Sam snorted. “Tabby and responsibility have never once crossed paths, let alone been introduced. And that’smesaying that.”
Scott wanted to tell her she was wonderfully responsible, but that would sound like sucking up. “She told me she got a 99.95 ATAR score.”
Sam gave him a rueful smile. “Yep. Best you can get. She’s the smartest person in our family by a mile and she’s never had a job, let alone gone to uni.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Dad wanted her to make up her own mind. He said if he pressured her, she’d only drop out or end up in some horrible job she didn’t want. He lived by the whole ‘she has to choose her own path’ theory.”
“Well, parental pressure does fuck people up,” Scott admitted. “I knew heaps of kids at Cambridge who were like that. They’d got top marks to make their parents proud and then once they were out of home, they couldn’t keep it toget—”
Scott felt a soft weight on his foot and saw a puppy attempting to clamber onto his shoe. “Oh, hello there.”
Slipping off the leather, the puppy took his shoelace between its tiny teeth and attempted to worry it, as though she were a much bigger dog. It slipped out of her mouth at once and she tried to leverage herself onto his shoe again and re-seize it.
Sam laughed. “Looks like you’ve made a friend. Go on, pick her up.”
Scott hesitated, then took in the puppy’s beautiful eyes. They were framed by two golden brows and he noticed one was set slightly higher, as though the puppy was perpetually questioning the validity of everything. He looked to the mother and perhaps he was just going insane, but she seemed to smile at him. He picked the puppy up. She weighed as much as a tin of tomatoes, only soft and squirmy. He cuddled her to his chest and felt her heartbeat flitter against his palm.
“She likes you,” Sam said softly.
“Do you like me?” He hadn’t meant to sound so abrupt, but with the tiny sweet-smelling puppy in his arms, it was easier.
Sam eyed him warily. “What do you mean?”
“Exactly that. Do you like me?”
“I…yeah. I mean, I don’t know if you remember but I was all over you in the car last night.”
It wasn’t exactly the answer he’d been looking for, but he could work with it. “Great. You like me, I like you. We should go on a date tomorrow night.”
Samantha’s fingers rose up to rub at her lips. Her gaze was everywhere but on him. “I don’t, I mean I do like you, Galahad, but—”
“Wait, let me ask again.” Scott held the puppy up to his face and nuzzled his cheek against it. It squeaked happily. “Please have dinner with me tomorrow night, Samantha?”
Her face softened. “You’re heartless.”
No, on the contrary his heart felt like it was three times its usual size. “I don’t want you to marry me, Samantha, I just think the two of us should have dinner. Explore this.”
She looked away from him, chewing her upper lip. “Look, I won’t say I don’t want to but…what about everything? The underwear and the letter and the pie? Shouldn’t we maybe not go there?”
Scott didn’t understand everything she was saying but he knew an excuse when he heard one. She didn’t want to hash this out, and that was fine. They could bury those memories, and all their rusty-chain implications for later or, better still, never. “The past is the past. We’re adults. Let’s go out like adults and just enjoy ourselves.”
She smiled a little half-smile. “Is that allowed?”
“Yes,” he said, not caring if it was true or not. The puppy squirmed in his arms and he smiled at it. “Come on, you don’t want to disappoint this little lady, do you?”
“How do you know it’s a lady?”
Scott lifted her up and saw the tiny rows of nipples and lack of a penis. “She’s a girl. A clever, clever little girl.”
He looked up to see Samantha staring at him intently. “Is everything—”
She kissed him. Scott registered surprise for all of a second before he kissed her back. It wasn’t a sexy kiss—there wasn’t any tongue and he was holding a puppy—but the intensity of it was magnetic. He prayed that the pressure of her lips meant she felt the same ache, the same urgent need to make this more than it had ever been before. His chest felt like it was going to cave in.
“Ew, not in front of the puppies! They don’t want to see this heterosexual grossness!”
Sam pulled away from him and they turned to see a grinning Tabby and a mortified red-cheeked Toby.