by Payne, Lyla
Her cheeks bloomed red. “We didn’t almost die, and we were just kissing. You’re such a drama queen.”
“That’s why they pay me the big bucks.” I stood up before her red cheeks, soft looks, and bright eyes undid me further, then held down a hand and hauled her to her feet beside me. “Fine. I’ll get some glasses.”
“Also, we’ve got a couple of problems. First, I’m guessing both of our phones are ruined.”
My heart sank, then stuttered as I remembered something awesome. “No! At least, I don’t think mine is—I got a free sample of that new spray shit that’s supposed to make anything waterproof. Check it out.”
I dug my phone out of my pocket and pressed the home button. It flickered on as though it hadn’t been submerged in river water, which was crazy. I’d seen one of the first demos on the Today Show. They threw a bunch of ketchup and mustard on Matt Lauer.
“That is fucking crazy,” she breathed, taking it from me. “Do you mind?”
She started scrolling through my contacts before I could respond, finding Mari’s cell phone number and hitting dial. “What are you—?”
“Marija? Hi, it’s Blair. Listen, I know I promised you that there wouldn’t be any trouble for you or your family if you helped us, but Sammy and I have run into a little snag.” She paused. “What? Oh. I don’t know why I just called him Sammy. My lips are numb.” Her cheeks reddened again, probably from the realization that Mari would think her lips were numb from an entirely different activity. “Anyway, you need to call the police and report your parents’ Mercedes stolen. Say you just noticed and you don’t know how long it’s been gone, since your parents are out of town and you’ve been using a driver—they’ll believe you. We’re going to catch a taxi back to your place, grab our things, and get out.”
I motioned for the phone, which Blair handed over. “Hey, Mari. I’m really sorry about this, and I’m sorry to ask you for something else, but I saw an old Volkswagen in the garage, does it run? Can we take it? I promise to get it back to you.”
“Sam, I don’t care about that shitty car. My dad only keeps it because it’s the car he taught me to drive with and he’s a sentimental sap. Are you okay?”
The concern in her voice touched me. I looked down at my body, soaked and a little worse for the wear, then glanced at Blair, who resembled a drowned cat. The expression on her face reflected longing and resignation, and it cut me straight through the chest.
We were both a mess, but someone cared enough about me to ask if I was okay. Had anyone ever asked Blair the same thing and truly wanted to hear the answer? Her friends at Whitman seemed nice enough, they seemed as though they liked her—especially her roommate, Audra—but what did I know? I’d spent a brief few days with them, and we hadn’t been sober the majority of the time.
“I’m fine,” I told Mari after a pause. “We’ll be by in the next thirty minutes. Thank you, and I promise to explain every last detail of what’s going on when I see you in Australia next month.”
“You’d better. Take care of yourself, please. And for God’s sake, don’t trust every single person who looks up at you with big doe eyes and says you can.”
Mari hung up before I could reply, which was fine since figuring out a response that wouldn’t raise Blair’s hackles would have been difficult. I put the phone in my pocket and reached out, tugging her into my chest before she could protest.
Her body went rigid against mine, her arms tucked in, forearms against my chest. But the longer I held her, my chin resting on the top of her head, the more Blair relaxed. Finally, her arms went around my back and her chest sank into mine.
“Are you okay?” I asked, my breath steaming in the cold morning.
She nodded. When we pulled apart, I saw the tears in her eyes but chose to ignore them. This girl wouldn’t hate anything more than me seeing her cry, except maybe me making a big deal out of it. Maybe she wouldn’t let me give her much, but that I could do.
*
We made it back to Mari’s, changed clothes, grabbed our packs, and took the Volkswagen without any trouble. Two police cars passed us on the way out of her neighborhood, but the fact that we avoided that situation made me feel better about involving my friend.
It also made me feel better that Blair cared enough about not getting Mari into trouble to make that call at the first opportunity. The way she’d treated her had bothered me more than a little—having an attitude with me for no apparent reason was one thing, but doing it to a friend was something else altogether.
I would never compare growing up in the tennis world to anything more stressful, such as growing up an orphan or a foster kid, but our community was bonded in a similar way. We didn’t always get along, and there were some who were better friends than others, but we were family.
“Okay, so where next?” I asked, ready to type a destination into my phone since Blair’s was toast from the dip in the Danube.
“Well, I’m thinking we’ll try Santorini next.”
“Greece. Excellent. Huge improvement, in my opinion.”
“You’re a beach guy as opposed to a mountains guy, I take it?”
“I’m a warm weather guy, honestly, and Greece has beaches and mountains. What’s not to like?”
“An unstable economy? Impossible travel? Mistreated donkeys?”
“Wait, you’re telling me you don’t like Greece?” I asked as she navigated toward an interstate based on the road signs, though I had no idea how since they were in Serbian. “How are you reading those signs? Are you an alien? A pod person?”
She shrugged. “I’ve traveled a lot, Sam, probably about as much as you. But I’m guessing I’ve done quite a bit more driving abroad—or at least more paying attention. Interstate signs all look the same, and obviously I can read the numbers.”
“Okay, but how do you know which way to go once you find it?”
“I have a good sense of direction. Born that way.”
The highway loomed up ahead, and Blair navigated us south. The map on my phone said Greece was about 552 miles from here, almost directly to the south. “Let’s get back to you not liking Greece.”
“It’s not that I don’t like it. It’s just not my favorite place that I’ve visited, that’s all.”
“What is your favorite place you’ve visited?” It was the first time in a long time that I’d asked a girl such a throwaway question and been dying to hear the answer. It occurred to me that the girls I’d been spending time with since forever hadn’t been that hard to figure out.
I was enjoying the challenge.
“Probably Romania. Brasov. I really love Ephesus, too, though.”
“Those are super-random places. I’ve never been to either one.”
“That’s one reason I like them—despite Brasov being close to Dracula’s castle, it’s not a huge tourist destination. And Turkey’s instability keeps people away, even though the coastal areas are fairly safe.”
“When do you have time to travel to such remote locations? What about school?”
I watched a veil slip over her animated features at the question. Questions about likes and dislikes, fine. Ones that might reveal anything about her life, not okay. Noted.
“I’m doing fine in school, and the teachers at Whitman are progressive. High school was the same way.”
Another question, one about her father and whether he had dragged her all of those places to steal money from weak-minded people such as me, dried up when she steered us off the highway. A small cluster of restaurants, hotels, gas stations, and other side-of-the-highway staples clustered at the bottom. “Where are we going?”
“The car needs gas, and you need a disguise. Plus, I’m hungry.” She pointed. “There.”
A McDonald’s nestled next to a cheap drugstore across the street. She parked at the store, then unbuckled and dragged me inside and over to the racks of glasses.
“You pick some out, I’m going to find you a hat. And some razors for me.”
&nb
sp; She wandered off before I could contemplate the reason for her sudden concern about grooming. Instead I spun the racks, looking for the most unlike-me pair of glasses they had available, finally settling on an oversized, horn-rimmed pair that made me look like a hipster liberal-arts professor at some hippie school.
They worked better at disguising me than I would have thought, especially with the week-old scruff crawling over my jaw and lip. It itched something fierce, but when I’d said something about shaving Blair had nixed that idea right away. Itchy was better than her holding me down and bleaching my hair or something equally ridiculous.
“I have to say, you pull off the sexy nerd look better than I would have guessed.” Her gaze found mine in the mirror, happy again and maybe even a little excited.
“You think I’m sexy?” I teased.
“I would think you would be used to girls calling you sexy by now,” she tried to backpedal, holding out a knit cap that would be at home in any number of Abercrombie ads. She also cradled a pay-as-you-go phone and two pairs of rubber flip-flops.
I turned around and pinched the hat between two fingers, trying my best not to wrinkle my nose. “I’m not used to you saying I’m sexy. Or using your words when it comes to me at all.”
“Whatever. Yes, I think you’re hot, okay?”
I moved closer so no one who happened to speak English could overhear. “And you want me?”
“I think I made that clear last night.”
It annoyed me that she sounded embarrassed. “Being attracted to someone or asking for what you want isn’t anything to feel shameful about, Blair. I think it was pretty obvious that I wanted you, too, and you’re beautiful and sexy and maddening and perfect. Please don’t feel like you have to hide from me, or be anything other than what you are. Who you are.”
“What if you don’t like who I am?”
The weight of the moment fell around my shoulders like an iron cloak, heavy and uncomfortable and unfamiliar. My life off the court contained happy, carefree people and situations, because I dealt with enough pressure in the day-to-day life of my career. As much as I liked Blair, as much as I wanted her, this scared me.
Mostly because I didn’t know how to handle it.
“It doesn’t matter if I like it, you can’t be anyone else.” I tweaked her nose, trying to ignore the bare anguish in her dark eyes. “Besides, I already don’t like you, remember?”
It didn’t get me the kind of smile I wanted, but her effort was better than nothing.
“What’s with the rubber shoes?” I asked, leading her to the checkout counter.
“Welllll, I’m thinking we’re about to experience our first hostel.”
I hoped she didn’t notice the hitch in my step. “So?”
“So they have communal bathrooms, like the dorms at Whitman. And everyone knows you wear flip-flops in the shower or risk some crazy foot fungus.”
Good Lord in heaven, I could not handle this. The mention of the word fungus in the same sentence with communal bathrooms made me itch from the soles of my feet all the way to my hairline. Not to mention the nausea burbling in my stomach.
This trip hadn’t been as bad as it could have been, at least not so far. Flying coach for almost three days and sitting in a stranger’s car had been uncomfortable, but Mari’s had been nice enough and even though this Passat was old, it was clean. I’d already blocked out the memory of that bus.
But hostels? I didn’t know if I could do it without breaking into hives, but I couldn’t tell Blair that. She’d thought from the beginning that I would bail on this whole trip because my life as a spoiled, pampered rich boy hadn’t prepared me for any hardships.
While that was true, my germophobia presented the real issue.
Calm down. Deep breaths. Cross that bridge when we got to it, chew sleeping pills if necessary.
“Awesome. Thanks for getting me pink ones, by the way.”
“They only had women’s. Sorry.”
“You don’t sound sorry,” I observed as we waited in line behind an old man with a twist in his spine that bent him nearly in half.
“Oh, I’m not. I can’t wait to see you wear them. Consider yourself lucky if a mysterious photo doesn’t end up on some show like TMZ.”
I flinched at the reference even though Blair had been kidding. No one who grew up with money and any kind of notoriety at all had patience for that paparazzi crap, but my aversion ran higher than normal after they got hold of that story about my credit card being declined.
The elderly gent finished his transaction and we paid cash for our few purchases, then Blair and I carried them out to the car. She got back behind the wheel and reentered the highway after a quick run through the drive-through at McDonald’s.
I tried not to eat that shit after stumbling across the YouTube video that explained the way meat products not fit for human consumption were cleaned with chemicals—the pink slime thing—but there was something comforting about being able to grab delicious fries and a Coke almost anywhere in the world. Blair ordered the same thing, plus a cup of coffee.
The sound of the wheels on the pavement tried to lull me to sleep, but every time I closed my eyes all I could see was moldy walls trapping the stink of homeless kids sweating on sagging mattresses, and laying awake listening to cockroaches and rats wage epic battles through the filth on the floors. My image of the disgusting hovel where she expected me to sleep tonight could be worse than the real thing. Could be. “So, where is this hostel going to be? Do we need reservations?”
“Actually, that’s not a bad idea. It’s too far to drive all the way to Santorini in one day, unless you want to take turns and sleep in the car, so maybe we should stop halfway. Somewhere in Macedonia? Do you want to check?”
It was on the tip of my tongue to say we’d drive it straight through, but she’d want to know why. Not to mention that, even though we’d had a decent night’s sleep in an actual bed last night, there were circles under her eyes that said Blair hadn’t rested all that well. It wouldn’t be fair to ask her to drive through the night if we didn’t have to, and even though some of my exes might accuse me of selfishness, I was worried about her.
Her fatigue had to be more than the will-they-won’t-they saga the two of us had going on at the moment. She’d had a strange childhood, and even though her father’s influence on her life now remained a bit cloudy to me, it had to be more than she wanted. If she could get him arrested, put behind bars, maybe she could start to build the kind of life she wanted, not the one that he’d forced on her.
Christ, maybe I was fucking overtired. It was the only viable excuse for having such sentimental thoughts about a girl I barely knew. One that had, at least in a peripheral sense, turned my life upside down.
Looking up the halfway point between Belgrade and Santorini took my mind off the fact that I was losing my shit. “What about this place called Skopje in Macedonia? Looks fairly good-sized, and there are a few hostel Web sites.”
“Do any of them have reviews or anything?”
The way she said it set off warning bells in my mind. “You say that like you don’t know any more about finding a hostel in a foreign country than I do.”
She cast me an incredulous look. “Do I look like I’ve led the kind of life where I’ve stayed in hostels? My father has houses all over the world. He stole millions of dollars from you, and you’re nowhere close to his first success story. I went to prep school with the kids of actors and musicians and politicians. Trust me, I don’t know any more about staying in hostels than you do.”
“Oh.”
“But I do know about this little thing called the Internet. And I know you can find reviews and recommendations for just about anything, so if there’s nothing about any hostels in Skopje, then we don’t want to stay there.”
It made sense. I felt like a moron for not thinking of that myself.
“It looks like there are several that have decent ratings and more than a few reviews.” I scro
lled through the top recommendations, my hope that this wouldn’t be the death of me flickering back to life. “This one doesn’t look bad, actually. Even clean.”
“Hmm.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you can make pretty much anything look clean in a photograph, Sam.”
Chapter 12
The Unity hostel in Skopje should have looked better, considering how hard it was to hold my eyes open even though it wasn’t even 6 p.m. We’d had a long day, between the almost-sex in the bathroom, almost getting arrested for breaking and entering, jumping sixty feet into a freezing cold river, and then racing out of town.
My stomach had started rumbling an hour ago, but if I’d seen a bed that looked clean enough, I could have been convinced to forgo dinner and go straight to sleep.
While the community bedrooms didn’t look unclean, exactly, they left me with a wary feeling that did nothing to encourage sleep. The rooms looked as though they had been decorated by a fifteen-year-old girl who had been fan-girling over her favorite boybands. There were ten or twelve beds in each room, singles mostly, and each bed came complete with a curtain that could be pulled for privacy. The curtains and bedding were an alternating mint green, hot pink, aqua blue, and a bunch of other colors that shouldn’t be in the same room. The prints ranged from polka dots to sparkly circles, with a few paisleys and stripes thrown in for good measure.
Alcohol was the only answer.
“Are you hungry?”
Blair tore her eyes away from the perky neon oasis. “What?”
“Are you hungry? More specifically, would you like to find somewhere within walking distance and get plastered enough to be able to sleep here tonight?”
She nodded, slowly at first but picking up speed. “Yes.”
The teenage guy at the front desk, who had green spiked hair and so many holes in his face it was hard to know where to look without being rude, directed us a few blocks away to a strip of restaurants and bars.
It surprised me sometimes, how similar things could be in the world while still being so different. Jesenice had been different from Belgrade, and they were both different from Skopje, but there were still couples strolling in the streets, places to eat, and college-aged kids shoving one another in front of a club called Ballet.