Fiona yanks her arm away. “Do not touch me.”
“Okay.” Sam holds his hands up, backs off right away. “Okay.” He knows he’s in the wrong here, obviously; he knew this was inevitable, on some level, the same way he knew it was inevitable that his show was going to get canceled even if he never really let himself think about it. He’s fully aware that the only possible course of action is to own this as the massive fuckup it is, to prostrate himself and beg her forgiveness and hope eventually she forgets the whole thing.
He picks a fight instead.
“You know what I want from you, actually?” he asks, hands still in the air. “I want to have an actual adult conversation about this for once in our entire relationship. The reboot. Because I think you owe me that much.”
“First of all, our entire relationship is, like, three weeks,” Fiona scoffs. “And second of all, I don’t owe a damn thing to you or anybody else.”
That stings—the idea that he’s been in this more than she has, that he’s trying to make it something other than what it is. “Oh, right,” Sam says, clapping himself theatrically on the head, “sorry. For a second I forgot what a tortured lone wolf you are. Won’t make that mistake again. Although I guess tortured lone wolves don’t usually have cushy little family businesses to fall back on when they irreversibly fuck up their career.”
Fiona’s eyes fly wide. “Oh, that’s what you think I’m doing?”
“I think you’re in the position of not having to hustle, that’s for sure.”
“Having to hustle?” Fiona bursts out laughing. “Look at your apartment, Sam! Look at your fucking car! Are you really going to stand here and try to convince me you’re hurting for cash?”
“I’m completely broke, Fiona!”
“What?” That surprises her, he can tell. “You are not.”
“Yeah, I am.” It feels gross and good to say it, like ripping off a scab. “Quite seriously, how have you spent basically every waking minute with me for the last three weeks and not noticed that? Congratulations, you were right, I’m exactly as much of a fuckup as you’ve always known I was. I have tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. I have no idea how I’m going to pay my rent next month. My mom is dying”—he almost gags on the word—“and I’m desperately trying to get my shit in order while she’s still around to see it.”
Fiona smirks. “And doing the Birds of California streaming revival is the thing that’s going to convince her that you’ve really made it?”
Sam feels his whole body flush with shame and anger. “Fuck you.”
“Fuck you,” she counters immediately. “I’m the one person in your life who refused to be manipulated by you, and you couldn’t deal with it, so you spent a month lying to my fucking face instead.”
“Can you blame me?” he bursts out. “You wouldn’t even consider it. Not only would you not consider it, you wouldn’t even do me the courtesy of telling me why.”
“I’ve given you plenty of reasons!”
“Not a single one that isn’t bullshit, you haven’t. What the hell was I supposed to do?”
“Gee, I don’t know.” Fiona looks at him like he’s a clown. “I mean, you could have been the one person in America who respected my fucking boundaries. Just, like, to start.”
“Your boundaries?” Just like that, Sam has had enough. “Come off it, Fiona. You love to act like Darcy Sinclair and whoever else just randomly started picking on you for no reason, but, like: you did all that shit. You did it! I’m sorry, but if you wanted people to stop looking at you all the time then maybe you shouldn’t have walked around for five years of your life acting like a total fucking sideshow!”
Fiona doesn’t say anything for a moment. Right away, Sam knows he’s gone too far. “Fiona—”
“Well!” She cuts him off. “You feel better, now that you finally got that off your chest?”
Sam’s stomach plummets. “I’m sorry,” he tells her, scrubbing both hands through his hair. “I didn’t mean—” He can tell by the expression on her face that he’s just confirmed something for her, some secret fear she’s had that she’s tried to talk herself out of or ignore. He is embarrassed of her, a little bit—more than a little bit, on occasion—and judging by the way she’s looking at him right now there’s a part of her that knew it this whole time. Sam has never felt like more of a coward in his entire life. “I shouldn’t have—look. We’re both worked up, obviously. Why don’t we just—”
“Here’s what’s going to happen right now,” Fiona tells him crisply. She definitely isn’t smiling anymore, but nothing about her is out of control, either. Mostly she just looks . . . blank. “I’m going to go into the bedroom and put my clothes on. You’re going to go out onto the balcony and wait until I’m gone.”
“Fiona—”
“I never want to see you again,” she says calmly. “And I’d like for again to start as soon as possible. So please go.”
Sam stares at her for a long beat, his mouth opening and closing uselessly. Fiona doesn’t wait for his answer before she turns and walks away.
Chapter Seventeen
Fiona
Fiona gets all the way downstairs before she remembers he drove her here last night, the two of them groping each other like teenagers in his stupid fancy car. It feels like a lifetime ago, like it happened to someone else entirely—his hands on someone else’s body, the engine rumbling behind someone else’s knees. She digs her phone out of her bag and calls for an Uber, then stands outside Sam’s apartment for three endless minutes while she waits for it, mostly hoping he won’t come down here after her. Hoping a little bit that he will.
He doesn’t.
She thinks about going to a bar and getting so drunk she can’t see straight. She thinks about calling Richie and seeing if he can hook her up. She thinks about doing something so weird and public and fucked that she winds up back at Cedars, but in the end it all feels like a lot of work for nothing, so instead she rides home in the back of the Uber with her head against the window, looking numbly at Instagram photos of Martha’s Vineyard cottages on her phone.
“Hey,” says the driver, glancing at her in the rearview. “Aren’t you—”
“No,” Fiona says flatly. “I’m not.”
Back at home she gets into bed, puts Wives With Knives on her laptop, and passes out like someone has decked her. When she wakes up, the screen saver is on, and she can tell by the light spilling in through the blinds that it’s already the middle of the afternoon. Her head is throbbing, a dull persistent ache at the back of her skull; the foot masks she did with Claudia and Estelle have finally started to do their thing, and her feet are weird and wrinkly, little shreds of skin flaking off her toes. When she looks at her phone, there’s nothing from Sam—not that she was expecting there to be. There are, however, eleven missed calls from Georgie.
“I have bad news,” Georgie announces when Fiona calls her back, sounding darkly excited to be the bearer of it. “Larry broke both his ankles.”
“What?” Fiona sits upright in bed. “How?”
“He stepped off a curb wrong.”
Fiona shakes her head even though Georgie can’t see her. “That’s . . . not real.”
“It’s real.”
“I—okay,” Fiona says, scrubbing a hand over her face. Larry is their Torvald, Fiona’s onstage husband. Without Torvald, there’s no show. “Well, DeShaun can do it, can’t he? That’s what we have understudies for.”
“That’s the other thing,” Georgie says. Fiona can’t decide if she’s imagining the glee in her voice or not. “Apparently DeShaun booked a three-episode guest spot on Malibu Nights.”
Just for a minute, Fiona can’t breathe. “That’s not real, either,” she manages.
She sends out a group text canceling tonight’s rehearsal, pending a plan she has no idea how she’s going to come up with. Then she pulls the blankets over her head and goes back to sleep.
She stays in bed for a long time. It’s embarrassing; she hasn’t cried in years and she doesn’t intend to start now but she can feel that familiar heaviness in her chest and throat and sinuses, like clouds gathering before a storm. She knew better. She knew better, and still she let him—
Still she let herself—
Ugh, she is the stupidest fucking person in the world.
“You’re here?” Claudia asks at some point later that night, stopping in the doorway. “This whole time I thought you were out.”
Fiona shakes her head. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m going to get up in one second and make dinner.”
“It’s like ten thirty,” Claudia tells her gently. She’s wearing a pair of white coveralls that make her look like a trendy Ghostbuster, Fiona’s heart-shaped sunglasses perched in her hair like a headband. “Are you okay?”
Fiona sighs. “No,” she admits.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”