Page 7 of Lethal in Pink

Three typing dots appear. Disappear. Then reappear again with the wrath of a thousand paper cuts.

Captain Chaos: 의료진을 보내겠습니다.(We will send med team.)

I type back before my brain can overthink it.

Me: 의료진은 필요 없어요. 그냥 자고 싶어요. 제발요.(No med team. Just sleep. Please.)

Captain Chaos: 알겠습니다. 하지만 내일 오전 9시에 벨로라(Veloura) 경영진과 브랜드 협업 관련 회의가 잡혀 있습니다. 변명은 통하지 않습니다.(Fine. But you have a conference meeting with the executives at Veloura at nine in the morning regarding your brand collab. No excuses.)

Gahhh! 9 AM. On a morning after a two-hour performance that left me feeling like I’d been run over by a truck and then reverse-parked on.

Cool. Fantastic. I love this for me.

I type back a thumbs up because sometimes compliance is the most aggressive form of resistance, and then I lock my phone and drop it in front of me.

I need a goddamn vacation.

Not the kind where I’m flown to Bali and photographed poolside for a magazine spread that reads “Kai Ryu Recharges His Batteries” in thirty-six-point font. Not the kind where my manager books a private villa and then fills the itinerary with sponsored content shoots disguised as leisure. I need a real break. A chance to breathe without a camera in my face or a microphone under my chin.

I need a chance to just be…me.

And damn it, after this tour, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Chapter three

Amiyah

Iam vertical before my alarm has the chance to commit its violence, my hand already on the phone screen sliding the alarm into oblivion. Last night's job ran later than expected, so now I’m surviving on four hours of sleep and a sheer force of will.

I don’t know what the hell I was thinking, accepting a hit the night before the last day of the semester, but here the fuck we are.

Dragging myself out of bed with the grace of a newborn giraffe on roller skates, I trudge to the kitchen and press the button on the espresso machine and watch as it sputters to life. While it works, I scroll through my phone, flipping through notifications that don’t matter and emails that can wait until I’ve had at least three ounces of caffeine in my bloodstream.

The espresso finishes with a final, satisfying hiss. I pour it into my favorite mug—the one with the little pink hearts that says “Hot girls object” and I add coconut milk and a squirt vanilla syrup and a squirt of brown sugar syrup, stir, then take my first sip.

It’s perfect. The kind of perfect that makes my eyes flutter shut for exactly one second before reality kicks back in and I make my way to the bathroom for my eleven-minute skin care routine that is a non-negotiable.

Cleanser first.

A dollop of something French and expensive that smells like nothing because fragrance is for amateurs and my pores are like federal employees—they don’t get holidays. I work it into my skin in small, circles, the way my mother taught me before she died. Before the job went wrong. Before the phone call that completely rearranged my entire universe.

I push the thought back into its place, tucked away in the back of my brain. Now is not the time for grief. Now is the time to rinse.

After I rinse with lukewarm water, I pat my face dry with a towel that is not the fluffy one—that’s for evenings only. The fluffy one is sacred.

Toner next.

Two cotton pads, doused. One for each cheek, one swipe down the center of my forehead, one across my chin. The cotton comes away clean, which means either my skin is immaculate or I’m lying to myself, and honestly, this early in the morning, I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to determine which.

Serum is the third step.

Three drops on my fingertips, tapped across my forehead, cheeks, jawline. The bottle is glass and the label is in Korean and I have no idea what half the ingredients are, but it cost ninety dollars and the woman at the counter swore it would make me “glow from within,” which is marketing speak for “we have successfully separated you from your money,” but whatever. I’m glowing.

Or I will be.

Or I’m a sucker.

The jury is still out.