Love Story(53)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“Erin found out I’m majoring in pre-med instead of business,” Hunter said.

“Hunter Allen,” my grandmother scolded him. I could picture the angry line forming between her exquisitely arched brows. “How could you let that happen?”

“I’m in the honors program with her,” Hunter explained in his most persuasive, reasonable, in-control voice, the one that made women fall in love with him. “You asked me to get into a couple of her classes so I could keep tabs on her. But it works both ways. If I’m close enough to find out things about her, she’ll find out things about me.”

My grandmother protested, “But what are we going to—”

“I took care of it,” Hunter interrupted her. Nobody interrupted my grandmother, or so I had thought. “I told her I’m just fooling you into paying for my college, and you have no idea I’m in premed.”

My grandmother cackled. “That’s rich.”

“Well, it worked,” Hunter said. “For now. But I don’t know how long—”

“Just fix it, Hunter,” my grandmother said. “You can fix anything with your charm. All you have to do is convince her to major in business and run the farm. And make certain she’s not fooling me like you’re fooling her! Surely that won’t take so long? You said she’s starving. Let’s see if she can spend a Christmas without my pralines!”

“I’ll step in before she starves,” Hunter said, and I thought I detected a disapproving tone toward my grandmother. Amazing what this boy could get away with. “But you’re right. I’m getting closer to convincing her. Bringing her here was a good idea. It reminded her of how much she loves this place. One of the guys at the stable told my dad she was out for hours on Boo-boo yesterday afternoon.”

“On whom?”

“Boo-boo. Her horse. You know, High and Mighty. By Rocky Mountain High out of Might Is Right.” The breakfast dishes clinked. “Congratulations on your win yesterday, by the way.”

“That horse certainly earned back the cost of the trip to Dubai to buy him,” my grandmother said, and the conversation turned easily enough from manipulating me to buying horses.

I sat on the stair and listened to them for a few minutes more. I could sit here until they finished breakfast and came out of the kitchen to discover me, and I could confront them. Or I could go storming into the kitchen now.

Or I could creep back up the sweeping staircase the way I’d come, because it didn’t matter that they knew that I knew. All that mattered was that both of them had betrayed me even more deeply and blatantly than I had imagined, and that the love I’d thought had grown between Hunter and me was the worst kind of lie.

Every step he’d taken toward me—acting like my stable-boy story had affected him, writing his own sexy stories, taking me to Belmont, kissing me in the hospital, dragging me home—he’d taken to make me fall in love with him so he could advise me to follow in my grandmother’s footsteps. If I did as he said, she gave him a free ride.

As I crossed my room, stepped into the tree, and closed the window behind me, I struggled to pound my feelings for Hunter into a small box, like squeezing my grief into a box when my mother died. I said to myself, Hunter never liked me. I should not want him anyway because he is in cahoots with my grandmother. He has no interest in me romantically. I am still okay, I am okay, I am okay.

It wasn’t working. The further we’d gone, the more I’d realized I wanted and needed him, needed desperately to connect with him, even if it was only physical. I needed his touch, was starved for it.

I was concentrating so hard that I missed my last foothold in the tree and fell on the ground, directly on my sore hip. Pain jabbed through me. Tears stung my eyes.

I limped back down the lane. Just as I reached the path to Tommy’s house, I heard a car topping the hill. My grandmother rode in the backseat of the limo she took to races. She watched me through the tinted window as she passed, eyes hidden by big designer sunglasses, mouth pulled into a disapproving frown.

An hour later I answered a knock on Tommy’s front door. Hunter gestured to the farm truck waiting in the lane. “Your chariot awaits.” Then he pushed me inside, where the driver couldn’t see us, and kissed me hard on the mouth. “Good morning.”

AFTER THE TAXI DROPPED US OFF in front of our dorm, Hunter walked me up to my room and pressed me against the hall wall. “Just because we’re here in New York doesn’t mean we’re going back to the way we were,” he said, nuzzling my cheek. “We have a hard day tomorrow and we need time to work through this, but things will be different between us now. Promise me.”

“Promise.” My voice sounded too bright to my own ears, my delivery ironic. But Hunter had played the devoted new boyfriend all morning in the airport. He didn’t seem to notice that I regarded him with lust and stony silence.

Ten hours later I was hunched over my laptop at my desk, struggling with the last paragraph of my history paper, when I heard a commotion in the outer bedroom. I rolled my desk chair back and peeked around the door frame. Summer was there with Manohar, Kyle, Isabelle, Brian, and Brian’s new boyfriend, all of them leaning on the others, tipsy. Bringing up the rear, standing at the threshold to the hallway, was Hunter.

“Erin!” Summer called when she saw me. “We came to find you. Aren’t you done with your paper yet? We’re going to the club, baby!”

My heart leapt. Summer, Jřrdis, and I had had a great time at the club the week before classes started. I hadn’t had time to go since.

“I have a test tomorrow,” I said. “I’ve almost finished my paper, and then I’m going to bed.” That is, I might be going to bed. Despite my best instincts, that depended on what Hunter was doing. Angry as I was with him, I could not let him go to that club with Isabelle.

“You don’t need all that sleep just to pass a test,” Brian said. “You need to relax and get your mind off studying for a while, and you can do that at the club.”

“Oooh, what’s this?” Brian’s boyfriend exclaimed, peering at one of Jřrdis’s works in progress. She’d started to glue the faces onto a board. All at once, everyone else tried to explain Jřrdis’s art, and Jřrdis.

Hunter walked over and leaned through my doorway. His shadow blended with my shadow on the wall behind him until I couldn’t tell one from the other. “Are you going?” he asked me quietly.

I was about to burst with anger. I should tell him I knew everything about his deal with my grandmother. But then our relationship, even our friendship, would be over. I wanted to get him out of my system, didn’t I? Otherwise I would wonder for the rest of my life what he would have been like. I would dream about him.

“I’m going if you’re going,” I said, looking him straight in the eye.

He disappeared into the larger room. I heard him say, “She’s going.”