Love Story(44)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“No, you don’t. You’re not scheduled on weekends to make bad lattes with foam spleens. You only fill in for people on weekends, and they haven’t called you yet. I checked with Summer before she left for class.”

“But they could still call,” I murmured. And after three days out of work with a bruised hip last week, I desperately needed the money. Which reminded me: “I don’t have the money for a plane ticket.”

He released my arm, reached into his coat pocket, and showed me my boarding pass: Blackwell Erin Elizabeth.

“I’ll miss my belly-dancing class this afternoon.”

He rolled his eyes. “How many times have you skipped it before?”

“Never. I’m sure as hell not sabotaging my chances at a publishing internship with a D in belly dancing.”

He watched me, waiting for me to admit how lame my excuses were getting.

“I have a history paper due on Monday,” I protested. “And a huge calculus test. You know that. You have the same test. Going out of town this weekend would be academic suicide.”

“I have an anatomy test, too. We’ll study on the airplane on the way down,” he said in a soothing voice. “We’ll study on the way back, and anyway, we’re coming back Sunday morning. It’s only a Saturday of studying you’ll miss.” He raised his blond brows at me.

Suddenly I was aware of the fact that he stood over me, and I was in bed, wearing a T-shirt and panties and no bra. He might not know that because I was half covered with a sheet, but I knew it. And I wondered how Hunter Allen’s sex life fit into this complicated puzzle. He had taken the college tuition my grandmother had planned to give to me. In return he was obligated to do her bidding and bring me down to see her. There was no room in this equation for a relationship between him and me, yet he stood over me and my body tingled.

“Your dad will be there,” he said.

I lay paralyzed for a moment, staring into his clear blue eyes. Hunter touched me and Hunter coaxed me and I sifted through my reactions to each, but my reaction to the idea of seeing my dad made no sense at all. I jumped up, forgetting I was embarrassed to have Hunter see me in my T-shirt and panties, and snatched my boarding pass from him to examine it more closely. “My God, are we even going to make this flight? Why didn’t you wake me sooner?” I handed it back to him and watched to make sure he pocketed it.

I shoved my toes into my flip-flops and snagged my bucket of toiletries. Brushing past him on my way out the door because the room was so small, I threw at him, “I’m going to grab a shower. Don’t forget to pack my hat.”

WE WERE QUIET IN THE CAB to the airport, and at the gate. Hunter alternated between reading a textbook with a skinless torso on the cover, liver and lungs and heart exposed, and frowning at a stack of note cards covered in his illegible scrawl.

I pretended to read history. I tried, but my mind was on another sort of history. My brain spiraled through my first twelve years in California, my dad yelling at my mother because we didn’t have any money, my mother yelling back at my dad that we might have a little more if he would get off his ass, culminating in the showdown in my grandmother’s stable that I hadn’t even seen. There had to be some explanation for my dad’s behavior then and his disappearance afterward. There was a perfectly good reason for why he had left me with my grandmother after my mother died, and why he had never contacted me again. He was coming to Kentucky to see me and he would clarify everything.

Hunter had bought the tickets too late for us to have seats together, and that made things worse for me. Nobody I knew watched me, so pretending to read history was a moot point. I looked out the window, wondered about my dad, and willed the plane to fly faster. I wanted to see him so badly. I would forgive six years of abandonment just to sit at his feet and gaze moonily up at him like a Dalmatian kept in a pen.

By the time we touched down in Louisville, I had worked myself into a frenzy of questions. “How did my dad know I would be here?” I asked, hurrying after Hunter in the terminal.

He kept glancing up at the signs pointing us toward baggage claim. Neither of us was very good at airports, we’d found. When he and his dad had moved to Louisville, and when my mom and I had escaped to Louisville, we had all ridden the bus.

“I don’t know,” Hunter said.

“Maybe he thought my grandmother and I are getting along,” I mused, running after Hunter as he turned a corner, “and of course I would come home to see her for the Breeders’ Cup.”

“Maybe,” Hunter said, stopping in front of the carousel that would spit out our suitcases.

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “I doubt he’d think of the Breeders’ Cup. He doesn’t know anything about horses.”

We stood in silence until the carousel ground to life. Hunter snagged his bag. He put one hand on my arm to stay me when I recognized mine, and he lifted it off the carousel for me. He started across the wide room toward passenger pickup with both suitcases in tow, but I took mine back from him, saying, “Maybe the Breeders’ Cup is coincidental. He assumed I would be living at my grandmother’s house, still in high school, because he’s forgotten how old I am.”

“I don’t know,” Hunter said again.

Suspicious this time, I looked him in the eye as we walked along. When he met my gaze, then fussed with his suitcase handle again, I knew he wasn’t telling me everything he knew. “What is it?” I insisted.

“My dad,” he said, nodding toward the sliding glass doors and slipping his sunglasses on.

Tommy had parked the Blackwell Farms king-cab pickup truck at the curb. As the airport doors slid open for us, I let the weight of my suitcase on wheels slow me like an anchor. Hunter reached the pickup first. Tommy bear-hugged him and they slapped each other on the back. They were both blond and had similar features, but Tommy’s face was weathered from the sun, and he wore a Blackwell Farms baseball cap and windbreaker that made him look strange embracing Hunter in his cashmere sweater and expensive sunglasses, obviously the heir to a horse fortune.

Tommy held Hunter at arm’s length and beamed at him. Tommy had all Hunter’s friendliness without any of Hunter’s what’s-in-it-for-me calculation. It was hard to picture him as the distant father from the story Hunter had written for Gabe’s class, but certain elements of it rang true. Tommy was a drinker, I knew. He had been a smoker, but Hunter had badgered him into quitting. Tommy had complained about this at the stable every day for a year. Now he rolled a toothpick in the corner of his mouth, chuckling at something Hunter had said.

Then Tommy turned to me with his arms stretched wide. “Erin! How’s the princess?”

“Hey, Tommy,” I said, going in for a hug. My grandmother had always discouraged me from hugging the help. She embarrassed me. I embraced Tommy and let him pick me up and set me back down.