Cherry Red Summer (Emely and Elyas Book 1) (21 page)

“People weave their wishes and dreams together into a lif
e . . .
but they actually don’t mean anythin
g . . .
They’re completely unimportant, irrelevant, like one human being. Compared with the expanse of the universe, an individual existence isn’t even worth mentioning.”

My eyes wandered from jewel to jewel across the heavens, and I lost myself in the darkness of the infinite. “That kind of frustration is hard to bear, but on the other hand it fascinates me time and time again.” I paused before continuing. “Have you ever wondered
where
the universe is? It has to be
somewhere.
So what’s behind it? What’s under it? If you don’t believe in God, you’re left with so many unanswered questions. You go from one question to the next without end, never finding an answer.”

I stopped talking. That had been the CliffsNotes version of my thoughts, though I had still gone into more detail than I wanted. This was one of my favorite topics, and I could philosophize for hours, but that would let Elyas in on my private, inner world.

I looked at him when he didn’t say anything. He stared out the window and seemed to be just as lost in the darkness. I started to worry after several more minutes passed.

“Did you fall asleep?” I asked. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I was boring him to death.

He winced. “What? No, no, I was just thinking about what you said.”

“Have you by chance come up with the answers to all the questions that keep me up at night?” I asked.

“No,” he said gently. “But I think they’re going to keep me up at night now, too.”

He didn’t say anything for a while, and when it occurred to me to look at the clock, I saw it was almost one in the morning. My last bus was leaving in ten minutes. I should have frantically leaped up and run downstairs, but I didn’t move.

I convinced myself the pot had left my legs too tired. Or I was too lazy to get up now. Or I was afraid of interrupting Alex and Sebastian if I stormed through the living room. Deep inside, though, I knew those were only half-truths.

The full truth was I liked lying next to Elyas on the bed.

It was hard to get my brain around. Maybe I didn’t want to get my brain around it.

In the background, “Give In to Me” by Takida played softly, the lyrics lulling my thoughts along. Reality blurred around me, and the memories of Elyas’s and my past together flitted through my mind. Usually I tried to suppress them, but now I let them take me away.

C
HAPTER
15

T
HEN AND
N
OW

I
still remembered the first time Elyas and I met. I was about four or five, and I was over at the Schwarzes’.

Alena offered a friendly hello at the front door and led me upstairs to her daughter’s room. Alex was sitting on the floor playing Barbies, the somewhat older Elyas kneeling next to her with his hair tousled up, holding a Barbie as well. As I walked in, the first thing I noticed was his huge, turquoise-green eyes.

I giggled, pointing at him. “You’re a boy who plays with Barbies!”

Elyas pursed his lips and glared at me with angry sparks in his eyes. He snorted, stood up, walked over, and whacked me on the head with the Barbie.

The drama was perfect: I started bawling because he had hit me, Alex started bawling because the Barbie’s head had come off, and Elyas started bawling because Alena chewed him out and sent him to his room.

I grinned. That had been so long ago, but I could still picture it so clearly.

It was much later that I found out Alex had forced him to play Barbies with her, which is why he was so angry about my teasing him.

Elyas and I didn’t get along for a long time after that, but at some point we overcame our differences and became friends. The three of us did a lot together. Every day we took walks through the woods around Neustadt. We were even the proud owners of our own treehouse, which we had made ourselves.

At a certain age, Alex stopped wanting to get her clothes dirty. Elyas and I didn’t understand her attitude, but it put an end to our hanging out as a threesome.

It took another few years for my feelings toward him to change.

I should mention that kid-Elyas didn’t have much in common with adult-Elyas. Elyas used to be a loner—shy and reserved. He didn’t have many friends, and his free time was mostly spent reading books, studying for school, and playing the piano.

There wasn’t any one incident—not even a small one—that started me thinking of Elyas as more than a sort of brother. I was fourteen, and he was fifteen, when I found myself hoping I’d run into him whenever I was at the Schwarzes’. But whenever I did run into him, usually in the hallway or at dinner, all I could do was blabber incoherently. I was sure he thought I was a complete idiot, though he didn’t
seem
to think that. That’s what I told myself, at least, every time he flashed me that magical smile of his.

Despite my fantasies, I wasn’t dumb enough to think I had a sliver of a chance with him. He was by far the handsomest of any of the boys I knew, and he was also the nicest and most intelligent, too. Why would he be even remotely interested in a nondescript, run-of-the-mill small-town girl like me?

So I never told him how I felt. I didn’t even tell Alex. I just bottled it all up inside, hoping the feelings would one day evaporate.

Of course my feelings didn’t evaporate, though. They just grew stronger.

I was fourteen when I first learned that love can really suck.

That feeling lasted a long time. Two years later it was still his face I saw whenever I closed my eyes. Anytime he stood opposite me, my knees would melt, and I would forget everything around me. Anytime he spoke to me, I lacked the breath to answer. Anytime he touched me, my skin burned, even if they were just tiny instances of contact. And I never forgot the feeling.

As we grew older, our encounters grew rarer, although we still enjoyed talking when we did see each other. But Elyas eventually found his own friends. And changed.

I’d never seen him with another girl up to then. I was glad, too, because it would have broken my heart. I never understood, though, why he didn’t have a girlfriend. Girls should have been flinging themselves at him left and right.

His male friends were less reserved than he was, and that created plenty of opportunities for hookups. I didn’t like his friends. Least of all Kevin. I never understood what Elyas liked about him. They were total opposites. Kevin was a typical brainless yokel with only three things on his mind: screwing, drinking, and troublemaking.

I had a problem with him, and he apparently also had a problem with me, judging from the disparaging looks he gave me whenever I was talking to Elyas. One day when I walked across the courtyard at school, I couldn’t help overhearing Kevin loudly sharing his opinion of me with Elyas.

“Why are you wasting all your time with that stupid bitch? Aren’t you embarrassed to be seen with her?” Kevin hadn’t needed to mention me by name because it was obvious who he was talking about. It wasn’t just what he said, either; it was how he said it.

Although I was used to Kevin’s insults, that one really hurt my feelings. Maybe because he was right. He made it clear that I was in a totally different league from Elyas, and I would never have the slightest chance with him. I’d known it in my head for a long time, of course, but my heart grasped at straws. That was the moment my heart gave up.

As Elyas was about to respond, he noticed me. His eyes widened as he realized I was within hearing distance, and he hesitated before ignoring Kevin and walking toward me. It was too late, though, and I immediately looked at the ground and stumbled off. Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t have talked to him just then. My tears betrayed me, and I couldn’t stop them.

I asked myself why he never noticed my feelings for him. Given how ridiculous I acted in his presence, even a blind man could have seen.

I walked a few paces, then turned around. I knew him well enough to know he would be following me across the courtyard, despite my attempt to flee. He was, but I turned away again. When I did, I had never been so happy in my whole life to suddenly run into Sören Nordmann. My salvation!

“Hi, Emely,” he said smiling, and I stopped.

“Hi, Sören,” I said.

I looked back over my shoulder. Elyas had stopped and waited a couple of seconds, before he turned around and walked back over to Kevin.

I watched Elyas until Sören pulled me back to reality.

“Can I walk you home?” he asked.

I would have preferred to be alone, but I told him OK.

Sören had been popping up around me almost every day for a year. He would spend the whole day at school herding me, like a sheepdog trying to get his sheep into a pen.

It’s not that I didn’t like him; I just didn’t like him the way he wanted.

Even in those days the wrong kinds of guys were always interested in me, but little did I know that it was just the beginning of a long era of crap.

Sören continued fighting for my affections for three years straight, with only brief respites. When I was eighteen, I finally gave in. Sören thought things were great between us. He was definitely a nice guy, but over the course of our nine-month relationship, one thing never measured up. It was during this period that I decided sex was overrated. I dated two other guys after Sören and had sex with them, but they didn’t do anything to improve my impressions. Of course, I didn’t know any of that yet when I gave in and let Sören walk me home that day.

Neither of us said anything almost the whole way home, something I imposed on us with my body language. I was lost in my thoughts, still trying to digest what Kevin had said.

When we stood on my front porch, I wanted to say good-bye, but Sören asked me to wait a second.

“Emely,” he said. “I wanted to ask and see i
f . . .
maybe you’d go to the movies with me tomorrow afternoon?”

Honestly, I didn’t want to go, but looking into his hopeful eyes, I couldn’t turn him down. A diversion like a movie would do me good, so I tried to look at it positively. Plus, I thought, even someone as oblivious as Sören can’t misinterpret any signals at a matinée.

“All right,” I said, and his eyes grew wide in surprise.

“Oh! U
h . . .
grea
t . . .
So I’ll pick you up here, and then we can take the bus into town together,” he said as I nodded, wanting nothing more than to go inside.

I spent the next couple of hours in bed. I eventually ran out of tears and lay staring into space, picturing Elyas’s face again and again.

Most people say love is wonderful, but I was wondering why it hurt so much. What had started as a simple crush on my best friend’s older brother had become an almost inescapable trap, one I needed to escape if I didn’t want it to destroy me.

I would have spent the rest of the day in bed in a quasi-vegetative state had I not been torn out of my melancholy by the doorbell. I wiped the traces of tears off my cheeks and struggled out of bed. I was sure my parents had forgotten their keys again or something.

The doorbell rang two more times as I made my way downstairs, and when I opened it, my throat squeezed shut: Elyas stood in front of me. He looked at me with his beautiful eyes, his hands in his pockets.

He had never visited me at my house before. We had only ever seen each other at school or at his and Alex’s house. He had never stood outside my front door before.

“Hey,” he said, with an embarrassed smile.

The individual beats of my heart had merged into a frantic racing. “Hi,” I replied hesitantly.

“Can I come in?”

I blinked at him but then opened the door wide. “Uh, sure,” I said.

He followed me upstairs, and I was less able to breathe with each step. Him, here in my house, right behind me—I couldn’t believe it. What did this mean?

We walked to my room in silence; the mood was tense, and I couldn’t tell if it was me, him, or both of us. I stopped in the middle of the room and had to muster all my courage not to turn around to face him.

I’d dreamed of having him in my room so often, and suddenly without any warning here he was, standing awkwardly, surveying my room.

Elyas had changed a lot in the two years since I’d fallen in love with him. He was much taller now—taller than me by at least a head. He wasn’t a kid anymore, but a young man.

“What’s up?” I asked, trying to sound casual, though casualness had never been one of my strengths. He looked at the floor before looking me in the eye.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I
t . . .
What Kevin said was garbage. Forget about him.”

I stared at him. He came over just to say that?

I cleared my throat. “It’s no big dea
l . . .
I overreacted. It’s OK.” Judging from his face, he thought my acting skills were as crappy as I did. He put his hands back in his pockets before slowly and shyly walking toward me.

I thought I would die when he stopped only inches in front of me. The intensity of his eyes made me float into another world, far away from reality. I thought I was imagining it when Elyas hesitantly and slowly raised his hand. Very cautiously, as though I were the fire on top of a candle that might suddenly go out in a wisp of smoke if he moved too fast.

I couldn’t think clearly anymore; the only things I could feel were his hand on my cheek and the wonderful feeling of being touched so tenderly.

“You’ve been crying,” he said in a soft voice, stroking my skin with his finger.

His words had a magical effect on me, but at the same time I thought I might melt into the floor with embarrassment. I shook my head.

I was hypnotized by his eyes as he bent toward me. I didn’t understand what was happening; my breathing felt chaotic, and my arms encircled him, as if on their own.

The next instant I got my first kiss from the very person I’d always wanted it from. I’d dreamed of this moment so often, down to the tiniest detail, always tragically aware it would never come true. But here it was, happening. Kissing him for real surpassed anything I’d dreamed. Elyas didn’t jam his tongue down my throat either, the way they do in the movies. It was totally different, and much nicer than it had ever been in my girlish imagination.

His lips touched mine softly, slowly covering them with little kisses as his fingertips gently touched my cheek. As he kissed me, he opened his mouth slightly so I could feel his warm breath on my lips. My whole body stayed rigid, as goose bumps covered my skin. Then I finally started to kiss him back. We tenderly brushed our lips together and started to move in sync with each other, which warmed me to the tips of my toes. I was floating.

Our lips parted and kissed so naturally, and we melted together as though we were intended for each other. Our tongues met only after an eternity, at first carefully touching and then dancing—saying more than words ever could.

I wanted to take root in this spot and spend the rest of my life like this. I wanted to hold on to this moment forever. I never wanted anything more than to be with him and kiss him.

Even now, that still ranked as the best kiss I’d ever had. Nothing else in my entire life had been as beautiful as those few minutes. Not my second kiss, not any sex I’d had—nothing could hold a candle to that experience. I carried the memory of it with me, keeping it locked in a box deep inside me. I would take it with me to my grave someday, unforgotten.

Our kiss lasted a long time, much longer than most other kisses I would experience. When it came time to separate his lips from mine, it still felt way too soon. I closed my eyes. So many intense and unfamiliar feelings raced through my body, leaving me with a lingering intoxication. I didn’t dare open my eyes again; I was much too worried I had dreamed everything. As Elyas’s warm lips softly kissed my temples, I finally let go of all my worries, without reservation.

I opened my eyes carefully and found myself looking into the most breathtaking smile. His face was so warm and loving, I immediately lost myself in it again.

A thousand questions swirled through my foggy brain. How did this happen? I might have asked Elyas, too, except my mother started yelling from downstairs just then, disturbing our cozy little twosome. We stood face-to-face, looking deep into each other’s eyes when the bedroom door suddenly opened.

“Emely, come downstairs and help us unload the—” She stopped talking upon seeing us.

Elyas and I weren’t even touching at that point, but the way we had been gazing at each other must have given my mother the feeling she had burst in on something. Not least of all because we stared at her with wide, startled eyes.