Sam’s face falls then, his broad shoulders sagging. He lifts his hand like he’s going to touch her, then seems to think better of it. “Fee,” he says, his voice cracking a little. “Yeah it is.”
Fiona leans back on her palms and tilts her chin up, staring into the lights and concentrating on keeping her bottom lip steady. She didn’t want to let him hurt her. She didn’t want to be the kind of person who could get hurt. She didn’t want to be the kind of person who felt much of anything, period, but then he strolled into the print shop like he couldn’t possibly imagine she’d be anything but delighted to see him, and now it’s all these moments later and here they are. “Yeah,” she admits finally. “It is.”
“I’m sorry,” he says immediately. “It doesn’t matter why you didn’t want to do the fucking show, obviously. You said you didn’t want to, and that should have been enough. But I felt desperate—not that that’s an excuse—but I felt desperate, so I acted sneaky, and I acted like a piece of shit. And I’m sorry. Again.”
Fiona tilts her head to the side, considering. “That’s... a pretty good apology,” she admits.
Sam smiles goofily. “Thanks,” he says, the relief audible in his voice. “I practiced in the car.”
She considers him then for a long, loaded moment—his open face and the uncomplicated way he’s looking at her, his green merman eyes—and feels something unlock deep inside her. She closes her eyes, breathing in the dust and sweat smell of the theater. The soap and cologne smell of Sam. “Do you want to know the real reason?” she asks, and opens her eyes again.
All at once Sam gets very, very still. “Yeah,” he blurts. Then, like he’s worried she’s going to change her mind if he isn’t polite enough: “I mean. Yes please.”
Fiona huffs a laugh, though nothing about this is actually funny. Already she’s regretting saying anything at all. “You’re not going to think you love me anymore once I tell you,” she warns him. “Or like me, even.”
“Doubtful,” Sam says, and now he does reach for her, his fingertips just grazing the edge of her sleeve. “Try me.”
Fiona pulls her arm away, instinctive—drawing one knee up and tucking her foot underneath her, making herself small. She never imagined telling him, and now that she’s come this far she finds she isn’t entirely sure how. It’s very possible he won’t even believe her. It’s very possible nobody will.
She’s quiet for a moment longer, rubbing her thumb back and forth over a fray at the hem of her jeans. “Iwasa late bloomer,” she finally tells him. “But you weren’t my first kiss.”
Sam looks at her curiously. “Okay...” he says, shaking hishead like he thinks she’s setting him up for some kind of riddle. “Who was your first kiss?”
“Jamie Hartley.”
For a too-long beat Sam just stares at her like she’s fried his motherboard, like his brain is glitching and he needs to unplug himself and wait thirty seconds to reconnect. “I—what?” he finally says.
Fiona hesitates, not particularly wanting to repeat it. Makes herself say it again. “Jamie Hartley was my first kiss.”
“Jamie Hartley is, like, pushing fifty years old.”
“Is he?” Fiona barks another laugh, dry and brittle. “No shit, Sam.”
And—yeah. He gets it this time. Fiona watches as everything reshuffles in his head like those Magic Eye books Claudia used to like when she was a kid—how suddenly he can see the secret picture hidden inside what happened that day at the UBC lot. Inside what happened when she heard him on the phone the other morning.
Inside what happened at the end of her career.
“Fuck,” he says slowly, reaching back and running a rough hand over the back of his head, yanking a little at his hair. “I—fuck, Fiona.”
“Yeah,” Fiona agrees, lips twisting; she’s trying to sound tough and nonchalant about it all but her voice wobbles, dangerous. “That too.”
Sam doesn’t say anything for a moment. Fiona keeps her eyeson her sneakers, wanting to postpone the inevitability of whatever blame or incredulity or disgust she’s going to see in his expression, but when she finally pulls herself together and glances over in his direction the only thing she finds on his face is—
“So first of all, you were wrong,” Sam says quietly. He catches her gaze and holds it, steady on. “I still love you. I still don’t need to qualify it. And I am really, really fucking sorry that happened.”
Fiona blinks. She thought she was prepared for every possible reaction on his part—that by now she’d lost the ability to be surprised—but somehow she didn’t account for this one. “I could have said no,” she points out, worried that maybe he isn’t understanding. “I knew it was wrong, I knew it was messed up. I wasn’t so divorced from reality that when he saidDon’t tell anyoneI thought he was, like, protecting our true and abiding love. I could have said no. And I didn’t. Not at first.”
“Are you kidding me?” Right away, Sam shakes his head. “You were, what, seventeen? Eighteen? If it happened to your sister, would you say,Well, you didn’t say no?”
“Of course not,” Fiona says immediately, the thought of Claudia like a bucket of ice water dumped directly over her head. “That’s different.”
“How is it different?”
“It’s just different, Sam!” She scrubs a hand over her face. Of course she knows it isn’t different, not really. But there’s an entire world of shame and weirdness between knowing something intellectually and feeling it in her cells. “Anyway. It went on for... awhile. And I didn’t know how to tell him I wanted him to stop. So instead I told him I wanted to quit the show.”
Sam raises his eyebrows. “And I bet he was just falling all over himself to let you out of your contract.”
“He fully laughed at me,” Fiona remembers, her cheeks warming with old embarrassment. She hasn’t let herself think about it in a long time. “So then I told my parents I wanted to quit, but I had already kind of started acting like a freak by then—”
