I wrote a college romance where he knows almost immediately that she's the one.

The courses went on, and the year passed with an almost effortless rhythm. Then, one afternoon in science class, she walked through the door, and for a moment, everything else seemed to lose its importance.

The book on my desk remained open, its pages waiting patiently beneath my hands, but the words had become meaningless. My eyes had abandoned them entirely. They were fixed instead on the girl standing at the front of the room, and I remember thinking that beauty had no business looking so real. She looked less like someone who had simply walked into class and more like something an artist had spent a lifetime imagining before finally finding the courage to put onto canvas.

Her blonde hair was gathered into a bun, effortless in the way only certain kinds of beauty can be, with a few delicate strands escaping as though even they refused to be contained. A mandatory mask covered the lower half of her face, concealing the very features I suddenly wanted more than anything to see, and somehow that only made her more impossible to look away from. There was something almost cruel about it—the suggestion of a smile hidden beneath fabric, the unanswered question of what the rest of her face might reveal. My mind began completing what my eyes could not, and every possibility seemed more beautiful than the last.

But it was her eyes that held me.

There are people you look at, and then there are people who make you forget that you are looking at all. She had the kind of presence that quietly rearranged the room around her. Desks became scenery. Voices dissolved into background noise. The fluorescent lights above us suddenly seemed too ordinary for someone like her to be standing beneath them. I could hear the teacher speaking, pages turning, chairs shifting against the floor, yet all of it felt impossibly distant. She had stepped into the room, and without knowing my name, without saying a word to me, she had somehow become the only thing in it.

I wanted to memorize her before I had even met her.

The curve of her eyes when she glanced toward someone speaking. The way the light caught the loose strands of blonde hair near her temples. The small movements of her hands. The quiet grace with which she carried herself, unaware—or perhaps completely aware—of the fact that someone several desks away had forgotten how to read a sentence.

I had seen beautiful women before. Of course I had. But this felt different. Beauty had always seemed like something easily recognized and just as easily moved past. This was something else entirely. This was the kind of beauty that made you curious. The kind that made you ache to know the person inside it. I did not simply want to see what was hidden behind the mask. I wanted to know what made her laugh hard enough to forget herself. I wanted to know which songs she played too loudly when she was alone, what frightened her, what she loved, what made her angry, what thoughts occupied her when the rest of the world had gone quiet.

And perhaps that was what unsettled me most.

She had only just walked into the room, and already I wanted to know everything.