So Wild

by Eve Dangerfield

  “And the one you like has the black hair?”

  “I…”

  “We don’t have to talk about it,” Toby said quickly.

  They watched as Sam drew the Yaris up to the curb. She looked so fucking pretty, Scott could hardly stand it.

  “Tattoos,” Toby whispered, staring at the girls.

  “What’s wrong? You don’t like tattoos?”

  “I don’t mind them.” He checked his watch again. “My parents hate tattoos.”

  Scott wanted to ask if his parents liked anything except huge, decaying statues of Jesus but Tabby was bursting from the passenger seat with her turquoise hair and even more colorful tattoos. “Greetings, Nova Scotia! Who’s your mate?”

  “This is my assistant, Toby. His parents breed spaniels and he’ll be showing us the puppies.”

  “Hey, Toby!”

  Toby gave her an awkward wave. He was hunching slightly and Scott fought the urge to tell him to stand up straight and smile properly.

  Sam got out of the car, sweeping her long black hair over her shoulder. When she smiled at him, Scott felt like he was levitating off the ground. “Hello.”

  “Hey.”

  “It’s great to see you, again.”

  “It’s good to see you too.”

  “Yeah, yeah, blah blah, can you feel the love tonight?” Tabby interrupted. “Where are these puppies at?”

  Toby pointed to his back gate. “They’re, uh, right this way.”

  He led them into a medium backyard where three full-grown Cocker Spaniels came snuffling up. Tabby immediately bent to pet them. “Are these the parents?”

  “No, Mopsy, the mother is in the shed. We, uh, don’t know who the father is.”

  “Bastards,” Tabby said, looking impressed.

  “Um, yeah kind of.” Toby walked over to the plastic and corrugated iron structure and pulled the deadbolt back. “Uh, Scott, did you want to…?”

  With a trepidation he couldn’t place, Scott walked up and stuck his head in the door. There were six pups in total. They were bigger than they’d been in the video, their coats thicker and their dark eyes bright as beads. Their mother was there, a golden Cocker Spaniel reclining on her side. She seemed to smile at him in welcome. Scott watched as the puppies struggled to their feet and made their way toward him, ambling so sweetly he was almost embarrassed. They were just so…gorgeous.

  Someone poked him hard in the shoulder.

  “Okay, mate,” Tabby said. “Time to move aside.”

  He stepped aside and Tabby rushed in. “Is it okay for me to lie down and have them jump on me, Tobes?”

  “Um, I guess, but the floor might be—”

  But Tabby was already lying on concrete, her arms spread wide. “Come to me, puppies! Come to Tabitha!”

  The puppies didn’t need any encouraging, all six bounded over to her sniffing and nuzzling her sides. One of the braver ones pawed at her hip and she scooped it into her arms and kissed its tiny face. “Hello pupper, I love you. I love you so much.”

  Toby was watching her with wide eyes. “Are you…okay?”

  “No, I’m in heaven.” Tabby lifted the puppy high above her head. “This is heaven and it’s so wonderful, it hurts.”

  Scott looked around and saw Sam hovering nearby. “Come and have a look?”

  She came closer, close enough that he could smell the jasmine of her perfume. The squeak of delight she emitted when she saw the puppies made his chest ache. “Oh, aren’t they lovely?”

  Scott turned his face so it was inches from her ear. “Not as lovely as you. Thank you for coming.”

  “No problem, what do you think? Are you going to get a puppy?”

  “We’ll see. I just got here. To Australia I mean, also to this house. They are cute, though.”

  “Very.”

  Sam smirked and looked away. Was she fighting thoughts of the night before, too? The feel of skin, the way they’d moved together like they’d known exactly how to drive the other insane…

  Tabby raised a hand. “Hey, Tobes? I’m busting, is there a chance I can take a wee inside?”

  Toby clenched his jaw. “I…er…”

  He cast a panicky look at Scott, who knew exactly what he was thinking, please don’t make me show a hot girl the Jesus house, Mr Sanderson. Help me.

  “Er, maybe we should go and get a coffee,” Scott said. “Come back afterward?”

  Tabby frowned. “Or I could just pee in the house? What’s wrong, is it a composting toilet? It’s fine, if it is. I lived in a tent for three months. I have little-to-no germaphobia.”

  “You could use some germaphobia,” Sam said. “Don’t worry about it, we should go, I have a client in an hour.”

  Now it was Scott’s turn to throw Toby a panicked look. He didn’t give a shit how many graphic depictions of Christ’s death lay between here and the toilet—he needed the DaSilva sisters to stay, at least until he’d asked Sam on a date. Toby licked his lower lip. “Okay, it’s all good. You can use our bathroom.”

  “Sweet,” Tabby said, brushing a few stray bits of dog kibble from her yellow smock dress. “Lead the way.”

  Scott watched them leave with relief. Tomorrow he’d buy Toby all the lattes the kid could drink for taking this bullet, but now he had a job to do. In the absence of her sister, Sam moved further into the shed. She knelt by Mopsy, stroking her side. “Is your assistant okay? Is Tabby freaking him out? I can tell her to back off, if she is.”

  “No, I don’t think it’s that. Toby’s got a house full of Jesus paraphernalia. Or his parents do.”

  Sam tilted her head to the side. “Well there you go. Don’t worry about Tabby, she won’t say anything. She’s a nutbag, but she doesn’t judge.”

  Scott smiled. Say whatever you liked about the DaSilvas—and his dad had said plenty over the years—they weren’t judgmental and they never had been. Maybe because their patriarch had been an honest-to-god hippie. “I know.”

  Sam’s face lit up. “Hey, remember when those Mormons were canvassing the neighborhood? They knocked at your place and your dad opened the door—”

  “And told them to sod off if they knew what was good for them,” Scott finished. “I don’t know who was more embarrassed, the Mormons or my mum.”

  “Definitely the Mormons. They came over to our house and they looked so disheartened, dad made them peppermint lemonade and they stayed for like, three hours.”

  He and Sam smiled at each other and the childhood memory. It was strange to have someone to share them with after all these years in London where his backstory amounted to little more than ‘Sanderson spent ten years in Australia, then his mum died.’

  Sam stared at the puppies gamboling at her feet; she smiled and shook her head. “I don’t know why I let Tabby drag me here. She’s going to want to adopt one or all of them and I’m going to have to be the arsehole who says no fucking way.”

  “She’s not ready for the responsibility?”

  Sam snorted. “Tabby and responsibility have never once crossed paths, let alone been introduced. And that’s me saying that.”

  Scott wanted to tell her she was wonderfully responsible, but that would sound like sucking up. “She told me she got a 99.95 ATAR score.”

  Sam gave him a rueful smile. “Yep. Best you can get. She’s the smartest person in our family by a mile and she’s never had a job, let alone gone to uni.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “Dad wanted her to make up her own mind. He said if he pressured her, she’d only drop out or end up in some horrible job she didn’t want. He lived by the whole ‘she has to choose her own path’ theory.”

  “Well, parental pressure does fuck people up,” Scott admitted. “I knew heaps of kids at Cambridge who were like that. They’d got top marks to make their parents proud and then once they were out of home, they couldn’t keep it toget—”

  Scott felt a soft weight on his foot and saw a puppy attempting to clamber onto his shoe. “Oh, hello ther
e.”

  Slipping off the leather, the puppy took his shoelace between its tiny teeth and attempted to worry it, as though she were a much bigger dog. It slipped out of her mouth at once and she tried to leverage herself onto his shoe again and re-seize it.

  Sam laughed. “Looks like you’ve made a friend. Go on, pick her up.”

  Scott hesitated, then took in the puppy’s beautiful eyes. They were framed by two golden brows and he noticed one was set slightly higher, as though the puppy was perpetually questioning the validity of everything. He looked to the mother and perhaps he was just going insane, but she seemed to smile at him. He picked the puppy up. She weighed as much as a tin of tomatoes, only soft and squirmy. He cuddled her to his chest and felt her heartbeat flitter against his palm.

  “She likes you,” Sam said softly.

  “Do you like me?” He hadn’t meant to sound so abrupt, but with the tiny sweet-smelling puppy in his arms, it was easier.

  Sam eyed him warily. “What do you mean?”

  “Exactly that. Do you like me?”

  “I…yeah. I mean, I don’t know if you remember but I was all over you in the car last night.”

  It wasn’t exactly the answer he’d been looking for, but he could work with it. “Great. You like me, I like you. We should go on a date tomorrow night.”

  Samantha’s fingers rose up to rub at her lips. Her gaze was everywhere but on him. “I don’t, I mean I do like you, Galahad, but—”

  “Wait, let me ask again.” Scott held the puppy up to his face and nuzzled his cheek against it. It squeaked happily. “Please have dinner with me tomorrow night, Samantha?”

  Her face softened. “You’re heartless.”

  No, on the contrary his heart felt like it was three times its usual size. “I don’t want you to marry me, Samantha, I just think the two of us should have dinner. Explore this.”

  She looked away from him, chewing her upper lip. “Look, I won’t say I don’t want to but…what about everything? The underwear and the letter and the pie? Shouldn’t we maybe not go there?”

  Scott didn’t understand everything she was saying but he knew an excuse when he heard one. She didn’t want to hash this out, and that was fine. They could bury those memories, and all their rusty-chain implications for later or, better still, never. “The past is the past. We’re adults. Let’s go out like adults and just enjoy ourselves.”

  She smiled a little half-smile. “Is that allowed?”

  “Yes,” he said, not caring if it was true or not. The puppy squirmed in his arms and he smiled at it. “Come on, you don’t want to disappoint this little lady, do you?”

  “How do you know it’s a lady?”

  Scott lifted her up and saw the tiny rows of nipples and lack of a penis. “She’s a girl. A clever, clever little girl.”

  He looked up to see Samantha staring at him intently. “Is everything—”

  She kissed him. Scott registered surprise for all of a second before he kissed her back. It wasn’t a sexy kiss—there wasn’t any tongue and he was holding a puppy—but the intensity of it was magnetic. He prayed that the pressure of her lips meant she felt the same ache, the same urgent need to make this more than it had ever been before. His chest felt like it was going to cave in.

  “Ew, not in front of the puppies! They don’t want to see this heterosexual grossness!”

  Sam pulled away from him and they turned to see a grinning Tabby and a mortified red-cheeked Toby.

  “Sorry about that,” Scott said automatically.

  “I forgive you.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Sam snapped. “It was just a kiss.” Before Tabby could reply, she turned to face him. “Yes.”

  For a second Scott had no idea what she meant, then he grinned. “Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  And that was it. He had a date with Samantha DaSilva. Scott, scared he’d try to punch the air and hurt the puppy, put her back on the ground. She immediately gamboled back to her mother and siblings, her tiny tail wagging furiously. Despite the good news, he felt an ache in his chest. She wanted to go back. Only animal curiosity had brought her to him in the first place. He was being an idiot imagining she’d come over out of some ‘wand chooses the wizard’ desire to become his pet. She was an animal, an adorable, intelligent animal, but not one capable of navigating her own adoption.

  “I’ve got a meeting at half-seven, I should get going,” he told the others. “Toby, thanks for having me over.”

  All four of them said goodbye to the puppies and left the shed. Tabby and Sam said goodbye and though Scott wanted to kiss her, he accepted her wink and wave. “I’ll call you later,” he said as she walked away. “On your landline.”

  “Leave a voicemail,” she said over her shoulder and, unless he was imagining it, she walked away with her hips swinging more than they ordinarily did.

  “Well done,” Toby said, blushing furiously again. “About the um, kiss and the date and everything.”

  “Thanks. How did you find Tabby?”

  Toby shot him a terrified look and Scott laughed. “She’s full-on, isn’t she?”

  “Yeah, and pretty.” Toby cleared his throat, looking more mortified than ever. “So were you um…did you maybe want to take a puppy?”

  He did want to take a puppy, but he’d also just gotten the first girl he’d ever had a crush on to agree to a date with him. His hands were shaking, he was so happy—he shouldn’t be making any rash puppy-based decisions right now. “I’ll tell you what, if you tell your parents I’ll take the puppies, will that stop them from bumping them all off?”

  Toby looked confused. “Yeah, but only for a little while. Why? Don’t you really want to adopt them??”

  “I do, but I don’t know if I’m ready yet.” Scott pulled out his wallet and extracted all the money he had. He handed the notes to Toby, whose eyes widened. “This is way more than I’d sell them for.”

  “I’m not buying them. It’s a deposit. Give it to your parents and see if it makes them a bit more lenient. Then put up some more ads online. I’ll help you, if you like. And if after four weeks, or whenever the puppies are old enough to leave their mother, you haven’t found anyone, I’ll pay for them to live in a puppy kennel until we find a place to stay. I can’t keep all six at my place, my landlord’ll freak his nut.”

  Toby flushed. “You know, Mr Sanderson—”

  “Scott.”

  “Scott,” he agreed. “You can take her if you want her. I think it’s pretty obvious she wants to be with you, too.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not that simple. I’ve got to do this properly. First Sam and then the puppy. Maybe. Now, let’s get going before your parents show up.”

  Chapter 12

  July 21, 2007

  Sam was at her desk pretending to study, but was actually drawing a geometric square on her English practise essay. There was a knock at the door and her dad came in looking so somber, her first thought was that her mum had come back.

  “Sammy, Elaine passed away.”

  For a moment Sam was confused, her mind racing with thoughts of family court and custody hearings. Then what he was saying absorbed and she clapped a hand to her mouth. “Scott’s mum? She’s gone?”

  “Yes, Sammy, she’s gone.”

  Seeing his eyes were red, Sam stood up and hugged her father. For a long time they stood swaying, until her dad squeezed her tight and let go. “I’m going to go talk your sisters. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said, wondering why he’d told her first. Was it because she was the eldest? Or was it a coincidence? Surely it wasn’t because he knew about the pies. She’d been so careful about hiding the pies.

  She walked to her window and her heart almost fell clean out of her chest. Scott was sitting on his bed, with his face in his hands, his sandy hair jutting over his fingers like a verandah. She pressed her hand to the dirty windowpane. She wanted to go and see him, make him less alone. She could open the window and call out t
o him, she could climb the tree that still connected them and tap on his window. And then what? Talk? She didn’t know what to say to someone whose mother had just died. But what else could she do for him?

  It was wrong, the thought that came to her next, but it came all the same. She knew he was still a virgin and that he got no small amount of shit from it—from herself included. Maybe she could go down there and just offer to take that business off the table? Would that be a kind thing to do?

  She imagined Scott pulling her into bed and kissing her desperately, needing to escape the pain. A shiver went through her and she was ashamed of herself. No, she wouldn’t offer to comfort him with her vagina, but maybe she could—

  “Sam!” The door to her bedroom burst open. It was Nicole, red-faced and shiny-eyed. “Did dad tell you about Scott’s mum?”

  “Yeah,” Sam said, fighting back tears. “It’s horrible.”

  “We have to make him and his dad food! That’s what people do when someone dies. I’ll make a lasagna and you can do one of your pies. A chocolate one or something.”

  “I…” She glanced over her shoulder at Scott. He was still sitting motionless on his bed. What did she really have to offer someone in his situation? He wouldn’t want to see her. Dessert was the best thing she had to offer. “Okay, I’ll make another pie.”

  It would be a strawberry one. After weeks of covert pie deliveries, she knew he liked them the best.

  Present Day

  People thought Sam had ‘a look.’ They were wrong. She wore black jeans, halter tops and doc martens because then she didn’t have to think about wearing anything else. Tattoos were forever, no one expected her to show up anywhere with different tattoos—why did she have to spend any amount of time thinking about what to wear? Sam hated clothes. She hated clothes and she hated shopping and she hated fashion trends, and choosing an outfit for an occasion made her want to die.

  This philosophy was not helping her as she attempted to find something to wear on her ‘real date’ with Scott. Everything she owned was a bit…trash, and she knew Scott was taking her somewhere fancy. As she pulled out dresses and skirts, some of them dating back to her early teens, she grew more frustrated. Pretty soon she was going to chuck in the towel and show up naked in a trench coat. And not in a hot way.