“Well, in case you’ve never seen it yourself, Samuel, I can tell you it was not an artistic fucking ballerina picture with swans shot by Annie Leibovitz.” Fiona shrugs violently, her whole body suddenly made of angles. “I showed up on the day and they said she had a conflict. And then something happened with the swans—like, they didn’t die or anything, they were just unavailable that day, probably they were booked for the wedding of, like, an actual famous person, but then it turned out that one of the lighting assistants was also, like, a reptile guy.” She sighs. “You see where this is going.”
Sam does. Listening to her tell it reminds him of sitting through a horror movie, watching some skinny blond ingenue creep down a darkened hallway to meet her inevitable demise. Shouting Don’t do it and knowing full well she can’t hear him. “Yeah.”
“I could have said no,” she points out, running her thumb around the lip of her mug. She isn’t quite meeting his eye. “I should have said no, which you’ll notice was sort of a recurring theme in my life back then, but I just thought—hell, all these people are already here, I’m the one who got myself into this, so. I did it. I grit my teeth and I went somewhere else in my head and I did it. And now for the rest of my life, when people hear my name, that’s what they’re going to think of.”
Sam opens his mouth to tell her that’s not true, then shuts it again. She’s probably right—it is true, at least a little. A past like Fiona’s isn’t the kind of thing people tend to forget. He glances over her shoulder instead of meeting her eyes, trying to ignore the sneaking suspicion that being out here with her is the worst thing he could possibly be doing for his career and his reputation and wishing, not for the first time, that he wasn’t the kind of person who cares about things like that. He is that kind of person, though; he always has been, and the truth is he’s not sure how much longer he’s going to be able to pretend otherwise.
Thankfully the waitress returns with their plates just then, setting them down without fanfare and stalking off again. “You forgot to tell her she’s the woman of your dreams,” Fiona observes mildly.
“I didn’t forget anything,” Sam tells her. “Eat your eggs.”
Fiona needs to get a birthday present for her sister, so after breakfast they duck into a little shop a few doors down, the kind of place that’s full of crystals and leather bracelets and those little felt pennants girls like with slogans about coffee and feminism. It smells like patchouli and citrus, a little like Fiona herself. “Which?” she asks, holding up two gold necklaces, each of them strung with a bead no bigger than his thumbnail. “Jade or tigereye?”
Sam sifts his hand through a basket of tiny enamel pins shaped like avocados. “Tigereye,” he decides, though he doesn’t actually know which one is which. He just likes the way it sounds when she says it.
Fiona pays for the necklace, plus one of the avocado pins and a card with a cartoon of an ostrich wearing a party hat. They’re walking back to the car when Sam’s phone dings with a text from Erin. Just filed that giant-ass Vanity Fair piece, she reports. Taking myself to drunk lunch if you want to meet up?
Sam hesitates. Drunk Lunch is a celebratory tradition that dates back to their days of living together, when both of them were still scraping for whatever work they could get. Back then it usually meant splitting a burger and as many cheap shots as they could possibly afford, then passing out in front of Bones reruns in the middle of the afternoon. Nice work, killer, he texts back. Can’t meet up now but I owe you a plastic bottle of gin.
BORING, Erin chides. Too busy with Riley Bird?
Sam blinks, his gaze flicking instinctively in Fiona’s direction. The safest strategy here would be bald denial, but part of what makes Erin so good at her job is her ability to detect the faintest whiff of bullshit even over text, so instead he just shoots her the eyes emoji and hopes that’s enough of an admission to satisfy her.
No such luck. Holy shit, she volleys back immediately, are you with her right now??? Bring her to me at once.
Then, a moment later: Unless you’re, like . . . She sends him three eggplant emoji.
Sam snorts. “For fuck’s sake,” he mutters, shoving his phone back into his pocket as they reach the car.
Fiona glances over at him, curious. “What?” she asks.
Sam opens his mouth, fully intending to make up something innocuous. “You don’t want to meet my friend Erin, do you?” he blurts instead.
This time, the regret is searing. Right away he wishes he could reach out, grab the words from the air, and shove them back into his mouth. It’s way too fast, the stakes are way too high, and by the way Fiona blanches he can tell she feels the same way.
To her credit, it only takes her a moment to recover. “Don’t lie,” she says airily. “You don’t have any friends.”
“Oh, you’re a gut-buster.” Sam smirks, relieved. “Really, if this whole community theater thing doesn’t work out, you should give stand-up a try. I bet Jerry Seinfeld would love to take some pointers from you.”
Fiona raises her eyebrows. “I’m sorry, is Jerry Seinfeld your gold standard of a hilarious comedian?”
Sam frowns. “What’s wrong with Jerry Seinfeld?”
Fiona shakes her head faintly, gazing at him over the roof of the car. It’s like Sam can see her brain working—how she’s weighing all the possible outcomes, cataloguing the ways it might go wrong. Then she takes a deep breath. “Sure,” she says, and oh, she is so, so casual. “Let’s go.”
Shit. “Okay,” he fires back immediately. If they’re playing chicken here—and he’s pretty sure they are—he’s definitely not going to be the one who blinks first, even if he’d rather shave off his eyebrows or compete on Dancing with the Stars. Fuck, there’s no way this isn’t going to be such a massive crash and burn. “Yeah. Let’s.”
Erin is sitting at a corner table at their usual place reading The Paris Review and nursing a bourbon, a half-eaten Cubano on the table beside her. “Oh my god, you actually came,” she says, standing up and wiping her hands on a paper napkin. She’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt that says THE FUTURE IS NONBINARY, her dark hair in a long braid over one shoulder. “I thought for sure you were going to bail.”
“We almost did,” Sam and Fiona say in unison, then whirl to look at each other with naked horror.
Erin’s eyes widen. “Oh, you guys are already gross.”
Sam ignores her. “Fiona St. James,” he says, gesturing between them, “Erin Cruz.”
“Why do I know that name?” Fiona asks as they shake.
“Erin’s a writer,” Sam explains. Even as the words are coming out of his mouth he’s filled with an irrational fear that Erin wrote something horrible about her somewhere—fuck, how did he not think to google that?—but then all at once Fiona’s whole face lights up.
“You wrote that piece in the Times a few months ago,” she says, sitting down across from Erin, “about the gross coach at St. Anne’s.”