“Shut up,” Fiona mutters fiercely. “Sam.”
Sam grins and lets go.
This time she does gasp: the size and the stretch of him, the rangy weight of his body on top of her. “That okay?” he murmurs into her hair.
“Yeah.” It’s better than okay, if she’s being honest—the slow, purposeful way he’s moving inside her, like there’s nowhere on earth he’d rather be. Fiona shifts her hips. “I—yes.”
He smiles then, or at least it sounds that way. “Okay.”
It goes on like that for a while, his mouth on her jaw and his hands everywhere he can reach her, her waist and her thighs and her hair. “Wanna see you,” he tells her finally, rolling them so she’s on top, and before Fiona can think of anything to say to that his fingers are between her legs and she’s coming again, no warning, shocked by the speed and the intensity of it. “Oh my god,” she says. “Oh my god, Sam.” She catches her breath, lifts her head to look at him. “Don’t be smug.”
Sam laughs up at her, the corners of his eyes crinkling. “I’m a little smug,” he says.
“Yeah.” Fiona swallows. “Keep going,” she murmurs, rocking her hips to encourage him. Up close he’s not entirely perfect, with a tiny acne scar near his hairline she’s never noticed before and the beginnings of crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes. She reaches down and collects his wandering hands, curling her fingers around his wrists and pushing them up against the pillows. Sam’s eyes get very dark.
“Fiona,” he says, so quiet, and there’s a ragged edge in his voice that sounds unfamiliar and strange. “Fiona, please.”
Fiona nods. “I lied,” she confesses, dropping her head down so her mouth is pressed right up against his ear. “When I told you I was only imagining the sheets.”
“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.”