Love Story(13)
Author: Jennifer Echols

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

He 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 Jřrdis 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.”