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Chapter 4 - The Author and the Aliens

With that, Caz's eyes lit up.

"Can I?" he excitedly asked, leaning forward on the edge of the couch while quickly going through his notebooks, "I have so much stuff on this and the only other people I've taught this to are Mr. Mesji and Miri!"

And with that, despite our tiredness, he began to teach me the name of his own alien language, which was called Tekkiyan. Shockingly enough, it only took me until the Friday of the following weekend to get the hang of basic sentences (such as "hi, how are you" and "my name is Stella" and "what's your name" and "I am 18 years old").

That Friday was a fairly busy day. Caz had also decided to start teaching me how to write in Tekkiyan, and some new ships had landed in the forest. Above all of that, I was planning on calling Em to talk for a bit, and Mr. Mesji was ordering pizza, while Miri baked cookies. All in all, a hectic day, and as I was trying to find a quiet place with good cell service so I could talk to Em (cell coverage in the mountains was so spotty, you could have cell service on one end of a room, and none on the other), Caz was following me wherever I went, trying to make me say the vocabulary.

"Quick, how do you say 'I am'," Caz asked, perching delicately on the edge of the couch that I was standing on, which was the best place to get all 4 bars of cell coverage. 

"It's yai atchen," I sighed, as my phone started to buzz, "Now go away, I want to talk to-"

Caz started to back away, gently putting his hands up as he said,

"You want to talk to your newest girlfriend, Emersyn. I understand, and I shall leave you to be."

He bowed out of the room, leaving me standing on the couch, my still-ringing phone in hand. I quickly answered it, and pressed it to my ear.

"Hey," I breathlessly said, "Emersyn, how's it going?"

She laughed, her voice sweet and melodic, before replying,

"It's going pretty good! How's it going with you? Have you met any more aliens besides Skai?"

I sat down on the back of the couch, and replied,

"Nah, not yet. A new ship did land in the woods though, and I'm going to go check that out tonight, so I'll call you back when I do meet some more aliens!"

"You're so cute when you ramble on about things like that," Em said, her voice soft and gentle. I paused, then, after a very long moment of silence, asked,

"What do you mean by that?"

Em laughed, before replying,

"I mean that I like how you ramble on when you get excited. Like on Wednesday, when I gave you my recipe for lemon poppyseed bread, and you made it, and you talked to me about how good my recipe was, and how it was probably even better coming from me. I liked hearing that. It's cute."

I laughed, and said,

"Thank you! I mean, I meant what I said about the bread. It would probably be better coming from you, since you made it. And... if you made it, it would give me an excuse to see you again. I love hearing your laugh, and seeing your smile. So... yeah."

Quietly, I smacked myself on the face, regretting saying that. There was a pause on the other end of the line, before finally, Em said,

"Okay, Stella, I have an idea. You're going to have to hear me out on this one, but I think it's the perfect compromise between your love of hearing me laugh and seeing me smile, and my love of hearing you gush about things."

"Okay?" I nervously asked, "What is it?"

"Are you free tomorrow?" Em asked. I paused, then replied,