Cherry Red Summer (Emely and Elyas Book 1)

by Bartsch, Carina

  “What should we do now?” Elyas asked pleasantly.

  With him close behind, I turned at a quick pace into the nearly empty east wing of the building. “I’m going back to my dorm room,” I answered. “I couldn’t care less what you do.”

  He flashed me a rakish smile. “Then that resolves the issue of whether we should head to your place or mine.”

  That was the last straw. I balled my hands into fists, turned around, stopped in front of him—coming only up to his chest—and screamed in rage. “What the hell is your problem?”

  He took a step backward and blinked. “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t get it!” I yelled, gesticulating wildly. “Why do you spend every freaking minute of your life trying to get me into bed? Do you know how creepy that is?”

  He raised his hands defensively. “That was just a joke about going to your room—”

  “Oh yeah? Well maybe it was just a joke, but look at my face and see how serious I am. You showed up to bother me in my lecture! What the hell is wrong with you?” He stared at me, eyes wide, silently opening and closing his jaw three times. “In case you haven’t noticed by now, I’m not jumping into your arms!” I continued. “Not now. Not ever. What do I have to do to get you to leave me alone? Why won’t you give up? All you need to do is stroll through campus once and you’ll have ten girls’ phone numbers in no time. So why are you stalking me? Why won’t you just leave me alone?” My rage turned into pure incomprehension.

  “I’m not even your type!” I yelled, and he cocked his head to the side. “What the hell is your problem?” I continued, and put my hands on my hips. “I asked you a question: Why won’t you leave me alone?”

  He ran his hand through his hair and opened and closed his mouth like a fish. “I-I don’t know,” he stammered, looking around. Then a smile found its way onto his face. “I like stubborn cases?” he added.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know why I even bothered asking,” I snorted, leaving him standing in the hallway.

  I didn’t hear anything behind me at first, giving me hope I’d finally gotten through to him, but he caught up by the time I opened the door.

  He followed as I scurried across the courtyard, my eyes fixed on the ground. I wished he would dissolve into thin air and vanish. But problems never do that, and this one was no exception. All I had left was the hope of quickly making it to my room, where I could slam the door in his face. Unfortunately, since I was too focused on the potential for future door slamming, I wasn’t paying attention to my surroundings.

  “Watch out!” Elyas called. As I raised my head, I felt something whack into my side with a loud rattle. The impact bowled me over. In the blink of an eye, I found myself on the ground feeling like something sharp had drilled through the palm of my hand. My knees were also throbbing, but the burning in my hand dominated everything.

  Elyas dropped to his knees beside me and touched my shoulder. “Are you hurt?”

  I looked into his wide eyes for a moment before trying to raise my head. What happened?

  “Does anything hurt?”

  “I’m fine,” I mumbled, scanning my surroundings until I noticed a guy staring at me in shock as he stood astride a bicycle whose front tire was bent out of shape.

  I put my head back down and moaned. For Pete’s sake, why was this always happening to me?

  I heard the guy flip down his kickstand and park his bike. “Oh my God,” he said. “I’m so sorry, Ma’am. I didn’t mean to—you just ran right in front of my bike. I’m so sorry!”

  Elyas shot the guy a sharp look. “That’s not helping her right now.”

  “B-but . . . ,” the bicyclist stammered. “I didn’t even have time to brake. It was totally an accident.”

  “It’s fine,” I interjected. “It was my own fault.”

  As more and more people started gawking, I grew increasingly embarrassed, so I tried to get up. Elyas put his hands under my back and supported me until I was sitting. I rolled my shoulders to get his arms off me and inspected my injured hand, which was full of splinters of glass. As if the rough landing wasn’t enough—with my special talent, I had also managed to land on the remains of a broken soda bottle.

  “Let me take a look,” Elyas said, taking my hand gently into his. He examined it briefly. “Nothing looks very deep, but this is going to need to be irrigated well, in any case.” I nodded, squinting at the wound myself.

  “Is there anything I can do?” the bicyclist asked.

  “Yes, please steer around her next time,” Elyas said.

  I glared at Elyas. “Stop being mean. It was my own fault. Actually, it was yours!”

  “My fault?” he asked.

  “Yes! If you hadn’t shown up in my lecture, then none of this would have happened.”

  “No one told you to run away from me. Besides, that’s no reason to go picking fights with bicycles.”

  I forced myself to endure the pain of getting up on my knees and standing because I was about to go ballistic on Elyas. When he tried to help me up, I snarled, “I can do it myself,” and pushed him away.

  I finally got up onto my feet, still shaky, and took a deep breath.

  “You have no idea how sorry I am, Ma’am,” the bicyclist said. “If there’s anything I can do for you, I’d be glad to help.”

  “First, you can stop calling me ma’am—I’m not that old,” I said. “It’s not that bad. Really—don’t worry about it. I’ll be fine. It’s not even remotely your fault. Actually, I should be apologizing to you for stepping in front of you without looking. I’m sorry about that, and thankful I didn’t do that in front of a motorcycle or something.”

  “B-but—” he started.

  “Really,” I said, and he exhaled in relief and fell silent.

  “Time for you to take your bike and move along. There were a couple of young women back there you missed running into, you were driving so fast. If you hurry, you can catch up and run them over, too.”

  “Elyas!” I snapped. The exasperation on my face said it all. For once, he kept his mouth shut and let the bicyclist apologize twenty more times before wheeling his bike away.

  “You should probably be on your way, too,” I said to Elyas.

  “You’ve got two options, Emely,” he said. “You let me go up to your room with you and help you clean and dress your hand. Or I drive you to the doctor, and they do it there. It’s your choice.”

  I arrived at my dorm room, fuming, with Elyas in tow. To make matters worse, Eva was nowhere to be seen, and the room was empty. I’d have preferred pulling the glass out of my hand myself, but I had to concede Elyas’s point that it would be “complete nonsense.” Since I didn’t feel like going to a doctor’s office and spending the afternoon in a waiting room, I had no choice but to take him up on his offer.

  “Sit down,” Elyas said, pointing at my bed.

  I still wasn’t feeling that great, so I obeyed him. God, I was like a toddler who couldn’t survive outside alone. I felt so pathetic having to feel that way anytime I was in Elyas’s presence.

  I sighed and held my injured palm out to him. The more I looked at the wound, the worse it seemed to hurt. So I looked away.

  “Do you have bandages and rubbing alcohol around?”

  “In the bathroom cabinet,” I muttered. He dug around in there and returned to lay out the supplies neatly on the bed.

  “For people who aren’t in the medical profession, you and Eva are amazingly well stocked,” he said.

  “Well, I keep crashing my face into the ground. A lot of this stuff is from your dad, actually. Every time I see him, he unloads mounds of medical stuff like this on me.”

  “Seriously?” Elyas said, laughing. I nodded, though not at all amused.

  He suppressed a smile. “Can you really be that clumsy, Emely?”

  I didn�
��t reply, looking at my feet instead. He laughed softly and disappeared into the bathroom again to fill a bowl with water. Once he had everything he needed, he knelt in front of me and gently took hold of my hand.

  “Hold still . . . ,” he instructed as I flinched.

  He gently cleaned around the wound with a wet cloth. Then he took the tweezers, and slowly pulled out each piece of glass, shard by shard. Somehow I couldn’t look away now, even though it wasn’t a pretty sight. “OK?” he asked after a while, and I answered with a mumbled yes as I watched him work. I was more than a little reluctant to admit it, but he was treating me with a great deal of care and a good bedside manner, trying his utmost not to hurt me. The only thing that bugged me was being so damned close to him. If I lowered my face eight inches, his hair would touch the tip of my nose. I held my hand as far away from my body as I could, but my arms were only so long. And clearly not long enough.

  “There,” Elyas finally said. “You’ve survived the worst of it.” He dipped the cloth back into the water and thoroughly but gently dabbed the wound. He did one more careful check to make sure he’d gotten out all the bits of glass. “Looks good,” he said, satisfied with his work. As grudging as I was to admit it, I thought it looked good, too.

  “Now, try to move your hand,” he instructed. I complied and made a loose fist. It hurt, no question about it, but everything seemed to work just fine.

  “Very good,” he said, unwrapping a fresh sterile gauze pad and soaking it with rubbing alcohol. “This is going to burn a little,” he warned. I nodded as he began dabbing the wound, and I had to clench my teeth. A little was an understatement.

  Once he finished, Elyas examined my hand one last time before applying a thick layer of ointment. Then he put two fresh gauze pads over that and wrapped my hand in a gauze bandage.

  “Leave this on overnight, and then put a fresh dressing on tomorrow morning when you get up. If the wound gets red or pussy, or feels very hot, that means it’s infected and you’ll need to go to the doctor. Understood?”

  I nodded and looked at my bandaged hand, which burned much less with the cool ointment.

  “Now you need to take off your pants,” he continued.

  I blinked at him. Seriously?

  It took Elyas a second to understand the look on my face. “Because of your knee. You were limping pretty badly on our way here,” he said.

  “Two words, Elyas: Forget it!”

  “Can it be that my sweetheart is a little bit shy?” he teased as the smile he had suppressed since my accident now reappeared on his face.

  “There is no way in hell ‘your sweetheart’ is going to sit here in front of you in her underwear!”

  “OK, so you’re shy,” he said, grinning. “I admit that I think it’s cute and all, but it’s not helping me examine your leg. At least let me roll up the leg of your pants,” he suggested.

  I grumbled but gave consent since rolling stiff denim up with one good hand would have been extremely hard for me. I was lucky I’d shaved my legs that morning.

  He carefully took off my shoe and rested my foot on his thigh. I narrowed my eyes to watch him wrap his fingers around the cuff of my pants and slowly—too slowly, really—roll the leg of my jeans up. I got a weird feeling from it that I didn’t like. There was something about the way he looked at my exposed leg. Had they not covered the human leg in his medical school program yet, or was he hungry?

  Illegal limb trafficking sailed through my head. Or was I thinking of organ trafficking? It was something along those lines. Better keep an eye on him, in any case.

  I sighed. My God, what was my problem? He was just rolling up the leg to my stupid jeans. It’s not like he was sliding my panties down!

  Elyas got the pants up over my knee, put his hands on either side of the injury, and studied it more closely. With the unpleasant sensation of his hands on my skin, my focus wavered from my injury. My heart beat faster. Undoubtedly from the shock of the accident. One hundred percent from the shock of the accident! No—a thousand percent!

  Dammit, I hated myself for this stupid feeling.

  He’s an ass, he’s an ass, he’s an ass, I repeated in my head.

  “It’s just an abrasion, although it’s quite large,” he diagnosed, looking up at me. “Why do you look so mad?” He frowned.

  Did I look mad? With the muscles of my face all tensed up, I guess I did.

  “It’s a reflex when you’re near me,” I muttered.

  He smiled. “I like being near you.”

  “Yes, I know. Unfortunately,” I said, to which he smiled again.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “you’ve also got yourself a pretty decent bruise here. I’m sure it hurts.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Not squeamish, huh?”

  “No, and I don’t cry when I break a nail, either. So if that’s it, can I roll down my pant leg again?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, I’m sure it’s just awful sitting here in front of me half naked and all.”

  “I’m only a fifth naked—and, yes, it’s awful. Are you done or what?”

  “No, not yet,” he continued. “I need to clean this wound. And what’s so awful about me doctoring you up?”

  I was sick of his stupid questions.

  “Oh, Elyas. Get real. First you practically shove me in front of the bike, and then you come running with Band-Aids.”

  He laughed. “Oh, so now I pushed you in front of the bike?”

  “Indirectly, yes,” I said. He shook his head, still smiling, and started working on my leg. I swallowed as he dabbed the open wound with alcohol and rubbed the same ointment over it.

  I thought it was finally behind me, but then felt the tips of his fingers slide down my bare shin. His fingers were not where they had any business being, and again I got that weird feeling.

  “Are we done?” I said.

  “Yes.” He sighed softly. “Unfortunately,” he added under his breath.

  Unfortunately my ass. But still—yay, we were done.

  “At some point you need to show me the other half of your leg. Because I liked the first half.”

  “Dream on,” I grumbled. At that moment Eva flung the door open and burst into the room. She froze when she saw Elyas, who was still kneeling holding my leg. She seemed to get the wrong impression, because she called out, “I see nothing!” and spun on her heels, vanishing from the room in a flash.

  Elyas and I looked at the door before looking at each other.

  “Will you call her back in here?” I asked, frowning and shaking my head.

  He sighed and nodded before struggling to his feet. Once his hand was on the door handle, he hesitated and turned toward me.

  “Just to revisit our topic from before,” he started, sliding his fingers over the metal, “you are absolutely my type.” With a brazen grin, he left the room without another word. I stared after him, my mouth agape.

  CHAPTER 11

  NIGHTMARE

  Hi, Dad,” I said cheerfully into the telephone.

  “Em-Em!” he replied. “How are you?”

  “Good, thanks. And you guys?”

  “Oh, I miss you every day—but otherwise everything’s fine here.”

  I smiled. It felt so nice to hear his voice. “I miss you too, Dad.”

  “You’re at college and having the time of your life. You shouldn’t be missing your old dad.”

  “But I do, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “Same old pigheaded Emely,” he said with an audible smile. “Is there a particular reason for your call? Is something on your mind?”

  “No, I just wanted to find out how you’re doing. Why—am I disturbing you?”

  “You never disturb me, Emely. It’s just that your mother has made plans without my knowledge, as usual, and conned me out
of my cozy TV night at home. Apparently she’s dragging me to a party tonight.”

  “Oh, you poor thing,” I said sighing. “What kind of party is it this time?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest. You know your mother: she has acquaintances I’ve never heard of hidden in every corner.”

  Yes, indeed I did know my mother. And my father had my full admiration because he always rolled along with whatever happened, with incredible patience.

  “My condolences,” I said. “When do you need to get going?”

  “We were actually supposed to leave twenty minutes ago, but Carla disappeared into the bathroom half an hour ago, saying, ‘I’ll be ready in ten minutes.’ I haven’t seen hide nor hair of her since. Oh—here she is.”

  “All right, then, I don’t want to hold you up,” I said. “It was nice to talk to you, Dad, if only for a second. Tell Mom I said hi.”

  “Emely says hi,” I heard him say.

  “Hugs and kisses back!” my mother called from the background.

  “You heard her?” he asked me.

  “Loud and clear as always,” I said, grinning.

  “Do you have plans tonight?”

  “No. Eva’s spending the night elsewhere, and I think I’m going to take the opportunity to get some studying in.”

  “Bookmarks are going to start growing out of your ears at some point, sweetheart.”

  I grinned. “I don’t think you need to worry about that, Dad.”

  “I’m not so sure, sometimes,” he said, sighing. “Studying is, of course, important, and good grades and a solid degree will undoubtedly benefit you in the future. But there’s something even more important than all of that, and that’s called life. So please do me a favor and don’t forget that, all right?”

  “Dad, you’re overstating things. I’m not just sitting here behind a stack of books. Honestly.”

  “I hope so. Otherwise there are so many beautiful things you’re missing out on.”

  “Karsten!” my mother said.