“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.