Erin takes him for a breakfast beer at the dive around the corner from her apartment: cool and dark and a little bit grimy, the floor slightly sticky underfoot. It’s early enough that they’re the only people sitting at the bar, a friendly drunk scratching lotto tickets at a table in the corner and some daytime talk show carping away on the TV—a talk show, Sam realizes belatedly, on which they’re playing the footage of Fiona outside her theater over and over. Fiona St. James at It Again in New Viral Video, the chyron reads.
“For fuck’s sake.” Sam drains most of his beer in two long gulps. “Hey,” he calls, signaling the bartender before he quite knows he’s going to do it, “sorry. Would you mind turning this off?”
The bartender looks dubious. “You object to The View?” he asks.
“No, I don’t object to The View, I just—sports?” he begs. “There must be a sport on somewhere, right? There’s always sports on.”
The bartender rolls his eyes, but dutifully flips over to competitive bowling on ESPN2. When Sam turns back to Erin, he finds her staring at him, her eyes wide and triumphant. “Holy shit,” she says quietly, “did you catch feelings for Riley Bird?” She says feelings but it sounds like what she means is chlamydia.
Sam finishes his beer instead of answering. “Better not let her hear you call her that,” he says finally. “She’ll eat your heart in the fuckin’ marketplace.”
Erin shakes her head. “Don’t try to put me off.”
“I’m not trying to do anything,” Sam replies, knowing he sounds peevish. “We hung out a couple of times, that’s all. I barely know her.”
“Can you not be full of shit for one second?” Erin asks, setting her glass down. “Like, now that I’m actually looking at your face I’m realizing I’ve been kind of an asshole about the whole thing, so I probably owe you an apology, but putting that aside for a minute, it doesn’t have to be some bullshit game of who can be the coolest guy in Hollywood. If you like her, which you clearly do, and she’s going through a thing, which”—she gestures at the TV—“shit, she clearly is, then what are you doing sitting here with me? Go be a decent human person and make sure she’s okay.”
“It’s not—” Sam breaks off. “I mean, we aren’t—” He sighs. “She’s not taking my calls, okay? I tried her last night, and again this morning, but she doesn’t want to talk to me. Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“Yes, actually.” Erin smiles, reaching for her glass again before kicking him gently underneath the bar. “I am sorry, for the record. I wouldn’t have been so cavalier if I knew it was, like, a real thing.”
“It’s not,” Sam says reflexively. “But maybe it could be?” He drops his head back. “I don’t fucking know.”
“Liar,” Erin says cheerfully. Sam orders another beer.
When he gets home there’s a residuals check waiting for him from a Hallmark movie he did a couple of Christmases ago, which cheers him up for a minute, though after he pays down his credit card enough to be able to use it he’s basically right back where he started. Sam frowns. He hasn’t been this broke since he was living with Erin, doing push-ups on the nasty carpet in their tiny apartment and splurging on ten-dollar haircuts. He can’t believe he let himself wind up here again.
He walks around the apartment for a while. He eats half a bag of baby carrots standing up at the sink. He thinks about taking a nap, but he can’t settle, even after he jerks off and watches two episodes of an afternoon court show and checks to see if maybe Russ emailed him with news about the firefighter thing, which he has not. He pulls up Fiona’s video one more time. He remembers a night back in the third or fourth season of Birds, a big party at a fancy hotel out in Malibu—the network threw one every year the week of the Television Critics Association press tour, when everyone came out to LA to watch next season’s pilots and take corny pictures of themselves in front of the Hollywood sign. The party was always black tie, candles floating in the pool and tuxedoed waiters scurrying by balancing trays of champagne and canapés. Thandie and Fiona used to call it the Sexless Prom.
Attendance, while not strictly mandatory, was strongly encouraged, and though Sam had dutifully shown up every year he’d been on the show, the whole thing never got less weird to him, all the big Family Network names mingling together: the second lead from a vaguely racist period piece about a feisty pioneer nurse chatting up the host of a morning talk show that was best known for showcasing new and novel recipes for ground beef every single day. He was angling for a little bit of face time with the star of a marquee drama about a small-town sheriff—the guy had just booked a role in a Coen Brothers movie, and Sam wanted to know how—when he spotted Fiona standing near the edge of the pool talking to a couple of older women from one of the executive teams, clutching a rocks glass in one hand and tiny appetizer plate piled with a mountain of fruit from the cheese board in the other. Judging by the expression on her face, she was seriously considering drowning herself in the shallow end.
“There you are,” Sam said, striding over and swinging an arm around her shoulders before he quite knew he was going to do it. “I’ve been looking for you. We’re all getting in the photo booth.” He grinned his most winsome grin at the executives. “Sorry, ladies. Need to find this gal a feather boa and some novelty sunglasses, stat.”
“What the hell?” Fiona asked once they were alone, sitting down hard on the edge of a massive stone planter overflowing with tropical flowers and taking a sip of her drink. “How do you know I wasn’t dying to talk to those women?”
Sam raised his eyebrows. “Were you?”
“No,” she admitted. She was wearing a short, fringe-y dress and sky-high heels, a bunch of chunky rings on her fingers. Also, though she was holding it together decently well—not to mention the fact that she was only eighteen—he was pretty sure she was shit-faced. She’d started showing up on the gossip sites by then, a few dicey scenes at clubs in West Hollywood and a well-publicized fling with a two-bit pop star whose biggest hit featured a chorus that consisted entirely of the words my junk, my junk repeated over and over. Sam had asked Thandie about it when they’d broken up, just casually, in response to which Thandie had fixed him with an extremely dubious look and told him that if he was interested in Fiona’s personal life for any particular reason, he could damn well ask Fiona about it. “But I could have been.”
“You could have been,” he agreed, “and I apologize.”
“I forgive you,” she said politely.
“Magnanimous,” Sam teased, plucking a grape from her plate. He wasn’t interested in Fiona’s personal life for any particular reason, for the record. He’d just been curious, that was all. “Worried about getting scurvy?” he asked, nodding down at the pile of fruit.
“Cute.” Fiona rolled her eyes, fingers brushing his as she picked up a strawberry and popped it into her mouth. “I’m on a diet, technically.”
“Really?” That surprised him. “Why?”
“Jamie says I’m getting fat.”
“Seriously?” Sam blinked. It didn’t sound like something Jamie would say. It was certainly not something Jamie had ever said to him, and Sam found himself almost unable to picture it. He wondered if maybe Fiona had misunderstood, somehow, but knew better than to ask. “What the hell?”
Fiona shrugged. “Lucky for me,” she said, raising her glass in a little toast, “vodka is a low-calorie food.”
Sam grinned, charmed in spite of himself. “How drunk are you right now?”
“Fuck off,” she said immediately, but she was smiling. “How drunk are you right now?”
“Moderately,” he admitted, and Fiona laughed. In the glow of the patio lights she looked—he tried to think of another word, and couldn’t—luminous, full mouth and long eyelashes and something faintly glittery slicked across her collarbones. Then, all at once, her face fell. “This,” she said quietly, setting her glass down on the planter between them, “is not a good idea.”
Right away Sam felt himself blush, like he’d gotten caught doing something he shouldn’t have; and yeah, okay, there was a tiny part of him that had been thinking about asking her if she wanted to get out of here, that was in fact more than passingly interested in her personal life and wondered if there might be a place for him in it. Still, he didn’t think he’d been so obvious that she needed to shut him down preemptively.
But Fiona didn’t seem to be talking about whatever intentions might or might not have been forming in the back of his mind for the rest of the evening. In fact, she didn’t seem to be talking about him at all. She ran a hand through her hair, her rings catching at the tangles. “I’m fucking up,” she said, so quietly she might have been saying it to herself.
“What?” Sam shook his head, not understanding. This conversation had taken a hard swerve when he wasn’t paying attention, and he wasn’t sure how to get it back on track. “Why, because you’re drunk at Sexless Prom? Nobody can even tell.”