Page 79 of So Wild

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 knowhow—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’snew.”

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, shedid. 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.”

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