Staying On Top(65)

I trailed a hand over her belly, watching her muscles twitch. “We can stay longer if school really isn’t an issue. I don’t have to be back in Australia until the end of the year.”

She paused so long I thought she might be considering it, but in the end, she shook her head with a smile sad enough to make me believe she regretted it. “I can’t stay away that long. As fun as pretending to be on an international vacation is, that’s not why we’re really here.”

The way her lips spat the word pretending, as though that’s all we were doing, made the blood in my veins turn to ice. I wanted to protest, but she wasn’t wrong. We were pretending to be people we weren’t, except somewhere along the way we had become more like that vacationing couple than the opposite forces we’d began as in Melbourne.

It was best to play to my strong suit and go with the flow. I had no idea what was happening between us, but I enjoyed Blair’s company, we were compatible as hell, and the thought of going back on tour and never seeing her again made my heart sink all the way into my toes. That’s what I did know. What I didn’t know was how she felt about it, how this trip would turn out, or how either one of those things would affect everything else.

“Let’s get you some coffee, gorgeous. Then we’ll spend one day with the fishes.”

*



The weather had cooperated, with the temperature rising into the low eighties and the sun shining on the deck of the sailboat that hauled us out to a perfect dive site. We’d been down twice, once after breakfast and then again right before lunch, and were waiting two hours before taking one last trip. It had been a long time since I’d dove, but it came back to me pretty well and the supervising divemaster had been meticulous and patient.

I had never seen turtles before, and at the end of the second dive a school of dolphins had shown up to play. The entire experience had been magical. Blair had laughed often, her face brilliant under a smile and droplets of salt water, but every time she looked at me with undiluted happiness, the word pretending flashed before my eyes.

Could she be that good of an actress? Had I fallen into Wonderland, a place where Blair had turned into someone else, but only until she unearthed the opportunity to go home?

It killed me to think that, so I decided not to. I was being paranoid, which was unlike me, and the reason for that should stay unanalyzed, too. The enormity of the feelings circling my heart like sharks were too intense for the fact that Blair and I had really only known each other for a couple of weeks total.

I shouldn’t have felt so lost at the idea of not having her around. First and foremost, no girl liked a stage-five clinger of a guy, independent girls such as Blair even less so. She wasn’t pretending to have a good time today, and neither was I. We were two people enjoying the day and each other’s company, end of story.

The internal lecture did little to salve the worry darkening my mind.

“What are you thinking about?”

Blair’s question shook me out of my ridiculous melancholy. I rolled my head her direction, squinting in the early afternoon sun and wishing I’d called Oakley rep for a couple pairs of sunglasses after putting the call in to Head.

“What?”

Her body had bronzed in the few hours we’d spent on deck, and looking at her in her plain black bikini gave rise to certain thoughts that gave rise to other things not so easy to hide in my swim trunks. At least the divemaster left us alone.

“You look worried. There’s a wrinkle right here.” She reached over and rubbed her finger between my eyebrows. “It’s weird. Do you not want to go down again?”

“Oh, I haven’t gone down at all. But I’m looking forward to it.”

“I meant down on another dive, perv.” The way she bit her lip said she was thinking about the other kind of going down now, though, and I wished the divemaster would disappear altogether.

“No, it’s not that.”

“What is it? Your bed-bug rash is already clearing up, if that’s it. I think the saltwater helped.”

The bed-bug rash hadn’t entered my mind for hours, which shocked me. It didn’t seem wise to be honest with her about what was on my mind, since my concerns could be chalked up to insecurity, which was about the most unattractive thing in the world. But I didn’t want to lie to her, either. “I was thinking about how nice today has been.”

“And . . . ?”

So much for skirting the issue. I should have known that wouldn’t fly with her. “And I’m already feeling a little bit sad that we won’t have another.”

“Well, one is one more than we expected when we set out, right?” She squinted back at me. “And really, Sam, with the way our lives are, the two of us should take what we can get.”