“No.” But for the first time in ages, she wished that wasn’t the case.
He was looking at her, his eyes dark with a feeling that made her warm inside. She imagined herself on his lap, his thigh bones pressing into her stomach as he pulled her skirt up her hips.
‘Now, Samantha,’he’d say in his lovely cut glass accent.‘What am I going to do with you?’
“Should I give you my number? If you want to call me back about the offer.”
“I’m pretty sure I don’t need it,” she said, but some impulse made her add, “You know where to find me if you need me.”
Scott dipped his head. “I do.”
And she wandered home from the pub, her belly full of beer and her brain alternating between thoughts of her ex-neighbours body and three million dollars.
Chapter 5
The laws oftime said Sam was two minutes older than Nicole, but in reality her twin had emerged from the womb aged forty-five and proceeded to clock three years every fortnight until she was only marginally younger than Gandalf.
It was a cliché, identical twins who weren’t anything alike. The Olsen twins made a career out of parading their same-face-different-personality shtick around. The Wakefield twins of Sweet Valley High only had about a gazillion volumes dedicated to the same bullshit. But she and Nicole weren’t quaint ‘good girl’ and ‘only slightly less good,maybeshe wears a leather jacket girl’ twins. They were polar opposites.
When they were eight, Sam’s passion was WWE and Nicole’s was reading The Financial Times. In their senior year, her twin was voted ‘most likely to become Prime Minister’ while Sam had to contend with ‘most likely to go to jail.’ Nicole got a Masters of Accounting at the best university in Australia and Sam completed her tattoo apprenticeship and got busted trying to bring a joint into an Ice House gig. She didn’t go to jail for it, though—take that, graduating class of 2007.
All things considered, Sam had way more in common with her younger sister Tabby than she did the other half of her embryo. That baffled her. Genetically, she and Nicole werethe exact same person, how the fuck could they have different tastes in food, clothes, art, music, boys, politics and every other thing on the planet? Whenever she talked to her dad about it he rambled about the karmic wheel, but Sam preferred to think of her and Nicole as proof of the unique human soul. How else did you explain a person with her exact face whose favourite singer was John fucking Mayer?
They’d always been close. That was a cliché Sam never minded—the built-in best friend, the steadfast ally. When they were kids, she and Nicole wanted to marry brothers and live in the same house forever; shape their whole future around the two of them. Then they were adults drifting apart as their friends and careers diverged. At twenty-two, Nicole accepted a job in Adelaide. Sam clung to the belief that the move was temporary, but then her twin got engaged to Aaron and they bought a house. When Sam heard the news, she wrote Nicole an email she never sent.Please don’t make a life so far away from me. I need you. We belong together.
She knew it was stupid, to describe your twin in a language that was only appropriate for lovers. She and Nicole weren’t a single person. She was entitled to march to the beat of her own (extremely rigid) drum, far away from Brunswick and their dad and the mess of their shared adolescence. But in spite of the distance Nicole had put between them, Sam knew she’d freak if she sold the business without her knowledge.
That was why, three days after her meeting with Scott Sanderson, Sam closed the shop up early, ran a scalding bath, poured a large glass of Shiraz, and when she was pleasantly light-headed from the heat and alcohol, called her twin on her landline. She didn’t have a mobile phone, but she did have her own extension—just like Claudia from The Babysitters Club. It had a long twirley cord so she could talk in the bath and the receiver was shaped like an ice cream cone—a whimsical touch that always made her smile. At least, it usually did. Just then, the silliness of it only enhanced her feeling of being an incompetent adult.
Her twin picked up on the second ring. “Has dad called? Is he hurt? Is he sick?”
“No.”
“Oh, hello then.”
Sam grinned. “Hey, is Aaron home?”
“No, he’s got a meeting and then he’s going to the gym.”
“Good.” Sam hadn’t wanted to tell Nicole the news about the business with her fiancé around. He was an insufferable snob moonlighting as a barrister and he’d demand Nix put the call on loudspeaker so he could weigh in with his cunt opinions.
“So…what’s up? Dad’s fine, isn’t he?”
“I couldn’t tell you. I haven’t heard from him, but I do have news. Get a massive drink of some kind and sit down.”
“Oh god, what’s wrong? Do you have cancer?”
Oh Christ, she’d forgotten about Nicole’s lifelong fear that everyone and everything was going to get cancer. “No. No one is in any kind of immediate danger. Go get a drink and I’ll fill you in.”
She listened to the click-splash of her twin pouring a glass of wine—a white because wine was another thing they couldn’t see eye-to-eye on. So her fiancé was at the gym, was he? A likely fucking story.
A year ago, Nicole found a wrapper and a hotel bill in one of Aaron’s suit jackets. The cheating itself wasn’t that surprising—Aaron had the octopus ooze of a born skirt chaser—but what had surprised Sam was Nicole’s refusal to leave. Her twin swallowed all Aaron’s piss-weak lies about stress and how it would never happen again, while ignoring the fact that he refused to apologise and tried to shift the blame onto her by saying they weren’t having enough sex. Sam didn’t have power over who Nicole married, no more than she had power over anywhere her twin lived, but it was hard to talk to her after that. Hard to look at her without wanting to shake her very hard.
After the cheating incident, their dad had sent Aaron copies ofThe Ethical SlutandSex at Dawnalong with a note suggesting ethical non-monogamy might be a viable option. Aaron had mailed the books back and refused to talk to him for months.
“What did you expect?” Sam had told her dad. “He wants a traditional relationship. You know, where the guy cheats on his wife and she just has to get over it.”
Sam took a big gulp of wine, offering the universe the same silent prayer she’d had for three years—that her twin would wake up and smell the pheromones before she and her slimy fiancé scrambled their DNA into a kid. It hadn’t worked yet, but maybe a thousand times would be the charm.