“Fuck,” Sam says, and then it’s happening for him—his whole body going taut, his face as vulnerable and undone as she’s ever seen it. Fiona feels like the most powerful person in the world.
Once it’s over Sam yanks her down on top of him, their chests pressed together, Fiona’s face tucked against his salty neck while their breathing slows down to something like normal. After a while she starts to wonder if he’s sleeping, and she bites gently at his collarbone to check. “Eventually I’m going to want dinner,” she tells him softly, rubbing her thumb across his flat brown nipple. “Just as, like, a heads-up.”
Sam laughs at that, the low, satisfied rumble of it echoing all down Fiona’s limbs. “I’ll get you dinner,” he promises, his fingers trailing sleepily up her backbone. “Fuck, Fee. I’ll get you whatever you want.”
Fiona closes her eyes even though he can’t see her. Just for a second, she lets herself believe he’s telling the truth.
Chapter Fourteen
Sam
Sam blinks awake early, the light just barely turning blue outside the window, and finds Fiona lying on her back beside him, staring at the ceiling with one hand tangled in her hair.
“This time I did hide your shoes,” he announces, rolling over and sliding his palm across her naked stomach, thumb dipping into her navel. Last night they ordered dinner and ate it on the couch in front of a two-part Ted Bundy documentary, then had sex again in Sam’s kitchen before crawling back into bed and messing around a little more for good measure. Sam likes hearing her sounds. “Just in case you were thinking about trying to clumsily sneak out again.”
Fiona’s eyes narrow. “It wasn’t clumsy,” she protests, turning to face him and propping herself up on one elbow.
Sam shoots her a dubious look. “You were like a herd of water buffalo unwrapping cough drops at the opera,” he says.
“Evocative.”
“Louder than Paula Deen calling her weird adult sons in for a fried chicken dinner down on the farm.”
“Okay.”
“You made a monster truck rally sound like the quiet car on the Amtrak Acela.”
That makes her smile. Her face is sweet and sleepy, her mouth smudged from kissing and her hair operating at nearly twice its normal volume. She looks like a Renaissance painting, actually, though Sam 100 percent knows better than to say anything like that out loud, so instead he just keeps on touching her—tracing her lips and the bridge of her nose and the seashell curve of her ear, connecting the dots of three or four closed-up piercings until he gets to the tiny pearl still fastened securely in her earlobe.
“They’re my mom’s,” Fiona admits after a moment, her fingertips brushing his as she reaches up to fiddle with it. Her voice is very quiet.
“Ah,” Sam says. “I was wondering.”
“She works at a pottery studio in Seattle,” Fiona explains, rolling her eyes like the tweeness of it offends her to her very core. “She moved there to, like, find herself after she left my dad.”
“When was that?”
“Long time ago. Second season of the show, I guess?” Fiona flops onto her back, shrugging into the pillows. “I was sixteen.”
Sam nods, trying not to look eager. She hardly ever talks about her family. “Was it a surprise?”
“I mean, yes and no,” she admits, still talking up at the ceiling. “Don’t get me wrong, my parents always had their problems. I think they had Claudia more or less explicitly to try and fix their marriage and then were shocked and dismayed when it didn’t work. But I will admit to being slightly taken aback that she felt the need to cross state lines to get far enough away from us for her comfort.” Then she grins. “And that was when I was still basically normal! Imagine if she’d waited around a year or two? She’d have had to go to New Zealand and farm alpacas.”
Sam doesn’t know whether to laugh at that or not. She’s got the same tone she had when she was talking about Weetzie Bat the other night, like she’s kidding around but also not really. “Do you guys talk?” he asks now, and Fiona shakes her head.
“Not really. I’m sure this will come as a shock to you, the beneficiary of my sparkling conversational repartee, but we don’t usually have a ton to say to each other.”
“Not even when everything was, like . . .” He trails off.
“No,” Fiona says quietly. “Definitely not then.”
Sam doesn’t reply for a moment. Not for the first time, he thinks about asking her what the hell was actually going on with her around the time Birds got canceled, why she was so bent on blowing up her entire life, but he’s pretty sure that as far as she’s concerned he’d be buying himself a one-way ticket to Fuck Yourself Junction, and he doesn’t want to do that. He might not know what’s happening between them, exactly, but he knows he doesn’t want to ruin it just yet. “That must be hard,” is all he says.
“Not as hard as you’d think.” Fiona shrugs. “I feel like she can go screw, mostly. But I’m also stupidly attached to these earrings, so you do the math.”
“And your dad?”
Fiona smiles. “My dad’s a really decent guy,” she says, “but he has a lot of problems that he either cannot or will not get help for.” She lifts her eyebrows. “I keep telling him, a few weeks in a psych hospital? Fix you right up.”
Sam reaches out to tuck her hair behind her ear. “Your sister is lucky to have you,” he says, but right away Fiona shakes her head.
“Other way around, dude,” she says. “Other way around.”
It’s fully light now, the sky turning pink and yellow and warm out in the courtyard. The sun streams in through the windows, bounces off the gold in Fiona’s hair. She’s a marvel, this girl. This woman. He wants to tell her that, too, but a) he thinks she’d probably never let him live it down and b) he’s afraid of the feeling, a little, the force of it in his own stupid chest. It’s way too much, way too soon.
Thankfully, she seems to have had enough of talking about herself for one morning. “What about you?” she asks, slouching down into the bed again. Sam can see the dark outline of her nipples through the white cotton of the sheet. “Good dad? Bad dad?”
“I don’t know, really,” he admits, lying back down beside her and tucking one arm behind his head. “They split up when I was a real little kid. I’ve only ever met him a handful of times. So: bad dad by default, I guess?”
Fiona frowns. “Is that the truth?” she asks, reaching out and running a speculative finger along the cut of his bicep. “Or is it like, a sad-sack story you tell girls to make them want to sleep with you?”
Sam’s mouth drops open. “Fuck you!” he says with a laugh. “I was just so nice to you about your fucked-up parents!”
That makes her smile. “You were,” she admits—scooting a little bit closer, pressing herself against his side. “You were very nice.”
“Also, for the record, some might point out that it probably says more about you than about me if my bad dad story turns you on.”
Fiona tilts her head. “Some might,” she agrees, swinging one leg over his hips and bending down to kiss him. “Some might also point out that you’re sounding pretty offended for a guy with a hey ladies aren’t I deep Van Morrison guitar nailed to his living room wall. For all I know your dad is back in Wisconsin right now making chocolate-chip pancakes and wearing unflattering jeans, with no idea you’re besmirching his good name.”
“Uh-huh.” Sam bucks against her, involuntary. He’s been half-hard since he woke up. “For all you know I’m a guitar virtuoso.”
Fiona drags herself along the length of him, teasing. “Are you?”
Sam bites back a groan. “No,” he admits, swallowing hard as she ducks her head to nip along his jawline, “but I could be.”
“You could be,” she agrees, then reaches toward the nightstand for a condom.
When they’re finished they doze for a little while longer, a warm breeze ruffling the curtains and the birds calling to each other outside the window. Sam keeps waiting for that familiar surge of regret or impatience, that feeling of wanting her to leave—it happens more often than it doesn’t when he brings someone home, though it’s not a trait he particularly likes in himself, because it makes him feel like a meme or a cad character in a low-end romantic comedy—but instead he’s just kind of glad she’s here.
Eventually his stomach starts to growl, though, and he nudges her with his knee under the covers. “You know,” he points out quietly, “we never got eggs.”
As soon as the words are out Sam does regret them, a little bit—like maybe he’s trying to drag this thing out past its sell-by date, to make it something other than what it is. On the other hand, Let’s get eggs isn’t exactly a marriage proposal. Not to mention the fact that, historically speaking, it’s not like Fiona is the type to turn down an offer of breakfast food.