Deer Luhan,

You have a rather dramatic sense of timing and I love you for it.

Leigh

As predicted, the girls were long gone from the building the phones’ locations had traced to and Yi didn’t find much to help with furthering the investigation beyond solid proof that they had been there.  Once he returned to control the Stalker, I retreated to a corner with the recovered phones and the list of names and numbers and idly wondered why eight of the thirteen foreign fans had actually opted for buying whole new phones rather than just Chinese sims.  It didn’t particularly make sense to me that they wanted new sims, anyway, until I caught sight of the smashed phone again.  Of course, if you had a nice phone and you were travelling in a foreign country and didn’t want it stolen, you disguised the fact you had it with an old phone.  And most of them came with sim cards inside, even if you didn’t want to use that sim.  What should have been their escape plan had backfired miserably, but I had to hand it to the Japanese girl for at least trying.

The boys tumbled back in at dinnertime, tired and irritable.  Luhan went to bed immediately.  The others stayed up long enough to eat, but retreated soon afterwards, leaving me feeling a little put out.  Since it was my last night with them, I wanted to stay up and chat, or at least play a game of some sort.

“We ought really to have thrown you a leaving party,” said Xiumin regretfully as he sat down on the sofa beside me and handed me a cup of coffee.  He was the only one still up, and largely because he’d seen how glum I was looking and wasn’t yet quite too tired to do anything about it.  “It’s all a bit sudden.”

I took a gulp of the nectar-like liquid and sighed as the bitterness hit my tastebuds.  “I would have liked just a few more days.  Or a bit more warning.”

He put an arm around my shoulders.  “Shame Luhan isn’t trying to organise it this time, or we’d be able to guarantee you’d still be here next week.”

I managed a wan smile in response.

“How’s D.O.?” he asked, taking a sip of his own coffee.

“Not great.  His fever won’t go down, but in his words, ‘it’s just flu’ and he’s hoping to sleep it off.”

Xiumin shot me a sideways glance.  “You should probably sleep too, you know; you aren’t looking so great yourself.”

“Geez, thanks, Xiumin,” I said sarcastically.  “Way to make a girl feel good about herself.”

“You’re tired, upset and stressed,” he pointed out.  “There would be something wrong with you if you looked like you were about to waltz off to a ball.”

I coughed.

“And you really don’t want to catch D.O.’s flu,” he added.  “You should finished your coffee and then go to bed.”  There was a pause.  “I shouldn’t have given you coffee.  You might not sleep.”

This time, my smile came more easily.  “I’m going to miss you.”

“Are you actually going to miss me, or are you just going to miss the coffee?” he demanded, grinning.  I took the opportunity to wrinkle my nose.

“Just the coffee,” I told him, and he smacked me lightly on the shoulder, jostling me as I grinned into my coffee mug.

“That bracelet’s pretty,” he said suddenly, catching at my wrist.

Putting my coffee down, I looked to see that he was pointing at the pearl bracelet Luhan had got me when we went shopping in Beijing together.

“EXO’s thirteenth member.”  He turned the little silver hexagon over.  “Very sweet.  Did Luhan get this for you?  You’ve definitely earnt it.”

We all slept in the next morning.  Kai and I probably would have done anyway even if things had been planned for the morning because D.O. was coughing the entire night.

“His fever’s spiked and won’t break,” Kai told me, worried, as he washed his face and I brushed my teeth.  “I don’t understand why he’s being so stubborn about it.”

“Safety,” I replied dully.  “I think he’s worried about being hospitalised.  Until all this stuff with Luhan’s over, it’s not really safe for one of us to be somewhere alone, at least without some kind of bodyguard.  Luhan’s aunt was abducted from a hospital, after all.”

Ten minutes later, we emerged into the living room to see that Yi’s base of operations had expanded yet again.  There were now nearer fifty computers and seven assistants.

“Morning,” he greeted us, waving absently without looking up from the screen he was poring over.  “The super tall Chinese guy was talking about organising brunch.”

Right on cue, the door into the suite opened and Kris came in with an enormous tray of food, followed by Tao and Xiumin, who were carrying more.

“Manager’s gonna be occupied for at least the next forty-five minutes,” Kris reported as he set down the tray.  “And we need to leave in an hour.  But that gives us time.”  He plonked the tray down directly in front of me, stopping me dead in my tracks, and sat down.  “Leaving breakfast!”

More than a little taken aback, I sat down on the floor opposite him.  Tao and Xiumin carefully placed the other trays end to end with the first one.

“There’s chicken!”  Kai pounced immediately, earning himself a slap to the wrist from Tao.

“Let Leigh choose first.”

Laughing, I reached for the chicken that Kai was mournfully eyeing and popped a piece of it into his mouth.  He sent me a beaming smile.

The smell of food – or perhaps just the voices and hunger – began to attract the others, and they were soon swarming around the trays like wasps around honey.  Xiumin, Tao and Kris had got a selection of pretty much everything that was on the breakfast menu – cereals, a full English that was no doubt for foreigners, almost an entire tray of fruits (that I had difficulty keeping from drooling over), noodles, you name it – and Lay even turned up with a cake he’d gone out to buy.

“The fans and press are mental,” he reported as he settled the cake in my lap and took a seat on the other side of Kai.  “You said chocolate cake was your favourite at some point.”

“You remembered that?” I asked in surprise.

“No, Sehun did.”  Lay nodded to the maknae, who was standing just behind me.  “I just asked him.”

I could feel the temperature rising rapidly, especially when Sehun took a nonchalant seat beside me and reached across me for the fruit, his arm brushing against my leg.  I was unable to help jerking back and very nearly sent the cake flying.

“You should cut that,” Sehun told me around a mouthful of goji berries, gesturing to the cake.  “Oh, and you should try this.”  He popped something he said was a mangosteen into my mouth before I had a chance to complain.  Sweetness burst against my tongue and I withdrew my head sharply and put the back of my hand against my mouth, feeling like somebody had put all the fluids in my system up to forty degrees celcius.  I could have sworn I’d felt a feather-light touch on my lips from his fingers as he’d fed me.  This is going to drive me nuts.

But I had no time to dwell on it, because Luhan was suddenly offering me a different indigenous fruit to try and then Chen was complaining about the fact that I hadn’t had an opportunity to taste scorpion.  It only struck me about ten minutes later that nobody was teasing me or Sehun for interacting.  At all.  I almost wanted to ask what was going on with that, because it felt like something was seriously wrong and missing, but we all got distracted by D.O.’s appearance.  He was wrapped in just about every blanket in the hotel room and looked like death.

Luhan offered him some fruit as he sat down between me and Sehun and laid a weary head on my shoulder, but he declined any form of nutrition.

“Hey, dude,” said Chen reproachfully as D.O.’s body was wracked by coughs.  “It’s OhReeLee amnesty hour – let them sit together.”

“And here was I thinking you guys were actually being nice to us for once,” Sehun grouched, flicking longan peel at him.

“They’re not going to start kissing in front of you or something like that if you just leave them peacefully for an hour,” Suho added, just as reproachful as Chen had been.  Baekhyun turned to him in delight.

“Hyung, does that mean you’re considering joining in our bet?”

Sehun got to his feet, scowling.  “You guys are absolutely insufferable.”  He stalked off to his room, slamming the door behind him.

Chanyeol turned to Baekhyun.  “Well done, Baek.”

“But Leigh’s leaving today,” Baekhyun retorted as if I wasn’t sitting there.  “It’s Sehun’s last chance to make a move.”

My face was definitely as red as an emergency flare.

“He’s obviously not going to if you’re going to be untactful,” Suho snapped at him.  “Just leave the poor kids alone.  Sorry, Leigh,” he added.

I mumbled something incoherent as I ducked my head, feeling idiotic, and reached for the dragon fruit.

“Hey, I was just wondering,” Xiumin cut in, sensing a change of topic was needed, “do you guys eat a full one of these every day in England, because I think I’d be the size of a tractor if I tried.”

I looked up again to see he was halfway through a full English breakfast.  The sight of all the sausages and hash browns and bacon and eggs and the notion that anybody would have to cook that every morning, let alone the stomach to eat it daily, made me chuckle.

“No, of course not.  It’s for special occasions, but normally, you only do a couple of things, like bacon and eggs, if you’re going to cook at all.  Most of us normally have cereal.”

“Tastes good, though,” Xiumin added with a grin.  “Are you going to cut your cake or are you just going to let it sit there?”

Luhan excused himself to go and retrieve Sehun for “the main event”, as he put it, and Kris produced a silver cake slicer out of nowhere.

“We wanted to get you a gift of some sort,” Suho told me with compunction, “but all this was rather sudden and we never really got the opportunity to go shopping.  We were planning to do it today while Lay took you around Changsha, but things….”  He trailed off and shrugged.

“It feels like a bit of a cop-out on our part, but it’s all we can really do at short notice when we’re besieged in our accommodation,” Kris took up, reaching behind him for a plastic bag.  “Anyway.  We hope you like it.”

I shifted the half-cut cake out of my lap and over to Kai, who immediately dug in with his hands, and opene