Sehun and I made brunch for ourselves in his apartment shortly after leaving the roof. The recipe for the grilled cheese sandwiches came from the cookbook Sehun had given me. And, although I was solely – and proudly – responsible for cutting up the cheese and making up the sandwiches, I had a slight fear of the oven so Sehun actually put them in. Admittedly it wasn’t exactly a hard dish to make, but the sense of satisfaction I got from it made it seem like I had just cooked for a queen.

Wiping my mouth off after the meal, I beamed at Sehun. “That book’s a miracle worker if it can make my cooking taste like that.”

He nodded. “Must be.” I had forgotten he tasted my tea before.

“Where did you get it anyway?” I enquired at I moved to wash up. Sehun scooped the plate out of my hand and took it to the sink on his own.

“I ordered it online,” he absentmindedly told me as he put on a manly pair of blue washing up gloves.

“From America?” I pushed.

He hummed in agreement. I had figured as much.

“It was a good gift, so thanks.”

He smiled. “Just as long as you aren’t going to keep eating those biscuits. I’m surprised you’re still as small as you are with the amount of wrappers in your bin.”

I tsked and shook my head, strolling over to him. “You couldn’t have just said 'you’re welcome', could you?”

“You’re welcome.”

Picking up the cookbook, I flicked through the pages and glancing over all the tasty looking food. I came to a page with what looked like a Mars bar cheesecake. Pointing it out, I tilted the book towards Sehun so he could see it without touching the page with his bubble-covered hands. “I bet Baekhyun would like that. Chanyeol, too.”

Sehun’s movement stopped almost instantly and he glanced sideways at my face, but in an obvious sort of way. His expression was hard.

“What?” I asked, leaning onto the worktop so I could see his scowling face better. He ignored me for a moment, his scrubbing of the dishes seemed to suddenly intensify when he resumed. I felt the urge to smile at the way he was abusing the grill pan in his hands but held it in, reasoning that he probably wouldn’t take it too well in his current mood. “What, what, what?” I chirped, trying to get his attention.

Wiping his sleeve on his forehead as a way of scratching himself, Sehun huffed out a breath that caused his fringe to ruffle a little. Looking pointedly at me, he continued to scowl. “You sure talk about Baekhyun a lot.” It seemed he had completely ignored my comment about Chanyeol.

“Do I?” I asked, honestly thinking about it. If I did, I was certainly not aware of doing so.

He scoffed in disbelief. “Honestly, I feel like I’m just someone for you to talk about Baekhyun to.” Ok, he was definitely exaggerating now. I couldn’t even think of that many instances where we even brought up Baekhyun.

“We don’t talk about him that much,” I defended, leaning back from the counter now.

“Yeah we do,” Sehun quickly countered. “Why do you always bring him up?” Suddenly Sehun’s eyes narrowed a little. “Do you, by chance, like him?”

“Like him?”

Sehun nodded unblinkingly as his eyes continued to scrutinise me.

“Of course I like him!” Sometimes, Sehun could be a little dense but when his jaw dropped to the floor I realised that in this particular case it may have been me that was the dense one. Before I could rectify my statement, Sehun was already spouting some nonsense about how totally incompatible Baekhyun and I were.

When I finally managed to catch up with his words, he was about here, “And he still uses that same pen for every test even though he’s changed the ink cartridge in it about twenty times so it’s not even the same damn pen anymore. Does that seem sensible to you? No. And can he cook? Don’t bet on it. He’s almost as bad as you are. That makes you incompatible. And don’t even get me started on his-”

“Sehun,” I interrupted, once again fending off the smirk. I was afraid that if I allowed him to continue then I would never hear the end of the rant. “I don’t think you understood what I meant.”

He remained silent while his brain processed this information then waited for me to continue.

“I should have said, ‘yes, I like you all.’ I didn’t mean for it to sound the way it did.”

Sehun’s mouth rounded in understanding as he silently oh’d then, on cue, his cheeks pinked as he realised what he had just began spurting. Clearing his throat and turning back to the abandoned dishes, he mumbled, “Baekhyun’s a good guy, really.” Clearly he had just realised all the bad things he had just spat out about Baekhyun and was now feeling perhaps a little guilty.

“I know he is.” My mind flashed back to just last night when Baekhyun had asked me quietly if I could keep an eye on Sehun. I smiled a little at the thought, but this didn’t go unnoticed by Sehun.

“What?” he asked as he suspiciously eyed my smile.

I shrugged. “I was just thinking about something.”

“Something Baekyun-related?”

“Yeah.”

Another scoff but softer this time. “And speaking of Baekhyun,” Sehun sounded well and truly miffed by this point. “What were the two of you whispering in his kitchen about yesterday?”

That was yet another thing I couldn’t tell him. I quickly shrugged innocently. “Just cake. Why?”

Sehun seemed to accept this as an answer although I could still see him glancing at me every now and then.

“When we go back to school,” he began once we had put nearly all the dishes away. “I think I want to sit in the middle of our row.”

I frowned a little; that would mean he was sitting between Baekhyun and I. “Why? You didn’t sit there before I came. That’s why I sit there; it’s the only free seat since the two of you used to talk too much.”

“What do you mean the two of us?” Sehun grumbled, clearly remembering being split apart from his friend. My guess was that the talking part was mainly down to Baekhyun and not the other way around.

“If you move back there we’ll all just get split up and besides, it’s not like there’s much of the school year left anyway.”

Pouting a little, Sehun conceded defeat and declared that he was going to shower. That, to me, was a cue to leave and I did so with my pillow and cookbook in tow, a contented smile on my lips as I went.

When I plugged my phone into the charger later that day and a frenzy of messages reached me, it immediately became clear to me what it had been that I had forgotten to do last night: call my father. A chill ran down my spine when I saw a total of; twenty-seven missed calls from Paz, my father’s secretary; four calls from Luhan; three calls from some of my other old friends; and two missed calls from my father. Two. That might not seem like a lot, but for my father to actually personally call back after reaching voicemail was practically unheard of. I instantly wanted to curl up and hide.

After listening to about four frantic voicemails from a frazzled sounding Paz, I deleted the rest of her messages. I was no psychic, but I could see a pattern forming. There were no messages from my father; as expected. And