Love Story(49)
Author: Jennifer Echols

He said carefully, “I did. Your grandmother would not have wanted to see the two of you together.”

“But you said she likes Hunter,” I pointed out. “She’s giving him her freaking farm.” At least, that’s what she thought.

Tommy nodded. “Hunter has brains like I’ve never seen. He’s smart, like his mother. He’ll do right by this farm, since you don’t want to. But it’s one thing if he gets your grandmother’s business. It’s something entirely different if he gets you. He’s not—”

Good enough is what Tommy didn’t say. The unspoken words hung in the air between us. I wondered whether he thought this was what my grandmother believed, or if he believed it himself.

“Why are you pushing Hunter and me together, then?” I asked in exasperation. “You sat there in the truck yesterday and asked us if we were hooking up.”

“I wasn’t pushing you together,” Tommy said calmly. “I was commenting on what I saw, which is that you’ve already been together. I could see it all over his face.” Tommy fished a toothpick out of his pocket and put it in his mouth.

“Really?” I asked, wishing it were true, hoping against all logic and good sense that Hunter had fallen for me and his dad had sensed this. “I’ve always found Hunter’s face unreadable.”

Tommy rolled the toothpick to one side of his mouth and talked around it. “He’s got my face.”

“Right,” I said as the starting bell clanged and the doors on the gate banged open.

15

Several hours later, Tommy and I unloaded a couple of horses at the farm, unhitched the trailer, and drove down the hill to his house. He headed right back out to a celebration with the other stable hands. My grandmother’s horse had won the last race at the Breeders’ Cup. Whenever she received a five-million-dollar purse, it was her custom to send a case of fine bourbon to the stable hands. You’re welcome.

I was done with being a stable hand, I decided, and I did not want any bourbon. My muscles ached to the point that I could feel the individual fibers scraping against each other every time I moved. All I wanted was for this horrible trip to be over. I stumbled into Hunter’s bedroom and tossed the bills Tommy had given me for my work onto the bed. They landed beside Hunter’s anatomy note cards, stacked neatly and secured with a rubber band.

I picked them up and turned them over curiously, as if I had never before seen such an exotic prize. He definitely had not left them for me to find for some reason. He might do that with his dorm room key or his wallet, but he would not play fast and loose with his homework. He must have stepped in to look for something—surely he’d left something he’d meant to take to college with him, even if I hadn’t—and he’d forgotten them.

He needed them back.

Slipping the stack into the pocket of my farm jacket, I shut the door of Tommy’s house behind me and trudged up the lane toward my grandmother’s house, taking care to stay in the long green grass, well off the road. Everybody coming to and from her party was driving drunk.

I slowed as I approached the mansion towering over me, three white stories pointing straight for a full moon in the starry sky. The driveway was full of expensive cars. I would be recognized even in my stable-boy clothes if I went through the front door, dragged from group to group of ecstatic old people, until I was forced in front of my grandmother. I waded through the cold grass around the house, across the patio, and tiptoed through the side door.

Hunter stood in the hallway, with both hands on a marble-topped eighteenth-century console table, taking a hard look at himself in the enormous mirror. I stopped. I knew he hadn’t heard me come in because he hadn’t moved. I could present him with the note cards and then

I wasn’t sure what.

I didn’t dare. He stared at himself, leaning forward as if inordinately concerned with the dark circles under his eyes.

But he stayed that way for so long that I finally took a few steps toward him. I passed the back entrance to the kitchen, which leaked dance music from the live band in the ballroom, and kept walking until I saw him from a new angle.

His eyes were closed. He was not staring at himself. He was steeling himself, and as I watched he took a final deep breath and pushed off from the console.

I skittered into the kitchen before he saw me. I walked backward until I bumped against the island—ouch, granite countertop gouging my barely healed skin—and spun around at a clinking behind me. A dark-haired figure straightened with his hands around a bowl of potato salad. Whitfield Farrell was going through my grandmother’s refrigerator like he lived here.

“Erin!” he exclaimed. “Guess what I heard.”

Whitfield and I had not parted on good terms. The last time I’d seen him was the Derby party, when Hunter had told him to get his hands off my ass—the inspiration for my unfortunate stable-boy story. But if Whitfield had been sober, we would have pretended to forget all about that. For the sake of our families getting along and doing business, we would have embraced, backed off, and conversed politely, as we’d both been trained.

Whitfield was not sober. “I heard that you told your grandmother you didn’t want her f**king farm,” he slurred. “You ran off to New York City”—ran was a jerk of the potato salad bowl hard enough to send the plastic wrap flying off the top and sailing down to the granite top of the island—“and she gave her farm to Hunter Allen.”

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“And

” He held up his finger for silence, nearly dropping the bowl.

I rushed around the island and caught the bowl before it dropped, then set it on the counter.

This was a mistake, because now I was only a foot from Whitfield. He took off my cap and tossed it to the high ceiling. It rang a huge pot hanging from the rack over the island. “I heard you were playing stable hand today. I don’t understand you at all.”

“You don’t have to. I’ll see you around, okay?” I had thought I’d rather die than set foot in my grandmother’s party, but now the dance music and the crowded foyer leading to the front door were the lesser of the evils. I took a step in that direction.

He stopped me with a hand on my bruised hip. “Why are you making it so hard on yourself? Look at me.”

I should have pulled away from him. He would have been right on my heels as I entered the foyer, but then I could have escaped him in the jovial drunken crowd.

His tone and his words stopped me. “Look at me.” He spoke tenderly, the way I’d longed to be spoken to by a hero with an important message just for me.

I looked up into his eyes, which were green like the winter grass. I had talked closely with him a hundred times before. I’d never noticed what color his eyes were. And as my life veered closer and closer to the story I’d just turned in for Gabe’s class, I made a mental note of this detail to add to my story when I revised it for my end-of-semester portfolio.