Our Little Dorm Mother

Chapter 38- Bad Feeling

It was quarter to eleven.

Chanyeol kept glancing at the clock on the wall above him as he drummed his fingers on the desk. He was late, really late and, he knew he needed to get out of the meeting as fast as he could so that he could meet with Nami, in the cinema, if she was still there waiting for him.

As the conference finally ended, he didn't bother with any of the polite formalities and went straight to Manager-nim. "Can I have my phone back now?" he asked impatiently. Manager-nim had confiscated his phone earlier so that he could concentrate on the conference call.

Carelessly, Manager-nim returned it to him, satisfied that the conference call had proceeded without any mishaps.

Chanyeol snatched it from his hands and started sprinting downstairs. As he did so, he checked his messages: there were five from Nami. The last one said that she was going home.

"Shit!" he cursed. Their date had been ruined and it was all his fault.

He checked his phone calls and found that he had ten missed calls. Most of them were from D.O.

He scrolled down and found that Nami had tried calling him. The last one was fifteen minutes ago. He tried calling her immediately but, to his dismay, she didn't pick up. She must be fuming... he groaned inwardly. And he didn't blame her for ignoring his calls.

Chanyeol rushed outside and hailed a cab. He will go home and see if Nami was there and beg for her forgiveness.

~*~

"Is Nami-ah home?" Chanyeol asked straight away as soon as he entered the dorm. He looked around the common area and saw that D.O, Xiumin and Suho were huddled together on the sofa, watching TV.

Xiumin looked at him curiously, "She's not home" he replied. "We thought she was with you. Weren't you together just now?"

"Yeah" Suho added peering at him, "how was your date?"

Chanyeol's face fell in despair. "She's not home?" He couldn't believe what he was hearing. He looked at his phone again and tried calling her, panic slowly rising from his gut.

Upon seeing Chanyeol's reaction, D.O got up from his seat, wrinkles forming on his forehead as he furrowed his brows. He had a bad feeling about this. "Chanyeol-ah," D.O said slowly, "where is Nami-ah?"

The other two turned to face him, more aware now of Chanyeol's jittery behaviour. Chanyeol dropped his phone from his ear forcefully as his call went straight to voicemail again. "She's not answering her phone." He eyed the trio in front of him, anxiousness evident in his wide eyes. "I don't where she is. I got a text from her half an hour ago that said that she was leaving but, if she's not in the dorm then..." Chanyeol grew quiet as he refused to think of the worst-case scenario.

D.O joined him in his worry, "She called me earlier, about an hour ago, and she said that had met up with a friend." He paused as he tried to recall his conversation with her, "I think she was at a café, I heard someone ordering an espresso in the background."

"Maybe she's still there?" Xiumin suggested, rising to his feet. He looked at the other three who were now facing one another, the movie they were watching, abandoned in the background.

Chanyeol was unsure. An uneasy feeling overwhelmed him again, the same feeling he had felt when Nami had gone missing the first time. He didn't want to think that something bad had happened to her. He didn't want to believe that he had failed her again. Panic was rising in his being causing the hairs on his body to stand erect as an unpleasant tingling sensation overcame him. He was filled with dread. And what he dreaded most was that Nami was in some sort of danger.