She takes him to In-N-Out, the two of them sitting outside on rubber-coated benches in the yellow light of the neon sign. The waffle weave digs into his ass. It’s a warm night, the smell of car exhaust and fryer oil hanging densely in the air.
“Can I ask you something?” Fiona says, dragging a fry through a puddle of secret sauce. She ordered without looking at the menu, coming back to the table with a cardboard box full of cheeseburgers and fries; she also paid, which he appreciates, though he doesn’t say that out loud. “How do you even know all those people?”
Sam takes a sip of his milkshake. “All those people, like, my friends?”
“Sure.” Fiona looks dubious.
“They’re industry people, mostly.” He shrugs. “Kimmeree does something with social media.”
“Of course she does.”
Sam frowns. The truth is they’re not actually his good friends, those guys back in the bar. Erin in particular hates that whole crowd; she heard who all was coming out tonight and bailed so hard and so fast Sam was surprised she didn’t pull a muscle. They’re a lot, he gets it. But he’s also not about to sit here and let Fiona shit on a bunch of perfectly nice people she didn’t even bother to talk to. “Look,” he tells her, “whatever she said to you back there. She didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Didn’t she?” Fiona huffs a laugh.
“No,” Sam replies, “she didn’t. She was trying to be friendly.”
Fiona eyes him over her cheeseburger like he’s too stupid to breathe air. “That is . . . emphatically not what was happening there.”
“Fine,” he admits, “maybe not. But—but—”
“But what, exactly?” Fiona raises her eyebrows, gestures with her chin toward the car. “Go back to the bar and hang out with her, if she’s such a sweetheart. Honestly, I don’t even know what you’re doing out here eating french fries with me when your girlfriend is—”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
“Okay,” Fiona says, setting the rest of her burger down on its waxed paper envelope. “The person you have casual recreational sex with. Whatever.”
“Isn’t all sex recreational?” Sam points out.
“You know what I mean.”
Sam doesn’t, not really. “I’m not having any kind of sex with Kimmeree,” he tells her, “not that it’s any of your business. And I don’t have a girlfriend, either, if that’s the information you were trying to get.”
That gets under her skin, which was the point. Sam watches the temper flare in her dark, witchy eyes, like someone blowing on a campfire. He can almost see the sparks flying off her skin and out into the night. “It wasn’t,” is all she says.
“Okay.” Sam shrugs, affecting carelessness. “Fine. I’m just saying, you don’t have to go around hating everyone for fun. There are plenty of other ways to spend your time.” He pops a fry into his mouth. “You could join an Ultimate Frisbee league, for example.”
Fiona laughs, not nicely, and loud enough that a delivery driver glances over at them as he climbs back into his car with a giant bag of food. “First of all,” she snaps, “I’d rather perform my own root canal. Second of all, I don’t hate everyone for fun—I hate most people, because they deserve it. And third of all, I was in a psych hospital, not rehab. It’s different.”
That shocks him—not the information itself, necessarily, but the sound of her saying it. Sam is quiet for a moment before eventually he nods. “I wasn’t going to ask.”
“No, you were going to google it,” she fires back. “Or maybe you already googled it, I don’t know.”
He did google it, actually, the day he went to see her at the copy shop, so he doesn’t say anything. He tries to imagine her there, sitting in her sweatpants with the door locked playing checkers with the other patients. Everything he knows about psych hospitals he learned from watching movies and TV.
“I’m not embarrassed,” she continues, her voice all brass and bluster. “Frankly, more people in this business should spend some quality time in a mental health facility.”
“Hey, you won’t hear me arguing,” Sam says. Then, before he quite knows he’s going to ask her: “What was it like?”
He fully expects her to tell him to mind his own business, but instead Fiona seems to stop and consider it, like possibly nobody’s ever asked her to describe it before. “It was quiet,” she finally says.
Sam nods. The sound of her voice is almost nostalgic, like his mom when she talks about going out to the bars with her girlfriends at UW-Madison in the eighties. “Seems about right.”
“Everybody expected me to fight it,” she continues. She’s gazing across the patio at the cars whizzing by on the busy street, their headlights gleaming in the dark. “But, like, why would I have fought it? I was messed up, obviously. I never said I wasn’t messed up. I wanted to be, like, less messed up, so I went to the place and I did the fucking thing, and still for the rest of my life nobody is ever going to let me—” She breaks off, looking almost startled to realize he’s still listening. She shakes her head. “Forget it.”
Sam gazes at her across the table, her jaw set and her expression haughty. She looks like a queen facing down a losing war. It’s the most she’s said about her past—the most she’s said at once, period—since he walked into the copy shop the other morning. Just for a moment, it occurs to him to wonder what else she might be keeping to herself.
“People are taking our picture,” she announces suddenly, nodding across the patio at a couple of teenage girls in babydoll dresses faking the world’s least-convincing selfie; they look away when he glances over, muffling giggles behind cupped hands.
Sam shrugs. “I hadn’t noticed,” he says, which is bullshit, and he and Fiona both know it. The truth is he’s got a sixth sense for people looking at him, and he never stops worrying that one day they won’t care enough to do it anymore. Sometimes it feels like he’s got a perpetual leaderboard in his head: Does he have fewer Instagram mentions than he did a couple months ago? Did fewer girls check him out at the gym? How many search results come up when you google his name? Isn’t that exhausting? Erin asked him once, and the answer is yes, of course it is, but also he doesn’t know how he’d possibly stop. “Quick, you better do something weird for the camera.”
“Gotta preserve that personal brand,” Fiona agrees. “Any thoughts?”
“Could scale the side of the building and perform the first act of 1776 as a one-woman show, maybe.”
“Slather a bunch of animal sauce on my face like a mud mask and lie down by the dumpsters so the raccoons can lick it off.”
“Take my car,” he suggests, “and I’ll start screaming about how you stole it.”
Fiona smiles. One of the selfie girls lights up a cigarette, the match flaring like an old-fashioned camera bulb. “Do you still smoke?” Fiona asks him.
“Huh?” Sam frowns. “I never smoked.”
Fiona frowns back. “Yes you did.”
“I definitely didn’t.”
“At the wrap party, you told me you did.”
“What wrap party?”
Fiona makes a face. “You know which one,” she accuses. “The last one.”
“Refresh my memory.”
“The one where we—” Fiona gestures vaguely with her cup, tipping it back and forth between them. “You know.”
“The one where we what, exactly?” Sam tilts his face to the side. He’s fucking with her, obviously. He just wants to see if she’ll say it. He remembers standing outside in the alley beside her, the cigarette burning down between his fingers and the safety light catching the neon streak in her hair.
Fiona shakes her head, popping the last fry into her mouth and gathering up their garbage. “Okay, you know what?” she says. “Fuck you.”
“I’m kidding, I’m kidding. I remember.” He smiles. “No reason to get defensive just because I was your first kiss.”
Fiona scoffs. “Oh, is that what you think?”
Sam raises his eyebrows. “Was I not?”
“I was nineteen, asshole.”
“No shame in being a late bloomer.” Sam grins. “Who was your first kiss, then?” he asks, surprised to find he’s actually curious. His first kiss was his neighbor Mallory back in Wisconsin, which he would tell Fiona if she seemed at all interested, which she does not. She did something different with her hair tonight, he can’t help but notice. When she walked into the bar he did an actual double take—her tan shoulders and the sharp cliffs of her collarbone, the hourglass curve of her body—then purposely talked to his friend Anto for an extra two minutes before he went over to her so that he wouldn’t look eager and pathetic and like he was waiting for her to show up, which he had been. His mom would slap his face if she knew that.
Fiona stuffs the last of their trash into the paper bag, standing up and waving to the girls across the patio. “Come on,” is all she says.
The grease and the sugar went a long way toward sobering him up, but Fiona insists on driving him home anyway, leaning hard on the gas as they cruise down Fountain in the balmy purple night. Sam keeps glancing over at her, her face half-light and half-shadow in the pale green glow of the dashboard. Her cheekbones are very sharp.
“What?” she asks, the third time he does it.
“Nothing,” he says, fishing his phone out of his pocket and scrolling industriously. Fiona hums a quiet sound of disbelief in reply.
“Here we are, sweet pea,” she says when she pulls up to the curb underneath the massive jacaranda tree outside his building. Back in Milwaukee, Sam imagined all apartments in LA looked like this, a two-story U-shaped stucco situation with a courtyard at its center, a fountain burbling quietly away. Then he got here and spent ten years living in a series of particleboard dumps. “I’m going to call a car.”
As she reaches for her purse on the dashboard, Sam gets a whiff of her hair—vanilla and sandalwood. “Do you want to come in?” he hears himself ask.
Fiona laughs out loud. “No.”
Sam rolls his eyes. It’s not like he’s dying for her to take him up on the offer or anything, but he doesn’t know what there is to sound quite so incredulous about. “What do you think, I’m going to put a move on you?” he asks, leaning back against the passenger side window. “I’m not going to put a move on you.”
“Oh, right,” Fiona says, “you just want me to come in so you can show me your record collection.”
“I don’t have a record collection,” he says. Then, before he can think better of it: “Do you want me to put a move on you?”
Fiona laughs again. “You got me,” she says with a twist of her lips. “It was literally all I could think about on the ride over here.”
Sam lifts an eyebrow. “Really?” he asks, though of course he knows she’s just giving him shit. “What did you think?”
“I—” That flusters her, Sam can tell, which was the point, but it has the unintended consequence of flustering him a little, too. He imagines it in high definition before he can stop himself: his hands on the ladder of her rib cage, her soft-looking mouth on his jaw. Neither one of them says anything for a full second too long.
Fiona pulls it together first. “I think I probably should have made you get an STD test before I even got in the car,” she says finally, but it’s weak as far as insults go, and before he can answer she’s sighing theatrically, opening the door, and climbing out into the warm, humid night.
“Fine,” she announces imperiously, “one drink.”
Sam smiles.
Sam’s apartment is on the second floor, up an outdoor staircase laid with painted terra-cotta tile in reds and greens and yellows. Bright pink snapdragons vine along the wrought iron railing lining the catwalk. He moved in here as soon as The Heart Surgeon pilot got picked up, the same week he leased the Tesla. A couple of years in this place, he thought, then a house with a view in Laurel Canyon, the ghost of Mama Cass wandering around humming to herself early in the mornings. Then—once he finally broke out in movies like Russ keeps saying he’s going to—a mansion in the Palisades, next door to Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn.
That was the plan, anyway.
For now he’ll be lucky if he can pay next month’s rent.
Sam unlocks the heavy wooden door and flicks on the lights in the foyer, heading straight for the bar cart in the living room. He grabs two glasses and doubles back toward the kitchen for ice. “I have tequila,” he calls over his shoulder. He feels nervous all of a sudden, though he isn’t entirely sure why. “You want a lime?”
“Um, sure,” Fiona calls back, though he gets the impression she isn’t really listening. Sure enough, a moment later: “This is your place?” she asks, the surprise audible in her voice. “This is . . . nice.”
Sam raises his eyebrows at the freezer. “Why, because you were expecting me to live in a cardboard box on the side of the freeway?”
“I mean, yeah,” she admits. “Kind of.”
“Thanks a lot,” Sam says, though he isn’t actually offended. He’d never bought real furniture before and had no idea what he was doing, so he hired the decorator at West Elm to pick it all out for him. She did a pretty good job, lots of wood and leather and a big modern armchair that makes him feel a little bit like Dr. Evil whenever he sits in it. There’s a Gibson Les Paul signed by Van Morrison hanging on the wall above the couch.
When he comes back into the living room Fiona is standing in front of his bookcase; she’s scooped her hair up into a knot on top of her head, the pale nape of her neck exposed. “You’re a Sarah Waters fan?” she asks. She’s standing on her tiptoes to peer at the top shelf, the muscles in her calves flexing. “Seriously?”
Sam reaches for the bottle. “Who?” he asks.
Fiona holds up a paperback he doesn’t even think he’s ever seen before, and he shakes his head. “My old roommate, Erin,” he explains. “She did a whole Marie Kondo thing when we were moving out of our last apartment. I wound up with a lot of her stuff.”
“Aha.” Fiona nods. “You know, somehow I didn’t take you for a connoisseur of erotic lesbian historical noir.”
That gets his attention. “I am actually . . . very interested in at least a couple of the words you just said.”
Fiona makes a face. “Uh-huh,” she says, turning back to the bookshelves, “see, now that’s more about what I expected from you, Sam Fox.”
“Hey now.” Sam presses the icy glass against her back, right in between her shoulder blades; Fiona gasps quietly. “I read.”
“Oh yeah?” she asks, plucking the tequila from his outstretched hand and taking a sip. “Thank you. What’s your favorite book, like, The Alchemist?”
“Shut up.” Sam blanches. “How did you know that?”
Fiona bursts out laughing. “Oh my god, no it’s not.”
Okay, now he’s a little bit offended. “What’s wrong with The Alchemist?” he demands.
“I mean, nothing.” Fiona shrugs, taking her glass and settling herself down on one side of the couch, crossing one long leg over the other. “It’s just the favorite book of every man who’s only read one book.”
Sam shakes his head. “You really think you know everything there is to know about me, don’t you.”
“Of course not,” she deadpans immediately. “The final ten percent is strictly conjecture.”
“Cute.” Sam sits down beside her, careful to leave a foot of space between them. “Okay then, princess. What’s your favorite book?”
“Oh, I don’t know how to read.”
Sam laughs. “Unsurprising, really.”
“I know, right?” Fiona runs her thumb around the rim of her glass, not quite meeting his gaze. “No, um. It’s Weetzie Bat.”
Sam shakes his head. “What now?”
“I mean, it’s dumb,” Fiona says, though from the guarded look on her face he can tell she doesn’t actually think that. “It’s about a girl who lives in LA in the eighties and is, like, amazingly, heartbreakingly cool. Back when we were doing Birds I used to keep a paperback of it jammed down the back of my jeans like a gun, for good luck or something. That’s how bad I wanted to be her.” She takes another sip of her tequila, waving her hand in front of her face like the idea is a visible cloud of stupidity she can fan away. “Anyway. Spoiler alert. It turns out I’m just me.”
Sam shrugs, bumping his knee against hers. Her jeans are the kind with on-purpose holes in them, and patches of soft, tan skin are showing through. “You’re not so bad, Fiona St. James.”
“Well.” Fiona smiles at that. “I’m no Weetzie Bat.”
They’re quiet for a moment, drinking their tequila. The silence feels electric and keen. Sam thinks, very clearly, Fuck it, and as soon as the words pop into his head it’s like his hand is moving of its own volition from where it’s resting on his own thigh over to Fiona’s. His thumb slips inside a fray in the denim at her knee to rub at the hard cap of bone there, drawing slow circles on her smooth, warm skin.
Fiona’s breath hitches. She looks down and watches his thumb move for a moment, the rise and fall of her chest visible inside her tank top. “I thought you weren’t going to put a move on me,” she reminds him, raising one thick eyebrow. She’s still looking down at her lap.
Sam nods seriously. “I’m not putting a move on you,” he promises, then ducks his head and kisses her.
Fiona gasps against his mouth, the smell of alcohol and lime sharp in the air as her wrist jerks and tequila sloshes out of her glass. He feels like the odds are fifty-fifty he read this all wrong and she punches him in the face, but instead she kisses him back right away, eager, like she was waiting for him to cop on all night long. Sam hums a low, pleased sound. He takes her glass and sets it on the coffee table, then reaches for her hand and licks the inside of her wrist where the tequila is still dripping down it. She tastes like limes and salt.
Fiona swallows hard. “Okay,” she murmurs—more to herself than to him, Sam thinks. She touches her face, her neck, her collarbone. “I—um. Okay.”
Sam smiles. If he’d known this was what it would take to get her to quit looking at him like he’s a total fucking fool, he would have done it way before now. “Do you want me to stop?”
Fiona shakes her head. “No,” she admits, so he kisses her again, harder and longer and deeper this time, then nudges her backward until she’s lying against the throw pillows, her hair falling out of its knot and fanning out in a corona around her face. Sam makes a gentle fist, his fingers catching in the tangles as his other hand migrates up from her hip to her waist to her ribs, tracing the underwire of her bra and circling her nipple until he can feel it tighten up through both layers of fabric. Fiona whimpers.
“That okay?” he mutters, and she nods.
Sam backs off long enough to ruck her shirt up a little, ducking his head and trailing his mouth down over her stomach. It’s been a long time since he did this with a person who wasn’t actively trying to make a career at least in part out of counting macros, and he likes the soft curves of her body, the soap-sweat smell of her skin. “You taste good,” he mutters, and Fiona makes a sound that might be a scoff but she’s also arching up into it, reaching down and sifting her hands through his hair. She tugs once, not particularly gently, and Sam groans against her hip.
The sound of it seems to bring her back to herself. “Come up here,” she orders, yanking at his shirt, working the tiny buttons through their holes and pushing the fabric off his shoulders. She rakes her nails lightly over the back of his neck, and Sam shivers. He pulls her tank top over her head and reaches behind her to work the clasp on her bra, pulling the straps down and catching her nipple in his mouth; Fiona closes her eyes and lets him suck for a minute before she tugs at his shoulders, pulling him up so they’re fused chest to chest.
Sam’s been hard since basically the first second he kissed her and when she opens up her hips to make space for him he growls into her neck, grinding himself mindlessly against her like he’s thirteen and not thirty-one. Fiona hooks one leg around his to keep him close. He’s only ever done cocaine a couple of times but this is what it felt like, his entire body buzzing like he swallowed a handful of stars or his bones are made of neon. She’s chasing his hips with hers, gasping, and all at once Sam’s—shit, Sam’s pretty sure she’s close.
He lifts himself up long enough to work one hand down in between them—if he’s going to get her off he’s damn well going to do it properly—but as soon as he reaches for the button on her jeans she freezes.
“Okay,” she says—pulling away, boosting herself up onto her elbows. “Okay, okay, now I want you to stop.”
Sam stops. “What?” For a second he thinks she’s kidding, but one look at her face has him sitting up so fast he gets light-headed, or maybe he would have been light-headed either way. Multicolored spots explode in front of his eyes. “Sorry,” he says. “I—yeah, of course, sorry.”
“No, it’s not—” Fiona breaks off, touching her mouth like she’s checking to make sure it’s still there. “I’m sorry, I just—” She looks around for a moment, pulling her knees up and scrubbing both hands through her hair. “I shouldn’t have—”
“No no no, you don’t have to explain anything,” he blurts, but he’s surprised by how badly he wants her to. All at once he wants to know everything there is to know about her, her birthday and her middle name and the story behind the scar on the underside of her upper arm. He’d think it was the booze, except he’s not actually even a little bit drunk anymore. He likes her. He likes her so much. And he’s been trying not to think it and trying not to think it since that very first day at the copy shop, but here it is, sitting nakedly in the middle of the room for anyone to see.
“I’m sorry,” Fiona says again. She’s looking around the living room, presumably for her clothes; Sam plucks her bra off the back of the couch and hands it over, and she offers him half a smile. “Thanks.”
“Yeah, of course.” Sam nods, glancing politely away while she does up the hooks and pulls her shirt on, only then once she’s dressed she leans over and kisses him again, slow and wet and a little bit dirty, and okay, now he really has no idea what the fuck is going on. “Fee,” he starts, voice cracking a little. He’s still completely, 100 percent hard. “Can you just—”
Fiona shakes her head. “I should go.”
Something about the tone in her voice gives Sam the distinct impression he’s never going to see her again after tonight, the idea of which makes him weirdly panicky, considering the fact that until the other day he hadn’t thought about her in years. “What if you didn’t?” he blurts.
That stops her. She looks over at him, raising her eyebrows. “What if—?”
“I’m serious,” he says, scrambling shirtless up off the sofa, then immediately feels like a massive tool. “I mean, look, I’m not trying to be some creepy weirdo who can’t take a hint, so obviously go if you want to go, but.” He shrugs. “What if you stayed?”
“Sam—”
“We can just sleep,” he promises, which is the kind of earnest, stupid Nicholas Sparks bullshit she is absolutely never going to let him hear the end of; he’s holding up a hand to cut her off at the pass when she nods.
“Okay,” she says.
Sam blinks at her. “Seriously?” That is . . . not what he was expecting her to say. If she’d said good night, gone outside, and set his house on fire, he would not be more surprised. “You want to stay?”
Fiona’s eyes narrow. “Do you not want me to stay?”
“Of course I want you to stay,” he says, and for once he honestly doesn’t even give a crap about how eager it sounds. “That’s why I asked.”
“I’m not going to have sex with you,” she reminds him. “This isn’t some cute thing where I’m playing hard to get but I secretly want you to convince me to—”
“Fiona,” he interrupts, because he likes to think that fundamentally he’s not a piece of shit, “I know.”
She studies him hard for another long second, like she’s looking for the catch, and he doesn’t know what she sees in his face, but it must satisfy her, because she nods again. “Okay,” she says, sounding more sure about it this time. “I’ll stay.”
Sam feels his whole body relax. It’s the feeling of swerving just in time to avoid hitting another car or making it to your seat just before the plane door closes, the flight attendant floating by to offer you a drink. “Okay,” he echoes, trying not to smile. “Good.”
Fiona relaxes, too, her shoulders dropping as she perches on the arm of the sofa. “We have to watch serial killer documentaries,” she informs him. “That’s what I watch to fall asleep.”
Sam laughs, then realizes she’s not kidding. “Wait,” he says, “really?”
Fiona frowns. “Look, I can go,” she says immediately, gesturing toward the door. “You’re the one who—”
“No no no,” Sam says again, holding both hands up in surrender. “Have it your way. You’re missing out, though. Usually when girls sleep over I read to them by candlelight from The Alchemist.”
Fiona laughs.
She pads down the hallway behind him, hovering barefoot in the doorway as he smooths the blankets over his unmade bed. Once they’re in he turns off the light and opens up his laptop, then realizes as the screen blinks to life that he hasn’t used it since the other night: sure enough, the cartoon boobs from the porn site are still bouncing merrily away. “Friend of yours?” Fiona asks, her voice completely even.
“I read it for the articles,” he shoots back, clicking over to Netflix. “So, is one serial killer documentary as good as another? Or do you have, like, a greatest hits list you like to work from?”
Fiona smiles magnanimously. “You can pick.”
In the end they watch some grisly fucking thing about the Mansons—a cheesy sixties rock score played over shot after shot of Sharon Tate’s yellow hair and round, pregnant belly. Sam tries not to flinch. He likes a slasher flick as much as the next guy, but true crime has always weirded him out—the luridness of it, he guesses, low-end producers making money off the worst day of other people’s lives.
Also, it always makes him a little nervous he’s about to get serial murdered.
Still, he likes having Fiona propped up on one elbow beside him, the ends of her long hair just brushing his arm. It’s not like he’s trying to look or anything, but the collar of her tank top gapes open a little so he can see the tops of her breasts out of the corner of his eye, a handful of freckles scattered across her chest like glitter. He can feel the heat radiating off her skin. Something about the whole setup has Sam afraid to move too much, like how his mom always made Adam and him hold still when deer showed up in their yard while they were playing football. He doesn’t want to scare her away.
“Okay,” he says finally, grimacing as the narrator reports the findings of Sharon Tate’s autopsy in excruciatingly minute detail. “Can we turn this off, please?”
Fiona sighs loudly, flopping over onto her back. “I guess,” she agrees. “But if I wind up lying awake all night it’s your fault.”
Sam looks at her pointedly. “I might say the same thing to you, cutie-pie.”
In any case, she’s passed out what feels like two seconds later—hogging all the blankets, her chilly feet brushing his underneath the sheets. Sam looks over at her, squinting to try and see her in the darkness. The sound of her breathing is the last thing he hears before he falls asleep.