Fiona blinks at him for a moment in the darkness, then sags. “Oh,” she says, scrubbing a hand over her face. Her hair is one big tangle. “Sorry.”
“No, it’s okay.” He almost asks her what she was dreaming about, but that seems like a bad idea, too, on top of which there’s a tiny part of him that doesn’t actually want to know. Instead he smiles, smoothing a hand down her arm. Fiona smiles back—at least, he thinks she does; it’s hard to tell in the dark—and lies down beside him.
He doesn’t mean to, but he must fall asleep again, because the next time he wakes up she’s gone, the mattress cool beside him. He gets out of bed and shuffles into the living room, where he finds her curled up in a ball on the couch watching something called Evil Lives Here on cable. “Hey,” he says sleepily, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “What are you doing?”
Fiona doesn’t look at him. “I mean.” She shrugs, gesturing at the TV. “That’s pretty obvious, no?”
Sam frowns. “Are you okay?”
“Yep.”
“Okay.” He’s used to her giving him a hard time about things, but she sounds really and truly annoyed, and he’s not sure why. “Do you want to talk to me?”
“What?” Fiona stares at him blankly. “There’s nothing to talk about. I’m fine.”
“You . . . don’t look fine,” Sam says carefully. She doesn’t, either: there are dark rings under her eyes; her hair is a little bit matted. He wonders how long she was tossing and turning before she gave up and came out here.
Fiona laughs hollowly. “Thanks a lot.”
“No, I didn’t mean—” Sam breaks off. Her jaw is set, her shoulders somewhere up in the neighborhood of her ears. He can see her closing up shop, sure as the lights blinking out in the strip malls back home. “Do you want to come back to bed?”
She shakes her head. “You go,” she says, nodding in the direction of the bedroom. “I’m going to watch this.”
Instead he crosses the living room and lies down at the other end of the couch. Their feet brush, but she pulls hers away, curling her knees up and keeping her eyes on the television. “Fee,” Sam says, gazing at her in the half dark. Then, even though he has a pretty good idea of how it’s going to go: “Do you get nightmares a lot?”
Sure enough: “Sam,” she snaps, reliable as winter in Wisconsin. “Leave it, okay? I can go home, if I’m keeping you up.”
“What?” Sam startles. “No, hey, that’s not what I want.”
“Okay.” Fiona shrugs. “Well then. Let me watch this, okay?”
“Okay.”
He doesn’t sleep for a long time, and he can tell she doesn’t, either. Instead they lie there in uneasy silence, the light from the TV flickering across the rug.
He wakes up the next morning, and she’s making pancakes.
“Something approximating pancakes, anyway,” she says when he pads into the kitchen, popping up onto her toes to plant a cheery kiss on his mouth. She’s wearing underwear and one of his T-shirts, her hair piled high on top of her head. “There’s coffee.”
“I—thanks.” Sam scratches at the back of his neck, cautious. Fiona has never, in all the time they’ve been hanging out, made coffee in the morning. Honestly, Sam didn’t even know he had coffee in this house. “Wow.”
“I don’t have rehearsal until tonight,” she continues, moving busily around the kitchen. “Want to do something? A hike?”
Sam raises an eyebrow. “Since when do you like to hike?”
“I like to hike!” she defends herself. “I could like it, conceivably. I’ve never actually done it.” She shrugs. “But that’s a thing normal people do, right? With the person with whom they’re engaging in various and sundry sexual acts?”
Sam smiles. “I think it’s a thing people do, yeah.” His brain catches on that word, though, normal, like a snag in the knit of a cashmere sweater. He can’t get over the feeling that she’s playacting, like she accidentally dropped some important façade and now she feels like she has to compensate. “Fiona,” he says. “About last night.”
“Yeah,” she says with a self-deprecating smile. “Sorry. I don’t sleep so well sometimes and it makes me an asshole.”
“You weren’t an asshole,” he says.
“You know what I mean.” She waves her hand, like him finding her half-catatonic in his living room is cigarette smoke she can swat away. “I’m going to shower.”
“Wait,” he says, “what about the pancakes?”
Fiona shrugs, like she hasn’t considered it. “I’m not actually hungry. I mostly just wanted to make them. You should eat, though.”
“Okay . . . ?” Sam frowns. “We showered last night, you realize.”
“I mean.” Fiona presses another kiss against his mouth, though he can’t figure out if he’s imagining that it feels a little bit forced. “I don’t think it counts when there’s no soap involved.”
“We used soap.”
“Not for washing.”
That makes him smile. “Fair,” he admits.
Fiona heads down the hallway, pulling off her T-shirt as she goes. Sam watches the long line of her bare back, muscles flexing underneath the smooth expanse of her skin. He stands there for a moment once she’s gone, stuffing a couple of pancakes absently into his mouth. He definitely didn’t have the right ingredients, and they taste distinctly sandy; still, nobody has made Sam breakfast in years.
Fuck it, he thinks, setting a half-eaten pancake down on the counter. He’s being a dick. Everybody’s entitled to a bad night every once in a while—not to mention the fact that when one considers the complete, collected history of Fiona St. James meltdowns, last night barely registered. He’s overthinking it because he feels guilty about lying to her, that’s all. Enough is enough. It’s time to come clean.
He’s just about to head down the hallway when his phone rings on the counter. Sam frowns. It’s a number he doesn’t recognize—the firefighter thing, he realizes suddenly, his heart lifting in his chest. And yeah, usually something like that would come through Russ, but it’s conceivable they wanted to talk to him direc—
“Sam Fox,” he says.
“Sam!” comes the familiar voice on the other end. “Jamie Hartley.”
Sam startles. Jamie hasn’t called him in—well, Jamie hasn’t called him ever, actually. “Um, hey,” he says, glancing over his shoulder at the bathroom door. “Can I call you back?”
“No,” Jamie says cheerfully. “This is important. Do-or-die time here, buddy. Look, I talked to your agent, and he says you’re just as excited to get this thing off the ground as I am. And I know you’ve been making time with our girl.”
Sam can just imagine Fiona’s face if she heard Jamie refer to her as their anything. “I don’t know if that’s what I’d call it,” he manages, trying to keep his voice as quiet as he can without actually whispering. “And dude, I gotta tell you, it really seems like any negotiations you’re trying to have with her should probably be between the two of y—”