Happy birthday to Loopsided and LittleMissAi!  I hope you both have an absolutely wonderful day! :D

This graphic was made by Pouringmoonlight.  Isn't it lovely?

Deer Luhan,

If any of them even contemplates mentioning a love triangle, there will be murder on my hands, I swear.

But at least I can frame you for it because we look identical.

Leigh

The great thing about an extra six people in the dorm was that the place got tidied up six times as fast, especially since they needed somewhere to sleep.  The not-so-great thing was that it also got messy again six times as fast, especially when four of them decided camping out in the living room with Lay was a definite go.

“I really think it would be nicer to let Leigh have the bedroom to herself,” Suho was insisting for the forty-nineth time when Luhan refused to give up his bed.

“We don’t have spare beds in this place,” Luhan pointed out yet again, “and you’re telling me to ditch one of the only actual beds there is?  That’s irresponsible waste, that is.”

“But she’s a girl and she needs her privacy!  Besides, not that I’m trying to cast aspersions on you or anything, but one guy and one girl and a locked bedroom door—”

“So join us.”  Luhan shrugged.  “I’m sure Leigh won’t mind.”

“Threesomes are always better,” D.O. chipped in as he aimed a punctured basketball at the hoop.  Chanyeol and I broke off our table football battle against Chen and Kai to listen.

Luhan choked.  “Wait, how do you know that?”

“Just what are you trying to suggest?” Suho spluttered.

D.O. lobbed the ball and missed before turning back to them.  “Well, Leigh’s already slept with Sehun and Baekhyun, so it’s not like another guy sleeping on the floor in her room is really going to bother her.”

Suho’s and Luhan’s jaws nearly hit the floor.  Luhan turned to me.

“Wait, Leigh, you never told me about this.”

“Please tell me you used protection,” Suho said weakly.

“D.O.!” I wailed.  “What have I told you about making things seem worse than they actually are?”

“I didn’t sleep sleep with Leigh,” Baekhyun attempted to clarify without looking up from his phone.  “I have absolutely no desire to be castrated.  Prettyfingers, not Unsullied.  Except I actually am unsullied, just not in the Unsullied way of unsullied, and maybe not completely unsullied in a—”

“Stop talking,” Tao advised.

“We shared a bed when I was in hospital,” Baekhyun finished off.  He looked up and frowned.  “Wait, that still sounds wrong, doesn’t it?”

He was greeted by silence.  Luhan was still staring like he’d just walked in on his sister changing or something.

Groaning, I sat down on the floor and whacked my head against the table football table.  Luhan turned an accusing gaze on me.

“And what’s this about you sleeping with Sehun?” he demanded.

“Whoa,” said Chanyeol, taken aback.  “What are you, her super-overprotective big brother or something?”

“Luhan’s been acting like a jealous boyfriend ever since he got back,” Lay said with his usual dazed look.  “You should have heard his reaction over the phone when Chen found her hiding in the closet on Monday.”

“Lay, shut up,” Luhan commanded, his gaze turning steely.  “Leigh, what’s this about you and Sehun sleeping together?”

Chen let go of his table football rods, one eyebrow raised.  “Well, I think we’ve just discovered a way to tell the two of them apart.  Mention bedroom antics concerning Baekhyun and Sehun and Leigh becomes a frustrated ball of angst and Luhan looks like he’s going to murder somebody.”

“You shut up too,” Luhan snapped at him.  “I’m going to be having words with Sehun about this.  Leigh!”

“Jesus, Luhan,” I groaned, “I’ve already told you about this.  It was when we were translating your song and Sehun collapsed because he was ill and he was too heavy for me to move off the bed and Kai and D.O. were absolute b*st*rds and left him pinning me down.  Sehun doesn’t even remember it.”

Lay almost, almost hammered the final nail into the coffin.

“Hang on a sec,” he said, ducking his head to one side as Tao lobbed the punctured basketball at the hoop this time, “I though you were the one who liked pinning people down, not that you liked being pinned down yourself.”

There was dead silence.  The ball bounced off the ruined TV set with a loud crash, sending it tumbling to the floor in pieces, but other than that, nobody even moved.

I wanted to crawl into a corner and die when I saw that Sehun had frozen at the end of the hallway bordering the living room, evidently having just returned from the studio where he’d been with Xiumin and Kris.  The latter two were standing right behind him, Kris looking thoroughly confused while Xiumin was failing miserably at trying to hide a smile.

“Lay,” said Sehun with his classic poker face, “how exactly do you know this?”

I almost wanted to hug him until Chen suddenly leant around Kai with a soul-destroying smirk and said: “Wow, Lay, I had no idea you were submissive.”

There was a hollow bang in my ears as the final coffin nail was driven home, Kai letting out a catcall and Baekhyun and D.O. yelling something along the lines of “Leigh and Lay did what?”

“I thought it was only supposed to be me and Baekhyun who were into that kind of thing among us guys,” Chanyeol contributed in a lame attempt at a joke.  There was another bang as I hit my head against the table football table.  I tried to do it a third time, but my head hit a hand instead and there was a whispered curse.  I opened my eyes to see Sehun crouching in front of me.

“Judging from your reaction, you’re Leigh,” he said, his tongue poking out between his teeth.  Kai emitted an ear-splitting wolf whistle and he and Chanyeol started giggling.  “Come on.”  Sehun gripped me under the armpits and hauled me to my feet.  “I want to talk to you.”

“The bedroom doors have locks,” Chen offered, pointing towards the room I was sharing with Luhan.

I glared at him.  “Yes, but you know how to pick them all.”

He shrugged, his grin broadening.  “Can’t deny it’s a lifesaving skill.”

I just fumed silently at him, for the most part because he was right and the smug little b*st*rd knew it.  Sehun tugged gently on my arm, trying to get me to follow him out of the dorm.  Xiumin reached out to stop me as we drew level with him, but Kris caught his eye and gestured for him to drop his arm.

“Ah, as planned,” I heard D.O. say with satisfaction when we passed Kris and Xiumin.  “Luhan, don’t follow them, God.  Let Sehun be her prince.”

Sehun paused long enough to lean back around the corner and give D.O. the finger.

We ended up going to the helipad.  Sehun had suggested the studio because he didn’t want to take me out of the building, just in case (and also because Kris and Luhan might have skinned the pair of us alive), but the boys had been in and out of the studio all evening and I wouldn’t have put it past them to install some kind of secret bugging device in order to listen in on conversations – D.O.’s reaction to Sehun wanting to talk to me alone absolutely stank of him trying to manipulate it so that we’d end up by ourselves.  Granted, he couldn’t have been certain of Sehun walking in exactly when he did, but the excruciating conversation was bound to have got Sehun trying to shut it down in someway or another whenever he appeared, because that was what he’d always done with the video calls.  From the cheers that had followed us out of the dorm, more than one of the boys had been angling to get us on our own.  I even checked behind me several times to make sure they weren’t following.

It was a cold, blustery night and I found myself huddling in the lee of the tall walls surrounding the staircase we’d just come off, hoping that it wasn’t going to rain.  Sehun hunkered down beside me.  We were both silent for a while.

Sehun spoke up first.  “H… how are you doing?”

“I’m sorely tempted to make a hitlist right now and stick D.O. and Baekhyun right at the top of it,” I grumbled.  There was enough light for me to see him hiding a small smile.

“I meant with the whole… with the dorm break-in and stuff.  The closet.”  He didn’t look around at me.  “I’ve never seen the others so worried.  We just… I mean, I couldn’t get hold of you over the phone and none of the others could, and then one of the fans came up to us asking what was wrong with Luhan and showing us a video clip of him turning completely white and bolting out of an interview after checking his phone….  And when we got hold of Luhan, just….”  He swallowed.  “Even Chanyeol was moody.  Wouldn’t leave his room.  Baek was so scared he wouldn’t get off the phone to Xiumin because he wanted a second-by-second account of what was going on to be sure you were safe.  Kai just… Kai cried.  And D.O. burnt all the food.  I thought he was going to kiss Suho when hyung said he’d got tickets to bring us over here early.”

I gave a listless shrug.  “It was terrifying,” I said in a small voice.

“You don’t sound terrified.”  He peeked cautiously sideways at me.

“I’m worried I’ll break down if I try to show any emotion about it,” I admitted, having to fight to keep my voice calm as I remembered the suffocating blackness as I’d tried to hide.  “It was the first time I had a panic attack.  I thought the fear was going to kill me.”

There was a pause, then a rustle of movement, and he flicked me very, very gently on the forehead.  For a moment, it looked like Sehun wanted to say something, or to try to lighten the mood, but then he turned away again and dropped his hand.  I felt my cheeks begin to redden.  It was odd just how fam