His Bosnian Love | { Kenan Yıldız Fanfic }

10 - Esma

You could say everything was as normal as it could be. Good grades, a happy family, and even a mutual liking with a crush here and there. Every sphere of her life was going perfectly fine. She had nothing to complain about. 

That is, till the summer before high school. 

"Mom, I'm going out!" Esma was acting all sanguine in her outdoor attire. She loved dressing up, even if it was just going to fetch water. This time, however, she was to go on a date.

"Don't forget to say hi to Aaron's mom from me, won't you." 

"Sure, sure." 

Esma giggled like a ten-year-old girl and hopped out of the house. 

Aaron had asked her out a couple of weeks prior, but she was cautious as to what his intentions were. After incessant pressure from her friends, as well as her mom, to give him a chance, she finally decided she was going to say yes to him. 

You could say she practically grew wings on her back with the way she was running off into the sunset. 

Wait, scratch that. There was no sunset; it was literally noon, but what was there, surrounding the village centre, on the sun-heated cobblestone square in front of the public fountain, was what you could actually call a pack of wolves. 

Not literal animals, but worse. 

Aaron and his little pack. 

It's not that they were as blood-starved for human flesh as their animalistic emobied versions of them. 

It's more the fact that men (in this case, boys), were always, if not ten times more rude when they were packed up compared to when they were alone. 

As if their fragile male ego just gets a boost from "showing off" their masculinity in front of their friends. 

This was a rule that Esma followed religiously, and even her outspoken, witty personality wouldn't dare go up to men in such instances, in tremendous fear of getting publicly degraded. 

But at that moment, she was in such a high from the joy that enveloped her that she was deluded into trespassing the sacred rule she once strictly obliged to. 

Now that she was in front of them as if the wide-eyed Aaron didn't speak for himself, probably mentally noting that she was of no right mind at the moment to be thinking nor acting rationally. 

They all silenced once she stood in front of them, gleaming with a smile across her face. 

"Okay, soo, I've been thinking about this Aaron and, well, I'll go out with you!" 

She couldn't prepare herself for the upcoming wheezes that would've shattered the confidence of a grown man, let alone a fifteen-year-old girl. 

Still, Esma firmly stood her ground and didn't let it get to her. Surely, they were just joking around at Aaron's expense. 

Finally, he spoke up. 

"What, pfshhh, of course not. I never even asked you out." 

What? The guy that was once chasing her was now outright rejecting her. Okay, maybe she did, in fact, need to stick to the sacred rule she had not to approach men in groups because she'd never get an honest and genuine reply from them. But something about this just seemed so off and as ingenuine as it was, she could've never pinned down the words that exited his mouth to be Aaron's. Not in a million years. The boy who treated her to sweets all the time and would sneak lollipops to her in class. 

Eventually, she backed off, feeling the void and emptiness eating her from the inside, just going mindlessly nowhere precisely. 

It wasn’t even the pain that got to her as much as the confusion which was now a new form of torture,  not letting it go.