Staying On Top(50)
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 scrolled 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.
The trek from Unity at dusk felt surreal and glowing, so different from the cosmopolitan Belgrade that it was like falling backward in time. My fingers twitched with the desire to reach out and take Blair’s hand, and after stopping myself half a dozen times, I gave in.
“What are you doing?” she hissed, looking as disoriented as I felt.
“You said we needed to act more like a couple, right? If you were my girlfriend and we were here, I would hold your hand.” I gestured to our surroundings. “It’s romantic, don’t you think?”
“I suppose.” She grimaced as though the idea of romance didn’t appeal to her, but a half smile drifted across her lips.
I wanted to kiss them, so I stopped and pulled her toward me, then pressed my mouth against hers.
Kissing Blair surprised me every time—for all of her prickliness in our other interactions, as soon as our lips met she melted into me as though her body wanted nothing more than to be part of mine. This time was less hurried than our previous kisses at first, but when she sighed into me, I stroked her tongue with mine, reveling in the taste of her, the way she was soft but demanding, shy but filled with our shared craving.