“Here I am,” Sam agrees cheerfully. “Fiona, Kimmeree. Kimmeree, Fiona.” He smiles. “Fiona and I used to work together.”
“I remember,” Kimmeree says, though it’s unclear to Fiona if she remembers because she’s been in Sam’s life that long or because she once owned a Birds of California pencil case. “Nice to meet you.”
“You too,” Fiona says, smiling back. She can’t tell if she’s imagining that Sam looks a tiny bit surprised that she knows how to behave herself in social situations, like possibly he was expecting her to hiss and scratch like the feral cats that prowl the alleys around the theater. Whatever, so he has a very beautiful girlfriend. Fiona emphatically does not care.
“I’ll get those drinks,” is all he says.
Once he’s gone Kimmeree turns to look at her, an expression on her face that suggests she too read on Twitter that Fiona was dead. “So,” she says, “what are you . . . doing with yourself these days?”
Right away Fiona feels her spine straighten; it takes some effort, but she forces her shoulders to relax. It’s a perfectly harmless question, she reminds herself. There’s no reason to get defensive. “Laying low, mostly,” she admits. “My dad has a business, so I’m working there for a while.”
“Aw, that’s so sweet!” Kimmeree chirps. She’s wearing one of those dresses that’s made entirely of spandex, so tight that it seems like you ought to be able to see the cartoon outline of everything she eats—assuming, of course, that she ever eats anything. Fiona feels like an American-made car.
Kimmeree puts a brightly manicured hand on her arm, leans in close. “Honestly,” she says, “I have to tell you, I really admire you being out and about and everything. I think I’d die if all that, you know”—she waves a hand in a way that is ostensibly meant to indicate Fiona’s entire life—“happened to me.”
Fiona bites her tongue hard enough to taste iron. “And yet here I am,” she says. “Stubbornly alive.”
Sam comes back with a drink for Fiona then, though not one for Kimmeree, and Fiona is trying to decide what to make of that exactly when Kimmeree leans in close. “Wait,” she says, ducking her head conspiratorially. “Fiona. Are you allowed to drink?”
Fiona tilts her head to the side, not understanding. “I . . . think so?” she says, though there’s one insane moment where she thinks it’s possible the law changed while she was being a hermit in her house and nobody told her. “I’m twenty-eight.”
“No,” Kimmeree says, wide-eyed. “I mean, weren’t you in rehab?”
Fiona feels Sam react more than she sees it, the way his whole body gets very still like an animal smelling danger. She wills herself not to flinch. “Oh my god,” she deadpans, putting a hand over her mouth. “You’re right. Shit, I totally forgot.”
Kimmeree’s eyes narrow, uncertain. “Wait,” she says again. “I don’t—”
“No, I appreciate it,” Fiona assures her seriously. “Thanks for looking out for me.” She isn’t even mad. Well, no, that’s not true, she’s totally mad, but more than that she just feels utterly, backbreakingly stupid. God, what did she think she was doing? Trying to be normal, trying to be a grown-up, trying to be the kind of person who could get a casual drink with—okay, fine, whatever—a hot guy she used to work with. She has no business being out like this. Everything Darcy Sinclair ever wrote about her was true.
Still, one good thing about the slow-motion natural disaster of the last decade of her life is that it’s taught her just how easy it is to get up and walk away.
So that’s what she does.
“Excuse me,” Fiona says pleasantly, then sets her wineglass on the bar and turns on her heels and weaves her way through the thickly packed crowd toward the exit. She’s made it all the way out onto the street before Sam calls her name.
Fiona ignores him, fishing her phone out of her purse. She Ubered here—she always Ubers if she thinks there’s any chance she’s going to have even one drink; the literal last thing she needs is to get herself arrested for a DUI on top of everything else—but the closest driver is finishing a ride six minutes away.
“Fiona!” Sam says again, catching up with her on the sidewalk. The hair around his face is a little sweaty, his eyes glassy and bright. “Where are you going?”
“I’m leaving.”
“Why?”
Fiona hesitates. Her first instinct is to lie—left my oven on or family emergency or Crohn’s Disease flaring up again—but in the end, what does she care? After all, she reminds herself firmly, it’s just Sam. “Because I’m not having fun.”
“Oh.” He looks confused. “Really?”
She laughs. “Really,” she tells him. “Why, is this literally the first time a girl has ever said that to you in your entire life?”
Sam considers that for a moment. “Yes, actually.”
“Oh my god.” Fiona looks down at her phone: four minutes to go. She can’t wait to get home and change into her pajamas and tell Claudia being lonely is underrated—that, in fact, having tested out the alternative, she now feels even more secure in her plan to continue apace for the foreseeable future. Maybe she’ll get a cat to make it official.
“Are you one of those girls who doesn’t like other girls?” Sam asks. He looks pleased with himself for a moment, like he thinks he’s figured something out about her. “Is that it?”
Fiona’s temper spikes. “Fuck you,” she says immediately. Three minutes, then two, then three again. “I’m one of those girls who doesn’t like anyone.”
“I mean, that’s a fact.”
That stings a little, even though all he’s doing is agreeing with her. Fiona sets her jaw. “Okay,” she says, waving shortly before turning to walk away. “Good night, Sam.”
But Sam is persistent. “Come on, Fee,” he urges, trotting after her like an animated sidekick in a Disney cartoon. “What are you even doing out here, waiting for the bus?”
Fiona cackles. “Is that your concept of how the world works? Sorry I’m not cruising up to the valet every night in a ridiculous fucking weinermobile like some people I could name.” She looks down at her phone again. “My Uber is going to be here in a minute.”
“Cancel it,” Sam says immediately.
“Why?”
“Because—because—” He breaks off, gazing at her in the light coming off the neon sign of the club. His eyelashes are long as a girl’s. “Are you hungry?” he asks. “You want to go get food?”
Fiona shakes her head. She doesn’t understand what his game is here—why he invited her out in the first place, why he cares either way if she stays or she goes. She fully expected him to give her the full-court press about the Birds thing tonight, as if by coming here she’d accepted a free vacation from a time-share company and would thus be required to sit through a lengthy and aggressive sales presentation, but in fact he hasn’t said anything about it. She wonders if he’s so drunk he forgot. It seems ill-advised to give him the chance to sober up enough to remember.
On the other hand: she’s starving. She was too nervous to eat dinner, embarrassingly, and that bar wasn’t exactly the kind of place to get loaded tots. And then there’s the other thing, the way all her organs momentarily rearranged themselves when she looked up and saw him watching her from the back of the theater yesterday afternoon. The way she felt on the dance floor with his hands on her waist.
“Maybe,” she allows.
Sam perks up visibly, like there’s a dimmer switch attached to his belly button and somebody just twisted it up to full bright. Fiona has to resist the urge to roll her eyes. “Great!” he says. “Sushi? Or tapas? Or there’s this really authentic Thai place I know—”
“Enough,” Fiona says, canceling her ride before holding a hand out for his car keys. “I’m driving.”
Chapter Eight
Sam
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.”