Fiona tilts her head. “Some might,” she agrees, swinging one leg over his hips and bending down to kiss him. “Some might also point out thatyou’resounding pretty offended for a guy with ahey ladies aren’t I deepVan Morrison guitar nailed to his living room wall. For all I know your dad is back in Wisconsin right now making chocolate-chip pancakes and wearing unflattering jeans, with no idea you’re besmirching his good name.”
“Uh-huh.” Sam bucks against her, involuntary. He’s been half-hard since he woke up. “For allyouknow I’m a guitar virtuoso.”
Fiona drags herself along the length of him, teasing. “Are you?”
Sam bites back a groan. “No,” he admits, swallowing hard as she ducks her head to nip along his jawline, “but I could be.”
“You could be,” she agrees, then reaches toward the nightstand for a condom.
When they’re finished they doze for a little while longer, a warm breeze ruffling the curtains and the birds calling to each other outside the window. Sam keeps waiting for that familiar surge of regret or impatience, that feeling of wanting her to leave—it happens more often than it doesn’t when he brings someone home, though it’s not a trait he particularly likes in himself, because it makes him feel like a meme or a cad character in a low-end romantic comedy—but instead he’s just kind of glad she’s here.
Eventually his stomach starts to growl, though, and he nudges her with his knee under the covers. “You know,” he points out quietly, “we never got eggs.”
As soon as the words are out Samdoesregret them, a little bit—like maybe he’s trying to drag this thing out past its sell-by date, to make it something other than what it is. On the other hand,Let’s get eggsisn’t exactly a marriage proposal. Not to mention the fact that, historically speaking, it’s not like Fiona is the type to turn down an offer of breakfast food.
Also: he doesn’t want to say goodbye to her just yet.
If Fiona thinks he sounds thirsty or desperate, it doesn’t seem to bother her. “I could eat eggs,” is all she says. She flips back the covers and pads down the hall toward the bathroom, not bothering to pull her clothes on. Sam takes a moment to enjoy the view—the graceful slope of her backbone, the high round curve of her ass. She doesn’t look back at him until she reaches the bathroom, curling one hand around the doorjamb and calling down the hallway.
“Hey, Sam?” she says—sounding distracted, almost, scratching the back of her knee with her opposite foot. “Your dad’s a giant loser, and him not being there for you every day of your life is one hundred percent his loss.” Then she steps into the bathroom and shuts the door, the lock clicking neatly behind her. Sam stares down the empty hall.
For breakfast they go to a place he knows with a tiny patio out back, bougainvillea winding through an arbor over the rickety round tables, and plinky pop-folk music piping through a tinny outdoorspeaker. Sam orders an acai bowl with blueberries and flaxseed. Fiona orders bacon and three eggs. “It’s you!” the waitress says, looking at her wide-eyed. “I read on the internet you were dead.”
Fiona nods, smiling sweetly. “I was,” she admits.
The waitress doesn’t react. “My brother had a poster of you in his room,” she muses instead. “The trashy one, with the nudity and the lizard?”
Fiona keeps smiling, shaking her head. “I don’t know it,” she says.
The waitress frowns, confused, then evidently decides she’s not interested in pursuing this conversation. “Acai bowl, bacon, and eggs,” she repeats, glancing down at her notepad, then shuffles grumpily away.
Once she’s gone Sam raises his eyebrows across the table. “That happen to you a lot?”
Fiona shakes her head. “Oh, that was nothing,” she says, scooping her hair into a knot and securing it without the benefit of an elastic. “Sometimes they’re rude.”
Sam takes a sip of his coconut latte. “I have to ask,” he says. “The thing with the lizard.”
Fiona brightens. “Oh, I love that poster!” she says immediately, clapping her hands like a delighted child on Christmas morning. “It came out exactly how I wanted it. It was my artistic vision from the very beginning. Actually, if you ever visit my family home you’ll see a life-size version of it framed above the fireplace with one of those special museum spotlights on it, so we can all behold it with appropriate reverence every time we walk in the—”
“Okay,” Sam says, holding his palms out in surrender. He knew it was a mistake to ask. “Okay. Point taken.”
Fiona is quiet for a moment, like she’s debating how much she wants to tell him. Finally she sighs, sitting back in her chair and wrapping her hands around her coffee mug. She has delicate-looking hands, Fiona does, like maybe they’re the one part of her body she hasn’t been able to properly disguise.
“They told me Annie Leibovitz was going to shoot it,” she says, her voice so quiet Sam has to lean across the table to hear her. “And it was going to be this hugely artistic thing with birds—like a play on ballerinas,Swan Lake, whatever.” She makes a face. “There was a point when I was trying to start over, you know. There was a point when I was trying to get people to take me seriously again.”
“Okay,” Sam replies, feeling a little bit sick. “So what happened?”
“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’tdieor 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 througha horror movie, watching some skinny blond ingenue creep down a darkened hallway to meet her inevitable demise. ShoutingDon’t do itand 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. “Ishouldhave 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—itistrue, 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. Heisthat 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.”
