Love Story

In the ensuing commotion, which involved Hunter looking outraged as Manohar and another guy extricated themselves from his own lap, Summer whispered to me, “These city boys can’t drive.”

I nodded. “Hunter will use that.”

Her eyes widened. “For what?”

“He can’t stand being a passenger because he’s not in charge. I guarantee you he’ll find a way to drive us home.”

“Drink, ladies?” The bartender, who was driving, handed a bottle of Kentucky bourbon through the little window. The boys in the back with us produced tumblers from a secret compartment in the back of the driver’s seat—the limo was used for drunken wakes, apparently—and handed the bourbon around. Hunter put up his hand in an understated gesture of refusal. Just as I’d thought. After everyone else got drunk, he could drive the limo home because he would be the last one standing.

“Drink?” Hunter prompted me. One of the boys was trying to hand me a tumbler across the limo.

“No thanks,” I said.

When the boys’ volume escalated again, he asked me quietly, “More history homework tonight?”

“Calculus,” I said. “I can’t do it tomorrow. I’m working twelve hours.”

I’d been careful not to use a snippy tone. Still, I hoped the words themselves would shut him up. No such luck. He said, “You’re really tired.”

“I’m not tired.” I watched him suspiciously. “How can you tell I’m tired?” Maybe I’d been too stingy with the remnants of my miracle cream, and I needed to use a little more under my eyes.

“When you’re tired, you hold your chin up.” He demonstrated, lifting his nose into the air. “You look haughtier than usual.”

“Oh, nice,” I said.

“I didn’t mean it that way.” He spread even farther in his seat, arm along the windowsill, one ankle on the other knee, taking up more than his share of space, as always. Then he gave me a cocky grin. “I like you haughty.”

I did not know what to say to that. He was flirting with me again. I tried not to be flattered. He had flirted with me at the beach party right after putting his hands all over that blonde. Flirting meant nothing to him. I said noncommittally, “I think it’s the hat.”

“What?” Summer yelled across the car at Manohar. “I can hardly hear you.” She turned to the other boys. “Simmer down! It’s like freaking Boy Scout camp in here.” Then she turned to Hunter. “Trade places with me.”

Without protest, Hunter crouched and allowed Summer to slip past him and collapse between the door and Manohar. Hunter turned, sat down beside me, and proceeded to put his ankle on the opposite knee and his arm along the back of the seat behind me.

Summer was attempting to explain the Southern phenomenon of mud riding to Manohar, and Manohar was expressing disbelief. But between sentences and over her glass of bourbon, she took time to give me a sly smile.

I tried to ignore the tingles along my neck and shoulders where Hunter’s arm accidentally touched them. I looked out the window.

AT THE TRACK, THE GUYS WANTED to buy drinks—this would be a long process involving many drink stands because six people were drinking and only two of them were twenty-one—and find a place in the stands. They didn’t understand that betting on horses with any aplomb took some work. While the rest of them laughed amid the crowd under autumn trees, Hunter and I grabbed tip sheets and stood at the paddock fence, watching the grooms parade the thoroughbreds that would run in the first race.

This was déjŕ vu, standing next to Hunter at a fence with horses on the other side. I did not want to like him or have a good time today. I wished that the stallion in front of us didn’t remind me of Boo-boo, and that I wasn’t itching to touch him, just to feel his warm skin and sheer power under my palm.

“Hey, it’s Boo-boo,” Hunter said.

He meant the horse’s markings, but I chose to take him more literally. Paging through the tip sheet, I said, “No, this guy’s bloodlines are from California.” Then I flipped through the booklet for the next horse shaking its mane in front of us. The sire was from my farm. I’d never been too impressed with the father even though he’d won the Stephen Foster Handicap, but the dam was from a prestigious farm, and she’d won the Kentucky Oaks.

The bottom line was that horse races were never sure things. That’s why people bet on them. And all the information available to me about these horses was available to everyone at the track. All I could do with my background was give it the proper weight. I muttered, “This is nothing Manohar’s friends wouldn’t know if they’d just done their homework.”

“It’s a fraternity,” Hunter said. “They want the easy way out. You are the homework.”

As he spoke, something loomed large in the corner of my vision. We both turned back to the paddock in time to see a groom lead the next thoroughbred past, an enormous bay with black points. This horse looked like strength and speed, the veins standing out in his chest as his muscles strained with the effort to keep himself from bolting over the paddock fence, through the crowd, and out into the parking lot just for kicks. He was the kind of horse I would have been afraid of back home.

“That is a beautiful horse,” I murmured at the same time Hunter breathed, “That is a beautiful horse.”

We glanced at each other. He smiled at me. Despite myself, I smiled back.

“You telling the boys to bet on him?” he asked.

Shaking off the chill that had washed through me when he smiled at me, I consulted the brochure again. “Not with that jockey.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Who’s supposed to be the horse prodigy here, me or you?”

“You’re going to get Manohar blackballed,” he said, but he wasn’t looking at me. It wasn’t like Hunter to let on that someone didn’t have his full attention in a conversation. I followed his gaze to a blood bay colt with a white blaze. The horse looked out of his league in a race like this.

Then I realized Hunter wasn’t looking at the horse. He gazed at the groom, a lanky, white-haired African-American man. I figured this out when the groom’s eyes passed casually over the crowd and stopped on Hunter. His eyes widened, his jaw dropped, and then he broke into a big grin.

Hunter grinned, too. He lifted one finger from the fence in greeting.

The man realized he was still leading the horse. Down by his side, he flattened his hand, motioning for Hunter to wait.

Hunter nodded.

Then, as the man led the horse past us and made the turn in the paddock, he circled his finger at his side, asking Hunter to meet him back in the stables, I guessed.

Casually Hunter straightened and stretched his arms over his head. “I’m going to slip around back and try to talk my way into the stables. I doubt it will work, but you never know.”

“Is he a friend of yours?” I asked. “Did your dad work with him when you lived here?”

Hunter glanced at me in surprise. “Yeah. I hoped I might run into him, but I never thought he’d recognize me.”

I nodded. “Because you were only twelve when you left?”

“Yeah.” His eyes followed the groom and colt out of the paddock. “He looks exactly the same.”

“Go ahead.” I nodded in the direction the groom had gone. “I’ll cover for you. I won’t let the others know you’re human.”

He gave me a look I couldn’t read. He bent down, ducked under the wide brim of my hat, and kissed my cheek.

And then he was gone, sashaying through the crowd milling around the fence, holding his blazer slung over his shoulder with two fingers.

8

I watched the rest of the horses parade around the paddock, perused the tip sheet carefully, and told the boys which horse to bet on. I gave them my warning that horse racing was not an exact science and that my knowledge of the sport might give them an edge or lead them straight to the poorhouse. Nevertheless, they bet on the horse I picked, the horse won at twenty-five to one (everybody else at the track had bet on the impressive bay), and afterward the boys did not listen to my words of caution anymore.

By the lull before the last post time of the afternoon, the boys had gotten drunk and greedy. They’d insisted I pick the trifecta for them, which meant the horses that came in first, second, and third, in order. If I hit it, it would pay unbelievable odds, precisely because hitting it was nearly impossible. They were so excited that they wandered out of the stands and down to the fence where they could cheer on their horses right next to the track. I was glad. When they lost their entire winnings for the afternoon on this one race, I didn’t want to be around.

But Manohar and Summer had forgotten all about betting. They had gotten drunk and fallen in love. They’d talked with their heads close together all afternoon, and from what I could overhear, none of it had anything to do with horses. Huddled close and holding hands on the armrest between their seats, they didn’t seem to notice when Hunter stepped into our booth and tossed his blazer over the back of a seat, his temples shining with sweat as if he’d done some work in the stables.

“Did you see who you wanted to see?” I asked, watching the tractor tow the gate to the starting line.

“Lots of old friends.” He smiled to himself.

I looked up at him, then back to the field in front of us, which was filled with warm sunlight and the slanting shadows of evening. “This track is huge. When you first came to Churchill Downs, did it seem small?”

“I never saw much of it,” he said. “I was back in the stables, not out on the track.” But maybe he realized that he sounded like a recording stuck on replay—we both did, reminding ourselves of what we used to be and what we’d done to each other—because he took a breath and went on, “We had our own house here on Long Island. We rented it, but it seemed like ours. And we went into the city a lot. In Louisville we lived on your grandmother’s farm and that’s all there was. Churchill Downs seemed tiny in comparison, yeah, but so did my whole world.”

“So tell me something, stable boy,” Manohar called from his seat. “I’ve been puzzling through this. If you stole Erin’s birthright on graduation night—”

Hunter opened his mouth to protest, but Summer broke in. “Let him finish, Hunter. We’ve both been wondering about this.”

“—how did you get admitted to college so quickly?” Manohar asked. “You’ve cast yourself as an innocent who happened to be handed Erin’s fortune—”

I snorted. Then realized I should not have snorted while wearing an elegant autumn hat.

“Exactly.” Manohar pointed at me. “To be admitted, Hunter must have applied to school ahead of time, when you did, Erin. So the corporate takeover was premeditated.”

“That’s not what happened,” Hunter said. I couldn’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses, but he sounded angry. “I’d always planned to come to school here. I’m from here, and I wanted to get back here. I got a scholarship. The same one Erin got, actually. But it wasn’t enough, and if it hadn’t been for Erin’s grandmother, I would have been stuck in Kentucky.”

“Unless you worked your way through school slaving forty hours a week in a coffee shop,” I cut in. “God forbid.”

“Actually,” Hunter’s voice rose, “Erin got the idea from me to come to school here, not the other way around.”

I had kept a curious distance from this conversation, watching Hunter squirm from a few feet away. But I should have known Hunter would turn it around so he sounded blameless. I plopped down in the seat between him and Manohar, exclaiming, “That’s ridiculous. My grandmother went to school here. She wanted me to go here, and when I did some research and discovered they had a great creative-writing program, I agreed. I planned on this all along. It was only when she insisted on controlling my major and my career and my life that things fell apart.”

“That’s not what happened,” Hunter said again. “When I first met you, you swore you were going back to California.”

“Back to California?” Summer broke in. “Erin, you never told me you moved to Kentucky from California.”

Hunter talked right over her. “You only got interested in New York when I told you how cool it was, and I gave you a magnet with the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building and the other landmarks on it. My grandma gave it to me before I left Long Island, and I gave it to you, and you’re going to sit there and say I stole your life from you?”

I was glad I wore sunglasses and a hat, because I could feel my face burning. Could Hunter really be the source of my treasured New York magnet? The months surrounding my mom’s death were a blur to me now. I really didn’t remember where the magnet had come from. I was embarrassed that I couldn’t say for sure, and even more ashamed that I’d never even considered he might have a grandmother, too.

“What have you done?” Summer murmured to Manohar.

“Hey, kids,” Manohar said, “I was just curious about the timing. I didn’t mean to—”

Stony faced, Hunter told me, “You plagiarized my life. You’re like a seventh-grader. You take notes from the internet, forget where the information came from, and copy it straight into your school paper. You plagiarized my life without even knowing it.”

A bell went off in my head. After a few seconds of staring at Hunter’s hardened face and thinking I was going crazy, I realized the race had started. All four of us jumped up and leaned on the rail.

“Erin, which horse did you tell them would come in first?” Summer asked.

“Number nine,” I said, hoping Hunter couldn’t hear over the noise of the crowd how my voice was shaking with emotion. I cleared my throat. “In the pink-and-white silks.”

“He’s way back in the pack,” Manohar said.

“Wait for it,” I muttered. “I’ve watched that jockey for years. On this horse, he’ll come through.”

“Which one did you say would come in second?” Summer asked.

“Ten, in the yellow,” I told her.

“I guess that’s okay,” she said. “He’s second now. Do the boys win anything if you’re right only about that one?”

Hunter leaned toward me. “Did you tell them to box the horses?”

Hating how my pulse raced when his shirtsleeve brushed my sweater, I nodded.

“So they’ll win some,” Hunter told Summer. “Not nearly as much as if she hits the trifecta.”

“Which one did you say would come in third?” Summer asked.

“Number seven,” I said, “in blue.”

“What are you doing to me, woman?” Manohar exclaimed. “That horse is dead last in a field of fourteen!”