Staying On Top (Whitman University) by Lyla Payne

you?”
    “I mean, you still look good. Green’s a nice color on you.” As hard as I tried, I could not keep the smirk off my face or out of my voice. Blair had been none-too-subtle about the assumption that I would be the one most uncomfortable on the bus.
    “I get motion sick, sometimes, especially on the hillier parts. The smell isn’t helping.”
    One of our fellow passengers had some kind of mutant BO that had been making my eyes water since boarding this bucket of bolts two hundred miles ago in Ljubljana—which, for all my world travels, I still couldn’t pronounce.
    “You were fine in the car. And on the train.” I wanted to reach up and rub her back to offer comfort, but I had promised not to touch her until she asked. Stupid.
    “I know. I guess the terrain wasn’t so bad? It’s better when I’m driving, too.” She pushed off the window, brushing harder against me as she settled back in her seat. “Distract me.”
    A million filthy thoughts sputtered through my mind, urging my hard-on toward painful, but if she was softening toward me now wasn’t the time to be dirty. “What are you majoring in?”
    “Boring.” She sighed. “Marketing.”
    “Okay, fine. What do you want to do with your marketing degree, Blair Paddington?”
    “I think I’d like to work in higher education. Recruitment, maybe.”
    “You could talk me into about anything.”
    “Is every conversation just an excuse to make a suggestive comment?”
    I shrugged, then gave her a smile. “I can’t help it. My mind is one-track with you this close.”
    “Try harder.” She crossed her arms, features twisting into a grumpy expression that was starting to turn me on. I heard a hitch in her breath, and her tongue snaked out to lick her cherry red lips. 
    It took every ounce of focus to bite back a groan. I didn’t know how much longer I could keep my promise not to touch her. The heat vibrating in the space between us suggested that’s about all it would take to set off a chain reaction.
    “What was it like growing up with your dad?” I tried, suspecting Blair wouldn’t come within ten yards of giving me an honest answer to that one.
    “What was it like growing up with your dad?” she fired back, splotches of red appearing on her cheeks.
    “Not too memorable, but not horrible,” I replied, trying to model a normal response for her. Nothing about my parents was a secret. My financial divorce from them at age sixteen had been the talk of the tennis world, as had my subsequent decision to still let them join me on tour when they asked. “They got me into tennis, so I’m thankful for that. I spent the majority of my childhood traveling, and they spent the majority of my teenage years spending the money I made.”
    “They sound sweet.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm.
    “They’re not evil or anything, they just never had money. I could have been worse off.”
    “You could have been better off, too.” Blair’s hand, resting on her thigh, twitched and then inched its way toward mine.
    I held my breath waiting for the contact. My body went perfectly still, like a thirteen-year-old boy on his first date in a movie theater, anticipating that very first moment when his hand touched the girl he’d been fantasizing about for months.
    When her skin hit mine—just the outside of her pinky finger against the outside of mine—the little spark that shot up my arm shocked me, but still, instinct urged me to stay still. She reminded me of an animal in the woods, one trying to decide whether or not to take the carrot out of my hand. Scaring her away was the last thing I wanted.
    That realization surprised me, too. Why, with my ability to go through life happy and satisfied and unfettered, alongside girls who wanted to be in my company, had this one sparked such an interest for me? 
    It could be as simple as the fact that she didn’t seem like other girls, but I thought it was more than that. I’d thought that we could go through