Love Story (10 page)

“As long as there’s no dialogue”—I spoke directly to him—“no connection between the characters, nothing really happens in this story. It’s all in the character’s head, and there’s no action.”

“Seems to me he got plenty of action.” This Manohar-like comment was made by a boy who hardly ever said anything in class. If even
he
felt it was safe to take potshots at me, belaboring the issue was pointless. I looked to Gabe, my signal that I was done.

“Your turn, Hunter,” he called.

The class was silent as Hunter finished writing a note on his story, or finished faking writing a note for effect. Then he grinned brilliantly at us. “Thank you for your comments. I was a little nervous about my first time”—everyone chuckled because he was so hilarious—“but it wasn’t nearly as painful as I thought. Your feedback will be helpful when I revise this story for my portfolio at the end of the semester.” He sounded like a human form letter.

“Did you mean to leave out dialogue?” Summer pressed him. “Was it too hard to write, like Erin said?”

He kept grinning while the smile faded from his blue eyes. “Gabe may take exception to this, but I feel that my contribution to class on the day my story is discussed is the story itself. Then you tell me what you think of the story, and I learn from that. I shouldn’t have to respond to your response. That’s not freshman honors creative writing anymore. That’s freshman honors psychology, and I don’t need any talk therapy.”

“Maybe you do,” said Isabelle, beside him. “Maybe you wrote something into your story that you never intended. You could learn a lot about yourself from that.”

“I always do exactly what I intend,” Hunter snapped.

Thirteen people stared at him. Hunter did not lose his cool. I knew this from six years in school with him. Even his new friends knew this about him by now.

He blinked, realizing what he’d done. The slow smile spread across his face again. He winked at Isabelle. “But thanks for the advice. I honestly appreciate the work all of you put into critiquing my writing.”

* * *

D
ISCUSSION MOVED ON TO ANOTHER CLASSMATE’S
writing, but my mention of “my kind of story” generated another argument later in the class between Summer and Manohar about proper genres for the course. Class time ran over. I had to get up and leave before Gabe dismissed us, and even so, I was late for work at the coffee shop.

No matter. Hunter’s story was all I thought about through my entire shift. I knew exactly what Summer was talking about when I walked into our room six hours later.

“I’ve been telling Jørdis all about it.” She motioned me over to Jørdis’s bed with a pair of scissors.

“My stable boy was blond,” I protested, taking the scissors and the magazine Jørdis handed me and settling in the pillows beside her. “If this girl is me, why doesn’t she have red hair and a face clogged with freckles? I’m not hard to describe.”

“Exactly,” Summer said. “He couldn’t give her red hair. Everybody in class would know it was you. Nobody suspected he was the stable boy in your story because he hadn’t even shown up yet when you turned your story in. But this girl is you. It’s obvious. Since he was twelve, this girl has made him feel as if the earth stood still. He’s still a virgin because if he couldn’t have this girl in high school, he didn’t want anybody else. She even has your husky voice.”

I winced. “Yeah, that screams sex, doesn’t it?” I had taken exception to the husky voice description. Just because I was an alto didn’t mean he had to make me sound like a cougar.

“So?” Summer insisted. “How can you ignore the fact that he’s talking about you?”

I wasn’t ignoring it. I realized he was talking about me. I also knew he wasn’t serious about any of this. If he’d really felt this strongly about me, he would not have stolen my fortune.

No use explaining this to Summer, though, because she would find a way to twist the theft of a hundred and forty-seven horses into a romantic overture. I shook my head. “Even if the girl were me, the guy in the story isn’t Hunter. The guy in the story knows all about anatomy.”

“Hunter is taking anatomy,” Summer said.

My scissors stopped their progress across the magazine page, and the metallic scrapings of Summer’s scissors and Jørdis’s filled my ears like alarm bells. I forced myself to start cutting again before they noticed I’d stopped. “No, he isn’t,” I told Summer. “He’s a business major. Why would he take anatomy?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted, “but I saw his anatomy book on his bed when I went to Manohar’s room yesterday.”

“And why did you go to Manohar’s room yesterday?” Jørdis asked with as much innuendo as her Danish accent would allow.

“Oh, it was nothing like that,” Summer assured her. “I was passing in the hall outside his room—”

“Because you just happened to find yourself three flights up on a men’s floor for no apparent reason,” I played along.

Laughing, she put her hand over my mouth. “—and he called me inside because he was making mulligatawny and wanted me to sample it.”

Jørdis and I cracked up, careful to move our sharp scissors aside before we doubled over laughing on the bed. Summer smiled ruefully at us.

Finally Jørdis managed, “You sampled his mulligatawny! Was it good?”

“It was okay,” Summer said. “I would have to get used to it.”

That made Jørdis and me laugh harder. Coughing through it, I asked Summer, “Are you going to sample his mulligatawny again?”

Still smiling, she shook her head. “Sometimes mulligatawny is just mulligatawny”

“Oh,” Jørdis and I said together. I was disappointed that Summer hadn’t made progress in her romance with Manohar. I wished I could send her on another mission, since she seemed to need an excuse to justify making a move on him, but I didn’t dare. If Manohar had been as mad as Summer said about being manipulated regarding the stable-boy issue, I didn’t want to push it. Gabe hadn’t called me into his office for a stern talking-to by now, the third week of class. Maybe I’d dodged a bullet.

“Anyway,” Summer said, “Hunter’s taking anatomy. Everything that happened in the story is exactly like what really happened at the beach party. That means he’s hot for you, Erin.”

“That also means he slept with that blond girl,” I pointed out.

“If he did, at least he wants you to watch,” Summer said.

“I need to find a way to read this story,” Jørdis said.

“But he didn’t sleep with that girl,” Summer said, dismissing the idea with a wave of her open scissors. “Remember, he left the party with you and Brian. He and Brian came back. I saw the blond girl a few more times, but never with him.”

“Who left first?” I asked. “I could hear the music all the way down here. You had your argument with Manohar and left a couple of hours before the party shut down. Hunter had plenty of time to hook up with her. Looks like he did.”

D
EEP IN THE NIGHT
I
WOKE
. I had lain in bed for a long time without realizing I was awake. Finally something made me roll over and peer out the window nearest the head of my bed, onto the dusky street, just in time to glimpse Hunter returning to the dorm.

He was one floor down, several steps away from the front stoop, and the crisp red leaves in the trees cast him into the shadows of the streetlights. But I knew him by the way he moved. His overcoat was open to reveal jeans and a casual but expensive shirt underneath.

Overcoat? It was hardly fall, not cold enough—but glancing at the clock on my filing cabinet, I realized it must be plenty cold for him to need this extra layer in the stillness at four thirty in the morning. The wind caught the back of his coat and whipped it behind him as he grasped the stair railing with one hand. He swung himself onto the stoop, as if expending his last bit of energy would be worth the trouble because it would get him to bed that much faster. I knew the feeling.

He had disappeared under the awning now. Through floors and walls, I caught the faintest whisper of his fingers on the buttons as he punched the combination into the lock, then the groan of the door opening for him. He shut it quietly—which I wasn’t expecting. I’d never noticed the way he opened and closed doors when other people were asleep, but he’d caused me so much trouble personally that I expected the door to slam. It did not. I hardly registered it closing before my ears picked up his steps on the staircase—fast at first, still excited about going to bed, slower as he reached my story.

He was as near as he would get to me now, sliding around the second-story banister on his way to the next staircase, leaning his weight into it, his exhaustion overcoming him. If I jumped out of bed and dashed through Summer and Jørdis’s room and burst into the hallway, I could catch him. His sleepy blue eyes would widen in surprise, then narrow again when he saw it was me.

And then he was gone, shuffling up the first few steps of the second staircase with renewed energy, slowing as he reached the top. A pause as he circled the third-story banister.

The faintest footsteps now, slowing as they faded. A squeal as he opened his own door on the fifth floor. A thump as he shut it. Open and shut, done and over.

I closed my heart to him then. I thought I had succeeded in forgetting him ten times over. Each time I was mistaken. He managed to find his way into my heart again and sabotage it from the inside. This time was the last. In the dead of night he had gone to visit that blond girl, and now he had come home.

7

M
y next story was due the following day. I could have written one accusing him of sleeping with that girl. But I’d never intended to call him out in the first place, and I certainly wouldn’t write another story about him now.

Trouble was, I’d lost my taste for writing romance. At least, for
these
people to read, and Hunter to smirk about, and Manohar to make fun of. My laptop and I still played Cupid on break at the coffee shop and during any luxurious hour I could spare on the weekends, writing and people-watching in the park. But that was for me, not to show.

For class I wrote a story about a girl dealing with some unnamed tragedy by closing herself in the closet of a huge, empty house, with her evil unnamed authority figure clomping around in the hallways, sending the servants to check on the girl in the closet, never venturing inside herself.

Two weeks later, my next story was about a seventh-grader obsessed with the idea that if she won the middle school spelling bee and made it to the next round, she would see her absentee father in the audience. He had finally come for her! But she never made it to that round because she spelled
desertion
with a double
s.

Maybe I was trying to tell Hunter a little about myself with these stories, and apologize in a very roundabout way for not connecting with him in high school. Typically, I couldn’t tell if he was affected by them or not, because in class his comments were blandly supportive, and on paper he wrote helpful technical comments. Sigh.

But I thought these stories moved me closer to the publishing internship, if Gabe had any sway. He seemed excited about them during class. He wrote in pencil in the margins that he saw me taking chances and growing as a writer. My classmates seemed impressed with the stories, too, and discussed them animatedly and invented deep bullshit meanings for what were essentially pages out of my middle school diary. I was surprised and disappointed that my classmates liked these stories so much, because I hated them. At this point I decided everybody in the class must be clinically depressed.

A few weeks later, the girls in class, even Summer, giggled behind their hands at how much they looked forward to Hunter’s sexy stories. But it seemed to me that his fortune-teller story was just installment number two of “Anatomy Unit on the Reproductive System.”

And his story was not his way of hinting that he liked me. Neither was the fact that he sat on Jørdis’s bed one Friday afternoon when I cruised through wearing my belly-dancing outfit. Yes, I was a little self-conscious about walking down the street in it, and my grandmother would die, but with my jacket over the top it didn’t look significantly weirder than some of the other oddities New Yorkers wore in public. I was
very
self-conscious about wearing it in front of Hunter.

“Hullo, Erin,” Hunter said without looking up from his cutting.

“Hullo, Hunter,” I said without slowing down. I stepped into my own little bedroom and pushed the door until it was open only a crack.

I stood there staring at the bay windows for a moment. Normally next I would close the shades on the windows. Slowly I reached for the pull on the first shade. But even after I’d closed them all, knowing Hunter was on the other side of my door while I changed, I felt as warm and exposed as if they had been wide open.

I hung my belly-dancing outfit on a hook in my room, rather than on the outside of the door where it usually stayed. That would be a painfully obvious ploy for Hunter’s attention. I made myself a gourmet dinner by opening a pack of peanut butter crackers, and I settled on my bed to study.

Listened for Hunter in the outer room.

Waited for him to burst in.

Of course he didn’t. It bothered me that he didn’t come in to bother me, and he knew this. However, I had vowed to close my heart to him, and I meant it this time. I tried my best to throw myself into my history reading.

But come on, it was history. Versus Hunter.

After half an hour of torture, I peeked around my door. I would feel foolish if I’d focused on Hunter and wasted half an hour of precious homework time when he wasn’t even there.

He was asleep.

Not quite believing what I was seeing, I tiptoed across the room for a closer look. The overhead light and the lamps on either side of Jørdis’s bed shone on him like a specimen in an operating theater, but he was dead to the world. He had curled his big body on the end of Jørdis’s bed. His eyelids did not flutter when I stood over him. His long blond lashes cast severe shadows down his soft cheek. His expensive T-shirt had pulled away from his waistband to reveal his tight, muscular side and the long white scar.

His late-night visits to the blonde must have worn him out.

Angry as I was, I empathized with him. If I’d been able to take a catnap in another dorm room or the library, I wouldn’t have wanted to be woken. So I only slid the scissors very carefully off the ends of his fingers, away from his eye, and set them on the bedside table.

Then I went back to my room. But it wasn’t long before Summer bounced onto the end of my bed, and she seemed a lot more excited than I was about Hunter’s presence. “His poor scar is showing,” she whispered. She stuck out her bottom lip in sympathy. “You should go rub his back or stroke his hair or something.”

“He’s not a puppy,” I whispered back. “And I doubt he’d appreciate it. He’s not here for me.”

“He
is
here for you!” she insisted.

“He’s cutting faces for Jørdis,” I corrected her. “Everybody in the dorm has cut faces for Jørdis at one time or another.”

“Yes, but most of them don’t come back for more.”

She had a point. And, truth be told, I did think Hunter was there for me. I just didn’t know why. I huffed out a sigh and hissed, “He’s already got my tuition and my inheritance and a career at my farm. He has no reason to flirt with me, sometimes, and sometimes insult me and try to make me feel awful about breaking away from my grandmother.”

“He likes you,” Summer whispered. “More than likes. He’s interested in you romantically.”

“Oh, yeah? Then why did he feel up that blonde at the party in the bathroom?”

“He was trying to make you jealous,” Summer said with exaggerated patience, “just like in his story. He is giving you obvious hints, and you are choosing not to take them.”

“That’s so unlike him. If he wants me, why doesn’t he come out and tell me?”

She shrugged. “You’re so defensive. You’ve got a Kentucky-size chip on your shoulder, and the stable-boy story incident didn’t help. I’m not saying I blame you for any of that. I’d be defensive, too. I’m saying it’s an obstacle, he’s trying to get around it, and you keep blocking his way.”

I wanted to believe her, but it seemed too simple. “Do you know why he’s asleep right now?”

She shook her head.

“He’s going out at eleven thirty and coming back at four thirty, three or four nights a week.” At her strange look I hurried on, “I am not spying on him. I wake up when he comes down the stairwell that late, and I watch him walk down the sidewalk. Later I watch him come back.” I gestured toward my bay window.

“Maybe he has a job,” she said.

“He doesn’t need a job. He has my grandmother. He wouldn’t jeopardize his perfect grades for extra pocket money. And there’s no pattern to his days. I always work from five to eleven Monday through Thursday. The only reason my weekend schedule is irregular is that it’s our busiest time and my boss wants me to make as few bad lattes as possible to reduce the damage.” I felt my nostrils flare as I said, “Hunter’s visiting that blonde.”

Summer gave me a stern look. “You have made that up.”

Had I? He’d dated a lot in high school, but the girls he went out with talked about him as if he was the perfect gentleman. They were only sad and confused that he hadn’t asked them out again. He wasn’t the type to sleep around. He definitely wasn’t the type to sleep around and then write a tell-all story about it for a college class.

Then again, what did I really know about Hunter? I felt such a strong connection with him because our lives for the past six years had been intertwined. But we weren’t friends. And this connection I felt with him … maybe I’d made that up, too. After all, I was a novelist.

“He’s going to see that fortune-teller from his second story,” I suggested. This I
really
didn’t believe. I wanted Summer to reassure me.

She rolled her eyes. “Hunter Allen is not having sex with a fortune-teller. He is entertaining the men in the class, fascinating the women, and egging you on. Do you hear yourself and how you have been egged on? You are thoroughly eggy right now. You’re like a freaking omelet.” She bounced up from my bed and went back into her room.

A few minutes passed in which I did not get any homework done at all. I could hear her paging quietly through a book. Finally I heard the mattress creek on Jørdis’s side of the room. A pillow thudded to the floor. Then I could hear Hunter and Summer talking.

Summer: “Wake up, sleepyhead.”

Hunter: “Jesus. Sorry.”

Summer: “You shouldn’t cut out faces for Jørdis when you’re so tired. You left way too thick a border around them. She’s going to get you.”

Hunter, after a yawn: “She needs a thicker border so she can overlap them when she glues them to the canvas. She hasn’t thought this through.”

Summer: “I’m just warning you.”

Hunter: “Thanks for the warning.”

The conversation ended, and after several moments of silence I realized I was straining my ears to hear them through the wall instead of reading history. I bent my head to my book.

“Hey,” Hunter said, looming over me.

I let out some kind of strangled squeal, and my book and laptop went flying in different directions.

“Sorry, sorry,” he soothed me, holding both hands up to calm me down. “I forgot how easily you startle.”

“What’s the matter?” Summer stuck her head through the door. “What’d you do to her?”

“She startles easily.” Hunter sounded the tiniest bit miffed. “It was an accident.”

Summer gave me an uneasy look, then winked at me and disappeared.

I took deep breaths and winced at my hard, fast heartbeat. Accepting the laptop Hunter retrieved from the floor for me, and then the history book, I managed, “I didn’t hear you cross the room. What are you, a ninja?”

“Maybe.” As he sat on the foot of my bed, his rakish smile made me suspect his next story for Gabe’s class would be a ninja hook-up. But it was so hard to stay defensive when he paired the smile with sleepy blue eyes. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep out there. I thought you would come out and talk to me in your belly-dancing costume.” He nodded to the sad pool of green gauze that had fallen from its hook in the corner.

I thought what he meant by this was,
I put my hands all over that girl in the shower and then wrote a story about doing her. I also wrote a story about doing a fortune-teller. So I don’t see why in the world you did not come into Jørdis’s room and flirt with me.
This seemed to be what he was implying, but I couldn’t be sure.

“I have a lot of homework,” I said.

“And I have a proposition.”

“’Kay,” I said warily. I tried to keep my tone flat, but I was dying to know what it was.

“I promised you I wouldn’t tell Gabe about the …” He opened his hand on his thigh. This meant
embarrassing stable-boy story.
He went on, “But I told you I couldn’t vouch for Brian or Manohar.”

“Oh, no,” I whispered.

“Listen.” He put his hand on my ankle. “Brian won’t say anything. He likes you, and he likes Summer, and Summer has worked hard on him. But Manohar needs a favor.”

I nodded for him to go on, hoping I would be able to hear him over the blood throbbing in my ears. Being startled had only half the effect on my pulse of Hunter’s hand on my ankle.

“Manohar’s rushing a fraternity,” Hunter said. “Some of the older and very influential brothers have a trip to Belmont Park planned for tomorrow. It would help Manohar get in their good graces if he brought along a horse-racing insider.”

I frowned at him. “You want me to handicap the races for them? Aren’t you going? You could do it.”

“Not like you can,” he said. “I was interested in the training side, and I liked to predict which colts would train well, but during the races I wasn’t watching. I was in the stable, currycombing.” He squeezed my ankle hard, and I wondered whether this was unconscious. “You were the one in the stands, taking notes on the big picture.”

I could have argued with him. He knew as well as I did that horse racing was unpredictable. Even though I could probably make educated guesses about winning horses better than most people, I’d never imagined using my knowledge to place bets at Belmont Park through a partner of legal age. If I’d thought I could make any money that way, I wouldn’t have been working at the coffee shop.

But if I argued this point, I’d be arguing myself out of a promise of silence from Manohar. So I said, “Great!”

“One of the guys is borrowing a limo from his dad’s business,” Hunter said. “He’ll pick us up in front of the dorm at noon.” He looked at his hand on my ankle as if he hadn’t realized it was there. He jerked it away and stood.

I almost forgot to ask, “Can I bring Summer?”

“Of course,” he said in a tone that told me he’d been expecting this question.

Summer popped her head into the room again. “Where are we going?”

“Hunter!” Jørdis boomed from her bedroom. “What have you been doing with these borders? I told you not to cut so large a border!”

Hunter gave me a conspiratorial smile that said we both understood Jørdis and her tendency to overexcitement about cutting. I did not share the smile with him, but I didn’t have to. Hunter could make me feel that camaraderie with him even when I didn’t want to.

“Sweet dreams, Erin.” He went out to placate Jørdis.

A
T NOON THE NEXT DAY
, S
UMMER
and I walked down the stairs in front of the dorm and into a gaggle of six boys. Several of them said, “Nice hat.”