"Nothing gives easy

Easy gives nothing

I'm just trying to keep

Income coming in"

Up We Go by LIGHTS

“Well, what now?” Yixing asked Peeves who was sitting on the floor of the living room next to him.

Yixing looked around the apartment from his spot, at a loss. After that girl, Christine had grabbed her food and darted out of the apartment, all the while shooting furtive glances at Yixing, he didn’t have anything else to do. Andy was supposed to be gone for hours. He wandered around the apartment to find the bathroom, which he had to go through Andy’s room to get to. He was relieved when he saw his luggage stacked against the wall there. In his haste to get to Andy, he’d completely lost track of it. He wondered briefly why that djinn, Nilah, had even bothered since she had already made it clear she didn’t care about them past how she could use them.

Of course, he couldn’t complain. So he pulled his phone out of his pocket and set it on the luggage. He had turned it off so he wouldn’t be bothered by all the calls and texts he was getting from people over his abrupt vacation, and he was still putting off responding to them.

After he finished in the bathroom and started looking around, he noticed how completely neat and organized everything was. It looked like the apartment had just been cleaned, and maybe it had, because it barely looked lived in. More like a film set than an actual apartment. It had everything you needed, all the basic furniture, and it was decorated, but it didn’t feel like a home.

The only place that didn’t look perfect was the couch where he had sat. The cushions were now haphazardly arranged since he had messed them up from sitting on them. So, he straightened them up as best he could before sitting on the floor, now nervous of messing anything up.

Yixing petted Peeves who had started rubbing himself against Yixing’s knees, but quickly switched to just scratching him when he noticed all the hair that was flying off Peeves from his actions. He was stuck alone in this apartment that belonged to a girl that he really didn’t know, with nothing really to do. He wasn’t hungry, and he was sure everything he’d find on the T. V. would be in English.

Deciding there was no avoiding it, since he literally had nothing to do to avoid it, Yixing stood back up and went into Andy’s bedroom to grab his phone and turn it back on. He sat on the edge of the bed, at first worried about messing up the covers, but figuring by the time Andy got home she’d probably be going to bed anyways and wouldn’t mind if it wasn’t perfect.

He then started thinking about Andy sleeping, which lead to him thinking about how he was going to be sleeping in this apartment with her, which could lead to them sleeping together…

Yixing shook his head to clear his thoughts. He wasn’t going to think about that. He may be magically inclined to… love her, but that wasn’t true for her.

Of course, he could probably make her love him, too.

He shook his head again, trying to rid himself of those kinds of thoughts. The way he felt wasn’t real, and he really needed to focus more on a way to break the spell. However, the emotions felt real. He was actually feeling them, and that’s what made it so hard and confusing. While he knew that he should be working to stop it all, he didn’t want to. Every single cell inside of him was screaming for Andy, and they all baulked at the idea of leaving her.

His craving to be near her was so strong that he was extremely disappointed when he noticed she didn’t have any pictures of herself hanging anywhere. In fact, there weren’t any pictures of people anywhere, just paintings and drawings. Yixing wondered at first if Andy’s had been the hand to create them, and thought that if she had she was talented. Just further proof that she was an amazing girl and he should be doing everything he could to stay with her rather than go back to not being associated with her.

By this time, his phone had and he was completely unsurprised to see he had a ton of missed calls and texts from people. He texted back to the people he needed to just to let them know he had landed, that he was safe, and that they didn’t need to worry about him.

That done, he didn’t have anything to do again.

Yixing came up with the idea of looking her up on social media, but didn’t know her full name. So, he snooped around a bit. He went through her school bag because he figured something would have her full name on it, and of course he found it. He was tempted to go through it a bit more, just to see what she was taking and what grades she got, but Yixing figured that was taking it a bit too far. Better to snoop around the information she put online that she doesn’t mind people knowing.

Yixing searched her name, Andy Park, and found a profile for her on a social media website fairly easily. He couldn’t read any of the information about it since it was all in English, which in his excitement he had forgotten he couldn’t read, but he was able to find pictures of her. He scrolled through them, surprised that there was more pictures posted of her than any she had taken herself.

He found her beautiful in all of them, though.

Well, if not beautiful, at least endearing. She seemed to have a tendency to make weird faces when she knew people were taking pictures of her. Those pictures made him smile as much as any of the others.

Yixing continued scrolling through the photos, only stopping when Peeves crawled into his lap and curled up into a ball. At first Yixing wasn’t sure how he felt about that, but decided that since it probably meant he’d been accepted, he just continued on with what he was doing before, letting the cat sleep in his lap.

He attempted translating some of the captions with them, having to run them through an online translator since he couldn’t find many words he recognized, and when he did they were lost in a sea of unfamiliar ones. All he saw, and all he read only served to cement his feelings for her even more.

Eventually, though, he ran out of photos. There was still some time before Andy returned, but he started wondering what should happen when she did. What was he going to do? How was he going to react? What should he say?

Yixing wondered if they should go ahead and start discussing how they were going to help him break the spell he was under, but when he glanced down at his phone again and saw Andy’s face smiling back up at him in one of those rare pictures where the person taking the picture convinced to her to, he through that thought out the window. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t even pretend that he could. He wanted to be here, with Andy. The guilt of his decision still gnawed at him, but his feelings were resolute. Besides, who’s to say he wouldn’t like her without the magic? Maybe if they’d met under normal circumstances, he’d have fallen in love with her? It seemed probable, since she was clearly an amazing woman. He was sure she was, even though he barely knew anything about her. It was a gut feeling.

Andy seemed like a great girl, someone he could like.

The moment he allowed himself to have this thought, he was gone. He could barely even contemplate the thought of breaking the spell. At that point, his world started revolving around Andy completely, and everything else was just going to have to fit around her.

Having this realization felt like something had slid into place for him, like something had clicked, or a switch had been flipped. He was suddenly aware of how much he needed her, how much he desired her. She was the most important thing to him, he needed to make her happy, and he was completely sure that he could make her happy.

Yixing believed in this thought so much that even if he hadn’t been under a spell, he was thoroughly convinced it would still be true. That they must be a perfect match. First thing’s first, though; he had to make her fall in love with him, let her see the truth in it, too.

It had been a while since he’d last dated anyone, so he was a little rusty when it came to something like this. Plus, it would be doubly hard since she’d be convinced all of his feelings were the result of magic, that nothing he felt could be his own true feelings, and that they needed to break the spell. She wouldn’t understand that he was sure he was developing his own feelings for her with the magical ones. He had to be since his feelings were so strong and so real.

So he needed to come up with a plan to get her to understand and to fall for him. He needed to come on strong enough that she wouldn’t doubt, and he needed to make her fall for him fast. He was already impatient to be with her. He was already impatient just to see her again.

Yixing eventually came up with an idea. It wasn’t the best idea, but he thought it might be good to start off strong.

~

"It finally happened,” Valery, the manager, said not unkindly to Andy as she finally made her way into the restaurant for work. “You finally showed up late.”

Andy glanced at the clock on the computer screen as she quickly logged in for her shift.

“I’m not late, I still have a minute,” Andy answered back absentmindedly.

She regretted it as soon as the words were out of . Responding to Valery’s comments only encouraged her to keep talking. Horrible as that sounded, Andy couldn’t help feeling this way.

After checking the clock when Andy was done, Valery said;

“You got lucky this time,” Valery said teasingly. “But you’re still really late. You usually get here fifteen minutes early or something like that. It’s a good habit, but you’re still young. You’re going to show up late eventually. Everyone does. I did myself, once. I was still living with my parents at the time…”

Andy’s mind wandered at this point, having already heard multiple versions of this same story. Valery tells it every time someone shows up late, but since everyone had actually been punctual recently, it had been a while since she’d last been able to tell it.

Andy leaned against the counter where the cash register, where she had signed in on, was and looked out at the restaurant to see if there was anything that needed doing. It was still early, so there were only a few tables and the other waitress had taking care of them under control, and the main floor of the restaurant seemed pretty clean. Apparently, Mary, the other waitress, had been cleaning to stay away from Valery too. It’s the only time she ever did aside from regular closing duties and when Valery specifically told her to.

Andy held back a sigh, not wanting to tip Valery off that she wasn’t listening. Usually, Andy did try and listen, but her mind was back at her apartment right now, worrying about Lay. Or, well, part of her was worrying. Another part of her was still getting used to the idea that Lay of Exo was in her apartment. That he was here, and she could actually talk to him because she could speak Mandarin.

Andy had never been a huge fangirl. She hadn’t plastered her walls with posters of her favorite singers, she never had tons of merchandise, she never did weird or crazy things just to be able to go to a concert.

But K Pop had always been a bit different. She still didn’t have the posters, she wasn’t allowed to because it was too childish, and she still hadn’t gone to concerts, no K Pop groups ever came near enough for it be plausible, even if she did have the extra time, money, and someone to go with her. But she did invest in buying the physical albums, even though it was so much more expensive, and she loved watching the music videos and performances and variety shows and everything else that went with it. Andy couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but there was something specific about K Pop that she loved.

Exo had been one of the groups she had really liked, and she had liked them for a long time. She had been a fan since back when there were twelve members, and not just nine. Her favorite member had always been Lay. He seemed very sweet and passionate, and she was drawn to that and his personality. Plus, he was incredibly talented.

Now that she actually had the time to stop and think about the situation, she couldn’t help her inner fangirl rising up. She was both nervous and excited to go home and see him. To properly greet him, talk to him. A small, selfish part of her was actually happy this had happened. A bigger, more responsible part was still flipping out over the repercussions that stupid wish had.

Andy was pulled out of her thoughts when the front door to the restaurant opened and a customer made their way inside. The hostess wasn’t there yet, so Andy had to seat them herself. She hurriedly began her duties, only catching the last few words that Valery was saying, (Something about the time her brother had gotten trashed at a frat party and tried making out with a dog. It was another story Andy had already heard before. It ended with the guy in the ER because the dog tried to maul the guy’s face. Dogs, apparently, didn’t like it when drunk guys tried to kiss them either.)

“There’s a phone right next to you,” Mary said to Andy like she was talking to a child as they passed each other a little while later.

The phone had already started ringing and gone off before starting up again. It was the hostess’s job to answer the phone, but she was gone. Andy had thought Mary was going to answer it since she had been near it originally, but of course she didn’t. Why would she when Andy was around, though? Andy was the one who usually picked up all the slack. It was a habit she picked up largely because of Mary, because as soon as Mary was inconvenienced, she got excessively angry, and when that happened, everyone else had to pay.

Andy set down the dirty plates she had picked up on another table that still needed to be cleaned before answering the phone.

“Your table’s food is ready,” Valery said once Andy had set down the phone. Her arms were crossed and her eyebrow was raised as though asking what in the world Andy was doing answering the phone instead of delivering food to the table.

Andy didn’t have the time explain that no one else was bothering to answer the phone, and that Valery was the first person to show up who was technically supposed to answer the phone. So instead, she just kept quiet and went to grab the food and deliver it to it’s table.

By the time closing came around, Andy had pretty much forgotten about Lay. The evening had been slow enough that almost much everyone was able to start on their closing duties early, and they were all just sitting around, waiting for the last couple to finally get up and leave since they were just talking and it was five till closing. While Andy was leaning against the counter with the cash register again, staring down the oblivious couple, she remembered.

Suddenly, she wasn’t so keen on going home soon. The nerves hit her as if she had just run into a wall. Andy felt she was being ridiculous since she had just been with him earlier, but at the same time it had been different. Earlier, they had been trying to deal with a psychotic djinn, and then she had to leave for work immediately since she hadn’t figured suddenly finding yourself responsible for a foreign celebrity thanks to a wish you made off a magical creature wouldn’t be a plausible excuse for missing a shift.

They had barely spoken to each other at all, and it hadn’t hit her just what was happening at that time. She could barely think about the fact that he was at her apartment, now, let alone that he would be spending the night there.

When the couple finally got up and left ten minutes later, Andy was slow to finish up. Mary didn’t even bother waiting for Andy, like the waitresses typically did for each other, clearly annoyed that Andy wasn’t rushing to leave. The only thing going through Andy’s mind, though, was that she wished she hadn’t finished all of her other duties early.

Eventually, though, she finished up and had to head home. She hesitated in front of her apartment door, letting herself think for a moment that what had happened earlier hadn’t really happened, that it was all just a hallucination from stress or a weird dream from a nap she didn’t remember waking up from. It was crazy, and a stretch, but she let herself have the one moment of piece before unlocking her front door and walking in.

All the lights in her apartment were on, except the one for the bathroom. Aside from that, everything still looked in order; clean and organized, the doors to her bedroom and the bathroom left open for the cat to roam freely (because God forbid Peeves be denied entry anywhere). On top of that normality, though, there was that there was no Lay. She shut and relocked the door, but tried not to make a sound, nervous. She moved to her bedroom and was surprised to see a shirtless Lay sprawled out on her bed, Peeves curled up next to him, both sound asleep.

Peeves lifted his head and looked at her when she reached the doorway, but Lay remained un-phased. He continued to sleep peacefully; his hand on his stomach, chest rising and falling, face tilted towards the door as though he had been watching, waiting for some one to walk through.

Three guesses who, Andy thought, surprised that she was still capable of making a joke about all this.

The fact that he was shirtless didn’t have as much of an effect on Andy as it probably would have most girls in her position. She grew up going to public pools a lot, and her parents got their own pool a couple of years ago, so she was used to being around topless guys. Still, the fact that it was Lay, and the fact that he was in her bed did have an affect on her.

She turned the lights back off, not wanting to bother him, and made her way quietly to her drawers to grab her pajamas. The drawers were lowed as she opened them, and she hoped that he would just continue to sleep through the noise, but when she turned to check on him he was, of course, looking back at her. Andy coudn't help but think bitterly for a second that nothing was going right for her tonight.