Serafico: переводы

→“Oh,” I say, laughing like a hyena. I’m aware that his hands are on my hips. My hips that are unadorned by Spanx. I think this is the first time ever. Since last summer, anyway. I mean, that he’s touched my un-Spanxed hips and I haven’t been naked in bed. Lying down in a prone position. “I am. I just came from a meeting with the Gecks.”

→Luke lifts his head and looks down at me through half-lidded eyes—those eyes I’ve always found so dreamy, with those impossibly long, dark lashes.

→I guess that’s how, after not having seen him for nearly a month, when Luke kisses me, I’m capable of feeling nothing.

→Luke takes another step forward, and I’m trapped with my back against the door. He twines an arm around my waist and leans down to kiss me. I have to use every ounce of self-restraint in my power to keep from jerking my face away from his.

→“That’s amazing.” I take another step backward. If this keeps up, soon I’ll be in the hallway again.

→And I realize, a little belatedly, that Rose is right. Not only would Gran have loved what’s going on between me and Chaz, but she’d have been rooting for it. She was the one who’d urged me not to get engaged. She was the one who always thought Chaz was my boyfriend all along.

→“Are they ever,” Rose says, getting up and grabbing Chaz’s and Dad’s empty plates. “Too bad Gran’s gone. She’d have loved this.”

→I lift up one of the flat, uncomfortable Knight’s Inn pillows and smack him with it. He laughs and tugs it away from me, then wrestles me back down to the mattress.

→We barely order our nachos in time to make the eleven o’clock cutoff.

→And then, as the mist swirls and tumbles around the man’s legs as he turns into our driveway, I see something that causes my heart, which a moment ago was frozen, to explode into what feels like a million tiny pieces of flame—like fireworks, only inside my chest, instead of up in the night sky: he’s wearing a baseball cap.

→But what would Luke be doing here? I mean, it’s true my grandmother—the family member I cared about most in the world although I might not have realized it until it was too late—is dead. And it’s true I’m really disappointed in him because he’s made no effort during the course of our relationship so far to meet anyone in my family.

→My heart seems to freeze inside my chest.

→I notice through the fog that the man is walking toward our house. I also notice he’s the same shape and size as…my fiance.

→Yeah, that hadn’t been much fun.

→Someone gets out of the parked car. Even though it’s pretty dark out, and the mist is pretty thick, I can see it’s not a woman. It’s a man, tall and broad-shouldered. I look away, through the fog, into the dark sea of our yard—the yard where Rose and Sarah forced me to hose off Mom and Dad’s bedspread that time Gran was babysitting us and ended up vomiting cooking sherry all over it.

→But the car doesn’t turn into the driveway. It pulls over and parks down the street. It’s so warm and humid outside, a sort of mist has settled over the street, making it look as if a fog has rolled in. I stare at the red taillights through the fog, breathing in the summer air, so familiar and yet so strange after so many months in the city. The smell of fresh-cut grass, the whine of cicadas, the chirp of crickets…these are summer scents and sounds that are almost foreign to me now, I haven’t experienced them in so long.

→Headlights flash, and I raise my head. Mrs. Brand and her Brunswick stew. I swipe at my cheeks with my wrists. I don’t want Mrs. Brand—whoever she is—to see me looking like such an unholy mess.

→God. Maybe I should take one of those pills Dr. Dennis prescribed after all. I can feel them, rattling around in their bottle in the pocket of my jeans. Will they make me feel less emotional? Will they stop me from feeling anything at all? Because right now that’s what I’d really, really like.

→And now she’s gone. And I’ll never have the chance. Never have the chance to talk to her again.

→Not that I ever told her that.