“Bye! Hope I see you soon!” the waitress called after him.
“You too,” Scott lied. The coffee was good but this place was far too close to Silver Daughters. Besides, it wasn’t like there weren’t other cafes. From what he’d seen, Melbourne’s café quota had risen to one per person.
He walked back toward Silver Daughters Ink, ignoring the way his hands were tingling as though he was headed for a job interview or certain death.
“She won’t be in there,” he said aloud. “It’ll just be her dad. We’ll spend a few minutes talking rubbish before—”
A short man exploded out of Silver Daughters slamming the glass door back on its hinges. Scott had a second to wonder what was happening before he was knocked backward. Pain exploded in his arse-bones as he hit the concrete. The man fell on top of him, his breath sour, his wooly jacket smelling strongly of mildew. Scott pushed at his chest, trying to get him off. “What are you playing at?”
The man rose and resumed running, his battered shoes making loud slapping sounds on the concrete. Despite his furious movements, he wasn’t going very fast. He looked as though he were sprinting underwater.
“Are you okay?” Scott called after him.
The man jogged on, his chunky arms swinging ineffectually. Still sitting on his arse, Scott watched him, fascinated.
“Oi!” a woman called behind him. “Stop that asshole! Grab him!”
Scott glanced over his shoulder and saw a girl in black jeans and a shiny red top sprinting toward him. “Grab him!” she shouted, pointing in the direction of the short man. “He robbed me, grab him!”
Scott struggled to his feet but before he got his balance, the woman had blown past him and launched herself at the short man like an alley cat.
“Gotcha!” She pinned the short man to the ground, bundling his arms to his sides. “I can’t believe you did this, Frank, you absolute toolbox.”
“Get off me,” the short man hollered. “I’ll pay you later, I promise.”
“You get your ass back in the store and pay Gil right now. You’re not getting away with this!”
“I can’t pay. I don’t have any cash on me!”
“Then I’ll call the cops!”
The short man cackled. “How’re ya gonna do that if you’re on top of me? I know you don’t have a phone, Sam.”
Scott, who was brushing the gravel from his suit pants—the nice ones, goddammit—froze. Sam? Did that guy just say…?
The woman glanced at him. “Look, mate, if you’re okay, can you please call the cops?”
But Scott couldn’t do that. All he could do was stare.
Samantha DaSilva had been an astoundingly beautiful teenager—milky skin, wide blue eyes, the kind of girl that could have played a teenager on TV. While everyone else slogged it through puberty, she swanned around in midriff tops, her skin clear as a summer sky, her silky black hair like something out of a shampoo commercial. It had been Scott’s evil hope that her beauty would burst by the time they were twenty-four. That she’d grown craggy from all the cigarettes she smoked and paunchy from the beers she drank. He wanted that because then he could look back on his crush with something like nostalgic relief.
He’d hoped in vain. She was even lovelier than when she was the loveliest teenager on earth. Her mouth was wide and her eyes were the same deep, breathtaking blue, but there was a seriousness to her features, a solemnity that made her look as though she’d seen and felt a world of things since he’d left. Given their location—and the fact she’d just tackled a man—he should have recognised her sooner. Why hadn’t he recognised her sooner? Was it the tattoos? There were a lot of tattoos; elvish markings across her collarbones, an antique cameo bracelet on her right bicep, lacy wrist-cuffs that made her look like a gothic Wonder Woman. But there was something he’d forgotten, something that, as she struggled to hold the short man down, he could only marvel at. She was alive. She was so fuckingalive. Not happy, not sweet, not demure or in any way subdued. She was passion itself, wrapped in an insanely gorgeous body. She’d been that way from the moment he’d seen her. Fearless. Wild.
“Mate? Are you listening to me?” Samantha said. “Can you call the cops? This guy just stole five hundred bucks from me.”
Right, yes. The cops. Scott fumbled for his phone. Samantha DaSilva was still here. Still here, and covered in tattoos. Still here and she’d justtackled a man. He squatted down, pressing his knee into the short man’s back as he dialed triple nine. The phone refused to connect and, swearing, he remembered he was in Australia and dialed triple zero. He was following the pre-recorded prompts when the short man twisted beneath them and with a dexterity Scott could hardly believe, wiggled free of both him and Samantha, shooting to his feet like a bar of wet soap.
Both he and Samantha stood to chase and their knees connected, sending them both sprawling backward. Programmed to save him and not the expensive technology he owned, his hands flew backward to break his fall and he heard his iPhone shatter on the warm concrete.
“Bloody hell.” Scott lifted the phone and saw the screen was covered in a spider web of fractures. He was suddenly furious with the short man, with himself, with his father for sending him here.
“Nice going, you two!”
Scott looked up to see the short man sprint away in the same incompetent manner in which he’d left Silver Daughters Ink. Samantha clambered to her feet. “Come back!”
The short man just shot her the finger and kept running. “See you around, Sammy!”
“Arsehole!” Scott shoved his broken phone into his pocket and got up, determined to find the short man and improve this dismal afternoon by punching him in the face. A cool hand fell on his wrist.