Love Story

by Jennifer Echols

  He loosened a large limestone rock from the century-old wall next to his house—fuck this farm, anyway—and set it on the end of the tape measure to keep it secure in the middle of the road. Then he started walking up the hill. The tape measure was only a hundred feet long, so he kept having to mark his place in the road and start over in order to make progress. After eighty-five yards, he stopped and looked around. He was standing beside an enormous old oak. If the sun was six feet wide and sat directly in front of his house, this was where Mercury would be to scale, a barely visible pencil eraser. He wasn’t sure his classmates would understand this analogy, but he did, and he appreciated for the first time the vastness of space, the emptiness, the vacuum.

  He walked another sixty-four yards up the road, gravel crunching under his work boots. The sky had deepened to rose now, and he might have been worried about a car creaming him without ever seeing him in the dark, except that there was nobody out here to run him down—only the boss, and the people who worked on the farm, most of whom had gone home for the night already, or lived here like his dad in an ancient house built back when it was acceptable for workers to live on their employers’ land.

  He stopped and looked around. He was standing next to a large mossy boulder that jutted from the grass, maybe a marker of something long gone, maybe a tombstone, maybe just a boulder. He had wondered about it since he’d arrived here at the farm. Now he set his tape measure down on the road and walked over to the boulder. The moss was soft, with creepy-looking white flowers that glowed like an alien species in the disappearing light. He looked back toward his house. It was a football field and a half away now, and if the sun were six feet wide in front of his door, Venus would be here, the size of his thumbnail.

  He slid a piece of paper out of the pocket of his jeans and consulted his calculations.

  He tugged the tape measure so the end of it escaped the last rock he’d placed in the road. The tape measure zipped back into the case. He made a mental note to pick up all his rocks when he was finished. If a farm truck was damaged running over one, his father would kill him.

  He set the end of the tape measure down in the road again and secured it with a new piece of the heirloom fence. From Venus, he walked another sixty-four yards, down the other side of the hill and halfway up the next one, and stopped. If the sun was six feet wide in front of his front door, which he couldn’t see anymore because the hill was in the way, but he knew how far away it was, Earth would be here, also the size of his thumbnail. He looked around. Now he could see the boss’s house on top of the highest hill of all, looming regally in white-painted brick over the wild and verdant rolling hills, like a Victorian lady in a hunting party.

  He considered his calculations again. He thought the experiment was working out well. Of course, if he performed this demonstration at school, he would lay it out starting in the science classroom. He would take the whole class on a walk out of the classroom (Mercury), down the hall (Venus), outside the building (Earth). They would have to walk a third of a mile to get to Neptune. That was the only drawback. But Neptune needed to be a third of a mile away, or he would have to reduce the planets so much that nobody could see them, which was not good for the purposes of demonstration. He thought his teacher might balk at the class taking fifteen minutes to walk two-thirds of a mile just to see where Pluto would be at the darkest reach of its orbit, because it would seem to her that they were goofing off and were not on task when nothing could have been further from the truth.

  But as he shivered in the twilight, he realized that she might have a point. He himself had no desire to walk the entire two-thirds of a mile to Pluto over another eight hills and up a grade to the stables. Three planets had been enough for him and he got the gist. Pluto had been downgraded to a dwarf planet anyway.

  Satisfied—really wanting to finish what he’d started and walk the rest of the solar system, but cold and satisfied enough—he pocketed his calculations, zipped the tape measure up, and started back toward his house, remembering again that he needed to pick up the rocks and put them back in the fence where they belonged.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a movement in the grassy valley below the white mansion. It was the girl, urging a black filly into a gallop, hair streaming behind her. He had thought he might run into her, but he’d assumed that if he did, he would be looking up at her. Now she was in the hollow, and he was on the crest of a hill, looking down.

  I COULD HARDLY SPEAK WHEN GABE asked me what I thought of Hunter’s story. I definitely couldn’t think. I said something about his penchant for scientific jargon that distracted the reader from the emotion of the story, and I wondered, along with Summer, whether he was writing that way on purpose.

  I did not wonder out loud whether he’d moved the setting of his story to Kentucky in order to hint to Gabe that we knew each other and had been toying with each other in our stories. I did not tell him what I thought of his story:

  After living the life of a self-made chick for the last five months, and having Hunter psychoanalyze that experience for me, I realized that maybe there was an advantage after all to growing up with money. Maybe I did think better of myself because my grandmother owned a Kentucky horse farm. I didn’t worry as much as someone else would when I was down to my last pack of ramen noodles, or when I got hit by a taxi. I knew that if I ever did deign to call her for help, she would send me money.

  But if I did have those feelings of superiority, they did not survive Hunter writing a beautiful story in which he gazed down on me as if I were someone to be pitied. I saw myself exactly as he saw me.

  And that made me angry.

  The interminable class finally did end. Gabe gave me a look I didn’t really see, hefted himself out of his chair, and left. The rest of the class got up giggling, as usual. Their chatter about Hunter unexpectedly turning out to be a space nerd had already changed to chatter about heading to the dining hall together as they passed over the threshold to the hallway.

  Hunter stood with his back against the open door, blond head cocked at me in question.

  “Coming?” Summer asked me.

  I shook my head, never taking my eyes off Hunter. She stood beside me a moment more, hand poised on the table. I could tell she was looking from him to me, sensing the electricity, knowing we had communicated something awful to each other through a story. Again.

  “I’ll wait for you.” She walked through the door. I listened for her voice and Manohar’s and Brian’s to recede down the hall, but they didn’t.

  “Everything okay?” Hunter called to me.

  He sounded like a noncommittal friend asking after my health. I looked like a crazy person sitting at the table after everyone else had left, staring at “The Space Between.” I was going to sound like a crazy person no matter what I said to him next.

  It had to be said. I stood with my book bag, swept up “The Space Between” without a single mark on it, and crumpled it in one fist. Rounding the table, I shoved his story at his chest.

  He took the wad of paper. “What’s the matter?” he asked innocently.

  I thought of Summer, Manohar, and Brian just outside the door, listening. I did not want them to hear this. But if I asked Hunter to step away from the door and close it so we could have a private conversation, I would be showing him how much I cared. I was through with that.

  I moved even closer to him and met his gaze. “I’m below you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said evenly, looking me straight in the eye, obviously waiting at the door for exactly this altercation, which proved he did in fact know what I was talking about, and I had had enough.

  “I’ll tell you what I’m talking about.” I touched the thumb of my opposite hand. “I wrote a story about how much I liked you. I never meant for you to read it.” I touched my pointer finger. “You wrote a story about how much you hated me.”

  Hunter’s grin melted from his face. He took a breath to say something.


  “No, you’re right,” I interrupted him. “Not one story. You wrote three stories like that.” I touched my third finger. “I wrote a story about my mother, hoping we could talk about it.” I touched my fourth finger. “In response, you wrote a story about looking down on me.” I touched my pinkie, really banged on it with my other finger, until I bent it backward and hurt it. “Don’t write any more stories about me, Hunter. And I won’t write any more stories about you. Deal?” I whirled toward the door.

  “Wait,” he said.

  Whatever. I’d reached the threshold. The light was brighter in the hallway, and Summer, talking to Manohar and Brian, looked up at me with concern in her eyes.

  “Erin.” His hot hand was on my shoulder. He pulled me back into the room, against the door, out of their line of sight.

  He leaned close. This must have been because he didn’t want the others to hear, but I could almost have pretended that he wanted to be near me as he growled against my cheek, “If that’s all you got from my story, that I hate you, you’re not a careful reader.”

  Even though my heart raced with his closeness, I tilted my head and stared at him blankly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Two could play that game. I rolled away from him and stepped around the door frame.

  He caught me and pulled me back again.

  Pinned me against the door.

  Crushed my lips beneath his.

  I let him sweep his tongue inside my mouth and take over my body there in the rich room for one long, taut minute. Then I realized what I was doing, and what he was doing. I pushed his shoulders. Hunter did not push easily. I shoved him away hard and nearly toppled over myself, bouncing my sore hip against the door and sliding off.

  Hunter grabbed my forearm before I fell. “What’s the matter?” he asked, eyes glassy.

  I started to speak and realized I’d pressed my fingers to my tingling lips. I put my hand down. “What’s always the matter? You’ll be nice for the next two weeks, and I’ll agonize over what we mean to each other. Then you’ll write another story for class. You’re experimenting with me like you play with the women in your stories. All my stories are about you. And I can’t do this anymore.”

  I jerked my arm out of his grasp and stalked out of the room, past my wide-eyed friends.

  As I descended the stairs, holding on to the rail to keep from wrenching my hip, I heard Summer stage-whisper to Hunter, “What did you do to her now?”

  The coffee shop was slammed and just got busier as the night dragged on. A new off-off-Broadway play in the theater next door had gotten great reviews—I’d wanted desperately to see it but hadn’t had a spare second—and when it ended each night, it dumped the patrons into the shop, thirsty for lattes.

  Somehow I managed to write my story for next Monday’s class anyway. I scribbled sentences on discarded receipts and a hundred napkins when my boss wasn’t looking and stuffed them in the pockets of my apron. Late in the night when I got off work, I wondered whether Hunter expected me to bring him coffee again for his trek to the hospital. I trudged in the other direction, to the library, where I typed every receipt and napkin into my laptop, printed off the file in the computer lab, and turned in my story to the front desk before I could chicken out. I constructed my sentences of the strongest steel, honed them to fine points, and hurled them straight at Hunter’s heart.

  13

  Way too early the next morning, he knelt on the tiny space of floor between my bed and the door, packing my suitcase.

  I propped myself up on one elbow and gazed at him to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing, his muscular shoulders working underneath a thin cashmere sweater as he neatly folded my clothes, the morning sunlight filtering through the shades and gleaming in his blond hair. I mumbled, “Hunter, what the hell.”

  “Rude. You’re grumpy because you’re not getting enough sleep.” He glanced up at me. I caught a glimpse of dark circles under his own eyes before he turned his attention back to the suitcase. “There’s nothing wrong with this dress, but I want you to wear it with these shoes, okay? Do not wear a feather boa with it, or a swan around your neck, promise me. You looked great when we went to Belmont, but your style gets eclectic on occasion.”

  “Where am I going?” I asked.

  “We,” he said.

  I huffed my impatience. “Where are we going?”

  “Home. Your grandmother requests your presence at the Breeders’ Cup.”

  The story I’d just turned in for Gabe’s class was set in Louisville. For a moment I thought Hunter had read it and was taunting me, daring me to go back there and prove the story wasn’t fiction. But he couldn’t have read it. Not unless he’d gone to the library between two and eight in the morning.

  No, this was heavier, weighty with reality. If he’d told me two months ago that my grandmother requested my presence, I would have asked that he convey to my grandmother where she could stuff it. Eight weeks had crammed much more into my mouth than I could chew. Hunter had to be very careful that he fulfilled her wishes, lest she ask too many questions about the business degree he was not earning. I wanted to help him make a fool of her. I didn’t want to cause him trouble by refusing to go with him.

  Or … maybe I did, now that I knew he looked down on me. He was looking down on me now. I heard his quick steps across the hardwood floor and felt the heat of his body in the cold room as he knelt beside my bed. He put his hand on my arm. “Erin.”

  He was not going to leave me alone. He would not even let me hide my tears. Giving up, I rolled onto my back, arching it to keep from pressing my newly healed scrapes against the New York City T-shirt I’d been sleeping in, and sniffled. “I don’t want to go anywhere with you, especially Louisville.”

  This was not true, and I knew it as soon as I said it. He had stolen my birthright and cheated my grandmother and looked down on me and I still wanted to be wherever he was, on the off chance we might make that connection I’d wanted with him for so long.

  He sensed this. His thumb moved on my arm, seductive as ever, but he watched me somberly, as if he took me seriously for once.

  “I have to work all weekend,” I said.

  “No, you don’t. You’re not scheduled on weekends to make bad lattes with foam spleens. You only fill in for people on weekends, and they haven’t called you yet. I checked with Summer before she left for class.”

  “But they could still call,” I murmured. And after three days out of work with a bruised hip last week, I desperately needed the money. Which reminded me: “I don’t have the money for a plane ticket.”

  He released my arm, reached into his coat pocket, and showed me my boarding pass: Blackwell Erin Elizabeth.

  “I’ll miss my belly-dancing class this afternoon.”

  He rolled his eyes. “How many times have you skipped it before?”

  “Never. I’m sure as hell not sabotaging my chances at a publishing internship with a D in belly dancing.”

  He watched me, waiting for me to admit how lame my excuses were getting.

  “I have a history paper due on Monday,” I protested. “And a huge calculus test. You know that. You have the same test. Going out of town this weekend would be academic suicide.”

  “I have an anatomy test, too. We’ll study on the airplane on the way down,” he said in a soothing voice. “We’ll study on the way back, and anyway, we’re coming back Sunday morning. It’s only a Saturday of studying you’ll miss.” He raised his blond brows at me.

  Suddenly I was aware of the fact that he stood over me, and I was in bed, wearing a T-shirt and panties and no bra. He might not know that because I was half covered with a sheet, but I knew it. And I wondered how Hunter Allen’s sex life fit into this complicated puzzle. He had taken the college tuition my grandmother had planned to give to me. In return he was obligated to do her bidding and bring me down to see her. There was no room in this equation for a relationship between him and me, yet he stood over me and my body tin
gled.

  “Your dad will be there,” he said.

  I lay paralyzed for a moment, staring into his clear blue eyes. Hunter touched me and Hunter coaxed me and I sifted through my reactions to each, but my reaction to the idea of seeing my dad made no sense at all. I jumped up, forgetting I was embarrassed to have Hunter see me in my T-shirt and panties, and snatched my boarding pass from him to examine it more closely. “My God, are we even going to make this flight? Why didn’t you wake me sooner?” I handed it back to him and watched to make sure he pocketed it.

  I shoved my toes into my flip-flops and snagged my bucket of toiletries. Brushing past him on my way out the door because the room was so small, I threw at him, “I’m going to grab a shower. Don’t forget to pack my hat.”

  WE WERE QUIET IN THE CAB to the airport, and at the gate. Hunter alternated between reading a textbook with a skinless torso on the cover, liver and lungs and heart exposed, and frowning at a stack of note cards covered in his illegible scrawl.

  I pretended to read history. I tried, but my mind was on another sort of history. My brain spiraled through my first twelve years in California, my dad yelling at my mother because we didn’t have any money, my mother yelling back at my dad that we might have a little more if he would get off his ass, culminating in the showdown in my grandmother’s stable that I hadn’t even seen. There had to be some explanation for my dad’s behavior then and his disappearance afterward. There was a perfectly good reason for why he had left me with my grandmother after my mother died, and why he had never contacted me again. He was coming to Kentucky to see me and he would clarify everything.

  Hunter had bought the tickets too late for us to have seats together, and that made things worse for me. Nobody I knew watched me, so pretending to read history was a moot point. I looked out the window, wondered about my dad, and willed the plane to fly faster. I wanted to see him so badly. I would forgive six years of abandonment just to sit at his feet and gaze moonily up at him like a Dalmatian kept in a pen.