Love Story(15)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“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.

He released my hand and nodded toward my chair. “Sit down another sec. Your grandmother wanted me to bring you something you left at home.” He reached around for his backpack.

Obediently I collapsed into my chair because my legs felt weak, and because I really did need him on my side. But I said quickly, “I don’t want it.”

He broke into a playboy grin, as if we were flirting instead of dancing around a sensitive topic. “How do you know you don’t want it? You haven’t even seen what it is.”

“Whatever it is, I left it on purpose.”

He pulled it from his backpack and placed it on the table between us. My music player and earbuds.

The last time he’d handed me my music player, at my grandmother’s Derby party last May, he’d saved me from a convo with Whitfield Farrell, a twenty-one-year-old college dropout who would inherit the famous farm next door. Whitfield was widely known for his drunken exploits at the horse parties, and widely rumored to want in my pants. My grandmother had ordered me to be nice to him because she did business with his dad.

So Whitfield put his hand on my ass. I was not far from slapping him and then taking whatever punishment my grandmother dished out, when Hunter tapped on the window and held up my music player, which I’d left in the barn. When he saw I couldn’t get away from Whitfield, he came inside the mansion. Made a big commotion of it, too, stomping in his stable boots across the antique Persian rug. Whitfield wandered away to find another bourbon. Hunter watched him go, then turned to me. And he flirted with me like he would flirt with any girl at school until my grandmother stalked up and asked him in an angry whisper what the hell he thought he was doing inside her house.

Thing was, this had seemed completely in character for Hunter. He was the charmer, the savior, the leader, every girl’s hero. When the neighborhood boor targeted a girl for the evening, of course Hunter would deftly intervene, even against the boss lady’s wishes.

For anyone else. Not for me. For years, Hunter and I had kept our distance. When he stepped in, I started thinking about him differently. Thinking hard about him. Casting him not as everybody else’s hero but as my own. The prom had passed already, but graduation was coming up. We were headed for the same college. Because of our past together, we would have a lot to work through, but maybe college was our time to do it.

And then he stole my life.

I managed a tiny smile for the several-months-older, quite-a-bit-drunker Hunter, as if the music player represented a long-ago period of my childhood rather than last May. “I definitely left that in Kentucky on purpose,” I said. “It’ll do me no good here. I can’t afford new songs.”

His golden jaw dropped. He rolled his eyes. He must be plastered. “Songs aren’t that expensive,” he said.

“Every little bit helps,” I said, “when I’m trying to pay the rent and experience New York.”

He talked right over “New York” as if he hadn’t heard me. “You love your music.”

“I did when I was trying to shut everything out. Now I’m trying to let everything in. I want to hear New York rather than some song I downloaded. I want to smell New York. Well—New York smells like garbage. Vietnamese garbage, Mexican garbage, Lithuanian garbage, Nigerian garbage, all within a three-block walk. Even the stench is part of the experience. I want to pay attention.”

Leaning forward, he covered my hand and the music player and earbuds on the table with both his big hands.

My face flushed hot like he had thrown his latte into it.

“You don’t want your music player because your grandmother gave it to you,” he said. “Admit it.”

I tried to pull my hand out from under his. The corner of the music player dug into my finger. I stood up.

“Sit down.” He sounded authoritative, and suddenly very sober. He squeezed my hand on the table. “We’re not done.”

“Yes, we are.” I loosened my hand from his and placed it on his shoulder. “Some of us work for a living.” I turned for the counter.

Before I could slip my hand away, he grasped it again. “Give me your new cell phone number.”

I laughed shortly at the irony: dreamy Hunter asking for my number, when I couldn’t give it to him anyway. “I don’t have a cell phone.”

He closed his eyes and kept them closed for several seconds, as if hoping that when he opened them again, my second head would have disappeared. In the light of two mismatched lamps on nearby tables, each of his blond lashes cast two long shadows down his tanned cheeks. He opened his eyes. “How can you not have a cell phone?”

“Too expensive.”

Shaking his head, he pulled my hand until it lay flat on the table in front of him. He drew a pen out of his pocket and clicked it open. “Here’s my number, then. If you ever need me, find a phone and call me.”

I was pulling hard all this time. Despite my best efforts, by the time he stopped talking he’d already written hunter across my palm, in case I forgot whose phone number was written there, and his area code.

“Hunter.” I looked around the coffee shop, afraid of making a scene at work, but truly not wanting Hunter’s number tattooed on my hand. “Hunter, this may be hard for you to understand when you are on the stealing end of the inheritance rather than the victim end. If I needed help, you are the last person on Earth I would call.” I gave my hand one last, hard jerk and reeled back a couple of steps. His pen had left his entire phone number on my palm, plus a line down my middle finger and off the tip.