Love Story (4 page)

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” I shouted over the laughter, “but there’s nothing in the syllabus for this class that says we can’t write
nipple.
”

“Because that’s understood!” Manohar exclaimed.

“Is it?” I asked. “Maybe you’re just bothered by nipple personally.”

“Everybody is bothered by nipple,” he said, karate-chopping the thick table with each syllable. “Serious writers know this. You would not find a nipple in
The New Yorker.
”

“She didn’t write this story for
The New Yorker,
” Summer said.

Manohar gestured widely with both arms. He hit Brian in the chest and didn’t seem to notice. “Exactly!”

I shook my head. “I don’t think this is about my story at all. I think it’s about you, Manohar. I can tell that reading this story made you uncomfortable, and I wonder why that is. Either you’re a very curious virgin, or you want a stable boy of your own.”

Manohar’s mouth dropped open. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. All the guys in the class moaned, “Oooooooooooh!”

Except Brian, who raised his hand and said, “Um, no, that would be me.”

And except Hunter. I was fairly certain Hunter hadn’t joined the moaning. I dared not turn my head to look at him. My face burned with anger at Manohar, and shame that he’d made me lose my cool and attack him with a joke worthy of my grandmother’s stables, and worry about what Hunter would say.

I read Gabe’s lips rather than heard him. “We never discussed what kind of writing was acceptable for this class.”

The students hushed themselves as if he’d stood up and banged his fist on the table, even though he’d spoken in his usual soft voice, like he was out having coffee with one of us and telling us about catching a wave in the Pacific. Now there was a little murmur of question:
What had Gabe said? Had he said something about Erin’s kind of writing?
But nobody wanted to be the one to admit they hadn’t been paying attention. After all, it was only our second class.

“To Erin’s point,” Gabe said, “there is no genre specified. I hope each of you will feel free to explore the kinds of stories that move you, and to hone your craft for your own purposes. To that end,” he turned to Manohar, “our critiques of each other’s work need to be constructive.” He turned to me, and I tried not to shrink back. “And we need to respond to those critiques in a manner that leaves the floor open to honest communication.”

The air was thick with tension, all eyes on me. If this had been high school, I would have sat there in silence and mortification.

But you know what? One year of age—I won’t say maturity, considering how I’d just lost my temper, but at least age—had changed me. And the publishing internship was a carrot held just beyond my lips, motivating me. Gabe had been taking notes the whole time Manohar and I argued. I should have been more careful about what I said in front of him. I had written a story about Hunter and I didn’t know whether he was going to blow my cover.

So I forced a smile and said, “Gabe, I’m truly sorry. I see now how I sounded, and I promise I’ll do better next time. It’s hard to be one of the first!”

He nodded, and Summer and some of the other girls laughed nervously. Manohar sneered down at my story.

I wrote
INTERNSHIP
in block letters in my notebook, as a reminder.

“Brian?” Gabe prompted. “What did you think of Erin’s story?”

“I enjoyed it,” Brian said. “That was some stable boy.”

I swallowed and did not look at Hunter and doodled curlicues around
INTERNSHIP
.

The girl next to Brian said the first line of my story was the funniest thing she’d ever read. Beside her sat Kyle, the guy who’d written about the wolf. He said my first line ruined my whole story for him. The next two people made similarly contradictory and therefore useless comments, and then came Hunter.

But Gabe skipped right over Hunter to give him more time to read, and asked for commentary from Isabelle.

The remaining girls said they liked my story. The remaining guys did not. I didn’t care anymore. My debut as a New York author was ruined already. Now I was only concerned with whether they’d noticed that the stable boy I’d written about was actually the stable boy sitting at the end of this very table. An uncanny likeness, they would say! An amazingly accurate description! Obviously written by someone infatuated with Hunter Allen!

But slowly I realized that nobody would figure out this story was about him. Nobody would suspect me of putting a character in my story who, one class period later, randomly showed up in the class. They wouldn’t even know we knew each other.

Unless he told them.

Summer took her turn, rushing to my defense with such enthusiasm that it was clear she was speaking as my roommate, not as a fellow writer. “Oh, and one more thing.” She looked straight at Manohar. “Nipple!”

The class laughed. I grinned at Summer and she beamed back at me. At that moment I loved her very much and almost forgave her for the brouhaha over my clothes earlier.

“Hunter, what did you think?” Gabe asked.

Everyone in the room looked at Hunter expectantly.

I looked down.

“Oh, I shouldn’t comment,” Hunter said, one side of his mouth curved up in a charming smile and one dimple showing.

I did not actually see this because I was staring down at David thumbing Rebecca’s nipple. I did not have to see Hunter’s charming smile to know it was there.

He went on, “I haven’t had a chance to read it closely enough.”

“You commented on the first two stories,” Brian pointed out.

“They were shorter,” Hunter said.

“This was a long story,” Isabelle affirmed. “I nearly had a heart attack when I saw it in the library. It’s thirteen pages long. For me, writing five is like pulling teeth.”

Through the general murmur of approval that ensued about the wondrous length of “Almost a Lady,” Manohar spoke to me across the table. “Congratulations. You have written a very long story.”

I shot him the bird.

Gabe grabbed my hand, lowered it gently to the table, and patted it twice without looking at me. He cleared his throat. The class quieted, and he prompted again, “Hunter?”

Hunter had been talking to Isabelle. Now he glanced up at Gabe, then turned his shoulders deliberately to me and met my gaze. He smiled.

I had known Hunter for a long time. This wasn’t his charming devil-may-care smile. It was tight and false.

He would never deliberately show it, but I suspected he was furious with me.

“Erin,” he said, “I am from Long Island, but I’ve spent some time around Churchill Downs, in Louisville, and I’ve been to parties with horse people. You’ve captured that experience perfectly.”

Isabelle said, “Her story’s set in the eighteen hundreds.”

Hunter nodded, eyes still on me. “The parties haven’t changed.”

“All right, Erin,” Gabe murmured. “It’s finally your turn to talk.”

I opened my lips. I’d had so much to say in defense of my story thirty seconds before. But I could not think of a single retort with Hunter watching me through those clear blue eyes, wearing that tight smile. He had never been to a race party as far as I knew. The closest he’d come was the night of the Derby last May, when he whistled to me from the yard and handed me my music player and earbuds, which I’d left on the shelf in the stable office. Now he was reminding me that my horse farm was his now. My horses, my house, my parties. Over the summer he’d probably thrown the parties himself.

I looked down and drew fireworks exploding out of internship. “I said everything I wanted to say when I spoke out of turn.”

“You’re sure?” Gabe asked me. “Going once, going twice …”

I bit my lip and nodded.

“It’s a big deal to go first,” Gabe addressed the whole table, “and I think all these authors deserve a round of applause.”

There was applause, and cheering, and somebody shouted, “Nipple!”

“Write hard,” Gabe said, “and I’ll see you Thursday.”

Chair legs raked back on the hardwood floor. Everyone burst into the conversations they’d been too repressed to have with each other on their way into class—before Hunter had arrived to loosen them up. Amid this bustle of leaving, Gabe inhaled deeply through his nose, portly chest expanding. He fished a tie-dyed bandanna out of his pocket and touched it to his forehead.

“Aw”—I was about to say “Gabe” but stopped myself since I still wasn’t sure what to call him—“is that because of me? I’m very sorry to make you mop your brow.”

He chuckled. “The first critique session is always the hardest. And some semesters are harder than others. I’ll make it. Don’t worry about me.” He was still smiling as he slid me his copy of “Almost a Lady,” rolled out of his chair, and left the room. But I wondered: did he mean I should be worried instead about myself, my writing, my grade, my career?

As people passed behind me to escape the room, they dropped their copies of my story in front of me. Normally I would have paged through them immediately to read the comments, even though I’d be late for work. But I needed to speak with Hunter. And he was flirting with Isabelle. I strained to hear them over the babble of other voices.

“Calculus is kicking my ass,” he told her.

“Going too fast for you?” she teased him.

“No, it looks vaguely familiar from high school. This TA, I don’t know where he’s from, but …”

“He has a very interesting accent in English?”

“Was he speaking English? I honestly do not know.”

Isabelle laughed. “Complain. He shouldn’t have been put in front of a class if his students can’t understand him.”

“I don’t want to be the one who strips this guy of his fellowship.”

Yeah, right, play the empathy card. Hunter was good at making people think he cared, until he stabbed them in the back.

“Get one of those computer programs that teaches you a foreign language,” Isabelle suggested.

“That would be a really good idea if I knew what language he was speaking.”

Hunter was funny. This was a funny conversation I should have been having with him instead of this bitch, and who did she think she was?

Standing, I forced the copies of “Almost a Lady” into my book bag along with my thirty-pound calculus book and my fifty-pound book for early American literature survey (not my favorite period, lots of puritanical preaching about virtue, bleh!) and my laptop. Manohar was standing next to his chair, too, watching me and still smirking at me.

I dropped my book bag in my chair and leaned across the table so swiftly that he stepped back. I managed not to laugh that I’d spooked him. I extended my hand. “No hard feelings,” I told him. “I don’t agree with your critique, but I do appreciate it.”

I think he took my hand only because he was so surprised. “No problem,” he said. Then he seemed to recover, and he grasped my hand hard enough to hurt. “I’m sorry if I was out of line.”

I pulled my hand out of his grip. “Don’t be. I carry a grudge. If you write some macho ultraviolent action-adventure crap for your first story, your ass is mine.”

I had thought Summer was deep in discussion with the guy next to her, but when I said this she shrieked with laughter, then giggled a quiet “Sorry” and turned back to the other guy.

“Game on, Kentucky,” Manohar told me. Grinning as if he really did look forward to the game (that made one of us), he shrugged one strap of his backpack over his shoulder and walked out.

Isabelle had finally left Hunter’s side. I hefted my bulging book bag and walked the length of the table. Hunter sat in his mighty chair like the head of the table rather than the foot, writing on his copy of my story. As I approached, he looked up and offered it to me. He didn’t smile as he said, “Hullo, Miss Blackwell.”

Taking the story from him, I noticed for the first time that his five-o’clock stubble glinted golden on his hard chin. I croaked, “Hullo, Hunter.”

He smiled then, the charismatic smile I recognized from school. “Thanks for not blowing my cover about being from Louisville. I told my roommates I’m from Long Island.”

“Why?” I asked.
’Cause that is kind of strange, considering that you have stolen my Louisville horse farm,
I wanted to add. I traced the
S
from
INTERNSHIP
with my fingertip on the thigh of my jeans and kept my mouth shut.

“Because people here think that the South is stupid,” he said. “Besides, I really am from Long Island.”

I frowned at him and turned around to make sure everyone else in the room had left. Only Summer waited for me outside the door, leaning against the frame and talking to Brian. I faced Hunter again and said softly, “You moved from Long Island to Kentucky before the seventh grade.”

“I never felt like I belonged there.”

Until now. There was so much irony in the unspoken words between us. Somehow I had to step past it and connect with him.

“I overheard you complaining about your calculus instructor,” I said. “As long as you’re rearranging your schedule, maybe you could transfer into my class. I have to go to work now, so I can’t stay and tell you about it—”

This was a flimsy excuse. It would have taken me an additional thirty seconds to give him my instructor’s name and class time.

“—but I take a break at nine. If you want to come by, I’d be glad to talk with you. I’m at the coffee shop on the corner of—”

He nodded. “I know the one. I’ve seen you there. I’ll come by at nine.”

He’d seen me there? I hadn’t seen him since graduation night, when he and my grandmother delivered the blow.

I wanted so badly to slap him. Or kiss him. But there was no physical show of the emotion passing between us, layer upon layer, the upper strata putting the lower ones under enormous pressure. I simply turned and left the classroom, “Almost a Lady” flopping about in front of me.

But I would need to mine those layers when I met him alone. I had to shut him up before he said anything about me and my stable boy to Gabe. I could not let Hunter Allen ruin my life.

Again.

3

“I
can’t believe you!” Summer exclaimed.

“Really?” I gave her a wary glance as I passed her in the hallway outside the classroom. I hoped she would follow me down the stairs. Brian had disappeared, but Hunter, sitting at the foot of the table, could still hear us.

“Yes, really!” She followed me down the stairs. “You are an attack dog. I’ve seen you in action. I’ll never forget how you barked at that cabdriver the other day.”

“You have to bark at cabdrivers or they’ll take advantage of you.” Actually, I had never talked to a cabdriver before, because I’d never had the money to take a cab. But right after I’d met Summer four days ago, I’d agreed to splurge and share a cab to MoMA with her, and ended up arguing with the cabbie about the expensive fare. Ever since, I had wished for that money back.

“But we start discussing your story and you melt down?” Summer asked. We’d reached the bottom of the staircase, and she pushed through the door ahead of me, onto the street. The twilight surprised me—as always. In Kentucky at this time, an hour of daylight would have remained, gently retreating across the grassy hills, into the trees at the edge of the western pasture. Here the five-story buildings created an artificial canyon, walls blocking out the sun. Night came early.

Summer didn’t seem to notice. She was on me. “I had to come to your defense. Gabe finally gave you a chance to talk and you didn’t say a thing. If I didn’t know you, I’d say that at one point, that ass Manohar made you cry! You must have had something in your eye.”

“Must have.” I glanced back at the entrance to the building to make sure Hunter hadn’t followed us. Then I pointed her down the sidewalk in the direction of the coffee shop. My five minutes of damage control with Hunter had already made me late. There was no leeway in my schedule.

“I don’t want you to get discouraged because of somebody like him,” she insisted. I was walking fast, and she had to skip to keep up with me. People hurrying home from work sidestepped us and watched the commotion out of the corners of their eyes as they passed us. “You’re going to finish writing the whole novel, right?”

“No.”

“Why not?” she insisted. “I loved that story! All the girls in the class did, not that you listened to their comments. After Manohar was so harsh, you were in outer space. You only heard the negative comments. I was watching you. Your ears pricked up when Wolf-boy Kyle said he hated your first line. But a lot of us enjoyed your story. Why don’t you finish the novel and try to get it published? Forget Manohar.”

“The market for historical romances is tighter than it used to be.”

She shrugged. “I’m sure they still publish brand-new authors.”

“Right, if those authors play by the rules. For a new writer trying to break in, that’s very important. ‘Almost a Lady’ doesn’t follow the rules.”

“What’s the matter with it?” She sounded genuinely curious, but as she asked, she twisted her neck to look up at the tops of the buildings. Nothing said
Southern
like her awe, and I hoped she got over it before she made me look like a hick by association.

“A historical heroine needs to be all innocent and virtuous and shit,” I told her. “She can’t just want some like Rebecca. And my hero, David, is completely wrong. A historical hero can’t be the same age as the heroine. He’s a lot older. He is respected in the community—or he
would
be respected, if only he had not been unjustly suspected of murder.”

“What?” Summer was listening now.

“That’s how these stories go,” I said. “But the historical hero will be cleared of the murder in the course of the story. Maybe the heroine will help him with that—at her peril! And the historical hero has tons of money. He might have inherited a title, too, because historicals are generally set in England in the eighteen hundreds. Setting it in America is asking for a rejection. So is making the hero a stable boy.”

“Then why’d you write it that way? I thought you were trying to get a novel published.”

“I wrote the story that’s been in my head.” I took a deep breath and finished with, “Hunter is the stable boy.”

“Hold that thought. I saw a rat.” She darted into the side street we were passing, toward a Dumpster. “My first New York rat!” she called to me over her shoulder. “He’s so cute!”

“Watch out,” I called back. “They jump.”

The adorable varmint must have jumped at her by then because she came screaming out of the street. She reached up and shook me by both shoulders. “Why didn’t you warn me?”

“Because you were chasing a rat, telling me how cute it was.”

She let my shoulders go but continued to scowl up at me. “Hunter is the stable boy? I thought David was the stable boy.”

At the mention of Hunter, New York City sharpened for me: The blue street tattooed with faded yellow lines. A building of brown brick on one side of the street and another of gray marble on the other. Small trees planted in the sidewalk, leaves already blushing red in mid-September. A shop window reflecting my hair, a blur of orange in the midst of the city. I had thought my summer here had been the experience of a lifetime, but the mere thought of Hunter intensified it—because he had almost taken it away from me. And he could take it away now.

“Come on,” I called to Summer. “I’m going to be late.” When she trotted beside me again, three steps to my two, I explained, “David is the stable boy in my story. He is modeled on Hunter, from class. Hunter of the piercing blue eyes and dreamy good looks and the invisible horse.”

“Oh, Hunter!” She slapped both hands over her mouth, then moved them to gasp, “How did this happen? You met him in the dorm and based this character on him, thinking he would never read it because he wasn’t in our class? How mortifying!”

“Not exactly,” I muttered. “I mean, yes, it’s mortifying, but I knew him before.”

She squinted up at me. “From your summer here?”

We’d come to the edge of the park, where two police horses, a chestnut and a gray, were tied several lengths apart. While they waited, they whinnied to each other to reassure themselves that they weren’t alone in this strange city.

I felt a pang, and a sudden drive to touch a horse, to run my fingers across a tough coat. I would get arrested.

I turned away from the horses and swallowed. “No, from home.”

“In Kentucky?” she shrieked. “But when he introduced himself in class, he said he’s from here. Long Island!”

I nodded. “His dad used to work with the horses out at Belmont. That’s why my grandmother hired his dad in the first place. He and Hunter moved to our farm when Hunter and I were in middle school.”

“You mean, they moved to your town and worked on your farm? No, you mean they actually moved to your farm, don’t you? Oh my God.”

“Well, we have small houses for the stable hands, and it was just the two of them. Most families wouldn’t want to live on the farm, but they did.”

“You have small houses for the stable hands,” she repeated in disbelief.

“Hunter and I were friends at first, and then our parents had a falling-out.” I shook my head to keep from dwelling on that awful night. “He and I avoided each other for the rest of the summer. And when school started in the fall, somebody figured out that his dad worked for my grandmother, and that Hunter helped out at the farm, too, sometimes, and everybody started calling him … wait for it …”

“Stable boy,” Summer intoned. Then she grabbed my arm. “I was right! You’re Rebecca from your story! You’re loaded!”

“Was loaded,” I murmured.

“But Hunter’s loaded, too,” Summer insisted. “He was wearing a Rolex.”

“I noticed. That was a nice touch on my grandmother’s part. What happened was—”

She looked at me as she stepped forward. I saw movement beyond her shoulders. In a flash I threw my arm in front of her just before she walked off the curb and into the path of a taxi.

“Hey,” she complained. Then she saw the taxi. Her eyes widened. “Whoa.”

I put my hand to my heart and breathed through my nose to calm the adrenaline rush. “Be more alert until you’re used to walking around the city,” I scolded her. “Accidents happen.”

“Everybody at my high school talked about a girl who was newspaper editor there a long time ago,” Summer exclaimed. “She went to New York City on scholarship and got killed in a crosswalk by a taxi her first day. I was almost that girl!”

“My high school told the same story,” I assured her. “It’s an urban myth designed to scare you and keep you at home. Just look both ways before crossing the street, okay?”

She blinked at the traffic whizzing in front of us until the light changed and we stepped into the crosswalk. “What happened was …,” she prompted me.

I glanced up the street again, paranoid now about speeding taxis. We were crossing Fifth Avenue. The five-story town houses grew into elegant twenty-story hotels here, carved stonework on every corner of the buildings. Ten blocks up, the Empire State Building, already glowing white against the pink sky, peeked around the shoulders of the smaller buildings in front of it.

I stepped up on the opposite curb. “When my grandmother was our age, she earned her business degree here in New York so she could run her family’s horse farm. She wanted me to do the same and take over someday.”

“I thought you’re majoring in English,” Summer protested.

“I am. A few days before high school graduation, I admitted to her that I did want to come to college here, but I would not major in business. I would major in English so I could write romance novels.”

“And she freaked?” Summer asked.

“My grandmother does not freak.” I felt my nostrils flare as I thought of her. “She waited until graduation night, when I’d come home to change between the ceremony and the parties. She called me into her office. Hunter was already there. She informed me that she didn’t need me anyway. Since blood clearly was not thicker than water, she would give Hunter my college money. He would major in business here, then run the horse farm. And when she dies, he will inherit the horse farm for his loyalty.”

“What!” Summer squealed. But she had to step behind me, single file. We’d reached a portion of the sidewalk with scaffolding overhead so the construction workers in the building didn’t brain pedestrians with falling cement blocks.

I kept talking over my shoulder as I entered the passageway packed with people forming two lanes of traffic. “The worst part is, I should have seen it coming. Our high school classmates would mention going to the University of Louisville or the University of Kentucky. Hunter would always shake his head and say, ‘I am getting out of here.’”

The passageway narrowed to one lane. A huge puddle from last night’s rain blocked half the width of the sidewalk, cigarette butts and a fortune cookie wrapper floating at the edge like timid waders in a cold ocean. “So it doesn’t make sense to me that he would accept my grandmother’s offer to take over the farm,” I said as I pushed my way through the crowd around the puddle. “Yes, he’ll get a free education, and he’s getting out of Kentucky for a few years. But then he’ll have to go back. For the rest of his life. Knowing how he feels about Kentucky, I’m astounded he would agree to this plan. Even for money. Even for her.”

It had been a while since Summer had interrupted me, which was unusual. Standing firm against people shoving me. I looked back and saw she was stuck on the other side of the puddle, politely waiting for a break in the oncoming pedestrians.

“Go ahead,” the sari-clad woman behind Summer scolded her in a singsong accent, “else we’ll be here all day.”

I stepped back into the current of the crowd, let it sweep me back to Summer, and grabbed her by the wrist. I pulled her roughly against the current, ignoring the mean looks of other pedestrians. My book bag socked one man in the shoulder and he told me sharply to watch it. I held fast to Summer’s hand and dragged her out from under the scaffolding. We popped into the open twilight. She sighed with relief. I suppressed my own sigh.

“How long did it take you to change from a nice, normal Southerner to a hardened New Yorker?” she demanded.

“A couple of hours, but I was living in a tiny two-bedroom apartment in Hell’s Kitchen with five roommates.” I glanced at my own cheap watch—I’d left my Rolex in my jewelry box at my grandmother’s house. I was way late for work. I increased my stride, and Summer practically ran beside me.

“During the summer, I worked two jobs and socked away money. I was too busy to dwell on what my grandmother and Hunter did. But in the past week, I’ve started obsessing about Hunter. I knew he was here. I suspected he was in the honors program and lived in our honors dorm. Maybe I even entertained a little fantasy that we could hook up, which would somehow solve all our problems rather than making them worse. I wrote the story to indulge that fantasy. I had no idea he was going to show up in the class.”

Though the coffee shop was in sight now, I stopped on the sidewalk and turned to Summer in exasperation, remembering what she’d done. “I tried to keep him out of the class, Miss ‘Can I Have Erin’s Vote’! We’ve got to develop a better silent language if we’re going to be friends. When I groan like I’m dying, that means, ‘Don’t let the hunk into the creative-writing class. My story is about him.’”

Summer winced. “I’m sorry. And you’re sorry. You can apologize to him.”

“I don’t care about him,” I lied. “I care about winning the publishing internship I told you about.”

“Oh, no!” She slapped her hands over her mouth. She knew how badly I needed that internship.

“I don’t want Hunter to tell Gabe he is the stable boy,” I explained, “because then Gabe will think I’m not serious about this creative-writing class. All Hunter has to do is open his mouth and he will ruin every chance I ever had at that job!”

“Don’t cry in the street,” she whispered, stepping close to me. “They say it attracts muggers.”

That’s when I realized my voice had escalated into a hysterical wail that echoed against the glass storefronts. Businesspeople never even glanced at me as they hurried past. I looked all around us and made sure Hunter was not among them. He was not.