My Soulmates are IDOLS Books 2+3 | 18+ [SoulBond Series]

251:excuses

Amber

She once hated the peace.

As a child, she'd spent her days feasting on slices of chewy flour dumplings, meat balls and crispy salted fish as the sun burned her skin and sweat dripped down her small back. She remembered staring at the cats that slinked between her legs begging for a bite; the ants that ran over blue plastic tables; and the stiff crinkle at the edges of her mother's eyes when she faked a laugh.

As the adults battled in tongues, she conjured a thousand scenarios in her head. A life where she'd be running from a dysfunctional family with a stepmother that hated her; a life where she'd be the poor maid of a handsome rich prince; a life with assassins charging after her; maybe even a lost princess.

A life that wouldn't circle around the leftover noodles that clung to the bottom of her bowl or the things she did in public for attention. A life that wouldn't be limited to her moments of disobedience or the red circles on the stack of papers she brought home from school. Something dramatic, something extraordinary, something...unfortunate.

The Amber in the future would give that little shit a tight slap on the face.

Amber was late, and it wasn't a good sort of late—the kind where you'd pray to God that your marshmallow sandwiched chocolates weren't blackened crisps in an oven left alone for far too long. Oh, that was already a situation deserving of a pity stamp from a condescending teacher. A teacher who assumed that a stamp with a 'good try' could lighten the festering mood.

Fat chance when faced with an Asian parent.

She was late.

The kind of late where the pot was on fire and she was hours away from stopping the resident toddler from tossing a wad of water into the flaming oil. And there was nothing she could do because it was all her fault.

In her head, her house was in ruins.

She groaned; her heart trembling so hard it was starting to turn her stomach into a mixer as the fourth bus she'd missed that day rolled away with a heavy grate. It was no doubt completely her fault for fucking up map-reading, she'd begrudgingly admit. But it wasn't her fault that the GPS decided to lose its shit at the very last minute, turning North to South and East to West. And she was, in retrospect, too stubborn to take a taxi because the trip was worth a PC game and then some.

A PC game, the latest one with the shiniest graphics and the best open-world gameplay.

But at this point, she didn't give a fuck about that PC game.

God, what was wrong with her?

The concept of oversleeping was as foreign as having a bed of thick hair sprout from her chin and top lip. Something she'd never had the luxury of experiencing even in JieMi's ridiculously manly body that was strangely devoid of hair. A gene that would have turned against him in another century but was well-appreciated in her lifetime.

But that didn't mean he didn't have pubes. Something which was a hairy disadvantage in her opinion although she didn't have the right to complain about it considering her own human body. She did however make it a point to tell him that with a scowl on her face when she found hair in her teeth.

God, she didn't have the right to say shit but it felt good watching him lose his head at her random comments. And it was quite amusing to see him react to her words, a dash of red paint over skin, as she gave him a lazy blowjob that had his breath escaping soft pink lips in the sexiest of ways.

Fluttering eyelashes, flexing muscles and popping veins over skin kind of sexy.

Ezra had slapped her ass and called her a pussy for being grumpy over hair. Then he'd loudly declared that she'd once farted in his face when he'd gone down on her and he hadn't complained because he was, in his words, 'a fucking saint'. He was always a fucking saint in his books. And then he'd kissed her senseless, pubic hair in her teeth and pre-cum on her tongue, without a damn care in the world.

Fuck, was that the best comeback of the century she'd ever heard but anyway—

Oversleeping was impossible. She'd never done that before in her entire life, and the first beep of the alarm usually sent her straight out of bed like a jet of water to the face. It scared the ever-loving shit out of her because sleeping through her alarm clock would mean a lifetime of fearing for the next day.

And it also meant that she was tired. So tired that her brain had decided that enduring the sound of the alarm was necessary. She'd felt like shit when she awoke; her bones were aching and her eyes were drooping with lethargy. It'd taken too much for her to get up, and rushing to get ready had made her dizzy enough to see green and black.

Was she sick again? Maybe.

The sky groaned, and she swore the thunder sounded almost like a loud rippling fart. She had to look again at the darkening sky with a squint, confused and befuddled by the authenticity of that gas. Had she magically imagined that sound?

But then another rip had her jolting away from the woman standing in the bus stop, the lady had the audacity to look at her as if she were the one stinking up the place. The stench was bad enough for her to take another step away, inching closer to the curb with a disturbed grimace on her lips. She was jittery as fuck and the slightest of things seemed to set her senses on absolute fire.

It was undoubtedly because of the caffeine (one shot too many), the fatigue and the anxiety.

University was coming to a close and her portfolio was begging to be filled. Empty as it was, the lack of future opportunities was frightening, a monster that loomed at the back of her head. It was giving her so much stress that she swore she'd lose her head.

That and her final project, a children's book laced with Augmented Reality and embedded with audio. While it seemed cutting-edge, it really just meant tons of coding and fiddling with an application that dripped with failure, and sobbed with stress.

She was fucked, so fucked she considered taking a gap year from school. And that had led to sleepless nights on a desktop that threatened to crash with overheat. She'd even spent a few hours doing work on the balcony where icy winds blew and collided against their window just to save the programme. Maybe, maybe that was why she was so tired and sickly. Too much cold air and the lack of good sleep.

Which was possibly why she'd found herself, two hours later, with drool leaking from her lips, her face lined with the red marks of a keyboard and her eyes red as hell. There was an endless line of fs on the screen, the pressure of her chubby cheeks on the keyboard had managed to open a hundred documents that made it clear exactly how fucked up her day was.

Along with the alarm clock that had been ringing for the past hour or two. It choked and died at some point of her desperate dash to get ready, a casualty of a war she had started. She should have taken that taxi when she still could. But Amber was a tad used to the safety of public transport and taxis just didn't sit well in her thrifty ass.

Excuses.