Love Story(31)
Author: Jennifer Echols

Normally Hunter was the politest person I knew—on the surface, anyway. He’d only made this rude comment about my weight because he was already angry with himself for rudely forcing me to go to dinner. I waited for him to hear himself and feel even guiltier. My most effective response to Hunter was to say nothing at all—if I could stand it. He expected a retort from me. He didn’t expect silence.

“You look great,” he said quickly. “You always look great. I just mean

” His voice trailed off.

I watched him from under the brim of my hat.

He scowled at the road, swinging the limo into as tight a turn as he could manage at an intersection crowded with restaurants and hungry Long Islanders. “You’ve told me before that you’re not spending every cent you make on the dorm. You’re still going to plays and movies, right? You could spend some of that money on food. Restaurants are a huge part of the New York experience.”

“Peanut butter and crackers are fine,” I said breezily. “I see what you mean, but I have to draw the line somewhere.”

Manohar turned around and spoke to us through the window. “Why don’t you move out of the dorm?” he asked.

“No,” Hunter said quietly. Somewhere in the backseat, Summer squealed, “No!”

Manohar went on, “Wouldn’t it be cheaper to live in an apartment with a lot of roommates? Not as nice, maybe, but at least you could afford it.”

“No,” Hunter said again. This time Manohar craned his neck to look at him.

“Yes,” I told Manohar, “it would be cheaper. I did that last summer.”

“And she had a bad experience that spooked her,” Hunter said.

“It didn’t spook me,” I said. “It only made me very angry and got me fired.”

“It should have spooked you,” Hunter said. “Manohar, she hasn’t lived here long enough to know who she can trust. She needs to be in the dorm with a sign-in desk and security. Don’t bring it up again.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Manohar insisted. “How do you know she can trust her randomly assigned dorm roommates? Jřrdis with a slash, for God’s sake!”

“She seems less dangerous as you get to know her,” I said.

“And Summer could be a serial killer,” Manohar said.

Summer’s giggle reached us from the backseat.

“It’s my life, Hunter,” I said, “and you’re going to have to trust my judgment. Sorry.”

Without taking his eyes off the road, Hunter reached behind him and slid the window shut with a bang. “You are so stubborn!” he burst out, loud enough that the boys in the back quieted, listening through the window for what dark path our conversation had taken.

“You’re just doing all of this to get back at your grandmother,” he said. “How can you keep insisting you don’t belong on that farm? Don’t you take the trifecta as a sign?”

“You know as well as I do that hitting the trifecta was pure luck. I nearly picked the number four horse to show.”

“But you didn’t. This business is in your blood.”

The sun was setting now. As Hunter laboriously pulled the limo into a congested parking lot, orange light shone directly into his blue eyes, making him squint.

He looked like a kid then, the twelve-year-old kid I’d met so long ago in a rolling green field in the summertime, bright sunlight glinting in his blond hair.

We should still be friends. We were made to be friends, not enemies. Maybe he recognized the insanity of our situation, too, and that’s why he was trying to persuade me to steal back the birthright he’d stolen.

“It’s not in my blood.” I lowered my voice because I had no wish to share this with the limo. “Romance novelists write that about their heroines all the time. It makes no sense, that the horse farm was in the heroine’s blood. Or the city was in her blood, or the wild Pacific coastline, or the oil-drilling rig on her parents’ vast Texas estate. The place was not in the heroine’s blood, Hunter. The simple fact is that she grew up there, and her overbearing grandmother insisted that she move back there, and the heroine finally gave in—”

“She did?” Hunter asked, blond brows up.

“In romance novels, Hunter, not in real life, and then everybody unanimously agreed it was in her blood, to make her feel better about moving back to the horse farm when she didn’t want to. But she didn’t feel better. She felt the same as she always had, that she wanted to be a writer and she did not want to do it on a horse farm in Kentucky.”

“Not yet.” Hunter stopped the limo along the edge of the crowded parking lot and turned off the engine. “But you will, because you’ll get tired of being poor. I know because I’ve been poor, and it sucks. If you weren’t rich, you would never, ever walk away from an opportunity like running your grandmother’s farm. You would not want to be a writer. It would never occur to you to give up your family’s support so you could see how the other half lives. And that’s all it is for you. You are not living the life of a starving artist. You’re only visiting. You can string yourself along on scholarships and tips from the coffee shop, but if you ever lose your job, or get thrown in jail for possession of someone else’s pot, or get hurt, your grandmother will be right there to catch you when you fall. You know it, and she knows it. Face it. You will never be poor, no matter how hard you try. And eventually you’re going to realize that.”

“Leave ’er alone!” came a shout from the backseat. Then, “Box your weight, Allen!”

Hunter blinked but didn’t otherwise acknowledge the frat boys yelling at him. “Erin, you waltz through life with grace and confidence that only come from old money. You will never bow to anybody like a person would who’d grown up poor. Even if you desperately needed a morsel of food to keep from starving, you might think you were begging, but the people with the food would give you some because they would think you were in charge. You couldn’t beg if you tried.” He got out of the car and closed the door.

While he’d been talking, the boys and Summer had bailed out of the backseat. I found myself alone in the silence, looking out over ancient brick buildings beaten by the Atlantic winds, a stranger in a strange land. The boys were from here. Even Summer seemed to blend in better now, but me? I had a wide-brimmed Derby hat perched primly on my knees.

I jumped as Hunter opened my door.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.” He held out a hand to help me from the car.

*

A COUPLE OF HOURS, A HUGE shrimp dinner, and a very long limo ride later, Hunter dropped us in front of the dorm. As the bartender collapsed into the passenger side so he could direct Hunter in driving the limo back to the funeral home, he offered me a thousand dollars for my advice that had made him and his friends nine thousand. I calculated in my head how many hours away from the coffee shop that money would buy me. And I could feel Hunter’s eyes on me, judging the poor little rich girl. I said no.