Free Staying On Top (Whitman University) by Lyla Payne

made me wonder if I should have said yes to his cheeky suggestion of a disguise.
    “Can we talk about this once we have more privacy?”
    He shrugged, unbuckling his seat belt and grabbing his bag from under the seat as the wheels touched down in Austria. I followed suit and the two of us disembarked with a couple hundred other passengers who looked as tired as I felt. Sam, for his part, appeared way too perky and refreshed for someone who had slept half bent over on a plane. The woman who had been sitting next to us grabbed him at the top of the Jetway.
    “Could I have an autograph? It’s for my daughter. She’s a big fan.”
    The spiderweb of lines around her eyes and lips put her in her fifties, probably, and I supposed her dark brown, brittle hair came courtesy of a box and a drugstore. She had been pretty once, though, and the smile she turned on Sam dropped years from her face.
    “I don’t believe you could possibly have a daughter old enough to watch tennis.” He rummaged around in his pack and came up with a tennis ball, then signed it with a wink. “There you go.”
    She hurried away toward baggage claim, her cheeks red and cracked wide with a grin. Sam’s smile widened when he saw the look on my face, which I imagined was somewhere between incredulous and disgusted.
    “What? Jealous?”
    “Hardly. I’d just forgotten what a shameless flirt you are.” I would never admit it, but I did feel the slightest twinge of . . . not jealousy. But something. Irritation?
    “It goes with the territory.”
    I snorted. “Right. Because you can’t be good at tennis and be an asshole to fans. No one has ever done that.”
    The smile slipped from his face, not disappearing, just shrinking. Even asleep on the plane, his lips had curled up at the corners. Not that I’d been staring. 
    “I know you want to think the worst of me, and I suppose you must have your reasons for that, but I’m not an asshole. A bit of a whore, if you want to be judgy about it, but never an asshole.”
    A funny feeling, shame or maybe guilt, took root in my stomach. It was foreign—a virus that my father had long ago vaccinated me against, and my body attacked it now. How Sam Bradford lived his life was none of my business. There had been good people in my path before and it had never stopped me. It wouldn’t now. I was almost out.
    “I don’t care who you flirt with or where you stick your penis, but I do care about how long this whole endeavor keeps me away from school. So, if you could try to focus.”
    “Okay. Fine. No funny business.” He reached out and tugged on the hairs that had fallen out of my bun, loosening the whole thing until it flopped low on my neck. “With anyone but you.”
    I groaned and trailed after him as he wound his way toward the ground transportation. My neck tingled where his fingers had landed and my own lips tried to twitch into an unused smile. Once outside he turned to me, eyebrows raised, but I hailed a cab and asked the driver to take us to a restaurant in a quiet, cheap neighborhood in the city.
    Twenty minutes later we stood on an uneven street. The sun’s rays reached fingers over the horizon, scrabbling for purchase against the night. Austria in late November meant freezing cold. Sam looked refreshed, his cheeks a healthy pink and the chilly wind ruffling his wavy brown hair. I felt disgusting after thirty-five hours of travel, but he may as well have stepped out of a shampoo commercial. That fact boosted my level of grumpiness, which helped me ignore the twinge of desire in my stomach, at least for the moment.
    I could not be attracted to him and rip him off. One of them had to go, and thanks to my dad, it had to be the former.
    My eyes adjusted to the lightening dawn. We were alone on the street, at least at the moment, and I could feel Sam’s silent questions pummeling me. Instead of having a conversation about it—which would mean protests—I moved, expecting him to follow. My tennis shoes