Love Story

by Jennifer Echols

  “You don’t have to. I’ll see you around, okay?” I had thought I’d rather die than set foot in my grandmother’s party, but now the dance music and the crowded foyer leading to the front door were the lesser of the evils. I took a step in that direction.

  He stopped me with a hand on my bruised hip. “Why are you making it so hard on yourself? Look at me.”

  I should have pulled away from him. He would have been right on my heels as I entered the foyer, but then I could have escaped him in the jovial drunken crowd.

  His tone and his words stopped me. “Look at me.” He spoke tenderly, the way I’d longed to be spoken to by a hero with an important message just for me.

  I looked up into his eyes, which were green like the winter grass. I had talked closely with him a hundred times before. I’d never noticed what color his eyes were. And as my life veered closer and closer to the story I’d just turned in for Gabe’s class, I made a mental note of this detail to add to my story when I revised it for my end-of-semester portfolio.

  “You don’t have to make it so hard on yourself,” Whitfield crooned. “It’s not a crime to inherit millions of dollars.”

  “I don’t think it’s a crime,” I protested. “I just—”

  He nodded. “Want to live your life without being told what to do.” His face inched closer to mine, and my urge to back away dissolved as I watched his lips. He understood exactly where I was coming from. Hunter did not.

  “Just do what they tell you, Erin,” Whitfield whispered. “You’ll have the last laugh in the end because you will be the millionaire, and they will be dead.”

  “Whitfield,” Hunter called sharply from the doorway to the back hall. “Get your hands off her.”

  I tried to step away from Whitfield, but his fingers dug into my bruise.

  Whitfield shook his head at Hunter. “Just because you say it doesn’t mean people are going to do it, Allen. You may have a hold on the old bitch, but nobody will ever forget where you came from.”

  “You know what?” I interjected, trying again to pull away as Whitfield held me firmly where it hurt. “I’m just going to—”

  “We talked about this last May,” Hunter boomed. “Get your hands off her or I will knock your teeth in.”

  Whitfield gaped at Hunter.

  I held my breath.

  Hunter took a step forward.

  “Okay!” Whitfield exclaimed, holding up his hands. “I don’t want you to cause a scene at your house, Hunter.” He turned to me. “Remember what I said.”

  Hunter took another step toward him.

  Eyeing Hunter, Whitfield grabbed the bowl of potato salad and escaped through the doorway to the foyer.

  “Well!” I exclaimed. “That was tense.”

  Hunter watched me, brows down, blue eyes dark. “I’m not cut out for this.” He rounded the island, sidestepped me, and followed Whitfield into the foyer. At first I thought he would try to catch Whitfield, but then above the crowd I saw the massive front door open and close, and I knew Hunter had left.

  I pushed through the party after him. Old people stopped me and hugged me and told the roaming waiters to bring me drinks and asked me if it was true my grandmother was grooming Tommy Allen’s son to take over the farm instead of me. These were exactly the conversations that I’d dreaded, that I’d braved in coming back here to see my father.

  My heart raced at the idea that Hunter was walking away from me. If my grandmother caught me here, she would insist on having a long discussion with me. By the time I got away, Hunter would be gone. I couldn’t let him go—not when he’d played hero to my damsel in distress for a second time. Not again.

  Finally I extricated myself from the party and dragged open the front door. Outside in the cold moonlight, the green grass shone in long waves, but no tall blond boy waded through it or trudged along the lane. He really was gone.

  Then I heard shouts and man laughter way over at the stables. My grandmother had sent the stable hands bourbon. They would be playing basketball.

  Sure enough, I rounded the stone corner of the stable, out of breath and sick with worry, just in time to see Hunter, stripped to the waist, wearing only the khakis and lace-up shoes from his horse-farm-heir uniform, sail through the air in a perfect layup. His white skin gleamed spookily in the strange light. He was breaking a sweat already in the cold air, and the scar on his side stood out like a marker from some ancient magic. He dunked the ball through the netless hoop and landed flat on his feet on the asphalt parking lot.

  Half the men moaned a triumphant “Oooooh!” and the other half a defeated “Aaaaaw.” Then another shirtless man pointed in my direction. “Erin!” The game stopped as I slid onto a white wooden bench against the stone wall. Several more stable hands called out to me.

  “Good work today, Erin!” Tommy shouted above them. Drunk now, he was a lot happier with the job I’d done than he had been sober. “As good work as Hunter ever did, and she doesn’t complain like Hunter.”

  Several of the men shoved Hunter in different directions. He didn’t seem to mind. He grinned at me, looking—proud, dared I say?

  “You want to play with us, Erin?” another man asked. I don’t think he meant anything by it, but the others read innuendo into it and groaned.

  “I haven’t had nearly enough bourbon for that,” I called back. “I’ll just sit here and watch, and I’ll call 911 when someone tears an ACL.”

  Most of them turned away, resuming their positions for the game. Only Hunter continued to stare at me with his blond head cocked to one side, bare muscular chest shining, basketball on his hip. He sounded genuinely puzzled as he said, “You don’t have a phone.”

  I opened my hands and shrugged. I recognized this uncharacteristically slow-on-the-uptake Hunter from our conversation in the coffee shop two months before. He was drunk.

  “Ball!” the other men called. Hunter turned and tossed the ball into the crowd.

  The game began again. I watched the men dodge each other, throw over each other, lose their balance and stumble drunkenly out of the area of play, then jog back again. I watched Hunter’s muscles work underneath his skin, his body retaining surprising grace even though bourbon had slowed his brain. Sweat darkened the blond hair at his temples. He grew hotter as I got colder, shrinking in my Blackwell Farms jacket on the hard wooden bench.

  When two men leaped for the ball at once and tumbled in a tangle on the asphalt, Tommy shouted, “We gotta call this. Come inside. Next round’s on me.” The bare-chested men slapped each other high-fives and moved through a doorway golden with light, into the stable office.

  Only Hunter stayed behind. He tugged his shirt out of a nearby tree. As he buttoned it he said, “Hullo, Miss O’Carey.”

  “Hullo, David.” I tried to keep my voice from shaking with cold and anticipation.

  He pulled his cashmere sweater over his head. “Did you remember to bring me the anatomy note cards I hadn’t forgotten?”

  So he’d left the note cards in his bedroom on purpose after all, to give me an excuse to find him at the party. With tingling fingers I reached into my jacket and handed him the cards. He pocketed them, a sly grin pulling at one corner of his mouth.

  “What’s with the British accent?” I asked. “They wouldn’t have talked like that in America by 1875. They might have had a lingering Scotch-Irish inflection because so many of them were recent immigrants and they didn’t have television to flatten the brogue.”

  He stared at me. In my usual wonky way, I’d blathered too much information. He had started the conversation from “Almost a Lady.” I wasn’t sure what he meant by this, but I was excited about finding out. So I began the conversation again. “Hullo, David. Would you like to walk behind the stables?”

  “I would soil my slippers,” he said, “and the maid would notice in the morning.”

  He was reciting my story, but he was also rejecting me. I stood and pasted a smile on my face to show him it was all in fun. “Okeydoke. Tom
my said he can’t take us to the airport tomorrow because he’s leaving for Churchill Downs too early, but one of the other guys will take us. I’ll see you in the—”

  Before I could take a step away, he reached out and grabbed my elbow. “I was making a joke.”

  “About our positions being switched, with you owning the farm and me working as a stable boy? You’re hilarious. You know what you should do with that kind of talent? You should go to college in New York and study creative writing.”

  He laughed too heartily at this, tugging at my elbow. “Come on.”

  I tried to slow my breathing. It formed white clouds in the frigid air, and Hunter could see how excited I was. “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Behind the stable!” he said in exasperation. He pulled me until I walked with him along the stone wall and past the last corner. As we turned and kicked through the gravel against the back wall, he stated the obvious. “I have never been this drunk in my life.”

  I chuckled. “It’s part of the job description.”

  His eyes widened. “It is! It really is. And it’s not the volume so much as the longevity. I think I had my first mint julep at ten o’clock this morning.”

  He slid onto the lone bench against the back wall of the stable, where potential buyers could watch horses trot around the paddock. I sat next to him, but not too close, still unsure about what we were doing here. Beyond the paddock fence, the green hills rolled and rolled under the stars, gently descending to the tree line. We sat there in the silence and the cold for a few moments. I tried to memorize this: vast farm below, the depthless sky above, and Hunter beside me. Not touching me. Just there for me.

  He broke the silence with a sigh. “This is so crazy. You should be schmoozing your way through blue-blood Kentucky, not me.”

  I shrugged. “I won’t lie. I’m sore right now. But I had a lot of fun being a stable boy today. In New York I never long for the horse parties or the horse people, but I do miss the horses.”

  “Yeah. Dad said you took Boo-boo out for a long ride yesterday. I was glad to hear that. I’ll bet she was so happy to see you.”

  “Why? I’m sure she didn’t recognize me.”

  “What are you talking about?” Hunter demanded. “Boo-boo loves you. She always has.”

  “She would love any random person holding an apple.”

  His lips parted and his blond brows went down in a concerned expression. Suddenly he jerked his head away from me and sneezed. I didn’t remember ever seeing him sneeze before, even with all the hay and dust constantly hanging in the air in the barns. But Hunter did sneeze, and what I’d thought was his concern for me had actually been a presneeze expression.

  Then he turned back to me. “Erin,” he said gravely, “that is the saddest thing I ever heard. That story you wrote for Gabe’s class. About the girl alone in the mansion, with nobody to talk to?”

  I nodded.

  “I wasn’t there in your house with you, obviously, so I don’t know,” he said. “But from watching you with your grandmother at the stables right after your mother died, it seemed like the two of you didn’t really talk. You remember your grandmother made my dad get you back on a horse the next week?”

  I laughed shortly. “I will never forget that.”

  “He told me you did not seem okay. He thought your grandmother wasn’t talking to you about what happened and you had no way to deal with it. After this went on for a few weeks, he wanted me to try to talk to you.”

  I blinked at him in the darkness. “You didn’t, though.”

  “We were already in school by then. Your friends had made fun of me. I was twelve. My higher brain functions weren’t fully developed. I was so in love with you.”

  The cold had woven its way into the fabric of my jeans and settled like a coating of ice in the folds of my jacket. Now I warmed again, puzzling through Hunter’s words. I didn’t know whether to take him seriously. “Your love for me was a symptom that your brain hadn’t developed, or—”

  “Shut up.” He turned to face me. “I am drunk and I am trying to confess, so just let me do it, okay? I had fallen in love with you over the summer. Then this horrible thing happened to you and you stopped talking to me. I thought you blamed me, or my dad. Which he deserved.”

  “No,” I protested. “It was an acc—”

  “I took it as a rejection.” He put his hand on my knee and looked me straight in the eyes. “It’s taken me all this time to figure that out. But I regretted it every day. And I’m truly sorry.” He sat back against the bench and faced the stars. The place where his hand had rested on my knee felt colder than ever.

  “I’m sorry, too,” I said, “so we’re even. I didn’t visit you in the hospital when you got crushed by a horse. For much the same reasons regarding love and rejection and being young.” And being a cold bitch, born and bred, I thought to myself, because he was trying to make a connection with me, and I couldn’t even meet him halfway.

  “That went on for six years,” he said. “You didn’t talk to me. I didn’t talk to you. You didn’t talk to your grandmother. And now she’s disinherited you. So in all that time, you never told her how you feel?”

  “How do I feel?” I leaned forward, honestly curious about what he would tell me.

  “You love horses. You love the farm. But everything about it reminds you of your mother dying and your dad leaving. You never dealt with it back then. You’re trying to deal with it now. You’ve gone far away to a place with no horses and very little grass, and you’re studying how to write a story with a happy ending. If you can write that ending for yourself, maybe you can come back.”

  Listening to this was like watching a colorful origami box unfold. Only it was Hunter showing me the contents. That made me very uncomfortable. I sat back and folded my arms across my chest, hugging myself against the cold.

  “When I brought you here,” he said, “I thought your grandmother would summon you. She must be waiting for you to come to her instead. Now I see that you and I may fly back to New York tomorrow without either of you giving in.”

  “Hm,” I agreed.

  “But if you do stumble upon each other and have a talk”—he turned to me and took my hand this time, warming it between both of his—“can’t you please tell her how you feel?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  He dropped my hand and slouched against the bench. “I wish you would, because I’m not sure how long I can put up with this.”

  “I’ll bet you can put up with it a little longer,” I said brightly, desperate to get out from under the heavy subject. “How much do you love college in New York?”

  He grinned. “I love college in New York. I love just being in the city. I love my classes. I love the hospital. I wish I weren’t there at two in the morning because I also love sleep, but I do love the hospital. I love Manohar and Brian. In a manly love kind of way, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said, the corners of my mouth stretched tight, trying not to laugh. “You get along great with everybody. Because that’s what you do.”

  “Because that’s what I do,” he agreed. “Do you love college in New York?”

  I sighed, a big puff of white air. “I do love college in New York. Lately I’ve been so busy with work and homework that I might as well be in Iowa, but I remember loving college in New York a month ago. I’m afraid it may be coming to a close, though.”

  He leaned nearer. “Seriously?”

  “If I got that internship,” I said, “I could hold on. Otherwise I’m in trouble. I wanted so badly to start my publishing career in the publishing mecca. But maybe that’s not possible for me now. I can write anywhere, I guess.” I laughed.

  He didn’t laugh. “What will you do, then?”

  “I might try California,” I said. “It’s almost as expensive as New York, though. And it’s tainted in my mind because my mother tried it with the worst of luck.”

  Hunter’s movement toward me was so sudden that I
instinctively shrank back. Then I realized he was reaching for my hand. He took it in his warm hand again, rubbing my palm with his calloused thumb. His voice was smooth like a song as he said, “I would not love college in New York if you weren’t there.”

  Suddenly I was flushing hot in the freezing night. “You wouldn’t?” I whispered.

  “No. When I said I love it, I listed all these things I love about it. I left you out.” He let my hand go and touched his finger to my lips. “I love you.”

  I stared stupidly at him. Was he joking again, reciting another line from my story? I didn’t remember writing this.

  He leaned in and kissed me. I didn’t respond for a few seconds. My mind lagged behind what my body was feeling.

  “Say it,” he whispered against my lips. “I know this is hard for you. Tell me.”

  “I love you.” Hearing my own words, I gasped at the rush of emotion.

  He put his hands on either side of my jaw and took my mouth with his.

  My mind still chattered that something was wrong with this picture. My body stopped caring. I grabbed fistfuls of his sweater and pulled him closer.

  He moved his lips to my cheek, to my ear, back to my mouth. I had never been kissed like this in my life. Each time I thought I should protest because there were so many unsettled matters between us, Hunter kissed me harder, forcing those concerns out of my mind. The cold air heated up around us.

  He unsnapped the top of my jacket and slipped his hand inside. His warm palm cupped my breast beneath my shirt.

  Then he straightened, blinking at me, and pulled his hand away.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Okay,” he panted. “I’m going to kick myself for this in the morning, but I don’t want to do this while I’m drunk. And I don’t want to do it behind the stable. I want everything to be perfect between you and me.” He stroked my hair away from my face. “Are you mad?”

  “Mad?” I squeaked. “No. Horny? Yes. Frustrated?”