Love Story(19)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“I’m afraid so.” Actually, I didn’t know. That’s how he’d developed the muscles in the first place, but surely my grandmother hadn’t made him work for his keep all summer long. He should have grown soft and faded to white in the electric lamplight of her expensively stylish office. He hadn’t.

“Do you know what the scar is from?” Summer asked, touching her side at the approximate location of Hunter’s long white scar. Now he would know we were talking about him—if he looked over at us. This didn’t seem likely. The blonde gazed up into his eyes and tilted her head, her long hair shifting damply over her bare shoulder.

“Surgery,” I said. “He broke some ribs. A horse fell on him.”

“What?” Summer exclaimed. “When?”

I shrugged. “Eighth grade?”

“Oh, no!” she cried. “He was so young! Did you visit him in the hospital and sit by his bedside? How sweet!” Hunter was going to hear her even over the throbbing music.

“Shhh,” I said. “No, we weren’t speaking.”

“Erin!” she protested. “Why not?”

Because only a year had passed since my mother died. I had been terrified for him, but if I had visited him, I wouldn’t have known what to say.

I nodded at the bar in front of the urinals. “Let’s get a drink.” I set off across the slippery floor without waiting for her answer and asked the upperclassman for a lime slush with no vodka.

“All right,” she said when she’d caught up with me. “But there is way more to this stable-boy thing than you are telling me.” She ordered a mango daiquiri with plenty of rum.

I had thought a run-in with Manohar was my biggest fear. After glimpsing Hunter and the blonde again, the prospect of chatting with Manohar seemed downright welcoming. He and Brian lay on lounge chairs in the corner, wearing sunglasses. Summer bounced up to Manohar and unceremoniously told him to scoot over on his chair. That meant I could perch on the edge of Brian’s chair. Unfortunately, this meant that I faced Hunter again.

The blonde stood in the shower spray with her eyes closed, hot water splashing off her face and streaming into her hair and dashing onto the tile floor around her perfectly polished red toenails. As I watched, Hunter reached over and stroked his big hand from the crown of her head down her darkened wet hair, in the middle of the stream of water. Her hair must feel so soft and warm to him, almost like his own body, like nothing. How could he do something so intimate to her? He hardly knew her.

The room was crowded, and when a bare-chested or bikini-clad body passed in front of me and blocked my view, I realized I was staring. I turned my attention back to the conversation with Summer, Manohar, and Brian about the food in the dining hall—which I’d never eaten anyway because I’d begged a university financial counselor to let me off the too expensive meal plan. But the half-naked bodies would move on, and my foolish gaze would return to Hunter.

I could have wondered for the rest of the night whether paying attention to another girl was Hunter’s way of telling me he was interested in me instead. I was a romance writer. I spun scenarios the way I wanted them to go.

But that would drive me crazy. I could foresee a whole semester of acting like a seventh-grader, obsessing over whether Hunter liked me—or worse, a whole four years of college. If I was able to stay here that long.

Instead, I used a technique I’d developed to cope after my mother died, putting all that grief into a small box so the rest of my life was clear of it. Chin up, I watched Hunter watching the blonde, his hand sliding down her bare back. I said to myself, Hunter likes this girl and not me. I should not want Hunter anyway because he stole my farm and he is in cahoots with my grandmother. He has no interest in me romantically. I am still okay.

And then I turned away. There were plenty of other boys to talk to in the sauna, and some of them looked almost as good as Hunter in the blurring steam. For instance, Wolf-boy Kyle plopped down on the end of Manohar’s chair, next to Summer, already drunk enough that he didn’t notice Manohar’s stony expression behind his shades or the way Manohar slowly and pointedly gave up possession of the chair, drawing up his legs and turning so he sat on it like a bench and his bare thigh touched Summer’s.

Kyle leaned toward me across the space between the chairs. “You’re the one who wrote the horny story in creative writing. You have got some balls.”

Summer shoved him lightly. Manohar barked with laughter. Brian sat up, murmuring, “What’d he say?” The music throbbed and echoed against the tile walls. Holding a conversation involved lipreading as well as listening.

I cleared my throat. “For the sake of polite conversation, Kyle, I will choose to overlook that gender-confused mixed metaphor. And my story wasn’t horny.”

Everyone, even Summer, gaped at me.

I laughed. “Okay, I guess it was,” I acknowledged as Hunter sat down beside me on the end of Brian’s chair.

Hunter grinned at everybody but me. “Am I missing class?”

I wanted to ask him where his blond girl had gone off to. Now that I looked, she’d disappeared from the shower, and she wasn’t hanging behind him with her hand on his shoulder. But I should not have lusted after him anyway, and he probably had no idea that he was making my skin burn on the side where he sat. I struggled to focus on the group conversation, which had turned to Gabe.

“I’m a little disappointed in him,” Summer was saying. “My other roommate, Jřrdis—I think you’ve met her, Hunter—”

Hunter smiled at Summer. He didn’t glance at me.

“—she’s a sophomore, and she says her honors freshman writing teacher was a willowy lady in a cape who led the class on observation missions through the West Village during class time. I don’t think we’re going on any observation missions. Gabe sits and listens to us and sips his coffee.”

“If it’s really coffee,” Manohar said. “He’s so quiet, like he’s in an alcoholic fog.”

“Hear, hear.” Kyle clicked his plastic cup against mine in a toast.

My stomach turned over. I felt strangely defensive of Gabe. “I know it’s coffee,” I said. “It comes from the shop where I work. Sometimes he wanders in after class.”

“Speaking of which.” Hunter reached over, took my cup from my hand, and tasted the lime slush.

The Hunter I knew was not rude enough to drink from my cup uninvited. Was he flirting with me? My proper reaction would be outrage, especially after he’d had his hands all over that blonde. I tried not to stare at his wet lips.

“How do you know Gabe’s not spiking his coffee?” Brian asked, dragging me back to the conversation.

I didn’t know this. But it seemed a stretch to equate Gabe being quiet with Gabe being drunk on the job. And though these drunk boys were just shooting the shit behind their teacher’s back, I felt bad for Gabe since he wasn’t there to defend himself.