Love Story

“Wait for it,” I said again. “It’s a big track and a long race.” I tuned them out, tuned the crowd out, focused on lucky number seven. I loved to watch horses run, extending those long muscles and battling past each other in a rush of adrenaline and mud. I would have loved to be a horse—though not a racehorse, bred and trained and prodded and controlled. I would have wanted to run wild on some plain, running because it felt good and I could.

“Erin.” Summer pushed Manohar out of the way and stood between us at the rail. She squeezed my hand. “Erin, here come your horses. Oh my God! What if you were right?”

“Come on, number nine!” Manohar hollered. This was out of character for him. He stood taller on the bottom rung of the rail and pumped his fist in the air. “Number nine! Number ten!”

The pack spaced way out in the home stretch, so there was a good ten seconds at the end when number nine led, number ten ran second, and number seven ran third, and Summer bounced beside me and squeezed my hand harder and harder, and Manohar yelled louder. I expected the number four horse I’d almost put in this trifecta to come from behind, but he didn’t. The crowd noise pitched higher and higher, to a cl**ax as the horses zoomed past us. The crowd noise died off but Summer was still squealing. Manohar was shouting, “Erin Blackwell, I love you and I am sorry for every negative comment I ever made about your lascivious stories.” Way below us at the fence around the field, the other four boys cheered drunkenly.

Hunter chuckled beside me. “Erin,” he said, “you just won Manohar’s fraternity brothers nine thousand dollars.”

AS I’D PREDICTED, AFTER THE RACES the fraternity boys were too drunk to drive. They celebrated their victory with another beer apiece while the losing bettors milled out of the stands. They downed more shots of bourbon back in the limo. Hunter slipped effortlessly into the driver’s seat. The boisterous boys piled into the back. With Manohar and Summer inseparable, that left me in the front beside Hunter.

“Where are you going?” I asked as he passed the entrance for the Cross Island Parkway.

“The bay,” he said. “A little seafood joint I’ve missed.” He glanced over at me. “My treat.”

He must have guessed what I was thinking: dinner out was not in my budget. But I’d be damned if I’d accept it from him, after that business about plagiarizing his life. “No thanks,” I said. “I don’t need your charity, or my grandmother’s, either.”

Shouts of laughter came through the window from the backseat. “The guys owe you dinner out of their nine thousand dollars,” Hunter said.

“Maybe, but they’re too drunk to realize it.”

“Well, you’re not sitting in the limo while we go in and eat.” His voice grew tight. “Somebody will buy your dinner and you will eat it, or I will tell Gabe I am the stable boy.”

I huffed out an exasperated sigh. “I’ve just solved this problem with Manohar. I’ve paid my dues. You can’t hold the stable boy over my head and make me do anything you want.”

He pulled the limo to a stop at a light. “Yes, I can.”

We eyed each other for a few heartbeats. I glared angrily at him. I was mad at him for manipulating me, and madder at myself for letting him see I was angry. He half-smiled back at me, eyebrows raised in question. Then he glanced at his Rolex, a gesture strategically planned to look casual. I knew it was staged and the message was clear: I have your grandmother’s credit card, and you don’t.

Then he cocked his head to one side. The smile fell away, and he lowered his voice to an offended growl. “It’s only dinner.” Horns honked behind us, but he held my gaze for a few more seconds before pulling the limo forward. Then he asked, “How much weight have you lost since you’ve been here? The freshman fifteen refers to gaining fifteen pounds, not losing it.”

Normally Hunter was the politest person I knew—on the surface, anyway. He’d only made this rude comment about my weight because he was already angry with himself for rudely forcing me to go to dinner. I waited for him to hear himself and feel even guiltier. My most effective response to Hunter was to say nothing at all—if I could stand it. He expected a retort from me. He didn’t expect silence.

“You look great,” he said quickly. “You always look great. I just mean

” His voice trailed off.

I watched him from under the brim of my hat.

He scowled at the road, swinging the limo into as tight a turn as he could manage at an intersection crowded with restaurants and hungry Long Islanders. “You’ve told me before that you’re not spending every cent you make on the dorm. You’re still going to plays and movies, right? You could spend some of that money on food. Restaurants are a huge part of the New York experience.”

“Peanut butter and crackers are fine,” I said breezily. “I see what you mean, but I have to draw the line somewhere.”

Manohar turned around and spoke to us through the window. “Why don’t you move out of the dorm?” he asked.

“No,” Hunter said quietly. Somewhere in the backseat, Summer squealed, “No!”

Manohar went on, “Wouldn’t it be cheaper to live in an apartment with a lot of roommates? Not as nice, maybe, but at least you could afford it.”

“No,” Hunter said again. This time Manohar craned his neck to look at him.

“Yes,” I told Manohar, “it would be cheaper. I did that last summer.”

“And she had a bad experience that spooked her,” Hunter said.

“It didn’t spook me,” I said. “It only made me very angry and got me fired.”

“It should have spooked you,” Hunter said. “Manohar, she hasn’t lived here long enough to know who she can trust. She needs to be in the dorm with a sign-in desk and security. Don’t bring it up again.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Manohar insisted. “How do you know she can trust her randomly assigned dorm roommates? Jřrdis with a slash, for God’s sake!”

“She seems less dangerous as you get to know her,” I said.

“And Summer could be a serial killer,” Manohar said.

Summer’s giggle reached us from the backseat.

“It’s my life, Hunter,” I said, “and you’re going to have to trust my judgment. Sorry.”

Without taking his eyes off the road, Hunter reached behind him and slid the window shut with a bang. “You are so stubborn!” he burst out, loud enough that the boys in the back quieted, listening through the window for what dark path our conversation had taken.

“You’re just doing all of this to get back at your grandmother,” he said. “How can you keep insisting you don’t belong on that farm? Don’t you take the trifecta as a sign?”

“You know as well as I do that hitting the trifecta was pure luck. I nearly picked the number four horse to show.”

“But you didn’t. This business is in your blood.”

The sun was setting now. As Hunter laboriously pulled the limo into a congested parking lot, orange light shone directly into his blue eyes, making him squint.

He looked like a kid then, the twelve-year-old kid I’d met so long ago in a rolling green field in the summertime, bright sunlight glinting in his blond hair.

We should still be friends. We were made to be friends, not enemies. Maybe he recognized the insanity of our situation, too, and that’s why he was trying to persuade me to steal back the birthright he’d stolen.

“It’s not in my blood.” I lowered my voice because I had no wish to share this with the limo. “Romance novelists write that about their heroines all the time. It makes no sense, that the horse farm was in the heroine’s blood. Or the city was in her blood, or the wild Pacific coastline, or the oil-drilling rig on her parents’ vast Texas estate. The place was not in the heroine’s blood, Hunter. The simple fact is that she grew up there, and her overbearing grandmother insisted that she move back there, and the heroine finally gave in—”

“She did?” Hunter asked, blond brows up.

“In romance novels, Hunter, not in real life, and then everybody unanimously agreed it was in her blood, to make her feel better about moving back to the horse farm when she didn’t want to. But she didn’t feel better. She felt the same as she always had, that she wanted to be a writer and she did not want to do it on a horse farm in Kentucky.”

“Not yet.” Hunter stopped the limo along the edge of the crowded parking lot and turned off the engine. “But you will, because you’ll get tired of being poor. I know because I’ve been poor, and it sucks. If you weren’t rich, you would never, ever walk away from an opportunity like running your grandmother’s farm. You would not want to be a writer. It would never occur to you to give up your family’s support so you could see how the other half lives. And that’s all it is for you. You are not living the life of a starving artist. You’re only visiting. You can string yourself along on scholarships and tips from the coffee shop, but if you ever lose your job, or get thrown in jail for possession of someone else’s pot, or get hurt, your grandmother will be right there to catch you when you fall. You know it, and she knows it. Face it. You will never be poor, no matter how hard you try. And eventually you’re going to realize that.”

“Leave ’er alone!” came a shout from the backseat. Then, “Box your weight, Allen!”

Hunter blinked but didn’t otherwise acknowledge the frat boys yelling at him. “Erin, you waltz through life with grace and confidence that only come from old money. You will never bow to anybody like a person would who’d grown up poor. Even if you desperately needed a morsel of food to keep from starving, you might think you were begging, but the people with the food would give you some because they would think you were in charge. You couldn’t beg if you tried.” He got out of the car and closed the door.

While he’d been talking, the boys and Summer had bailed out of the backseat. I found myself alone in the silence, looking out over ancient brick buildings beaten by the Atlantic winds, a stranger in a strange land. The boys were from here. Even Summer seemed to blend in better now, but me? I had a wide-brimmed Derby hat perched primly on my knees.

I jumped as Hunter opened my door.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.” He held out a hand to help me from the car.

*

A COUPLE OF HOURS, A HUGE shrimp dinner, and a very long limo ride later, Hunter dropped us in front of the dorm. As the bartender collapsed into the passenger side so he could direct Hunter in driving the limo back to the funeral home, he offered me a thousand dollars for my advice that had made him and his friends nine thousand. I calculated in my head how many hours away from the coffee shop that money would buy me. And I could feel Hunter’s eyes on me, judging the poor little rich girl. I said no.

Manohar and Summer had seemed so tight all evening that I was surprised when she followed me up to our room. But as she peeled off her skirt and stood unsteadily staring into our open closet, head on the door frame, I realized she was exchanging her cute afternoon-on-the-town outfit for a comfy, subtly sexy night-in-with-new-boyfriend outfit. Brian must be away from the room on a date.

I wondered what Hunter was doing tonight.

She nearly fell over pulling on tight jeans. She’d hardly said a word since we came in. I could tell she wanted to talk to me about where she was going, but she didn’t know how to say it. I didn’t say it for fear of embarrassing her and scaring her off the project altogether. Two strangers, meeting by fortunate chance, falling in love—there was nothing more romantic, and nothing for her to be embarrassed about.

She was embarrassed anyway. She sat beside me on her bed, where I was carefully polishing the pricey and oh-so-comfortable boots I’d worn to Belmont. “If I don’t come in tonight

,” she began.

“Mm-hm?” I prompted her, spreading extra polish on the worn toe of one boot.

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll just be upstairs. Manohar has the private room like you.”

“That sounds nice.” I looked up at her and smiled. “Maybe stop drinking? Because it’s such a big night.”

“Potentially.” She nodded. “I’m through drinking for the night. I’m sober. Er. Not sober but soberer.”

“Okay.”

“I’m worried about you, though.” She pulled off her sweater and stood at the closet door again, waiting for a better one to appear. “You and Hunter really went at it a couple of times. I never understood what went wrong.”

I gave my attention to the toe of my boot, piling even more polish into a deep scrape in the leather. “I guess being around horses reminded us of why we never got along in the first place.” Not since the seventh grade, anyway. “Is he planning one of his late-night treks tonight?”

“That was my impression.” She pulled a sweater over her head and then looked at me with her hands on her hips. The off-the-shoulder black sweater made her look even sexier and more sophisticated than she realized. The effect would have been just what Manohar was looking for if she hadn’t been swaying slightly. Or maybe that would help.

Then she said, “I don’t want to abandon you.”

“You’re not abandoning me.” I waved my rag dismissively, releasing the odor of polish. “The second we start passing up nookie just to support each other’s neuroses, we need to talk about an adjustment in our relationship. But while you’re up there

”

I hated to ask her for another favor, since the first time I’d asked her to pump Manohar for information, they’d argued and she’d slumped into a funk for three weeks. But if all went well, she and Manohar were about to share his very small bedroom. I decided it was okay to ask. “Could you find out from Manohar where Hunter is going late at night?”

“I already asked. Manohar doesn’t know. Hunter says he can’t tell Manohar now that security has been breached. Which means me.” She threw back her shoulders and proudly poked out her chest. “Which also means he’s going somewhere he doesn’t want you to know about.”

I agreed. But to me it seemed likely that somewhere was the velvet-draped couch of the fortune-teller’s shop. Or, ouch, the blonde’s dorm room.

Summer cocked her head at me. “You love those boots, don’t you?”

I cackled, realizing how hard I’d been polishing the toe. “I do love these boots. Moreover, my grandmother paid a lot of money for these boots when I was in high school. I probably will never be able to afford a pair of boots like this again. Gone are the days when I would come home and kick them off and throw them in the closet because if they got beat up, I could just buy another pair. I am trying to make them last by cleaning them and polishing them and putting them away carefully.” I gave the heel one last rueful wipe. “It’s all very Little House on the Prairie.”