“Wait,” he said.

Whatever. I’d reached the threshold. The light was brighter in the hallway, and Summer, talking to Manohar and Brian, looked up at me with concern in her eyes.

“Erin.” His hot hand was on my shoulder. He pulled me back into the room, against the door, out of their line of sight.

He leaned close. This must have been because he didn’t want the others to hear, but I could almost have pretended that he wanted to be near me as he growled against my cheek, “If that’s all you got from my story, that I hate you, you’re not a careful reader.”

Even though my heart raced with his closeness, I tilted my head and stared at him blankly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Two could play that game. I rolled away from him and stepped around the door frame.

He caught me and pulled me back again.

Pinned me against the door.

Crushed my lips beneath his.

I let him sweep his tongue inside my mouth and take over my body there in the rich room for one long, taut minute. Then I realized what I was doing, and what he was doing. I pushed his shoulders. Hunter did not push easily. I shoved him away hard and nearly toppled over myself, bouncing my sore hip against the door and sliding off.

Hunter grabbed my forearm before I fell. “What’s the matter?” he asked, eyes glassy.

I started to speak and realized I’d pressed my fingers to my tingling lips. I put my hand down. “What’s always the matter? You’ll be nice for the next two weeks, and I’ll agonize over what we mean to each other. Then you’ll write another story for class. You’re experimenting with me like you play with the women in your stories. All my stories are about you. And I can’t do this anymore.”

I jerked my arm out of his grasp and stalked out of the room, past my wide-eyed friends.

As I descended the stairs, holding on to the rail to keep from wrenching my hip, I heard Summer stage-whisper to Hunter, “What did you do to her now?”

The coffee shop was slammed and just got busier as the night dragged on. A new off-off-Broadway play in the theater next door had gotten great reviews—I’d wanted desperately to see it but hadn’t had a spare second—and when it ended each night, it dumped the patrons into the shop, thirsty for lattes.

Somehow I managed to write my story for next Monday’s class anyway. I scribbled sentences on discarded receipts and a hundred napkins when my boss wasn’t looking and stuffed them in the pockets of my apron. Late in the night when I got off work, I wondered whether Hunter expected me to bring him coffee again for his trek to the hospital. I trudged in the other direction, to the library, where I typed every receipt and napkin into my laptop, printed off the file in the computer lab, and turned in my story to the front desk before I could chicken out. I constructed my sentences of the strongest steel, honed them to fine points, and hurled them straight at Hunter’s heart.

13

Way too early the next morning, he knelt on the tiny space of floor between my bed and the door, packing my suitcase.

I propped myself up on one elbow and gazed at him to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing, his muscular shoulders working underneath a thin cashmere sweater as he neatly folded my clothes, the morning sunlight filtering through the shades and gleaming in his blond hair. I mumbled, “Hunter, what the hell.”

“Rude. You’re grumpy because you’re not getting enough sleep.” He glanced up at me. I caught a glimpse of dark circles under his own eyes before he turned his attention back to the suitcase. “There’s nothing wrong with this dress, but I want you to wear it with these shoes, okay? Do not wear a feather boa with it, or a swan around your neck, promise me. You looked great when we went to Belmont, but your style gets eclectic on occasion.”

“Where am I going?” I asked.

“We,” he said.

I huffed my impatience. “Where are we going?”

“Home. Your grandmother requests your presence at the Breeders’ Cup.”

The story I’d just turned in for Gabe’s class was set in Louisville. For a moment I thought Hunter had read it and was taunting me, daring me to go back there and prove the story wasn’t fiction. But he couldn’t have read it. Not unless he’d gone to the library between two and eight in the morning.

No, this was heavier, weighty with reality. If he’d told me two months ago that my grandmother requested my presence, I would have asked that he convey to my grandmother where she could stuff it. Eight weeks had crammed much more into my mouth than I could chew. Hunter had to be very careful that he fulfilled her wishes, lest she ask too many questions about the business degree he was not earning. I wanted to help him make a fool of her. I didn’t want to cause him trouble by refusing to go with him.

Or

maybe I did, now that I knew he looked down on me. He was looking down on me now. I heard his quick steps across the hardwood floor and felt the heat of his body in the cold room as he knelt beside my bed. He put his hand on my arm. “Erin.”

He was not going to leave me alone. He would not even let me hide my tears. Giving up, I rolled onto my back, arching it to keep from pressing my newly healed scrapes against the New York City T-shirt I’d been sleeping in, and sniffled. “I don’t want to go anywhere with you, especially Louisville.”

This was not true, and I knew it as soon as I said it. He had stolen my birthright and cheated my grandmother and looked down on me and I still wanted to be wherever he was, on the off chance we might make that connection I’d wanted with him for so long.

He sensed this. His thumb moved on my arm, seductive as ever, but he watched me somberly, as if he took me seriously for once.

“I have to work all weekend,” I said.

“No, you don’t. You’re not scheduled on weekends to make bad lattes with foam spleens. You only fill in for people on weekends, and they haven’t called you yet. I checked with Summer before she left for class.”

“But they could still call,” I murmured. And after three days out of work with a bruised hip last week, I desperately needed the money. Which reminded me: “I don’t have the money for a plane ticket.”

He released my arm, reached into his coat pocket, and showed me my boarding pass: Blackwell Erin Elizabeth.

“I’ll miss my belly-dancing class this afternoon.”

He rolled his eyes. “How many times have you skipped it before?”

“Never. I’m sure as hell not sabotaging my chances at a publishing internship with a D in belly dancing.”

He watched me, waiting for me to admit how lame my excuses were getting.

“I have a history paper due on Monday,” I protested. “And a huge calculus test. You know that. You have the same test. Going out of town this weekend would be academic suicide.”

“I have an anatomy test, too. We’ll study on the airplane on the way down,” he said in a soothing voice. “We’ll study on the way back, and anyway, we’re coming back Sunday morning. It’s only a Saturday of studying you’ll miss.” He raised his blond brows at me.

Suddenly I was aware of the fact that he stood over me, and I was in bed, wearing a T-shirt and panties and no bra. He might not know that because I was half covered with a sheet, but I knew it. And I wondered how Hunter Allen’s sex life fit into this complicated puzzle. He had taken the college tuition my grandmother had planned to give to me. In return he was obligated to do her bidding and bring me down to see her. There was no room in this equation for a relationship between him and me, yet he stood over me and my body tingled.

“Your dad will be there,” he said.

I lay paralyzed for a moment, staring into his clear blue eyes. Hunter touched me and Hunter coaxed me and I sifted through my reactions to each, but my reaction to the idea of seeing my dad made no sense at all. I jumped up, forgetting I was embarrassed to have Hunter see me in my T-shirt and panties, and snatched my boarding pass from him to examine it more closely. “My God, are we even going to make this flight? Why didn’t you wake me sooner?” I handed it back to him and watched to make sure he pocketed it.

I shoved my toes into my flip-flops and snagged my bucket of toiletries. Brushing past him on my way out the door because the room was so small, I threw at him, “I’m going to grab a shower. Don’t forget to pack my hat.”

WE WERE QUIET IN THE CAB to the airport, and at the gate. Hunter alternated between reading a textbook with a skinless torso on the cover, liver and lungs and heart exposed, and frowning at a stack of note cards covered in his illegible scrawl.

I pretended to read history. I tried, but my mind was on another sort of history. My brain spiraled through my first twelve years in California, my dad yelling at my mother because we didn’t have any money, my mother yelling back at my dad that we might have a little more if he would get off his ass, culminating in the showdown in my grandmother’s stable that I hadn’t even seen. There had to be some explanation for my dad’s behavior then and his disappearance afterward. There was a perfectly good reason for why he had left me with my grandmother after my mother died, and why he had never contacted me again. He was coming to Kentucky to see me and he would clarify everything.

Hunter had bought the tickets too late for us to have seats together, and that made things worse for me. Nobody I knew watched me, so pretending to read history was a moot point. I looked out the window, wondered about my dad, and willed the plane to fly faster. I wanted to see him so badly. I would forgive six years of abandonment just to sit at his feet and gaze moonily up at him like a Dalmatian kept in a pen.

By the time we touched down in Louisville, I had worked myself into a frenzy of questions. “How did my dad know I would be here?” I asked, hurrying after Hunter in the terminal.

He kept glancing up at the signs pointing us toward baggage claim. Neither of us was very good at airports, we’d found. When he and his dad had moved to Louisville, and when my mom and I had escaped to Louisville, we had all ridden the bus.

“I don’t know,” Hunter said.

“Maybe he thought my grandmother and I are getting along,” I mused, running after Hunter as he turned a corner, “and of course I would come home to see her for the Breeders’ Cup.”

“Maybe,” Hunter said, stopping in front of the carousel that would spit out our suitcases.

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “I doubt he’d think of the Breeders’ Cup. He doesn’t know anything about horses.”

We stood in silence until the carousel ground to life. Hunter snagged his bag. He put one hand on my arm to stay me when I recognized mine, and he lifted it off the carousel for me. He started across the wide room toward passenger pickup with both suitcases in tow, but I took mine back from him, saying, “Maybe the Breeders’ Cup is coincidental. He assumed I would be living at my grandmother’s house, still in high school, because he’s forgotten how old I am.”

“I don’t know,” Hunter said again.

Suspicious this time, I looked him in the eye as we walked along. When he met my gaze, then fussed with his suitcase handle again, I knew he wasn’t telling me everything he knew. “What is it?” I insisted.

“My dad,” he said, nodding toward the sliding glass doors and slipping his sunglasses on.

Tommy had parked the Blackwell Farms king-cab pickup truck at the curb. As the airport doors slid open for us, I let the weight of my suitcase on wheels slow me like an anchor. Hunter reached the pickup first. Tommy bear-hugged him and they slapped each other on the back. They were both blond and had similar features, but Tommy’s face was weathered from the sun, and he wore a Blackwell Farms baseball cap and windbreaker that made him look strange embracing Hunter in his cashmere sweater and expensive sunglasses, obviously the heir to a horse fortune.

Tommy held Hunter at arm’s length and beamed at him. Tommy had all Hunter’s friendliness without any of Hunter’s what’s-in-it-for-me calculation. It was hard to picture him as the distant father from the story Hunter had written for Gabe’s class, but certain elements of it rang true. Tommy was a drinker, I knew. He had been a smoker, but Hunter had badgered him into quitting. Tommy had complained about this at the stable every day for a year. Now he rolled a toothpick in the corner of his mouth, chuckling at something Hunter had said.

Then Tommy turned to me with his arms stretched wide. “Erin! How’s the princess?”

“Hey, Tommy,” I said, going in for a hug. My grandmother had always discouraged me from hugging the help. She embarrassed me. I embraced Tommy and let him pick me up and set me back down.

“Hunter said you’d lost weight.” Tommy patted my tummy underneath my clothes. “Good thing you’re wearing that overcoat or you might blow away.”

On cue, icy wind gusted across the terminal driveway. I hadn’t known much about Kentucky when I moved here from California, and I’d been surprised by the tenuous winter that started in November: an overcast sky that spit tiny particles of ice instead of snow.

I wiped the wetness from my face. “Has my dad gotten here yet?”

“Your dad?” Tommy repeated, rolling the toothpick to the other side of his mouth.

“Or do you two have to stay away from each other? I shouldn’t have asked.” Tears stung my eyes. I could hardly see.

That’s why I was slow to understand the questioning look Tommy was giving Hunter, and the stony expression Hunter returned.

I think I might have gasped, “No!” and slapped both hands over my mouth. I wasn’t really aware of what I was doing besides staring at the sign beside the sliding glass doors, greeting visitors unfamiliar with the area with the various pronunciations of the city’s name: LOOAVULL. LUHVUL. LEWISVILLE. LOOAVILLE. LOOEYVILLE.

“Son—” Tommy began.

“I don’t want to hear it,” Hunter interrupted him. “Mrs. Blackwell wanted to see her and I didn’t know how else to get her on the airplane. Around here I could have slung her over my shoulder, but they frown on that in New York. Erin, come back.”

As I walked down the terminal sidewalk, I held up one finger to let them know—or at least to let Tommy know—that I needed a minute. Hunter couldn’t care less what I needed. I stomped down the sidewalk, tears mixing with the icy wind in my face. I would let the cold wind dry me out and then I would turn back. Except more tears kept coming as I thought about my dad. He had not done anything. Not anything new. Hunter had only scratched the scab off that wound. Hunter, whom I kept trusting for some reason. Why would I think he was on my side? He was swindling my grandmother. He could screw me over, too.