“I uh, just came up with it, but I think it’s for the best.”
Edgar sighed. “So do I. It’s a shame things couldn’t have been simpler.”
“What do you mean?”
“I know you care about Samantha and I know she cares about you. I was hoping you two would resolve your situation before she tried to auction your virginity or you moved away, but it seems it’s too late for that. Or too soon, more likely.”
“But…what?” Scott rubbed a knuckle across his smoke-stung eyes. “Do you think Samantha likes me?”
“I know she does,” Edgar said airily, lighting another cigarette. “Unfortunately, she’s stubborn and you’re shy and you’re both young. It doesn’t seem to be the right time.”
“I’m not shy, and I know how I feel.”
Edgar laughed. “I’m not attacking you, Scott, I’m just saying there’s an uneasiness to you that’ll smooth away with time. And Sammy’ll grow up and realise she doesn’t have to throw her whole weight into everything she does. Then I believe you’ll both be ready for something real. After all, you two were drawn to each other from the first. Maybe if your father…” He broke off and for the first time since Scott had known him, he looked angry.
“Did something…did something happen between you and my dad?”
“Not my place to tell you,” he said, gazing toward the road. “Not my place at all. Especially, now your mum’s gone. God rest her.”
Scott wanted to press him, but he knew Mr DaSilva wouldn’t say anything else. He felt lonely all of a sudden, lonely and tired. He wanted to go to visit his mother, but knew it was a stupid impulse. There was nothing at the cemetery except the remains of someone who could no longer talk to him. Scott ground out his cigarette. “I should get going. Thanks for the smoke.”
Edgar clapped him on the shoulder. “Not a problem. You need to be a friend to yourself now. Find a way to get the bad out and the good in. It’s what your mother wanted. It’s what all good parents want for their kids.”
“Right,” Scott said, with no clue as to what that meant.
“I mean it. Go back to London, make some new friends, have some lovers, but make sure you find something to run towards, not away from. Then you’ll be ready to come home.”
“Ah, sure…Mr DaSilva.”
Edgar smiled. “You don’t believe me, but you will. And I’ll tell you something else—when you come back, Sammy will still be here. She’s a homebody, beneath the wild.”
Scott laughed because he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t believe Mr DaSilva. Sam was the most restless person he knew and he bet she’d be gone from Brunswick as soon as she turned eighteen—but he wasn’t going to tell her father that. “I’ve already liked Samantha for ten years. That’s too long to have a thing for a girl who doesn’t like you.”
Mr DaSilva gave him a sad smile. “Not when it matters. Come see me before you leave for London, okay?”
Scott agreed, but he didn’t. He packed his bags that night, wrote his father a letter and took a hundred-and-fifty-dollar taxi to the airport. As he sat by the departure terminal, awaiting his flight, he listened to the The Kills and decided the first thing he’d do when he got to London was lose his virginity.
Chapter 15
The day was long and full of errors. Sam couldn’t stop thinking about Scott, passed out on his fancy hotel bed fully clothed with a Sharpie vagina on his cheek. She wondered if he’d woken up, wondered if he’d gone to the police. She wondered if he hated her. It shouldn’t have mattered, she hated him. He’d not only suckered her into a date, he’d had the nerve to be amazingly, heart-stoppingly good at eating pussy. Like, he’d almost made her lower half dissolve like a bath bomb.
Still, she refused to let herself dwell on that. At least no more than twice a minute.
Thankfully, she didn’t fuck up any tattoos, but everything outside that was a shitshow. She overcharged, she undercharged, she dropped coffee and stumbled over loose floorboards that had been there for a decade.
“Are you on drugs?” Gil said when he busted her chewing absent-mindedly on a corner of a tattooing magazine.
In a way, Sam supposed she was. Lust was a drug and while she still had no idea what to do with her infatuation whenever she wasn’t hot with anger, she was tingling at the memory of Scott’s tongue lapping warmly between her legs.
Nicole hadn’t asked what she’d done when she got home from the Windsor and Sam hadn’t told. She’d found her sister buried in paperwork—deep in the process of trying to ensure no one else could propose the heritage application she’d rejected. Sam didn’t feel it pertinent to mention that she—a twenty-seven-year-old small business owner—had resorted to revenge pranking their old neighbor once again.
A vagina. Why had she drawn a Sharpie vagina on Scott Sanderson’s lovely face? Sure, Nicole had thought he was trying to help his old man grift them out of their building, but had she learned nothing from buyscottsandersonaroot.com? On a practical level, pranking him was stupid—he could have retaliated by coming after the house twice as hard. On a personal level…did she believe Scott was only dating her because of their building? Or that he’d posted Nicole’s pictures on the school website? And if she didn’t think he was guilty, why didn’t she talk to him instead of lashing out?
When had she cultivated the idea that Scott was some posho asshole who deserved pranks? Her dad hadn’t encouraged that kind of behaviour. Growing up, he’d frequently sat them down for talks about peaceful protest and never making an enemy of anyone—even people you disagreed with.
It wasn’t until that afternoon that Sam considered her mother. She tried not to consider her mother, considering her mother had run away and ceased to consider her, but Madeline DaSivla seemed irritatingly relevant to her situation.
For one thing, she’d left, and despite denying having abandonment issues whatsoever, neither she nor her sisters were what you’d call ‘romantically successful.’ She herself struggled to maintain relationships past six months, Tabby was even worse and Nicole had a boyfriend every day of her life from fifteen onward. But that wasn’t the most pressing point; there was the fact her mum loved pranks.
She’d stretched cling wrap across the toilet and changed the time on all their clocks and shook up Coke cans and hid car keys and slipped fart cushions onto chairs. She let her seven-year-old daughters get The Idiot show bag at the Melbourne show and borrowed the sneezing powder to use on their dad.
Her mother loved pranks. Then she left, and within a few weeks, she and her sisters had launched a fully-fledged prank war against the neighbor with the nice clothes and still-married parents.
Sam almost dropped the tattoo machine. “Oh god, we’re a cliché!”
“What?” the customer demanded.
“Nothing! Tat’s coming along great.”
She kept her mind away from both Scott and her mum after that, afraid she’d cross a line and do some actual damage. As soon as she finished up for the day Sam headed upstairs. She’d have liked to have bounced some of the ideas in her brain off her sisters, but Tabby had cut out of work early to see a Skylarks gig and Nicole was having dinner with more uni friends. She could have stayed and forced Noah to talk through the Scott debacle, but she was worried what his hot take would be. Her colleague had a way of smashing through conversational bullshit with the force of an iron mace and she had the distinct impression he liked Scott. If he told her she’d fucked up bad and was an incompetent human adult, she might cry in front of him. Then where would she be?
So she climbed the stairs to the apartment, collected a bottle of Shiraz and took it to bed along with her eReader. She opened Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter hoping the suspense would keep her mind off her myriad of personal problems. She was right, but as the plot grew progressively darker she wondered if she should be reading this at night. She lit a few candles, hoping it would transform the mood from creepy to cosy. She was tucking away her lighter when she heard a tap at her window.
>
She should have been startled. It was late, she was alone, the sky was velvet black and an unknown thing was trying to get her attention from outside her second story bedroom window. Her mouth went dry and her skin prickled with goosebumps, but it wasn’t because she was scared. Far from it.
She knew exactly who it was, she had kind of known—though it was hard to know how—that this was going to happen. Why else had she gone to bed in silk shorts, her makeup still on?
Scott Sanderson was tapping at her window, the way he used to when they were kids, and Sam could hardly keep the smile from spreading across her face. She rose and walked over to him, her bare feet sticking slightly to the floorboards. The man crouched outside her window wasn’t a version of Scott she’d ever seen before. Not handsome Galahad in the restaurant, the awkward teenager bashing at his drums or the posh businessman in his suit. This version had a hard mouth and narrowed eyes, he wore dark jogging pants and a hoodie that clung to his chest and shoulders. He looked powerful and more than a little mean. The sight of him sent an electrical jolt all through Sam’s body. He came for me…
“Hello, Samantha,” he said through the glass. The sound was muffled but she understood him perfectly. She was pleased to see his face bore no signs of the labia she’d drawn on him.
“Hi.” Sam rubbed her hands against the silk of her shorts, feeling very female, very delicate and small. “You, uh, got the vagina off, then?”
Scott didn’t smile, so much as bare his teeth. “I did. Are you going to let me in?”
A good question. She wanted to let him in, but then she’d once had a crush on Johnny Depp. She wasn’t to be trusted. She folded her arms across her chest, as though to conceal the rapid pulsing of her heart. “What are you doing here?”
“Oh, I was just in the neighborhood, you know. Thought I’d stop by.” Scott tapped on the window. “This hasn’t changed much.”
Sam turned around and stared at her bedroom. No, she supposed it hadn’t changed too much since she was a girl. She hadn’t painted or moved any of the furniture. “I know. I liked everything the way it was.”
“You’re a homebody,” he said curtly. “You look like you don’t give a fuck, but you like the familiar and the comfortable.”
Sam frowned, confused by what he’d said and the conviction with which he’d said it. “No, I—”
“You do. And that’s not just my assessment, your father told me more or less the same thing, a long time ago.” Scott cast an eye over her bed. “Now, that’s new.”
He practically purred the word, as though it were a promise. A threat. It was so inexplicably dirty, Sam had to resist the urge to move her hands to her overheated face. “What are you doing in my tree?”
Scott laid a palm against the window. “I’ll answer that in a minute, I have a question for you.”
Sam was fairly certain she’d have known what this was about. “Ask away.”
“What the fuck?”
Okay, that wasn’t what she’d been expecting. “Huh?”
“My question,” Scott said with the asperity of a British barrister, “is ‘what the fuck’, Samantha?”
“I don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I think you do.”
And as she looked at him, she did. He meant ‘why?’ and not just why had she bailed on their date, but why after a decade were they were still dancing this dance. Why they were still pushing and pulling and driving each other crazy.
“You need to be quiet or my sisters will hear you,” Sam said, in lieu of an actual answer.
Scott gave a humourless smile. “Your sisters are out for the evening.”
“Have you been watching the house?”
“No. I had a conversation with Nicole before I came here. She informed me she and Tabby wouldn’t be home tonight.”
Sam frowned. “Why are you talking to Nix?”
“Because I wanted to inform her that I called the Melbourne historical society last night and confirmed what I already knew—I didn’t put your building on the list for possible historical sites. My father sent in a letter in my name and forged my signature to strengthen his own application.”
A further swell of adrenalin set Sam’s heart racing. “You didn’t do it?”
“No. I didn’t know that the meeting was being held last night, either. Something I would have been happy to tell you, had you mentioned it at all, instead of getting me drunk and drawing female genitalia on my face.”
It was serious conversation, but Sam still struggled not to smile. “You got it all off, but.”
“I did. I had to have Toby bring a bottle of nail polish remover to the hotel. I almost dissolved my outer dermis.”
“Ouch.”
Scott smiled in that flat, lupine way once more. “Samantha, you don’t want to know what I wanted to do to you afterward.”
Sam chewed her lower lip, aware of the pressure building between her legs. This was wrong, of course—he shouldn’t be at her window and she shouldn’t be finding it hot. Yet there was something unmistakably erotic about it. They were close, but the glass barrier restrained their movements. She was still in control, but what would happen if she lifted the window and allowed him to come in? Would they argue? Or would he drag her onto her bed and do the things she’d been thinking about for longer than she wanted to admit? Outside, she could hear the wind blow as it shook the leaves and rustled Scott’s thick sandy hair. “Are you cold?”
Scott shook his head. “I told Nicole I withdrew the heritage application. I also pulled some strings and had your counter-application pre-approved. It’s now virtually impossible to submit the building for heritage status.”
Sam gaped at him. “Seriously?”
“Yes. I’ve already emailed Nicole the documents.”
“Oh my God.” Sam felt like she was falling backward. That was one of her major problems curtailed, utterly removed from her list. She leaned against the window frame, unable to keep from smiling. “Wow. That’s amazing.”
Scott’s expression softened, but almost instantly the hard smile returned. “I’m glad you think so. Now, if you could please…?” He inclined his head toward the latch. “My feet are going numb.”
Sam hesitated, considered asking if he was going to ‘do anything,’ realised she was hoping he was going to ‘do anything’ and pulled the deadbolt on the window open, pushing the glass pane to the side. A rush of lukewarm air flooded the room, along with the scent of Scott’s cologne. Her palms dampened and she wiped them against her shorts. “Um, want a hand?”
“No.” Scott sprang through the window like a cat burglar, his sneakers barely making a sound as he landed.
“Agile.” Sam meant to add more, but Scott was straightening up and expanding, reminding her of just how tall he was. If that wasn’t bad enough, he pulled his hoodie over his head to reveal a taut white t-shirt and the kind of clean, guy-sweat smell you wanted to inhale forever.
“You know, you still haven’t answered my question.” Scott’s eyes were nowhere near as soft as his t-shirt looked; they were cold and trained on her face.
“Your question of ‘what the fuck?’”
“Yes.”
“That’s because I have no idea.”
He took a step toward her. “You have no idea?”
“Yup.” Sam tried to subtly wipe her hands on her shorts. The silk was growing shiny-thin in the face of so much rubbing.
Scott stared down at her, his height seeming much more significant than usual. “You know, we’re not kids anymore, Samantha. We’re adults and I know you wanted to be on that date with me.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes.” Another step closer. “You did. We were going to go back to my hotel and fuck each other senseless and you decided to play the same games you’ve been playing on me since we were children. One perceived slight and my school books are on fire, or my face has been disfigured or my virginity is being auctioned off on the internet.”
He w
as so close now. His scent was almost overwhelming. Was it weird that she found it sexy that he’d climbed the tree, like a fairytale prince gone rouge? She wanted to draw him that way, a nobleman bending the rules to visit the girl trapped in the tower—
“Samantha?” Scott’s hands were on her now, sliding down her shoulders to grip her upper arms. “Talk to me, just tell me what goes through your head when you’re about to do something ridiculous to me.”
Instead, Sam looked up at him, taking in the planes of his face, the stubble along his jaw. He was so different from the boy who’d spied on her as she played water balloon hopscotch, and yet it was the same person. Time had brought them from there to here and the strangeness of that made her dizzy. Outside the wind blew in aural waves, sending stray leaves and twigs against the side of the house. She and Scott Sanderson, trapped beneath a bone-dry sea together.
“Why?” she whispered. “Why do you bother with me, if I drive you crazy?”
“Funny, I asked myself the same thing while I was scrubbing my face raw.” Scott’s hands applied gentle pressure as he walked her backward. “I think it’s a conversation we’d be better off having somewhere else.”
Sam pressed her lips together, trying to get them to stop tingling in anticipation. “Feel free to get back out on the tree, I enjoyed talking to you there.”
“I don’t think so.”
She felt her mattress press into the backs of her knees. “You think we should talk in bed?”
“I think we should do a lot of things in bed, talking being the last item on a long list.” Scott picked her up as though she were nothing. “What do you think?”
“I think…” Sam swallowed. “I think you already tried that last night and wound up with a Georgia O’Keefe painting on your face. Twice, if you include the sex.”
Scott’s upper lip curled and he laid her gently down onto the mattress. “If that’s the way you’d like to play it, Samantha.”
He stood there a moment, examining her, his eyes lingering on her nipples poking through her t-shirt and the damp, silk-covered place between her legs. Then he turned, striding back toward the window.
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