“What happened?”
Fiona hesitates, gazing out at the teeming, writhing crowd. It occurs to her that if she keeps on casually telling him about all the people who have literally fled the Los Angeles area rather than spend one more second in her proximity, eventually he’s going to figure out it’s the only logical course of action and abscond back to the Midwest under the cover of darkness just to get away from her. A Milwaukee goodbye. “I think we both just got busy,” she says lightly. “You know, she’s got SAG awards to accept, and I’ve got informational posters about gonorrhea to proofread for the DTLA free clinic.”
Sam shoots her a look like he suspects she’s full of shit, but he doesn’t press her, which she appreciates. Instead he heads over to the bar to get them another round, but he must find somebody he knows over there, because he’s gone for what seems like forever, and the close heat of the club is starting to feel oppressive, the incessant noise grating on her nerves. She can only handle being out like this for so long. She’s just about to go find him and tell him she wants to get out of here when a hand lands on her shoulder. “Fiona St. James!” says a deep voice behind her. “I thought that was you.”
Fiona flinches at the unexpected contact, spinning around and coming face-to-face with a vaguely familiar guy in glasses and a Henley unbuttoned halfway down his skinny chest. “It’s me,” she agrees, trying to place him. A minor UBC actor, she thinks, or maybe some tangential member of the crew she used to party with? It’s also possible she’s never actually met him before and he’s trying to fake her out; that’s happened before, too. She wishes she remembered more about the couple of years after the show got canceled, except for the part where she doesn’t actually wish that at all.
“I always meant to text you,” the guy says, ducking his head close so she can hear him over the clamor. “After . . .”
“Ah.” All at once it comes to her: a wet, sloppy makeout in a booth at a club in West Hollywood, his hand creeping up the inside of her thigh. Josh, she thinks. Or Joss? “And here I’ve been waiting by my phone all this time.”
Joss/Josh’s lips twist. “Okay,” he says, taking a step closer, “I deserved that.”
You don’t deserve anything, Fiona thinks, her temper prickling. He may not have texted her, but he definitely called up Darcy Sinclair to tell her all about his wild night out with the Family Network’s most notorious young ingenue. The headline, if she recalls, was Bird in Heat.
“It’s good to see you out,” Josh/Joss is saying now, though it’s hard to hear him over the relentless clatter of the music and the dull buzzing sound filling her own head. “Who are you here with?”
Fiona shakes her head. “What?” she asks, his words only half registering. Pam once tried to get her to describe what the inside of her brain looks like when this happens, rage firing fast and powerful through every single one of her synapses. “It doesn’t look like anything,” Fiona told her finally. “It’s all noise.”
“I said,” the guy repeats—curling his fingers around her waist now, squeezing a little—“who are you here with?”
Well, that does it. “What the fuck, dude?” Fiona bursts out, batting him away just as Sam finally turns up, clutching a bottle of Pacífico in either hand. “Don’t touch me.”
Sam’s eyes widen. “Um,” he says, gaze darting back and forth between them, “everything okay?”
Fiona whirls on him. “Why does everyone think they can touch me?” she demands, loud enough to carry over the cacophony in the club. “Like, would you walk up to Sir Ian McKellen and pinch him on the ass? You fucking would not, so I don’t understand why—”
“Whoa whoa whoa,” Josh/Joss interrupts, holding his palms up, looking beseechingly at Sam. “Bro, I definitely did not pinch her ass.”
“Don’t talk to him!” Fiona snaps. Dimly she’s aware of people starting to look over at them, though she can’t bring herself to care. “You were delighted to talk to me two seconds ago, so it seems to me that the very least you can do is—”
“Okay,” Sam interrupts, glancing nervously at the bouncer, who’s eyeing them from his post by the door. “I think it’s probably time to blow this particular banana stand, don’t you?”
“Really?” Fiona asks dryly. “But I was having so much fun.”
“Uh-huh.” He hands the two bottles of beer over to Josh/Joss. “Peace offering,” he announces, with an infuriating little salute. “Have a good night, dude.”
“Don’t give him the beers!” Fiona protests, suddenly and deeply annoyed by Sam’s pathological need to be everybody’s best friend all the time. By his refusal to defend her, even if she knows she would have immediately made him regret it if he’d tried. “What the fuck are you giving him our beers for?”
“I mean, I don’t think they’re going to let us take them to go,” Sam points out. He takes her hand and tugs her toward the doorway; Fiona yanks her arm away, but she follows him, seething with the kind of weird exhilaration that always floods through her after she loses her temper. All at once she feels very, very calm.
“That fucking guy,” she says, shaking her head as they burst through the front door and out into the cool, breezy night. “I am so sick of guys like that fucking guy that I could vomit.”
“Did he actually pinch your ass?”
“Did he—” Just for a second she thinks about explaining to him, about Josh/Joss and Darcy. Then she shakes her head. “How is that in any way the point, Sam?”
“It’s not,” Sam clarifies immediately. “It’s not, of course it’s not, I just mean—okay, can you lower your voice, please?”
“Lower my—” Fiona frowns, stopping short in the middle of the sidewalk. “Oh my god. Are you embarrassed?” she realizes suddenly, whirling on him. “Seriously? Because you think I made a scene in front of some random aspiring screenwriter, or whoever the fuck that guy just was?”
“What? No,” Sam counters immediately, but he blanches as he says it. All of a sudden he isn’t looking her in the eye.
Oh, Fiona cannot believe him. “You are,” she accuses as she stalks across the parking lot. Anger and shame bloom inside her again like two desert flowers, vining up around her spine. “You absolute piece of shit.”
“First of all, take it easy on the name-calling, will you?” Sam says irritably. “Second of all, I just said I’m not, though one could argue that you made a scene in front of a lot more people than just one aspiring screenwriter. On top of which, how do you even know he was an aspiring screenwriter? He could have been Martin Scorsese’s assistant, for all you know, and—”
“You’re worried about Martin Scorsese’s opinion of you?”
“Martin Scorsese is arguably the greatest director of all time!”
“And now he’s never going to put you in a picture, by proxy?”
Sam—for god’s sake—Sam actually blushes. “I’m just saying, I don’t understand why you need to take a flamethrower to every single bridge you encounter.”
“And I don’t understand why you need to be such a striving little pissant, but here we are.”
“Wow.” Sam’s eyes widen, his expression stung. “Fuck you, Fiona.”
“Fuck you, Sam!” It feels good, to be mad. It feels familiar and energizing and significantly less terrifying than whatever else she feels for him, like her guts are about to fall out all over Sunset Boulevard for anyone to see. “You think you’re the first person—the first guy—to be embarrassed of me? Take a fucking number. Call Darcy Sinclair yourself, why don’t you, tell her what a psycho I am. Talk to her about it. Because honestly, I’ve heard it more than enough for one lifetime. I don’t need to hear it from you, too.”
Her voice wavers dangerously on that last part; Fiona sets her jaw. She’s not about to let him hurt her. At the very least, she’s not about to let him know he has.
She turns to walk away and call an Uber—ugh, she really needs to start driving herself places if she’s going to make a habit of leaving in a huff—but Sam grabs her arm. “I’m sorry,” he says, pulling her flush against him, burying his face in her hair. “I’m not embarrassed of you. I’m a jerk; I like you and I’m scared about it, I don’t know.”
Fiona breathes in, squeezes her eyes shut. There’s a part of her that wants to keep fighting—to end this now, to get it over with once and for all—but she’s surprised to find that another, bigger part of her just wants to hold on.