Cherry Red Summer (Emely and Elyas Book 1)
Page 37
I didn’t tell you about it ahead of time, but there was someone there. Someone from before who has driven me to the edge of insanity. I had to sleep in the same tent with him and ride a motorcycle home with him. Can you imagine how unpleasant it is to have to hold your hands around the waist of someone you’d prefer never to touch?
You can’t believe how much I’d like to erase the trip from my memory.
What would have happened if I had actually invited you? Well, I don’t know the answer, dear Luca, but I suspect very much that the trip would have gone differently, and somewhat better.
Maybe this all sounds kind of sudden, and I actually don’t know what’s gotten into me, but . . . What do think about setting up our in-person meeting? Like, in the near future?
Then maybe we could finally stop with the what-if questions. We like each other, so what are we waiting for?
Just think about it, and let me know.
Sleep well.
Emely
I pressed “Send” and stared at the screen. The words had poured out of me effortlessly. My voice of reason had written those lines. The voice that constantly told me the trip would be the start of my personal demise.
I should never have let myself fall in love with Elyas. Never. Nothing that had happened over the weekend should have happened.
I didn’t know why I suddenly had the urge to set up our meeting. Maybe it was my selfish hope of saving myself, even if I was well beyond saving. Maybe I was clinging to the last branch, to the idea that Luca could be like Elyas, although not the same. Maybe I wanted to give us a chance, after writing e-mails to each other for three months, to get to know each other in real life.
I stared into space but found no answer. Just a suspicion that it was a combination of all these things.
After a while I stood and went into the bathroom to get ready for bed. Wearing a T-shirt, I made my way to the bed and slipped under the covers. I laid my cell phone on my pillow, directly beside me, and kept checking it.
A half hour, an hour, two hours . . . It didn’t blink.
At some point I took it, typed a sentence, turned it off, and put it back on my pillow.
Why wasn’t Elyas texting me? Today of all days, after our night in the tent, after my kiss on his cheek . . . I didn’t understand.
I waited until four thirty the next morning. But my cell phone never made the slightest sound. Another day, another night. Tuesday passed, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday . . .
It remained silent.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carina Bartsch was born in 1985 in Erlangen, in the Franconia region of Bavaria. Her love of writing came late, but intensely. Bartsch had been searching since childhood for something she would really enjoy doing. At age twenty she finally sat at her computer and wrote her first short story. Instantly she realized, This is it. This, and nothing else. Suddenly she knew what her heart had been beating for all those years. Four years later, after she had won several writing competitions, Bartsch published her debut novel, Cherry Red Summer.
For more on the author, please visit www.carinabartsch.de.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Erik J. Macki worked as a cherry orchard tour guide, copy editor, Web developer, and German and French teacher before settling into his translation career. Becoming a translator was probably inevitable, as he has collected grammars, dictionaries, and language-learning books since childhood—and to this day is not above diagramming sentences when duty so calls. A former resident of Cologne and Münster, Germany, and of Tours, France, he did his graduate work in Germanics and comparative syntax. He now translates books for adults and children full time and has translated works by Kerstin Gier, Mirjam Pressler, Jutta Profijt, and Sara Blædel, among others. He works from his home in Seattle, where he lives with his family and their black Lab, Zephyr.