“I’m sure he’ll understand,” Nicole said finally. “He’d want me to help my family.Wantsme to help my family.”
Sam privately thought that what Aaron really wanted was for Nicole’s family to die in a mysterious cruise ship explosion and leave him all their money, but she wasn’t going to point that out. “Sure.”
“Do you want to tell Scott we’re not selling, or should I?”
“I will,” Sam said, trying not to sound as guilty as she felt.
“Cool. God, Scott Sanderson. I haven’t thought about him in years. What does he look like?”
“He’s…”Gorgeous? Friendly? Extremely buff?“…Super British again. It sounds like he’s barely been home since he left for uni.”
“Can you blame him? His mum died and then his dad was getting drunk and smashing up their house every night.”
Sam remembered. She remembered Scott Sanderson had smashed a few things of his own, including a strawberry pie that she’d…but she didn’t want to think about that.
“We don’t need to worry about him,” Sam said. “He’s only here for a visit. He, uh, just broke up with his girlfriend.”
She shouldn’t have said that, should have remembered how attuned her sister’s romance radar was. Nicole made an excited mooing noise. “Is he good-looking now?”
“He was always good-looking, in a virginal blonde kind of way.”
“God, you never gave him a rest with the virgin stuff. Where did you talk to him about his dad’s proposal? The courtyard? The office?”
“We…went out for a drink.”
There was more excited mooing.
“Nicole,” Sam warned. “We just went out for one awkward drink and that’s it.”
Sam wasn’t being entirely honest. Not about the quantity of drinks she and Scott Sanderson had shared or her interest levels. Though she had no intention of sleeping with her ex-neighbour, she thought about him all day and dreamt of him at night. The day thoughts ran the gauntlet from nostalgic to resentful, but the dreams were always the same.
They were sex dreams. She was kissing a blank-faced stranger on her bed when Scott appeared and lifted her from the stranger’s arms. He’d climbed through her window like he did when they were kids, only this time his intent was far from innocent. Shoving the stranger aside, he pulled her into his arms and kissed her deeply. “No more games, Samantha. You’re mine now.”
And instead of telling him to fuck himself, Sam would press against him. “Yes. I’m yours.”
He’d tear at her clothes, which in the dream-state slipped off like baking paper.
“What are you doing?” she’d ask as he arranged her on all fours on her bed.
“Something I should have done a long time ago,” he’d say as he ran his hands over her bare backside, squeezing her flesh.
“Please,” the blank-faced man begged from somewhere. “Please, stop?”
Dream-Scott would laugh. “Not a chance. You can watch if you’d like, though.”
And he did watch, he watched as Scott Sanderson made her come. Sam could never remember how he managed this, but it didn’t matter. The way she kept waking up disturbed and aroused mattered. The fact that she was having them at all mattered. She persisted in telling herself it was a coincidence even though she’d had the same dream three nights in a row. She couldn’t tell Nicole about the sex dreams. Her sister wasn’t a prude—no one who’d been taught the birds and bees by their dad and his extensive collection of sex-positive literature could have been—but she’d stiffened over the four years she’d been dating Aaron, grown a little more conservative about everything, including sex. She never wanted to hear details about Sam’s flings and would regard a recurring fuck-dream about Scott Sanderson as a moral failing.
Besides, it didn’t mean anything that she was fantasizing about Scott Sanderson, did it? She’d used to dream about him when she was a teenager, after all. Not that often but, still, enough that she remembered it. He’d always been spanking her in those dreams too and she’d put it down to internalized angst about the ways he taunted her.
“Okay, my tickets are booked,” Nicole announced. “Have you spoken to Tabby lately? Do you know what she’s up to?”
“Nope. I called her last week and she said something about squatting in an abandoned post office—”
“What? I thought she was house-sitting for that model?”
“That was last month. From what I could gather, she’s a bit tight on cash.”
“Surprise, surprise. I’ll call her right after this and work out her schedule. What has she been doing for money? Like, how does she have any at all?”