Deer Luhan, With Love

86

Chapter 86 – In Which I Am Abducted From My Own Birthday Party

You might want to have the Korean version of Overdose playing while you read.

Deer Luhan,

You guys are never going to be able to top this year’s birthday present.  Hilarious.

Leigh

I really should have guessed it from the moment they came on stage, but it wasn’t until they were forty-five seconds into Jump!, with the people in the O2 going absolutely wild in the audience, that I finally twigged, because it was my choreography that I’d made with Kai back in China that they were using.  Absolutely dumbfounded, I turned to demand Abbie how on earth she’d pulled this off without abducting anybody, but she’d vanished.  I was surrounded by ecstactic moshers who were yelling along to the music.

At the one minute mark, I could no longer take it: I jumped to my feet, stumbling momentarily without my crutches, but they were both lying on the ground and bending to pick them up was going to hurt, so I just ignored them and started shoving my way through the crowd as best I could.

It really wasn’t a good experience, but fortunately I was pretty distinctive in my blue ballgown and everybody recognised the birthday girl, so they parted to let me through.  It still took a couple of minutes to get to the stage because walking really wasn’t easy and it made me extremely tired.

The boys wearing the Tao and Xiumin masks spotted me and broke away to pull me up.

“F*ck you, Johnny Chan!” I yelled as he came spinning past me.

“You’re dumb!” he replied in Korean before bursting into laughter.  Still semi-incredulous, I just stood there at the edge of the stage as the song slowly ground to a halt.  Tao and Xiumin had left me to get back into position and finish up the performance.  It was only when the screams and applause nearly took the roof off – Two Steps From Hell could never go wrong – that I realised it must have been a really good one and that I hadn’t actually seen most of it.

“Hey.”  Somebody nudged me carefully in the ribs as Chen grabbed his microphone from before and went to the front of the stage, pushing his mask off.

“That’s it from us tonight!” he called, waving the mask in his free hand.  “We’ve been found out!”

“You ruined it,” Kai told me with a massive grin.  “We told your friend to put you right at the back so we could get Sehun to ask you for a dance the second you arrived at the stage because Jump! would have been over in the time it would have taken you to get from the back of this place to the font.”  He paused thoughtfully.  “That said, he was too worried about your condition to actually do that, so I was going to have to instead.”

“You lot are absolute b*st*rds,” I told him weakly.  “I even bumped into Chen the other day at university and he pretended he didn’t f*cking know me.”

“This has been EXO, everybody!” Kris yelled into the microphone as the others lined up for a bow.  “Thanks for being a wonderful audience!  We’re gonna steal the birthday girl now and leave you all to party!”

It seemed to be some kind of secret signal for Kai, because he scooped me off my feet without warning and headed for the wings at a sprint.

“What the hell?” I yelped, clinging onto him for dear life.  “Are you abducting me from my own birthday party?”