Love Story (5 page)

“I’m meeting him at the coffee shop at nine,” I told Summer, “to try to persuade him not to say anything to Gabe about it. But I’m not like you. People look at you and want to go over to your side and help you. People look at me and want to win whatever game they’re playing with me.”

I’d half-hoped I was wrong about this, but Summer did not deny it. “Only because you’re so strong-willed. You ask for trouble. It’s a good sign that Hunter agreed to meet you, at least. That means he can’t be too mad at you.”

“Yes, he can. Hunter can be furious with you, but he will still be polite.” Just like my grandmother.

I was late. I gave Summer a wave and called over my shoulder, “Thanks for listening!” as I dashed across the street and into the employee entrance of the shop. Dropping my book bag and ducking through the neck hole of my apron, I hollered, “I know! I’m late! I’m really sorry!” at the same time my boss shouted, “You’re late, Blackwell! We talked about this!”

Hastily I tied my apron strings behind my waist and headed up front to the counter. Minimum wage jobs were a dime a dozen in New York. I’d already held seven of them. But hunting for another would cost me time and money—money I couldn’t afford to lose, especially if Hunter decided to ruin my life.

Again.

I
STEAMED MILK AND POURED COFFEE
for hours before business slowed enough for me to take a peek at the copies of “Almost a Lady” burning a hole in the bottom of my book bag. I wasn’t supposed to do homework in the shop. My boss would probably lump reading comments about my story into that category, rather than the category in which this activity belonged: the
Someday When I Am a Best-selling Author You Can Take Your Soy Milk and Shove It
category.

But this time I didn’t care what he thought. He was in the back of the shop, and this was important.

First I read Gabe’s copy of my story because his comments mattered most. I closed my eyes for a moment and allowed myself to frame what I wanted him to say about my writing. I had used this technique a lot during the summer. If I pictured myself successful, I was more likely to find success. Every time I had done this over the summer, I had opened my eyes still unpublished, still poor, living with five dirty roommates, and about to get fired from my job walking dogs. Hope springs eternal, though, and before I read Gabe’s comments on my story, I envisioned him raving about my writing and suggesting that I apply for the publishing internship.
Oh, really?
I would say.
I hadn’t thought of that!

I opened my eyes and flipped through my story. Not one slash of bloodred pen stabbed my prose. Page after page was clean. He’d reserved his comments for the blank half of the last page, where he’d scribbled in soft pencil:

Erin,

I have read many stories for freshman honors creative-writing classes. Compared with the talents of past students, your grasp of dialogue and pacing is remarkable. You have a gift, and you have worked hard at honing it. I look forward to reading what you write for the rest of the semester and seeing how far you can push this.

As for Rebecca … I had difficulty connecting with her and caring about her because you never say what she wants out of life. It isn’t just the stable boy.

My cheeks tingled as if Gabe had slapped me. In the back of my mind I knew he’d given me a compliment of some sort in his first paragraph, but I registered only the insult in the second. Of course all Rebecca wanted was the stable boy. That was the whole point. What did Gabe want her to want? Was I supposed to make her a girl alone in the world, struggling to make ends meet in the big city? What a Theodore Dreiser–ass laugh-and-a-half that would be.

Feeling that I was being watched, I snapped my head up. I would have thought the shop was funky and adorable with its mismatched chairs, exposed brick walls, and art from students at my college, exactly the type of place I’d always wanted to work, except that my boss had yelled at me enough here in the past two weeks to ruin that effect.

The shop was empty. My coworker for the shift had disappeared into the back along with my boss, and not a single passerby wanted caffeine at this time of night.

I put my head back down. While my stomach was tied in a knot, I might as well read Hunter’s comments, too. I sifted through the stack of “Almost a Lady” until I came to his copy, which he’d commandeered from Isabelle and signed his name across like it was his, not hers, not mine. Paging through it, I saw there was a lot of writing in blue pen on a page near the end of the story, his scrawl almost illegible, like he’d already been in business for himself for forty-five years and if other people couldn’t read it, that was their problem. I kept flipping through and saw nothing else, even on the backs of the pages. I returned to the offending page. He’d circled “I saw a snake eat a rat once” and scribbled in the margin,

David would not say this. It’s gauche. He would not utter a sexually loaded metaphor at the risk of repulsing a lady. In fact, he would not risk his job, his father’s job, and this “country justice” you mention for a girl in the first place. He has other girls.

“What are you thinking so hard about?”

I jerked my head up at Hunter’s voice. He stood at the counter, blond hair in his blue eyes, watching me. I wondered how long he’d been there, and whether my lips had mouthed “ouch” as I read.

I shoved the stack of papers under the counter. He might have seen what I was reading and recognized his handwriting, though. So I admitted, “I was thinking I’m not going to enjoy freshman honors creative writing as much as I expected.”

“Give yourself a break and a little time,” he said in the soothing tone girls loved. “You’re invested in that class, and you had a hard first critique.”

What nice advice, and how innocuous. Clearly he was editing himself, just as he’d said David would have left out any sexual metaphors when easing a glove into Rebecca’s reticule.

I could have asked Hunter what variety of caffeine he wanted. I didn’t. I shooed him to a table at the window looking out on the neon-lit street, then whipped him up a latte. That’s the drink with the foamy head that a talented barista makes a design in, like a flower or a delicate palm frond. Note that I said
talented barista,
not
chick who had been working in a coffee shop for two weeks.
I had been shown how to make a heart. The bottom of it came out too rounded, and when I turned it upside down, it looked like an ass.

I poured a cup of black for myself, slid Hunter’s heart latte from the counter, and called to my boss that I was taking my break. I started from behind the counter and across the floor of the shop with full confidence. But as I neared Hunter, I realized that besides class, this was the first time I would be facing him since graduation night in Kentucky, when he stood behind my grandmother.

He turned from the window and focused those blue eyes on me. I slowed down. My heart thumped so loudly in my chest that I was afraid he would hear it if I sat down across from him. Note to self: I should not snag so much coffee while working in the coffee shop if the ticker went into palpitations every time a stable boy gave me a glance. As I sat down across from him with my cup of black, I pushed the latte across the table to him, ass cheeks down.

Only then did I realize the significance of bringing Hunter a latte with a heart drawn in the foam after I had just gotten it on with him fictionally. I should have attempted the palm frond.

It was too late then. But he didn’t notice the heart—at least, not right away. He looked out the window and tapped his toes under the table as if he was anxious to leave. This was so unlike him. He looked comfortable in every situation, whether he wanted to be there or not. The charm was always on.

A bell tinkled. Laughing students pushed through the coffee shop door and approached the counter. Hunter followed them with his eyes and then finally, painfully slowly, looked down at his mug. He frowned at it and turned it around on the saucer, trying to figure out what the picture was. “Oh!” he exclaimed. “How appropriate. You drew me a little heart.”

“It’s an ass.”

He tilted his head to one side to get a different view of it. He spun the mug around into its original position. “I see now.” He winked at me. “What you mean is, it was supposed to be a heart, but you realized too late that drawing me a heart in my latte would be embarrassing after I read your story.”

4

H
e had a strange way of pronouncing
coffee,
with a rounded
o.
He’d never had much of a New York accent, not even when he first moved to Kentucky. It only came out with certain words. I found myself dwelling on this to keep from running from the shop in mortification.

“No, the picture in your coffee is an ass,” I blurted in defense. “I also draw a mean spleen.”

His eyebrows moved up ever so slightly—one of the few ways I could tell I’d gotten to him. “Can you do a liver?” he asked. “With bile?”

This talk was not going as I had planned. To convince him to keep his mouth shut about the stable boy, I needed to be nice. I wished I could write internship on the surface of my coffee in foamed milk as a reminder.

I grinned at him with all the pretend friendliness I could muster. My cheeks hurt. “Give me another week of training. I’ve been working here for only two.”

His brows went down. “I thought you took a bus up here the day after graduation. My dad told me he drove you to the bus station.”

You mean the day after you stole my life,
I thought, grinning hard. Out loud I said, “I did. First I worked at a deli, but they were always trying to tell me what to do, which takes some getting used to.”

I meant it as a joke, but Hunter didn’t laugh. He just blinked at me across the rim of his coffee cup.

“Then I heard about a dog-walking job,” I hurried on. “That didn’t work out.”

“Why not?” Hunter asked. “You love animals.” He sounded as if he was trying to convince me.

“Dogs aren’t horses,” I told him. “But they
should
have bits in their mouths.” I held my hand in a claw beside my mouth to represent a horse’s bit.

Hunter looked blankly at my hand and then at me as if he did not get it.

I put my hand down. “I loved my job at the library, but I got fired when they caught me with weed.”

He gaped at me. “Erin Elizabeth Blackwell!”

I dismissed his concerns with one hand, nearly knocking over my coffee. “It wasn’t my weed. I had a lot of roommates and they were a mess. One of them hid his weed in my book bag and then forgot about it. Getting fired was the last straw. I was lucky I got fired, not arrested! I stomped all the way back to the apartment building, but as I stood on the sidewalk looking up at the window, scripting my dramatic exit from the apartment, I thought,
Where am I going to go?
”

I was back in the street that hot and lonely day in July, neck aching from looking up, eyes stinging from tears. Summer and Jørdis had complained for the past few days about living in the dorm, the crowding, the noise. I did not complain. Five dirty roommates had taught me the value of two clean ones.

“Are you sure you weren’t smoking just a little?” Hunter touched his thumb and finger to his lips, toking up.

“I don’t have time for that!”

His blue eyes opened wide. I realized that my hands were open wide, too, gesticulating in exasperation. I was still caught in that horrible July day. I needed to get my mind out of there. This conversation with Hunter was a completely different horrible situation, and I was not as desperate as I’d been back then. Not yet.

I cleared my throat. “Do you want the info on my section of calculus?”

“Yes,” he said quickly. “These sections are a crapshoot. If I’m not careful, I could transfer out of Eastern Europe, straight into Thailand.” He produced the latest-model cell phone, a giant step up from the bare-bones model he’d carried back home. As I gave him the name of the class instructor and the time, he entered the info with his thumbs. Several times his thumbs stumbled and the muscles of his strong jaw clenched, which was Hunter’s way of muttering “fuck” in frustration. Either he’d just gotten this phone and wasn’t used to it yet, or he was truly out of sorts.

“Why are you taking calculus anyway?” I asked. “Shouldn’t you be in business math, since you’re majoring in business?”

“Same reason you’re in calculus when you’re majoring in English.” He ended his data-entering session with an especially forceful hammering of his thumb, and dropped the phone into his backpack. “The university doesn’t want honors students taking easy A’s.”

“It might be an easy A, but business math would still make sense for a business major,” I reasoned.

He rotated his neck until it popped. “Why are you taking belly dancing? That makes no sense for an English major.”

I felt a flash of suspicion. How did he know I was taking belly dancing? But he’d also known where I worked before I told him. He must have seen me around in the past week without my seeing him. Clearly we’d been circling each other.

“I’m taking belly dancing because I can,” I said casually. “But if you’re taking calculus, you’re missing out on a business math class you need for your major. I looked at the catalog. I actually considered majoring in business like my grandmother wanted me to.”

This time he reacted. There was no other way to describe it. He seemed very surprised. And since Hunter never showed his surprise, I was more convinced than ever that there was something wrong with him. “You did?” he asked.

“Yes, for about five seconds.”

Recovering his cool, he took a slow sip of his latte, watching me over the rim of his cup as if waiting for a sign from me that I’d slipped in some poison. “Not that you would know this,” he said, setting his cup back down, “but running a horse farm is extremely complicated. It involves more than adding columns of numbers. I need to know the derivative of Horse of Course and the linear transformation of Boo-boo.”

I was sipping my own coffee, and I hoped the cup hid my face as I winced. Boo-boo was my horse.

Hunter leaned forward and looked straight at me. “This stable boy needs an education.”

If Hunter never showed surprise, he never, ever showed anger. And right now he seemed angry with me. Despite my stomach twisting into knots, I nonchalantly took another sip of coffee as if I were calmly considering him. I’d put this off long enough.

“Hunter,” I began, “I’m truly sorry about the stable-boy business in my story. I hope you didn’t take it the wrong way.”

He watched me steadily, his brows down in what I could have sworn was barely controlled outrage. I noticed for the first time that the rims of his eyes were red. “What way did you want me to take it, Erin?”

My fingertips hurt from pressing hard against my hot mug. “Maybe I had you on my mind because I assumed you might live in my dorm or register for some of my classes. But I never intended for you to read my story. I wasn’t baiting you, if that’s what you think.”

He continued to stare me down. Between my hot face and the coffee below my chin, I felt like I was sitting in a sauna.

Finally I asked, “Why are you angry with me?”

He sat back in his chair. “Why do you say I’m angry?”

“I can tell. For some reason, you’re slipping a little.”

He gave me a wry smile. “I’m angry because what you’ve done is insulting. There are only two possibilities. First, you knew I was going to be in that class, and you wrote that story deliberately to mess with me. But the story was dated several days ago and I just transferred classes today. I don’t see how you could have known.”

“I didn’t know,” I assured him. Boy, didn’t I.

“Which brings us to the other possibility. You wrote the first assignment of your creative-writing degree about me. Which means I was on your mind. Which means you liked me in middle school and high school, just like Rebecca carried a torch for David, through six years of those asshole kids at school calling me your stable boy, and you never said a thing.”

I could hardly believe what I was hearing. Not only was he angry, he was also admitting for the first time that he cared how people talked about him in relation to me. This scared me. When Hunter and I had started seventh grade, he was the new kid at my school. I could have made things easier on him and introduced him to my friends. I didn’t. I pretended he didn’t exist. That probably contributed to the asshole kids making fun of him when they found out he was living on the grounds at my farm.

And I had always felt guilty about that. But right after what happened between our parents, I could hardly look at him, much less maintain the friendship we’d started or pal around with him at school. I still couldn’t talk about it. My own anger welled up in defense.

“I don’t understand why you think there are only two possibilities for what is going on in my mind,” I seethed, “when we are not even friends. Sounds like an oversimplification on your part, to make yourself feel better about what you’re doing. Even you would feel bad about stealing the birthright of a girl who had a soul. But as long as I’m a shallow girl, starkly drawn in black and white, hell, steal away.”

Color crept into his cheeks underneath his tan. “I am not stealing anything. Not yet.”

“Oh, yeah?” I challenged him. “What time is it?”

Reflexively he glanced at his Rolex. Score!

I struck again. “Where’d you get the money for the outrageously expensive T-shirt you’re wearing? Did I drop it in Boo-boo’s stall before I left home? Because the last I checked, you were shopping across the river in Indiana, at the thrift store next to the mall, just to make sure you didn’t wear something to school that one of your friends had thrown out.” I had passed by the parking lot and seen the farm truck my grandmother let him drive to school. I knew what was going on.

I’d pushed him too far, and I held my breath for his reaction. I’d never seen him lose his cool completely. Now I was about to see it at my workplace and get fired from my job again.

His glare zeroed in on me. His jaw hardened—

And then he laughed. He threw back his head and let out rich, rumbly, boy chuckles as if I was the funniest girl in the world and I made him happy.

Hunter losing himself in laughter—this I had seen. But he used it strategically, as when the high school chemistry teacher or the president of the bank or the guidance counselor helping him apply to this college was the one making the joke.

I asked him suspiciously, “Have you been drinking?”

He beamed at me. “Drinking?”

“Did you go out drinking after the writing class?”

He shrugged. “Manohar and Brian and I had a few beers.”

I thought he’d had more than a few beers. “And when you had a few beers with Manohar and Brian,” oh God, I could just picture the guffawing, “what did you chat about?”

He maintained that same politely jovial expression, like he couldn’t quite catch what I was saying.

I gripped the edge of the table with both hands. “You didn’t chat about stable boys, did you?”

He grinned at the ceiling. “I might have mentioned it.”

“Hunter.” I gazed down at my mostly full mug of crude oil, stomach sinking. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Really?” His handsome face wore an ironic smirk. “I thought you wanted to talk to me about calculus.”

I felt like such a fool. I’d psyched myself up for this conversation, worried over it because it mattered so much, and he’d prepared by getting buzzed. I said gravely, “I think I have a shot at the publishing internship they award at the end of the semester. It would take a lot of pressure off me. But to get it, I need to do well in this class. I need Gabe to take me seriously. I don’t want him to find out there’s a real stable boy.”

Hunter picked up his mug. He tipped it ever so slightly toward him. I could still see the surface of his latte, and I watched him suck the heart into his mouth.

“You’re going into business with my grandmother,” I said. “I know you want to leave the stable boy behind. I’m trying to leave that whole life behind and get out of your way. The internship will help me do that.”

His tongue peeked out of his mouth. He licked a bit of the foam heart off his upper lip.

“I know you’re angry with me, Hunter, and I understand why. But I honestly never meant to offend you. My only real crime is to step aside and give you a stab at millions of dollars and a hundred and forty-two horses.”

“A hundred and forty-seven,” he corrected me. Of course they’d bought and sold and bred them over the summer. Because he was buzzed, he couldn’t resist reminding me that the farm went on without me.

He set his mug down. “I won’t tell Gabe.”

I ignored his patronizing tone. I was growing more desperate by the minute. “Don’t tell anyone else, either. It might get back to Gabe.”

The corner of his mouth quirked into a smile. “I won’t.”

“And ask Manohar and Brian not to spread it around.”

“I’ll ask. I can’t promise anything. You may owe them a favor.”

I stared dumbly at him. He was blatantly toying with me now. Hunter was very persuasive. He could have convinced Manohar and Brian of anything if he’d wanted to. He did not want to.

And what kind of favor could I possibly do for them? Unlike last spring when I could have gotten them admitted to the Churchill Downs clubhouse, I had no clout, no money, nothing left to offer.

Maybe that was Hunter’s point.

I’d done all I could do to save my internship, though. My boss was standing at the counter, reminding me that my break time was almost over. I raked back my chair. “Thank you, Hunter. And again, I’m really sorry about this. I know we both wish we could go back to enjoying New York and pretending each other didn’t exist.” I reached for my mug to take it back to the counter with me.

Before my fingers touched the ceramic, Hunter grabbed my hand and gazed up at me.

I hated how my body responded as if he were my boyfriend, not my classmate or even my sworn enemy. Maybe heat would have shot across my chest regardless because he was handsome, confident, a force of nature. But I was afraid I had done most of this damage to myself. In real life we hadn’t engaged in a friendly conversation since the summer before the seventh grade, save one sparkling night last May. But in my mind I’d already written
Almost a Lady,
the entire novel. In my mind, we’d slept together.

His hand still squeezed my hand. His thumb swept across my palm, and as I watched, the pupils dilated in his bright blue eyes. I wondered whether in his mind we’d slept together, too.