“Okay,” Sam interrupts, glancing nervously at the bouncer, who’s eyeing them from his post by the door. “I think it’s probably time to blow this particular banana stand, don’t you?”
“Really?” Fiona asks dryly. “But I was having so much fun.”
“Uh-huh.” He hands the two bottles of beer over to Josh/Joss. “Peace offering,” he announces, with an infuriating little salute. “Have a good night, dude.”
“Don’t give him the beers!” Fiona protests, suddenly and deeply annoyed by Sam’s pathological need to be everybody’s best friend all the time. By his refusal to defend her, even if she knows she would have immediately made him regret it if he’d tried. “What the fuck are you giving him our beers for?”
“I mean, I don’t think they’re going to let us take them to go,” Sam points out. He takes her hand and tugs her toward the doorway; Fiona yanks her arm away, but she follows him, seething with the kind of weird exhilaration that always floods through her after she loses her temper. All at once she feels very, very calm.
“That fucking guy,” she says, shaking her head as they burst through the front door and out into the cool, breezy night. “I am so sick of guys like that fucking guy that I could vomit.”
“Did he actually pinch your ass?”
“Did he—” Just for a second she thinks about explaining to him, about Josh/Joss and Darcy. Then she shakes her head. “How is that in any way the point, Sam?”
“It’s not,” Sam clarifies immediately. “It’s not, of course it’s not, I just mean—okay, can you lower your voice, please?”
“Lower my—” Fiona frowns, stopping short in the middle of the sidewalk. “Oh my god. Are you embarrassed?” she realizes suddenly, whirling on him. “Seriously? Because you think I made a scene in front of some random aspiring screenwriter, or whoever the fuck that guy just was?”
“What? No,” Sam counters immediately, but he blanches as he says it. All of a sudden he isn’t looking her in the eye.
Oh, Fiona cannot believe him. “You are,” she accuses as she stalks across the parking lot. Anger and shame bloom inside her again like two desert flowers, vining up around her spine. “You absolute piece of shit.”
“First of all, take it easy on the name-calling, will you?” Sam says irritably. “Second of all, I just said I’m not, though one could argue that you made a scene in front of a lot more people than just one aspiring screenwriter. On top of which, how do you even know he was an aspiring screenwriter? He could have been Martin Scorsese’s assistant, for all you know, and—”
“You’re worried about Martin Scorsese’s opinion of you?”
“Martin Scorsese is arguably the greatest director of all time!”
“And now he’s never going to put you in a picture, by proxy?”
Sam—for god’s sake—Sam actually blushes. “I’m just saying, I don’t understand why you need to take a flamethrower to every single bridge you encounter.”
“And I don’t understand why you need to be such a striving little pissant, but here we are.”
“Wow.” Sam’s eyes widen, his expression stung. “Fuck you, Fiona.”
“Fuck you, Sam!” It feels good, to be mad. It feels familiar and energizing and significantly less terrifying than whatever else she feels for him, like her guts are about to fall out all over Sunset Boulevard for anyone to see. “You think you’re the first person—the first guy—to be embarrassed of me? Take a fucking number. Call Darcy Sinclair yourself, why don’t you, tell her what a psycho I am. Talk to her about it. Because honestly, I’ve heard it more than enough for one lifetime. I don’t need to hear it from you, too.”
Her voice wavers dangerously on that last part; Fiona sets her jaw. She’s not about to let him hurt her. At the very least, she’s not about to let him know he has.
She turns to walk away and call an Uber—ugh, she really needs to start driving herself places if she’s going to make a habit of leaving in a huff—but Sam grabs her arm. “I’m sorry,” he says, pulling her flush against him, burying his face in her hair. “I’m not embarrassed of you. I’m a jerk; I like you and I’m scared about it, I don’t know.”
Fiona breathes in, squeezes her eyes shut. There’s a part of her that wants to keep fighting—to end this now, to get it over with once and for all—but she’s surprised to find that another, bigger part of her just wants to hold on.
“I wouldn’t blame you,” she admits quietly, her voice muffled against his button-down. “I mean, that’s not true, I’d blame you until the day I died, I’d find someone to put a hex on you and I’d start a rumor that you’re terrible in bed, but it’s not like I wouldn’t understand.” She shrugs inside his grip. “I know I’m too much.”
Sam shakes his head. “You’re . . . the perfect amount, actually.”
That makes her laugh for how ridiculous it is. “I’m sorry I called you a striving little pissant,” she says.
“I am a striving little pissant,” Sam says easily, “for all the good it’s doing me right now.” He ducks his head to kiss her—just once, so quick and light she almost doesn’t feel it. She can’t tell if she’s imagining that he looks around to make sure no one saw. “Want to go make up?”
Fiona raises her eyebrows. “Didn’t we just do that?”
Sam laces his fingers through hers, tugging her in the direction of the Tesla. “Not yet.”
He takes her home to his apartment and kisses her backward into his bed, then flips her onto her stomach and goes down on her until she’s keening quiet sounds into his pillows, her fingers tensing and relaxing in the sheets. Afterward they eat leftover takeout from cereal bowls, sitting cross-legged on the rumpled covers while the neighbors play a rowdy game of Celebrity across the courtyard. “How did you get started acting?” Sam wants to know.
“Oh my god, don’t ask.” Fiona smiles, clapping an embarrassed hand over her face. “I got discovered,” she admits, peeking out from between two fingers.
“Shut up.” Sam laughs. “You did not.”
Fiona nods. “I did. I was like, what, thirteen? I was hanging around at the print shop being a fucking ham when Caroline came in to pick up some bridal shower invitations—she was still an assistant at LGP back then, she was probably younger than I am now. She asked my parents if she could take a video of me on her phone, and here I am.”
“Here you are,” Sam says, trailing a finger over the thin, sensitive skin on the inside of her arm. “Did you want to do it?”
“What, acting? I mean, sure,” Fiona says with a shrug. “Or . . . I guess I kind of didn’t think about it as a choice at the time, more like. And then by the time I got it together enough to have an opinion . . .” She trails off. “Anyway. What about you?” she asks, spearing the last of the broccoli from her picked-over noodles and setting the bowl aside. “Did you come out of the womb, immediately hand over your headshot, and deliver a monologue from an Aaron Sorkin movie?”