Love Story(26)
Author: Jennifer Echols

Maybe I was trying to tell Hunter a little about myself with these stories, and apologize in a very roundabout way for not connecting with him in high school. Typically, I couldn’t tell if he was affected by them or not, because in class his comments were blandly supportive, and on paper he wrote helpful technical comments. Sigh.

But I thought these stories moved me closer to the publishing internship, if Gabe had any sway. He seemed excited about them during class. He wrote in pencil in the margins that he saw me taking chances and growing as a writer. My classmates seemed impressed with the stories, too, and discussed them animatedly and invented deep bullshit meanings for what were essentially pages out of my middle school diary. I was surprised and disappointed that my classmates liked these stories so much, because I hated them. At this point I decided everybody in the class must be clinically depressed.

A few weeks later, the girls in class, even Summer, giggled behind their hands at how much they looked forward to Hunter’s sexy stories. But it seemed to me that his fortune-teller story was just installment number two of “Anatomy Unit on the Reproductive System.”

And his story was not his way of hinting that he liked me. Neither was the fact that he sat on Jřrdis’s bed one Friday afternoon when I cruised through wearing my belly-dancing outfit. Yes, I was a little self-conscious about walking down the street in it, and my grandmother would die, but with my jacket over the top it didn’t look significantly weirder than some of the other oddities New Yorkers wore in public. I was very self-conscious about wearing it in front of Hunter.

“Hullo, Erin,” Hunter said without looking up from his cutting.

“Hullo, Hunter,” I said without slowing down. I stepped into my own little bedroom and pushed the door until it was open only a crack.

I stood there staring at the bay windows for a moment. Normally next I would close the shades on the windows. Slowly I reached for the pull on the first shade. But even after I’d closed them all, knowing Hunter was on the other side of my door while I changed, I felt as warm and exposed as if they had been wide open.

I hung my belly-dancing outfit on a hook in my room, rather than on the outside of the door where it usually stayed. That would be a painfully obvious ploy for Hunter’s attention. I made myself a gourmet dinner by opening a pack of peanut butter crackers, and I settled on my bed to study.

Listened for Hunter in the outer room.

Waited for him to burst in.

Of course he didn’t. It bothered me that he didn’t come in to bother me, and he knew this. However, I had vowed to close my heart to him, and I meant it this time. I tried my best to throw myself into my history reading.

But come on, it was history. Versus Hunter.

After half an hour of torture, I peeked around my door. I would feel foolish if I’d focused on Hunter and wasted half an hour of precious homework time when he wasn’t even there.

He was asleep.

Not quite believing what I was seeing, I tiptoed across the room for a closer look. The overhead light and the lamps on either side of Jřrdis’s bed shone on him like a specimen in an operating theater, but he was dead to the world. He had curled his big body on the end of Jřrdis’s bed. His eyelids did not flutter when I stood over him. His long blond lashes cast severe shadows down his soft cheek. His expensive T-shirt had pulled away from his waistband to reveal his tight, muscular side and the long white scar.

His late-night visits to the blonde must have worn him out.

Angry as I was, I empathized with him. If I’d been able to take a catnap in another dorm room or the library, I wouldn’t have wanted to be woken. So I only slid the scissors very carefully off the ends of his fingers, away from his eye, and set them on the bedside table.

Then I went back to my room. But it wasn’t long before Summer bounced onto the end of my bed, and she seemed a lot more excited than I was about Hunter’s presence. “His poor scar is showing,” she whispered. She stuck out her bottom lip in sympathy. “You should go rub his back or stroke his hair or something.”

“He’s not a puppy,” I whispered back. “And I doubt he’d appreciate it. He’s not here for me.”

“He is here for you!” she insisted.

“He’s cutting faces for Jřrdis,” I corrected her. “Everybody in the dorm has cut faces for Jřrdis at one time or another.”

“Yes, but most of them don’t come back for more.”

She had a point. And, truth be told, I did think Hunter was there for me. I just didn’t know why. I huffed out a sigh and hissed, “He’s already got my tuition and my inheritance and a career at my farm. He has no reason to flirt with me, sometimes, and sometimes insult me and try to make me feel awful about breaking away from my grandmother.”

“He likes you,” Summer whispered. “More than likes. He’s interested in you romantically.”

“Oh, yeah? Then why did he feel up that blonde at the party in the bathroom?”

“He was trying to make you jealous,” Summer said with exaggerated patience, “just like in his story. He is giving you obvious hints, and you are choosing not to take them.”

“That’s so unlike him. If he wants me, why doesn’t he come out and tell me?”

She shrugged. “You’re so defensive. You’ve got a Kentucky-size chip on your shoulder, and the stable-boy story incident didn’t help. I’m not saying I blame you for any of that. I’d be defensive, too. I’m saying it’s an obstacle, he’s trying to get around it, and you keep blocking his way.”

I wanted to believe her, but it seemed too simple. “Do you know why he’s asleep right now?”

She shook her head.

“He’s going out at eleven thirty and coming back at four thirty, three or four nights a week.” At her strange look I hurried on, “I am not spying on him. I wake up when he comes down the stairwell that late, and I watch him walk down the sidewalk. Later I watch him come back.” I gestured toward my bay window.

“Maybe he has a job,” she said.

“He doesn’t need a job. He has my grandmother. He wouldn’t jeopardize his perfect grades for extra pocket money. And there’s no pattern to his days. I always work from five to eleven Monday through Thursday. The only reason my weekend schedule is irregular is that it’s our busiest time and my boss wants me to make as few bad lattes as possible to reduce the damage.” I felt my nostrils flare as I said, “Hunter’s visiting that blonde.”

Summer gave me a stern look. “You have made that up.”

Had I? He’d dated a lot in high school, but the girls he went out with talked about him as if he was the perfect gentleman. They were only sad and confused that he hadn’t asked them out again. He wasn’t the type to sleep around. He definitely wasn’t the type to sleep around and then write a tell-all story about it for a college class.