Staying On Top (Whitman University)

by Payne, Lyla

  He got in after the briefest hesitation, reaching for the mainsail and rigging without being asked. I checked the rudder then slid the jib into place, leaving both sails unfurled until we puttered free of the marina and sluiced into the open water.

  We worked together to unfurl the sails and secure the mainsheet and boom, until the wind caught us and drove us forward at a comfortable pace. The day was beautiful, lending to the serenity of the sounds of the slapping waves and the light spray cutting off the bow. We tacked into the wind, then settled back to let the boat and the water do the majority of the work.

  “So, your phone was going nuts at dinner last night. Your friends at Whitman miss you?”

  Talking about the messages on my phone tightened the muscles between my shoulder blades. Even though the question could be innocuous, it wasn’t. “Audra was checking in, which is pretty normal. She’s not worried or anything.”

  “And … ?”

  “How do you know there’s an and?”

  “Isn’t there?”

  Sam reclined in the bow, arms behind his head, legs stretched out and crossed at the ankle. Sunlight bounced off the waves, bringing out the sparkling chestnut highlights in his hair. He looked like an impossibly perfect guy, and the fact that the way he acted backed that up made it hard to believe he was real, and that he could want me.

  “I’m worried about her, I guess. She’s dating this guy that rubs me the wrong way.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Just a bad feeling. Don’t you ever get those?”

  He nodded slowly, his eyes never leaving mine. “Sure. Have you said anything to her?”

  “No. She’s so happy. It doesn’t seem right to rain on her parade without anything to back it up.” I tugged the rudder, adjusting our course slightly. “But I had a couple of weird texts from her brother and my old roommate. I’m a little worried something happened.”

  “You should call her.”

  “I’ll see her in a few days. We need to keep the focus on my dad.”

  “Is that why you didn’t want to spend the night in Santorini last night? You wanted to put the focus back where it belonged?”

  There was nothing I wanted to talk about less than why I’d shoved us out of our fantasy and back into reality with such abrupt gusto. One of the only bad things about being trapped on a sailboat with another person was having nowhere to run.

  “Yes. I liked pretending that it was just you and me on vacation a little too much. And I’m not saying I didn’t love everything you said on the plane—I did. But we can’t figure out where we go from here until we get past this, you know?”

  “You’re a very practical girl, Blair, and I like that about you.”

  “But … ?”

  “How do you know there’s a but?” he parroted with a smile.

  “Isn’t there?”

  “Not really. It’s just … there’s a difference between being practical and being a pessimist. You’ve spent your life alone. I worry you don’t know how to let me just be there.”

  Quiet returned to the boat for several moments. If Sam loved my practical side, I adored his ability to sit in silence, to not push me, to wait for the right conclusion.

  “I don’t know how to let anyone be there, Sam. But I know that these past couple of weeks, I’ve gotten used to looking over and seeing your face. I’ve loved leaning into your arms, and kissing you, and I’m going to be seriously disappointed if we don’t get to have sex again before we part ways. I like having you around. It makes me sad to think that soon you won’t be.” I paused, swallowing my panic at sharing so much, terrified of the pain to come. “I’m trying.”

  “I would have taken advantage of another night on the beach. Just saying.”

  I rolled my eyes, hiding the fact that it killed me that we might never feel that impossible connection again. Another first for me. Not that I didn’t enjoy a good romp, but it was another thing that bored me quickly. With Sam, I couldn’t imagine ever being within five feet of him and not thinking about what I would do with him naked.

  “We’re not having sex in another boat, lover boy. I demand a bed.”

  “As long as there’s no bugs in it.” Sam shuddered at his own attempt at humor, his hand going to the back of his neck.

  My eyes dropped to the back of my leg to find that the rash had almost disappeared. “Right. As long as there aren’t any bugs in it.”

  Chapter 18

  We switched places with about an hour to go because I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore and Sam insisted I lay down. The warm sun, trusting someone else enough to let them take over, to doze off and know we would be okay—that Sam would be there, not asking anything from me that I wasn’t ready to give—it all felt too perfect.

  For the first time in my life, I sank into feeling good instead of pushing it away.

  In my dream, dolphins swam up beside the boat, happy and chirping. They leapt and sprayed water my direction, and my heart felt light, as though I didn’t have a single worry in the world. Then the sun disappeared. The waves grew choppy and gray, disturbing the dolphins until the fear in their eyes made me feel slimy and cold, dragged the lightness away and replaced it with a drowning dark. Panic stole my breath as strings of seaweed crawled over the edge of the boat, clawing and grasping like human hands, tugging me by my feet toward the abyss. A scream built in my throat and I kicked in a fruitless attempt to struggle loose.

  It sounded as though the waves were calling my name when I woke up with a start, panting, my heart beating a million miles a minute. My mouth went dry when I saw the look on Sam’s face and my phone clutched in his hand. He’d seen the text message my dad had sent yesterday. Or maybe my dad had called early. Either way, the jig was up.

  Instead of the kindness, the concern, that had been so often in his face, his maple eyes boiled with anger. I could have dealt with that, but the betrayal and pain swimming alongside it … that broke me in half.

  “You were playing me this whole time?”

  “Sam, no. I mean, yes, at the beginning, but—”

  “Jesus. You fucked me for information? How could you? How did I miss that?” Anger reddened the tips of his ears and his hand shook around my phone. “All of that shit you told me about growing up alone, it’s all sob story? You’ve been happily helping your dad this whole time, right? And you were going to get more information out of me so he could steal the rest of the money I worked for? Lost my family over? Destroyed my body for? How could you do that?”

  “I wasn’t going to, Sam. I didn’t lie to you, not after we got started. I swear.”

  “Yeah, well, the word of a con-artist and a whore doesn’t really mean much to me.”

  It felt as though he’d landed an actual slap across my face. For all of the bad things I’d done or helped do, none of my marks had ever caught on in front of me, had ever been the wiser until I’d long fled the scene, had ever had the chance to yell at me and damn, it hurt.

  I knew it hurt because it was Sam. Because no matter what I said, he wouldn’t hear anything but lies. He wouldn’t see anything but a girl willing to do anything to steal from him.

  So I didn’t say anything. Maybe that made it worse. In his eyes, a silent admission of guilt. But there didn’t seem to be any point to worrying about it now. Emotions swirled in the boat, in the air between us, building the longer we stayed silent. The pain, the anger, the aching, empty sense of loss brought tears to my eyes that I turned away in order to hide. They refused to be contained as the blue of the water grew lighter and shaded toward jade, then sea green, signaling our arrival in the Caymans. Sam made no move to comfort me, never stirred to speak. More insults would have been easier than the silence, which signaled to me that he had nothing left to say.

  After what felt like an eternity, Sam spoke again. “Let me guess—your dad isn’t going to be here, either. You want to go ahead and give me your big speech designed to earn my trust now, or were you saving it until we were na
ked again?”

  I closed my eyes, trying to will away the rest of my tears. It took forever before my throat stopped burning long enough to let loose the words it was squeezing to death. “Can we get the boat moored and then talk about it? And there’s no point in asking me questions if you aren’t going to believe a word I say.”

  Sam moved without agreeing or disagreeing, and the two of us brought Wiggler smoothly into the North Sound, dropped anchor, and made our way ashore. A flurry of shops and places to eat awaited the arrival of tourists and sailors, but we had to go through customs first. Sam crossed his thick arms over his chest while we waited in line. His refusal to look at me left my heart feeling stomped on and my body cold, as though I’d been tossed out in the Manhattan winter.

  “Nice touch with the tears, by the way. Brilliant.”

  The disgust in his voice hit my skin like pellets, diving beneath and dumping agony into my blood. “I know that you don’t have any reason to trust me, Sam. But I think my dad is here. I want to talk to him with you, just like I said in Melbourne.” I took a deep breath, hardly believing I was about to give him more ammunition. More truth to throw in my face. “But the reason I blew you off in St. Moritz … that was the truth. It seemed inevitable that we would be different. Not easy. I didn’t want to come on this con at all, but he forced me. And things changed along the way. You have to know that.”

  “I don’t believe anything you say,” he spat, handing over his passport.

  “Sir, you need to come with me.” The customs agent had his hand on his hip, over his gun. He spoke softly into the radio on his shoulder, his eyes flicking between Sam and me. “Are you Blair Paddington?”

  I nodded dumbly.

  “You’ll need to come with us, too.”

  Neither Sam nor I spoke while the rest of the people in the customs building stared at us as though we’d just bombed a village inhabited by kittens wearing party hats. I had almost convinced myself that this had to be some kind of misunderstanding when the police showed up to escort us away.

  My legs went numb and my heart pounded in my ears as they put us in the backseat of a police car outside the terminal instead of taking us to a room for questioning. No use pretending this was a simple immigration issue, then. Not if the police had flagged our passports.

  “This is fucking fantastic. If you can’t ruin my life by stealing all of my money, you’ll get me arrested so I get fined or suspended from the tour. Or banned.”

  “Sam, I swear I have no idea what’s going on.”

  He snorted. “Right. It has nothing to do with your penchant for borrowing things?”

  “Would you shut up?” We were in a fucking police car and he was basically admitting to stealing multiple items. I normally abhorred telling people to shut up, but cripes. This was my territory. No matter how pissed off Sam was, he needed to use his fucking head.

  He seemed to realize the same thing, sitting back and pinching his lips together for the remainder of the ride to the police station. It was a dingy, one-story building too close to the ocean to be so depressing—clearly not the main station, which I assumed was in George Town. The inside held a couple of metal desks, a small, square conference or interrogation room, a kitchen with coffee stains on the counters, and a single cell, where they dumped both Sam and I. The walls were cinderblock and the linoleum floors peeled up at the corners. Two wooden benches sat along the back wall of our cell, one end far too close to a stinky latrine.

  “Hey, don’t we get a phone call or something?” Sam shouted at their retreating backs.

  Neither of them replied, leaving us alone without an explanation for plucking us off the streets like vermin. It could be the sailboat, but I doubted it. The longer I had to think, the more I suspected my dad was behind our arrest. He’d seen the footage from the house in Belgrade, I was willing to bet, and had deduced that, for the first time in my life, I was not going to get the job done. Having us arrested smacked of him taking matters into his own hands, though how he thought it would get him the rest of Sam’s money I hadn’t the slightest idea.

  Sam slumped on the other end of the bench, sticking to his plan of not speaking to me. I guessed I wasn’t speaking to him, either, but there wasn’t much more to say. He knew I was a con, that I’d been willing to help my dad steal from him. He refused to hear me when I told him the truth—that the days we’d spent together had changed my mind.

  Changed my life, maybe.

  I didn’t have a clue how to convince him otherwise, and maybe I didn’t deserve the chance, anyway. This had always been how it was going to end. At least we had one good day.

  One of the officers returned, a young guy with a sexy British accent, shining blond hair, and muscles that tested the limits of his cheap uniform that would make half the girls at Whitman drop their panties, but he wasn’t looking at me.

  He crooked a finger at Sam. “You have a phone call.”

  Sam left without asking any questions, even though a bunch of them tumbled through my mind. First and foremost, who knew we were here? The answer could only be my dad, unless the press had somehow gotten ahold of the information—which, in the age of cell-phone cameras, wasn’t impossible—and why would my dad ask for Sam and not me?

  The answer to that question also provided clarity as far as my dad’s endgame in getting us arrested. Sam returned to our cell, a storm cloud of anger obscuring what was left of his “go with the flow” demeanor. He didn’t sit, instead pacing along the front of the cell.

  “Who was it?”

  “Who do you think it was, Blair?”

  I recoiled from the anger in his voice, but tried not to let the hurt show. “I think it was either my dad or that sleazy dude from TMZ.”

  The joke didn’t get me a smile, but that was probably too much to ask.

  “It was your dad.” He glanced down the hallway, maybe to make sure it was empty, then back at me. In his eyes, it was clear that his pain over my betrayal outstripped his anger, and the knowledge that I’d hurt him punched me in the gut.

  I’d been prepared for his anger, but not this. Not pain.

  “He says all I have to do is give you the information he needs and I’m free—no charges, no one will know. I don’t know how he can promise that, but that’s what he said.”

  “Sam, no. I’m not taking anything from you.”

  His lips twisted, a hateful edge glinting in his smile. “That’s the whole reason we’re together, Blair, right? Don’t wimp out now. I’m sure I’m not the first mark you’ve gotten close to in order to carry out your daddy’s twisted games.”

  My heart broke, but out of it boiled unexpected, indignant anger. “Hey, asshole, I understand you’re mad. But you don’t get to fling insults at me, or call me names.”

  My chin trembled despite my best efforts, and horror replaced the disgust in Sam’s eyes. He rubbed a hand through his hair, looking away from me and then back, opening and closing his mouth a few times before getting words out around clenched teeth. “I’m sorry. You were honest with me before we slept together. I just heard it wrong.”

  The tiniest scrap of my hope had somehow survived, and it floated to the surface with his apology.

  “I’m sorry, Sam. So, so sorry. I knew you were going to find out how this all started, and that you would be angry and feel stupid, and I should have been strong enough to resist the spark between us so this wouldn’t happen. If I would have known this would hurt you, too, I would have tried harder.” My feet begged me to take steps his direction. A twitch infected my fingers with the desire to touch him, the desire that had somehow become second nature in such a short time, and I hated that I couldn’t give in. Not anymore. “I like you, Sam. I wanted things to be different. But this is what I am. This is my life. I tried to tell you.”

  “That things can’t be different for you. Yeah, I get that now.”

  “Don’t you think I want them to be? Different?”

  “I want to, Blair. I do. I guess neither o
f us can get what we want today.”

  His words bled the remaining strength out of my legs and I flopped down on the bench, letting the tears wash out of my heart and drip out my eyes. It had been forever—years—since I’d cried at all, but it was all that I’d wanted to do since Sam looked at me with hurt and betrayal in his face earlier today. It felt good and terrible at the same time, to let go of the façade that had passed for the real me all of these years, to let someone else see me, even when I felt gross and hateful.

  Sam sat at my side. He didn’t touch me, even though it felt as though maybe he wanted to, but the warmth of his presence, of the idea that maybe he was my friend even if we were fighting right now, dug my fingers into that scrap of hope. That even if things weren’t different today, it didn’t mean they couldn’t be. With my roiling emotions drained, my intellect snapped into use again, and an idea took root in the back of my mind.

  Not a way to make Sam consider a future with me again, because I didn’t think that would be possible. Relationships were all about trust—that was the reason I’d never had a real one of any kind. No one could trust me, and I couldn’t trust them.

  But I could still find a way to make things right. I could do what I’d decided to do between Belgrade and Santorini—get Sam his money back. Get him out of this sticky situation without compromising his career. Figure out how to get out from under my dad’s thumb.

  Get my life on track, so that the next time I felt the way I felt when Sam stared into my eyes, I’d be able to believe in the possibilities of love, of a future.

  Just thinking of caring about anyone else the way I did about Sam made my heart rebel. Right now, it felt as though that would never happen. But Sam and I would never happen, either, and the time had come to do the only thing I could. One last gesture to what might have been before moving on with my life.