“You look beautiful,” Summer told my reflection.
“You are beautiful,” I said. She glowed with energy in her bright bikini. I wished, at that moment, that I could trade places with her, that I was the clueless Southerner wide-eyed at New York, wanting nothing more out of life than a fabulous professional job and a meaningful love relationship, ecstatic at the prospect of forced flirting with a boy from class.
We locked our outer door and pushed open the door to the stairs. “I’m so excited,” she gushed. Her voice sounded hollow in the stairwell. “Maybe next I could write an espionage story for Gabe. It’s like I’m a spy. A spy for love.” She kept talking but the music had drowned out her voice by the time we passed the third floor. We kept climbing and pulled open the door to the fifth floor.
I’d been going to horse parties since I was fourteen. In retrospect, I realized this was not because my grandmother thought I was mature enough to handle the alcohol and schmoozing with older boys like Whitfield Farrell. I was not. It was because she was grooming me, even then, to take over.
Four years later, Hunter was taking over instead, and I was destitute, with a lot of partying under my belt. I’d even done shots with a few celebrities who came to Kentucky only during Derby season and who thought they were part of the in crowd if they drank bourbon and wore a hat. And now, walking into a college party on the fifth floor of the honors dorm—could it sound more lame?—I got nervous, chickened out, spread my hands over my bare tummy, and would have backed away down the stairwell if Summer hadn’t grabbed my hand and pulled me through the crowd outside the bathroom.
“You like Hunter more than you want to admit,” she said in my ear as she tugged the door open. “But maybe he won’t be here.” She pushed me inside.
The room was dimly lit with a few rotating colored lights, and the hot, swirling mist made it even more difficult to see. The showerheads in every stall sprayed full force—hot water, judging from the fog. The room was more like a sauna than a beach.
But the boys had worked hard on the beach scene. A few potted palms framed the doorway where we stood. About half the thirty people in the room stood in a circle near the sinks and batted a beach ball back and forth. An upperclassman had set up a bar in front of the urinals. He chopped ice in a blender, mixed it with fruit juice and vodka, and garnished the drinks with paper umbrellas.
And over the bare shoulders of boys, right away I saw Hunter stripped down to his bathing suit and flip-flops. For the first time in months and months, here was what I’d seen almost daily for so many Kentucky summers: Hunter with his shirt off. Back home his muscles had worked underneath his skin, stacking bales of hay, holding a bucking stallion. Muscles like that, in a body as beautiful as a machine, should have made noise as they worked, some low grinding music, rather than sliding along silently through their task.
In class or in the coffee shop, I had known those silent muscles were there, disguised in a crisp cotton shirt or a blue polo for another girl to discover. Now another girl had discovered them all right. Bracing one hand against the wet tile wall, Hunter leaned in and talked to a blonde, as confidently and casually as if he’d met a girl from our rival high school outside the pretzel shop at the mall.
I waited for him to look up at me in the doorway, give me a smug smile, and turn back to her. That would let me know he was interested in me and trying to make me jealous.
He never looked at me. He kept talking to her as if I were not there.
Summer noticed, too. Conveniently ignoring his blond accessory, she gasped, “My God—Hunter’s body. Are those muscles from being a stable boy?”
“I’m afraid so.” Actually, I didn’t know. That’s how he’d developed the muscles in the first place, but surely my grandmother hadn’t made him work for his keep all summer long. He should have grown soft and faded to white in the electric lamplight of her expensively stylish office. He hadn’t.
“Do you know what the scar is from?” Summer asked, touching her side at the approximate location of Hunter’s long white scar. Now he would know we were talking about him—if he looked over at us. This didn’t seem likely. The blonde gazed up into his eyes and tilted her head, her long hair shifting damply over her bare shoulder.
“Surgery,” I said. “He broke some ribs. A horse fell on him.”
“What?” Summer exclaimed. “When?”
I shrugged. “Eighth grade?”
“Oh, no!” she cried. “He was so young! Did you visit him in the hospital and sit by his bedside? How sweet!” Hunter was going to hear her even over the throbbing music.
“Shhh,” I said. “No, we weren’t speaking.”
“Erin!” she protested. “Why not?”
Because only a year had passed since my mother died. I had been terrified for him, but if I had visited him, I wouldn’t have known what to say.
I nodded at the bar in front of the urinals. “Let’s get a drink.” I set off across the slippery floor without waiting for her answer and asked the upperclassman for a lime slush with no vodka.
“All right,” she said when she’d caught up with me. “But there is way more to this stable-boy thing than you are telling me.” She ordered a mango daiquiri with plenty of rum.
I had thought a run-in with Manohar was my biggest fear. After glimpsing Hunter and the blonde again, the prospect of chatting with Manohar seemed downright welcoming. He and Brian lay on lounge chairs in the corner, wearing sunglasses. Summer bounced up to Manohar and unceremoniously told him to scoot over on his chair. That meant I could perch on the edge of Brian’s chair. Unfortunately, this meant that I faced Hunter again.
The blonde stood in the shower spray with her eyes closed, hot water splashing off her face and streaming into her hair and dashing onto the tile floor around her perfectly polished red toenails. As I watched, Hunter reached over and stroked his big hand from the crown of her head down her darkened wet hair, in the middle of the stream of water. Her hair must feel so soft and warm to him, almost like his own body, like nothing. How could he do something so intimate to her? He hardly knew her.
The room was crowded, and when a bare-chested or bikini-clad body passed in front of me and blocked my view, I realized I was staring. I turned my attention back to the conversation with Summer, Manohar, and Brian about the food in the dining hall—which I’d never eaten anyway because I’d begged a university financial counselor to let me off the too expensive meal plan. But the half-naked bodies would move on, and my foolish gaze would return to Hunter.
I could have wondered for the rest of the night whether paying attention to another girl was Hunter’s way of telling me he was interested in me instead. I was a romance writer. I spun scenarios the way I wanted them to go.
But that would drive me crazy. I could foresee a whole semester of acting like a seventh-grader, obsessing over whether Hunter liked me—or worse, a whole four years of college. If I was able to stay here that long.
Instead, I used a technique I’d developed to cope after my mother died, putting all that grief into a small box so the rest of my life was clear of it. Chin up, I watched Hunter watching the blonde, his hand sliding down her bare back. I said to myself, Hunter likes this girl and not me. I should not want Hunter anyway because he stole my farm and he is in cahoots with my grandmother. He has no interest in me romantically. I am still okay.
And then I turned away. There were plenty of other boys to talk to in the sauna, and some of them looked almost as good as Hunter in the blurring steam. For instance, Wolf-boy Kyle plopped down on the end of Manohar’s chair, next to Summer, already drunk enough that he didn’t notice Manohar’s stony expression behind his shades or the way Manohar slowly and pointedly gave up possession of the chair, drawing up his legs and turning so he sat on it like a bench and his bare thigh touched Summer’s.
Kyle leaned toward me across the space between the chairs. “You’re the one who wrote the horny story in creative writing. You have got some balls.”
Summer shoved him lightly. Manohar barked with laughter. Brian sat up, murmuring, “What’d he say?” The music throbbed and echoed against the tile walls. Holding a conversation involved lipreading as well as listening.
I cleared my throat. “For the sake of polite conversation, Kyle, I will choose to overlook that gender-confused mixed metaphor. And my story wasn’t horny.”
Everyone, even Summer, gaped at me.
I laughed. “Okay, I guess it was,” I acknowledged as Hunter sat down beside me on the end of Brian’s chair.
Hunter grinned at everybody but me. “Am I missing class?”
I wanted to ask him where his blond girl had gone off to. Now that I looked, she’d disappeared from the shower, and she wasn’t hanging behind him with her hand on his shoulder. But I should not have lusted after him anyway, and he probably had no idea that he was making my skin burn on the side where he sat. I struggled to focus on the group conversation, which had turned to Gabe.
“I’m a little disappointed in him,” Summer was saying. “My other roommate, Jørdis—I think you’ve met her, Hunter—”
Hunter smiled at Summer. He didn’t glance at me.
“—she’s a sophomore, and she says her honors freshman writing teacher was a willowy lady in a cape who led the class on observation missions through the West Village during class time. I don’t think we’re going on any observation missions. Gabe sits and listens to us and sips his coffee.”
“If it’s really coffee,” Manohar said. “He’s so quiet, like he’s in an alcoholic fog.”
“Hear, hear.” Kyle clicked his plastic cup against mine in a toast.
My stomach turned over. I felt strangely defensive of Gabe. “I know it’s coffee,” I said. “It comes from the shop where I work. Sometimes he wanders in after class.”
“Speaking of which.” Hunter reached over, took my cup from my hand, and tasted the lime slush.
The Hunter I knew was not rude enough to drink from my cup uninvited. Was he flirting with me? My proper reaction would be outrage, especially after he’d had his hands all over that blonde. I tried not to stare at his wet lips.
“How do you know Gabe’s not spiking his coffee?” Brian asked, dragging me back to the conversation.
I didn’t know this. But it seemed a stretch to equate Gabe being quiet with Gabe being drunk on the job. And though these drunk boys were just shooting the shit behind their teacher’s back, I felt bad for Gabe since he wasn’t there to defend himself.
“That’s an idea,” Hunter whispered in my ear. “Want me to spike this for you?”
I shook my head and said softly, “I have homework to do later.” His bare shoulder next to mine sank like he was disappointed. I couldn’t waste energy puzzling that out when I needed to rescue Gabe’s reputation. Gabe mattered to me, and Hunter did not.
“I like Gabe,” I said loudly enough to carry. “He reminds me of someone.”
“Who?” Hunter asked. “Tommy?”
Although it had been hard for us to hear each other before, Hunter’s one word seemed to have rung out clear as day for everybody. “Who’s Tommy?” Kyle asked, and the others sat up to hear the answer.
I did not think this was the time or place or company to state that Tommy was Hunter’s easygoing father, and that Hunter and I knew each other from way back when. I could not trust Wolf-boy on top of everyone else with the stable-boy secret.
Hunter was thinking the same thing. He shifted the subject. “I like the way Gabe trusts us to comment on each other’s stories.”
“He goes too far,” Brian said. “Pedagogically speaking, it’s one thing to create a student-centered classroom by asking for the students’ voices. It’s another thing to let them bulldoze each other.”
“Is it bulldozing to express your opinion?” Manohar asked. For some reason we were having a hard time hearing each other again. He was shouting. “If you let a creative-writing student think her story is great when it isn’t, aren’t you doing her a disservice? If she sucks, she needs to know so she can change her major before it’s too late.”
I opened my mouth and quickly closed it again. My eyes were on the prize, keeping Manohar from going to Gabe with the stable-boy secret. If the price was allowing him to take potshots at me in public, I could pay it.
Summer said what I didn’t dare say. “You’re assuming that the student making the comment knows what he’s talking about. What if he tells another writer that she sucks and discourages her, when her work is very good? What if the student making the comment is, for instance, an economics major and is only taking creative writing in the first place because the honors program requires it, and in actuality he doesn’t know shit?”
“This is just a replay of class,” Hunter said. “If we’re going to talk about creative writing, let’s be less specific.” I wished he were coming to my aid, but I knew he was only taking control and keeping the peace, as usual.
And I’d had enough. “I don’t think it’s possible to talk about creative writing without being specific.” I turned to Kyle, across from me. “Do you have a really sharp knife?”
He blinked at me, then peered into his cup. “Is this a trick question?”
“No. I only came up here because I need to borrow a very sharp knife, and I thought you might have one.” I didn’t add that thinking of him as “Wolf-boy” had called to mind the necessity of a knife in the wilderness. This connection made no sense anyway since he was from Brooklyn.
Brian raised his hand and called out, “I have a really sharp knife.”
“May I borrow it?” I asked.
“My father gave it to me.”
I squinted at him through the mist. “May I borrow it without telling your father?”
“Why don’t we go get it from our room,” Hunter called across me to Brian. “Then we’ll take it down to Erin’s room and use it. It will never leave your sight.”
I clamped my teeth together to keep from saying anything about Hunter’s presumptuous “we,” his decision that my use of Brian’s knife needed Hunter’s input. I could not forget his hands on that girl.
Brian scowled behind his shades, but no one was immune to Hunter’s charm. He stood and nodded to Summer. “Save my seat, would ya?”
“Kyle will save it, won’t you, Kyle?” Summer asked. “I’m comfortable here.” She winked at me.
I assumed that was the signal to me that she felt comfortable with Manohar—more than comfortable. The mango daiquiri was probably helping. I felt uneasy about leaving her there. But after all, half the people crowding the bathroom were chicks, and home was three floors down.
Carefully I crossed the slippery floor, assuming Hunter and Brian would follow. I reached for the handle on the bathroom door, but a man’s hand reached past me and opened it first—Hunter, I saw, glancing over my shoulder. I stepped into the hallway, the air dry and freezing in comparison, and told myself the temperature change was the reason I shivered.
“This way.” He reached his arm around me and touched my shoulder. He walked ahead of Brian and me, three doors down. Brian fished his key from the pocket of his bathing suit. Hunter reached his own key first and turned it in the door.
Their room was set up exactly like mine but looked completely different. As Brian opened a drawer in his dresser to retrieve the famed knife, I scanned his floor-to-ceiling collage of psychedelic posters. Hunter quietly sat on the opposite bed. His wall was blank, almost as if he and Brian were having an interior design standoff.
I stood awkwardly between them. “Manohar got the small room? How did that happen? I’ve talked to a lot of people in this dorm and there’s always a story behind who gets the small room.”
Hunter patted beside him on the bed, an invitation for me to sit.
Blushing, I shook my head.
He spoke without skipping a beat. “I didn’t want it. That room is claustrophobic.”
“And I came out of the closet when I was thirteen.” Brian turned to us, brandishing
a glinting dagger. “I’m not going back in.” He came toward me with the knife, handle first.
“Brian!” Hunter jumped up from his bed. “Don’t give it to her when she’s never used one before.”
“She asked to use it,” Brian said. “Isn’t that why we’re here?”
“You’re going to use it for her. Or I will.” Hunter took the dagger by the handle. “Sometimes Erin doesn’t know what’s good for her.” Barebacked and blade down like a jungle man ready to stab the python that crossed his path, he led the way out of the room.
Brian and I exchanged a glance and followed. “What do you need it for, anyway?” Brian asked me in the stairwell.
“I’m almost out of face cream and I can’t afford another tube. If I cut it open and put it in a plastic bag, I think I can get another month out of it, maybe six weeks.”
Hunter turned suddenly on the stair below us. Brian and I both jumped backward, but Hunter knew better than to turn with a knife point out. The knife was down by his side. “That’s what this is about? You don’t need face cream. You look fine.”
“That’s because I’ve been using it,” I said at the same time Brian said, “That’s because she’s been using it,” and rolled his eyes.
We exited the stairwell at the second floor. I unlocked the door, ushered them inside, and opened the inner door to my little bedroom.
“What’s your story, then?” Brian asked, already nosing around in my stuff. “How did you end up in the closet?”
“I volunteered,” I said from the doorway. “I like it.”
Hunter whispered, “You always did like sitting in the closet.”
I hugged myself as a chill raced across my skin.
He wouldn’t meet my eyes. He was fingering the filmy green fabric of the belly-dancing costume on the back of my door. In a normal tone he said, “I still can’t believe you’re taking belly dancing for your phys ed credit. It will never do you any good.”
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