Deer Luhan,

If the mafia don’t kill you first, then I will.  And if I die from overdancing before I can do that, then Sehun will probably kill you instead.

Leigh

Sehun had dragged me out of bed at five in the morning and forced me on a run before I was coherent enough to realise what was happening.  Let me tell you it’s a shock to come to your senses and realise you’re half a kilometre from your bed in the dark and freezing cold.

I also wasn’t very happy because I was jetlagged, hungry, craving coffee, and in pain because he’d been trying to teach me choreography for some of the EXO dances the night before.

“You’ve basically got a choice between picking up singing or dancing in two days,” he’d told me, which hadn’t exactly filled me with confidence.  “We normally lip-sync for Wolf, but we can just pretend you’ve lost your voice and they’ll put everything on lip-sync for you, so you can focus on dancing without worrying about that.  But if we say you’re injured and can’t dance, they’ll just put you on the side and haul in a backup dancer and make you sing everything live.”

Did I mention that Sehun’s primarily a dancer and was consequently very biased about the best course of action?

Fortunately, I’d done enough track events to be able to complete the run (though Sehun turned it into a last-person-back-to-the-dorm-washes-everybody’s-underwear race), and I surprised the pair of us with a sprint-finish up the stairs.

“You’re on underwear duty, you horrible person,” I gasped out as he typed in the code to let us in.  “And get me coffee.”

“I’ll make the others play rock, paper, scissors for it, and what happened to please?”

“You don’t understand: coffee is essential to me functioning.  Why do you think I ended up in Korea?  I hadn’t had enough coffee that morning to figure out something was wrong.”

He burst out laughing and flicked me on the forehead.

“Hey!”

“I’m just getting rid of the dead brain cells taking up room in your head.”

We had to pick our way over a few sleeping bodies in the living room – somebody (or rather, two bodies) appeared to have been late-night gaming on the TV, and the boy Sehun had told me off for nicknaming “Camel Eyes” the day before had managed to sprawl himself out with his torso and arms all over the floor and his legs, ankles delicately crossed, up on the arm of the couch.  Sehun paused to poke them off.  Camel Eyes just rolled over with a snore as his feet thumped down, and Sehun raised an eyebrow.

A door which I vaguely recognised opened and a sleepy boy with dark red hair shuffled out, yawning.

“S’up, guys,” he mumbled and disappeared in the direction of the bathroom before either of us could reply.

“Wait a second,” I said as Sehun headed for the door the boy had appeared from.  “Is that our room?”

“Yeah.  Why?”

“What was that guy doing in our room?”

Sehun looked a little put out at my use of “our”, like I was trying to make us a couple or something.  “D.O. rooms with me and Luhan.”

A creeping feeling of discomfort was spreading through me.

“Was he in there last night?”

Sehun’s expression was a mixture of disturbed and amused.

“Is your brain really that dead without coffee?” he asked me.

“He was in there last night, wasn’t he?”

He just gave me a creepy grin and waggled his eyebrows.

“Sehun!” I bellowed.  “You might at least tell me these things!”

Four doors banged open and the three sleeping bodies shot into sitting positions.

“Whoa,” said Camel Eyes, blinking owlishly at the pair of us.  “Sehun, did you sit on Luhan’s bed again?”

“Guys, it’s seven in the morning,” Kris groaned, shutting his door again as soon as he’d clarified that nobody was being killed.

“Hyung,” complained Snapback Shorts’ voice, “if you wake me up at this time again, I’m going to hunt down your Rubik’s cube and torture it slowly to death before feeding it to my dogs.”

“Wow,” said Camel Eyes, looking between me and Snapback Shorts.  “This must be a world record.  I don’t think any of us have ever got Kai out of bed before without physically removing him from it.”

“Hyung,” said another guy who sounded more tired than Kai – I just about remembered that his name was Suho, “are you fighting with Sehun as well as Xiumin now?  Please can you just sit down and work things out?”

I looked at him, baffled.  First of all, why was I fighting with Xiumin, and second of all, who was Xiumin?  I tried to wrack my brains in case Sehun had mentioned him the previous day, but something short-circuited and I just stood there blankly.

Sehun must have realised I was going into shutdown mode, because he took my hand and began to lead me towards the bedroom.  One of the guys on the floor wolf-whistled and Sehun changed directions, giving him the finger.  Camel Eyes kicked his feet back up onto the sofa and snuggled up comfortably on the floor.  He was snoring before we reached the short passage to the kitchen.

“Don’t touch Xiumin’s coffee machine or he’ll go ape,” Sehun warned, pointing to a very familiar contraption, a double of which was in my room at home.  I pouted.

“NO,” said Sehun.  “And don’t use aegyo on me – it’s not going to work.”

I made puppy eyes at him.  “Pweeease?”

He threw an arm up in front of his eyes as though I was burning him.  “Ugh!  Stop!  Okay, fine!  I’ll make it for you.  Just don’t touch the machine.”

I sat down and rubbed my eyes, looking around.  It was surprisingly neat, considering twelve guys lived there, but they had been away for a couple of months, and if anything, it would have been worrying – if not a potential biohazard – if the place hadn’t been clean and tidy.

“Here,” said Sehun, handing me a steaming mug.  “Are you aware you’re sitting on the bin?”

“Huh?”  I looked up at him.  He pursed his lips, trying to bite back a playful smile, and then his foot twitched against the bin pedal.

My coffee took flight, and I nearly went flying with it.

It took less than half a second of aegyo to convince Sehun to make me a new cup of coffee, and I searched for a safer seat while he did it.

I love coffee.  I always have.  Two hot mugs of it and it feels like my brain is revving up like a formula one racing car.  Sehun obviously noticed the difference too, because he looked super freaked out.

I beamed at him as he backed away.  “What next?”

“You look like you’re high,” he told me.  I pulled my lips back to turn my grin cheesy.

“Caffeine is my drug, babe.”

I thought I heard him mutter a swear word.

“I’m getting you out of here before the others see.”

Three hours later, Sehun and I were lying side by side on the floor, panting and covered with sweat.

“Are you sure you’ve never done this before?” he asked me breathlessly.  “You’re actually not that bad.”

Ugh.  My whole body hurts.  My thighs were absolutely burning.  I rolled over and scowled at him.  “I pick things up as I go along.”

He reached out and flicked me on the head.  It was becoming a bad habit of his.

“And I have a photographic memory,” I admitted.  “It helps.”

“You’re quite supple, as well,” he told me.  “That helps.  You into sports or something?”

“I used to do competitive gymnastics at school.”  I sat up.  “Gave it up when I went to university.”

“You liar!” he accused me at once.  “You said you had no experience of dancing before!”

I lay back down with a thud and winced as pain lanced through my head.  The left side above my ear was still extremely sore.  “I always scored high in tumble runs and on the beam, but I usually ruined my chances of getting placed because of the dance routines.  Particularly free-style.”

“Next you’re going to be telling me you were trained by a professional opera singer when you were small,” he grumbled.  “You’re not the best in the world, but if you’re bad, then Lay’s a unicorn.”

“But Lay is a unicorn,” I pointed out.

There was a pause.  “Oh yeah.”

“And I got kicked out of the school choir because I .”

Two hours later, he’d changed his tune.

“Wrong again,” he snapped, dragging me to a halt.  “It’s that’s right, wolf, I’m a wolf.”  He demonstrated, emphasising the wolf ears which I kept p