Love Story(10)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“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.”