Deer Luhan,

Innuendo, innuendo everywhere, and not a trace of Queen.

Leigh

I awoke to a familiar roar of fury and discovered Lay already sitting up in bed, looking as though he was pretending he wasn’t there.

“What have you done now?” I asked him, pawing sleep out of my eyes.  Lay wilted.

“Nothing,” he protested, his classic “I’m innocent” look on his face.  I was learning not to trust it.

“Lay, do you want me to challenge you on that?”

He wrinkled his nose, but before he could reply, the door burst open and an enraged Kris appeared.  He was only in boxers of the Spongebob Squarepants variety – something I’d discovered during my time with EXO was that all of them only slept in boxers from time to time, though those who knew I was a girl tended to take pity on my heart and the blood vessels in my nose and actually wear pyjamas – so I got a wonderful view of his abs before I caught sight of the padlock that somebody had clipped in a totally inappropriate place.  I clapped a hand over my mouth, trying to hold back my urge to snort and laugh, but it came out anyway.  Lay was failing miserably at hiding a smile.

“Okay, which one of you was it?” Kris demanded.  “Chen, Tao and Xiumin are like this as well, so it has to be one of you two.”

Right on cue, Chen, Tao and Xiumin also appeared in the doorway.  Xiumin and Chen were wearing light t-shirts, so the only other abs eye candy was Tao (his underwear sported Scooby Doo, and I was pretty sure he'd stolen them from Baekhyun), but I was soon distracted by the padlocks.  It was all wholly inappropriate, but they were so angry and looked so ridiculous I couldn’t hold back my laughter anymore.  Lay, just what the hell were you thinking this time?

“Wow,” said Lay.  “If you lot look like twerps, I must look like a right idiot too.”  He clambered out of bed and I saw that he, like the rest, had also been padlocked.  Who does that to themselves?

Uh, Lay, apparently, another part of my brain reminded myself.  This was the guy who’d shaved off half his own eyebrow so that nobody else would think it was him, after all.

The four in the doorway swivelled around to stare accusingly at me.

“What?” I demanded, sitting up.  The duvet slithered off the bed and I realised that I was the only one dressed in anything vaguely decent.  Luhan’s pyjamas were a surprisingly good fit and extremely comfortable.

“You have the keys,” said Chen, pointing to my bedpost.  “Unlock us.”

I coughed in alarm.  You what, now?  I am so not going there.  “You guys do realise you can just get rid of your problems by taking your boxers off, right?”

Four jaws dropped open, along with a whistle from Lay and a mutter of something that sounded like “is that supposed to be an innuendo?”

“Why didn’t we think of that?” Tao demanded, hands immediately going to his waistband.

“Oh God!” I yelled, covering my eyes.  “Not in front of me!”

“Whoops,” I heard him say.  “Sorry, Luhan, I forgot you were a virmffn—”

“Okay, out,” said Kris’ voice.  “Problem solved.  Luhan, you’re a horrible child.  Don’t do this again.”

The door shut with a snick, but I didn’t dare open my eyes until a laughing Lay prised my hands away from my face.  I looked up at him, flushing a little and trying to keep my eyes away from his dimple.

“What was that about?” I protested.  “Lay, I know it was you and you’re doing the eyebrow thief thing again….”

He sat down on the bed beside me.  “I figured you needed light relief after last night.  I was originally going to padlock you, too, but you weren’t wearing boxers and then I figured it would be inappropriate….”

“Lay!”  I punched him on the shoulder and he winced, but he was still laughing.

“I can’t believe they didn’t just think of taking them off.  You should have seen your face when Tao tried to undress—”

“I don’t want to know.”  I shook my head.  “I just don’t want to know.”

Chuckling, he slid off my bed and headed over to the closet.

“Hide your eyes, darling.  Don’t want them to burn from corrupted innocence while I change.”

“Why do people think you’re the innocent one?”

He turned and shot me a dazzling beam.  His dimple made him look like an angel.

“Oh yeah,” I muttered.  That was why.  I slumped back on my bed with my eyes shut.

A minute or two later, there was a creak and the mattress dipped.  I inched an eye open to see Lay sitting there, now dressed in a pair of dark blue jeans and a black polo shirt and putting on a pair of Naruto socks.  Figuring it was safe, I opened my eyes properly and sat up.

“What happened on your ‘run’ last night?” Lay asked me.  “And how did you end up on the helipad?  Don’t try to tell me you snuck past us in the foyer.  Our manager and Tao were there pretty much the entire night waiting for you to come back once we figured you were missing.”

“Luhan dropped me back by helicopter,” I told him.  “Can I explain the rest with Xiumin here?  It’s kind of traumatic and I only want to go through it once.”

Lay didn’t appear to process anything beyond my first sentence.

“By helicopter?” he demanded, incredulous.  “But Luhan’s a total wuss when it comes to heights—”

“He told me to jump off a twenty-five-storey building and snatched me out of mid-air,” I murmured, lying back down and closing my eyes as I remembered how sure and confident his grip had been.  It hadn’t been as comforting as a certain somebody’s hug, but then I probably would have fainted if Sehun had been the one to rescue me.

I didn’t realise I’d said that out loud until Lay dug out his phone and busily set about texting somebody.

“I will tell him that,” Lay said.  “Sehun can start practising air stunts so he can quite literally sweep you off your feet the next time he sees you.”

“Yah,” I grumbled, but I didn’t get a chance to complain further because the door opened and a wild – or rather, impeccably groomed – Kris appeared with a babble of Chinese that I processed as “Yo, Luhan, you’ve made headlines” because of the way he was holding up his phone.

“Apparently you’re filming an action movie,” he told me, tossing me the phone.  It was only when I caught it that I noticed the cover and recognised it as Tao’s.  Kris’ phone clearly hadn’t recovered – and probably wasn’t going to – after the mall.  Whoops.

I couldn’t be bothered to do more than skim the article, which was titled Bambi’s Grown Up!  EXO’s Luhan, No Longer Afraid Of Heights?, but the pictures caught my eye.  There were several of me running down the streets with people on my tail, two of me clinging to the pole in that metro train, and one very grainy, low-quality one that looked like it had been zoomed in on a lot in which two figures seemingly standing on thin air could be made out.  The dark clothing on the dark background made it difficult to make anything out beyond Luhan’s pink hair, but the slice of neon red sign in the background led me to believe it was of me a