Love Story

“Absolutely not,” Hunter said without looking up from his neat folding. “But I hear you’re out of a job, so that’s no excuse for staying. There’s lots to fly to Louisville for.”

“The end of the fall meet,” I murmured. I missed the horses.

“There’s the end of the fall meet,” he agreed. “And there’s, you know, Thanksgiving, which you usually spend with the people you love the most. And then there’s me.”

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.

“I don’t know,” Hunter said.

“Maybe he thought my grandmother and I are getting along,” I mused, running after Hunter as he turned a corner, “and of course I would come home to see her for the Breeders’ Cup.”

“Maybe,” Hunter said, stopping in front of the carousel that would spit out our suitcases.

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “I doubt he’d think of the Breeders’ Cup. He doesn’t know anything about horses.”

We stood in silence until the carousel ground to life. Hunter snagged his bag. He put one hand on my arm to stay me when I recognized mine, and he lifted it off the carousel for me. He started across the wide room toward passenger pickup with both suitcases in tow, but I took mine back from him, saying, “Maybe the Breeders’ Cup is coincidental. He assumed I would be living at my grandmother’s house, still in high school, because he’s forgotten how old I am.”

“I don’t know,” Hunter said again.

Suspicious this time, I looked him in the eye as we walked along. When he met my gaze, then fussed with his suitcase handle again, I knew he wasn’t telling me everything he knew. “What is it?” I insisted.

“My dad,” he said, nodding toward the sliding glass doors and slipping his sunglasses on.

Tommy had parked the Blackwell Farms king-cab pickup truck at the curb. As the airport doors slid open for us, I let the weight of my suitcase on wheels slow me like an anchor. Hunter reached the pickup first. Tommy bear-hugged him and they slapped each other on the back. They were both blond and had similar features, but Tommy’s face was weathered from the sun, and he wore a Blackwell Farms baseball cap and windbreaker that made him look strange embracing Hunter in his cashmere sweater and expensive sunglasses, obviously the heir to a horse fortune.

Tommy held Hunter at arm’s length and beamed at him. Tommy had all Hunter’s friendliness without any of Hunter’s what’s-in-it-for-me calculation. It was hard to picture him as the distant father from the story Hunter had written for Gabe’s class, but certain elements of it rang true. Tommy was a drinker, I knew. He had been a smoker, but Hunter had badgered him into quitting. Tommy had complained about this at the stable every day for a year. Now he rolled a toothpick in the corner of his mouth, chuckling at something Hunter had said.

Then Tommy turned to me with his arms stretched wide. “Erin! How’s the princess?”

“Hey, Tommy,” I said, going in for a hug. My grandmother had always discouraged me from hugging the help. She embarrassed me. I embraced Tommy and let him pick me up and set me back down.

“Hunter said you’d lost weight.” Tommy patted my tummy underneath my clothes. “Good thing you’re wearing that overcoat or you might blow away.”

On cue, icy wind gusted across the terminal driveway. I hadn’t known much about Kentucky when I moved here from California, and I’d been surprised by the tenuous winter that started in November: an overcast sky that spit tiny particles of ice instead of snow.

I wiped the wetness from my face. “Has my dad gotten here yet?”

“Your dad?” Tommy repeated, rolling the toothpick to the other side of his mouth.

“Or do you two have to stay away from each other? I shouldn’t have asked.” Tears stung my eyes. I could hardly see.

That’s why I was slow to understand the questioning look Tommy was giving Hunter, and the stony expression Hunter returned.

I think I might have gasped, “No!” and slapped both hands over my mouth. I wasn’t really aware of what I was doing besides staring at the sign beside the sliding glass doors, greeting visitors unfamiliar with the area with the various pronunciations of the city’s name: LOOAVULL. LUHVUL. LEWISVILLE. LOOAVILLE. LOOEYVILLE.

“Son—” Tommy began.

“I don’t want to hear it,” Hunter interrupted him. “Mrs. Blackwell wanted to see her and I didn’t know how else to get her on the airplane. Around here I could have slung her over my shoulder, but they frown on that in New York. Erin, come back.”

As I walked down the terminal sidewalk, I held up one finger to let them know—or at least to let Tommy know—that I needed a minute. Hunter couldn’t care less what I needed. I stomped down the sidewalk, tears mixing with the icy wind in my face. I would let the cold wind dry me out and then I would turn back. Except more tears kept coming as I thought about my dad. He had not done anything. Not anything new. Hunter had only scratched the scab off that wound. Hunter, whom I kept trusting for some reason. Why would I think he was on my side? He was swindling my grandmother. He could screw me over, too.

A shadow beside me made me turn my head. The Blackwell Farms truck crept backward along the curb, keeping pace with me. The window slid down and Tommy hollered, “Erin, get in the truck before Homeland Security crawls up my ass.”

I stomped a couple of steps more, but I was running out of sidewalk. UPS made Louisville one of the world’s busiest airports, but the passenger side of the airport was small, to match the city, and the terminal ended just ahead. I had no desire to wander through the industrial wasteland to the Ford plant.

I stepped over to the truck, jerked open the door, and tumbled into the backseat, shouting into the front, “Why did you tell me that, Hunter? What is the matter with you?”

Hunter leaned between the front seats to face me, sunglasses still obscuring his blue eyes on a cloudy afternoon. “It was the only way I could think of to get you here. Even the threat of going to Gabe with the stable-boy story wouldn’t get you to come back to Kentucky to see your grandmother, and she really wanted to see you. She was hysterical when I told her you’d gotten hit by a car. I didn’t have a lot of choice.”

He didn’t say he was sorry. He didn’t even look particularly sorry behind his sunglasses. He admitted his transgression with no apology.

A lot like my dad.

“You mean, you didn’t have a choice if you wanted to stay in college on my inheritance,” I corrected Hunter. “I hope nothing this important comes up again, because the stable boy is all you have to coerce me with now. Baiting me with my dad only works once per lifetime.”

“Stable boy,” Tommy muttered, shaking his head.

Luckily the farm wasn’t far, so I wouldn’t have to sit in the truck with Hunter for long. Of course, I’d spend the afternoon, all day Saturday, and Sunday morning stuck at my grandmother’s house. I had sworn to her that she would never see me again and here I was, only five months later. Broke, too, or I would have told Tommy to drop me off at a motel.

Instead, he drove the truck off the interstate, turned onto the narrow blacktop winding through the hills to the farm, then pulled onto the grassy shoulder underneath a huge, fire red maple. “Get out, both of you,” he barked.

Tommy did not bark often. The ice shower had stopped, so I couldn’t use the weather as an excuse. I slid across the seat and onto the ground, drained of emotion and shivering in my coat, looking down at the feet of Tommy and Hunter, standing in front of me. I had nothing to be ashamed of—Hunter was the one who should be ashamed—but I was afraid I looked like hell after crying and I didn’t want him to see me like this. I was an idiot, which made me want to cry again.