hold me ♡ minsung

16. eavesdropping and exam prep

♡

DECEMBER 6.

   Whatever stupid sickness Hyunjin gave him stuck with Minho for a long time. While Hyunjin was fully recovered and back to normal within three days, Minho's fever stubbornly refused to  break for even longer than that, and his symptoms took quite some time to fully fade away, so that he was still emptying tissue boxes at almost an alarming rate for days.

   It wasn't like him to take so long to recover. The sickness clung to him like cellophane, and it took a week for him to feel well enough to get up and start on homework. Even when he did that, his brain was fogged up so badly that he hardly got through an quarter of the stack of assignments he'd accumulated while he was sleeping away whole days.

   And then, by the time he was back to classes, it was already time to get serious about preparing for exams, which were being held at the end of the week, so he only had days to catch up, and up, and up.

   And then there was today.

  Today was the last day before exams.

   Yeah. Today was pretty much going to suck. That's what Minho thought to himself, the moment he woke up.

    Minho got up way later than he meant to, due to the fact that there were no early classes. Students were expected to use their extra non-class time to study hard for the upcoming exams, and that had been Minho's plan, but when the time came to get up and get to his desk, he found it incredibly difficult and ended up falling asleep again.

   Finally, he did peel himself out of his sheets and leave his warm, yet uncomfortable bed at just about noon. He felt even more like a zombie than he had when he woke the first time, with heavy limbs dragging him down, but he didn't have another hour to spend on sleep. If he didn't hurry up and get himself studying soon, he'd be in trouble when tomorrow came and he was handed packet after packet of papers with questions he couldn't remember the answers to. His mind was already producing for him visions of a tomorrow morning where he'd be left shrinking into his fold-out chair, a cloud of panic fogging up his mind as he realized the answers just weren't there, and there'd be nothing he could do but sit and stare and wait for his impending, scholastic doom. That's what got him out of bed.

    Still, when he plunked into the seat at his desk, he found that his bed, just to his left and hardly two steps away, was far too tempting, so he decided to shove all of his stuff into his backpack and leave the room to find somewhere he could focus.

   As Minho headed out of his room, the hallway was empty, and almost abnormally quiet. He could pick out the sounds and name them. There was the muffled noise of water running in the bathroom, of footsteps echoing in the stairwell, and of Chan's warm, charming laugh seeping out of the cracks in the door from one of the rooms behind him.

    Wait, Chan?

    Minho stopped in his tracks with narrowed eyes, because it suddenly struck him that that was quite unusual. Chan never really came down to the freshman floor.

    He was curious by now: what was Chan doing down here?

    He turned around and followed the sound, which was pretty obviously coming from Jilix's room. Now, focusing his ears on that alone, he could hear Jisung speak, too. He raised his fist to knock on the door, just to see, when he heard his own name. Instantly, on reflex, he drew his fist back and waited a moment.

    It'd be rude of him to eavesdrop, but he couldn't seem to stop himself from leaning his head in to hear what they were talking about. At first he couldn't make out much other than the change of tone: they weren't laughing anymore, and Jisung's voice had turned less lighthearted and more serious (maybe even concerned), like the sudden darkening of the sunny sky as the winds pull in a quick, summer storm.