Love Story(67)
Author: Jennifer Echols

I opened my hands and shrugged. I recognized this uncharacteristically slow-on-the-uptake Hunter from our conversation in the coffee shop two months before. He was drunk.

“Ball!” the other men called. Hunter turned and tossed the ball into the crowd.

The game began again. I watched the men dodge each other, throw over each other, lose their balance and stumble drunkenly out of the area of play, then jog back again. I watched Hunter’s muscles work underneath his skin, his body retaining surprising grace even though bourbon had slowed his brain. Sweat darkened the blond hair at his temples. He grew hotter as I got colder, shrinking in my Blackwell Farms jacket on the hard wooden bench.

When two men leaped for the ball at once and tumbled in a tangle on the asphalt, Tommy shouted, “We gotta call this. Come inside. Next round’s on me.” The bare-chested men slapped each other high-fives and moved through a doorway golden with light, into the stable office.

Only Hunter stayed behind. He tugged his shirt out of a nearby tree. As he buttoned it he said, “Hullo, Miss O’Carey.”

“Hullo, David.” I tried to keep my voice from shaking with cold and anticipation.

He pulled his cashmere sweater over his head. “Did you remember to bring me the anatomy note cards I hadn’t forgotten?”

So he’d left the note cards in his bedroom on purpose after all, to give me an excuse to find him at the party. With tingling fingers I reached into my jacket and handed him the cards. He pocketed them, a sly grin pulling at one corner of his mouth.

“What’s with the British accent?” I asked. “They wouldn’t have talked like that in America by 1875. They might have had a lingering Scotch-Irish inflection because so many of them were recent immigrants and they didn’t have television to flatten the brogue.”

He stared at me. In my usual wonky way, I’d blathered too much information. He had started the conversation from “Almost a Lady.” I wasn’t sure what he meant by this, but I was excited about finding out. So I began the conversation again. “Hullo, David. Would you like to walk behind the stables?”

“I would soil my slippers,” he said, “and the maid would notice in the morning.”

He was reciting my story, but he was also rejecting me. I stood and pasted a smile on my face to show him it was all in fun. “Okeydoke. Tommy said he can’t take us to the airport tomorrow because he’s leaving for Churchill Downs too early, but one of the other guys will take us. I’ll see you in the—”

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.