The audition is for Hot Rookie Fireman with a Tragic Military Past, and it actually goes amazingly, mind-bendingly well. Sam is shocked, honestly; it’s rare that he can feel himself nailing something in real time, slipping seamlessly into a character like he imagines legitimate actors do. He thinks of telling Fiona she’s his good luck charm, then imagines listening to her fake barfing sounds all the way to breakfast and thinks better of it.
He says his thank-yous—“You’ll definitely be hearing from us,” the casting director says with a smile, and Sam manages not to fist pump until he gets out of the room—and heads out to the parking lot, where he finds Fiona perched on the hood of the Tesla, shooting the shit with Jamie Hartley.
“Hey!” he calls, pleased. It’s a good day. “What is this, a reunion?”
“Uh-oh.” Jamie grins, lopsided and familiar. “Can’t be using that word yet.” He looks exactly the same as he did when he played their dad on Birds of California, that extremely well-preserved look that all the network guys out here have. “Hey, Fee, he said it, not me.”
Fiona smiles. “I will be sure to keep that in mind.”
“You do that,” Jamie says, slinging an arm around Sam’s shoulders and squeezing. He smells like a redwood forest. “Man, this is a surprise. How you doing, kid?”
“I’m good,” Sam says, ducking his head a little shyly. Back when he was still on Birds Jamie used to take him out for burgers at the end of every season and ask him what kinds of projects he wanted to work on, what his favorite movies were. Even back then Sam knew it was corny how much he looked forward to it, but he always looked forward to it anyway. When he heard about Jamie’s development deal at HBO he wondered if maybe there was a chance he’d get a call.
“I love this,” Jamie says now, letting him go and clapping him on the back. “The whole gang back together.”
“Except for Max,” Sam says, for Fiona’s benefit. “Can’t forget about Max.”
Jamie frowns. “Which one was Max?” he asks.
“Oh, come on!” Sam chides. “Little redheaded kid who played the cousin, you remember.”
“Of course I remember,” Jamie says. “I called and talked him into coming aboard the other day.” He turns to Fiona. “Did Thandie tell you she signed on?”
“I—” Fiona breaks off, the disbelief written all over her face. “Thandie?” she asks. “Really?”
“I know,” Jamie says with a self-deprecating laugh. “I was surprised, too. I thought she’d be too busy with Soderbergh and Fincher to be hanging around with schmucks like us. But she said it was such an important part of her life that she’d come in and do a couple of episodes for old times’ sake.”
“That’s big of her,” Fiona mutters under her breath—or Sam thinks that’s what she says, at least. Jamie doesn’t seem to hear.
“Anyway, I’ve gotta get going,” he says. “Got a meeting inside. But it was good to see you guys.” He winks. “Nice that you still hang out.”
He hugs both of them goodbye and lopes off across the parking lot in his leather jacket like Ben Affleck about to drill a nuclear missile into an asteroid. “I love that guy,” Sam says once he’s gone. Fiona is already back in the car, buckled neatly into the passenger seat with her hands folded in her lap. “Don’t you love that guy?”
Fiona doesn’t answer. “Did you plan that?” she asks. She isn’t looking at him, instead staring straight out the windshield at Jamie’s receding back.
Sam stares at her blankly. “Plan what?”
“Running into him.”
“What? No.” He shakes his head. Her tone is completely different than it was a minute ago, and when he looks at her a little more carefully he notices her body language is, too. She was acting, he realizes suddenly, and he’s immediately and bizarrely impressed with her chops all over again. She’s better than he is, that’s for sure. He wants to march her back inside the studio and tell them, This is the girl you should hire. “I had no idea he was here.”
“Okay,” Fiona says, and it’s obvious she thinks he’s full of shit. “Because I’m just saying, he sure didn’t seem that surprised to see us together.”
That irritates him, even as he feels a little bit guilty; he thinks of the way Jamie winked at him, like they were in on something together. Still: “Really?” Sam can’t resist saying. “He literally said, ‘This is a surprise.’”
Fiona’s eyes narrow. “Are you making fun of me right now?”
“No,” Sam says as they pull out of the parking lot. “Of course not.”
“Can you blame me for being a little bit paranoid? You’re crawling all over me trying to get me to do this revival, and then suddenly—”
“Oh, is that what you’d call what happened in my apartment this morning?” he interrupts. And he knows, he knows he’s going to regret it, but it’s out before he can stop himself: “Me crawling all over you?”
Fiona’s mouth gets very thin. “Okay,” she says quietly. Sam can practically see her nailing the No Trespassing sign back up over her door. “You know what, that’s fine, we don’t have to talk about this anymore.”
Sam sighs. “Fiona—”
“I said it’s fine, Sam.”
“Fine.” They’re quiet for a couple of minutes, both of them stewing, until all at once Sam realizes he doesn’t actually know where he’s going. “Do you still want breakfast?” he asks her. He can hear in his own voice that it sounds like he wants her to say no.
Fiona hears it, too, or maybe she really just doesn’t want to be around him any longer than she has to. “I should get back,” she says. “I can get an Uber, if you want to just drop me somewhere.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Sam says crabbily. “I’ll take you home.”
They don’t talk the entire ride back to her dad’s house, Fiona staring out the passenger side window through a pair of sunglasses she dug out of her enormous handbag. Sam keeps glancing over, but her face is inscrutable, a mask.
“Look,” she says, when he finally pulls into her driveway. She unbuckled her seat belt halfway up the block in preparation; frankly, he’s surprised she’s saying anything to him at all. “It was good to catch up. Hope they call you back for your thing.”
“Okay. Thanks.” Sam frowns. He thinks he should leave it alone, but he doesn’t want to. “Fiona,” he says quietly. “Can you tell me what happened just now?”
“What?” Fiona shakes her head, feigning ignorance. “Nothing. This was fun.”
It definitely doesn’t feel like nothing, but honestly, Sam is too irritated to press her about it. If she wants to act crazy and irrational, let her act crazy and irrational—that’s her business. It’s not like nobody warned him about her. “Okay,” he says. “See you around.”
“Yup.”
Sam watches her cross the lawn and let herself into the front door of her house, her shoulders hunched and fingers twitching. He thinks she might look back, but she doesn’t. He sits there for a moment longer once she’s inside, feeling like a total boner. Then he steps on the gas and drives away.
Adam calls that night while Sam’s eating plain quinoa out of the pot to atone for the burger, watching Wheel of Fortune on Hulu. “I’m going to tell you something,” Adam says, “but I don’t want you to freak out.”
That’s a terrible fucking way to get someone not to freak out, Sam thinks, fear already blooming in his chest. “What?”
“Mom’s okay,” Adam tells him, “but she had a little bit of a fall.”
Sam sets the pot on the coffee table. “What do you mean, a little bit of a fall?”
“She fainted in the parking lot after her doctor’s appointment.”
“Put her on the phone.”
“Sammy, I’m serious, she’s okay—”
“Put her on.”
There’s a rustling sound, and Adam is saying something Sam can’t make out. They still use the landline back at home. “I’m fine,” his mom says when she gets on. “I was flustered, that’s all. I saw a handsome doctor and just swooned away.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Of course it’s not,” she agrees. “How are you?”
Who cares how I am, Sam thinks. He feels like he’s about to cry. “I’m fine,” he says. “How do you feel now?”
“Well, honey, I have cancer.”
He makes a choked, phlegmy sound, halfway between a laugh and a sob. He wants to go home and sit at the kitchen table and ask her how to fix all his problems, up to and including My mom is sick. He wants to tell her about Fiona, bizarrely, though he has no idea what he’d say.
Instead he swallows hard. “I love you,” he tells her finally. “Put Adam back on.”
“I told you,” Adam says a moment later.
“Should I come home?” Sam asks.
“Can you afford to come home?” Adam replies, which is not Of course not, don’t worry about it, there’s plenty of time.
“Of course I can,” he lies. “Why do you keep talking to me like I’m broke?”
“I don’t know,” Adam says. “I don’t think you need to come, though. I’ll text you if anything changes.”
Sam hangs up and looks around at his ridiculous apartment, his expensive chair and douchey midcentury lamps and the signed Van Morrison guitar he bought when The Heart Surgeon first got a full-season order. He doesn’t even play the guitar. He doesn’t even like Van Morrison! He just bought it because he thought it was cool and that girls would want to talk about it when he brought them back here, which they generally do, although Fiona didn’t say anything about it either way.
Fuck, he doesn’t want to be thinking about Fiona right now.
He gets a beer from the fridge and dicks around on his computer for a while, trying to figure out how to list shit on eBay, then getting frustrated five minutes in and giving up. He has no idea why he’s so surprised that in the end she was exactly how all the memes made her out to be: moody and irrational and defensive, basically accusing him of messing around with her just to get her to do the reboot.
You were messing around with her to get her do the reboot, a tiny voice in his head reminds him, and he feels like the biggest jackass who ever lived.
That was why he went to see her at the print shop, maybe. But it wasn’t why he invited her out last night.
And it definitely wasn’t why he asked her to stay.
It doesn’t matter, Sam reminds himself, getting up and wandering into the kitchen. It’s over now. He opens a beer, drinking it down in three long, cold gulps without particularly tasting it. Reaches for another.
The next thing he knows it’s morning, and Erin is banging on the door of his apartment. His mouth tastes like it’s full of jockstraps. His head pounds. “Easy,” he says, swinging the door open.
Erin wrinkles her nose. “It smells like farts in here,” she says.
Sam scrubs a hand over his face. “Did you want something?”
“Don’t freak,” she says, and comes inside.
It’s the second time in twelve hours someone has led that way, and Sam doesn’t appreciate it one bit. He needs coffee. He needs water, and a bacon egg and cheese sandwich, and a starring role in an action-adventure blockbuster directed by Steven Spielberg. “Why would I freak?”
Erin holds out her phone, shoving the screen right up to his face. Sam blinks, focusing on the home page of a hugely popular gossip website—the same one that had such a boner for Fiona a few years ago, back when she was acting like a public nuisance all the time.
“Love Birds?” the headline reads, right above—oh, shit—four different pictures of Fiona and Sam leaving his apartment yesterday morning, his hand laced casually through hers. Everything old is new again! Looks like things are heating up between these former costars. Rumor has it a revival of beloved Family Network megahit Birds of California is in the works—assuming, of course, that Fiona St. James can keep from flying (see what we did there?) off the handle. See a slideshow of her most shocking public meltdowns below!
“Fuck me,” Sam says, shuffling through the living room and collapsing onto the sofa, his arms and legs prickly and hot. He’s got plenty of experience with gossip sites—there was a thing with him and Taylor Swift a couple of years ago, and he once wound up wrongfully implicated as a branch on the herpes tree of a catcher on the San Diego Padres. Still, something about this particular occurrence makes him feel like he’s gotten caught with his dick out—not because they got a picture of him leaving his apartment with a woman, he realizes slowly, but because that woman was Fiona St. James, who once smashed the front window of a luxe Beverly Hills eatery with a child’s pogo stick, which she had previously stolen. And yeah, he was half hoping somebody might snap a shot of them out at lunch the other day, but this is different. After all, it’s one thing to be hanging out with her in the name of trying to get her to do Birds of California. It’s another to just . . . be hanging out with her. It doesn’t exactly scream dashing, high-end leading man for hire.
You invited her out in the first place, he reminds himself. You’re the one who asked her back to your house.
Still, he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t kind of regretting it now.
“How did you not mention this?” Erin asks, sitting down in the Dr. Evil chair and swiveling around like a delighted kid. “You’re just, like, out here casually boning Riley Bird, not saying anything about it? Very gentlemanly of you, I must admit.”
“We’re not boning,” Sam says, raking his hands through his hair. “It’s . . . a weird situation.”
“I’ll say,” Erin agrees cheerfully. “Look on the bright side, though: this is way more interesting than your show being canceled. People have probably forgotten all about that.”
“Fuck you,” Sam says, but there’s no heat behind it. He knows it makes him an asshole to be embarrassed about this, on top of which he’s pretty sure that however invaded he’s feeling right now, Fiona’s probably got it worse. He remembers that first day in the print shop, how she told him the press had finally left her alone. “I should call her.” He reaches for his phone, knowing even as he’s dialing that she isn’t going to answer. Sure enough, it doesn’t even seem to be on. He hangs up without leaving a message, both because he doesn’t think it would make a difference and because he feels weird about saying anything sincere with Erin sitting right here, looking at him with that expression on her face that girls get when they think they know something.
“Go take a shower,” she says once he’s hung up. “I’ll buy you some disgusting wrap with egg whites.” Then, as he’s padding across the living room: “And open a window, would you? It smells like a tar pit.” Sam flips her off before he shuts the bathroom door.