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Ling jolted up, cold sweat wracking his body. After hyperventilating for the next minute or so, he realised he was in his bed, and it was light outside.

Wearing a loose, long-sleeve shirt, silk boxer shorts, and a slight hangover, he actually felt decent enough.

No fucking way? That was a dream? Well, not the nightclub part at least, because Ling also realised an arm, that had been slung around his midsection, had fallen to his thighs when he'd shot up in the bed.

And the arm belonged to a shirtless, still-comatose Logan.

Ling sighed in dim frustration, then shouted, "Wyatt!"

A moment of silence – in which Logan didn't even flinch so Ling checked his pulse: not dead – followed, before a thump hit the rug. 

"What?" shouted back a hoarse voice thick with sleep and discomfort. No doubt the other man had fallen out of his bed downstairs.

"Why is your frat friend in my bed?"

Ling waited out the bare feet shuffle against marbled concrete, until a head of sandy, messy hair became visible from his high-up angle.

"He's not on the green couch?" came a still sleepy, confused tone.

Ling looked beside him to the sunkissed, heterosexual man lying belly-down, yet facing him in a position denoting he had obviously been spooning Ling.

"Like I subtly inferred, no."

Wyatt groaned again. "It's too early for sarcasm. But sorry Ling, you know Logan gets cuddly when he's drunk." The next part he mumbled more to himself. "But how did he make it upstairs?"

Ling shrugged it off. He wasn't surprised Logan was at their place, as Lana, Daniel and Rigby all lived with others off campus, and were closer. The big dope next to him though lived in a fraternity, and so it was usually easier to just let him crash here on the couch some nights.

"It's fine," called back Ling, Logan still not waking up. "But did you strip him when you put him on the couch?"

"No, I only took off his belt and shoes. Shit, is he naked?"

Ling checked under the cover. "Still wearing jeans. But the shirt's gone."

The sounds of lifting pillows from the couch ensued. "No way, he must have commando crawled up the stairs. The shirt's torn and hanging off the corner of the flight."

Wyatt sounded mildly perplexed and impressed at the same time, though Ling merely scoffed, wiping sleep from his eyes. He wished he had cameras installed in the house now; drunk Logan sleep-crawling up the stairs in the dark would've been a good show.

Ling's dry amusement was thwarted when he remembered why he'd gone to the club in the first place. The events that took place as they left the club might have been a dream, though what he witnessed at the gym hadn't.

"Do you want me to come and get him?"

"No, it's fine." Ling grabbed his phone from the windowsill behind the bed's headboard. "It's both your days off from uni, let him sleep." Gently removing Logan's arm from around his hip, Ling put it back by the penis-drawing artist's side, checking his phone.

It was Ling's turn to groan. Ten missed calls and several messages and voice mails from Xavier. He'd have to speak to the other man eventually, especially seeing as he'd left clothes at Xavier's place. It was still early enough in the morning though that it could wait a little longer.

"Here you go," said Wyatt a few minutes later, coming up with two smoothies. He set the other one on the windowsill for Logan. "It might not be Junhui-level prep, but it should ease the headache." He also handed Ling a couple of aspirin with the mango, pear and coconut water concoction, as he figured upon tasting it.

That was also when Logan finally decided to come out of his coma. He opened one eye, was clearly not impressed with the light coming through the large window that had no shutters filtering the morning sun out, and pressed his entire face into the pillow.

Ling and Wyatt simply waited for the third one to realise where he was.

Moments later, Logan turned his head back on his cheek to face them, and cracked an eye open to look up at a sitting Ling. "Hey Ling," came his groggy, but still cheery voice. "What are you doing on the couch?"

"Lo" instead interjected Wyatt, amusedly. "How are your elbows and knees? Any scapes? Soreness?"

"Huh?" Logan actually attempted a feeble head lift. Then his surroundings must have slowly dawned. "Why am I in your bed?"

Wyatt snorted. "Because Ling's so pretty he turned you gay. You even tore your shirt off in desperation."

Logan looked from Ling, to Wyatt and back to Ling. And shrugged, allowing his face to drop back onto the pillow. "As long as I was the top," remarked his muffled voice.

Wyatt's shoulders shook with silent laughter as he left them to it, returning downstairs. Ling willed himself to do the same. He hadn't drank so much that he felt the need to run to the bathroom and throw up his whole digestive system. An image of the gory nightmare scene flashed through his mind then, but Ling forcibly dismissed it; he didn't want nausea to decide to make a sudden reappearance.

"Logan," he said, heading for the stairs. "Hangover stuff is on the windowsill. When you get up come to the kitchen, I'll make breakfast. And don't throw up on my bed." No answer came, but even though Logan still had his face hidden by the pillow, Ling assumed he'd been heard.

Ling made it to the first step before the younger man's voice quietly said, still croaky from sleep. "Thanks Ling...and sorry," he finished, bashfully.

"It's fine." Ling then added, to ease the embarrassment the other man probably felt right now. "And now I know why my back was nice and warm all night."

Ling made his way to his en suite; the single-slope ceiling, narrow space and exposed brick still coming across as homey rather than cramped. Despite the window next to the basin, Ling still pulled the bulb's hanging chain switch to shine more light. He washed the makeup properly from his face, then blindly grabbed a towel from the rack beside him. After drying his face and looking back up, Ling swore and violently recoiled.

When he blinked to clear the remaining water blurring his vision and looked back in the mirror, the figure was gone. Still, he spun around to inspect the space behind him, though he was alone. The figure had been little more than a shadow anyway, probably cast by the showerhead or something.

You're letting last night get to you, Zhi Ling, he internally scolded. He figured the macabre dream was due to the news report he and Wyatt had watched concerning the Heartbreak Killer.

The killer, also simply dubbed The Heartbreaker by the media, was known as such due to the fact that every victim found in this gruesome string, had a hole in their chest and a missing heart. None of the hearts had ever been recovered. As a body hadn't been found for a while, the general consensus was that the killer was either hiding the bodies, or, they'd stopped and were laying low.

The victims were all adults, mostly young, and considered fit and attractive with a slim build, which had of course elicited a morbid intrigue from the public. It hadn't helped that the first victims were found on the night of Valentine's Day. That had been several towns over.

But as Ling went to the kitchen under his loft bedroom and made a breakfast of blueberry pancakes with cream and maple syrup, he couldn't help the cluster of images from rattling his brain. The news report, Xavier cheating on him, that drunk guy at the club, and the even stranger man, Mr. Abel, who stopped the drunk guy from grabbing Ling, then the disturbing dream, only to be topped off with the creepy shadow-figure hallucination behind him in the reflection.

Maybe Ling had finally worked himself hard enough to make him snap, which is what he focused on rather than the eery sensation that the shadow figure in the mirror had been smiling at him.

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Spoiler: it wasn't a dream Ling.

~ Daci