Boss Complex

5. The sister complication

Chanyeol watches with his hands knotted into the fists of tell tale irritation. Here he was constantly gritting his teeth after spending all of these years without being concerned over others. There were so many years where he didn't even notice others going through struggles, he stood next to Victoria every day for months without realizing that she was going through a violent divorce. Though to be fair, she was very professional about it and had Joonmyeon not pointed out that she had bloodshot eyes from crying everyday, he might not have ever known.

But that was exactly the point. Joonmyeon notices his employees in a way that Chanyeol doesn't. The same way he noticed Baekhyun's wet shirt and was now leading him downstairs to buy him a new one. Chanyeol should have done that. He has so much more money than Joonmyeon anyway. He should have gone and offered to buy him a new shirt, they'd both suffered in the collision, and in hindsight he knew that it was an accident. He understood that it was an accident and still blew up over the top at him. His emotions were perpetually in the cool neutrals but when he gets around Baekhyun he sprays out like a shaken soft drink uncapped for the first time. He spits fire at the man, and he had to wonder if Joonmyeon was right about being too stern with him or if he was just especially close with the little intern these days. He had seen them together many times in the past weeks. If Baekhyun wasn't talking to Tao, he was talking to Joonmyeon. How he was able to stand being close to the two of them and their earnestness was beyond him since he found it hard to talk to them for too long when they were always talking about their dreams, plans, and all of the sweet things they usually had to say.

Chanyeol was firmly a realist and planning excessively is a waste of his time when there's not a sound financial feasibility.

Watching the two disappear into the hallway, Chanyeol turns back to his office, the room unnaturally spacious for just a moment. His gaze finds the coffee stained shirt and undershirt hanging from the coat rack. Stripping down he found a red mark on his abdomen where the coffee had temporarily warmed his skin. Beneath that white striped shirt, did Baekhyun have a similar mark? Was he tinted pink by their collision too? Chanyeol's fingers stroke along the waist of his slacks absently as he tucks in his shirt again, though it had yet to come out of place in the past few moments since he got the shirt on. He takes his seat at his desk and sees Baekhyun standing there before him again, the dark liquid soaking through his shirt, his cheeks flushed but the illusion starts to slowly change as Baekhyun looks up slowly from beneath his long lashes and sets the empty coffee cup on the edge of his desk. He unloops the ID badge and sets it down, reaches down to slowly, hesitantly grasp onto the hems of his shirt. His eyes flick down in embarrassment for a moment before he slowly starts to pull away the shirt, exposing the cool pale skin of his abdomen and the pink mark left from the coffee collision.

He reaches forward absently and finds that the illusion turns away embarrassed before disappearing entirely.

He hits the call button immediately and calls for Victoria.

"I need to take time off. I need to see a doctor." He says.

"Are you okay? Shall I make the appointment?"

"I'm seeing things. I think its exhaustion." He says eying the spot on his desk where an ID card lanyard and coffee cup had been just seconds before.

Dressed in a new cashmere camel colored crew neck sweater, Baekhyun steps out of a taxi on the wrong side of town. The neon lights all around him burn in flickering rainbows with offensive signs indicating an array of illicit propositions. With his eyes glued to the sign before him he pulls out his phone and double checks the name and address before sitting back in the taxi and handing over the bills in his hand.

"Thank you!" He says to the driver.

The man gives him a disapproving look but doesn't say anything. But really, Baekhyun was glad that he wasn't saying anything about why a guy dressed so nicely was here in the sleaziest part of the town. Slacks and cashmere don't belong in a place where lace and fishnets are the preferred articles of clothing.