Deer Luhan,

At first, I felt like dying from humiliation.  Then I felt like dying from excitement.  And now I feel like dying from heartbreak, terror, mortification, confusion, feels, and a certain somebody’s adorably cute way of expressing himself with embarrassment.

WHAT IS OH SEHUN DOING TO ME?  HELP, PLEASE!

Leigh

Kai found me at seven-thirty the next morning in the practice room in much the same position as Chen had once fallen asleep in the dorm living room: I was lying (asleep, until he jumped on my stomach with an excited cackle) on the ground with my arms spread wide and my feet up in the air, resting precariously on the CD player.

I came awake winded and doubling up as he bounced off me, and nearly sent the CD player flying with my flailing feet.

“You drool when you sleep!” he told me chirpily.  “Luhan would die if that gets out and people though it was Ree Lee him.”

I coughed weakly and rolled over.  It was far too early in the morning.  I hadn’t even had coffee.

“You’re a horrible person,” I wheezed out.  He just grinned and backed towards the door.

“I’m on it, Five.  Two strong espresso shots and some water, okay?  Stay here.”

I didn’t even have enough breath to tell him I wasn’t going anywhere when he’d jumped on me like that.  I wouldn’t have been surprised if his attack had created a dent in the floor under me.

After a couple of lonely minutes on the cold floor, I picked myself up and dusted myself off.  My stomach still hurt a lot, and I suspected it might bruise.  D*mn kid.  I stretched, trying to open up my diaphragm.  It really hurt, but after forcing myself to do a couple of jumping jacks, the pain dulled to a slow throb, and I got on with my usual stretching routine.

The door opened and a wild Taemin appeared.

“Hey, Luhan,” he said, looking around.  I hastily tugged my hoodie down to hide my chest compressor, a sliver of which had been on show when I reached up to stretch my arms out properly.  “Is Kai here?”

“Coffee errand,” said Kai’s voice from behind him, and Taemin moved aside.  Kai was balancing three cups as he manoeuvred around the door.

“Ooh!” said Taemin, reaching for a cup.  “Is one for me?”

Kai shook his head.  “Not unless you want Luhan to turn into the Hulk.”

I gratefully accepted the three cups he proffered to me and downed them all as fast as I could.  Taemin stared at me as I shook my head rapidly, feeling the familiar zing as my brain started up and the rest of my body switched from autopilot to Leigh-manual.  I beamed at Kai.  His response, like Sehun’s whenever I’d just drunk coffee, was to back off.

“Wow,” said Taemin.  “That is one creepy smile.”

“Yeah, we live with this every morning,” Kai told him.  “The coffee in Europe did something to him, I swear.”

“Did what?” I protested.

“You look like you’re an old creepy guy with a life ambition of finding kids to give sweets to,” Taemin told me.  Kai and I both looked at him, confused.  Kai’s expression was the first to clear.

“You know, Taemin,” he said, “there’s a single word that encapsulates all that and it’s e.”

“Hey!” I exclaimed, offended.  He snickered as he dodged out of the way of my punch.  Taemin stood there for a moment and then smiled brightly.

“Yeah, e!  That’s the word I was looking for!”

Unfortunately, his reflexes were extremely quick and there was no way I would have landed the punch I threw at him until he deigned to stand still.

“Anyway, Kai, Minho’s off filming a drama and the other three are singing, so I’ve got nobody to dance with.”  Taemin pouted.  “Join me?”

Kai exchanged a nervous glance with me.  I probably should have refused, but Taemin looked like a kicked puppy, and I was never one to turn kicked puppies away.

“Dancing with other people is fun,” I said with a shrug.  Taemin cheered.

“Hi, Five!”

I eyed him suspiciously.  “What has Kai been telling you?”

“Me?”  Kai pointed to himself, blinking innocently.  “Nothing.”

“I don’t get the joke at all,” Taemin went on.  “It’s just kind of funny that you randomly got named nicknamed after a number and your reaction makes it funnier because I’ve never seen you get riled up over something.”

It was with great difficulty that I forced myself to relax and smile at him.  Right.  Luhan’s easy-going, and I have a hot temper.  Remind me again, Luhan, why did you choose me?

“And Kai,” Taemin said, turning back to his friend, “when are you going to teach me how to do those air flairs?  They looked so cool.”

Kai covered half his face with a hand, biting a lip, and shot me a nervous glance.

“Luhan does them much better, hyung,” he said.

Taemin turned to me expectantly.  I sighed.  There was that kicked puppy look again.

“Are there any mats?” I asked him.

This time, it was Taemin who received Kai’s nervous glance, but Taemin didn’t appear at all affected.

“Of course!” he replied with a bright grin.  “They’re in The Other Room.”

He made quote marks, and that made it sound ominous.

“Which other room?” I asked.  “Wait, do I even want to know?”

“Oh, hyung, no,” groaned Kai as Taemin made a flourish and pointed at the wall, indicating the room next door.  “No, we are not stealing mats from our TVXQ sunbaes.  What if they catch us?”

My jaw dropped.  TVXQ, in the building?  Yes please.

“We are so getting those mats,” I told Taemin, heading for the door immediately.  Stealth mode: activated.

Laughing, Taemin left a groaning Kai and scampered after me.

To my great disappointment, the room next door was empty, but, I reflected as Taemin slid back the mirrors into the storeroom at the back, if we nicked their mats, it meant that one of them would probably come knocking to get them back.  I might actually get a chance to meet Shim Changmin.  That in and of itself merited theft in any warped fan girl’s mind, even if theft was a criminal offence.

Taemin helped me haul a pair of large mats back into our practice room and set them up on the floor, and I set about teaching him a low flair to begin with.  I saw Kai tracking us with his eyes as Taemin picked it up, but he didn’t dare join in because he was supposed to already know.

“I’m just checking you’re doing it right,” he shut Taemin down when the older boy complained about Kai just standing there.  “Luhan can’t when he’s actually doing it alongside you.”

Taemin learnt extremely quickly, probably because, as he ‘reminded’ me around mid-morning, he’d been dancing for years and had built up many of the core muscles he needed to be able to do a few gymnastic manoeuvres.

“Oh, and by the way,” he added as I came down from demonstrating an air flair to him, “why are you wearing a bulletproof vest?”

I blinked at him, confused, and then caught sight of Kai mouthing: “tuck your t-shirt in – your chest compressor’s showing!”

“Oh, sh*t,” I muttered to myself, frantically doing as I was told and wracking my brains for a decent excuse.  Because I’m a bulletproof kind of boy didn’t seem like the best option to run with.  “Um, well, you know how Baekhyun got shot—”

“Oh yeah, you were supposed to be in the firing line with the original choreography, weren’t you?” said Taemin.  “I don’t blame you, actually.  Rumour has it that some of Baekhyun’s stans have been trying to get hold of guns and stuff to shoot you.”

“Hyung!” exclaimed Kai, appalled.

“Ah, sorry.”  Taemin blinked.  “I shouldn’t have said that, should I?”

I winced.  “I could have done with not knowing that.”

Taemin opened his mouth to say more, but I couldn’t help remembering the first time I’d met him and the excruciating things he’d come out with then.  It made me intensely glad that I’d been shoved into taking over from an EXO member rather than a SHINee member, because I had a feeling that, had Taemin found out I was a girl, the world would have known within a matter of hours, and I would have been lynched by fans upon disembarking from the plane and the SHINee member in Luhan’s position would most definitely have been killed by the mafia.

To my ego’s satisfaction, Taemin found the actual air flair much harder than the normal flair, and just as I had done when I first started learning it, he fell a lot.  After nearly landing on his head for a fourteenth time in a row, he