A/N: Extra big chapter to make up for the delay.

So you guys need to give me a big kiss, because I'm dying lately...

Anyway, 'hello' to the new subscribers and 'thank you's to everyone who's supporting this story all this while!

Let's do our best, guys!

“First of all. You, Do Kyungsoo, need a suit. You won’t be wearing. It every day but. It is the most important piece. Of your wardrobe.” Kai began talking in strange, long pauses and Kyungsoo couldn’t help but pace up to him to make sure the younger boy wasn’t seizuring, or something similarly worrying.

What he saw made him forget almost all about his discomfort and start laughing instead.

Kai was in fact holding a little paper full of notes and he was reading instructions, like a tourist.

“What are you laughing at?” The swindler glared at him mildly. “Tao made this for me. It is… tips, to shop well.” He tried to explain.

Kyungsoo pointed at his mouth, throwing a questioning glance at the boy.

“Yeah, ok. You can talk in front of me. That was part of the deal.” Understanding the meaning behind the singer’s look, Kai nodded.

“You at fashion just as much as I do, don’t you?” Was the first thing Kyungsoo said after a three day silence. And, to be honest, it felt pretty good.

“Maybe.” Kai crossed his arms defensively. “But at least I have the money to hire someone to give me advice for that.”

“Agreed. But am I really shopping here?!” The singer couldn’t believe it.

“Well, you didn’t think you could make Kim Junmyun fall for you with that dreadful T-shirt and those pitiful jeans, did you now?” Kai looked down on him, quite literally and Kyungsoo felt his face burning up.

Trust Kai to berate him for his fashion sense, when he was carrying notes from his secretary on how to shop.

“Anyway.” Like that, the younger boy brushed him off and continued studying his notes. “We need a suit for you. And a bow tie. Tao thinks a bow tie will make you look…” Kai frowned having some difficulty in reading his cat-like assistant’s handwriting.

“Irresponsible?” The wild guy questioned and Kyungsoo had to stand at the tips of his toes and look over the taller boy’s shoulder, only to snigger and roll his eyes.

“Irresistible. It’s saying ‘irresistible’.” He provided hiding a small smirk, as his swindler companion flinched at the sudden proximity.

“Well, excuse me for finding it hard to believe that your name and ‘irresistible’ could go together…” Kai scowled.

“Well, you’re still stuck with me as your model, which means you’ll just have to it up and get used to my not-so-irresistible looks.” Besides, Kai was the one who had proposed the deal, so he had no right to protest now, the singer thought.

“Did you just talk rudely to me, Do Kyungsoo?” The swindler raised an eyebrow challengingly. Yet he sounded more curious than angry. The shorter guy felt slightly intimidated, but nowhere close to begging for his life.

After their first two, eventful meetings, Kyungsoo had realized Kai was easily frustrated, like a small child whose parents refused to buy him that one toy he had his eyes on. However, exactly like a child, Kai got easily distracted and forgot what he was mad about. In a couple of minutes, he would definitely go back to whining about the singer’s ugly looks, or his lack of charm or something like that.

Because Kai was just a kid, so he didn’t understand how easy it was to hurt someone’s feelings.

“I was just stating the facts.” Kyungsoo replied boldly and to show just how brave and cool he was, he walked in one of the shining shops without waiting for Kai.

Of course the whole thing would have blown up on him had the other guy decided to just leave him and his attitude alone and go back to his dark office.

Thankfully, though, only ten seconds after Kyungsoo had entered the ridiculously stylish shop, the dark-skinned swindler followed him there.

“Honestly, it’s embarrassing to walk around with someone as rude and badly dressed as you are. I should have just abandoned you here.” Kai muttered under his breath and the singer scoffed, as if the same thought hadn’t crossed his mind a few seconds ago.

Now, Kyungsoo wasn’t a big fan of those romantic comedies revolving around the miraculous transformation of an ugly-duckling into a pretty, swan-like woman.

However, if he had learnt one thing from spending countless hours, watching aforementioned romantic comedies with his sisters, it would be that, the hero or heroine of the movie had great fun walking in and out of changing rooms, picking out the prettiest clothes out there, while their ‘fairy godmother’ –in this case Kai- nodded in approval.

After three hours, a zillion outfits and a dozen of glares from Kai, Kyungsoo realized romantic comedies were one big lie and the people who made them had probably never gone out shopping with a jerk like Kai as their ‘fairy godmother’.

In fact, not only did Kai not approve of the outfits Kyungsoo liked, but he also got bored of this procedure pretty fast and ended up lying on a velvet armchair and yawning his eyes out for the better part of the day.

From time to time, the swindler would snap a photo of a suit or a shirt that looked somewhat good on Kyungsoo and he would send it to Tao for inspection.

And that was pretty much all the younger boy did, while Kyungsoo ran around picking out clothes and trying them out one by one and fixing them in front of the mirror till they looked decent on him.

“Ok, I think we’re done here.” Kai nodded, picking himself up from the velvet armchair and motioning for the older guy to follow him.

“A-aren’t we buying anything?” Kyungsoo breathed out as he struggled to keep up. “I’ve tried on so many suits… If you didn’t like them you could have just said so and we could have gone to a different shop and-”

The words flew out of the singer’s mouth, not exactly getting his permissions first. He blamed it on having stayed silent for too long.

Kai ignored him and turned to the sales lady. “My assistant will e-mail you the list of the pieces we’re buying and you can deliver them to my apartment.” He said and the singer wasn’t so much shocked by the wild guy’s attitude –he had almost gotten used to that anyway- as he was stunned by the saleslady’s calm nod which followed.

Rich people were probably drinking something funny, because it seemed perfectly normal for them to waltz into a shop, put on a ton of clothes and then just leave them there, asking their secretary (because of course they had a secretary) to contact the store and order those same clothes they had been wearing moment before. And of course their poor hands couldn’t carry those clothes and the items had to be delivered to them.

In the end, Tao might have been right.

Kyungsoo really felt like he was stepping inside a different world.

“Wait a minute!” Then a new idea popped in the singer’s mind. “Why is your pet tiger picking my clothes?”

Kai raised his left eyebrow in a very emphatic, are-you-kidding-me kind of way. “Because he’s the only one who actually knows a thing or two about clothes.”

“But I’m going to wear them… Me!”Kyungsoo felt cheated.

“Sure. It’s not like you’re wearing them because you want to, though.” The swindler shrugged as he walked over to a shoes’ shop.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Was being treated like a fool also part of the deal? Kyungsoo didn’t remember agreeing to that.

“You’re styling up to impress Kim Junmyun. Not because you care about your looks or anything.” Kai didn’t even pay any attention to Kyungsoo as he spoke. Instead his eyes were focused on some pair of ridiculously expensive dress shoes on display.

“So that means I have no say in what I-” Aforementioned pair of shoes was thrown in the older guy’s arms suddenly, as Kai ordered him to shut up and put them on.

And so more time went on with the swindler idly playing around high class shops and Kyungsoo running behind him, trying all sorts of garments he never knew existed, let alone being used as clothing.

“Why do we need cufflinks?” He couldn’t help but whine at Kai, two hours later. “And why are these small things so expensive?”

Kyungsoo began counting, mentally, how many servings of jajangmyeon he could buy with the money one cufflink cost.

Sixty-eight. He concluded after a good five minutes, since his math skills were not what they used to be in highschool.

“If we just used buttons for the suits, we could save -” A glare from Kai interrupted him this time and it almost felt good to be acknowledged, Kyungsoo thought, discarding the fact that he was receiving very angry stares from a notorious swindler.

“We’ll take the Mont Blanc ones. With the silver lining.” The younger boy pointed, absent-mindedly, at a certain pair of cufflinks and handed over an unnervingly golden credit card to the man behind the counter.

“Are we done, yet?” The singer was aware, at the back of his head that he was nagging. Yet, he had reached a place of physical and mental exhaustion where there was no turning back to his sensible character.

He hadn’t expected shopping with Kai to be such a war of nerves.

“Almost.” The dark-skinned boy nodded and Kyungsoo thought it was the best thing that had happened to him all day.

“Now about your hair...” And that was possibly the worst.

Followed closely by the fuchsia color of the revolving chairs in the hair salon where Kai lead him ten minutes later.  

The pink-haired, male ‘coiffeur’, as he requested to be called, shamelessly commented that Kyungsoo’s hairstyle looked like a goat had thought his hair was grass and had eaten part of it.

Kai added fuel to the fire by sniggering evilly behind the singer who shifted uncomfortably at his seat in front of the mirror.

“Fix this somehow, Sean. Something charming and dorky would be great.” The swindler messed Kyungsoo’s hair and the shorter guy was ready to swear back at him when Kai put a long finger on his lips and motioned for him to stay silent, since this was part of the deal.

Then, he had the nerve to abandon Kyungsoo with a snarky, pink-headed version of Edward Scissorhands.

A good half hour passed, with the singer grumbling in his revolving chair and the ‘coiffeur’, named Sean, doing things to his head, putting small pieces of tinfoil and applying strange-smelling creams on it.

 “Are you guys into some… no-strings-attached kind of relationship?” Sean, or whatever, asked later, as he run manicured fingers through the singer’s hair in a slightly creepy manner.

Kyungsoo straightened up in his revolving seat and gave the man an offended stare.

“I mean you definitely have something he wants. Kai is not a person who runs around Gangnam with people he has nothing to gain from.” The coiffeur said matter-of-factly.

The singer narrowed his eyes at the hairdresser with as much strength as he possessed.

“You. And Kai. You guys are sleeping together. Right?”  The pink-haired version of Edward Scissorhands winked, causing the singer to choke on the ginseng tea that some doll-like assistant had offered him a minute ago.

Kyungsoo cleared his throat, kind of hoping his hair were longer, so that it could hide his flushed expression and searched his bag for the red notebook.

‘No way! Absolutely not. We are not doing THAT together.’ He wrote down scratching the paper a little with his pen.

“Then do you have him on the hook?” The shuffling of scissors was heard and Kyungsoo saw strands of hair falling on the floor near his feet. So he didn’t dare protest much this time.

‘I already explained, we’re NOT a couple.’ He put down on the notebook, trying to stay still.

“Yes, I got that. I was only asking if you have something on him…” Sean sighed, probably knowing he had to explain that further. “I mean, if you’re blackmailing, or threatening him… Anyway, you must have some sort of shady connection with Kai.” He sprayed some sort of liquid on the singer’s hair.

Kyungsoo pursed his lips together. It’s not that the pink-haired man was wrong, or anything. He did have a pretty shady deal with Kai. Yet, like all the people who have dangerous deals with swindlers, Kyungsoo didn’t want to admit any of it. Not to the curious ‘coiffeur’; not even to himself.

‘You’re saying it’s impossible for me to be here as Kai’s friend, or his school mate, or his cousin?’ The pale boy scribbled and pointed the paper at the pink-haired man.

Then, he felt the roots of his hair being pulled out, brutally. Sean scoffed, as the doll-like assistant handed him hair extensions which he glued on Kyungsoo’s scalp, not without pulling and pushing hard first.

When the man was done doing what felt like taking the singer’s scalp off, he scoffed again, loudly.

“Kai’s friend? School mate? Cousin?” He repeated as if it was the funniest thing he had heard all week.

‘Why not?’ Kyungsoo wrote.

“Then what’s Kai’s real name? If you're one of those things, you must know. So what is it?” The question made the pale boy freeze. Not only because there was no way for him to know that, but also because it had never bothered his mind before that ‘Kai’ was just a nickname, or a code name, or whatever it was supposed to be.

Sure he knew it.

Deep down.

But, it was remarkable how dutifully he had pushed this knowledge at the back of his head and persuaded himself that things like real names didn’t matter.

One is not meant to accept names like ‘Kai’. Normal people would definitely ask for a real, Korean name, before striking a deal with a swindler. Then again, normal people wouldn’t strike a deal and lose their voice in order to make someone fall in love with them.

So the question which was bothering Kyungsoo the most was, when had he stopped being a normal person and turned into this messed up, mute, cufflink-wearing, chestnut-haired…

His round eyes widened in shock.

‘Why is my hair like that?’ The singer ran a hand through his wet, uncharacteristically light-brown hair and wrote frantically on his notebook.

“What do you mean ‘like that’?” Sean grimaced at the words. “I made it a little longer and got rid of that faded, dark-brown color. It looks great!”

‘That was my natural color!’ Kyungsoo almost forgot about the deal and was ready to shout as he took in the image.

“Well, your natural color was boring and Kai ordered to give you a dorky slash charming style.” It seemed like everyone thought Kyungsoo’s opinion didn’t even matter, now that he was practically mute and bound by this deal.

He lowered his head in despair, trying not to think how big of a mistake he had made.

“You don’t know his real name, do you?” The ‘coiffeur’ sent a knowing glance at Kyungsoo who slowly shook his head in a ‘no’ fashion.

“I thought so.” This time, when the singer looked at Sean questioningly, the other somehow got the message.

“How did I know?” The hairdresser asked and the now chestnut-haired boy nodded.

“Things like friends and school mates and family… Kai really hates them. So there are no people who know his real name. He threw them all out, long ago.” A strong hand landed on the pink-haired man’s shoulder, startling both Sean and the singer.

“I see you guys are done.” Kai flashed them both a threatening smile.

“Your friend is noisy even when he can’t speak.” The owner of the salon commented as he got paid by the dark-skinned guy.

“But you’re noisier.” Kai deadpanned, throwing a half-glare at the man.

“Did you only realize this now, Kai-sshi?” Sean smiled and it seemed like he was holding back from saying much more.

Kyungsoo was at the middle of bowing respectfully at him and stuffing his notebook back inside his backpack when the swindler dragged him out of the salon, angrily.

“Where are we g-going?” The singer hastily zipped his bag.

“Back to the office.” Kai replied, his voice holding a dangerously strong vibe.

“Your office? Why?” It was already late and Kyungsoo needed to be at the bar in an hour. His employer had been kind enough to let him continue working as a dishwasher, so he couldn’t afford being late.

“I did my part of the deal today.” The younger boy pointed at his chest. “Now it’s time you do yours.”

Kyungsoo had suspected it before, but now he was sure.

After a day out with Kai, three things were brought to his attention.

For one, there were parts of the deal which hadn’t been explained to him properly.

Secondly, Kai, whose real name no one knew, was definitively not one of the normal people.  

And, thirdly, neither was Kyungsoo, anymore.