10,200 words

THREE

A deer nosing at a frozen woodland pond. A red-ed robin perched on a berried branch. Three crimson stockings hanging over a roaring fire. Baekhyun thinks his Christmas cards are coming along rather well. He’s even running ahead of schedule. He finishes adding the golden glow to the fireplace on his third one so far, hand sweeping across his graphics tablet with the pen poised between his thumb and fingers. His contractors approved his sketches a couple of days ago, the first real good news he’s had in a while.

Since the quiz, he’s been venturing outside a lot more. He’s no longer surviving off rubbish and is frequently buying himself fresh meat and pasta, and he did go to Agnes’ for tea. He ended up spending his whole day there, completely by accident and by no means against his will. She was telling him about her theatre days and the sugar daddy she almost had, which was equal parts enlightening and off-putting.

Baekhyun sighs and gulps down some water, contemplating what his picture is missing while he reaches for his phone. He keeps doing this, expecting to see a notification from Sehun or… Well, just Sehun. It always hurts to see his lock screen empty, but he has to remind himself that a lot of the people he talks to on a daily basis ring him on the landline instead. They don’t blow up his phone with cringy snapchat pictures, which, in retrospect, he’s thankful for. They’re annoying and obnoxious. Sehun used to like the dog filter the best because it slimmed down his face, not that it needed slimming.

Baekhyun has to stop himself from doing it again. Thinking about him. Remembering how things used to be. He doesn’t want you anymore, he tells himself, and succeeds in souring his mood. With his work saved, he abandons his computer and flops back on his bed, staring at the popcorn ceiling his grandparents thought was a good idea. He really needs to renovate, or maybe just find a way to hide all the things he doesn’t like. Baekhyun snorts and lets out a self-deprecating laugh. If only he could cover up Sehun as easily as the crack in the pane of his bedroom window.

Unless he wants to subject himself to greasy pub food every night, there’s nothing else Baekhyun can do in his evenings now that they’re void of a phone call to Hapton. He tries to find a new TV series to invest in but can’t find anything that tickles his fancy, so he sleeps early and wakes up before eight the next morning, unable to doze off again. Mornings always last much longer than afternoons, Baekhyun finds, as he mopes about his bathroom and kitchen trying to kill as much time as possible. He spends an extra half an hour in the shower and air-dries afterwards, then drinks his tea in the tiniest sips possible while staring out his kitchen window at his back garden. Please, he begs, let something interesting happen, and it comes in the form of a walking cloud.

Well, it’s a sheep, but Baekhyun thinks that calling them ‘walking clouds’ is much cuter and much, much more artistic.

At the end of his garden is a weak wooden fence only half Baekhyun’s height, with a gate that flew off during the last storm they had that he never bothered to put back on. He’s noticing a lot of shortcomings in his property now that he has a lot of time on his hands, things he wouldn’t have given a second thought to a few months ago. His mind mocks him. Blinded by love. Blinded by an insensitive feels more appropriate.

He doesn’t hurry out to commence lock down on the sheep. Baekhyun remains stood by his kitchen sink, sipping his tea, and allowing it to nibble away at the forest of weeds he has growing amongst the long grass he never cuts down at the bottom. Hopefully it’ll munch through all his dandelions and yarrow by the time its owner comes looking for it, that owner highly likely to be Minseok, if the large red number forty-seven that’s spray painted onto its torso is any indication.

After finishing his tea and slipping into some walking boots that he doesn’t tie the laces of, Baekhyun slowly paces through his garden, maintaining a respectable distance between himself and the sheep as he moves around it to get to the gate. He’s not sure how high sheep can jump, or if they can jump at all, so all Baekhyun can do is fill the gap in his fence and hope for the best while he waits for the sheep to be collected.

He his thumb and flips through the address book on his dresser he has in his hallway, hunting down Minseok’s telephone number so he can ring and say he’s picked up a stray. This type of thing happens every so often around here, waking up to random, uninvited livestock in your garden. Baekhyun finds it unfittingly charming, the small notes his nanna made by Minseok’s name equally so.

New farmer in town. Lovely smile. Pretty wife. Helped me down the pub stairs, the darling. Tea together next Monday!

It used to be his grandparents’ address book when they lived here, and his grandfather left it in his care when he moved out to go and live the rest of his days with Baekhyun’s uncle. He holds off calling Minseok so he can browse other comments his nanna has made, all of them being her first impressions of the new villagers as she was very methodical in getting their contact details. She’s called Agnes a compulsive liar and Bill and Mable old fogeys, but in some cases she’s scribbled out her initial thoughts and amended them with compliments galore.

Minseok ends up not being home, so Baekhyun busies himself with lunch and studies the movement of the sheep in his garden while he chews on a sandwich. Must be a hungry sheep, he thinks, because it’s uncovered several plant pots stacked against his fence that he’s never seen before, previously hidden behind the grass he fails to upkeep. His thumb twitches absently, a sudden urge to garden and cultivate taking Baekhyun over, and he suddenly decides that he needs to love his home a little more – and with his little helper doing the boring bit (weeding), Baekhyun is even more inclined.

Of course, being a farmer as he is, Minseok isn’t home to pick up the phone all day. His wife, Emily, will be just as busy, but luck strikes later on when he walks into the corner shop to pick up some milk and finds Minseok scanning the crisps aisle while squinting at his shopping list. Baekhyun glances at it briefly from over his shoulder and pulls a face at the weird choice of goods: BBQ crisps, sweet chili sauce, whipped cream and gherkins. Baekhyun can only hope Minseok won’t be eating those all at once.

“Guess what I found in my garden this morning,” Baekhyun says as greeting, voice bold and theatrical and snatching Minseok’s attention away from the selection of flavours on offer. He looks startled for a second before he breaks out in the smile Baekhyun’s nanna said was lovely, and Baekhyun grins at him as he reveals his findings. “Number forty-seven!”

Minseok gasps. “Flo!”

Naturally, Minseok names all his sheep, but at least he doesn’t paint smiley faces on them like Jongdae does with his.

“She’s been helping me out in the garden all morning,” Baekhyun jokes, switching the cool carton of milk he’s holding into his other hand before it goes numb. “Doing a spot of weeding.”

Minseok laughs and rolls his eyes, turning back to the shelves and finding what he’s looking for at the very bottom. “I’ve been wondering where she got off to. I’ve been looking for her all day,” he says as he moves towards the counter, Rose smiling at both of them and starting to scan through Minseok’s basket. “I knew there was one missing when I counted only 217 this morning. Then realised it was Flo when I didn’t get my regular morning head-.”

Baekhyun chuckles and shakes his head, casting his eyes to Rose when she says “With Yixing, they all just run away.”

“Ah, see, that’s because Yixing doesn’t have the touch,” Minseok teases, winking as he hands over a couple of notes. “Bet he doesn’t sing for his sheep, does he?”

Baekhyun and Rose exchange a worried but amused look. “No,” she admits. “Come to think of it, he doesn’t.”

Laughing, Baekhyun hands over the pocket change for his milk and crumples the receipt in his back pocket. They get talking about how it’s time to wean the lambs and separate them from their mothers in a different pasture, and of how Jongdae has only just started shearing his sheep when ideally he should have done so a month ago. Minseok complains about the low price of sheep wool nowadays, so Rose pitches in and talks of how she saves some wool for crafts, making miniature sheep toys that sell online for a higher price. It’s all interesting, and though Baekhyun can’t really join in all that much, he enjoys the back and forth.

He helps Minseok lead Flo into the back of his truck once they’ve left the store, leading her out of Baekhyun’s house and into the village centre. Baekhyun does suggest just letting her into Minseok’s bottom field, but Minseok says that some of his fence posts have come loose which is probably how Flo managed to get out in the first place.

“Fancy joining us for dinner, Baek? Em’s cooking,” he asks, leaning out of his truck window with one hand on the wheel.

“Only if we’re not eating gherkins,” he laughs, climbing up into the passenger seat and belting himself in. Flo bleats from behind them, her lips.

Dinner is crazily domestic. Two-year-old Sam is wriggling about in his high chair, and four-year-old Lucas is having to be fed with aeroplane noises to get him to open his mouth. Baekhyun accepts wine instantly when Minseok offers him some, and narrows his eyes just a little when he spies him not pouring his wife a glass alongside his own.

“Sorry for the mess, Baekhyun,” Emily says, wiping her sticky hands on a piece of kitchen roll after she’s wiped up Sam’s mouth.

“Oh, don’t worry about it at all! I’m not a big minder of mess.” He gives her a reassuring smile that she returns happily, until she sees Sam dribbling gravy down his chin again, gargling nonsense in such a serious way that he looks like he’s scolding his mother.

The main part of their house is old and cramped, with a new, joining extension out back that gives them much more space. Baekhyun doesn’t know how people do it—parenting. Watching Minseok and Emily fighting to get their children to eat something while their own food goes cold has Baekhyun feeling terrified of the idea of being responsible for a little human, so he downs some more wine.

Emily apologises when she excuses herself to change Sam’s nappy. Minseok says they’ve only just started potty training him and it’s not going so well, and they share a laugh when they hear Emily’s exasperated sigh of “How did you manage to eat and poo at the same time?”

“Did you hear about the Shaws moving out, Baek?” Minseok asks when he’s finally able to eat, having excused Lucas to go and do his preschool homework. They both hear the TV turn on in the other room, but Minseok doesn’t seem to have the energy to get up and tell Lucas off for procrastinating.

Baekhyun sets his cutlery down instantly. “The Shaws? As in my neighbours the Shaws?” he gasps, completely taken aback.

“Kyungsoo overheard them picking a realtor in the pub a few nights ago. They’re probably moving to the city for when the baby comes.”

“Oh.” Baekhyun deflates, pushing out his lower lip. “That’s a shame.”

Baekhyun shouldn’t be this sullen about it. The voice in the back of his head tells him that they’re only his neighbours, yet he still feels like everyone is leaving him all of a sudden. Who will be next? Jongin? Old Joe? Mr and Mrs Parker? The word ‘neighbour’ has a different definition in this village. To everyone else it just means the person next door, but here, your neighbours are everyone. They’re a part of you, and the Shaws were the first people to welcome Baekhyun when he first moved in. They helped him sort out his grandparents’ old things, they invited him over for dinner just because they wanted him there, and they sometimes banter through their shared wall by blasting songs with titles they can use to form a conversation. In a way, the community here is a jigsaw. Whenever someone leaves, a piece goes missing.

He also feels weird at the fact that everyone seems to know about it before him. Well, maybe not everyone, but it hurts to be told he wasn’t one of the first to know, considering he lives directly beside them. Who will he play badminton with over the garden fence now?

Minseok offers to drive him home but it’s bath time for his kids, the manic pitter-patter of little feet scampering about the bedrooms and landing telling that not all is going to plan and Emily needs an extra pair of hands. Baekhyun walks home in the dark, keeping to the very edge of the narrow country roads that house no street lamps or pavement. Every time he hears a car coming he has to squash himself into the bushes (and thistles), and he curses out whoever comes by at more than twenty miles an hour in these conditions.

It’s too late to disturb the Shaws now, even though he can see them watching TV through their living room window. The LED screen reflects different coloured lights on their face, and as he dawdles past he manages to catch their attention and offers a cheery wave. Baekhyun wonders when they were planning on telling everyone officially that they were leaving. Nothing is ever a secret here; even if you only ever think it, it’ll leak out somehow. Mable from up the road does have a lot of peculiar crystals and cards. Maybe she’s a clairvoyant.

He struggles to sleep that night, mind too busy and body too anxious. His phone screen blinds him in the darkness when he opens up Instagram, his chest physically sinking into his mattress when his eyes land on Sehun’s latest post.

Late night walk. Everything I want right here ♥（ﾉ´∀`）

It’s a picture of his new guy looking out over the river, all the lights reflected on its surface. Baekhyun bitterly remembers the landscape he was painting for their anniversary and wonders why he even bothered. His heart gives a lurch when he recalls that it would have been a year, and when his eyes lock onto the date he lets out the most pathetic noise he thinks he’s ever made. Tears flood his eyes before he can stop them and his nose clogs up to the point where he has to gasp for breath. It was today. Today they would have been together for a year. And to think he almost made it through the day unscathed.

When he wakes up, he doesn’t get up, and he hates himself for it. He loathes the routine of lying in bed and feeling like there’s no point in moving, because all he is is a failure that can’t make anyone happy and nobody wants. He wishes time would freeze so that he can just stop for a moment. Stop and deal with all this that has landed on his shoulders without losing another month. But it won’t. And it can’t. And it .

He does manage to move around midday after lying numbly in his bed for nigh on two hours. His stomach is grumbling like mad, so he knows he’s still alive and functioning and Sehun hasn’t slaughtered his appetite like he did before. After one slice of toast, Baekhyun curls up in his bath and sits under the jet of the shower, shivering until the steam from the scalding water spreads far enough to fight the cold.

“Don’t do this to yourself, Baekhyun,” he murmurs, drawing circles on one of his knee caps and feeling like his voice isn’t really his own. Like it belongs to someone else who’s just as disappointed with him as Sehun was. Guilt, shame and distress wrap around his throat and chest out of nowhere, but Baekhyun doesn’t cry. Instead, he rests his head back on the garish tiles his nanna was ecstatic with and internally coaches himself through his worries. It works, for the most part, but Baekhyun still feels like there’s a new weight on his chest when he stands to turn off the water.

Only Vanessa Shaw is in when he pops round to his neighbours in the mid-afternoon, busy ironing and hanging David’s shirts on a hanger stand in the middle of the kitchen. Their houses are pretty much identical layout-wise, as are most on their street, except for the conservatory they added at the back several years ago that looks out into the garden (which is in a much better state than Baekhyun’s is). Both their stories on how they came to live here are also similar, as David was left the property in his late uncle’s will and Vanessa came to live with him after they got married. More young people to the village, Baekhyun’s nanna had said down the phone when she rang for a gossip session, telling all she knew of her new neighbours.

“Baekhyun! Babes!” Nessa beams brightly when she opens the door, waving down her hallway and stepping to the side to let him pass. She’s just coming up on five months pregnant now, her loose t-shirt hiding the majority of what Baekhyun knows to be a fairly large baby bump. He kisses her on the cheek in greeting as he steps in and rubs his feet on the doormat, immediately offered tea and fruit scones at the round table in the kitchen.

“Word has it you’re leaving me!” Baekhyun calls from the porch as he unlaces his shoes, hearing Vanessa gasp and wondering whether he ought to tone it down on the surprises and playful accusations in case he causes a mood swing or some form of shock.

“How do you know about that?” she demands, scandalised, and comes to stand in the kitchen doorway with her hands on her hips. “Was it David?” Her tone lowers with her chin and she glares at Baekhyun, who finds that he’s actually quite afraid of her when she looks at him like that.

In just his socks, he pads towards her across the cream carpet, their house an array of calming beiges and pastels, and sits down opposite her at the table. “I think you’ll find it was Kyungsoo spreading this around. Apparently, he heard the two of you talking about selling your house the other night.”

“He heard that?!” she cries, burying her face in her hands. “Holy sh—sugar! Is nowhere safe?!”

Baekhyun cracks a grin. “Depends what you want to be safe from.”

Nessa rolls her eyes and relents to a smile. “We were going to tell everyone soon, I promise,” she says, reaching across the table for one of Baekhyun’s hands. “You first of all.” That sentiment is enough to quell the minor abandonment he’s been feeling, albeit he still curls his fingers tighter around her hand, admiring how her golden wedding ring complements her dark skin.

“I’ve actually been begging Dave to leave this place for months, even before I was pregnant,” she admits next, making Baekhyun’s smile waver ever so slightly. “It’s nothing to do with any of you. Everyone here is lovely and I’d stay if I could but with the baby coming, this place just seems more and more impractical every day, you know? We’re half an hour away from the doctors, and pretty much two hours away from a decent hospital. There are no schools around here and we only have one car, and Dave leaves the house two hours before it would be time to drop Baby off for the start of the day. It just,” she sighs, smiling sadly and slouching back in her chair, “won’t work.”

Baekhyun pouts. “When are you thinking of moving out?”

“Definitely before the baby comes.” Her tone is resolute as she retrieves her hand from Baekhyun’s hold and gets to cutting a scone in half from the cake stand she has in the centre of the table, buttering up the inner sides of it before taking a big mouthful. “Oh, help yourself,” she says around her food, Baekhyun sniggering as he does as she insists. “I know people always say that moving is one of the most stressful things and doing it while I’m pregnant is probably pushing my luck but I feel super chill about it right now.”

“Right now,” Baekhyun repeats for emphasis. Nessa deadpans.

“Come back to me when you’re a medical professional, Baekhyun,” she jokes as she makes to get up from her chair. The kettle has just finished boiling, a plume of steam funnelling up from the spout and blowing out around the bottom of the kitchen cupboards. Baekhyun touches her arm to get her attention, then gets up to make the tea himself.

“Does this mean I’ll never get to see the baby?”

“We’re not moving to the other side of the world,” she laughs, twisting around on her chair to face him. “We’re going to have a house-warming party that everyone’ll be invited to. And a baby shower, and I expect you to be there for that one. We can get down on non-alcoholic wine and stuff.”

Baekhyun smiles, despite knowing that he probably wouldn’t be able to make it to either event. Without a car, he’s pretty much stranded here.

“Shiznits, I just realised that this is probably why Jen isn’t talking to me.”

He stops midway through pouring the boiling water into the teapot. He’d forgotten about the Mills’ divorce, wrapped up in all his own mini disasters.

“I’ve tried to ring her four times, you know. The first time she picked up and put the receiver down again when she realised it was me. Then, went into the pub last night, went over to say hi and got completely ignored! I understand she’s in a bad place right now but it’s no excuse. I’ve done nothing but be there for her this past month.”

“I wouldn’t worry,” Baekhyun hums as he brings the teapot and two mugs to the table, setting them down on the bamboo placemat to the side of the scones. “People think and do weird things when they’re stressed out like that.” He quickly fetches the milk from the fridge before he sits down again, meeting her near-black eyes and realising he’s just opened up a door.

“Speaking of, how’re you doing?”

His first instinct is to say ‘fine’, but just as he starts to, his voice cuts itself off like a scratch mark on a CD and he changes his mind. No, he’s not fine. It’s just he doesn’t want to admit it.

“Talking about it will help, you know,” Nessa encourages. “I know it’s hard but I promise you, it will.”

Baekhyun allows her deep, soothing voice to lull him into a sense of calm. He looks across at her, defeated, and starts to shake his head.

“We were just meeting up like normal, after two weeks,” he begins, struggling around the lump that has made a home in his throat. “He picked me up and we went to a pub in Edgebank, then the plan was that I’d be staying the weekend at his, maybe even some time into the week after.” He vaguely notices that Nessa has started pouring the tea, steaming brown liquid diffusing amongst the milk she’s poured in the bottom of the mugs. It reminds Baekhyun of mixing paint.

“I think I could tell something was off but I didn’t want to overth