Deer Luhan, With Love

85

Chapter 85 – In Which Johnny Chan’s Dance Crew Makes An Appearance

Deer Luhan,

I want to know how the f*ck all of this was pulled off.

Leigh

The O2 arena, apparently.  Don’t ask how Abbie wrangled that.  God only knew.  And Jason had been right about pretty much half the campus being there.  Literally every person I’d ever bumped into at any point during my degree appeared to be there, along with the entirety of the Korean society, everybody on my course, and other people I sort of recognised.  They sent up a huge cheer when I walked in, and Jason promptly found me somewhere to sit before hovering at my shoulder like a bodyguard.

“Stay seated and let the peasants bow to you,” he instructed.  “Your dad showed me your medical records and you are not allowed to move in this crush.”

“Wait, my dad’s involved in this too?”

“He kind of helped plan everything.  It’s been his baby since you were allowed home.”

“This has been planned since I got out of hospital?” I queried dumbly.

“Hey.”  He whacked me lightly on the head.  “It takes effort to organise something in the O2, you know.”

“How much did all this cost?” I demanded, staring around at the banners and streamers, but before Jason could reply, I was pounced on by an old family friend I hadn’t seen in years.  Jason vanished into the crowd, leaving me at her mercy.

Fifteen minutes later, I had been showered in kisses and presents and my head was absolutely reeling.  I had no idea why something so big had been planned for my twentieth birthday party, because Dad was probably going to have trouble topping it next year for my twenty-first.  I could only attribute it to his and my mum’s being so glad I was still alive and actually home that they’d decided to go all out.  They both had a bit of a flair for the dramatic, and while my mum usually got violent, my dad just got, well… over zealous in displaying his feelings?  And in pretty odd ways and at pretty odd times, too.  Whoever had done the invitations, quite apart from inviting half the university, had invited pretty much every person I knew.  Literally the only people missing were the ones who were related to me.  It was weird.

It became clear Dad had been pulling out the stops when one of my favourite comedians got up on stage at half six and proceeded to perform one of his most famous skits, then made a bunch of jokes about me being the birthday girl that somebody had to have provided him with insider and confidential information for, and after half an hour of this, one of my favourite musical acts from university showed up, shoving the comedian off stage in another comic skit that took a good five minutes of him reappearing and popping up and ruining their band setup.

I left off puzzling over how my dad had managed to wrangle getting one of the UK’s most famous stand-up acts to come along to my birthday party in favour of singing along to the songs the band was playing.  My feet were twitching and I was getting a strong, strong urge to dance.  It probably wasn’t the best idea if I tried, though.  I still needed crutches if I wanted to walk anywhere, so dancing was going to be a no-go.  It sucked.  And I internally cursed Kai yet again for awakening my dancing spirit back in Korea.  I genuinely couldn’t hear music anymore without wanting to dance to it.

After playing some crowd favourites and working everybody up into a frenzy, the drummer broke out into a long solo that had the entire place going absolute wild for several minutes.