*The first part is a continuation of the last chapter, because we’d all like to see embarrassed Iseul, right? Right.

Bonus Chapter IV: Aftermath and Winter Hiking

Waking up with a pounding headache and blurry vision was bad, but waking up with no recollection of the night before was even worse. Waking up with all three of that and then falling out of the bed was pure rotten.

I ought to blame Baekhyun for that, because he was the first human being I laid eyes on, and I couldn’t help but remember that that was the second time I had woken up on the same bed as him and I wasn’t ready for that. Granted, there was a pillow in between our faces this time, but pillows only covered so much and his leg and arm was brushing against mine. Which, in my dictionary, was not acceptable.

So I tried to roll away, and ended up on the floor. Again, but of course -- typical.

The moment my head hit the tea table, which was placed an inconvenient distance too close to my bed, the headache erupted. Cringing, I tried to hug my head to my legs, but it didn’t make any difference either way.

“Iseul?” Baekhyun’s voice sounded, rough from sleep, and sounding a lot deeper than normal. He still sounded half asleep. Despite the headache that should’ve taken most of my attention, my heart decided to speed up at his voice. “Are you alright?”

The thought dawned on me that my bed was a single bed, which was not acceptable for two people to sleep on, and that this was my dorm, which meant Baekhyun shouldn’t be here and Haejoo should…

Alarmed, I whipped my head around to the opposite side of the room, but there was no one else there. That, and Haejoo’s bed was made. Folded neatly, in an impossible way, because Cha Haejoo had never made her bed that I knew of. And Haejoo also slept in later than me, which meant that she should be in the bed, still asleep. But no, she seemed to be have been replaced by Byun Baekhyun, who had also chosen the wrong bed to sleep on (unintentionally, I hoped) for the night.

“What’s going on? Why’s she gone? Why are you here?”

“Oh, that.” All of a sudden, Baekhyun sounded very much awake. He shot up on the bed. His hair was messy (beautifully messy, my mind added), sticking up everywhere. “Before you go around screaming and blaming me for everything, get the thought through your head that this was all your fault. Well, and Jongdae’s.”

Jongdae’s name was an unwelcome addition to that sentence, because if he had done something horrible, I trusted him even less than I trusted myself.

“What did… Jongdae do?”

Baekhyun scanned my face carefully, kicking the blankets off in the process of doing so. “You don’t remember anything?”

Everything last night, horrifyingly, was a blur of nonsensical events. Which, sadly, didn’t explain to me why Haejoo was gone with her bed made and Baekhyun was in my dorm and I had experienced short term memory loss. “Did you do anything?”

For the first couple of second, his face was a blank mask of confusion, before it turned into a kind of horrified surprise. Baekhyun’s face went bright red. He sputtered a first couple of sentences, before finally getting a slightly offended “no!” out. Some choking ensued, and in the end, he managed to speak coherently. “Who do you think I am? God, Iseul.” Despite that being cleared up, he still looked flustered.

I cleared my throat. It felt sore, and swallowing was a painful process. “Um. Now that we’re past that, can you tell me what exactly happened?”

Baekhyun, who had momentarily deflated a couple seconds ago, straightened his back at that again. “That,” he repeated, “Don’t freak out at me, and take a moment to understand this, okay? So, remember that time when--”

“Don’t start with the ‘remember the time’ things. It’s always the embarrassing memories that I don't want to remember.”

Baekhyun shot me a withering look. Fine. I was trying to prepare you from the shock, but okay. You were drunk.”

It took a couple seconds for that particular sentence to sink in fully, and then a couple more seconds for me to respond to it properly. In the end, the only thing I ended up doing was repeating it, and turning it into a question. “I was drunk?”

“You were drunk.”

It made complete sense, but somehow, not really. I didn’t drink. I couldn’t have been drunk. “I was drunk.”

Baekhyun nodded fervently, and I decided to stare at him.

There was no way I would ever touch alcohol. I’d tasted a bit of it before: the bitterness was something I disliked, and downing the whole thing would’ve been simply impossible for me. I would never willingly drink alcohol, and I could remember that I didn’t do it last night. In fact, after seeing Baekhyun’s aftermath of drinking, I had vowed to myself to never do it in my life, and I planned to keep that promise to myself. However, if I did drink, it would explain why my head hurt so much and I couldn’t remember anything -- but then again, why was Baekhyun here and Haejoo gone? Nothing made sense. I couldn’t have drunk anything alcoholic, I refused to think that I had -- I was with Baekhyun, Chanyeol, Kyungsoo and Jongdae for New Years dinner, and all we were doing…

Jongdae. Jongdae’s fault. Baekhyun had mentioned that it was Jongdae’s fault, but he wouldn’t do as much give me alcohol, right? Besides, I couldn’t remember even drinking alcohol…

“Apple juice. Do you remember?” Baekhyun’s voice cut through my thoughts. The horror finished draining into me.

“Apple juice…there was… Jongdae… it tasted weird...”

“Yeah. Jongdae put apple juice in your alcohol--” Baekhyun broke off, frowning. He ran a hand through his hair, and then groaned, realizing his mistake. “The other way around. He put alcohol in your apple juice, and then you were drunk. You have such a low alcohol tolerance.”

“Are you blaming me? I’m the victim here!”

He swung his legs over the bed, and then dropped down on the floor next to me. We were eye level now, and I found it a little hard to meet his gaze. It felt distracting when I did so, and what I really needed right now was to wrap my head around what had happened last night, not get distracted by Baekhyun’s presence. “Han Iseul,” he said, in a somber tone. “Listen to me right now. You are not the victim here.”

“Huh?”

“I,” Baekhyun announced. “I am the victim here. And today, I’m intending to make you the victim.”

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