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 beingslightlytaken aback that she felt the needto 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 aboutWeetzie Batthe 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 timeBirdsgot 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.”
Sam reaches out to tuck her hair behind her ear. “Your sister is lucky to have you,” he says, but right away Fiona shakes her head.
“Other way around, dude,” she says. “Other way around.”
It’s fully light now, the sky turning pink and yellow and warm out in the courtyard. The sun streams in through the windows, bounces off the gold in Fiona’s hair. She’s a marvel, this girl. Thiswoman. He wants to tell her that, too, but a) he thinks she’d probably never let him live it down and b) he’s afraid of the feeling, a little, the force of it in his own stupid chest. It’s way too much, way too soon.
Thankfully, she seems to have had enough of talking about herself for one morning. “What about you?” she asks, slouching down into the bed again. Sam can see the dark outline of her nipples through the white cotton of the sheet. “Good dad? Bad dad?”
“I don’t know, really,” he admits, lying back down beside her and tucking one arm behind his head. “They split up when I was a real little kid. I’ve only ever met him a handful of times. So: bad dad by default, I guess?”
Fiona frowns. “Is that the truth?” she asks, reaching out and running a speculative finger along the cut of his bicep. “Or is it like, a sad-sack story you tell girls to make them want to sleep with you?”
Sam’s mouth drops open. “Fuck you!” he says with a laugh. “I was just so nice to you about your fucked-up parents!”
That makes her smile. “You were,” she admits—scooting alittle bit closer, pressing herself against his side. “You were very nice.”
“Also, for the record, some might point out that it probably says more about you than about me if my bad dad story turns you on.”
