Deer Luhan,

I think we were caught at the wrong time twice today.

Leigh

It wasn’t just Luhan who was unwilling to let me out of his sight after that incident.  I was pretty certain Kris would have handcuffed me to his wrist if the inconvenience and potential public interest in it hadn’t been too great of an annoyance or risk.

Their protective attitude caused problems first of all when we moved back into the dorm at the end of Tuesday evening, which I found a little bizarre considering the police had cordoned the entire floor off the previous day.  I was pretty sure it was supposed to be several weeks or something before they would be prepared to reopen the murder zone, but apparently things functioned differently in China.  Either that or Luhan had pulled some serious strings with his family friend to enable us to move back in under the reasoning that “the dorm is the last place they’d expect us to be when they know they killed someone in it.”  I also had a feeling he wanted to snoop around for clues as to why the dorm had been raided in the first place and wasn’t prepared to trust the task wholly to the police.

Of course, the manager insisted on coming with us to check that everything was okay and to help us tidy up.  After a fair amount of arguing over the phone with Kris, Luhan decided it was better if I turned up as his twin brother to help sort out the dorm and then made a show of inviting me to stay the night when the manager started giving me the evils at around two in the morning.

The harder part was sneaking me out with them the next morning to accompany them on their schedule, especially since Luhan’s father was, according to Luhan, in private care for his “heart attack” the previous day, and at least one of his oh-so-filial sons should have been with him at all times.  I’d jokingly suggested I could just hide out in the closet like last time because nobody would ever find me there, and all six boys had looked at me liked they wanted to kill something because I’d even thought of it.  Chen actually confiscated my phone and lockpicks so I couldn’t follow through.

Xiumin had half-heartedly suggested letting me stay over with Luhan’s dad, but Kris and Luhan had both vetoed it with incredibly flawed reasoning about me being a disaster magnet everywhere I went when I wasn’t with an EXO member.  I tried to contradict them on that, but unfortunately we were all aware of the fact that three out of the four times I’d been on my own, I’d run into serious trouble with the mafia.  And the fourth I’d apparently “nearly burnt the dorm down because she was cooking”.  Such drama queens.

“Letting her stay with my dad without one of us is like inviting a hitman into the apartment to kill the pair of them,” Luhan said adamantly.  “She’s coming with us.”

“So what you actually mean is you find Leigh a lot of fun to be around and you get so paranoid leaving her on her own that you’d much rather have her with you rather than somewhere you know she’s safe,” Lay concluded.  “Okay.  That makes perfect sense.”

From Luhan’s reaction, I concluded Lay was being sarcastic.

“It’s more fun for her to be with us,” Kris insisted.  “Can you imagine being cooped up for hours at a time in one room without your friends and nobody to talk to?”

“Funnily enough, that’s what I tend to do to myself every night when I go to sleep.”

There was also something more credible which Luhan glossed over about distances and Saturday morning schedules and picking up visas and times and not being able to see people to airports, as well as one of the refugees squatting with Luhan’s father being a suspected something-or-other rather unpleasant when it came to his dealings with women (he was apparently staying there because he was needed to witness in an important trial and guaranteeing his safety – or survival – until then was proving to be almost as much of a farce as Sister Act) and the men potentially being uncomfortable having a young girl around.  It looked much more like Luhan didn't trust any of the men, except his father, with me.

I wasn’t complaining about going with the boys.  Since I couldn’t go out into Beijing by myself – or, come to that, step outside the dorm by myself – tailing them to their interview and commercial endorsement sounded like a lot more fun than lounging about by myself, especially in a still half-trashed dorm that stank of disinfectant when Kris had banned me from cooking.  Not that the cooker had been fixed anyway before the poor handiman had met the mafia.

In the end, Luhan and Xiumin hustled me out of the dorm when Tao engaged the manager in a lively discussion about whether Dior or Chanel was more in this season (when the manager twigged that Tao was talking about perfume, he nearly blew through the roof demanding to know who Tao was dating and how long for), and we installed ourselves in the van.  For safety’s sake, I ended up lying on the floor in the back row so that I was totally hidden from view, and I spent most of the journey tickling their feet (Xiumin was actually more ticklish than I was, and he ended up kicking me in the face more than once by accident).  I finished up with the classic of tying their shoelaces together.  They both went sprawling the instant they got out of the van.  It was Xiumin who said they’d decided to do an all-day three-legged-race and Luhan who busted that idea by announcing that he needed to go to the toilet.

Once they’d all moved further away to conduct the actual interview and the coast was clear, I slipped out of the van and went to stand among the filming crew.  It was outdoors, so I didn’t look too out of place shivering in Luhan’s enormous, thick winter coat, with a mask and scarf obscuring most of my face and a thick, furry hat on my head.  Plenty of other people who weren’t actively involved with lights, cameras, recording or asking questions were doing exactly the same as me.

Chen caught my eye as he zoned out from whatever the Chinese man conducting the interview was saying, and he shot a surreptitious peace sign at me and winked.  I stuck my tongue out at him and pointed at the interviewer, pulling my mask down to mouth in Korean that he ought to pay attention to what the guy was saying.  Chen just gave me a helpless pout, shrugging minutely and pointing to the interpreter who was hovering at Xiumin’s shoulder.  I faked disapproval and indignation.

One month! I mouthed at him, pointing to myself.  He gave me a playful scowl, pouted again, and then ruffled his hair as he tried to listen to what the interviewer was saying.

The whole-group interview wrapped up after a while or so and some of the boys got pulled aside for individual photo shoots while the others waited patiently for their own solo interviews.  Luhan came over to me the instant the manager’s back was turned and dragged me behind the nearest building.

“Hi!” he said, pressing a freezing cold hand against my cheek.  I yelped.  “Since you’re here, do you want to have some fun?”

“What kind of fun?”

He passed me his interview questions.  “Wanna do this?  With totally honest answers?”

I passed the sheet of paper back to him.  “Luhan, I’m not doing your interview for you.”

He grinned mischievously.  “Challenge.  And your forfeit is confessing to Sehun in front of the manager when he arrives on Friday.”

I looked across at him, baffled.  “What?”

“And I’ll film it and put it up on weibo.”

“That’ll damage your reputation more than mine, you know.”

“But it’ll still be hilarious.”

“Luhan, are you trying to blackmail me to do this interview with the prospect of ruining your own reputation through a stupid game or inspiring some totally insane HunHan shippers if I don’t?”

He beamed at me.  “Pretty much, yeah.”

I snorted, trying to hide a grin as I shrugged out of his coat and he handed me the dark blue blazer he’d been wearing.  “You’re despicable.”

“You make a wonderful minion, darling.”

Luhan had taken the precaution of matching most of our outfits that morning, but now I was beginning to suspect that he’d had an ulterior motive behind it all along.  It was literally just a jack