Love Story

by Jennifer Echols

  But he went on, “Besides, every time you write anything remotely like reality, it involves Hunter somehow. Hunter is calm and cavalier about everything but you and your writing. So if you don’t mind, to keep the peace, stick to your romantic fantasies from now on. But leave Hunter out of it.”

  WHEN I WALKED HOME FROM THE coffee shop a little after eleven that night, I found Summer sitting on her bed, reading. I had expected her to be up in Manohar’s room. I knew she was headed there now because she still wore makeup. She was waiting for me.

  She patted her bed. I set my book bag down carefully, to preserve it, and sat beside her, then kept sitting down and down until I lay flat in her pillows and stared at the cracked ceiling.

  “You love him so much,” I heard her say.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I just can’t understand how things have gone so wrong between you two for so long.”

  I didn’t want to talk about this, but looking at the ceiling made it easier. My stomach twisted into knots and I sucked in a breath against the pain, then blurted this out: “After my mom died I couldn’t look at him because his dad had been there with her when she died. Anytime I looked at Hunter, the whole thing replayed in my head. I couldn’t look at his dad, either. That didn’t last long because my grandmother told his dad to get me back on a horse right away so I wouldn’t be scared. But by that time, school had started and Hunter was the new kid and people were calling him my stable boy and I hadn’t done anything to stop it.”

  “Oh,” she said, as if that were the end of it and she was sorry she had asked.

  I kept going, now that I had started. “Then he got hurt. You know, the scar? And it was like my mother was dying all over again. I wanted to see him. I walked down to his house to ask his dad to take me to the hospital with him to see Hunter. But I just stood in the driveway for a while and couldn’t knock on the door.

  “When Hunter came back to school, he seemed to resent that, too, and we went through the rest of high school that way. People would tease him about being my employee and they would tease me about going after the stable boy, and girls would tell me he was perfect for me. They didn’t understand how much he hated me or why. Then we were seniors and competing against each other for a scholarship to the same college.”

  “Oh,” she said again. This time she reached over and stroked my hair on the pillow. That made my eyes fill with tears.

  “The night of the Derby he did something nice for me,” I choked out. “I hoped we were starting over. And then he stole my farm.”

  She stayed quiet for a few minutes. Finally she said, “You are a phenomenally bad communicator. I’m surprised you want to be a novelist. Or maybe that’s why you want to be a novelist.”

  I sat up, wiping the hair away from my wet face. “I love you,” I said.

  She snorted. “I’m easy to love.”

  “No …” I leaned forward and hugged her, just like that. My stomach twisted again as I did it, but I hugged her. Squeezed her hard.

  She rubbed my back soothingly and said into my shoulder, “I love you, too.” Then she held me at arm’s length. “Let’s go to a midnight movie. You never get out.”

  I shook my head. “I have to read for history.” Then I looked toward the ceiling again. “You go on upstairs. Manohar is waiting.”

  It took me a while to convince her, but she did eventually go. I moved to my room and unloaded my textbooks from my bag. But the loneliness of the empty room was overwhelming tonight, and the very thought of wandering alone across the ancient battlefields of my history chapters made my head throb. I took a quick trip down the hall to the bathroom to remove my makeup and cleanse myself of the coffee smell. I was so sick of spending long evenings standing up and serving lattes in the coffee shop that I would have preferred the odor of Thai garbage. I stretched out in bed, half asleep already.

  Hunter’s footsteps echoed in the stairwell and through the wall at the head of my bed. Suddenly wide awake, I flipped over and stared at the wall, ready to defend myself if Hunter burst through it. I leaned forward on my fists, head down as the noise descended. The front door of the dorm squealed open and thudded shut. I hopped to the other side of my bed and peeked out my window as Hunter walked away down the sidewalk, open overcoat blowing behind him.

  Enough was enough. I had to know.

  I jerked on the clothes I’d worn that day, slipped on my shoes, and shrugged into my own overcoat. Running out the door, I grabbed a scarf from my bedpost. Scarves were in fashion and I hadn’t yet needed it for warmth. Tonight it was functional. As I dashed down the stairwell, I tied it around my red hair.

  When I shoved open the front door, he was still visible one block up on the almost empty sidewalk. I hurried after him, as fast as I could go without running and drawing attention if he happened to glance around. I did run when he turned a corner, and I half-expected him to be waiting to startle me when I rounded the corner myself. Instead, I glimpsed his blond hair as he jogged down the steps to the subway.

  I’d ridden the subway a lot when I first arrived in New York—why not, when a monthly card bought unlimited rides? I was amazed that it would take me anywhere in the city. Then it had broken down on me a couple of times. There had been a period when construction was awful and I kept getting on the wrong line and it would always spit me out in TriBeCa. Lately I’d hardly ridden it at all. When class had started in September, my Manhattan had shrunk to a tight circle of dorm, class, coffee shop, library, dorm.

  Now I stepped onto the escalator and descended into the bowels of the city. From this angle, the staircase seemed to smooth out into a conveyor belt. That’s what my life had become, and, judging from the dark circles under Hunter’s eyes lately, maybe his life, too—a relentless machine, chewing us to pieces.

  At the bottom of the escalator, he walked forward into the light of the subway platform and disappeared from my view beneath the edge of the curved ceiling. He would have to look behind him while I was following in order to spot me. If he did, he would see me. There was no way around this. I had made myself as unobtrusive as possible, but he would still see me unless I was actively hiding behind a pillar, which would arouse the suspicions of the other passengers and the police. I didn’t know where he was going, so I didn’t know what would be there and why I might want to go there alone late at night. I would be busted. And when I was busted, I would have no excuse, only the truth: “I am going to die unless I find out about your secret love.”

  I stepped off the escalator just as the northbound train was pulling alongside the platform. I watched him board, and I ducked onto the same car through the rear door. The subway carried enough passengers for me to blend into the mass of dark overcoats, but not so many that Hunter had to stand and give his seat to an elderly lady. He sat and opened a book. From half a car back, I watched him read.

  As a stop approached, he pocketed his book, stood, and reached for the bar overhead. I lowered my chin, bracing myself for discovery. He didn’t look toward me. He closed his eyes, gripping the bar hard to keep his balance in the swaying car.

  Doors slid open. He filed out with the crowd. I stayed twenty paces behind, my heart throbbing harder and harder as we climbed the stairs up to the street. If the trek ended at a cocktail lounge, I would know as he slipped inside that his most recent story for class was not fiction after all. If he entered a fortune-teller’s storefront, I would stand in the cloud of incense smoke that wafted outside and know I should let him go.

  What worried me was ambiguity. As I hurried up the dark sidewalk after him, I hoped he would duck into a drugstore so I could spy on him as he made out with the blonde from the beach party who worked as a sales chick behind the counter. At least then I would know. But if he used a key to an apartment building and the door locked behind him, I would stand in the street rebuffed and thwarted, never to know whether he was picking up a clandestine game of poker or buying Ecstasy or carrying on an affair with his forty-something anatomy profe
ssor.

  Ahead of me he stopped at a busy intersection. I hung back, advancing to the corner only when the light changed and he crossed. The thought occurred to me that his destination might be the building directly in front of me. It could not be, I decided. I waited for him to veer to the side and continue down the sidewalk beside the building, toward his real destination.

  A hospital loomed ten glassy stories over the intersection, its bright emergency room carved out of the corner, ambulances blinking ominously, blue and red in the driveway. The lights danced through Hunter’s blond hair as his silhouette crossed the driveway, edged between ambulances, and disappeared into the brilliant lobby.

  My eyes stung with tears for the second time that night. My heart knocked against my breastbone. My mind ran frantically through the possibilities, each more awful than the one before. Hunter was dating a beautiful brain surgeon with a taste for younger men. Hunter was devotedly visiting his blond girlfriend from the shower, who had fallen ill. Hunter was ill himself. He was dying slowly. He wanted the rest of his short life to be as normal as possible. That’s why he couldn’t let me know where he was going. He didn’t want my grandmother to snatch his college education away now that he couldn’t fulfill his obligation as her heir.

  I had to find out. I stepped into the street.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw the taxi coming. I knew what I’d done wrong but it was too late to jump back. A jolt in my hip, and then I was skidding across the asphalt on my back.

  Everything stopped. I was staring up between the tops of buildings at the orange glow of the overcast night sky, and the street around me seemed strangely quiet, but in my head I heard the echo of the tires screeching. I should get out of the street. The next car would kill me.

  I put my hands behind me to push up to standing. My back stung like fire. The pain in my hip took my breath away. The taxi idled in front of me, a small dent in the hood. The door opened, releasing Middle Eastern rock music. The driver stood up behind the door, pointed at me, and cursed me in Arabic.

  On the far corner, in front of the hospital, four people in green scrubs stood beside a stretcher, waiting for the light to turn before crossing the street. I rolled off the unbearable pain in my hip. Facedown I examined the asphalt, tiny white rocks showing through where the blue petroleum base had worn away. The people in scrubs eventually reached me with their stretcher. When they asked me who they should call for me, I gave them the only phone number I could remember.

  11

  Hunter filled the opening in the privacy curtains. He wore green scrubs like the doctors and nurses who had scraped me off the pavement. For a split second I mistook him for an adorable doctor who looked a lot like Hunter. I knew it was Hunter when he gaped at me with a mixture of outrage and horror, his face pale, and demanded, “What did you do?”

  “Crossed the street,” I said. “Badly.” Wincing, I eased up from the gurney, putting my weight on my hand and my good hip. Only a few minutes had passed since they had brought me in, ascertained I wasn’t dying, and dumped me here. I still felt very shaky from the shock of being hit. But I didn’t want to face Hunter lying down.

  In two steps he bent over me and wrapped his arms around me. He was careful not to press on my hospital gown low against my back where the road rash was, but his touch on my shoulders radiated pain to the raw parts. I winced again.

  “Oh, God, I’m sorry.” He let me go but hovered over me, placing his big hands on my shoulder blades. He was so close that the air felt hot between us. “What did you hurt?”

  “This is just where I skidded across the road.” I gestured behind my back and then flinched at the sting in my skin as I moved my arm.

  “How far down does it go?” My back felt cold as he lifted one flap of my paper gown and looked.

  I kept my head down, my red cheeks hidden. He was peering at my back where my skin was missing. What could be sexier? Even if the circumstances had been happier, I was wearing no makeup and I was sure my hair was matted from my scarf. There was no reason for my blood to heat as if we were on a date instead of a gurney.

  But my body did not listen to logic when it came to Hunter. He was not examining my wound. He was captivated by the sight of my lovely and unblemished bottom. I was a novelist. I could dream, couldn’t I?

  Lightly I asked, “Are you asking whether I have gravel embedded in my ass? By the grace of God, no.”

  Hunter let my gown go and stood up. “The doc said the car hit your hip,” he insisted. “Is it broken?”

  I rolled on my side to face him. “It really hurts,” I said. “If it were broken, I think it would hurt worse.”

  He nodded. “When I broke my ribs, I couldn’t breathe.”

  “That’s because your ribs punctured your lung.”

  He pointed at me. “True.” Then he cocked his head to one side, blond hair falling into his eyes. “I’m surprised you remember that.”

  I winced again, not from physical pain this time. It had hurt so badly to care about Hunter but to hear about his accident third-hand. And that had been my fault. I should have nurtured our nascent friendship before everything had gone awkward. I had my excuses, but I was the one who had retreated into the closet and shut the door.

  And now we were so far apart that neither of us had any idea why the other was at this hospital. “You work here as a clerk?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I volunteer here as an orderly.”

  “Why are they letting you see patients, then?”

  “I was going to see you whether they wanted me to or not, because it’s you.” His eyes seemed to darken as I watched. “But the doc on rotation lets me sit in on examinations, sometimes. She knows I want to go to med school.”

  Now something different passed behind his eyes. He was realizing what he’d accidentally told me.

  “You want to go to med school?” I asked in disbelief.

  He opened his lips. His broad chest expanded with a deep breath underneath the green scrubs. “Yes,” he said on a sigh.

  “Which is why you’re taking anatomy, and calculus instead of business math. You’re a pre-med major.”

  He smiled tightly. “Yes.”

  I had always viewed Hunter as a suave opportunist. Looking back, I wasn’t sure why I’d assumed he was doing right by my grandmother. “You have no intention of majoring in business and running my grandmother’s farm after graduation.”

  “No.”

  Not without admiration I said, “You’re just milking her for everything she’s worth.”

  Now that he knew he was caught, he charmed me with a big grin. “Basically.”

  I was glad we’d faced off and I’d finally pried the truth out of him while I was propped up. But my hip ached like nothing I’d ever experienced, and I simply couldn’t balance on my tender bones any longer. “Any swindler of my grandmother is a friend of mine” came out a groan as I eased forward to lie down on my stomach on the table, one hand on my ass to make sure the paper gown didn’t ride up to reveal even more of my broken body to Hunter.

  His arm shot across my chest to support me as I lay down. I wondered whether he knew exactly what he was touching underneath my paper gown—but surely that was the farthest thing from his mind. Most people did not think dirty thoughts at a time like this. Only me.

  He sat on a stool and rolled it up to me. “That explains what I’m doing here.” He put his chin down on the edge of the gurney, watching me like a big friendly dog. “What are you doing here?”

  He was so dreamily handsome, looking at me with concern in his eyes, and his tone was so gentle, that I almost answered him.

  “You followed me,” he said.

  I shifted on the gurney, trying in vain to find a more comfortable position. My hip sure did hurt.

  “You wanted to know where I was going so late at night,” he said. “I’ve seen you watching me through your window.”

  Note to self: when boys look back at you watching them in the darkness
outside your well-lit window, but their expressions do not change, you relax, assuming they can’t really see you watching them, when they can totally see you.

  There was no way around it now. “I was afraid your stories in Gabe’s class were real,” I muttered.

  Hunter’s eyebrows shot up. “That I was having sex with a bar waitress? And you followed me to find out? For somebody who hates me, you sure are interested in my sex life.”

  “I don’t hate you, Hunter.” I felt my eyes filling with tears yet again. I was in pain of various degrees and types, but what brought me to tears was a hurt from six years before and eight hundred miles away.

  His fingers touched mine. At first I thought he would tug at my gown again. Then his fingers slipped past my palm and intertwined with my fingers. I had known his hands would be calloused from farmwork even now, an adaptation to an old life that took a while to wear off. Even so, I was surprised by the rough feel of his skin against mine.

  His hand moved up to stroke my hair. It felt so good, and the tingles racing down my arms were so delicious, that I fought the urge to close my eyes and purr. It was weird, but now that I knew he wasn’t having the sexy adventures I’d suspected him of, he seemed sexier. We had arrived at some adult place where people had actual relationships with each other and they worked out, if we were very lucky.

  At a sudden thought I jerked awake. “What about the blonde?”

  “What blonde?” he asked, surprised. His rough fingers moved across my hairline.

  “You act like I’m so silly to think your stories were real, but you were with the blonde in the bathroom.”

  “Oh! Right. I forget her name. I haven’t seen her since then. I told her I wanted to make you mad and asked her to let me paw her for a few minutes.”

  I found it difficult to be angry with him when his fingers were in my hair, stroking lightly. I did my best. “Then you acted shocked that I was mad.”