After the first week of January, the prince’s schedule began to fill up, meaning that he no longer had time to meet for a few hours on any given day to sketch.  Instead, two days of the second week of January, Yeonhee found herself scrambling across the city at short notice (accompanied by profuse apologies from the prince) to join him for lunch breaks where she actually had to stop him drawing from time to time to make sure he ate, and over the weekend, after a couple of days of radio silence, her phone was assaulted by a barrage of messages, all of which were sketches he’d drawn.

From: Private number, 23.46

Got really bored on the flight to Dubai.  Everybody else is asleep.

This was followed by a sketch that Yeonhee thought might be Luhan (okay, it was Luhan, as the follow up photo showed) sleeping.

From: Private number, 23.47

How do I draw people?  I can’t seem to get it right.

From: Private number, 23.47

Or animals, for that matter.

This was followed by something that looked almost like a bird.

Yeonhee squinted at her phone screen.

To: Private number, 23.48

It’s almost midnight here, your highness.  Can I get back to you tomorrow?

From: Private number, 23.49

Ah, sorry.  Time differences.  Sleep well!

Yeonhee was too busy packing the next day to respond properly to the messages (the prince didn’t nag her, presumably because he was busy), but once everything she needed for university was in boxes and suitcases to go back, she found herself returning to her art books from junior school to find how her teacher had started her off on sketching live objects.

Photos, mostly, it turned out.  There were a number of photos of friends and family members, some close-ups of heads, others with a couple of people and one or two (she’d clearly been ambitious) containing a lot of people, which made it difficult to put in the details accurately.  On the sketches, she could see faint, rubbed out markings of grids, and when she turned the pages back even further, it was to discovered three or four pre-drawn heads with grids over them that she had made copies of, trying to be accurate to the angles as best she could.

See-through grids was the answer, then, to help anchor little details.  Yeonhee pursed her lips, wondering where she was going to get some.  It wasn’t really something she’d seen in art shops, but maybe the university art department would have some that she could borrow.  She noted it down on a jot-pad app on her phone so that she wouldn’t forget.

When she got back, she was ambushed in her room by Baekhyun’s band, who played her a hard rock version of Happy Birthday while Mihae sprayed her with shaving foam and Sehun blew out the candles on her cake.  Touched (especially since Kyungsoo had apparently made the cake – she was impressed), Yeonhee set about opening her presents.

As he often did when it came to gatherings like this, Baekhyun stayed much longer than the others, flopping down on her bed with his arms around Juan’s pot.  Yeonhee tried to get him to put Juan down, because the plant pot had a hole in the bottom that typically trailed earth everywhere if it wasn’t on a base like the one she had by her desk specifically for that purpose, but he refused, whining and clinging onto Juan like a little child.

Eventually, he sat up.

“Can I ask you something?” he said, and Yeonhee’s heart lurched.  She prepared herself for an onslaught of sugar daddy questions, or possible some about her grandmother.

Not trusting herself to speak, she nodded.

“Can I borrow your notes from last semester to make photocopies?”

Well, better than expected.  Yeonhee nodded again, and he flopped back down, talking to Juan like one would indulge an adorable puppy.  Raising her eyebrows, Yeonhee realised she probably wasn’t going to be rid of him any time soon, and so she popped one of the Little Imp DVDs into her laptop and prepared for an evening of juvenile fun.

The two of them spent the rest of the week in the library, joined from time to time by Jongin and less frequently by Sehun.  Of the two, Jongin was significantly better company, but Sehun was the one you wanted there if you wanted to actually get work done, because he had the sort of death glare that would make anybody sheepish and turn to their books if they were disturbing the other occupants of the library, while Jongin had the attention span of a goldfish and every ten minutes would take to playing on his phone or starting up conversation.

Yeonhee was able to ignore it the first few times it happened, but on Thursday, unable to tune out the hushed conversation that Jongin and Baekhyun were having about the cost of guitar amps and whether or not they needed more of them for the band, she sighed and set aside her books.

“Guys,” she said, “do you mind taking your conversation elsewhere?”

“Have you changed your phone pattern?” Baekhyun asked her.  Surprised, she looked up to see him frowning at her phone screen – she hadn’t even realised that he’d taken it.  “Sugar Daddy’s asking you to meet up, by the way.”

“He’s not my sugar daddy,” Yeonhee snapped.  “He’s a friend.”

“Really?” drawled Jongin, raising an eyebrow at her.

“Really,” Yeonhee snapped, trying to snatch her phone back.  Baekhyun turned away, holding it out of her reach as he swiped her familiar pattern on the phone screen and pressed the home button.  To Yeonhee’s surprise, it refused him.  (He’d definitely got the right pattern, though.)

Jongin raised his other eyebrow at her, and Yeonhee lost her focus on Baekhyun, suddenly remembering something.  Jongin was Min’s (Minseok’s?) cousin, and he knew that his cousin hadn’t been the person Yeonhee was meeting that night.  She didn’t know if they were close enough for Min to say much about his job (they’d seemed pretty close, though), but given the sizable following that all the prince’s bodyguards had, and that Min seemed to be on duty most of the time and was often identifiable striding out in front of the prince and the rest of the entourage in video clips, Jongin would have to be pretty dense not to know that his cousin worked for the palace, and there was a fair likelihood that he’d figured out who she’d actually been with that evening.

(Was he doubting that she was a friend of the prince or that a friend was all she was?)

Then he gave her that sunny, adorable smile of his, and Baekhyun was waving her phone in her face again.

“Yeonhee, your phone doesn’t like me anymore,” he whined.  She took it off him, trying to swipe herself in, but when she pressed the home button, she realised that her phone was still counting down the number of seconds before she could try unlocking it again.  Baekhyun must have tried multiple incorrect combinations.<