Love Story(60)
Author: Jennifer Echols

He stopped folding. We exchanged a long look.

“Have you bought the tickets already?” I asked. “I thought my grandmother cut you off when you told her we were together.”

“That was the deal,” he said. “But she’s been calling me for updates about you. I guess I’m still employed for now.”

“Even after you were so naughty?”

“Even after that. She can’t admit this, but all she ever really wanted was to know you were okay and didn’t hate her.”

I blinked. “I don’t hate her,” I said, realizing this for the first time.

“Come with me to Louisville, and tell her.”

“All right.” I feigned reluctance. “Give me a few minutes to wrap up this writing and get ready.”

He nodded and pointed toward the larger bedroom. “I’ll wait for you out there. Jřrdis needs a lot more faces cut out for her project next semester.”

“Oh joy.”

After he left, I opened my laptop. While I was showering, I would print out the collaboration I’d been working on so Hunter could read it on the airplane. I hoped he approved. I prayed he would get it. There was a small, glimmering chance he would love it.

Thankfully it was almost ready to go, but it had no title page. Thinking of Hunter, whose opinion mattered to me even more than Gabe’s at that moment, I typed, love story.

And laughed.

In the larger bedroom I plugged the laptop into Summer’s printer, then stepped out the door with my bucket of toiletries, headed for the shower. As I looked back, Hunter glanced up from his magazine and scissors and grinned at me. This smile was for real.

Or

maybe I did, now that I knew he looked down on me. He was looking down on me now. I heard his quick steps across the hardwood floor and felt the heat of his body in the cold room as he knelt beside my bed. He put his hand on my arm. “Erin.”

He was not going to leave me alone. He would not even let me hide my tears. Giving up, I rolled onto my back, arching it to keep from pressing my newly healed scrapes against the New York City T-shirt I’d been sleeping in, and sniffled. “I don’t want to go anywhere with you, especially Louisville.”

This was not true, and I knew it as soon as I said it. He had stolen my birthright and cheated my grandmother and looked down on me and I still wanted to be wherever he was, on the off chance we might make that connection I’d wanted with him for so long.

He sensed this. His thumb moved on my arm, seductive as ever, but he watched me somberly, as if he took me seriously for once.

“I have to work all weekend,” I said.

“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.