain does wild things under academic stress.
It’s a Tuesday night in November. The wind outside howls against the windows, and Jimin is in the middle of her usual bedtime routine: school spirit hoodie, fuzzy socks, face mask, and brushing her teeth with the enthusiasm of a limp noodle.
And suddenly—
“I swear to God, if I have to share another group project with Mr. ‘I’ll circle back to that,’ I will become a weapon. A blunt one.”
Jimin snorts mid-brush, chokes, and nearly spits toothpaste all over the mirror. She grips the edge of the sink, laughing through the foam.
It’s them. Again.
And this time? Even more dramatic.
She rinses her mouth and leans on the counter, staring at her reflection. Her lips curve into a grin that she tries—fails—to suppress. There’s something about the voice that gets under her skin in the best way. Like a puzzle piece sliding into place, even if the rest of the picture is still missing.
From then on, it becomes a thing.
A rhythm.
There’s no control. No schedule. No context. Just thoughts—raw and ridiculous—slipping into Jimin’s head like a whispered secret from the universe.
Always when they’re panicking. Always when something is just too much.
“If I get rained on one more time, I’m committing treason.”
“I don’t even remember taking these notes. Did gremlins write this?”
Once—once—during what must’ve been a particularly spirited karaoke session for her soulmate, Jimin is lying half-asleep with a heating pad on her stomach when the voice blares into her head:
“I’m on the Next Level—”
And then—nothing. Absolute radio silence.
Jimin lies motionless on her bed, blinking up at the ceiling. The lo-fi playlist she had playing feels absurd now.
“…What the fuck,” she mutters into the dark.
She likes that song. But the way it echoed in her skull—full of breathless energy and chaotic conviction, like someone belting into the void from the backseat of a car at 1 a.m.—when she was trying to rest? Deeply unhelpful. Still… it was oddly charming.
It makes her smile. And sigh. And feel things she absolutely does not have time for midterm week.
She used to just think of them as the voice—some anonymous neural glitch or cosmic joke. But that night, the nickname starts to feel impersonal. Like calling a fire “the heat.”
They deserved a name. Something that fit.
She lands on it later that week, sitting by the window of her apartment with a mug of peppermint tea and a half-eaten bagel she doesn’t remember making.
Snow drifts lazily past the streetlamp outside. Her breath fogs the glass as she leans into the cold pane, chin on her arm.
And she thinks, That’s what they feel like.
Not the snow itself, but the feeling of it. That hush in the air when the world slows down. That strange contrast of cold against skin while your chest feels oddly warm. Sudden. Startling. Gentle in a way that still leaves you shivering.
Their voice always hits like that—unexpected, sharp at the edges, but comforting somehow. Like winter.
So she calls them Winter.
Not aloud. Not in her notes or texts. Just in her head, tucked safely between mental bullet points and emotional overreactions.
Winter is unpredictable but oddly soothing. Winter has a cadence that lingers—almost musical, like poetry written in mental spiral font. Jimin can never quite tell gender, but emotion? That she feels in full.
There’s a rhythm to the way their thoughts unravel. A tilt in every mental sentence, a breath between words, like someone trying really hard to keep it together while life keeps knocking over their coffee. The thoughts are never meant for her. Just… drifting. Cast into the universe like the static of someone thinking too loudly in a quiet room. Background noise, somehow bleeding into her foreground.
She starts waiting for it.
Not just the voice—but them. Whoever they are.
The moment their thoughts slip into her mind, it’s like the hum of an old record player—wobbly and full of life. A reminder that someone else is out there feeling things just as deeply, just as weirdly.
Even if she can’t respond.
Even if she has no idea who they are.
It doesn’t matter.
Winter is real.
And Jimin—against all logic, all romantic denial, and all stern warnings from her overworked frontal lobe—starts waiting for the next snowfall in her head.
By second semester, Jimin has resigned herself to never knowing.
Soulmate voices weren’t always guaranteed. Some people went their whole lives only hearing a few snippets. Others? Full conversations. There were no rules. No patterns. Just fate being selectively loud.
Aeri, of course, got the second kind.
“Yizhuo’s thoughts are loud,” she complains one morning, stabbing her fork into an over-sauced campus omelet. “She was debating whether to put pineapple on her lunch sandwich and ended up in a thirty-minute existential crisis.”
Jimin raises her coffee, bleary-eyed. “To loud gays and emotional sandwiches.”
Aeri flips her off, but there’s no bite to it.
Jimin hears Winter again while lying on the quad lawn, her psych textbook balanced across her knees and sunglasses perched just barely on her nose. The sun is warm, her ankle itches, and she’s about one paragraph away from giving up entirely when—
“Okay. Okay. Just breathe. You’ve survived worse. You’ve survived finals, group chats, and the time you accidentally liked your crush’s photo from two years ago. This is fine.”
Her grip tightens. The pen nearly snaps in her hand.
Her crush?
Her soulmate had a crush?
Which… shouldn’t bother her. People date before meeting their soulmates all the time. That’s the normal thing to do. That’s what dating apps are for.
Still, it feels like a rock in her stomach.
She lies back on the grass and stares up at the blue, too-perfect sky.
“Maybe she didn’t notice.”
She whispers to herself, “Nope. I heard you loud and clear.”
The next time it happens, Jimin’s at a campus café, still half-asleep, tapping her fingers on the counter as she orders her usual iced americano.
Behind her, someone says softly, “Hey, can I get a green tea latte?”
Her breath catches mid-tap.
Not in her head. Not a phantom echo. Out loud.
She turns—slowly, carefully, like her spine is made of glass.
It’s her.
Minjeong.
The girl from her psych class. Front row. Cute cardigans and sharp eyeliner. Barely speaks. Takes notes in color-coded gel pens and has the softest laugh Jimin’s ever heard. She never once imagined—
“Shit. Did she hear me order that? I knew I should’ve picked something cooler.”
Jimin’s brain bluescreens.
Because yes. That’s Winter’s voice. And Winter is Minjeong.
Minjeong is her soulmate.
And Jimin… is fucked.
It all makes sense.
The scattered karaoke. The late-night spirals. The dramatic quiz panic. There was even that one time—months ago—when Minjeong accidentally liked a photo from deep in Jimin’s Instagram. A blurry mirror selfie from her first year, captioned with three lightning bolt emojis and criminally bad lighting.
Jimin had noticed the notification, blinked, shrugged it off. People fell into social media rabbit holes all the time.
She didn’t think much of it.
But now?
Now it hits her like a delayed punchline.
Minjeong had spiraled about that. Winter had spiraled about that.
And Jimin—oblivious idiot that she is—just thought, huh, cute cardigan girl must’ve been bored.
Jimin stares into her coffee cup like it might rearrange her fate for her. She’d spent months pining over Minjeong from two rows back in class, convinced she didn’t stand a chance.
Minjeong never looked at her twice. Never seemed to notice when Jimin ran into the doorframe trying to get a better look at her Kuromi binder stickers. Never smiled back when Jimin held the library door open for way too long just in case. Minjeong was quiet. Intimidating in the way soft things often were—delicate, composed, unreadable.
And now—
Now she’s her soulmate.
“Okay, Minjeong, act normal. Don’t say something weird. Don’t babble about your binder stickers again. Just smile.”
Minjeong smiles at her.
Jimin drops her straw.
Aeri finds her in their apartment that night face-down on the couch.
“What happened?”
“I found her.”
“Who?”
“My soulmate.”
Aeri shrieks. “WHO?”
Jimin mumbles into the cushion. “Minjeong.”
“WHAT.”
“I know.”
“MINJEONG MINJEONG?” Aeri’s already pacing. “Front-row, sparkly stickers, never talks Minjeong?”
“She talks. I hear her all the time. It’s just—” Jimin groans, flipping over dramatically. “Now I can’t talk to her without hearing her voice and knowing she’s my soulmate and also remembering I once laughed at her mental breakdown over a vending machine.”
Aeri falls to her knees in theatrical despair. “You’re so doomed.”
“I know.”
Everything gets worse after that.
Every time Minjeong speaks in class, Jimin forgets what words are. She answers incorrectly during discussion. Accidentally calls Freud “Freudie baby” under her breath. Can’t make eye contact during group reviews.
And then there are the thoughts.
“Okay. Just ask her if she wants to go over lecture notes. That’s normal, right? Just two people… bonding over… neurotransmitters.”
“Her hair’s really soft-looking. Is that weird? It’s probably weird.”
“Maybe she’s already met her soulmate and they’re really pretty and—stop it. Focus. Focus.”
Jimin spends the next twenty minutes pretending to die by pencil stabbing.
It’s Aeri who saves her.
Or dooms her further.
“Come to the study group,” she says, tossing Jimin a granola bar without looking. “Yizhuo’s coming. Minjeong too.”
Jimin’s heart stops and she sits upright. “Minjeong?”
Aeri smirks like a cat who’s found a fresh box of drama. “You’ve been floundering long enough.”
“I’ll say something weird.”
“You always say something weird.”
“She’ll think I’m possessed.”
“She already thinks you’re cool.”
“She what?”
Aeri walks away.
Minjeong shows up to the study group in a cream sweater and glasses, hair tied loosely back like it’s just barely cooperating.
Jimin has to stop herself from giving away too many compliments and coming off weird.
They sit in a circle on the floor with snacks and notebooks, highlighters scattered like fallen leaves.
Minjeong ends up next to her.
Jimin can’t breathe.
“Hey,” Minjeong says, soft and uncertain.
“Hey,” Jimin says back. She’s pretty sure her voice cracks in five different frequencies.
“Okay okay okay she’s saying hey that’s fine don’t be weird—god she smells really nice what is that shampoo—”
Jimin chokes on her pretzels.
They study.
Kind of.
Mostly, Jimin glances sideways while Minjeong takes notes in perfect loops and pokes her soft cheek with the end of her pen when she's thinking. Yizhuo leans against Aeri. Aeri pretends not to be smitten. Jimin pretends to understand psych theory.
Then, Minjeong speaks.
“I… I like your pens.”
Jimin blinks. “Huh?”
“Stupid. Stupid. She probably thinks I’m stealing her stationery ideas—”
“No, I like yours too,” Jimin blurts. “The little clouds. They’re cute.”
Minjeong lights up.
Jimin dies inside from the cuteness overload.
Later that night, Jimin lies in bed staring at the ceiling.
She hasn’t said anything about the soulmate thing. Not yet.
She doesn’t know how.
But then—
“I wish I was brave enough to tell her. But what if she doesn’t want a soulmate yet?”
Jimin bolts upright.
She grabs her phone.
[jimin]: hey are you up?
She doesn’t send it.
Not yet.
Instead, she stares at the message and writes something new.
[jimin]: would you wanna study again sometime?
She presses send.
The reply comes thirty seconds later.
[minjeong]: yes :)
They start studying together regularly.
Sometimes with Aeri and Yizhuo. Sometimes just the two of them.
Jimin finds herself falling deeper with every moment.
Minjeong is clever. Quiet in public, but sharp when she speaks. She drinks tea with lemon and has a tiny rabbit keychain on her backpack. She doodles cats in the corners of her planner and once lent Jimin a pen that had glitter inside it.
And sometimes, just sometimes, Jimin hears her thoughts drift.
“I think she’d be a good kisser.”
Jimin walks into a door.
The night it all unravels is quieter than Jimin expected. No fireworks. No stormy sky. Just two girls and the soft hum of lo-fi echoing from her laptop speaker.
They’re curled up on her bed, a blanket pooled over their legs. The psych textbook lies forgotten between them, angled crookedly as if even it gave up. The only light in the room comes from the string of fairy lights above Jimin’s headboard, casting warm, sleepy shadows across Minjeong’s face.
Minjeong’s finger traces the edge of the page absently, her other hand cupped around her tea mug, untouched for the past ten minutes. She’s quiet, eyes drifting unfocused toward the corner of the room. Her whole body is stilled—but not relaxed. Like she’s paused mid-thought and doesn’t know how to restart.
Jimin watches her from the side, every cell in her body screaming with awareness.
The smell of mint shampoo. The slope of her nose. The way her fingers twitch when she’s nervous.
Then Minjeong speaks, barely above a whisper. “Can I ask you something?”
Jimin nods, too fast, too hopeful. “Of course.”
Minjeong hesitates, eyes flicking to meet hers.
“Please say you hear me too.”
And just like that, the world freezes.
Jimin’s heart feels like it lurches up into her throat. Her grip on the blanket tightens.
She exhales—slow, like she’s been holding her breath for months.
“I do,” she says, voice trembling at the edges.
They sit in silence.
Then Minjeong laughs—small and disbelieving. It cracks halfway through, as if relief is too big to hold. She covers her mouth with one hand, eyes flickering down.
“Thank god,” she breathes.
They don’t rush it. Don’t fall into each other like a rom-com finale. There’s no dramatic kiss, no fireworks soundtrack. They just sit there.
Shoulders brushing. Knees pressed together beneath the blanket. Breathing the same air like it’s the first time it’s ever mattered. Existing in a quiet that’s never felt so full.
Jimin’s hand shifts closer, fingers ghosting against Minjeong’s.
Minjeong tilts her head, her eyes flicking over Jimin’s face like she’s committing it to memory. “I was scared,” she admits quietly.
Jimin’s lips curve, soft and honest. “I was terrified.”
Minjeong nods, something tender flickering in her eyes.
Then, gently, like gravity is guiding her, she leans in. Their foreheads press together, warm and steady.
And in that delicate space between skin and silence, a single thought comes through—crystal clear and reverent.
“You’ve always been beautiful.”
Jimin’s breath stutters.
She closes her eyes, lets it wash over her, heart fluttering in her chest like a bird behind glass.
And whispers aloud, “So have you.”
The next morning, Jimin wakes up and immediately falls out of bed.
Not metaphorically. Like, full face-first, arm-tangled, blanket-wrapped collapse into hardwood reality.
Because Minjeong is her soulmate. And not in the abstract "ooh, a mysterious beautiful stranger" kind of way—but in the “you’ve watched this girl eat dry cereal in class with a mechanical pencil between her teeth” kind of way.
And now Jimin is supposed to, what? Just carry on? Study? Breathe like a normal person?
Absolutely not.
It’s one thing to daydream about the quiet girl in front-row cardigans. Another thing entirely to realize that every panicked, chaotic, dramatic spiral that’s been echoing in her head for months is Minjeong. That Winter—her Winter—has been Minjeong this whole time.
Minjeong, whose face does the tiniest crinkle when she focuses.
Minjeong, who gazed at her that night so earnestly with the brightest eyes and prettiest smile.
Minjeong, who still texted wanna grab coffee? ☕️ that morning like it wasn’t the most emotionally significant conversation of either of their lives.
They meet at the library café, and everything is fine.
Totally normal.
Jimin drops her student ID. Twice.
Minjeong catches it the second time, passes it back with a smile and a napkin before Jimin can even realize she’s spilled her drink. Again. Jimin can’t tell if it’s actual soulmate telepathy or if Minjeong is just that attentive.
It’s probably both.
The problem is—Jimin hears everything now.
“She looks really nice in that blouse.”
“I hope my hair doesn’t look weird. I didn’t have time to fix it—”
“Should I mention the dream I had? No. No. Too soon. Don't wanna rush.”
Jimin nearly walks into the glass case of muffins.
Later, once they’ve found a quiet corner table near the windows, Jimin fidgets with her straw.
“Do you think it’s weird,” she asks, “that I know when you’re freaking out now?”
Minjeong frowns, looking up from her drink. “No?”
“Because it is,” Jimin insists. “It’s intimate. I feel like I’m eavesdropping on your soul.”
“You literally are my soulmate.”
“Exactly! It’s terrifying.”
Minjeong leans her chin on her palm. “Do you not want to hear me?”
“What? No! I mean, yes! I—” Jimin flails, face hot. “God. Minjeong. Please stop looking at me like that.”
“Like what? Like I already know what you’re going to say and it makes me like you more."
Jimin makes a wounded noise and covers her face with her hands. “I’m gonna die.”
Turns out, the post-reveal stage is full of unspoken tension.
The good kind.
The devastating kind.
The kind that makes Jimin hyper-aware of every little thing. The way Minjeong touches her own cheek when she’s thinking. The way she hums under her breath when writing. The way she writes her lowercase g’s with a tiny, almost imperceptible tail.
Worse? Jimin can now tell exactly when Minjeong is spiraling internally and trying not to show it.
Like during study group, when Jimin’s half-listening to a lecture recap and suddenly hears:
“She smells really good. Like bergamot and regret.”
“Don’t say anything weird. Don’t flirt. Don’t say she smells like a daydream—”
Jimin snaps her pencil in half.
Minjeong is no better.
She hides it better, sure. But every so often, Jimin hears the tiniest crack in her mental composure.
“God, I want to hold her hand so bad. But what if it’s too soon? Is it too soon? It’s probably too soon.”
Or:
“Her laugh. I want to hear it forever. Is that creepy?”
It isn’t. Not even close. Jimin thinks it’s the most romantic thing she’s ever heard.
She doesn’t know how to say that without sounding too intense.
So instead, she throws a crumpled note into Minjeong’s lap during lecture that says:
you’re thinking very loudly again, puppy
Minjeong reads it. Then looks up. Then blushes.
Jimin thinks she might pass out on the spot.
The tipping point comes during a night in the dorm lounge.
They’re supposed to be watching something dumb. Something trashy. Perfect background noise while they sit under the same blanket and pretend not to feel their knees brushing.
Jimin can’t focus.
Because Minjeong is right there, smelling like mint shampoo, sitting too close, thinking things like:
“I want to kiss her.”
“What if she doesn’t want to kiss me back?”
“What if I ruin everything?”
“Please look at me.”
Jimin turns.
Minjeong’s staring at her—wide-eyed, nervous, hopeful.
Neither of them says a word.
Then Jimin whispers, “Minjeong.”
Minjeong inhales like it’s her first breath in hours.
And before Jimin can chicken out, she cups Minjeong’s cheek, leans in, and kisses her.
It’s soft.
A little hesitant. A little warm. A lot of feelings compressed into one breathless, blinking moment.
Minjeong melts into her. Her hand curls in the front of Jimin’s shirt, anchoring herself. Jimin feels the exact second Minjeong’s thoughts go blank—static silence that matches the dizzy blur in her own mind.
Then—
“Oh my god.”
“Oh my god oh my god she kissed me I’m kissing my soulmate this is real I’m going to combust—”
Jimin pulls back, breathless, and laughs.
“Hi,” she smiles.
Minjeong blinks at her, dazed. “Hi.”
Jimin bites her lip. “So… was that okay?”
Minjeong just launches herself into Jimin’s arms and kisses her again.
From then on, everything gets… easier.
Not perfect. Not effortless. But easier.
Jimin doesn’t panic when she hears Minjeong’s anxious thoughts. Minjeong doesn’t shut down when Jimin sends her mental compliments at 3 a.m. like:
“your hair looked magical today”
“i want to marry your handwriting”
“u were so pretty i almost failed a quiz”
They fall into something soft. Something gentle. Something tender. Something that lives in the space between two minds and one fast-growing heart.
Minjeong eventually starts speaking her thoughts aloud. Not always. But often enough that Jimin doesn’t have to guess.
Jimin starts writing her thoughts down in a shared journal. Doodles. Notes. Lyrics.
Sometimes, Minjeong wakes up to a page slipped under her door that reads:
“you’re my favorite thought.”
She keeps every single one.
Aeri calls them disgustingly domestic.
Yizhuo says, “About time.”
Jimin just grins, wraps an arm around Minjeong’s waist, and says, “Whatever. She’s mine.”
Minjeong flushes but doesn’t deny it.
One night, Jimin hears it again—quiet, unguarded, sleepy and soft:
“I love her.”
And this time, Jimin doesn’t panic.
She leans in, presses her lips to Minjeong’s temple, and whispers, “I love you too.”
Minjeong blinks.
Then beams.
Then tucks herself deeper into Jimin’s chest and thinks:
“Thank God.”