Fiona spends the better part of Saturday morning flat on her back on the stage at the theater, staring up at their fire hazard of a lighting rig and trying to figure out how to tell everybody that they’re going to have to cancel the show. She thought it was the noble, grown-up thing, to deliver the news in person, but now that she’s actually waiting for them to show up she feels like an asshole of the first magnitude for dragging the entire cast all the way downtown to attend the epitome of a meeting that could have been an email. She wonders if it’s too late to call them all again and tell them not to come. She’s just digging her phone out of her pocket when she hears the door open at the back of the theater and the sound of someone clearing his throat.
Fiona sits up so fast she gets dizzy, blinking out at the dark, empty house. She can’t see his face in the glare of the stage lights but right away she recognizes the broad, solid outline of his body, the TV-star line of his jaw.
“Hi,” he calls, lifting a cautious hand in greeting. “I’m Sam Fox. I’m here for an audition?”
Fiona snorts to cover the sharp, hopeful sound of her inhale, using her hand to shade her eyes. “Excuse me?”
“A gulf has opened up between us,” he tells her, voice booming as he strides up the center aisle, “I see that now. But Nora, couldn’t we bridge that gulf?” He plants his feet just before he reaches the stage—shoulders back and chest puffed, completely in character as a wounded, arrogant husband. “Can I never be more than a stranger to you?”
Fiona laughs, but the laugh turns into something else halfway out, her breath catching like broken glass inside her chest. “Why are you reciting my play to me?” she asks.
Sam drops his arms and just like that he’s himself again, his smile a little bit sheepish. “I learned it,” he confesses quietly. “I stayed up all night. I learned the whole thing. I’m ready.”
Fiona gazes at him for a moment, not understanding. “Why?”
Sam shrugs. “Because I think maybe I’m falling in love with you,” he explains, “and because I heard you needed a Torvald.” He shakes his head. “Estelle told me your guy fell off a curb or something? I don’t understand how you break your ankle falling off a curb.”
“It’s not a real thing,” Fiona agrees faintly. Then, in spite of herself, never quite as tough or cool or unbreakable as she wants to be: “Go back to the other part.”
“Sorry.” Sam smiles at that, slow and teasing. “Which part, exactly?”
“Don’t be an asshole,” she tells him. She’s still sitting on the stage, her legs out in front of her. She hasn’t washed her hair in three days. “The part about maybe . . .” She trails off, waving her hand. “You know.”
“There’s no maybe,” Sam corrects. “I shouldn’t have qualified it just now. I’m scared you’re going to tell me to go fuck myself, but still I shouldn’t have qualified it.” He wrinkles his nose. “Is that weird?”
“That you qualified it?”
“That I’m sure.”
“I mean, yes.” Fiona squeezes her eyes shut, opens them again. No guy has ever said it to her before. Nobody has ever even gotten close. “But keep going.”
“Well,” Sam says—taking one step toward her, then another. “I am. I’m sure. And I get why you wouldn’t trust me, and I’m not asking you to say it back.” He sits down on the edge of the stage, turning his body to face her. “I just think we should, you know. Plug into the love current, like Weetzie Bat says.”
“Shut up.” That makes her laugh, loud and disbelieving. “You read Weetzie Bat?”
Sam nods, shifting around and digging the battered paperback out of his pocket. “I brought it back in case you told me you never wanted to see me again,” he admits, his fingertips brushing hers as he hands it over. “You seemed serious about me returning it in a timely fashion.”
“I was,” Fiona says. She flips instinctively through the soft, worn pages, then glances at him sidelong. “And I still might.”
“Yeah.” Sam smiles a little sadly, there and gone again. “You do need a Torvald, though.”
Fiona raises her eyebrows. “You seem very confident that I’m going to give you this part.”
Sam shrugs. “I mean, I can do my monologue if you want,” he offers, then jerks a thumb toward the door. “I’ve got my headshots in the car, we can do the whole—”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“I owe you an apology.”
“That won’t be necessary, either.”
Sam’s face falls then, his broad shoulders sagging. He lifts his hand like he’s going to touch her, then seems to think better of it. “Fee,” he says, his voice cracking a little. “Yeah it is.”
Fiona leans back on her palms and tilts her chin up, staring into the lights and concentrating on keeping her bottom lip steady. She didn’t want to let him hurt her. She didn’t want to be the kind of person who could get hurt. She didn’t want to be the kind of person who felt much of anything, period, but then he strolled into the print shop like he couldn’t possibly imagine she’d be anything but delighted to see him, and now it’s all these moments later and here they are. “Yeah,” she admits finally. “It is.”
“I’m sorry,” he says immediately. “It doesn’t matter why you didn’t want to do the fucking show, obviously. You said you didn’t want to, and that should have been enough. But I felt desperate—not that that’s an excuse—but I felt desperate, so I acted sneaky, and I acted like a piece of shit. And I’m sorry. Again.”
Fiona tilts her head to the side, considering. “That’s . . . a pretty good apology,” she admits.
Sam smiles goofily. “Thanks,” he says, the relief audible in his voice. “I practiced in the car.”
She considers him then for a long, loaded moment—his open face and the uncomplicated way he’s looking at her, his green merman eyes—and feels something unlock deep inside her. She closes her eyes, breathing in the dust and sweat smell of the theater. The soap and cologne smell of Sam. “Do you want to know the real reason?” she asks, and opens her eyes again.
All at once Sam gets very, very still. “Yeah,” he blurts. Then, like he’s worried she’s going to change her mind if he isn’t polite enough: “I mean. Yes please.”
Fiona huffs a laugh, though nothing about this is actually funny. Already she’s regretting saying anything at all. “You’re not going to think you love me anymore once I tell you,” she warns him. “Or like me, even.”
“Doubtful,” Sam says, and now he does reach for her, his fingertips just grazing the edge of her sleeve. “Try me.”
Fiona pulls her arm away, instinctive—drawing one knee up and tucking her foot underneath her, making herself small. She never imagined telling him, and now that she’s come this far she finds she isn’t entirely sure how. It’s very possible he won’t even believe her. It’s very possible nobody will.
She’s quiet for a moment longer, rubbing her thumb back and forth over a fray at the hem of her jeans. “I was a late bloomer,” she finally tells him. “But you weren’t my first kiss.”
Sam looks at her curiously. “Okay . . .” he says, shaking his head like he thinks she’s setting him up for some kind of riddle. “Who was your first kiss?”
“Jamie Hartley.”
For a too-long beat Sam just stares at her like she’s fried his motherboard, like his brain is glitching and he needs to unplug himself and wait thirty seconds to reconnect. “I—what?” he finally says.
Fiona hesitates, not particularly wanting to repeat it. Makes herself say it again. “Jamie Hartley was my first kiss.”
“Jamie Hartley is, like, pushing fifty years old.”
“Is he?” Fiona barks another laugh, dry and brittle. “No shit, Sam.”
And—yeah. He gets it this time. Fiona watches as everything reshuffles in his head like those Magic Eye books Claudia used to like when she was a kid—how suddenly he can see the secret picture hidden inside what happened that day at the UBC lot. Inside what happened when she heard him on the phone the other morning.
Inside what happened at the end of her career.
“Fuck,” he says slowly, reaching back and running a rough hand over the back of his head, yanking a little at his hair. “I—fuck, Fiona.”
“Yeah,” Fiona agrees, lips twisting; she’s trying to sound tough and nonchalant about it all but her voice wobbles, dangerous. “That too.”
Sam doesn’t say anything for a moment. Fiona keeps her eyes on her sneakers, wanting to postpone the inevitability of whatever blame or incredulity or disgust she’s going to see in his expression, but when she finally pulls herself together and glances over in his direction the only thing she finds on his face is—
“So first of all, you were wrong,” Sam says quietly. He catches her gaze and holds it, steady on. “I still love you. I still don’t need to qualify it. And I am really, really fucking sorry that happened.”
Fiona blinks. She thought she was prepared for every possible reaction on his part—that by now she’d lost the ability to be surprised—but somehow she didn’t account for this one. “I could have said no,” she points out, worried that maybe he isn’t understanding. “I knew it was wrong, I knew it was messed up. I wasn’t so divorced from reality that when he said Don’t tell anyone I thought he was, like, protecting our true and abiding love. I could have said no. And I didn’t. Not at first.”
“Are you kidding me?” Right away, Sam shakes his head. “You were, what, seventeen? Eighteen? If it happened to your sister, would you say, Well, you didn’t say no?”
“Of course not,” Fiona says immediately, the thought of Claudia like a bucket of ice water dumped directly over her head. “That’s different.”
“How is it different?”
“It’s just different, Sam!” She scrubs a hand over her face. Of course she knows it isn’t different, not really. But there’s an entire world of shame and weirdness between knowing something intellectually and feeling it in her cells. “Anyway. It went on for . . . a while. And I didn’t know how to tell him I wanted him to stop. So instead I told him I wanted to quit the show.”
Sam raises his eyebrows. “And I bet he was just falling all over himself to let you out of your contract.”
“He fully laughed at me,” Fiona remembers, her cheeks warming with old embarrassment. She hasn’t let herself think about it in a long time. “So then I told my parents I wanted to quit, but I had already kind of started acting like a freak by then—”
“Understandable,” Sam points out.
“I mean, sure,” Fiona allows, “but they were already getting tired of my bullshit. My mom especially, even though she was up in Seattle by then. She told me I’d signed a contract, I’d made a choice. I didn’t have to re-sign if I didn’t want to. But I had to see it through until then.”
Sam winces. “So that was—”
“Right around the end of your last season, yeah,” Fiona says. She remembers the night of the cast party: Sam finding her hand and pulling her closer, his warm smile pressed against hers. How just for a moment he’d made her feel like a normal person. How for one moment she’d been able to forget.
“I just kind of lost it after that,” she says now, making a conscious effort to drop her aching shoulders; she’s been hunching without meaning to do it, her whole body up around her ears. “I’d started doing all this batshit stuff—stealing, constantly yelling at everybody, crashing my car—and then it was like I couldn’t stop.”
“You were trying to get fired,” Sam says reasonably, but Fiona shakes her head.
“It wasn’t like that,” she confesses. “That makes it sound like I had a plan, like it was calculated, and it wasn’t. I wasn’t. I was just . . . flailing.”
“Nobody helped you?”
“Nobody knew,” Fiona points out. “I mean, Thandie suspected. She flat-out asked me once. But I told her she was crazy, and projecting, and that she was the one who had a crush on Jamie to begin with. I pushed her away and I pushed her away until finally—you know. She went away.” She clears her throat. “Anyway. Eventually I did get fired, obviously, but by then it was like I’d created this whole other person and I didn’t know how to quit being her. Or even if I wanted to quit.” She shrugs, looking out at the empty theater. Remembering how safe it can feel to play a part. “Sometimes I still want to be her, to be completely honest with you. She’s tough.”
“You’re tough,” Sam counters. “You’re ferocious. And that fucking guy deserves—”
“Don’t,” Fiona interrupts, holding her hand up.
Sam frowns. “Don’t what?”
“Whatever you’re going to say, just—” She shakes her head. “I didn’t tell you any of this so that you could rescue me or, like, go out and defend my honor.”
“I’ve never met anyone who needed rescuing less than you do,” Sam says immediately. “And your honor is fine. Jamie fucking Hartley’s, on the other hand—” He breaks off. “I cannot believe that asshole has just been glad-handing his way around town this entire time.”
Guilt flares fresh in Fiona’s chest at that—for years, she’s had the sneaking suspicion that in all likelihood glad-handing isn’t the only thing Jamie’s been doing all over town. She thinks again of the high school girls at St. Anne’s, how many of them there were. “I can,” she says quietly.
Sam nods. “Yeah,” is all he says, and after that he’s quiet for a long time. “Well. I’m really glad you told me. And whatever you want to do or not do is the right thing, obviously, which doesn’t mean I don’t want show up at his house and beat the living shit out of him.”
Fiona smiles, she can’t help it. “What’s that called, a Sheboygan How Are Ya?”
“A Green Bay Bear Hug,” Sam says absently.
Fiona nods seriously. “In any case,” she says, “I think have a better idea. But I’m going to need Erin’s number.”
“Oh yeah?” Sam asks, tilting his head to the side. “What for?”
Fiona is just opening her mouth to tell him when the door at the back of the theater opens and Georgie and Pamela hurry in. “We’re canceled, right?” Pamela calls, her face hidden under an enormous black hat. “There’s nothing to do but cancel.”
But Fiona shakes her head, climbing to her feet and standing tall and proud in the middle of the stage. “This is Sam Fox,” she says, reaching for Sam’s hand and pulling him upright. “He’s going to be our new leading man.”