Love Story (12 page)

“It’s not in my blood.” I lowered my voice because I had no wish to share this with the limo. “Romance novelists write that about their heroines all the time. It makes no sense, that the horse farm was in the heroine’s blood. Or the city was in her blood, or the wild Pacific coastline, or the oil-drilling rig on her parents’ vast Texas estate. The place was not in the heroine’s blood, Hunter. The simple fact is that she grew up there, and her overbearing grandmother insisted that she move back there, and the heroine finally gave in—”

“She did?” Hunter asked, blond brows up.

“In romance novels, Hunter, not in real life, and then everybody unanimously agreed it was in her blood, to make her feel better about moving back to the horse farm when she didn’t want to. But she didn’t feel better. She felt the same as she always had, that she wanted to be a writer and she did not want to do it on a horse farm in Kentucky.”

“Not yet.” Hunter stopped the limo along the edge of the crowded parking lot and turned off the engine. “But you will, because you’ll get tired of being poor. I know because I’ve been poor, and it sucks. If you weren’t rich, you would never, ever walk away from an opportunity like running your grandmother’s farm. You would not want to be a writer. It would never occur to you to give up your family’s support so you could see how the other half lives. And that’s all it is for you. You are not living the life of a starving artist. You’re only visiting. You can string yourself along on scholarships and tips from the coffee shop, but if you ever lose your job, or get thrown in jail for possession of someone else’s pot, or get hurt, your grandmother will be right there to catch you when you fall. You know it, and she knows it. Face it. You will never be poor, no matter how hard you try. And eventually you’re going to realize that.”

“Leave ’er alone!” came a shout from the backseat. Then, “Box your weight, Allen!”

Hunter blinked but didn’t otherwise acknowledge the frat boys yelling at him. “Erin, you waltz through life with grace and confidence that only come from old money. You will never bow to anybody like a person would who’d grown up poor. Even if you desperately needed a morsel of food to keep from starving, you might think you were begging, but the people with the food would give you some because they would think you were in charge. You couldn’t beg if you tried.” He got out of the car and closed the door.

While he’d been talking, the boys and Summer had bailed out of the backseat. I found myself alone in the silence, looking out over ancient brick buildings beaten by the Atlantic winds, a stranger in a strange land. The boys were from here. Even Summer seemed to blend in better now, but me? I had a wide-brimmed Derby hat perched primly on my knees.

I jumped as Hunter opened my door.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.” He held out a hand to help me from the car.

* * *

A
COUPLE OF HOURS, A HUGE
shrimp dinner, and a very long limo ride later, Hunter dropped us in front of the dorm. As the bartender collapsed into the passenger side so he could direct Hunter in driving the limo back to the funeral home, he offered me a thousand dollars for my advice that had made him and his friends nine thousand. I calculated in my head how many hours away from the coffee shop that money would buy me. And I could feel Hunter’s eyes on me, judging the poor little rich girl. I said no.

Manohar and Summer had seemed so tight all evening that I was surprised when she followed me up to our room. But as she peeled off her skirt and stood unsteadily staring into our open closet, head on the door frame, I realized she was exchanging her cute afternoon-on-the-town outfit for a comfy, subtly sexy night-in-with-new-boyfriend outfit. Brian must be away from the room on a date.

I wondered what Hunter was doing tonight.

She nearly fell over pulling on tight jeans. She’d hardly said a word since we came in. I could tell she wanted to talk to me about where she was going, but she didn’t know how to say it. I didn’t say it for fear of embarrassing her and scaring her off the project altogether. Two strangers, meeting by fortunate chance, falling in love—there was nothing more romantic, and nothing for her to be embarrassed about.

She was embarrassed anyway. She sat beside me on her bed, where I was carefully polishing the pricey and oh-so-comfortable boots I’d worn to Belmont. “If I don’t come in tonight …,” she began.

“Mm-hm?” I prompted her, spreading extra polish on the worn toe of one boot.

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll just be upstairs. Manohar has the private room like you.”

“That sounds nice.” I looked up at her and smiled. “Maybe stop drinking? Because it’s such a big night.”

“Potentially.” She nodded. “I’m through drinking for the night. I’m sober. Er. Not sober but soberer.”

“Okay.”

“I’m worried about you, though.” She pulled off her sweater and stood at the closet door again, waiting for a better one to appear. “You and Hunter really went at it a couple of times. I never understood what went wrong.”

I gave my attention to the toe of my boot, piling even more polish into a deep scrape in the leather. “I guess being around horses reminded us of why we never got along in the first place.” Not since the seventh grade, anyway. “Is he planning one of his late-night treks tonight?”

“That was my impression.” She pulled a sweater over her head and then looked at me with her hands on her hips. The off-the-shoulder black sweater made her look even sexier and more sophisticated than she realized. The effect would have been just what Manohar was looking for if she hadn’t been swaying slightly. Or maybe that would help.

Then she said, “I don’t want to abandon you.”

“You’re not abandoning me.” I waved my rag dismissively, releasing the odor of polish. “The second we start passing up nookie just to support each other’s neuroses, we need to talk about an adjustment in our relationship. But while you’re up there …”

I hated to ask her for another favor, since the first time I’d asked her to pump Manohar for information, they’d argued and she’d slumped into a funk for three weeks. But if all went well, she and Manohar were about to share his very small bedroom. I decided it was okay to ask. “Could you find out from Manohar where Hunter is going late at night?”

“I already asked. Manohar doesn’t know. Hunter says he can’t tell Manohar now that security has been breached. Which means me.” She threw back her shoulders and proudly poked out her chest. “Which also means he’s going somewhere he doesn’t want you to know about.”

I agreed. But to me it seemed likely that
somewhere
was the velvet-draped couch of the fortune-teller’s shop. Or, ouch, the blonde’s dorm room.

Summer cocked her head at me. “You love those boots, don’t you?”

I cackled, realizing how hard I’d been polishing the toe. “I do love these boots. Moreover, my grandmother paid a lot of money for these boots when I was in high school. I probably will never be able to afford a pair of boots like this again. Gone are the days when I would come home and kick them off and throw them in the closet because if they got beat up, I could just buy another pair. I am trying to make them last by cleaning them and polishing them and putting them away carefully.” I gave the heel one last rueful wipe. “It’s all very
Little House on the Prairie
.”

She stepped closer and peered at them. “If it were
Little House on the Prairie,
you would wrap them in paper and put them on a high shelf.”

“Or I’d dig a pit for them in the ground and fill the pit with hay to keep them fresh and cold.”

“Or you’d pack them in a barrel with salt.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said, “they’re boots, not herring.”

“You should have taken that thousand dollars,” she said. “You earned it.”

I waited until she left for her quiet night with Manohar. Then I raked all my clothes off her closet rod and plopped them on my bed. I pulled my underwear out of the bottom drawer of my dresser and even stacked my textbooks on the pillow.

Every item I owned fit on the bed. I divided the items into two piles: items that my grandmother had bought and items that I had bought with money I’d earned since I moved to New York. I looked very, very carefully at my grandmother’s pile and considered throwing it away. I could toss some of it, but there was one thing I simply couldn’t part with. My laptop. I might as well throw my writing career away. And if I couldn’t throw out absolutely everything she’d given me, the exercise was pointless.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized there was no way to get around Hunter’s argument. Only a rich girl would consider throwing out a prized possession just because it was a gift from someone she was angry with. It was a gesture of the very privileged.

I stood looking at all my stuff. Enough of this. I was wasting time. I had homework to do, and a job to go to at six in the morning. I cleared all my textbooks off the pillow except calculus.

Footfalls sounded in the stairwell. I looked up as if I could see through the wall. These could be Hunter’s quick steps. This was the wrong time of night. But it was the weekend, and Summer had said she thought he was leaving.

Sure enough, as the heavy front door of the building closed and I peeked out the bay window, it was Hunter’s tall frame I saw mingling in the evening crowd on the sidewalk with his overcoat slung over his shoulder, ready for his trek back in the wee hours when the air would be frigid and black.

The following Thursday, the creative-writing class discussed yet another of his stories. Add the back room of a cocktail waitress’s bar to the list of possible
somewhere
s. The only way to find out where Hunter was going at night was for him to stop teasing and just tell me.

The story I composed over the next week was designed to make him do just that.

9

B
ut on the day it was due, I couldn’t let it go.

Students whose stories were discussed on Monday had to turn in the stories the previous Friday by noon. It was eleven fifty-five on Friday. I sat across from the front desk in the five-story lobby of the library in a mod chair of red fur that would have looked funky and adorable except that it was matted with wear and mysterious stains. I gripped “Anything Is Possible” in both hands, bending it in the middle, sullying it with my sweat, ruining the pristine condition I preferred for my stories because I thought they looked professional and made readers less likely to tear them in two during class discussion.

On the large digital clock behind the front desk, eleven fifty-five blinked to eleven fifty-six. I needed to turn this story in, but I could not. I had written it for a specific purpose, to shake Hunter out of his pattern of seeking me out, shutting me down, and writing a sexy story about somebody else. If this story didn’t motivate him to tell me how he really felt, nothing would.

The problem was that in prodding Hunter to lower his defenses, I’d lowered my own too far. The other stories I’d written for class had been fictionalizations of my life. This one wasn’t fiction at all.

At eleven fifty-seven I was second-guessing myself. Why had I written this story anyway? What had possessed me to do this to myself? I could quickly write another story as a replacement. It would suck, but at least I could protect my soul from the prying eyes of the class.

I couldn’t risk it. Gabe might have some system of knowing when a story had been turned in late. At the very least, some of my classmates might come into the library and ask for the reserve folder in the next few minutes so they could read the stories before starting their weekend. I would be busted, my grade would suffer, my dreams of the internship would be gone. It wasn’t worth the risk.

At eleven fifty-nine I wiped both wet hands on the matted red chair, crossed the lobby, and asked the kid behind the counter to add my story to the reserve folder for my class.

Before I could change my mind, I ran away, back across the lobby, past the group of chairs, and up the stairs.

My money from the summer was running out faster than I’d expected, and I’d signed up for extra shifts at the coffee shop the whole weekend. I had an early American literature survey (bleh!) paper to finish in the two-hour window before my belly-dancing class, and no time to lose. I settled at a table on a second-story balcony with a glass wall below the rail so I could see the lobby floor. This was one of my favorite places to study. The white noise of five stories of library was the perfect background music since I was sans music player and earbuds.

Nothing changed about the white noise, I was pretty sure. The scanners at the checkout desk below me blooped softly, the elevator slid up and down, and behind me girls were having too loud a conversation for a library. But something changed. Something made me look up from my laptop toward the front desk on the first floor.

Hunter was checking out the stories.

He took the folder and handed over his student ID in exchange, then headed for the group of chairs where I’d just been sitting. Nothing unusual about that. It was a convenient place to read if you’d popped into the library only to read the stories for class. He didn’t choose my fuzzy red chair. He sat in the larger carved chair upholstered in golden velvet, a stylized throne.

But he didn’t seem like a king, for once. The huge chair made him smaller in comparison. He looked young, curled up with the stories, one leg folded under him. I hadn’t seen him sit that way since middle school, happening upon him reading under a tree in my grandmother’s pasture. He would not sit that way if he knew people were looking at him. Strange what a gaze did to Hunter.

I watched him. I knew he was reading my story rather than one of the others because my paper was a higher-quality bright white, one of the few luxuries I sprung for anymore. He stared at one page for a long time, leafed back to the page before it, read the whole passage again. He winced. I tried to figure out which of the many wince-inducing sections he was reading, judging from how many sheets he seemed to have left. I couldn’t tell.

Reaching the end, he held the story up and stared at it for a few minutes. He stretched and popped his neck, then settled back down to read the other two stories. But the bright white story came out again. He read it through, slipped it back into the folder, turned in the folder at the desk, and left the library. He’d scratched a lot of comments in his notebook about the other two stories, but after reading mine, the first time and the second, he hadn’t scrawled word one.

Maybe he was saving his comments to tell me in person. All weekend I half-expected him to confront me as I worked at the coffee shop, or read on a blanket with Summer in the park, or wrote in my room and listened for him in the stairwell. He did not confront me. I did not see him. My story hadn’t affected him the way I’d hoped. He’d gotten the last laugh after all.

That’s what I thought until class on Monday.