Love Story(51)
Author: Jennifer Echols

Before I could take a step away, he reached out and grabbed my elbow. “I was making a joke.”

“About our positions being switched, with you owning the farm and me working as a stable boy? You’re hilarious. You know what you should do with that kind of talent? You should go to college in New York and study creative writing.”

He laughed too heartily at this, tugging at my elbow. “Come on.”

I tried to slow my breathing. It formed white clouds in the frigid air, and Hunter could see how excited I was. “Where are we going?” I asked.

“Behind the stable!” he said in exasperation. He pulled me until I walked with him along the stone wall and past the last corner. As we turned and kicked through the gravel against the back wall, he stated the obvious. “I have never been this drunk in my life.”

I chuckled. “It’s part of the job description.”

His eyes widened. “It is! It really is. And it’s not the volume so much as the longevity. I think I had my first mint julep at ten o’clock this morning.”

He slid onto the lone bench against the back wall of the stable, where potential buyers could watch horses trot around the paddock. I sat next to him, but not too close, still unsure about what we were doing here. Beyond the paddock fence, the green hills rolled and rolled under the stars, gently descending to the tree line. We sat there in the silence and the cold for a few moments. I tried to memorize this: vast farm below, the depthless sky above, and Hunter beside me. Not touching me. Just there for me.

He broke the silence with a sigh. “This is so crazy. You should be schmoozing your way through blue-blood Kentucky, not me.”

I shrugged. “I won’t lie. I’m sore right now. But I had a lot of fun being a stable boy today. In New York I never long for the horse parties or the horse people, but I do miss the horses.”

“Yeah. Dad said you took Boo-boo out for a long ride yesterday. I was glad to hear that. I’ll bet she was so happy to see you.”

“Why? I’m sure she didn’t recognize me.”

“What are you talking about?” Hunter demanded. “Boo-boo loves you. She always has.”

“She would love any random person holding an apple.”

His lips parted and his blond brows went down in a concerned expression. Suddenly he jerked his head away from me and sneezed. I didn’t remember ever seeing him sneeze before, even with all the hay and dust constantly hanging in the air in the barns. But Hunter did sneeze, and what I’d thought was his concern for me had actually been a presneeze expression.

Then he turned back to me. “Erin,” he said gravely, “that is the saddest thing I ever heard. That story you wrote for Gabe’s class. About the girl alone in the mansion, with nobody to talk to?”

I nodded.

“I wasn’t there in your house with you, obviously, so I don’t know,” he said. “But from watching you with your grandmother at the stables right after your mother died, it seemed like the two of you didn’t really talk. You remember your grandmother made my dad get you back on a horse the next week?”

I laughed shortly. “I will never forget that.”

“He told me you did not seem okay. He thought your grandmother wasn’t talking to you about what happened and you had no way to deal with it. After this went on for a few weeks, he wanted me to try to talk to you.”

I blinked at him in the darkness. “You didn’t, though.”

“We were already in school by then. Your friends had made fun of me. I was twelve. My higher brain functions weren’t fully developed. I was so in love with you.”

The cold had woven its way into the fabric of my jeans and settled like a coating of ice in the folds of my jacket. Now I warmed again, puzzling through Hunter’s words. I didn’t know whether to take him seriously. “Your love for me was a symptom that your brain hadn’t developed, or—”

“Shut up.” He turned to face me. “I am drunk and I am trying to confess, so just let me do it, okay? I had fallen in love with you over the summer. Then this horrible thing happened to you and you stopped talking to me. I thought you blamed me, or my dad. Which he deserved.”

“No,” I protested. “It was an acc—”

“I took it as a rejection.” He put his hand on my knee and looked me straight in the eyes. “It’s taken me all this time to figure that out. But I regretted it every day. And I’m truly sorry.” He sat back against the bench and faced the stars. The place where his hand had rested on my knee felt colder than ever.

“I’m sorry, too,” I said, “so we’re even. I didn’t visit you in the hospital when you got crushed by a horse. For much the same reasons regarding love and rejection and being young.” And being a cold bitch, born and bred, I thought to myself, because he was trying to make a connection with me, and I couldn’t even meet him halfway.

“That went on for six years,” he said. “You didn’t talk to me. I didn’t talk to you. You didn’t talk to your grandmother. And now she’s disinherited you. So in all that time, you never told her how you feel?”

“How do I feel?” I leaned forward, honestly curious about what he would tell me.

“You love horses. You love the farm. But everything about it reminds you of your mother dying and your dad leaving. You never dealt with it back then. You’re trying to deal with it now. You’ve gone far away to a place with no horses and very little grass, and you’re studying how to write a story with a happy ending. If you can write that ending for yourself, maybe you can come back.”

Listening to this was like watching a colorful origami box unfold. Only it was Hunter showing me the contents. That made me very uncomfortable. I sat back and folded my arms across my chest, hugging myself against the cold.

“When I brought you here,” he said, “I thought your grandmother would summon you. She must be waiting for you to come to her instead. Now I see that you and I may fly back to New York tomorrow without either of you giving in.”

“Hm,” I agreed.

“But if you do stumble upon each other and have a talk”—he turned to me and took my hand this time, warming it between both of his—“can’t you please tell her how you feel?”

I shook my head. “No.”

He dropped my hand and slouched against the bench. “I wish you would, because I’m not sure how long I can put up with this.”

“I’ll bet you can put up with it a little longer,” I said brightly, desperate to get out from under the heavy subject. “How much do you love college in New York?”

He grinned. “I love college in New York. I love just being in the city. I love my classes. I love the hospital. I wish I weren’t there at two in the morning because I also love sleep, but I do love the hospital. I love Manohar and Brian. In a manly love kind of way, of course.”

“Of course,” I said, the corners of my mouth stretched tight, trying not to laugh. “You get along great with everybody. Because that’s what you do.”