Love Story(25)
Author: Jennifer Echols

No use explaining this to Summer, though, because she would find a way to twist the theft of a hundred and forty-seven horses into a romantic overture. I shook my head. “Even if the girl were me, the guy in the story isn’t Hunter. The guy in the story knows all about anatomy.”

“Hunter is taking anatomy,” Summer said.

My scissors stopped their progress across the magazine page, and the metallic scrapings of Summer’s scissors and Jřrdis’s filled my ears like alarm bells. I forced myself to start cutting again before they noticed I’d stopped. “No, he isn’t,” I told Summer. “He’s a business major. Why would he take anatomy?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted, “but I saw his anatomy book on his bed when I went to Manohar’s room yesterday.”

“And why did you go to Manohar’s room yesterday?” Jřrdis asked with as much innuendo as her Danish accent would allow.

“Oh, it was nothing like that,” Summer assured her. “I was passing in the hall outside his room—”

“Because you just happened to find yourself three flights up on a men’s floor for no apparent reason,” I played along.

Laughing, she put her hand over my mouth. “—and he called me inside because he was making mulligatawny and wanted me to sample it.”

Jřrdis and I cracked up, careful to move our sharp scissors aside before we doubled over laughing on the bed. Summer smiled ruefully at us.

Finally Jřrdis managed, “You sampled his mulligatawny! Was it good?”

“It was okay,” Summer said. “I would have to get used to it.”

That made Jřrdis and me laugh harder. Coughing through it, I asked Summer, “Are you going to sample his mulligatawny again?”

Still smiling, she shook her head. “Sometimes mulligatawny is just mulligatawny”

“Oh,” Jřrdis and I said together. I was disappointed that Summer hadn’t made progress in her romance with Manohar. I wished I could send her on another mission, since she seemed to need an excuse to justify making a move on him, but I didn’t dare. If Manohar had been as mad as Summer said about being manipulated regarding the stable-boy issue, I didn’t want to push it. Gabe hadn’t called me into his office for a stern talking-to by now, the third week of class. Maybe I’d dodged a bullet.

“Anyway,” Summer said, “Hunter’s taking anatomy. Everything that happened in the story is exactly like what really happened at the beach party. That means he’s hot for you, Erin.”

“That also means he slept with that blond girl,” I pointed out.

“If he did, at least he wants you to watch,” Summer said.

“I need to find a way to read this story,” Jřrdis said.

“But he didn’t sleep with that girl,” Summer said, dismissing the idea with a wave of her open scissors. “Remember, he left the party with you and Brian. He and Brian came back. I saw the blond girl a few more times, but never with him.”

“Who left first?” I asked. “I could hear the music all the way down here. You had your argument with Manohar and left a couple of hours before the party shut down. Hunter had plenty of time to hook up with her. Looks like he did.”

DEEP IN THE NIGHT I WOKE. I had lain in bed for a long time without realizing I was awake. Finally something made me roll over and peer out the window nearest the head of my bed, onto the dusky street, just in time to glimpse Hunter returning to the dorm.

He was one floor down, several steps away from the front stoop, and the crisp red leaves in the trees cast him into the shadows of the streetlights. But I knew him by the way he moved. His overcoat was open to reveal jeans and a casual but expensive shirt underneath.

Overcoat? It was hardly fall, not cold enough—but glancing at the clock on my filing cabinet, I realized it must be plenty cold for him to need this extra layer in the stillness at four thirty in the morning. The wind caught the back of his coat and whipped it behind him as he grasped the stair railing with one hand. He swung himself onto the stoop, as if expending his last bit of energy would be worth the trouble because it would get him to bed that much faster. I knew the feeling.

He had disappeared under the awning now. Through floors and walls, I caught the faintest whisper of his fingers on the buttons as he punched the combination into the lock, then the groan of the door opening for him. He shut it quietly—which I wasn’t expecting. I’d never noticed the way he opened and closed doors when other people were asleep, but he’d caused me so much trouble personally that I expected the door to slam. It did not. I hardly registered it closing before my ears picked up his steps on the staircase—fast at first, still excited about going to bed, slower as he reached my story.

He was as near as he would get to me now, sliding around the second-story banister on his way to the next staircase, leaning his weight into it, his exhaustion overcoming him. If I jumped out of bed and dashed through Summer and Jřrdis’s room and burst into the hallway, I could catch him. His sleepy blue eyes would widen in surprise, then narrow again when he saw it was me.

And then he was gone, shuffling up the first few steps of the second staircase with renewed energy, slowing as he reached the top. A pause as he circled the third-story banister.

The faintest footsteps now, slowing as they faded. A squeal as he opened his own door on the fifth floor. A thump as he shut it. Open and shut, done and over.

I closed my heart to him then. I thought I had succeeded in forgetting him ten times over. Each time I was mistaken. He managed to find his way into my heart again and sabotage it from the inside. This time was the last. In the dead of night he had gone to visit that blond girl, and now he had come home.

7

My next story was due the following day. I could have written one accusing him of sleeping with that girl. But I’d never intended to call him out in the first place, and I certainly wouldn’t write another story about him now.

Trouble was, I’d lost my taste for writing romance. At least, for these people to read, and Hunter to smirk about, and Manohar to make fun of. My laptop and I still played Cupid on break at the coffee shop and during any luxurious hour I could spare on the weekends, writing and people-watching in the park. But that was for me, not to show.

For class I wrote a story about a girl dealing with some unnamed tragedy by closing herself in the closet of a huge, empty house, with her evil unnamed authority figure clomping around in the hallways, sending the servants to check on the girl in the closet, never venturing inside herself.

Two weeks later, my next story was about a seventh-grader obsessed with the idea that if she won the middle school spelling bee and made it to the next round, she would see her absentee father in the audience. He had finally come for her! But she never made it to that round because she spelled desertion with a double s.