Deer Luhan,

We should both dress up as me more often.  It has surprisingly entertaining results.

Leigh

I was totally disorientated when I woke up.  It could have had something to do with the fact that I’d migrated to lie across the width of the bed while I slept and was now sprawled out like a starfish, pillow nowhere to be seen and duvet tangled around my legs while my head hung over the side, though it was more likely because I was somewhere I didn’t recognise at all and having all the blood in my head wasn’t really helping me to think.

With a groan, I sat up and shifted around into a more normal position.  Luhan was sound asleep in the bed next to me and so motionless he could have been dead, and Sehun had curled up in a foetal position in the armchair, his face apparently a bookmark for A Game of Thrones.  Stretching, I checked my watch and saw that it was quarter past seven in the morning.  From what I remembered, we didn’t have much of a schedule today, although in the aftermath of the variety show filming being a day earlier than anticipated, the manager had insisted on getting an interview with a local magazine for this evening and Luhan and I were going to have to sort out who was going to do it and who was going to sit on the side.  There were a couple of school visits on Monday and Tuesday and then the whole of Wednesday was going to be taken up filming for the variety show in China.  Lay had promised to show me around Changsha on the Thursday as it was his hometown and Thursday was a free day.  It was something to look forward to.

But before all of that, it was probably a good idea to figure out how I was going to get back into Kai and D.O.’s room without alerting anybody to the fact I hadn’t been in there all night, and it wasn’t going to be easy when there wasn’t a way I could pick the lock because all the doors used electromagnetic cards as keys.  Biting my lip, I swung my legs out of bed and opened the doors out onto the balcony, hoping that some fresh air might help me to think.

It was only once I was actually on the balcony and saw that the doors for the balcony windows for the next two balconies along were open that I remembered Kris mentioning something about rooms being connected by balconies along with the implication that Luhan and I could use them for quick escapes into other rooms if we needed to.

Kris’ idea of “connected” differed somewhat from mine in that there was a gap of at least three feet between each balcony and the concrete ledges were surrounded by iron railings  about half my height and there were plenty of plant pots in the way, not to mention that I only had recourse to parkour of any kind when my life was in serious danger.  Still, I wasn’t in the mood for the OhReeLee shippers, and my mouth was beginning to feel seriously icky because I hadn’t been able to brush my teeth the previous evening.  I was pretty sure Sehun and Luhan were bright enough to figure out that I’d gone back to my own room when they woke to find me missing, so I screwed up my courage and scrambled onto the railings.  From what I could remember from the floorplan, the next balcony along was Chanyeol and Baekhyun’s and mine was the one after that.

My ninja-like diveroll landing between a potted palm tree and an orange tree that looked extremely lost almost had me whooping with delight, but I restrained myself and moved on.  My next landing wasn’t so neat: I lost my concentration because I thought I heard voices from the room, and I ended up knocking over and nearly breaking some large exotic potted shrub, but when nobody came flying outside to see what the commotion was, I figured my ears must have been playing tricks on me.  Feeling like a schoolgirl sneaking back onto campus after bunking a couple of lessons, I slipped through the double doors.

The first thing I noticed, with distinct relief, was that Kai was still cocooned in the enormous double bed and that the lights were out.  The second thing I noticed, with distinctly less relief, was that D.O. was nowhere to be seen.  Praying that he was in the ensuite bathroom and that he hadn’t been awake enough to notice I was missing, I started tiptoeing across the room as silently as possible in a bid not to wake Kai up.

I had barely got three steps when my happy hypothesis came tumbling down around my head.

“Leigh,” said D.O.’s voice from behind me, unnaturally deep and drawn out.

Closing my eyes with a silent curse, I came up short and braced myself to turn around.  “Yes, Satan?”

A sidelamp clicked on and I saw D.O. leaning against the wall, arms folded and one eyebrow cocked.  It looked like he could well have been spending the entire night there waiting for me to show up, but I knew him well enough to know that he was too pragmatic to have done that and probably hadn’t been there more than twenty minutes at the most.  For one thing, he didn’t look nearly tired enough to have been up all night.  For another, he was already dressed for the day.

“Where have you been?” he asked me in a more normal tone of voice.

I gulped.  His eyes were narrowed, and I was going to have to come up with a pretty good excuse for him not to guess which room I’d spent the night in.

“…Out for a breath of fresh air on the balcony?” I tried, sounding even less confident than I felt.  D.O.’s familiar sugar-salt grin reappeared and it was thoroughly unwelcome.

“Bullsh*t,” he told me in English.  “Your bed hasn’t been slept in and those are Luhan’s pyjamas.  You stayed in his room with Sehun, didn’t you?”

I stopped trying to pretend otherwise and folded my arms grumpily across my chest.  “Only because you locked me out of my own room.  And all my pyjamas are Luhan’s pyjamas.”

He laughed quietly.  “Kai was shattered and went straight to sleep when we got in, and I was pretty tired too.  Forgot about giving you the room key until too late – I’m guessing you were in Luhan and Sehun’s room chatting, right?  Right—” he didn’t even wait for confirmation from me before deciding that was definitely what had happened, “but I did leave the balcony doors open for you to come back in if you wanted to.”

“Yeah, because I’m really going to go balcony hopping in the dark when we’re seven floors up,” I snorted.  D.O. just raised an eyebrow at me.

“Am I missing something here?  Didn’t you just get back in that way?”

“But it wasn’t dark,” I grumbled.  Teasingly, D.O. cupped a hand around his ear and leant forwards.

“I’m sorry, I don’t think I heard you correctly.  I’m missing the bit where you didn’t go hopping from balcony to balcony or sleeping in Sehun’s bed.”

My jaw dropped.  “How did you know that?”

His face lit up like a firework.  “What, I’m right?  You actually slept in his bed and not just in his room?”

I sank slowly to the floor, groaning.  It was obviously useless to try denying that now.

“Sehun slept in the armchair,” I mumbled.

“You’re cruel,” D.O. told me immediately.  “Honestly, you kicked him out of the bed to sleep in a cold, hard armchair—”

“It was upholstered with plenty of cushions and he offered!”

D.O. tugged me to my feet.  “You were clearly supposed to say, ‘oh, it’s not a problem, we can sleep together.’”

“But that implies other things!”

I found myself staring directly at D.O.’s sugar-salt grin.

“Exactly.”  He beamed at me.  I genuinely wanted to cry.

“I hate you,” I muttered, and he started laughing again.  Frankly, I’d never been so glad Kai was such a heavy sleeper, because I didn’t think I would have been able to handle more than one person being like D.O. at that point, even if Kai usually toned things down or blurted inappropriate stuff out by accident.

Unfortunately, I was wrong in my assumption that Kai was asleep.

“I smell and extreme ual frustration,” said his sleepy voice from the bed.  “And D.O., why the are you wearing a deer-stalker hat and where did you get that pipe?”

I locked myself in the bathroom until Kai and D.O. both got the hint I didn’t want to talk to them and that I wanted to be left alone, though I heard them giggling like a pair of schoolgirls as D.O. told Kai about where I’d spent the night.  Then the double doors clicked shut and I breathed a sigh of relief, figuring it was safe to come out again.  But I still waited another good five minutes before I actually ventured out.

I had only just managed to get over to my – actually, probably Luhan’s – suitcase before there was an energetic rap on the door.  I straightened up and eyed it sceptically, wondering who it might be.  Not D.O. or Kai, because they could both get back in with the key card (that said, they were both polite enough to knock on the offchance I might be changing, but I figured one of them would call out to me were that the case to check if he could come in).  Chances were it was one of the others, and from the way he’d knocked, this person was evidently extremely happy.  I narrowed my eyes further.  The last thing I wanted was to face Baekhyun this early in the morning.  Or Chanyeol.  Or Lay.  Or, for that matter, Chen.  And God forbid it was Suho for a lecture on staying safe, though I doubted his knock would have sounded so chipper.

The knock came again, followed shortly by a buzz on my phone.

Open up!  Luhan had sent me.  There’s not a chance in hell I’m going to go jumping from balcony to balcony.

Relieved, I let him in.

“I brought you clothes!” he cooed as I shut the door behind him.

“I have clothes.  That you packed for me.”  I pointed to the suitcase.  Luhan took a step back and held up a hanger with a dress on it.  I blinked twice at it, and then blinked again when I suddenly took in his clothes.

“Luhan, what the possessed you this morning when you were getting dressed?  You’re not Scottish.”

“Well, dur,” he said as though it was the most obvious thing ever, tugging down the hem of his tartan skirt.  “Anyway, the manager’s out and won’t be back until mid-afternoon, just before our interview, and since you spend all your time pretending to be me, I thought today we might shake things up a bit and I’ll pretend to be you.”

For several moments, it was impossible for me to do more than stare at him and his gleeful smile in anything other than complete shock.

“And by the way,” he added, “I’m actually wearing a dress too – I just need help putting on the bra, so I haven’t put the top bit on yet.”  He pulled up the t-shirt he was wearing to show me the top part of the dress scrumpled down by his waist.  I just continued to stare.

“You shoudn’t be drinking alcohol before breakfast,” I managed eventually, eliciting a loud snort from him.  He the tartan-patterned dress on the hanger into my hands, along with some femine underwear, which made me jump.  I immediately looked at the bra size, and my eyes nearly bugged out of their sockets.  “How do you know my bust size?”

Luhan just gave a nonchalant shrugged.  “I asked Kai.  He’s good at guessing those sorts of things.”

I turned the clothing over in my hands.  “You guys are unbeliev—”  It was then that my eyes caught on the brand name, and I momentarily froze.

Then I scrambled hastily to check the other items of clothing.

“Luhan, I can’t possibly take these.  They’re ridiculously expensive.”

He pouted and actually stamped his foot against the floor.  “C’mon, Leigh, it’ll be fun!  You get to use me as a live doll and style my hair!”

“I am not happy for you to spend this much money on me.”

Sighing, Luhan let his arms swing by his sides and dropped the cutesy act.  “Let me spoil you for this remaining week, please?  My English isn’t anything like good enough for me to fill in for you for a term at university and I’m kind of limited in what else I can do for you.”