“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.
Chapter Eleven
Fiona
Claudia’s the one who tells her about the pictures. Part of the agreement Fiona made with Pam back when she was in treatment was that she had to stop looking at Darcy’s website, and she has, for the most part. But Claudia still has a Google Alert set for Fiona’s name, meticulously scanning the horizon for any sign of trouble like the guys on the Wall in Game of Thrones.
“It doesn’t say anything bad, really,” Claudia promises, leaning against the kitchen counter. Brando hovers in the hallway, like a pinch hitter waiting to see if he’s about to get called off the bench. “I just thought you’d want to know.”
Claudia is right: objectively the photos aren’t that bad. After all, Fiona is fully clothed, in command of all her faculties, and not actively berating any innocent bystanders, which means by Darcy’s standards they’re basically the watercolor illustrations from a child’s book of nursery rhymes. Still, Us has picked them up, and so have half a dozen other websites, and seeing herself looking so dopey and unguarded—the openness of her expression, the gooney way she’s smiling at Sam—makes Fiona feel like someone has stuck their dirty hands inside her chest cavity, getting smudge marks on all her organs.
Of course, it’s possible it’s not just Darcy that’s making her feel that way. Everything is jangled up inside her: Sam, Jamie, Birds. It’s like all the shit she spent the last five years trying to smooth over is all mixed-up again, and she can feel the urge building inside her to do something reckless: to hurt someone, to hurt herself. Last time she felt like this she wound up floating naked in the pool at a JW Marriott in Playa del Carmen with very little memory of how she got there, but she doesn’t do that kind of thing anymore, so instead she goes to work and fixes spaghetti for her sister and lies in bed listening to LeBron James read a guided meditation on her phone.
She’s trying. She’s trying so hard.
Finally she gives up and throws one arm over her face, slipping the fingers of her other hand down into the waistband of her boxers. She thinks of Sam’s touch on her hips and her thighs and her stomach; she thinks of his warm, clever mouth on her breasts. It’s not enough—none of it feels like enough—but it gets the job done, and when she’s finished she curls onto her side and falls into a restless, edgy sleep.
She gasps awake less than an hour later, soaked in her own sharp, panicky sweat: “Fuck,” she mutters when her heart stops pounding, sinking back against the damp, clammy sheets. She hardly ever gets nightmares anymore, but when she does they’re always vicious and embarrassingly unsubtle: suddenly realizing she’s locked inside her trailer on the UBC lot, or Jamie banging on the door of her dad’s house demanding to know where she’s been. Fiona scrubs a hand through her hair, reaching for the remote and flipping on Evil Among Us, but even after an episode and a half of grisly murder she still feels like all her nerve endings are jangling around inside her body, so she gets up and heads into the kitchen to make herself a sandwich.
She doesn’t bother to turn on a light as she grabs a plate from the cupboard and some turkey from the fridge, slapping some mayo on a slice of bread and willing herself to calm down. Pam used to say that focusing on a concrete task was a good way to get herself under control, but instead the longer she stands here the more it starts to feel like she’s about to blast off to the moon, breath ragged and heart stuttering. When she tries to cut the sandwich in half she looks down and realizes she can’t feel her hands.
Fiona swears under her breath, panic and rage roiling up inside her in equal measure. The knife clatters loudly into the sink. She thinks about the details of her time on Birds as infrequently as possible, but all at once she remembers sitting on set one night maybe halfway through filming on the second season, which everyone kept saying was even better than the first: they were getting quasi-famous all of a sudden, recognized in public and invited to parties and premieres. They’d been on the cover of Entertainment Weekly a few weeks earlier, Sam’s arm slung around her shoulders, Thandie’s head thrown back as she laughed.
She was on the floor with her ankles crossed paging through The Long Hot Summer, which Estelle had recommended, when a tall, broad shadow fell across the page. “Catching up on your reading?” a deep voice said. She looked up and realized with a start that Jamie was looming above her, his hands tucked in his jacket pockets and his hair curling down over his collar. “Anything good?”
Fiona held up the slim paperback so he could see the cover. “It’s kind of . . . turgid.”
Jamie laughed out loud. “I did it in college,” he told her, “a million years ago. I should read it again.” He leaned against the wall with his arms crossed, looking down at her curiously. “You’re here late,” he observed. “You’re done for the day, aren’t you? Somebody picking you up?”
Fiona shook her head. “Thandie’s going to take me when she’s done,” she said, hoping that didn’t sound pathetic. She’d gotten her license a few months earlier; her dad kept saying they were going to go car shopping, though now that he’d lost interest in so much as running to Ralphs for groceries, she sort of doubted that it was something they were going to get to anytime soon. Her mom had moved out three weeks ago.
Now Jamie glanced over at the set, where the lighting guys were readjusting for what seemed like the twentieth time, and rolled his eyes. “Thandie’s going to be here for hours,” he predicted, nudging her in the shoulder with his denim-covered knee. “Come on. I can take you.”
Fiona shook her head. Even back then she always hated asking for favors from people, the itchy feeling of being in someone else’s debt. “You don’t have to do that,” she said. “I’m fine.”