Chapter Eight #2
“Horse girl,” she admits, like it’s embarrassing instead of incredibly posh. Though I’m beginning to think that Soraya could make anything look cool. “It’s been a few years, though.”
“As the equestrian among us,” Campbell says, looking at Soraya as we pile into the elevator, “let me ask you this.” He gestures at me. “Is a black turtleneck standard attire for this sport?”
Dexter laughs, and I glare at him. He covers his mouth with one hand and gives me an apologetic look.
Campbell shoves his hat on backward. Smiles at me the whole ride down.
Iris turns out to be the natural. Soraya, sure, but of the newbies—me, Dexter, Iris, Nolan—it’s Iris who takes to horseback riding like a fish to water.
Her horse, a splotchy brown mare named Quill, loves her.
Does everything she says the minute she says it.
I quickly fall to the back of the pack with my horse, Nantucket, who hates not only me but all of my ancestors and anyone who’s ever deigned to talk to me in my life.
Tobias, who Lucia introduced as Wicksteed Aspen’s “stable hand,” told us to make a clucking noise when we want our horses to move. I can hear him clucking away at the front of the trail. I cluck and Nantucket just blinks, his long eyelashes glinting in the midafternoon sun.
“Come on, buddy,” I say, nudging his sides with my boots. “Please.”
He takes one step forward, then sways a little like he’s making up his mind before halting entirely.
We’re on a trail through the autumn-washed hills that lurch up into Bell Mountain.
The entire landscape is blanketed in yellowing aspen trees, and late-afternoon light casts the mountain glowing orange.
There are birds singing. The scent of pine trees carries on the breeze. I’m fucking miserable.
It’s too hot, for one thing: I’m sweating in my turtleneck, which Dexter will never find out about.
My ponytail feels sweltering on the back of my neck.
The lowering sun is too bright, and the saddle is too hard, and I didn’t drink enough water before we left the hotel so I feel sort of tingly and two-dimensional.
Lucia said today was about having fun before the hard work starts tomorrow, and I’m worrying about whatever that means, what sort of trial I’ll wake up to in my downy king-sized bed in that suite two doors from Campbell’s.
If my inability to bond with Nantucket is some kind of test that I’m already failing.
“You coming, Mattie?” Dexter calls back to me, wincing into the sun as he turns over one shoulder. He was scared shitless when his horse walked up and sniffed him directly in the face, but now they appear to be dear friends. “Do you need help?”
Campbell, beside him, looks back at that.
“All good!” I shout. I cluck so violently it twinges behind my eyes like a migraine.
Nantucket takes a couple reluctant steps.
“Are you clucking?” Dexter calls.
“I’m clucking!” I try to sound valiantly composed in case Lucia can hear me, but my voice is unmistakably spiked with hysteria. Campbell starts to turn his horse around. Fuck.
Nantucket refuses to comply as I frantically cluck into the hair at the back of his neck, angling closer to his ears as if not being able to hear me is even slightly part of our problem.
He dips his head away from me, snuffling at some dry grass near his front hoof.
As the rest of the group continues down the trail, Campbell saunters back toward us with one hand on the reins, the other on his thigh. Like he thinks he’s John goddamn Wayne.
“Need a hand?”
“No,” I say, emphatically. Now he gets to look like the hero in front of everyone? “I already said no.”
Campbell comes to a stop beside me, our horses facing opposite directions so we’re looking right at each other. I feel like a puddle of my former self, sweaty and crazed. Campbell looks calm enough to be leading a guided meditation.
“Are you sure?”
I glare at him.
He regards me, a smugness in his eyes that makes me want to scoop them out with grapefruit spoons. He shifts his weight, legs spread in a straddle, and I jerk my gaze away. “You know it’s okay to ask for help, French.”
“From you?” I say, trying again to nudge Nantucket with my heels. “I don’t think so.”
“We helped each other a lot that summer, didn’t we?”
I stop and look up at him. His face is in the shadow of his helmet visor, everything else so bright around him that his expression’s hard to read. I can just see the soft curves of his mouth, the rustle of hair above his ears as a blessedly cool breeze moves between us.
“Is that what we were doing?” I ask.
Every time we stole an assignment from each other. Every line of each other’s we rewrote and rewrote until we were sure we’d one-upped it. Every jab we lobbed across the shared wall of our computers.
“You certainly helped me,” Campbell says. There’s a game here, some way he’s playing me, but I’m too dehydrated to figure it out. “Pushed me.”
I’d like to push you right off that horse, I think. And then I’d like to push myself immediately off my own.
“Convenient, since you beat me.” I hate saying it out loud. I never would, if I wasn’t halfway delusional in the sun.
Campbell shrugs, like what happened between us that summer—what’s happened all the years since—is casual. Something so insignificant he doesn’t think twice about it. “I had more experience than you.”
He doesn’t mean job experience. He means ad school. The year he spent building a portfolio of spec work before he even applied for the Slater Faust intern program, the résumé-builder I couldn’t afford fresh out of undergrad with a new rent payment to split with Ava.
“Well, I didn’t have a spare thirty grand lying around,” I say. Nantucket finally lifts his head, and this time when I cluck he starts lumbering down the trail. “Or a year to spend earning a piece of paper that’s not even a degree.”
From behind me, Campbell calls, “Well, I got the Slater job, didn’t I?”
I growl, a depraved sound that escapes me before I can swallow it.
He did get the Slater job. And I’d rather tame one hundred obstinate Nantuckets than let him take this one from me, too.