Love Story

by Jennifer Echols

  “Yes.” He set his forehead against mine.

  “Yes,” I agreed. “Mad? No.”

  He watched me with serious eyes. His gaze fell to my chest. He fastened the snaps he’d unfastened a few moments before, then put his hands on my shoulders. “I’m just so thankful we’re finally together.”

  “Me, too,” I whispered. I felt uncomfortable saying this. I wished I had a cell phone so I could call Summer for verification that I was not making a terrible mistake. But she would yell at me and tell me to stop being stupid. I did not need her permission to fall in love.

  He kissed me on the forehead, then stood, holding out his hand to me. “I’ll walk you home.”

  I took his hand and swung it as we rounded the stable again, back the way we’d come. “I’ll walk you home,” I said.

  “No,” he said with exaggerated patience, “I’ll walk you home.” With his other hand he gestured toward the top of my grandmother’s mansion, just visible over the rise. “I’m not leaving you wandering around in the night with all these drunk people and, my God, Whitfield Farrell and his fucking bowl.”

  I giggled. It made me insanely happy that he was jealous of Whitfield Farrell. “You’re drunk, though. You might stumble into the road and get hit by a car.”

  “They will be sorry,” he said. “I will dent their car. I am strong like an ox.”

  I burst into laughter, and he laughed with me. He was so handsome in the gentle starlight, and he looked so happy. I couldn’t remember ever being this happy myself. I was still nearly broke and my grandmother hated me and I had a history paper due Monday that I hadn’t started writing, but I could handle all of this with Hunter laughing beside me. I squeezed his warm hand.

  “I’ll cross back through the pasture if it makes you feel better.” Dropping my hand, he draped his arm around me and pulled me close for another kiss on the forehead. He walked me all the way down to his house, backed me against the front door, and thoroughly kissed me good night.

  16

  I sprang out of bed. Sunlight streamed through the window. I hadn’t intended to sleep so late. I needed to get started on my history paper. I wanted to see Hunter.

  I showered and dressed in record time. My stomach rumbled when I saw that Tommy had left me a big breakfast in the kitchen, but I could come back for that later. I shrugged on my overcoat and dashed up the lane.

  Outside my grandmother’s mansion, I stood at the foot of the hickory tree, looking through the yellow leaves at my window, two elongated stories above. When I’d lived here I’d never had occasion to sneak out of my room. That part of my stable-boy story had been wishful thinking. But I’d made sure that I could sneak out if I needed to. I had been planning my escape from this place for a long time. Now I could sneak in.

  My hip ached as I took massive steps up the hickory branches, careful not to let twigs scrape my face before my first time with Hunter. I snagged my overcoat a few times and panicked all over again at the idea of tearing it and freezing to death in New York City because I couldn’t afford another, but eventually I reached my windowsill. The ancient window, huge panes rippled with age, was unlocked, just as I had left it last June. I lifted it open and dropped inside my room, which looked huge to me now. It was four times the size of Hunter’s room, and sixteen times the size of my mini-bedroom in the dorm. I turned toward my bed.

  It was neatly made. Hunter’s suitcase was open on the coverlet. He was up already.

  After a disappointing peek around the empty bathroom, I tiptoed out into the hall. He was here somewhere. If I could find him without encountering my grandmother first, I could lure him back to my bedroom, and we could finish what we’d started last night. He had wanted perfection for our first time. This would be it.

  After cursory glances into the upstairs parlor and the movie theater and the library, I sneaked down the wide, curving staircase, fingers tracing the banister rubbed silky smooth by a history of trailing hands. When I reached the bottom, I stopped short and sat on the last stair. I could hear Hunter and my grandmother through the arched doorway to the kitchen, saying my name.

  “Erin found out I’m majoring in pre-med instead of business,” Hunter said.

  “Hunter Allen,” my grandmother scolded him. I could picture the angry line forming between her exquisitely arched brows. “How could you let that happen?”

  “I’m in the honors program with her,” Hunter explained in his most persuasive, reasonable, in-control voice, the one that made women fall in love with him. “You asked me to get into a couple of her classes so I could keep tabs on her. But it works both ways. If I’m close enough to find out things about her, she’ll find out things about me.”

  My grandmother protested, “But what are we going to—”

  “I took care of it,” Hunter interrupted her. Nobody interrupted my grandmother, or so I had thought. “I told her I’m just fooling you into paying for my college, and you have no idea I’m in premed.”

  My grandmother cackled. “That’s rich.”

  “Well, it worked,” Hunter said. “For now. But I don’t know how long—”

  “Just fix it, Hunter,” my grandmother said. “You can fix anything with your charm. All you have to do is convince her to major in business and run the farm. And make certain she’s not fooling me like you’re fooling her! Surely that won’t take so long? You said she’s starving. Let’s see if she can spend a Christmas without my pralines!”

  “I’ll step in before she starves,” Hunter said, and I thought I detected a disapproving tone toward my grandmother. Amazing what this boy could get away with. “But you’re right. I’m getting closer to convincing her. Bringing her here was a good idea. It reminded her of how much she loves this place. One of the guys at the stable told my dad she was out for hours on Boo-boo yesterday afternoon.”

  “On whom?”

  “Boo-boo. Her horse. You know, High and Mighty. By Rocky Mountain High out of Might Is Right.” The breakfast dishes clinked. “Congratulations on your win yesterday, by the way.”

  “That horse certainly earned back the cost of the trip to Dubai to buy him,” my grandmother said, and the conversation turned easily enough from manipulating me to buying horses.

  I sat on the stair and listened to them for a few minutes more. I could sit here until they finished breakfast and came out of the kitchen to discover me, and I could confront them. Or I could go storming into the kitchen now.

  Or I could creep back up the sweeping staircase the way I’d come, because it didn’t matter that they knew that I knew. All that mattered was that both of them had betrayed me even more deeply and blatantly than I had imagined, and that the love I’d thought had grown between Hunter and me was the worst kind of lie.

  Every step he’d taken toward me—acting like my stable-boy story had affected him, writing his own sexy stories, taking me to Belmont, kissing me in the hospital, dragging me home—he’d taken to make me fall in love with him so he could advise me to follow in my grandmother’s footsteps. If I did as he said, she gave him a free ride.

  As I crossed my room, stepped into the tree, and closed the window behind me, I struggled to pound my feelings for Hunter into a small box, like squeezing my grief into a box when my mother died. I said to myself, Hunter never liked me. I should not want him anyway because he is in cahoots with my grandmother. He has no interest in me romantically. I am still okay, I am okay, I am okay.

  It wasn’t working. The further we’d gone, the more I’d realized I wanted and needed him, needed desperately to connect with him, even if it was only physical. I needed his touch, was starved for it.

  I was concentrating so hard that I missed my last foothold in the tree and fell on the ground, directly on my sore hip. Pain jabbed through me. Tears stung my eyes.

  I limped back down the lane. Just as I reached the path to Tommy’s house, I heard a car topping the hill. My grandmother rode in the backseat of the limo she took to races. She watched me through the tinted w
indow as she passed, eyes hidden by big designer sunglasses, mouth pulled into a disapproving frown.

  An hour later I answered a knock on Tommy’s front door. Hunter gestured to the farm truck waiting in the lane. “Your chariot awaits.” Then he pushed me inside, where the driver couldn’t see us, and kissed me hard on the mouth. “Good morning.”

  AFTER THE TAXI DROPPED US OFF in front of our dorm, Hunter walked me up to my room and pressed me against the hall wall. “Just because we’re here in New York doesn’t mean we’re going back to the way we were,” he said, nuzzling my cheek. “We have a hard day tomorrow and we need time to work through this, but things will be different between us now. Promise me.”

  “Promise.” My voice sounded too bright to my own ears, my delivery ironic. But Hunter had played the devoted new boyfriend all morning in the airport. He didn’t seem to notice that I regarded him with lust and stony silence.

  Ten hours later I was hunched over my laptop at my desk, struggling with the last paragraph of my history paper, when I heard a commotion in the outer bedroom. I rolled my desk chair back and peeked around the door frame. Summer was there with Manohar, Kyle, Isabelle, Brian, and Brian’s new boyfriend, all of them leaning on the others, tipsy. Bringing up the rear, standing at the threshold to the hallway, was Hunter.

  “Erin!” Summer called when she saw me. “We came to find you. Aren’t you done with your paper yet? We’re going to the club, baby!”

  My heart leapt. Summer, Jørdis, and I had had a great time at the club the week before classes started. I hadn’t had time to go since.

  “I have a test tomorrow,” I said. “I’ve almost finished my paper, and then I’m going to bed.” That is, I might be going to bed. Despite my best instincts, that depended on what Hunter was doing. Angry as I was with him, I could not let him go to that club with Isabelle.

  “You don’t need all that sleep just to pass a test,” Brian said. “You need to relax and get your mind off studying for a while, and you can do that at the club.”

  “Oooh, what’s this?” Brian’s boyfriend exclaimed, peering at one of Jørdis’s works in progress. She’d started to glue the faces onto a board. All at once, everyone else tried to explain Jørdis’s art, and Jørdis.

  Hunter walked over and leaned through my doorway. His shadow blended with my shadow on the wall behind him until I couldn’t tell one from the other. “Are you going?” he asked me quietly.

  I was about to burst with anger. I should tell him I knew everything about his deal with my grandmother. But then our relationship, even our friendship, would be over. I wanted to get him out of my system, didn’t I? Otherwise I would wonder for the rest of my life what he would have been like. I would dream about him.

  “I’m going if you’re going,” I said, looking him straight in the eye.

  He disappeared into the larger room. I heard him say, “She’s going.”

  “Hooray!” Now Summer poked her head into my room and whispered hoarsely, “Do you want a drink before we go? Or drinks? Manohar has a flask of—I don’t know what it is, honestly.”

  “Oh, God, no,” I said. Just what my calculus test needed.

  “Suit yourself.” Now she disappeared from the doorway. She said more loudly, “Hunter, Manohar has a mystery flask!”

  “Oh, God, no,” Hunter said.

  My fingers paused over my laptop keyboard. He couldn’t have overheard my whispered convo with Summer. Yet we were saying the same thing, feeling the same thing at the same moment, worried about school and frankly somewhat exasperated with our friends and sooooo bone tired and yet desperate to be with each other. I had always viewed Hunter as different from me—the opposite of me, really—and now I hated him thoroughly, yet tonight he was the person most like me in the universe.

  “Come on, Erin!” Summer called.

  I rolled backward in my chair and leaned through the doorway myself. “Go on without me. I’ll be right there. I’ve lost my train of thought for this paper. I can’t finish with you guys standing here.”

  “Come on,” Hunter reprimanded them. “Leave her alone. She’ll show up in a while.” They groaned begrudgingly and shuffled out. The last one to leave, Hunter looked back over his shoulder and asked me, “Won’t you?”

  I nodded. I didn’t see how, honestly. I had lost my bead on this paper. I didn’t see how I could miss this night with Hunter, either.

  But thirty minutes later I did finish, then changed into club clothes and stared at myself in the mirror. I definitely was no classic blond beauty. But I had always done the best I could with what I had. On this particular night, worn-out looking from days of worry and hard work and little sleep, I supposed I could have been a model in a gritty heroin-chic fashion-magazine spread.

  Yes, I would do for Hunter.

  I heard the music from the club a block away. I couldn’t see the lights—the windows were blocked out, as if something delicious and secret was going down inside—and in the shadows near the door, Hunter leaned against the brick wall, waiting for me.

  He met me halfway down the block and walked with me. “I shouldn’t have let you come by yourself,” he grumbled, “but by the time I realized that, I was afraid that if I went back for you, you’d come a different way and I’d pass you. Why are you a young woman in New York without a cell phone, again?”

  “Are you kidding? A cell phone costs two hundred packages of ramen noodles every month.”

  Before I realized what he was doing, he had paid my way into the club. I tried to protest, but he couldn’t hear me over the music. We wound through the writhing crowd, Hunter leading me by the hand. Summer and Manohar danced at the edge of the floor—Manohar, dancing! courtesy of the flask—and Summer pointed us toward an empty booth, the table scattered with glasses and a pitcher of soda.

  Hunter slid onto the red velvet bench against the wall. I could sit on the bench across the table from him. Or I could sit on the bench beside him. I didn’t have to sit right next to him. He’d acted all day like we were together and he couldn’t wait to seal the deal. If I sat close to him, I’d be making my first move toward seducing him in return, though I knew full well I would dump him before he had the chance to dump me.

  Decision made, I plopped down beside him on the bench without looking at him.

  He said something. I couldn’t hear him.

  “What?” I asked, turning to look at him.

  He watched me intensely, strobe lights flashing across his long nose and sparkling in his blond hair. He crooked his finger at me, beckoning me closer.

  Only so I could hear what he’d said, right? I leaned toward him.

  At the same time, he stopped crooking his finger at me and laid that hand back where it had been, across the top of the seat.

  So as I leaned my head toward his mouth, his arm was sort of around me.

  “Are you as tired as I am?” he asked.

  I still could hardly hear him over the music, but I knew he was talking loudly because his breath in my ear made my skin dance.

  “I’m stone-cold sober,” he said, “and I feel more drunk than I did last night.”

  What he said rang so true, so unexpectedly and absolutely true to my life in that moment, that I laughed, and I smiled at him as if he were my friend, and I couldn’t stop laughing.

  He laughed, too—chuckling at first, watching me, unsure as to whether I was putting him on. Then laughing with me, a full-body laugh that had us both leaning forward across the bench, toward each other.

  Finally the giddiness passed, mostly because my mouth hurt from smiling. Also because a few girls passing by the table had glanced in our direction and I was afraid we’d get kicked out for doing Ecstasy. But the lovely feeling remained, the warmth of laughing, the nearness of Hunter, smiling at me.

  The smile stayed on his lips, but his eyes looked worried as he leaned toward me again and said in my ear, “I’m not sure I can handle pre-med.”

  I backed away from him enough so that I could lo
ok into his eyes. He was dead serious, and again, what he said rang true. I nodded. “I know exactly what you mean. But you will feel better tomorrow. You’ll hardly remember feeling like this tonight.”

  He watched me, eyes serious. “Why will I feel better tomorrow?”

  I shrugged. “Because your tests will be over, and you will have gotten some rest tonight.” I’d thought what I meant was obvious. Weird that I understood him perfectly, and he didn’t understand me at all.

  “I will?” He leaned forward to talk into my ear again—but this time his cheek touched mine, and his stubble combed across it, dragging a tingling sensation behind. If our friends on the dance floor glanced in our direction, they would not be able to tell we were touching each other. They would think we were still leaning close to hear each other, like before. They would have no idea that every nerve in my body sparked to life and burned as he growled in my ear, “Would you like to dance?”

  I gave him a small nod. He stood and held out his hand to me. I put my hand in his. He led me onto the dance floor, in a clear space in a dark corner where the strobe light did not quite reach and the pink searchlight never swept.

  Pulling me close, he wrapped one arm around my waist and put his other palm to my cheek. “I’ve done this all wrong,” he whispered in my ear. “I want to start over.”

  At the feel of his breath on my earlobe, my heart shivered, sending tingles across my chest. My lips parted. I moved my cheek against his hand so he stroked me softly.

  “This is a slow country song,” he whispered, his voice audible over the throbbing techno beat only because his lips moved against my ear. “And we are alone.”

  Then he kissed me. His lips were on mine, pressing hard and hungrily. His hands were on the back of my neck, his fingers weaving into my hair, holding me in place as he opened my mouth with his tongue. His hands moved from my neck down my back and around to my front—not far enough to cup my breasts, but far enough to tell me what he wanted. I could not see whether anyone was watching us. He did not look. His eyes were closed, fists gripping my slinky blouse, lips on mine, like he would never let me go.