“Why?”
“Because—because—” He breaks off, gazing at her in the light coming off the neon sign of the club. His eyelashes are long as a girl’s. “Are you hungry?” he asks. “You want to go get food?”
Fiona shakes her head. She doesn’t understand what his game is here—why he invited her out in the first place, why he cares either way if she stays or she goes. She fully expected him to give her the full-court press about the Birds thing tonight, as if by coming here she’d accepted a free vacation from a time-share company and would thus be required to sit through a lengthy and aggressive sales presentation, but in fact he hasn’t said anything about it. She wonders if he’s so drunk he forgot. It seems ill-advised to give him the chance to sober up enough to remember.
On the other hand: she’s starving. She was too nervous to eat dinner, embarrassingly, and that bar wasn’t exactly the kind of place to get loaded tots. And then there’s the other thing, the way all her organs momentarily rearranged themselves when she looked up and saw him watching her from the back of the theater yesterday afternoon. The way she felt on the dance floor with his hands on her waist.
“Maybe,” she allows.
Sam perks up visibly, like there’s a dimmer switch attached to his belly button and somebody just twisted it up to full bright. Fiona has to resist the urge to roll her eyes. “Great!” he says. “Sushi? Or tapas? Or there’s this really authentic Thai place I know—”
“Enough,” Fiona says, canceling her ride before holding a hand out for his car keys. “I’m driving.”
Chapter Eight
Sam
She takes him to In-N-Out, the two of them sitting outside on rubber-coated benches in the yellow light of the neon sign. The waffle weave digs into his ass. It’s a warm night, the smell of car exhaust and fryer oil hanging densely in the air.
“Can I ask you something?” Fiona says, dragging a fry through a puddle of secret sauce. She ordered without looking at the menu, coming back to the table with a cardboard box full of cheeseburgers and fries; she also paid, which he appreciates, though he doesn’t say that out loud. “How do you even know all those people?”
Sam takes a sip of his milkshake. “All those people, like, my friends?”
“Sure.” Fiona looks dubious.
“They’re industry people, mostly.” He shrugs. “Kimmeree does something with social media.”
“Of course she does.”
Sam frowns. The truth is they’re not actually his good friends, those guys back in the bar. Erin in particular hates that whole crowd; she heard who all was coming out tonight and bailed so hard and so fast Sam was surprised she didn’t pull a muscle. They’re a lot, he gets it. But he’s also not about to sit here and let Fiona shit on a bunch of perfectly nice people she didn’t even bother to talk to. “Look,” he tells her, “whatever she said to you back there. She didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Didn’t she?” Fiona huffs a laugh.
“No,” Sam replies, “she didn’t. She was trying to be friendly.”
Fiona eyes him over her cheeseburger like he’s too stupid to breathe air. “That is . . . emphatically not what was happening there.”
“Fine,” he admits, “maybe not. But—but—”
“But what, exactly?” Fiona raises her eyebrows, gestures with her chin toward the car. “Go back to the bar and hang out with her, if she’s such a sweetheart. Honestly, I don’t even know what you’re doing out here eating french fries with me when your girlfriend is—”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
“Okay,” Fiona says, setting the rest of her burger down on its waxed paper envelope. “The person you have casual recreational sex with. Whatever.”
“Isn’t all sex recreational?” Sam points out.
“You know what I mean.”
Sam doesn’t, not really. “I’m not having any kind of sex with Kimmeree,” he tells her, “not that it’s any of your business. And I don’t have a girlfriend, either, if that’s the information you were trying to get.”
That gets under her skin, which was the point. Sam watches the temper flare in her dark, witchy eyes, like someone blowing on a campfire. He can almost see the sparks flying off her skin and out into the night. “It wasn’t,” is all she says.
“Okay.” Sam shrugs, affecting carelessness. “Fine. I’m just saying, you don’t have to go around hating everyone for fun. There are plenty of other ways to spend your time.” He pops a fry into his mouth. “You could join an Ultimate Frisbee league, for example.”
Fiona laughs, not nicely, and loud enough that a delivery driver glances over at them as he climbs back into his car with a giant bag of food. “First of all,” she snaps, “I’d rather perform my own root canal. Second of all, I don’t hate everyone for fun—I hate most people, because they deserve it. And third of all, I was in a psych hospital, not rehab. It’s different.”
That shocks him—not the information itself, necessarily, but the sound of her saying it. Sam is quiet for a moment before eventually he nods. “I wasn’t going to ask.”
“No, you were going to google it,” she fires back. “Or maybe you already googled it, I don’t know.”
He did google it, actually, the day he went to see her at the copy shop, so he doesn’t say anything. He tries to imagine her there, sitting in her sweatpants with the door locked playing checkers with the other patients. Everything he knows about psych hospitals he learned from watching movies and TV.
“I’m not embarrassed,” she continues, her voice all brass and bluster. “Frankly, more people in this business should spend some quality time in a mental health facility.”
“Hey, you won’t hear me arguing,” Sam says. Then, before he quite knows he’s going to ask her: “What was it like?”
He fully expects her to tell him to mind his own business, but instead Fiona seems to stop and consider it, like possibly nobody’s ever asked her to describe it before. “It was quiet,” she finally says.
Sam nods. The sound of her voice is almost nostalgic, like his mom when she talks about going out to the bars with her girlfriends at UW-Madison in the eighties. “Seems about right.”
“Everybody expected me to fight it,” she continues. She’s gazing across the patio at the cars whizzing by on the busy street, their headlights gleaming in the dark. “But, like, why would I have fought it? I was messed up, obviously. I never said I wasn’t messed up. I wanted to be, like, less messed up, so I went to the place and I did the fucking thing, and still for the rest of my life nobody is ever going to let me—” She breaks off, looking almost startled to realize he’s still listening. She shakes her head. “Forget it.”
Sam gazes at her across the table, her jaw set and her expression haughty. She looks like a queen facing down a losing war. It’s the most she’s said about her past—the most she’s said at once, period—since he walked into the copy shop the other morning. Just for a moment, it occurs to him to wonder what else she might be keeping to herself.