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Staying On Top(45)

By:Lyla Payne


When she came back into the living room, the snapping tension in her eyes made everything real. The control with which she moved, the calm flowing from her, helped me breathe.

She was a constant contradiction. A bundle of nerves in situations I considered normal, chill when we were about to get arrested for trespassing.

“What do we do?”

“We need to get out of here, obviously,” she whispered.

“There’s not another road, so there’s no way back to the car.”

Blair gave me a look that said duh, so I decided to stop thinking out loud. Instead I worried silently about Mari’s car and how she was going to explain why it was abandoned out there.

“What did you see in the bedrooms? Is there a balcony? What’s behind the house?”

The low volume of her voice and the pounding of my heart in my ears made it hard to decipher her questions. It finally made sense and I closed my eyes, trying to remember.

“We’re a little short on time, here.”

“Your impatience isn’t helping,” I murmured. “Okay. There’s a balcony that overlooks the river off the master bedroom. The rest of it is woods. Undeveloped.”

She walked off without answering me. I followed in silence as she poked her head into a couple of rooms before finding the master. We both went in and she closed the door, then yanked open the French doors leading to the balcony.

We peered together over the railing, cold morning air freezing the nervous sweat on my skin. Blair shivered and it crossed my mind to offer her my jacket. My mind, my autopilot, had been derailed by the sound of those police sirens, though. And the idea that they were coming here for us.

She turned to me, dark eyes stoic. “We have to jump.”

“Jump? Are you crazy?”

“It’s not too far to the river—sixty feet at the most. It’s the only way we’re not going to get caught.”

“So what if we get caught?” I hadn’t thought too much about this whole trip until I stood facing a sixty-foot jump into a freezing cold river, but Leo would kill me for running around trying to find Neil on my own. My trainer would kill me if I got injured. If the fall didn’t. “You’re his daughter, right? Don’t you have some kind of right to be here?”

“That’s not really the point, is it? We get caught, they contact my dad to check out my story and verify that we’re not trespassing, and your jig is up. If we don’t surprise my dad, it’s over. He knows we’re looking, he disappears.” She crossed her arms, her expression almost lazy. “It’s up to you, Bradford. What do you want to do?”

“How do you know the river is deep enough to handle us from this height? What if someone drove a car into the water and we smash into it? I mean, I want my money back, Blair, but I don’t want to die.”

“I don’t want to die either, Sam, Christ. The Danube is at one of its deepest points in Belgrade, where it joins with the Sava.” She paused, closing her eyes for the briefest of seconds. “And I know it’s safe. There are pictures of my mom cliff jumping from this spot, before they built the house here. She was a daredevil.”

I wished we had more time so I could ask her a follow-up, get her to talk more about her mom and how her life might have been different, but the sirens had given way to ominous silence. A thud sounded from inside the house.

The idea of losing all that money still made me sick to my stomach. The thought that I could play all of these years, put all that stress on my body, and come out of it with hardly anything to show destroyed the last of my resolve and I nodded. And I wasn’t ready to leave. “Okay. I trust you, Blair. Let’s go.”

“Together.”

Her hand slipped into mine and it felt good. Like this five-foot-eight, wiry, damaged girl would keep me safe. Or maybe that I would be okay as long as she was with me.

Either way, her touch calmed the adrenaline slamming my heart into my rib cage. The two of us climbed over the railing, balancing on the lip on the outside. Her fingers tightened around mine.

“One. Two.” Pause. “Three.”

We jumped together without discussing it, leaping as far away from the shore as we could. The balcony hung over the water by a good eight to ten feet, and we managed to push out another five on our own. In the instant before my stomach flew up into my throat, I thought, We’re going to be okay.

The water smacked my feet hard, as though someone had whacked the bottom of them with one of Quinn’s fraternity paddles. It was cold. Painful even through the soles of my shoes. The water closed over my head and I lost Blair’s hand in the swirl of freezing liquid. Bubbles—little ones, big ones, popped from my lips and tickled my skin as my arms swirled, trying to tell up from down and propel me the right way.