Sam sets the pot on the coffee table. “What do you mean, a little bit of a fall?”
“She fainted in the parking lot after her doctor’s appointment.”
“Put her on the phone.”
“Sammy, I’m serious, she’s okay—”
“Put her on.”
There’s a rustling sound, and Adam is saying something Sam can’t make out. They still use the landline back at home. “I’m fine,” his mom says when she gets on. “I was flustered, that’s all. I saw a handsome doctor and just swooned away.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Of course it’s not,” she agrees. “How are you?”
Who cares how I am, Sam thinks. He feels like he’s about to cry. “I’m fine,” he says. “How do you feel now?”
“Well, honey, I have cancer.”
He makes a choked, phlegmy sound, halfway between a laugh and a sob. He wants to go home and sit at the kitchen table and ask her how to fix all his problems, up to and including My mom is sick. He wants to tell her about Fiona, bizarrely, though he has no idea what he’d say.
Instead he swallows hard. “I love you,” he tells her finally. “Put Adam back on.”
“I told you,” Adam says a moment later.
“Should I come home?” Sam asks.
“Can you afford to come home?” Adam replies, which is not Of course not, don’t worry about it, there’s plenty of time.
“Of course I can,” he lies. “Why do you keep talking to me like I’m broke?”
“I don’t know,” Adam says. “I don’t think you need to come, though. I’ll text you if anything changes.”
Sam hangs up and looks around at his ridiculous apartment, his expensive chair and douchey midcentury lamps and the signed Van Morrison guitar he bought when The Heart Surgeon first got a full-season order. He doesn’t even play the guitar. He doesn’t even like Van Morrison! He just bought it because he thought it was cool and that girls would want to talk about it when he brought them back here, which they generally do, although Fiona didn’t say anything about it either way.
Fuck, he doesn’t want to be thinking about Fiona right now.
He gets a beer from the fridge and dicks around on his computer for a while, trying to figure out how to list shit on eBay, then getting frustrated five minutes in and giving up. He has no idea why he’s so surprised that in the end she was exactly how all the memes made her out to be: moody and irrational and defensive, basically accusing him of messing around with her just to get her to do the reboot.
You were messing around with her to get her do the reboot, a tiny voice in his head reminds him, and he feels like the biggest jackass who ever lived.
That was why he went to see her at the print shop, maybe. But it wasn’t why he invited her out last night.
And it definitely wasn’t why he asked her to stay.
It doesn’t matter, Sam reminds himself, getting up and wandering into the kitchen. It’s over now. He opens a beer, drinking it down in three long, cold gulps without particularly tasting it. Reaches for another.
The next thing he knows it’s morning, and Erin is banging on the door of his apartment. His mouth tastes like it’s full of jockstraps. His head pounds. “Easy,” he says, swinging the door open.
Erin wrinkles her nose. “It smells like farts in here,” she says.
Sam scrubs a hand over his face. “Did you want something?”
“Don’t freak,” she says, and comes inside.
It’s the second time in twelve hours someone has led that way, and Sam doesn’t appreciate it one bit. He needs coffee. He needs water, and a bacon egg and cheese sandwich, and a starring role in an action-adventure blockbuster directed by Steven Spielberg. “Why would I freak?”
Erin holds out her phone, shoving the screen right up to his face. Sam blinks, focusing on the home page of a hugely popular gossip website—the same one that had such a boner for Fiona a few years ago, back when she was acting like a public nuisance all the time.
“Love Birds?” the headline reads, right above—oh, shit—four different pictures of Fiona and Sam leaving his apartment yesterday morning, his hand laced casually through hers. Everything old is new again! Looks like things are heating up between these former costars. Rumor has it a revival of beloved Family Network megahit Birds of California is in the works—assuming, of course, that Fiona St. James can keep from flying （see what we did there?） off the handle. See a slideshow of her most shocking public meltdowns below!
“Fuck me,” Sam says, shuffling through the living room and collapsing onto the sofa, his arms and legs prickly and hot. He’s got plenty of experience with gossip sites—there was a thing with him and Taylor Swift a couple of years ago, and he once wound up wrongfully implicated as a branch on the herpes tree of a catcher on the San Diego Padres. Still, something about this particular occurrence makes him feel like he’s gotten caught with his dick out—not because they got a picture of him leaving his apartment with a woman, he realizes slowly, but because that woman was Fiona St. James, who once smashed the front window of a luxe Beverly Hills eatery with a child’s pogo stick, which she had previously stolen. And yeah, he was half hoping somebody might snap a shot of them out at lunch the other day, but this is different. After all, it’s one thing to be hanging out with her in the name of trying to get her to do Birds of California. It’s another to just . . . be hanging out with her. It doesn’t exactly scream dashing, high-end leading man for hire.
You invited her out in the first place, he reminds himself. You’re the one who asked her back to your house.
Still, he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t kind of regretting it now.
“How did you not mention this?” Erin asks, sitting down in the Dr. Evil chair and swiveling around like a delighted kid. “You’re just, like, out here casually boning Riley Bird, not saying anything about it? Very gentlemanly of you, I must admit.”
“We’re not boning,” Sam says, raking his hands through his hair. “It’s . . . a weird situation.”
“I’ll say,” Erin agrees cheerfully. “Look on the bright side, though: this is way more interesting than your show being canceled. People have probably forgotten all about that.”
“Fuck you,” Sam says, but there’s no heat behind it. He knows it makes him an asshole to be embarrassed about this, on top of which he’s pretty sure that however invaded he’s feeling right now, Fiona’s probably got it worse. He remembers that first day in the print shop, how she told him the press had finally left her alone. “I should call her.” He reaches for his phone, knowing even as he’s dialing that she isn’t going to answer. Sure enough, it doesn’t even seem to be on. He hangs up without leaving a message, both because he doesn’t think it would make a difference and because he feels weird about saying anything sincere with Erin sitting right here, looking at him with that expression on her face that girls get when they think they know something.
“Go take a shower,” she says once he’s hung up. “I’ll buy you some disgusting wrap with egg whites.” Then, as he’s padding across the living room: “And open a window, would you? It smells like a tar pit.” Sam flips her off before he shuts the bathroom door.