Love Story

by Jennifer Echols

  “I think it’s so cool!” Brian exclaimed.

  In the back of my mind I knew I should have thanked Brian for coming to my defense. All I could focus on was Hunter, who had touched another girl in the shower and now had the gall to stick his nose in my business. “What phys ed credit will do me any good?” I asked suspiciously. “Horseback riding?”

  “You said it,” he muttered. “I didn’t.”

  “I liked the idea of getting my abs in shape,” I said truthfully. “I’ve been doing it for three weeks and look.” I thrust my tummy forward to show him. It was flat. Not that he cared.

  Brian stuck his head out of my bedroom to see. “You should get your belly button pierced. Say it like you mean it.” He disappeared through the doorway again.

  “Are you kidding?” I called. “Do you know how much that would cost, not to mention the price of a charm to plug the hole?”

  “Your grandmother would be furious,” Hunter said quietly, “just like the last time you got a piercing.” He touched one finger to the diamond stud on the side of my nose.

  We held one another’s gaze for a long, electric moment.

  I knocked his hand away and whispered, “Everything I do isn’t designed to make my grandmother furious. I don’t give a damn what she thinks.”

  I flounced through the doorway, into my room. Brian’s rummaging hadn’t bothered me at all, but now that Hunter was coming in behind me, I glanced around frantically.

  Nothing was out of place. Nothing would betray any more of my secret fantasies to Hunter. He already knew them all anyway.

  Brian stood before a cheap frame nailed to my wall. “Wow, a rejection letter. You should take this down. Doesn’t it discourage you?”

  Ugh, I’d forgotten about the rejection letter. It meant a lot to me to display it. That summer I’d finished the romance novel I’d worked on my entire senior year of high school. I sent it off to the publisher I’d written it for. After only a month, I’d gotten a rejection letter, which was very quick. They must have really hated it.

  I searched my dresser drawer for the cream. “No, it encourages me. It’s my first firm step toward the writing career I want.”

  Brian glanced over his shoulder at me. “Isn’t a rejection a step away from the writing career you want?”

  “No,” I said. “All writers get rejections.”

  “Not the ones who are published,” Hunter pointed out.

  I grabbed the cream from the drawer and wagged it at him between my fingers. “Knife, please.”

  Instead of giving me the knife, he held out his hand for the tube. I gave it to him. He set it on top of my desk and poised the knife blade above it. Brian and I leaned in to watch. I wanted to make sure Hunter wouldn’t mutilate the tube and spill its precious contents—and, I discovered as I edged closer to him, the air around him was so warm. My skin heated deliciously without touching his.

  “This is like surgery. With a hatchet.” Lightly he slit the tube at the bottom along the crimp, then at the top where it flared out to the cap, then down the middle, connecting the top and bottom cuts. With the tip of the blade he lifted one of the flaps he’d made. “It opens like the space shuttle cargo bay.”

  “Genius,” I said. “My hero.”

  He straightened and looked at me. Brian and I straightened, too, because when Hunter straightened, the knife came closer to us.

  “So, you have a plastic bag to keep it from drying out?” Hunter asked me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  When I didn’t move, he looked at Brian, then back at me. “Put it away and come back upstairs with us,” he told me.

  “You go ahead.” I nodded toward my early American literature survey (bleh!) book on my desk. “I have a lot of reading to do.”

  His face fell. Either he was an even better actor than I’d thought, or he was genuinely astonished that I refused to return to the party with him after he so gallantly performed surgery on my face cream.

  “It was lots of fun though,” I said. “Quite an eyeful.” To Brian I said, “Do me a favor and make sure Summer comes home safe.”

  “Will do.” Brian had already left my room and headed for the outer door.

  Hunter stood there a moment longer, blond brows down, disoriented because another man had been put in charge. Then he recovered, resetting his face in the handsome default mode. “Have a great night, Erin. See you in class.”

  “Thanks, Hunter,” I said in a tone that ran right up to the edge of sarcasm without going over. I walked him to the door, shut and locked it behind him, and dashed back to my bedroom to strip out of my damp bikini and bundle into soft sweats before I froze.

  As I changed, I listened to their footfalls. Where my bay window ended on one side, my bedroom shared a wall with the stairwell. I didn’t want to switch my pillow to the other end of my bed because I would feel vulnerable with my head that close to the door—but some nights I was tempted when students whooped and tramped to the upper floors in the wee hours.

  Tonight I was glad I could hear Brian’s fast shuffle, holding on to the handrail, and Hunter’s slower, heavier amble up the center of the stair tread. I listened to them ascend between the second and third floors, third and fourth, fourth and fifth, their steps disappearing behind the heavy fifth-floor door. This way I knew they were truly gone. The door was closed on the party. Hunter could get back to his blonde, and I could get back to work.

  A few hours later, two sets of footsteps skipped back down: one fast as before, the other lighter and halting, tipsy. Brian’s voice chuckled at the outer door to my room. The door shut. Only the tipsy steps tripped between the beds, and then Summer was falling through my doorway, pushing my books aside and curling up in my lap.

  I brushed her black hair away from her shut eyes. “What’s the matter?” I yawned.

  “I mentioned the stable boy to Manohar,” she mumbled. “He got mad at me. He thinks I don’t really like him, and the only reason I was flirting with him was to get something for you.”

  I could have been coy and said, I thought you were only flirting with him to get something for me. You genuinely like him after all? Gasp! Instead I said soothingly, “He lives in your dorm and you’ll have class with him the whole semester. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to work it out. He’ll come around.”

  She rolled over and I scratched her bare back between the straps of her bright yellow bikini until Jørdis came in from the art studio. I meant to read for early American literature survey (bleh!) all this time, but I dwelled on my own words to Summer. For once, I believed them. Summer and Manohar were brilliant and funny, and as long as they could step past the barriers set up by their own egos, there was nothing to come between them.

  At least, that’s what I hoped. Each night during my fifteen-minute break at the coffee shop, I looked around at the customers, picked two of them to put together, and brainstormed a happy ending for them. Usually they were students because the coffee shop was so close to campus. They had no real problems. Their parents were paying their way through college. The price of one of their nightly mochas could have kept me in peanut butter crackers for two weeks. Any of these young men and women could be perfect for each other. They just didn’t know it, and they would never introduce themselves to each other except in a file on my laptop.

  But sometimes the customers were young professionals. Guys with the latest haircut, chicks with unruly but strangely flattering hair and no makeup, all wearing the most expensive off-the-rack suits they could afford. I would be this girl eventually. If I played my cards right and won the publishing internship, I could be this girl in January. She loved her job and was set for life. She could hardly believe her luck when the hot guy from the adult nonfiction department at her publishing house walked over to her table and asked to sit down.

  I treasured this fifteen minutes a day of writing. Lived for it. So, much as I loved Summer, I felt a twinge of annoyance when she bounced into the coffee shop during my break almost a week
after the beach party. More trouble must have bubbled up between her and Manohar. The coffee shop was out of her way. “Hey!” I called. “What’s up?”

  She slid into the chair across from me. “I was just coming back from the library.”

  “Headed to the dorm? This is not on your route.”

  “Yeah. I wanted to ask you something.” She suppressed a smile. “Have you read the stories for creative-writing class tomorrow?”

  I pointed at her. “No! I’ve needed to do that, but I got behind in my reading, and when I get off work I have to study for a calculus test tomorrow. I’m going to be down to the wire”—I winced at the unintentional horse racing metaphor—“reading stories right up until class. Why?”

  “Hunter’s story is about you.”

  “What do you mean, his story is about me?” I asked loudly enough that my boss peeked through the doorway from the back and put his fists on his hips.

  “Uh-oh,” Summer whispered. “I’d better go before I get you in trouble.”

  Too late. But I couldn’t let her go yet. My heart was beating so hard, I might actually die of curiosity. “Is there a redhead in Hunter’s story?”

  “No, but—”

  “Okay, thanks for the heads-up. I’ll read it tomorrow.” I closed my laptop, dismissing her, and went back to work. As I made a cappuccino for my next victim, my heart slowed down. I wasn’t in Hunter’s story. This was more of Summer’s wishful thinking, mentally writing a story of her own.

  That idea got me through my night at work, hours of studying, and a reasonably successful calculus test the next morning even though Hunter sat across the room. But an hour before creative-writing class, alone in the library, absorbed in Hunter’s literally and figuratively steamy story, I wasn’t so sure.

  6

  Blurred Vision

  by Hunter Allen

  His friends created a “beach party” in the men’s bathroom on their floor of the dorm by turning on all the showers full force. They said the dorm had a huge boiler that never ran out of hot water, like any converted brownstone in New York City. This seemed strange to him because he was from horse country, where fences were made of limestone boulders that workers had dug up from the ground in 1900, where crops were dried in barns painted black to take best advantage of the warm sun, where the grass was green year-round because of the sun and the rain and the nourishing limestone breaking down deep under the ground. Humans and the elements lived in harmony in the country. He had no understanding of the city, where the sheer number of humans overwhelmed the elements completely, yet the boiler never ran out of hot water.

  “This feels so good,” said the girl under his hands. His friend tending bar had reported that the girl had downed three strawberry daiquiris already. She was in possession of a fourth, but she had balanced it on the soap dish while she stepped into the hot shower, soaking her bathing suit. She looked up at him through half-closed eyes. He watched droplets from the shower ricochet off the mildewed walls and splash into the clear plastic cup, forming a layer of hot water on top, a second layer of melted strawberry-tinged slush underneath. It no longer looked appetizing, but she’d drunk enough for his purposes anyway.

  “It does feel good.” He slid his hand around her, toward her latissimus dorsi. He expected this move to go smoothly, but his skin jerked against hers with wet tension. He’d hardly started and he needed lube already.

  His friends would laugh at him for thinking this. All men were supposed to come to college experienced. They should know how to massage a girl in the shower in front of half the dorm and act suave about it. They should know how to get this girl into bed shortly afterward and make her think it was a good idea.

  He would never have admitted this to his friends or anyone else, but he was not experienced. And the main reason he hadn’t gotten around in high school had just walked through the bathroom door directly behind him.

  He could not see her with his back turned. He could not hear her husky voice. But he could hear the giggles of her ubiquitous friend. And he watched the mist from the showers settle in layers like the ice and artificial flavoring in the cup on the soap dish set into the wall. The fog from the showers should have swirled with turbulence when she and her friend opened the bathroom door. Instead it calmed and quieted, just as the whole world slowed to a canter, a walk, a halt with its ears pricked up when she came near.

  Her stare burned a hole between his shoulder blades. She could stare all she wanted but he would not turn around. Never again. She’d made it clear since they were twelve that he was not good enough for her. If she changed her mind now just because he had his hand on another girl’s latissimus dorsi in a public shower, she could eat her heart out.

  Setting his chin down on the girl’s shoulder, he watched his own index finger blaze a silvery path through the droplets of water clinging to her back. His fingertip reached her spine and he traced small circles there, a taste of what he would do to other parts of her later. He wondered whether she was already too numb to feel his touch and understand the innuendo.

  Eyes still half closed, she lifted her chin and parted her lips for a kiss.

  Instead of kissing her, he pressed his finger into her fossae lumbales laterales, the indentations in the small of her back, and stopped. She was a beautiful girl, no doubt, and he did know her name. The situation had not quite reached that level of cliché. But he did not know what her major was, or what she planned to do for a career, or what city in Jersey she was from. His friends would make fun of him if they found out this bothered him.

  The girl from home had crossed the room behind his back and settled on a lawn chair. He could hear her now, joining a conversation as if she wasn’t staring a hole through him.

  Maybe she wasn’t.

  That decided the matter. He kissed the girl in front of him. He eased her backward until she was trapped between his body and the mildewed wall. Not that he needed to trap her. She willingly opened her mouth for him.

  Maybe she knew what his major was and what town he was from. He had not told her, but maybe she’d found out. Or maybe it really didn’t matter.

  This is what he told himself as he pressed his tongue into her oral cavity. Her upper and lower lips were erogenous zones. The harder he kissed her, the faster her sensors fired messages to the nucleus accumbens in her brain. That center in turn sent a tingling sensation to her mons pubis, awakening it to the possibility that it might be next. She and he were from different states, after all, and unlikely to be related, and sensing this through their pheromones was apparently all the motivation they or anybody else needed to start the reproductive cycle.

  He was running his tongue just above her clavicle when she pressed her hands to his pectoral muscles, feigning a request that he pause. “It’s awfully crowded in here,” she whispered, her breath curling the steam. “Could we go to your room where it’s private?”

  She had made the first move. He would get what he’d come for without even feeling guilty. He sniffed deeply with satisfaction, savoring this moment—and smelled the Stachybotrys growing on the walls.

  Before he could back out of the situation, he grabbed her hand, epidermis to epidermis, and pulled her toward the door. The crowd was thick, the mist thicker, the lights flashed and bobbed in a bankrupt approximation of a disco, and still he caught a glimpse of the girl he’d hoped was not really behind his back, watching him.

  Outside the bathroom, in the frigid hallway, his companion’s nipples hardened beneath her bikini top with the release of testosterone because of the alcohol, and oxytocin because of his hands on her. As he led her toward his room, she tripped. He slowed his pace and generously supported her gluteus maximus so she wouldn’t fall before they reached their destination.

  He closed his door behind them. She stumbled to his bed, sat down, and kicked off her flip-flops. She was a lot more ready than he was. His friends would be appalled that he hesitated. There was nothing wrong with this scenario. Nothing.

&nbs
p; He pulled her up to standing, tossed back the blankets, and sat her back down on the sheets. Cotton, Gossypium hirsutum, rather than silk, a secretion of Bombyx mori, but he was in college and nobody lost his virginity under ideal circumstances. Otherwise he wouldn’t have a story to embellish when he was fifty. Gently he drew her down on top of him. He opened his bathing suit and pushed past hers. As the nucleus accumbens in his own brain flooded with activity, he pondered what species of monster he’d become.

  * * *

  “A MONSTER WHO GETS SOME,” KYLE murmured as we all placed Hunter’s story on top of our stacks. But that comment was under the table, so to speak, not part of the official class discussion. The official discussion, starting with Manohar’s opinion, was even worse: “I just want to thank Hunter for being so brave and sharing his first time with us.”

  The response was snorts and howls of laughter from the men in the class, and it set the tone for the discussion of Hunter’s story. I expected someone, maybe even a treacherous Manohar or Brian, to point out that the narrator’s “horse country” place of origin was not Long Island. The limestone fences, black tobacco barns, and green grass in winter were iconic Kentucky, Bluegrass Region, and anybody reading between the lines could have figured out that Hunter was my stable boy. But nobody mentioned this. They were too busy guffawing about sex.

  The women stammered about how moving the story was, how vulnerable the narrator was, and how interesting it was to get a guy’s point of view on dating. This was polite of them and hid what they really wanted to say, which was that they’d been hot for Hunter before and now they could hardly stand it. He had become a movie star.

  The men snickered and said they thought the story ended too soon, which was their way of saying they realized all the women were hot for Hunter and they wished they’d thought of this ploy themselves. They tried so hard to have the right clothes, the right hair, and money for dates. None of them had ever thought to use the writing class as a pickup place.