Deer Luhan, With Love

75

Chapter 75 – In Which Baekhyun and Lay Are Well Worth Bringing Along

Deer Luhan,

There is actually something comforting about having familiar people along with you when you’re doing something reckless and stupid, even if the fact they’re there does actually make you even more worried in the first place.

Leigh

Breaking in through the front doors of the enemy hideout was about as far as our badassery went.  The lift broke down on the thirteenth floor (I reminded myself that today was a Friday), and it was about twenty minutes of swearing and clanking before it grudgingly decided to move again and deposited us down on the twelfth.

“Yay,” grumbled Baekhyun as we rounded the wooden bannisters onto the landing between the thirteenth and fourteenth floors.  “Forty-five steps down.  Four hundred and sixty-five left to go.”

“I’m not totally sure how you can stomach mental maths in a situation like this.”

“Don’t complain, Baek,” Lay admonished him.  “It’ll tone your thighs and calves.  That’s important for a dancer.”

Baekhyun shot him a glare that could only have been intensified with eyeliner.

“Okay,” said Lay meekly, stepping away from him and holding his hands up.

By the twenty-third floor, all three of us were sweating, and I was beginning to get paranoid that our footsteps echoing up the stairwell was going to attract some kind of attention.  The landings were also lacquered in wood after the twentieth floor and didn’t have rugs on them, and each time the rubber soles of one of our shoes squeaked across them, I couldn’t help but flinch.  Lay eventually broke the silence on the twenty-fifth floor.

“Do either of you feel kind of like we’ve walked into a haunted house?” he asked, eyeing the flickering lightbulb, which was definitely loosing the struggle for life.  Most of the lights on the previous floors had been out, and not even Baekhyun had been tempted to disturb them.

“Shush,” Baekhyunn grumbled, clearly uneasy.

All Lay did was reduce his voice to a whisper.  “Good thing we didn’t bring Tao.  He would have freaked.”

I concluded Lay was nervous.  He was starting to peer as high up the stairwell as he could.  Both Baekhyun and I were taken by surprise when he suddenly grabbed us and dragged us into a doorway.

“I heard something,” he whispered.

“What, over all your babbling?”  Baekhyun was nervous too, apparently.  Lay trod on his foot to shut him up, but the only result was Baekhyun hissing curses everywhere.  I muffled his mouth with my hand before Lay was tempted to do him some proper damage.

Once Baekhyun stopped squirming and I was able to concentrate on other things, it became apparent that somebody was walking down the stairs.  I looked at Lay and Baekhyun in a panic, then frantically scanned the surroundings for a place to hide.  The cover of the doorway might hide us from anybody looking down from above, provided they only looked from one particular angle, but that was about it.

Lay nudged me to the side, and a little later, there was a snick and he pushed the door open, tugging me and Baekhyun with him.

“Lay!” I hissed.  “You can’t just break into somebody else’s apartment!”

The scream from the woman and the man we’d just walked in on kissing just about summed that up.  Baekhyun immediately hid behind me, and I hid behind Lay.