Love Story

by Jennifer Echols

  “No, the picture in your coffee is an ass,” I blurted in defense. “I also draw a mean spleen.”

  His eyebrows moved up ever so slightly—one of the few ways I could tell I’d gotten to him. “Can you do a liver?” he asked. “With bile?”

  This talk was not going as I had planned. To convince him to keep his mouth shut about the stable boy, I needed to be nice. I wished I could write internship on the surface of my coffee in foamed milk as a reminder.

  I grinned at him with all the pretend friendliness I could muster. My cheeks hurt. “Give me another week of training. I’ve been working here for only two.”

  His brows went down. “I thought you took a bus up here the day after graduation. My dad told me he drove you to the bus station.”

  You mean the day after you stole my life, I thought, grinning hard. Out loud I said, “I did. First I worked at a deli, but they were always trying to tell me what to do, which takes some getting used to.”

  I meant it as a joke, but Hunter didn’t laugh. He just blinked at me across the rim of his coffee cup.

  “Then I heard about a dog-walking job,” I hurried on. “That didn’t work out.”

  “Why not?” Hunter asked. “You love animals.” He sounded as if he was trying to convince me.

  “Dogs aren’t horses,” I told him. “But they should have bits in their mouths.” I held my hand in a claw beside my mouth to represent a horse’s bit.

  Hunter looked blankly at my hand and then at me as if he did not get it.

  I put my hand down. “I loved my job at the library, but I got fired when they caught me with weed.”

  He gaped at me. “Erin Elizabeth Blackwell!”

  I dismissed his concerns with one hand, nearly knocking over my coffee. “It wasn’t my weed. I had a lot of roommates and they were a mess. One of them hid his weed in my book bag and then forgot about it. Getting fired was the last straw. I was lucky I got fired, not arrested! I stomped all the way back to the apartment building, but as I stood on the sidewalk looking up at the window, scripting my dramatic exit from the apartment, I thought, Where am I going to go?”

  I was back in the street that hot and lonely day in July, neck aching from looking up, eyes stinging from tears. Summer and Jørdis had complained for the past few days about living in the dorm, the crowding, the noise. I did not complain. Five dirty roommates had taught me the value of two clean ones.

  “Are you sure you weren’t smoking just a little?” Hunter touched his thumb and finger to his lips, toking up.

  “I don’t have time for that!”

  His blue eyes opened wide. I realized that my hands were open wide, too, gesticulating in exasperation. I was still caught in that horrible July day. I needed to get my mind out of there. This conversation with Hunter was a completely different horrible situation, and I was not as desperate as I’d been back then. Not yet.

  I cleared my throat. “Do you want the info on my section of calculus?”

  “Yes,” he said quickly. “These sections are a crapshoot. If I’m not careful, I could transfer out of Eastern Europe, straight into Thailand.” He produced the latest-model cell phone, a giant step up from the bare-bones model he’d carried back home. As I gave him the name of the class instructor and the time, he entered the info with his thumbs. Several times his thumbs stumbled and the muscles of his strong jaw clenched, which was Hunter’s way of muttering “fuck” in frustration. Either he’d just gotten this phone and wasn’t used to it yet, or he was truly out of sorts.

  “Why are you taking calculus anyway?” I asked. “Shouldn’t you be in business math, since you’re majoring in business?”

  “Same reason you’re in calculus when you’re majoring in English.” He ended his data-entering session with an especially forceful hammering of his thumb, and dropped the phone into his backpack. “The university doesn’t want honors students taking easy A’s.”

  “It might be an easy A, but business math would still make sense for a business major,” I reasoned.

  He rotated his neck until it popped. “Why are you taking belly dancing? That makes no sense for an English major.”

  I felt a flash of suspicion. How did he know I was taking belly dancing? But he’d also known where I worked before I told him. He must have seen me around in the past week without my seeing him. Clearly we’d been circling each other.

  “I’m taking belly dancing because I can,” I said casually. “But if you’re taking calculus, you’re missing out on a business math class you need for your major. I looked at the catalog. I actually considered majoring in business like my grandmother wanted me to.”

  This time he reacted. There was no other way to describe it. He seemed very surprised. And since Hunter never showed his surprise, I was more convinced than ever that there was something wrong with him. “You did?” he asked.

  “Yes, for about five seconds.”

  Recovering his cool, he took a slow sip of his latte, watching me over the rim of his cup as if waiting for a sign from me that I’d slipped in some poison. “Not that you would know this,” he said, setting his cup back down, “but running a horse farm is extremely complicated. It involves more than adding columns of numbers. I need to know the derivative of Horse of Course and the linear transformation of Boo-boo.”

  I was sipping my own coffee, and I hoped the cup hid my face as I winced. Boo-boo was my horse.

  Hunter leaned forward and looked straight at me. “This stable boy needs an education.”

  If Hunter never showed surprise, he never, ever showed anger. And right now he seemed angry with me. Despite my stomach twisting into knots, I nonchalantly took another sip of coffee as if I were calmly considering him. I’d put this off long enough.

  “Hunter,” I began, “I’m truly sorry about the stable-boy business in my story. I hope you didn’t take it the wrong way.”

  He watched me steadily, his brows down in what I could have sworn was barely controlled outrage. I noticed for the first time that the rims of his eyes were red. “What way did you want me to take it, Erin?”

  My fingertips hurt from pressing hard against my hot mug. “Maybe I had you on my mind because I assumed you might live in my dorm or register for some of my classes. But I never intended for you to read my story. I wasn’t baiting you, if that’s what you think.”

  He continued to stare me down. Between my hot face and the coffee below my chin, I felt like I was sitting in a sauna.

  Finally I asked, “Why are you angry with me?”

  He sat back in his chair. “Why do you say I’m angry?”

  “I can tell. For some reason, you’re slipping a little.”

  He gave me a wry smile. “I’m angry because what you’ve done is insulting. There are only two possibilities. First, you knew I was going to be in that class, and you wrote that story deliberately to mess with me. But the story was dated several days ago and I just transferred classes today. I don’t see how you could have known.”

  “I didn’t know,” I assured him. Boy, didn’t I.

  “Which brings us to the other possibility. You wrote the first assignment of your creative-writing degree about me. Which means I was on your mind. Which means you liked me in middle school and high school, just like Rebecca carried a torch for David, through six years of those asshole kids at school calling me your stable boy, and you never said a thing.”

  I could hardly believe what I was hearing. Not only was he angry, he was also admitting for the first time that he cared how people talked about him in relation to me. This scared me. When Hunter and I had started seventh grade, he was the new kid at my school. I could have made things easier on him and introduced him to my friends. I didn’t. I pretended he didn’t exist. That probably contributed to the asshole kids making fun of him when they found out he was living on the grounds at my farm.

  And I had always felt guilty about that. But right after what happened between our parents, I could hardly look at him, much less maintain the
friendship we’d started or pal around with him at school. I still couldn’t talk about it. My own anger welled up in defense.

  “I don’t understand why you think there are only two possibilities for what is going on in my mind,” I seethed, “when we are not even friends. Sounds like an oversimplification on your part, to make yourself feel better about what you’re doing. Even you would feel bad about stealing the birthright of a girl who had a soul. But as long as I’m a shallow girl, starkly drawn in black and white, hell, steal away.”

  Color crept into his cheeks underneath his tan. “I am not stealing anything. Not yet.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I challenged him. “What time is it?”

  Reflexively he glanced at his Rolex. Score!

  I struck again. “Where’d you get the money for the outrageously expensive T-shirt you’re wearing? Did I drop it in Boo-boo’s stall before I left home? Because the last I checked, you were shopping across the river in Indiana, at the thrift store next to the mall, just to make sure you didn’t wear something to school that one of your friends had thrown out.” I had passed by the parking lot and seen the farm truck my grandmother let him drive to school. I knew what was going on.

  I’d pushed him too far, and I held my breath for his reaction. I’d never seen him lose his cool completely. Now I was about to see it at my workplace and get fired from my job again.

  His glare zeroed in on me. His jaw hardened—

  And then he laughed. He threw back his head and let out rich, rumbly, boy chuckles as if I was the funniest girl in the world and I made him happy.

  Hunter losing himself in laughter—this I had seen. But he used it strategically, as when the high school chemistry teacher or the president of the bank or the guidance counselor helping him apply to this college was the one making the joke.

  I asked him suspiciously, “Have you been drinking?”

  He beamed at me. “Drinking?”

  “Did you go out drinking after the writing class?”

  He shrugged. “Manohar and Brian and I had a few beers.”

  I thought he’d had more than a few beers. “And when you had a few beers with Manohar and Brian,” oh God, I could just picture the guffawing, “what did you chat about?”

  He maintained that same politely jovial expression, like he couldn’t quite catch what I was saying.

  I gripped the edge of the table with both hands. “You didn’t chat about stable boys, did you?”

  He grinned at the ceiling. “I might have mentioned it.”

  “Hunter.” I gazed down at my mostly full mug of crude oil, stomach sinking. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Really?” His handsome face wore an ironic smirk. “I thought you wanted to talk to me about calculus.”

  I felt like such a fool. I’d psyched myself up for this conversation, worried over it because it mattered so much, and he’d prepared by getting buzzed. I said gravely, “I think I have a shot at the publishing internship they award at the end of the semester. It would take a lot of pressure off me. But to get it, I need to do well in this class. I need Gabe to take me seriously. I don’t want him to find out there’s a real stable boy.”

  Hunter picked up his mug. He tipped it ever so slightly toward him. I could still see the surface of his latte, and I watched him suck the heart into his mouth.

  “You’re going into business with my grandmother,” I said. “I know you want to leave the stable boy behind. I’m trying to leave that whole life behind and get out of your way. The internship will help me do that.”

  His tongue peeked out of his mouth. He licked a bit of the foam heart off his upper lip.

  “I know you’re angry with me, Hunter, and I understand why. But I honestly never meant to offend you. My only real crime is to step aside and give you a stab at millions of dollars and a hundred and forty-two horses.”

  “A hundred and forty-seven,” he corrected me. Of course they’d bought and sold and bred them over the summer. Because he was buzzed, he couldn’t resist reminding me that the farm went on without me.

  He set his mug down. “I won’t tell Gabe.”

  I ignored his patronizing tone. I was growing more desperate by the minute. “Don’t tell anyone else, either. It might get back to Gabe.”

  The corner of his mouth quirked into a smile. “I won’t.”

  “And ask Manohar and Brian not to spread it around.”

  “I’ll ask. I can’t promise anything. You may owe them a favor.”

  I stared dumbly at him. He was blatantly toying with me now. Hunter was very persuasive. He could have convinced Manohar and Brian of anything if he’d wanted to. He did not want to.

  And what kind of favor could I possibly do for them? Unlike last spring when I could have gotten them admitted to the Churchill Downs clubhouse, I had no clout, no money, nothing left to offer.

  Maybe that was Hunter’s point.

  I’d done all I could do to save my internship, though. My boss was standing at the counter, reminding me that my break time was almost over. I raked back my chair. “Thank you, Hunter. And again, I’m really sorry about this. I know we both wish we could go back to enjoying New York and pretending each other didn’t exist.” I reached for my mug to take it back to the counter with me.

  Before my fingers touched the ceramic, Hunter grabbed my hand and gazed up at me.

  I hated how my body responded as if he were my boyfriend, not my classmate or even my sworn enemy. Maybe heat would have shot across my chest regardless because he was handsome, confident, a force of nature. But I was afraid I had done most of this damage to myself. In real life we hadn’t engaged in a friendly conversation since the summer before the seventh grade, save one sparkling night last May. But in my mind I’d already written Almost a Lady, the entire novel. In my mind, we’d slept together.

  His hand still squeezed my hand. His thumb swept across my palm, and as I watched, the pupils dilated in his bright blue eyes. I wondered whether in his mind we’d slept together, too.

  He released my hand and nodded toward my chair. “Sit down another sec. Your grandmother wanted me to bring you something you left at home.” He reached around for his backpack.

  Obediently I collapsed into my chair because my legs felt weak, and because I really did need him on my side. But I said quickly, “I don’t want it.”

  He broke into a playboy grin, as if we were flirting instead of dancing around a sensitive topic. “How do you know you don’t want it? You haven’t even seen what it is.”

  “Whatever it is, I left it on purpose.”

  He pulled it from his backpack and placed it on the table between us. My music player and earbuds.

  The last time he’d handed me my music player, at my grandmother’s Derby party last May, he’d saved me from a convo with Whitfield Farrell, a twenty-one-year-old college dropout who would inherit the famous farm next door. Whitfield was widely known for his drunken exploits at the horse parties, and widely rumored to want in my pants. My grandmother had ordered me to be nice to him because she did business with his dad.

  So Whitfield put his hand on my ass. I was not far from slapping him and then taking whatever punishment my grandmother dished out, when Hunter tapped on the window and held up my music player, which I’d left in the barn. When he saw I couldn’t get away from Whitfield, he came inside the mansion. Made a big commotion of it, too, stomping in his stable boots across the antique Persian rug. Whitfield wandered away to find another bourbon. Hunter watched him go, then turned to me. And he flirted with me like he would flirt with any girl at school until my grandmother stalked up and asked him in an angry whisper what the hell he thought he was doing inside her house.

  Thing was, this had seemed completely in character for Hunter. He was the charmer, the savior, the leader, every girl’s hero. When the neighborhood boor targeted a girl for the evening, of course Hunter would deftly intervene, even against the boss lady’s wishes.

  For anyone else. Not
for me. For years, Hunter and I had kept our distance. When he stepped in, I started thinking about him differently. Thinking hard about him. Casting him not as everybody else’s hero but as my own. The prom had passed already, but graduation was coming up. We were headed for the same college. Because of our past together, we would have a lot to work through, but maybe college was our time to do it.

  And then he stole my life.

  I managed a tiny smile for the several-months-older, quite-a-bit-drunker Hunter, as if the music player represented a long-ago period of my childhood rather than last May. “I definitely left that in Kentucky on purpose,” I said. “It’ll do me no good here. I can’t afford new songs.”

  His golden jaw dropped. He rolled his eyes. He must be plastered. “Songs aren’t that expensive,” he said.

  “Every little bit helps,” I said, “when I’m trying to pay the rent and experience New York.”

  He talked right over “New York” as if he hadn’t heard me. “You love your music.”

  “I did when I was trying to shut everything out. Now I’m trying to let everything in. I want to hear New York rather than some song I downloaded. I want to smell New York. Well—New York smells like garbage. Vietnamese garbage, Mexican garbage, Lithuanian garbage, Nigerian garbage, all within a three-block walk. Even the stench is part of the experience. I want to pay attention.”

  Leaning forward, he covered my hand and the music player and earbuds on the table with both his big hands.

  My face flushed hot like he had thrown his latte into it.

  “You don’t want your music player because your grandmother gave it to you,” he said. “Admit it.”

  I tried to pull my hand out from under his. The corner of the music player dug into my finger. I stood up.

  “Sit down.” He sounded authoritative, and suddenly very sober. He squeezed my hand on the table. “We’re not done.”

  “Yes, we are.” I loosened my hand from his and placed it on his shoulder. “Some of us work for a living.” I turned for the counter.