Love Story

by Jennifer Echols

  “I was shocked that you were mad. Before then, I’d thought you didn’t like me very much.”

  “Even after the stable-boy story?”

  “You said it was fiction.” He sighed and put his chin in his hand, setting his elbow on the gurney close to me, stroking my hair with the other hand. “Everything you do surprises me. That’s how you keep my attention.”

  I looked up at him, stared deep into his blue eyes that reflected the fluorescent lights in the ceiling. I kept his attention. I licked my dry lips and took a breath to ask him what that meant.

  Before I could speak he said, “I’m supposed to take you to X-ray in a few minutes.”

  “Wrong.” I shook my head, and my hair hissed back and forth on the gurney’s paper covering. “I’m going to refuse it, and I’d appreciate some help in speeding that up.”

  His hand stopped in my hair. He said darkly, “You can’t refuse it.”

  “It’s my right, and I have to. My grandmother kicked me off her health insurance. I’m on the university’s cheapo student insurance, which means I get emergency care but I have to go to student health first or they might not pay. I can’t afford an X-ray and my dorm room, too.”

  “What if your hip’s broken?”

  “We agreed it probably isn’t. Anyway, I’ll find out tomorrow morning when the student health office opens.” I didn’t look forward to spending the rest of the night in this much pain and afraid to put my foot down, but there was no other way.

  “You are not leaving,” he ordered me. A nurse swished by outside the curtain. Hunter looked over his shoulder at her, then sidled closer to me and lowered his voice, but his tone was as intense as before. “I will not let you leave until you see the doctor.”

  “You can’t stop me.” I met his gaze and tried to look as determined as he did, which was difficult with my hip aching in a new way. Some of my muscles had been so surprised by the hit that they forgot to hurt at first. Slowly, they were remembering.

  Suddenly he sat up, face clear and friendly. “I’ll fix it. Back in a sec.” He kicked off from the bed, propelling the rolling stool all the way through the opening in the curtain.

  I turned my head to one side and closed my eyes against the white light, trying to get comfortable, melding my body with the hard gurney. I was so sleepy. It was after midnight. I could not imagine Hunter staying awake and alert here night after night.

  “Hey,” he coaxed in a low voice.

  I opened my eyes, squinting against the light. His hand was in my hair again, and he leaned over me.

  “I’ll help you up,” he said. “We’re going to X-ray. I took care of it for you.”

  “What do you mean, you took care of it?” I slurred. I didn’t want to go, but his arms were underneath me, easing me toward the edge of the gurney and a waiting wheelchair padded with pillows. I was afraid any resistance would result in another game of hospital gown peekaboo.

  He settled me so gently in the soft wheelchair that my hip and my back hardly hurt. Pushing me past the curtain and into the bustling emergency room, he leaned close, over me, to say, “I fixed it. They’re going to lose the records of your visit, so you’ll never get billed. But you’re my girlfriend.”

  “What do you mean, I’m your girlfriend?” What delicious blackmail was this? And was it worth the price? Perhaps I could stand it.

  “I had to make them think I have a vested interest in you,” he whispered. “They never would have agreed to lose your records if I told them you were my friend at twelve years old but not so much at eighteen and I had pretty much walked in and stolen the birthright to your family farm. See? Shhh. Hey, Brody.” He slapped hands with another man in scrubs wheeling an empty gurney in the opposite direction. The man eyed me, waggled his eyebrows at Hunter, and kept going.

  “Couldn’t you have said we’re friends and left it at that?” I needed to keep up the facade that I did not like the idea at all. At the same time, I was a little afraid Hunter would call the charade off.

  “I have a lot of friends,” he explained, wheeling me into a waiting room marked X-RAY. He rounded the wheelchair and knelt in front of me. Behind him, a door stood ajar. A contraption I assumed to be an X-ray machine was visible through the crack. He glanced over his shoulder at the door, then turned back to me. “Sorry about this,” he murmured as he slid both hands into my hair and kissed me.

  All I could do at first was feel. His lips were on mine. His hands held me steady, so I couldn’t have shrugged away if I’d tried, but I would not try. Bright tingles spread from my lips across my face and down my neck to my chest. I longed to pull him closer for more. I reminded myself that we were faking this for a reason. I didn’t want to make the kiss deeper than necessary in case it turned him off.

  Hunter deepened it. His tongue pressed past my teeth and swept inside my mouth. One of his hands released my hair and caressed my shoulder, traveling down. The farther his hand went, the higher I felt. My hip hardly hurt and my back pain was gone. I wondered how low his hand would go.

  I never found out. A shadow stood in the doorway and cleared its throat.

  I stopped kissing Hunter back and braced for him to jump away. He did back off, but very slowly. He sat back on his haunches and glared at the X-ray tech as if she had a lot of nerve. His cheeks were bright red.

  “So, Hunter,” she said mischievously. “This is your girlfriend.”

  “Hullo.” I gave her a small wave.

  “And you got hit by a taxi while you were crossing the street to visit Hunter? That is so romantic! Have you seen Sleepless in Seattle?”

  “Not romantic,” I said flatly. “I hate that movie. They don’t meet until the last scene. They don’t kiss at all.” Too late I realized I sounded like I was begging Hunter for more.

  “But in that movie,” the tech said, “they talk about An Affair to Remember. Have you seen that? Deborah Kerr is crossing the street to meet Cary Grant and gets hit by a car. Years later he comes back to her and she’s paralyzed from the waist down.”

  “You call that romantic?” I heard myself yelling. “That is repulsive!”

  Hunter stood and put a heavy hand on my shoulder as he pushed my wheelchair past the tech and through the doorway to the X-ray machine. “Erin is in a lot of pain,” he murmured to the tech, “and she doesn’t want to think about being paralyzed from the waist down.”

  After that the tech was a lot nicer, because Hunter had a way with people. Hunter lifted me onto the table and left the room so he wouldn’t be irradiated or see my bony ass. The tech rolled me around as gently as she could.

  Then Hunter wheeled me back behind the curtain. A nurse finally gave me some pills for the pain, and that’s when the night began to fade. I remember a tech cleaned and bandaged my back. That was intense. I had been kidding about the gravel embedded in my back, but he found some small rocks, sure enough, and plopped them into a metal pan and showed them to me, and Hunter yelled at him.

  I remember that a doctor told me my hip wasn’t broken but I would have a bruise the size of a grapefruit or, since citrus fruits were out of season, an acorn squash. I laughed at this but Hunter did not. He stood there with his arms folded. Some trick of the fluorescent lights overhead formed deep shadows under his eyes.

  We began to talk of leaving. I mentioned the subway and he got angry, I thought, so I didn’t press it. My overcoat was retrieved, thank God, because I couldn’t afford another, but they’d cut my clothes off me when they brought me in. Hunter went to change out of his scrubs and stole some for me.

  Toward morning I was too sleepy to protest as he stood between flashing ambulances in the driveway, hailed us a taxi, scooped me from the wheelchair, and placed me inside the car. I lay along the seat on my good hip with my head on Hunter’s hard thigh and his callused finger stroking soft patterns on my neck where my hair fell away. In a burst of adrenaline I might have run screaming into the street again if Middle Eastern rock had played on the radio, but this cabdriver ha
d a taste for disco.

  Under the throbbing beat I asked, “Why are you volunteering as an orderly in the middle of the night?”

  “I’m a white male, so I need all the help I can get for admission to med school. The assumption is that if you’re a white male, you’ve had every advantage.” He yawned.

  “Why do you want to go to med school?” I asked. “Were your broken ribs a turning point for you, and you’ve been driven to become a doctor and help other people like you ever since?”

  “No.” I thought he laughed a little, but I couldn’t quite hear over the music.

  I glanced up at him and saw only the lights of late-night clubs flashing pink and green across his face. Looking up at him caused me to shift my weight, which hurt, so I settled back and closed my eyes again. Talking to him this way was easier, especially considering my next question. “Are you sick?”

  Suddenly I felt the same fear that had propelled me into the street at the hospital without looking both ways. He would be taken from me before we even knew what game we were playing.

  “No,” he said.

  I sighed my relief very slowly and carefully against his thigh so he wouldn’t notice. “Is your mother sick?”

  He paused long enough that I thought I’d hit on the horrible explanation. But his finger never stopped stroking my neck. Finally he said, “No. She lives in New Jersey. She’s never taken much of an interest in me. My dad does not have good luck with women. Why do you ask?”

  “I’m trying to figure out why you’re not majoring in business at the University of Louisville. I know you wanted to come back to New York, but you could have taken six or seven years and worked your way through Louisville. Swindling my grandmother out of a college education, volunteering at night—you’re going to a lot of trouble here.”

  “That’s true.”

  I waited for his explanation. When he didn’t give me one, I guessed. “Did you mention medical school to a high school teacher who told you that you couldn’t do it?”

  This time his finger stopped on my neck.

  “That’s it,” I declared. “They knew you weren’t well off and your mother wasn’t around. They assumed you weren’t med school material. Therefore you became med school material. You’re Gatsby. You’re working your way up. You probably have a journal where you keep track of your calisthenics.”

  “You need to learn not to say everything that pops into your head.” His sharp tone cut across the disco beat.

  “You’re right,” I said immediately. I had finally reached a friendly place with Hunter—very friendly, if you counted fake dating for the purpose of cheating the medical system—and then ruined it. “Hunter, I’m sor—”

  “In the guidance counselor’s office in high school,” he interrupted me, “what they say to you is, ‘We can get you into a great college where you can learn to be a better millionaire.’ What they say to me is, ‘We can get you an entry-level job at UPS. You can work your way up. If you wanted to take a few college classes to make yourself feel like you’re going places, that’s fine as long as they don’t interfere with work. Someday maybe you will even get to drive the truck.’”

  “I’m really sorry.” I had seen Hunter angry, but I had never heard him bitter, and I desperately needed to fix what I’d broken. I pushed up through the pain so I could sit upright and face him across the taxi.

  He held me down with one heavy arm. “No, I’m sorry. I just …” He looked down at me and stroked his finger across my neck again, more deliberately now, as if forcing himself. “It’s not strange that I’m fooling your grandmother into paying for my education. It’s strange that you’re not. You could have lied to her about majoring in business and taken English classes on the side. You could still do it. Why is it so important that she doesn’t help you, and that both of you understand she’s not helping you?”

  “Because.” I shouted the word. The taxi driver half-turned in his seat. I watched him to make sure he put his eyes on the road again and didn’t hit any love-starved novelists.

  “My mother wanted to be an actress and my grandmother told her she was cutting her off, surprise. So my mom booked for L.A. when she was eighteen. Maybe she would have made it if she hadn’t gotten pregs when she was twenty.”

  “With you,” Hunter said.

  I nodded on his thigh. “Even after I was born she got a few bit parts, but mostly she would work as a secretary, and then she got training as a paralegal. My dad mostly didn’t work. That was a big thing they fought about. He always had some reason for why he wasn’t working. He was always saying she was the one with the rich family, why didn’t she ask her mother for money, and she always said she wasn’t asking that bitch for shit, not after what her mother had said to her when she left. But she wouldn’t marry my dad, either, and I never knew why, but now I wonder if it was because she didn’t want him officially part of her family, with access to the family money that he talked so much about and seemed so eager for.”

  “So you’re a bastard,” Hunter said.

  The question caught me off guard. “You mean—was I born out of wedlock? Yes.”

  “Then I’ve got one up on you after all.”

  “What do you mean, you’ve got one up on me after all? Are we in some sort of contest? A birthright contest?” I watched the colored lights from the shops we passed reflecting on the vinyl seat. “Never mind. Don’t answer that. I guess we are.” After six years we’d finally admitted we liked each other. It had taken us all of an hour and a half to hate each other again.

  Or did we? His hand had moved to my face, brushing my bangs lightly away from my forehead with his calloused fingers. “So, you have to win this battle with your grandmother because that will prove she was wrong all along. If you win, your mother wins.”

  I adjusted my head on his thigh, unable to find a comfortable position. He was way too muscular to be a pillow. And I murmured, “My mother is dead.”

  12

  Deep in the night he laid me on my bed. Summer and Jørdis whispered questions. I got lost in sleep and painkillers but at some point during the next day or the next, Summer brought me a walking cane and a huge breakfast and said Hunter had dropped them off. When I limped back to class, he started sitting next to me in calculus—not flirting with me or hovering over me but acting routinely pleasant and torturing me with wonder at whether he’d really wanted to kiss me that night in the hospital. Summer was all aflutter at the whole incident. She agreed with the X-ray tech that getting hit by a taxi while crossing the street to see Hunter was romantic, until I showed her the black bruise on my hip and the slowly healing gouges in my back.

  But a week and a half after my accident, when I’d already come back from the coffee shop and delivered a cup to Hunter for his long trek to volunteer at the hospital, Summer peeked her head into my room and asked me with wide eyes whether I’d read his new story. I had gotten wise by then. I did not get my hopes up. I could have rushed to the library and read it when he was scheduled to put it there for us, but then I would have obsessed about it until class time.

  I knew better. I waited until the last minute, Thursday, after a lunch of peanut-butter crackers, to limp to the library and read all the stories for class. Hunter’s last.

  That way I was furious for only ten minutes, the space of the walk between the library and the honors classroom building, before I faced him.

  The Space Between

  by Hunter Allen

  His eighth-grade science teacher tried to explain how big space was. Space was so big, it seemed, that there was hardly anything in it, thus its name. Space.

  He did not get it, and he wanted to. He hated the rare times when he didn’t understand something in class. So that night after he had fed the horses and eaten the dinner he heated for himself in the microwave, and his dad was ensconced in front of the television with a pack of cigarettes and a cooler of beer at his feet to save trips to the refrigerator, he sat at the kitchen table with a pad and a calculator
and worked out the relationship between the scale of the planets and the scale of the space between them. He started by making Mercury the size of a baseball, but that made the sun sixty-six feet wide. He shrank everything again. Mercury was now the size of a pencil eraser, and the sun was six feet wide. Mercury was eighty-five yards from the sun.

  He still didn’t get it. Could space truly be that big? He decided to walk out the model. Then he would understand. He crossed his father’s line of sight and opened the front door. Standing on the porch, he could see the orange ball of the sun just disappearing behind the grassy hill on which the boss’s house sat. The black silhouettes of trees slashed across the bright pink sky.

  He leaned back through the door and called to his dad, “I’m going for a walk.”

  “Stay away from that girl,” his father said.

  He didn’t respond to this. He didn’t have to, because his father was watching TV, not him. He simply closed the door and walked out into the twilight, face burning, chest tight with embarrassment and anger and dread and longing.

  He stepped off the wooden porch, onto the walkway of stone pavers a hundred years old. They led down a grassy bank to the gravel road that wound through the enormous farm. In New York, where he had come from not too long before, in early springtime the grass still would have been brown. Here in Kentucky it was already long and green and juicy for the horses.

  He retrieved a measuring tape from the truck. Standing in the gravel road in front of his small house, he looked to the right. The road disappeared over the hill, but he knew it bumped from grassy hill to grassy hill until it finally met the two-lane highway a mile off. That was the direction his father wanted him to go.

  He looked to the left. The road disappeared over that hill, too, but he knew it pitched higher and higher with more and more hills until it reached the high point of the farm, where the boss’s house perched. That was the direction his father forbade him to go.