Love Story(22)
Author: Jennifer Echols

At least, that’s what I hoped. Each night during my fifteen-minute break at the coffee shop, I looked around at the customers, picked two of them to put together, and brainstormed a happy ending for them. Usually they were students because the coffee shop was so close to campus. They had no real problems. Their parents were paying their way through college. The price of one of their nightly mochas could have kept me in peanut butter crackers for two weeks. Any of these young men and women could be perfect for each other. They just didn’t know it, and they would never introduce themselves to each other except in a file on my laptop.

But sometimes the customers were young professionals. Guys with the latest haircut, chicks with unruly but strangely flattering hair and no makeup, all wearing the most expensive off-the-rack suits they could afford. I would be this girl eventually. If I played my cards right and won the publishing internship, I could be this girl in January. She loved her job and was set for life. She could hardly believe her luck when the hot guy from the adult nonfiction department at her publishing house walked over to her table and asked to sit down.

I treasured this fifteen minutes a day of writing. Lived for it. So, much as I loved Summer, I felt a twinge of annoyance when she bounced into the coffee shop during my break almost a week after the beach party. More trouble must have bubbled up between her and Manohar. The coffee shop was out of her way. “Hey!” I called. “What’s up?”

She slid into the chair across from me. “I was just coming back from the library.”

“Headed to the dorm? This is not on your route.”

“Yeah. I wanted to ask you something.” She suppressed a smile. “Have you read the stories for creative-writing class tomorrow?”

I pointed at her. “No! I’ve needed to do that, but I got behind in my reading, and when I get off work I have to study for a calculus test tomorrow. I’m going to be down to the wire”—I winced at the unintentional horse racing metaphor—“reading stories right up until class. Why?”

“Hunter’s story is about you.”

“What do you mean, his story is about me?” I asked loudly enough that my boss peeked through the doorway from the back and put his fists on his hips.

“Uh-oh,” Summer whispered. “I’d better go before I get you in trouble.”

Too late. But I couldn’t let her go yet. My heart was beating so hard, I might actually die of curiosity. “Is there a redhead in Hunter’s story?”

“No, but—”

“Okay, thanks for the heads-up. I’ll read it tomorrow.” I closed my laptop, dismissing her, and went back to work. As I made a cappuccino for my next victim, my heart slowed down. I wasn’t in Hunter’s story. This was more of Summer’s wishful thinking, mentally writing a story of her own.

That idea got me through my night at work, hours of studying, and a reasonably successful calculus test the next morning even though Hunter sat across the room. But an hour before creative-writing class, alone in the library, absorbed in Hunter’s literally and figuratively steamy story, I wasn’t so sure.

6

Blurred Vision

by Hunter Allen

His friends created a “beach party” in the men’s bathroom on their floor of the dorm by turning on all the showers full force. They said the dorm had a huge boiler that never ran out of hot water, like any converted brownstone in New York City. This seemed strange to him because he was from horse country, where fences were made of limestone boulders that workers had dug up from the ground in 1900, where crops were dried in barns painted black to take best advantage of the warm sun, where the grass was green year-round because of the sun and the rain and the nourishing limestone breaking down deep under the ground. Humans and the elements lived in harmony in the country. He had no understanding of the city, where the sheer number of humans overwhelmed the elements completely, yet the boiler never ran out of hot water.

“This feels so good,” said the girl under his hands. His friend tending bar had reported that the girl had downed three strawberry daiquiris already. She was in possession of a fourth, but she had balanced it on the soap dish while she stepped into the hot shower, soaking her bathing suit. She looked up at him through half-closed eyes. He watched droplets from the shower ricochet off the mildewed walls and splash into the clear plastic cup, forming a layer of hot water on top, a second layer of melted strawberry-tinged slush underneath. It no longer looked appetizing, but she’d drunk enough for his purposes anyway.

“It does feel good.” He slid his hand around her, toward her latissimus dorsi. He expected this move to go smoothly, but his skin jerked against hers with wet tension. He’d hardly started and he needed lube already.

His friends would laugh at him for thinking this. All men were supposed to come to college experienced. They should know how to massage a girl in the shower in front of half the dorm and act suave about it. They should know how to get this girl into bed shortly afterward and make her think it was a good idea.

He would never have admitted this to his friends or anyone else, but he was not experienced. And the main reason he hadn’t gotten around in high school had just walked through the bathroom door directly behind him.

He could not see her with his back turned. He could not hear her husky voice. But he could hear the giggles of her ubiquitous friend. And he watched the mist from the showers settle in layers like the ice and artificial flavoring in the cup on the soap dish set into the wall. The fog from the showers should have swirled with turbulence when she and her friend opened the bathroom door. Instead it calmed and quieted, just as the whole world slowed to a canter, a walk, a halt with its ears pricked up when she came near.

Her stare burned a hole between his shoulder blades. She could stare all she wanted but he would not turn around. Never again. She’d made it clear since they were twelve that he was not good enough for her. If she changed her mind now just because he had his hand on another girl’s latissimus dorsi in a public shower, she could eat her heart out.

Setting his chin down on the girl’s shoulder, he watched his own index finger blaze a silvery path through the droplets of water clinging to her back. His fingertip reached her spine and he traced small circles there, a taste of what he would do to other parts of her later. He wondered whether she was already too numb to feel his touch and understand the innuendo.

Eyes still half closed, she lifted her chin and parted her lips for a kiss.

Instead of kissing her, he pressed his finger into her fossae lumbales laterales, the indentations in the small of her back, and stopped. She was a beautiful girl, no doubt, and he did know her name. The situation had not quite reached that level of cliché. But he did not know what her major was, or what she planned to do for a career, or what city in Jersey she was from. His friends would make fun of him if they found out this bothered him.