Deer Luhan, With Love

14

Chapter 14 – In Which I am Not Sehun’s Secret Girlfriend

Deer Luhan,

I hope your dad recovers soon and you find your aunt quickly.  Sitting with Baekhyun was the most harrowing night of my life, and I don’t even know him that well.  I can’t imagine how bad it would be when it’s people you actually know.

Leigh

It was the steady beep of the heart monitor that eventually calmed me.  According to Chanyeol, who’d come to the hospital with us, I’d spent the seven hours that Baekhyun was in surgery huddled in a corner in a passage as close to the operation room as I could, practically screaming at people to leave me alone whenever they tried to get me to go somewhere else or lie down.

But all that was over now, and I was finally coherent, if not exhausted, and Chanyeol had left at dawn to fill in forms and get some rest and food.  After a good deal of argument, he and the doctors had agreed that I should be allowed to stay with Baekhyun until I felt a bit better.  Baekhyun was still unconscious from the anaesthetic, but he was breathing unaided and his chest was rising and falling regularly and the doctor who’d come to check on him an hour before had pronounced him stable.

Shortly before breakfast, Luhan rang for the fifty-second time.  I’d been rejecting calls from everybody throughout the night because I wouldn’t have been able to handle speaking to anybody, but I was now beginning to crave the comfort of a familiar voice.  My mum would have been the best, but it was midnight in the UK, so Luhan was going to have to do.

“Hi,” I said morosely.

Luhan didn’t give me time to get any further.  “I saw the news.  Is Baekhyun okay?”

I nodded, biting my lip, and glanced over at him.  He was still breathing normally.  “Yeah.  I’m with him now.  He has three fractured ribs and the bullet grazed his lung, but the doctors said they got the bone shards out of his lung surface and nothing vital was hit, so he’ll recover as long as nothing gets infected.”

“Oh, thank God.”  Luhan’s voice sounded weak with relief.  “The reports over here are saying things like he only has a ten per cent chance of living.”

I felt myself tearing up.  “No, the doctors were hopeful he’d pull through before they even started surgery.  There was a lot of blood though.  And a lot of internal bleeding.”

“The main thing is he’s safe now,” Luhan told me.  “I hope everybody else is okay, you included.  It must have been a shock.  I saw the footage – he landed right on top of you.  You looked like….”  His voice trailed off: he evidently couldn’t find the right word to describe it.

“That should have been me,” I choked out.  “It’s my fault, Luhan.  I should have been the one in front when Baekhyun was shot.  We got too close to the front of the stage, so I had to do the flairs behind him instead.  I’ve never felt so uselessly rotten in my life.”

“Leigh, Leigh,” he said, as though trying to talk sense into me.  “Somebody who saw the dance video has analysed the footage and what’s so far known of the trajectory of the bullet.  If you’d been in front, you would have been shot dead immediately.  Baekhyun was lucky he was standing just off to the side or it could have been fatal.”

He wasn’t making me feel any better.  “Luhan, you don’t understand!  That bullet was meant for me!”

“No, that bullet was meant for me.”