Love Story - Page 9/36

The music cranked up several floors above me, signaling a party. I’d overheard Manohar and Brian talking about it in creative-writing class a few days earlier. I’d felt the obligatory blush flood my face, and the obligatory drive to glance at Hunter at the end of the table, where he chuckled with Isabelle. If our dorm was throwing a party, surely he would be there.

But the farther I stayed away from Hunter, the better for both of us. I even smiled at Manohar during class when he shot a few barbs at me about the romantic elements of Isabelle’s awful story. After class, as I was walking out with Summer, I thought I heard Manohar whinny at me. I ignored him.

Now that the bass line of the rock song shook my bay windows, I turned the page in my history textbook. And wished for my music player after all.

I’d almost regained my concentration, focusing on the words rather than the beat, when the door burst open and banged against my desk. “We’re going to a beach party!” Summer announced, already bouncing away. “Put on your bathing suit!”

I peeked around the door frame into the larger room, where she was pulling a bright yellow bikini out of her dresser. “The coffee shop takes up so much of my time,” I said. “I need to study while I ca—”

She whirled to face me and shook her fists, a piece of bikini swinging in each. “You wanted me to flirt with Manohar and bring him over to your side. This is the perfect opportunity, and I am not going to a party in the men’s bathroom in a bikini by myself!”

Reluctantly I pulled my own bikini from my dresser. It was designer, from last year. Luckily it was solid steel blue, not a bold pattern that would date it to a particular collection. And it wasn’t too worn. I’d gotten no use out of it at all during my long, hot summer working in New York.

One of the differences between expensive clothing and cheap clothing, I’d discovered now that I’d actually tried on something in a New York department store’s bargain basement, was that expensive clothing could make the wearer look better. My bikini was no exception, draping in graceful folds reminiscent of a 1950s starlet.

But a glance in Jřrdis’s full-length mirror reminded me that there was nothing the loveliest designer bikini could do about my freckles. This summer I’d had zero opportunity to acquire a light tan, so my freckles stood out like a pox on my white skin. In Pride and Prejudice, Lydia calls a neighborhood girl a “nasty little freckled thing.” Silently Elizabeth agrees. The reader is not to sympathize with Lydia, but she is to sympathize with Elizabeth. I loved Jane Austen with all my heart, but I could not forgive her for this.

Summer called, “I guess, if I am going through with this bizarre notion of flirting with Manohar, I need to touch up my makeup and look like I mean it.”

This was Summer’s hint, I thought, that I’d taken off my makeup for the night, and she did not approve of my look for a party. Reluctantly I pulled my face cream out of my makeup bag. I was almost out. And I would never be buying this particular miracle cream again. It was ridiculously expensive, I realized now that I compared its price with dorm rent. I resented having to waste a dollop on this party, just to silence Manohar on the stable-boy issue.

Summer watched me struggle with the tube. “Fold it like toothpaste.”

“I’m past that point. I think I can get another month out of it if I cut it open, but I’ve tried all Jřrdis’s scissors. They’re not sharp enough.” I sighed with relief as I came away with a smear and moisturized my face. Then I reached for my powder.

“Are you trying to cover up your freckles?” Summer watched me in the mirror above her dresser. “I’m not saying you should. But I use a brand of foundation that’s a lot thicker than yours.”

“No, I’m not trying to cover them up. It’s fruitless. I’ve tried everything and I have made peace with them.” Lie. “The most I can hope for is to tone them down with a look of dewy freshness.” I passed the powder brush over my nose one more time. I’d lived a hard life and lost my looks already. Or maybe that was the dark circles under my eyes from studying late. Anyway, I wasn’t gussying up to catch a man. Summer was saving my internship and I was going with her, in a bathing suit so I would feel even more na**d and exposed than I had during that first critique session in the writing class—almost as if Hunter had planned the party this way.

“You look beautiful,” Summer told my reflection.

“You are beautiful,” I said. She glowed with energy in her bright bikini. I wished, at that moment, that I could trade places with her, that I was the clueless Southerner wide-eyed at New York, wanting nothing more out of life than a fabulous professional job and a meaningful love relationship, ecstatic at the prospect of forced flirting with a boy from class.

We locked our outer door and pushed open the door to the stairs. “I’m so excited,” she gushed. Her voice sounded hollow in the stairwell. “Maybe next I could write an espionage story for Gabe. It’s like I’m a spy. A spy for love.” She kept talking but the music had drowned out her voice by the time we passed the third floor. We kept climbing and pulled open the door to the fifth floor.

I’d been going to horse parties since I was fourteen. In retrospect, I realized this was not because my grandmother thought I was mature enough to handle the alcohol and schmoozing with older boys like Whitfield Farrell. I was not. It was because she was grooming me, even then, to take over.

Four years later, Hunter was taking over instead, and I was destitute, with a lot of partying under my belt. I’d even done shots with a few celebrities who came to Kentucky only during Derby season and who thought they were part of the in crowd if they drank bourbon and wore a hat. And now, walking into a college party on the fifth floor of the honors dorm—could it sound more lame?—I got nervous, chickened out, spread my hands over my bare tummy, and would have backed away down the stairwell if Summer hadn’t grabbed my hand and pulled me through the crowd outside the bathroom.

“You like Hunter more than you want to admit,” she said in my ear as she tugged the door open. “But maybe he won’t be here.” She pushed me inside.

The room was dimly lit with a few rotating colored lights, and the hot, swirling mist made it even more difficult to see. The showerheads in every stall sprayed full force—hot water, judging from the fog. The room was more like a sauna than a beach.

But the boys had worked hard on the beach scene. A few potted palms framed the doorway where we stood. About half the thirty people in the room stood in a circle near the sinks and batted a beach ball back and forth. An upperclassman had set up a bar in front of the urinals. He chopped ice in a blender, mixed it with fruit juice and vodka, and garnished the drinks with paper umbrellas.

And over the bare shoulders of boys, right away I saw Hunter stripped down to his bathing suit and flip-flops. For the first time in months and months, here was what I’d seen almost daily for so many Kentucky summers: Hunter with his shirt off. Back home his muscles had worked underneath his skin, stacking bales of hay, holding a bucking stallion. Muscles like that, in a body as beautiful as a machine, should have made noise as they worked, some low grinding music, rather than sliding along silently through their task.

In class or in the coffee shop, I had known those silent muscles were there, disguised in a crisp cotton shirt or a blue polo for another girl to discover. Now another girl had discovered them all right. Bracing one hand against the wet tile wall, Hunter leaned in and talked to a blonde, as confidently and casually as if he’d met a girl from our rival high school outside the pretzel shop at the mall.

I waited for him to look up at me in the doorway, give me a smug smile, and turn back to her. That would let me know he was interested in me and trying to make me jealous.

He never looked at me. He kept talking to her as if I were not there.

Summer noticed, too. Conveniently ignoring his blond accessory, she gasped, “My God—Hunter’s body. Are those muscles from being a stable boy?”

“I’m afraid so.” Actually, I didn’t know. That’s how he’d developed the muscles in the first place, but surely my grandmother hadn’t made him work for his keep all summer long. He should have grown soft and faded to white in the electric lamplight of her expensively stylish office. He hadn’t.

“Do you know what the scar is from?” Summer asked, touching her side at the approximate location of Hunter’s long white scar. Now he would know we were talking about him—if he looked over at us. This didn’t seem likely. The blonde gazed up into his eyes and tilted her head, her long hair shifting damply over her bare shoulder.

“Surgery,” I said. “He broke some ribs. A horse fell on him.”

“What?” Summer exclaimed. “When?”

I shrugged. “Eighth grade?”

“Oh, no!” she cried. “He was so young! Did you visit him in the hospital and sit by his bedside? How sweet!” Hunter was going to hear her even over the throbbing music.

“Shhh,” I said. “No, we weren’t speaking.”

“Erin!” she protested. “Why not?”

Because only a year had passed since my mother died. I had been terrified for him, but if I had visited him, I wouldn’t have known what to say.

I nodded at the bar in front of the urinals. “Let’s get a drink.” I set off across the slippery floor without waiting for her answer and asked the upperclassman for a lime slush with no vodka.

“All right,” she said when she’d caught up with me. “But there is way more to this stable-boy thing than you are telling me.” She ordered a mango daiquiri with plenty of rum.

I had thought a run-in with Manohar was my biggest fear. After glimpsing Hunter and the blonde again, the prospect of chatting with Manohar seemed downright welcoming. He and Brian lay on lounge chairs in the corner, wearing sunglasses. Summer bounced up to Manohar and unceremoniously told him to scoot over on his chair. That meant I could perch on the edge of Brian’s chair. Unfortunately, this meant that I faced Hunter again.

The blonde stood in the shower spray with her eyes closed, hot water splashing off her face and streaming into her hair and dashing onto the tile floor around her perfectly polished red toenails. As I watched, Hunter reached over and stroked his big hand from the crown of her head down her darkened wet hair, in the middle of the stream of water. Her hair must feel so soft and warm to him, almost like his own body, like nothing. How could he do something so intimate to her? He hardly knew her.

The room was crowded, and when a bare-chested or bikini-clad body passed in front of me and blocked my view, I realized I was staring. I turned my attention back to the conversation with Summer, Manohar, and Brian about the food in the dining hall—which I’d never eaten anyway because I’d begged a university financial counselor to let me off the too expensive meal plan. But the half-naked bodies would move on, and my foolish gaze would return to Hunter.

I could have wondered for the rest of the night whether paying attention to another girl was Hunter’s way of telling me he was interested in me instead. I was a romance writer. I spun scenarios the way I wanted them to go.

But that would drive me crazy. I could foresee a whole semester of acting like a seventh-grader, obsessing over whether Hunter liked me—or worse, a whole four years of college. If I was able to stay here that long.

Instead, I used a technique I’d developed to cope after my mother died, putting all that grief into a small box so the rest of my life was clear of it. Chin up, I watched Hunter watching the blonde, his hand sliding down her bare back. I said to myself, Hunter likes this girl and not me. I should not want Hunter anyway because he stole my farm and he is in cahoots with my grandmother. He has no interest in me romantically. I am still okay.

And then I turned away. There were plenty of other boys to talk to in the sauna, and some of them looked almost as good as Hunter in the blurring steam. For instance, Wolf-boy Kyle plopped down on the end of Manohar’s chair, next to Summer, already drunk enough that he didn’t notice Manohar’s stony expression behind his shades or the way Manohar slowly and pointedly gave up possession of the chair, drawing up his legs and turning so he sat on it like a bench and his bare thigh touched Summer’s.

Kyle leaned toward me across the space between the chairs. “You’re the one who wrote the horny story in creative writing. You have got some balls.”

Summer shoved him lightly. Manohar barked with laughter. Brian sat up, murmuring, “What’d he say?” The music throbbed and echoed against the tile walls. Holding a conversation involved lipreading as well as listening.

I cleared my throat. “For the sake of polite conversation, Kyle, I will choose to overlook that gender-confused mixed metaphor. And my story wasn’t horny.”

Everyone, even Summer, gaped at me.

I laughed. “Okay, I guess it was,” I acknowledged as Hunter sat down beside me on the end of Brian’s chair.

Hunter grinned at everybody but me. “Am I missing class?”

I wanted to ask him where his blond girl had gone off to. Now that I looked, she’d disappeared from the shower, and she wasn’t hanging behind him with her hand on his shoulder. But I should not have lusted after him anyway, and he probably had no idea that he was making my skin burn on the side where he sat. I struggled to focus on the group conversation, which had turned to Gabe.

“I’m a little disappointed in him,” Summer was saying. “My other roommate, Jřrdis—I think you’ve met her, Hunter—”

Hunter smiled at Summer. He didn’t glance at me.

“—she’s a sophomore, and she says her honors freshman writing teacher was a willowy lady in a cape who led the class on observation missions through the West Village during class time. I don’t think we’re going on any observation missions. Gabe sits and listens to us and sips his coffee.”

“If it’s really coffee,” Manohar said. “He’s so quiet, like he’s in an alcoholic fog.”

“Hear, hear.” Kyle clicked his plastic cup against mine in a toast.

My stomach turned over. I felt strangely defensive of Gabe. “I know it’s coffee,” I said. “It comes from the shop where I work. Sometimes he wanders in after class.”

“Speaking of which.” Hunter reached over, took my cup from my hand, and tasted the lime slush.

The Hunter I knew was not rude enough to drink from my cup uninvited. Was he flirting with me? My proper reaction would be outrage, especially after he’d had his hands all over that blonde. I tried not to stare at his wet lips.