Love Story(70)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“Promise.” My voice sounded too bright to my own ears, my delivery ironic. But Hunter had played the devoted new boyfriend all morning in the airport. He didn’t seem to notice that I regarded him with lust and stony silence.

Ten hours later I was hunched over my laptop at my desk, struggling with the last paragraph of my history paper, when I heard a commotion in the outer bedroom. I rolled my desk chair back and peeked around the door frame. Summer was there with Manohar, Kyle, Isabelle, Brian, and Brian’s new boyfriend, all of them leaning on the others, tipsy. Bringing up the rear, standing at the threshold to the hallway, was Hunter.

“Erin!” Summer called when she saw me. “We came to find you. Aren’t you done with your paper yet? We’re going to the club, baby!”

My heart leapt. Summer, Jřrdis, and I had had a great time at the club the week before classes started. I hadn’t had time to go since.

“I have a test tomorrow,” I said. “I’ve almost finished my paper, and then I’m going to bed.” That is, I might be going to bed. Despite my best instincts, that depended on what Hunter was doing. Angry as I was with him, I could not let him go to that club with Isabelle.

“You don’t need all that sleep just to pass a test,” Brian said. “You need to relax and get your mind off studying for a while, and you can do that at the club.”

“Oooh, what’s this?” Brian’s boyfriend exclaimed, peering at one of Jřrdis’s works in progress. She’d started to glue the faces onto a board. All at once, everyone else tried to explain Jřrdis’s art, and Jřrdis.

Hunter walked over and leaned through my doorway. His shadow blended with my shadow on the wall behind him until I couldn’t tell one from the other. “Are you going?” he asked me quietly.

I was about to burst with anger. I should tell him I knew everything about his deal with my grandmother. But then our relationship, even our friendship, would be over. I wanted to get him out of my system, didn’t I? Otherwise I would wonder for the rest of my life what he would have been like. I would dream about him.

“I’m going if you’re going,” I said, looking him straight in the eye.

He disappeared into the larger room. I heard him say, “She’s going.”

“Hooray!” Now Summer poked her head into my room and whispered hoarsely, “Do you want a drink before we go? Or drinks? Manohar has a flask of—I don’t know what it is, honestly.”

“Oh, God, no,” I said. Just what my calculus test needed.

“Suit yourself.” Now she disappeared from the doorway. She said more loudly, “Hunter, Manohar has a mystery flask!”

“Oh, God, no,” Hunter said.

My fingers paused over my laptop keyboard. He couldn’t have overheard my whispered convo with Summer. Yet we were saying the same thing, feeling the same thing at the same moment, worried about school and frankly somewhat exasperated with our friends and sooooo bone tired and yet desperate to be with each other. I had always viewed Hunter as different from me—the opposite of me, really—and now I hated him thoroughly, yet tonight he was the person most like me in the universe.

“Come on, Erin!” Summer called.

I rolled backward in my chair and leaned through the doorway myself. “Go on without me. I’ll be right there. I’ve lost my train of thought for this paper. I can’t finish with you guys standing here.”

“Come on,” Hunter reprimanded them. “Leave her alone. She’ll show up in a while.” They groaned begrudgingly and shuffled out. The last one to leave, Hunter looked back over his shoulder and asked me, “Won’t you?”

I nodded. I didn’t see how, honestly. I had lost my bead on this paper. I didn’t see how I could miss this night with Hunter, either.

But thirty minutes later I did finish, then changed into club clothes and stared at myself in the mirror. I definitely was no classic blond beauty. But I had always done the best I could with what I had. On this particular night, worn-out looking from days of worry and hard work and little sleep, I supposed I could have been a model in a gritty heroin-chic fashion-magazine spread.

Yes, I would do for Hunter.

I heard the music from the club a block away. I couldn’t see the lights—the windows were blocked out, as if something delicious and secret was going down inside—and in the shadows near the door, Hunter leaned against the brick wall, waiting for me.

He met me halfway down the block and walked with me. “I shouldn’t have let you come by yourself,” he grumbled, “but by the time I realized that, I was afraid that if I went back for you, you’d come a different way and I’d pass you. Why are you a young woman in New York without a cell phone, again?”

“Are you kidding? A cell phone costs two hundred packages of ramen noodles every month.”

Before I realized what he was doing, he had paid my way into the club. I tried to protest, but he couldn’t hear me over the music. We wound through the writhing crowd, Hunter leading me by the hand. Summer and Manohar danced at the edge of the floor—Manohar, dancing! courtesy of the flask—and Summer pointed us toward an empty booth, the table scattered with glasses and a pitcher of soda.

Hunter slid onto the red velvet bench against the wall. I could sit on the bench across the table from him. Or I could sit on the bench beside him. I didn’t have to sit right next to him. He’d acted all day like we were together and he couldn’t wait to seal the deal. If I sat close to him, I’d be making my first move toward seducing him in return, though I knew full well I would dump him before he had the chance to dump me.

Decision made, I plopped down beside him on the bench without looking at him.

He said something. I couldn’t hear him.

“What?” I asked, turning to look at him.

He watched me intensely, strobe lights flashing across his long nose and sparkling in his blond hair. He crooked his finger at me, beckoning me closer.

Only so I could hear what he’d said, right? I leaned toward him.

At the same time, he stopped crooking his finger at me and laid that hand back where it had been, across the top of the seat.

So as I leaned my head toward his mouth, his arm was sort of around me.

“Are you as tired as I am?” he asked.

I still could hardly hear him over the music, but I knew he was talking loudly because his breath in my ear made my skin dance.

“I’m stone-cold sober,” he said, “and I feel more drunk than I did last night.”

What he said rang so true, so unexpectedly and absolutely true to my life in that moment, that I laughed, and I smiled at him as if he were my friend, and I couldn’t stop laughing.

He laughed, too—chuckling at first, watching me, unsure as to whether I was putting him on. Then laughing with me, a full-body laugh that had us both leaning forward across the bench, toward each other.

Finally the giddiness passed, mostly because my mouth hurt from smiling. Also because a few girls passing by the table had glanced in our direction and I was afraid we’d get kicked out for doing Ecstasy. But the lovely feeling remained, the warmth of laughing, the nearness of Hunter, smiling at me.