Lovers: Boarding School Vol. 2//The First Reset

//pool

(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ HAPPY ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF LBS2'S DEBUT ｀;:゛;｀;･(°ε° )

❤️ Thank you for another incredible year y'all, I love you ❤️

YES 2/3 UPDATES I WANTED TO WRITE HAVE BEEN FINISHED FOR THIS WEEK! NOW I NEED TO COMPLETE ANOTHER ONE GYAHHHHHHH (ノ￣皿￣）ノ ⌒=== ┫

I hope you enjoy this pretty touching update ꒰˘̩̩̩⌣˘̩̩̩๑꒱♡

*not edited*

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Walking along the edge of an expansive, rectangular outdoor pool, behind a freshly groomed and regal-looking Lionel, was a young seven year-old James who had since traded in his mouthful of a name (James Tristan Amares III) for a simpler, but sleeker "James Amares-Leigh".

Two weeks had passed since his mother's and Orson's grandiose destination wedding in the breathtaking Amalfi coast, and James still had to pinch himself on occasion to check if everything he had experienced until now was a dream. The top-of-the-line flights on private jets, the multi-course dinners inside multi-starred restaurants overlooking a wide open sea--James loved every second of his second life as a re-branded Leigh. But if there was one thing that prevented the "perfect" him from getting the "perfect" life he wanted, it was his newly officiated step-sister sitting on a pool chair under a parasol on the other side of the pool.

After she had scared the crap out of him with those nightmarish sketches she drew--and after she had pissed him off one breakfast when she claimed their home was simply a "cage"--James learned to keep a sizable distance from the mysterious girl when possible. She was unpredictable, unreadable, and unusual--three characteristics that James hated in a person--and he decided it was better for them to keep each other at arm's length so as to maintain the illusion of a harmonious "perfect" family.

"A cage?" James huffed to himself as he looked at the magnificent backside of their home from the corner of his eye. A girl who had never experienced the hardships and the 99 cent box macaroni he had to go/eat through could never understand just how fortunate her blessed life in this "cage" was. Her life was rosy since birth. What did she have to complain about?

It was about two hours past noon and the sun was beating down on him, cooking his head, face, and shoulders with its UV death rays that had him perspiring buckets. The sky was cloudless and effervescently blue as the chlorinated waters that glittered to his right, and the pool area was relatively empty, save for a certain raven-haired girl who was scribbling away in her sketchbook on the other side of the pool.

James glanced at Violet for a second before shifting his gaze back to Lionel. For the past half-hour, James had been trying to get Lionel back indoors after the cat followed Violet out to the pool area and drifted away from her when he got bored.

While he was a little upset that the cat liked his step-owner more than him, James was concerned for Lionel, worried that the fluffy white cat might slip into the pool and become a drowned mop if the young boy didn't keep a close eye on him. It wasn't like the girl he preferred to be with was watching out for him considering how fixated she was with her current "art" project.

Sighing, James attempted to gently usher Lionel back to the other side of the pool as picking him up when they were a foot away from the pool made him anxious. James wasn't a big fan of pools or chlorinated water since pool water tended to tint his hair a faint green that would last for a couple of days. Because of this, the "talented" and "prodigal" James never learned how to properly swim and he would get nervous around large bodies of water that were deeper than the caps of his knees.