Love Story(57)
Author: Jennifer Echols

They collapsed inside black bucket seats of soft leather. The boy rolled toward her and coaxed, “Unbuckle my belt, Erin—”

*

“GOOD AFTERNOON.” GABE BEAMED AT US as he closed the door behind him and eased himself into the upholstered chair at the head of the table.

I was glad class was starting. I’d been dreading it all day. I was half glad Hunter wasn’t there. I wondered where he was instead. I hoped he wasn’t acting out one of his sexy stories as revenge on me. And I wished I’d finished reading over my story again, picturing what he would think as he read it. I was just getting to the dirty part.

Gabe raised his white eyebrows at Hunter’s empty chair at the foot of the table. Beamed at everyone else again.

Footfalls sounded at the bottom of the staircase below us.

“Let’s start with Erin’s story today, shall we?” Gabe said. “None of us will be able to think about anything else until we get that out of the way.”

The class tittered. Summer looked over at me, face sympathetic.

The footsteps stomped closer in the stairwell.

“Manohar,” Gabe said, “why don’t you start—”

Hunter burst through the classroom door, waving my story in my face. Wow, he must have been really angry to take reserve materials out of the library. That was not allowed. He probably had alarm bells ringing and the campus police after him, and he must have left his student ID.

That was what I was thinking as he shouted at me, “Did you want me to watch? Did you want us all to watch? You screamed at me for not writing the right kind of story, Erin, and you have a lot of nerve. Every story you’ve written in this class, you’ve calculated to stab me and twist the knife, from casting me as your stable boy to this piece of f**king  p**n ography.” He threw “Obedience” down on the table in front of me.

Gabe was yelling at us. Gabe who had never raised his voice in class before or shown any kind of anger at all was standing up in front of his elegant upholstered chair, red faced, shouting about how in forty years of teaching creative writing he had never encountered such insolence. He actually used the word insolence.

I stood up, too, because as long as I sat, I was lower than Gabe and lower than Hunter. I told Hunter, “You didn’t seem to mind the f**king  p**n ography last night.”

“We were doing it, Erin, not writing about it for everybody to read!”

“Well, just fix it, Hunter! You can fix anything with your charm!”

The front of Hunter’s shirt rose and fell with his rapid breathing, buttons glinting in the glow from the stained-glass lamps. And in his glare, I saw everything he was thinking. I had overheard what my grandmother had said to him. I had figured out that she was paying him to watch over me, and he’d faked his feelings for me for that purpose. I had slept with him anyway, and faked my feelings for him in turn.

The one thing I hadn’t counted on was that at some point during the last few months, or the last week, or the last day, his feelings for me had turned real. He thought mine were still fake.

And Hunter did not like to be taken advantage of.

Gabe was giving us a lecture. Everyone in the room gawked at me. A girl at the other end of the table whispered, “Hunter is Erin’s stable boy?”

And I started to cry.

Summer patted my hand on the table. “Go,” she said.

“Where?” I asked her. My voice broke.

“Gabe said to go wait for him outside his office,” she whispered.

Sure enough, Hunter had turned to leave, and Gabe glowered at me with his arms folded.

I’d never been to Gabe’s office. I followed Hunter’s stomping up to the third floor of the building. When I emerged from the stairwell, I spotted him at the far end of the hall, backpack slung over one shoulder, arms crossed on his chest, staring out the window onto the street. Beside him was a comfy-looking chaise longue, the only seat in the hall. I took one step toward it to wait there for Gabe, but Hunter turned and glared at me.

I backed down the stairwell, deciding it might be better to wait out class in the basement snack bar.

By the time class ended, I had scribbled twenty pages of a new story and stopped crying. Ascending the staircase again, I saw that Hunter hadn’t budged. He stared out the now dark window and shouldered his burden of books. This time I would not let him scare me away from the chaise longue. I trudged down the hall, plopped on the chaise, and opened my history book, like that would fool anybody.

“Well.” Hunter’s voice cracked as he said this. He cleared his throat. “There goes your internship.”

“Which is exactly what you and my grandmother wanted,” I said without looking up from my book. After a moment I said brightly, “Maybe I still have a shot. I seriously doubt Gabe is on the committee. He won’t give me a stellar rec from class, but I can try to sidestep him and submit my portfolio to the committee—”

“He is on the committee,” Hunter said.

“He’s not on the committee,” I insisted. At least, I hoped he wasn’t on the committee. I had assumed he wasn’t, but it would be like Hunter to know something I didn’t know. I stammered, “Only the bigwigs in the English department are—”

“I’m telling you,” Hunter said, “he is on the committee. He’s the head of the committee. He’s won the O. Henry and the Pulitzer.”

“Gabe?” Even as I gaped at Hunter, I realized he must be right. A university English department with this good a reputation wouldn’t hire a washed-up junior college reject to teach honors creative writing. He didn’t dress like a beach bum because he was so low on the totem pole that he could get away with it. He dressed like that because he was so high. I put my shaking hand up to my mouth, speechless for once.

Hunter sat beside me on the chaise. “You’re not the only one with something to lose. If Gabe flunks us, I can kiss med school good-bye. I’ll still be dragging my GPA out of this hole when I’m a senior.”

“You’re being a little melodramatic,” I said faintly.

“Me? You’re the one writing stories about—” He stopped himself. “It doesn’t matter now. Just tell me about Whitfield.” His face was white stone.

“What do you care?” I snapped. “Every single thing you have done to, for, or with me since you’ve been in New York you’ve done because my grandmother paid you. You are not my boyfriend. You are not even my real friend, and it’s none of your business.”

“You made it my business last night,” he insisted.

I looked into his intense blue gaze for a moment. “My story is fiction.”

He scowled at me. “Your name is in it.”

“What? No it isn’t. I wrote it in the third person about a nameless girl.”

“Your name is in it, Erin,” he insisted. “Freudian slip.”

Uh-oh. “I mean, it’s sort of nonfiction,” I backtracked, “but it happened a while ago. Not this weeken—”