Deer Luhan,

I’m starting to think Sehun and I are never not going to be ed.

Leigh

It took until Luhan asked me if he could borrow some of my clothes before the others calmed down, staring at him like he’d suddenly sprouted tentacles.

“What?” he demanded.  “Those two want to go out and so do I, so if I dress up as a girl there’s not going to be the problem of two Luhans walking about.”

“What did he say?” Abbie asked, looking inquisitively from me to Luhan.

“You’re about to see Luhan in drag,” I told her.  “Mind going upstairs and picking out some clothes for him from my wardrobe?”

She looked uncertain as to whether she should squeal or be a little freaked out, and eventually settled for the latter.

“…Right,” she said.

“Oh, and bring him down a few pairs of socks, too,” I added.  “He needs them to stuff his bra.”

Now she looked really freaked out.  It was Luhan’s turn to look quizzically between me and Abbie.

“Is she okay?” he asked.

“I don’t think she approves of your fake s,” I replied, causing snorts of laughter around the table.

“Oh.”  He blinked rapidly several times and then flashed a brilliant smile at my friend.  “Any chance you could find me a miniskirt?” he asked in English.

I thought she was going to faint on the spot.

D.O. spread his arms solemnly.  “Welcome to the real EXO.  You are now trapped and there is no turning back.”  He gave an evil grin.

Abbie tugged on my arm.  “I thought the Satansoo thing was just a joke,” she whispered.

“Oh, no, it’s very real,” D.O. told her.  “And also, if I were gay, there would be no chance of Kai ever topping me unless he wanted to be castrated.  I feel that’s something I ought to set straight.”

“You’re supposed to be my friend!” Kai spluttered.

“Stress the ‘supposed’ a bit more, please.”  D.O. picked up the newspaper my dad had left on the table earlier and started to look through it.

“Abbie,” I reminded her, “Luhan needs female clothes.”

“O-oh, right.”  She vanished.  The boys watched her go.

“You know,” said Kris, “she’s amazingly calm considering how she greeted us at the airport.”

“Yeah, I thought I was gonna die,” Kai agreed.

“I think she’s still trying to adjust to the fact that you’re a total bunch of nutcases rather than being the godlings she expected.”

It took a very long time for Abbie to stop gawping once Luhan appeared in a summer dress I’d forgotten I owned.  He had a wig of hair down to his shoulders and kept playing absently with one of the bra cups.

“Hyung, stop groping yourself,” Sehun admonished as he finished putting everybody’s contact numbers into my phone for me.

“But it feels really weird!” Luhan protested, flicking the other one.

“Do you want people to think this is the red light district when you step outside?” Lay demanded.

“Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?” Baekhyun hollered from across the room.

“We are going out,” Sehun told me firmly, dragging me past a stupefied Abbie and tucking my phone into my pocket.  “I refuse to put up with that for a minute longer.”

As he shut the kitchen door behind us, I heard Luhan asking Xiumin, “Are my s on an even keel?”

For some totally stupid reason – which, okay, might have had a lot to do with me being stubborn and still determined to rehabilitate – we decided we were going to walk.  We got as far as the tube station before we were spotted.

“It’s not a bubble tea café,” I was explaining.  “It’s a proper tea shop with hundreds of different infusions, and we’re going to get a cream tea.”

“Is that typically English?” Sehun asked me, eyeing me carefully to make sure that I wasn’t in too much pain.

“It’s very English.”

“It sounds downright weird.  Is it literally a tea-flavoured cream?”

“No—”

“But you don’t even like tea.”

“That’s why you’re going to drink the tea for me—”

Thankfully, I was mistaken for Luhan, or else I think the fan that suddenly backhugged me would probably have killed me.  Sehun looked murderous enough to kill her, at any rate, when I let out a strangled squawk of pain.

“I love you, oppa!” the girl squealed, tightening her grip uncomfortably.

“And I love Sehun,” I huffed, trying to pry myself free.  Sehun looked too gratified at my retort to attempt helping me.

The girl let go of me in shock.  “HunHan is real?” she demanded.

“HunHan is Ree Lee real,” I affirmed.  Sehun snorted, and it was only then that I realised what I’d done.  “D*mn you, Chen.”

“Wow, I….”  The girl looked between the two of us.  “Can I have your autographs?”

“Sure,” said Sehun just as I was about to refuse, “on the condition you tell nobody you’ve seen us for the rest of today.  And no photos.”

And just like that, about fifty camera flashes went off in our faces and we found ourselves blocking a lot of angry commuters off from the ticket barriers with an impromptu signing event.  There were several fans who spoke Korean – there were actually several very lovely fans from Korea as well who’d happened to be in the UK and were delighted to discover that EXO was in the area – and those that didn’t spent a lot of time cooing over our English, which Sehun found hysterically funny.

Eventually, one of the members of station staff came over and told us off for causing a public disturbance, so we bid the fans goodbye and scrambled through the barrier.  The majority came piling after us.

“How do we lose them?” Sehun asked me in a low voice as we rode the escalator down the equivalent of a couple of storeys.  I shrugged.

“We hope we’re the last ones onto our particular train.”

As luck would have it, we were.  A couple of line changes later, we were out in the open again, happily tail-free, and Sehun was looking around in interest as I took him over to the café.

“London’s got a lot of trees,” he said as we stepped inside.  “It’s much greener than I thought.”

“That’s what makes it a bearable place to live in,” I told him.  “Apart from all the amazing stuff that goes on, of course.”

Sehun found the whole cream tea thing bizarre.

“This is a snack,” he said as a large plate of sandwiches, plus a tray of scones, appeared before us.  “This isn’t tea – it’s practicaly a meal.”

“Don’t kid yourself.  You could probably eat ten of these in one sitting,” I admonished him.  He shrugged.

“True.”

The cream tea was a pleasant affair.  Sehun held my hand under the table for most of it and pretended nothing was going on in the skinship department, was a little put out that his tea didn’t have any tapioca pearls in it (I told him very firmly that bubble tea didn’t go brilliantly with scones), and wasn’t totally sure what his reaction to the scone was.

“It’s, like… all one flavour,” he said around a mouthful.

“Most items of food are.”

“But there’s, like, no herbs or spices or anything.”

“Because it’s a scone.”

He took another bite, absently cream off his upper lip.  “You English people eat weird things.”

“Well, we invented jaffa cakes and and kitkats, so I think you can allow us a little slack.”

Sehun wolfed down the remainder of the food and threw me a confused look.  “What are jaffa cakes?”

And that was how our date ended up in the biscuit aisle in Sainsbury’s, Sehun turning a pack of jaffa cakes around in his hand, completely oblivious to the fans who’d spotted us in the store and started pointing and screaming (and queuing up to take photos of us, much to the amusement of the staff) and eventually giving voice to a rather nonplussed: “are they sure it isn’t a cake, though?”

“There was a huge tax court case that debated over that a few years before I was born,” I told him, flinching as a flash went off in my eyes.  “And they’re technically cakes, though they’re otherwise biscuits.  But they’d be called jaffa biscuits if they were biscuits—”

“That just sounds weird,” Sehun interrupted, putting the pack back on the shelf.  He looked around, blinking as if only just realising that we were surrounded.  “There are way too many people who recognise us in this city.”

It took a very long time to get out of Sainsbury’s.  It probably would have been quicker if I’d been able to run, or if Sehun had taken my suggestion of stealing a trolley and trying to make a break with me in it.  We