Interns

Chapter 15: Human

Heaven was in chaos. One of Heaven's fallen guardian angels had agreed to give her soul to a demon. Although banished, Heaven still kept tabs on her and would go after whoever tried to meddle with Heaven's plans for her. As a result, a team of angels was sent to raid Hell as soon as Yixing had brought Naeun there as his mission entailed.

A violent fight ensued. There were casualties. Both sides were weakened in the fight, and the angels failed to bring Naeun back to Heaven directly as they were supposed to, so once again she was left behind on Earth. However, the angels that did survive the fight had captured the demon trainee, Jongin, and they were able to take him to Heaven and use him as a hostage to force Hell to keep away from her. Was this a wise move? To the angels, probably, yes, but to Kyungsoo, who was best friends with Jongin, no, that was not wise at all.

Naeun was freaking out. Within a matter of hours, she was expected to believe that angels and demons were real. The angel part was not too difficult to believe, but demons? And that she had been working with one every day and she was oblivious to all of this? His red eyes made sense to her now as she thought about how he fingered her in the empty conference room at the nature reserve.

She did not know what to do. She was overwhelmed and this was giving her a headache. She needed to talk to somebody, but who would be there for her? She scrolled through her recent contacts and realized that all of her friends, even Katie, would just think that she was fooling around with this angel business and demon nonsense. That was until she scrolled further down and stopped at the chat with Baekhyun.

Maybe her thumb was just tired; that's why she stopped scrolling. Or maybe a part of her thought that Baekhyun would believe her if she were to tell him what had just happened between her and Yixing and between Heaven and Hell.

Naeun no longer felt offended or awkward that Baekhyun had randomly kissed her last time, or about the rumors that were spreading, because, seriously, compared to what she had just gone through in the past few hours, nothing else could be considered odd anymore. So she contacted Baekhyun and he suggested that she could meet up with him and chat at a café that he was going to take her to as an apology back when he thought that his prawn tarts had triggered her allergy and made her faint. He texted her the address and in an hour's time she was seated at his table.

The café was situated in an alley, and Naeun would not even have known of its existence had Baekhyun not told her about it. She frowned and found it slightly strange that it was so empty. Baekhyun was the only customer. But she shrugged it off and figured that it was better that nobody else would be around to hear what she had to say to him.

"You probably don't like vanilla stuff," Baekhyun began as soon as Naeun settled down, not for a moment ditching his flippant, joking attitude. "So how about a salted caramel cappuccino?"

Naeun quickly agreed to it because she did not really care what she was going to drink or eat. She was here to vent and she just needed somebody, something, to make sure that she was not going insane. She started to explain everything to Baekhyun, and she could not even bring herself to care or think that it was super awkward that she was here telling a coworker that she agreed to give her soul away just so a sexy colleague would go down on her. Baekhyun listened patiently, and for her it was a relief to see that firstly, he was not calling bullshit on what she was saying, and secondly, he did seem genuinely interested. He did not laugh at her or interrupt either, which she really appreciated. And confiding in him did seem to calm her down.

"Your throat must be dry now. Why don't you take a sip?" He pointed at the coffee under her nose, and he drank from his own cup too.

"Yeah, you're right," she croaked, and downed half of the glass in one go. The caramel made it sweet and easy to ingest, but by the time she realized that it was too damn salty, it was too late. She wanted to spit it out, but she could not do that as it would be impolite, given that Baekhyun was so earnestly recommending the drink to her.