Cat Boy

16 | asmr

It's almost midnight when the bell rings.

Vernon looks up from the notes, brow furrowed. Usually, he'd be asleep, but Joshua had been occupying his room to paint and has only just left, leaving the boy wide awake. He'd decided to get some work done if he wasn't going to sleep—might as well be productive—but when he hears the sound of the bell, a sudden exhaustion rolls over him like slow waves at the beach.

For a few seconds, he doesn't move, ears pricked for any sounds of movement from Joshua's room. When it becomes clear that the pink-haired boy is too deep in slumber to attend to their mysterious nighttime visitor, Vernon sighs to himself and gets to his feet.

It's probably Jeonghan, he muses, though he's not convinced by his theory. It's not the first time they've had to deal with inebriated kids during midterm week, but he'd been looking forward to a Sunday break. Apparently one can never catch a break during the busiest week of the year (surprisingly, it's not Christmas week).

The sharp bell cuts into the middle of his quick stretch, and he huffs in annoyance before going out of his room. He turns his neck sideways and hears a series of cricks, like his spine is some kind of unoiled machine part. The door creaks open with eerily similar sounds, and he feels a brief thrill of fear at the noise, suddenly reminded of a horror movie he'd been forced to watch many a moon ago.

Fortunately—or perhaps not so fortunately—it's not Frankenstein's monster that awaits him at the other side. It's Daehyun, her hair tied back with hasty hands so strands of it have escaped to hand around her face like loose ropes on a ship's deck. She's wearing an old gray hoodie that's a couple of sizes too big with a familiar-looking caricature of Newton on the front, and there's a frantic expression on her face he associates with worried college kids who haven't had a wink of sleep before their exam.

"Daehyun?" he asks, too surprised to pay attention to the fact that he's still in his pajamas. "What are you doing here?"

"I need to study," comes the brisk reply.

Vernon goggles at her, unsure what he's more surprised by—her sudden arrival or her sudden willingness to study. He comes to the conclusion that it's the panic for tomorrow's test that spurred on her change of heart, and perhaps her roommate is a little...noisy? "You can study at the café," he says uncomfortably. "We're open all night."

"I know, I saw," she says, nodding. A curl of her hair untucks itself from behind her ear at the movement, and it takes all of his willpower (and folding his arms behind his back) not to reach out and tuck it back into its rightful position. "I just think I won't be able to study alone."

He frowns. "You want a study group?"

"I want you to teach me," she corrects, and his eyebrows twitch. "I guess I just got really used to our physics routine and it's easier to listen when you explain things, because I picked up a book by myself in the afternoon and I'm pretty sure I stayed on the same paragraph for an hour and—" She pauses suddenly, as if the wind has whispered a shocking piece of news into her ear. "Wait, were you sleeping? Crap, I'm so sorry—"

"No, no, it's fine," he interjects enthusiastically, pulling the door open. Daehyun steps in uncertainly, and he shuts the door behind them and turns to her, widening his eyes so he looks more awake. "I couldn't sleep anyway, and I was studying too, so I guess I could help."

She purses her lips into a hopeful smile. "Thank you, you're the coolest," she gushes, picking out her way into his room by memory even though it's so dark everything is only just visible. Vernon takes a deep breath to calm himself before following her back inside.

Hopefully he hasn't woken up Joshua.

When he finally ducks into his room, she's already positioned herself on the bed, pushing up the pillow against the headboard to rest against so the hard edges don't dig into her back. The reading light is on and twisted away from his table so the orangish glow shines onto the pages of the notebook, which is open against her knees, pushed up just a little away from her torso.