“It’s been like a week and a half. You don’t think he’s quit, do you?”
Chanyeol paced back and forth in Kris’s office, ruffling his own hair in an effort to keep from shouting at his boss. Kris wasn’t making it easy for him.
“I don’t know. He did call in for the first couple of days, and he sounded awful. I told him to take as long as he needs.”
Chanyeol groaned. “Have you tried calling him?”
“His phone is off or something; it goes straight to voicemail.”
“Dammit.” Chanyeol slammed his hands down on the desk, making Kris jump before he looked up at him with a cynical expression.
“Chanyeol, get your ass out of my office, and go check on him if you’re so worried.”
Chanyeol brightened. “Oh, that’s a good idea!” He deflated a moment later. “I don’t know where he lives. He’s never told any of us.”
Kris rolled his eyes and muttered a prayer for patience. He tapped a few keys on his computer and pulled it up, jotting the address down on a post-it before sticking it on the back of Chanyeol’s hand. “There,” he said. “Now stop bothering me, I’ve got to figure out how the hell he’s been making this work.”
“…What?”
“Baekhyun changed the system, so that it works better – and it does – but I don’t know what he did, and since he didn’t tell me how he did it, I’ve got to figure it out. Hey, ask him to come back one more time even he’s quit without notice, so he can explain this to me,” Kris asked. Chanyeol looked hard at the note with Baekhyun’s address, memorising it, and then nodded.
He swung one leg over the saddle of his motorcycle and straddled it without turning it on. He had no idea where the street even was, and pulled up the GPS on his phone to get directions. It was surprisingly not far away, and he quickly scanned the directions that came up before tucking his phone back into his pocket and revving his bike up.
Fifteen minutes later, he entered a derelict neighbourhood. Sure that he’d made a wrong turn somewhere, Chanyeol checked his GPS again, only to have it tell him that he was a mere one block away from Baekhyun’s apartment.
What the hell does he live in a dump like this for? Didn’t he say one of his mother’s men bought her a house? Why isn’t he living in it instead?
When the neighbourhood itself offered no answers, Chanyeol turned down Baekhyun’s street, and saw the cluster of motel apartments where – according the address he’d given – Baekhyun lived.
The idea of someone as beautiful and wonderful as Baekhyun living in this neighbourhood filled Chanyeol with a deep fear. He’d lived in the same huge house all his life, and his parents had spoiled him rotten. Even now he worked for Sinful Confessions because he was bored and Kris was his friend, not because he needed the money. Just the thought of living in this place was abhorrent to him on a deeply personal level.
It was made all the worse when he considered Baekhyun living here. Baekhyun who had become near and dear to him in the time they’d worked together. He didn’t even mind that the other man had asked to switch, because he knew it was just a job. He hadn’t quite gotten up the guts to actually ask Baekhyun out yet, just the two of them on an actual date, but he’d been working up to it.
And then Baekhyun went home early one day and just never came back.
He parked in a guest spot in front of Baekhyun’s flat and walked up to the door. He was still having trouble reconciling the angelic man he knew with a home that looked like this – there were cracks in the wall, he noted, and shuddered when a roach scurried away from him. The nameplate on the door read Byun B. however, and so he knew he was in the right place.
Now that he was here, it seemed awfully foolish. What if Baekhyun really had meant to quit? An icy gust of wind came up under his jacket and made him shiver. Before he lost his nerve, he raised his hand and knocked. The door swung open slightly and hung there.
A sudden horrifying vision – that he was going to step into his apartment and find Baekhyun dead and half-eaten by rats – swept through him. “Baekhyun!” he called, and pushed the door all the way open. It was dark inside the flat, and he groped for a light-switch.
It clicked, but the lights didn’t come on. The apartment was roughly the same temperature as the outside, which was probably only a step or two above freezing. Fear gripped Chanyeol and he whipped his cell phone out, using it as a flashlight.
There didn’t seem to be anything on the floors – no trash or rats or bugs – which was a small miracle as far as Chanyeol was concerned. He found a tiny kitchenette tucked into an alcove, and there was a door off to one side of it. When he opened it, it revealed an empty bathroom, with a towel neatly folded on the back of the toilet and some toiletries around the sink. A clothes hamper was half-full beside the shower.
Chanyeol stepped back out of the bathroom and continued his sweep of the room. He found a cheap old television set and a DVD player on the floor, and then noticed the couch tucked into the corner of the room. There was a pile of blankets humped over it, and then Chanyeol just about lost it when they moved.
A white hand appeared in the dim glow of his cell phone and shoved the blankets down slightly. Baekhyun’s groggy face materialized, squinting into the mechanical light.
“Who’s there?” he croaked, and Chanyeol thought, Wow, Kris was right, he sounds awful. Baekhyun coughed, a wracking, painful sound that seemed to come from the bottom of his lungs, and Chanyeol realised how sick he was. There was a half-eaten bowl of ramyun noodles beside the couch, and he nearly kicked it over when he knelt beside the sagging couch to feel Baekhyun’s forehead.
“It’s me,” he said, idiotically. “Chanyeol. Jesus Christ, Baekhyun, have you been here the whole time in the dark?”
“…Chan,” Baekhyun said, and sneezed before coughing again. “No,” he tried again when the horrible fit had passed. “Power went out… sometime … I don’t know. What day is it? Am I late?”
Chanyeol’s heart swelled until it felt like it was going to burst out of his chest. It felt like the force of his emotions would be enough to light up the room in a moment. “You’re not late,” Chanyeol said. “We – I was just worried about you. Come on, you need to go see a doctor.”
Baekhyun shook his head. “Can’t,” he wheezed. “Can’t pay.”
“What do you mean?”
“My mother – died.”
Chanyeol thought he ought to feel something more than a sense of overwhelming relief, but there was nothing else in him for the woman who’d allowed her son to be taken against his will like that. “So…?” he asked, and then realised it was callously heartless of him to say it like that. She was, after all, Baekhyun’s mother. Quite possibly his only family in the world.
“Hospital bills,” Baekhyun said. “Funeral costs. Need – I need to pay it off.” His eyes fluttered as he turned his head into the pillow and coughed again. It shook his whole body. Chanyeol shook his head.
“You’re going to the doctor, now,” he said. “I can’t let the man I love die of pneumonia because he’s too stupid to look after himself.”
He didn’t know he was going to say it until the words were out of his mouth. Baekhyun blinked owlishly at him from beneath the stack of blankets. He didn’t know he was going to say it, but once they were there in the air between them he knew they were true. “Come on, Baekhyun. I’m gonna call Kris; he’s got a nice big SUV. I’m not sticking you on the back of my motorcycle like this; you’d fall off.”
Baekhyun laughed hoarsely, then groaned when it turned into a coughing fit. When it passed, he asked, “You drive a motorcycle?”
“I ride a motorcycle,” Chanyeol corrected, already dialing Kris’s number. “So this is probably the worst possible timing, but Baekhyun, would you go out with me?”
“Just – just go out?”
“Maybe we can fuck, too.”
Baekhyun began laughing once more, while Kris, who’d picked up his phone just in time to hear that last line, squawked in horror.
