The Quirky Tale of April Hale (Quirky Series #1)

2.21: The Hardest Hits Come Not From the Fist

And yet...

And yet it still wasn't enough.

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2.21: The Hardest Hits Come Not From the Fist

Sometimes my body betrayed me.

Usually, the betrayal happened whenever there was something unavoidable was happening. Me in the verge of pissing myself would mean I would forget to speak proper English and consider flailing my arm to be some sort of a decipherable language.

The betrayal also happened whenever my routine was disrupted. This would ruin my whole day and then everything would sound feel and look bitter. I didn't even know that bitter could qualify as a picture, but when I saw a GIF of a kitten playing with a hedhehog and not feeling even a single twinge of 'AWWW', then something must be wrong within my head.

Around That Guy, the betrayal happened in a secondly basis.

I was supposed to be filming Audra and Him chatting about some make-up. From the amount of eye-rolling that He did, I could tell that He was exerting a generous amount of effort of trying to look interested, but still anyone who watched five seconds of this could see that his efforts all came to a glaring fail.

I was supposed to be good at filming. I had trained my arms to carry around the heavy equipment. But today, I felt like a total n00b who deserved every 'Your Mom' curse in 100 language.

It was like I lost total control of my body. Everything that was supposed to keep my blood pumping had been annihilated, and I often found myself gasping for air and then getting wobbly in the knees.

Case in point: me tripping on a totally smooth floor.

As I was falling, I saw not one, but four people getting ready to cushion my fall.

That Guy, whom I prayed so hard to not be the one who did it, my brother, Alex, and...

Audra.

Audra caught me mid-fall, but instead of putting on a heroic face after such heroic action, she glared at me straight in the air, rendering me speechless.

"What the hell are you doing?" she breathed right into my face with so much savagery that I could taste the kale she ate for lunch.

"Broccoli," I said as an afterthought, because at second thought it smelled more like broccoli than kale.

"Don't act cute like you know nothing!" more hissing, and right now, I smelled a bit of cheese.

I almost felt faint partly because of the distance and partly because I didn't fancy a cheese breath.

"Your salad breath is distracting me," I said, and then finally Audra let me go. There was another glare, one that shot a tremor from my back running to my spine.

"We take a short break!" a second was all Audra took to get back her previous cheeriness. She swayed into Quentin, and then jumped at him and he caught her. I could hear him praising her for saving me.

"That's some next level bitch shit she's pulling," Alex's voice was so close to my ear that I almost thought that he was within my head.

"I don't think any female dog would know how to bite and then glomp in the time span of one minute," I replied.

Alex snorted a laugh, which sounded mellifluous and elegant. I wondered how he cultivated that ever-present sophistication. Did he have an etiquette teacher, or was it the works of wonderful genetics? He could snort and then sneeze and he still looked like he could be announcing the national charter.