Love Story(32)
Author: Jennifer Echols

Manohar and Summer had seemed so tight all evening that I was surprised when she followed me up to our room. But as she peeled off her skirt and stood unsteadily staring into our open closet, head on the door frame, I realized she was exchanging her cute afternoon-on-the-town outfit for a comfy, subtly sexy night-in-with-new-boyfriend outfit. Brian must be away from the room on a date.

I wondered what Hunter was doing tonight.

She nearly fell over pulling on tight jeans. She’d hardly said a word since we came in. I could tell she wanted to talk to me about where she was going, but she didn’t know how to say it. I didn’t say it for fear of embarrassing her and scaring her off the project altogether. Two strangers, meeting by fortunate chance, falling in love—there was nothing more romantic, and nothing for her to be embarrassed about.

She was embarrassed anyway. She sat beside me on her bed, where I was carefully polishing the pricey and oh-so-comfortable boots I’d worn to Belmont. “If I don’t come in tonight

,” she began.

“Mm-hm?” I prompted her, spreading extra polish on the worn toe of one boot.

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll just be upstairs. Manohar has the private room like you.”

“That sounds nice.” I looked up at her and smiled. “Maybe stop drinking? Because it’s such a big night.”

“Potentially.” She nodded. “I’m through drinking for the night. I’m sober. Er. Not sober but soberer.”

“Okay.”

“I’m worried about you, though.” She pulled off her sweater and stood at the closet door again, waiting for a better one to appear. “You and Hunter really went at it a couple of times. I never understood what went wrong.”

I gave my attention to the toe of my boot, piling even more polish into a deep scrape in the leather. “I guess being around horses reminded us of why we never got along in the first place.” Not since the seventh grade, anyway. “Is he planning one of his late-night treks tonight?”

“That was my impression.” She pulled a sweater over her head and then looked at me with her hands on her hips. The off-the-shoulder black sweater made her look even sexier and more sophisticated than she realized. The effect would have been just what Manohar was looking for if she hadn’t been swaying slightly. Or maybe that would help.

Then she said, “I don’t want to abandon you.”

“You’re not abandoning me.” I waved my rag dismissively, releasing the odor of polish. “The second we start passing up nookie just to support each other’s neuroses, we need to talk about an adjustment in our relationship. But while you’re up there

”

I hated to ask her for another favor, since the first time I’d asked her to pump Manohar for information, they’d argued and she’d slumped into a funk for three weeks. But if all went well, she and Manohar were about to share his very small bedroom. I decided it was okay to ask. “Could you find out from Manohar where Hunter is going late at night?”

“I already asked. Manohar doesn’t know. Hunter says he can’t tell Manohar now that security has been breached. Which means me.” She threw back her shoulders and proudly poked out her chest. “Which also means he’s going somewhere he doesn’t want you to know about.”

I agreed. But to me it seemed likely that somewhere was the velvet-draped couch of the fortune-teller’s shop. Or, ouch, the blonde’s dorm room.

Summer cocked her head at me. “You love those boots, don’t you?”

I cackled, realizing how hard I’d been polishing the toe. “I do love these boots. Moreover, my grandmother paid a lot of money for these boots when I was in high school. I probably will never be able to afford a pair of boots like this again. Gone are the days when I would come home and kick them off and throw them in the closet because if they got beat up, I could just buy another pair. I am trying to make them last by cleaning them and polishing them and putting them away carefully.” I gave the heel one last rueful wipe. “It’s all very Little House on the Prairie.”

She stepped closer and peered at them. “If it were Little House on the Prairie, you would wrap them in paper and put them on a high shelf.”

“Or I’d dig a pit for them in the ground and fill the pit with hay to keep them fresh and cold.”

“Or you’d pack them in a barrel with salt.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said, “they’re boots, not herring.”

“You should have taken that thousand dollars,” she said. “You earned it.”

I waited until she left for her quiet night with Manohar. Then I raked all my clothes off her closet rod and plopped them on my bed. I pulled my underwear out of the bottom drawer of my dresser and even stacked my textbooks on the pillow.

Every item I owned fit on the bed. I divided the items into two piles: items that my grandmother had bought and items that I had bought with money I’d earned since I moved to New York. I looked very, very carefully at my grandmother’s pile and considered throwing it away. I could toss some of it, but there was one thing I simply couldn’t part with. My laptop. I might as well throw my writing career away. And if I couldn’t throw out absolutely everything she’d given me, the exercise was pointless.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized there was no way to get around Hunter’s argument. Only a rich girl would consider throwing out a prized possession just because it was a gift from someone she was angry with. It was a gesture of the very privileged.

I stood looking at all my stuff. Enough of this. I was wasting time. I had homework to do, and a job to go to at six in the morning. I cleared all my textbooks off the pillow except calculus.

Footfalls sounded in the stairwell. I looked up as if I could see through the wall. These could be Hunter’s quick steps. This was the wrong time of night. But it was the weekend, and Summer had said she thought he was leaving.

Sure enough, as the heavy front door of the building closed and I peeked out the bay window, it was Hunter’s tall frame I saw mingling in the evening crowd on the sidewalk with his overcoat slung over his shoulder, ready for his trek back in the wee hours when the air would be frigid and black.

The following Thursday, the creative-writing class discussed yet another of his stories. Add the back room of a cocktail waitress’s bar to the list of possible somewheres. The only way to find out where Hunter was going at night was for him to stop teasing and just tell me.

The story I composed over the next week was designed to make him do just that.

9

But on the day it was due, I couldn’t let it go.

Students whose stories were discussed on Monday had to turn in the stories the previous Friday by noon. It was eleven fifty-five on Friday. I sat across from the front desk in the five-story lobby of the library in a mod chair of red fur that would have looked funky and adorable except that it was matted with wear and mysterious stains. I gripped “Anything Is Possible” in both hands, bending it in the middle, sullying it with my sweat, ruining the pristine condition I preferred for my stories because I thought they looked professional and made readers less likely to tear them in two during class discussion.