“Understandable,” Sam points out.
“I mean, sure,” Fiona allows, “but they were already getting tired of my bullshit. My mom especially, even though she was up in Seattle by then. She told me I’d signed a contract, I’d made a choice. I didn’t have to re-sign if I didn’t want to. But I had to see it through until then.”
Sam winces. “So that was—”
“Right around the end of your last season, yeah,” Fiona says. She remembers the night of the cast party: Sam finding her hand and pulling her closer, his warm smile pressed against hers. How just for a moment he’d made her feel like a normal person. How for one moment she’d been able to forget.
“I just kind of lost it after that,” she says now, making a conscious effort to drop her aching shoulders; she’s been hunching without meaning to do it, her whole body up around her ears. “I’d started doing all this batshit stuff—stealing, constantly yelling at everybody, crashing my car—and then it was like I couldn’t stop.”
“You were trying to get fired,” Sam says reasonably, but Fiona shakes her head.
“It wasn’t like that,” she confesses. “That makes it sound like I had a plan, like it was calculated, and it wasn’t.Iwasn’t. I was just... flailing.”
“Nobody helped you?”
“Nobody knew,” Fiona points out. “I mean, Thandie suspected. She flat-out asked me once. But I told her she was crazy, and projecting, and that she was the one who had a crush on Jamie to begin with. I pushed her away and I pushed her away until finally—you know. She went away.” She clears her throat. “Anyway. Eventually Ididget fired, obviously, but by then it was like I’d created this whole other person and I didn’t know how to quit being her. Or even if I wanted to quit.” She shrugs, looking out at the empty theater. Remembering how safe it can feel to play a part. “Sometimes I still want to be her, to be completely honest with you. She’s tough.”
“You’retough,” Sam counters. “You’re ferocious. And that fucking guy deserves—”
“Don’t,” Fiona interrupts, holding her hand up.
Sam frowns. “Don’t what?”
“Whatever you’re going to say, just—” She shakes her head. “I didn’t tell you any of this so that you could rescue me or, like, go out and defend my honor.”
“I’ve never met anyone who needed rescuing less than you do,” Sam says immediately. “And your honor is fine. Jamie fucking Hartley’s, on the other hand—” He breaks off. “I cannot believethat asshole has just been glad-handing his way around town this entire time.”
Guilt flares fresh in Fiona’s chest at that—for years, she’s had the sneaking suspicion that in all likelihood glad-handing isn’t the only thing Jamie’s been doing all over town. She thinks again of the high school girls at St. Anne’s, how many of them there were. “I can,” she says quietly.
Sam nods. “Yeah,” is all he says, and after that he’s quiet for a long time. “Well. I’m really glad you told me. And whatever you want to do or not do is the right thing, obviously, which doesn’t mean I don’t want show up at his house and beat the living shit out of him.”
Fiona smiles, she can’t help it. “What’s that called, a Sheboygan How Are Ya?”
“A Green Bay Bear Hug,” Sam says absently.
Fiona nods seriously. “In any case,” she says, “I think have a better idea. But I’m going to need Erin’s number.”
“Oh yeah?” Sam asks, tilting his head to the side. “What for?”
Fiona is just opening her mouth to tell him when the door at the back of the theater opens and Georgie and Pamela hurry in. “We’re canceled, right?” Pamela calls, her face hidden under an enormous black hat. “There’s nothing to do but cancel.”
But Fiona shakes her head, climbing to her feet and standing tall and proud in the middle of the stage. “This is Sam Fox,” she says, reaching for Sam’s hand and pulling him upright. “He’s going to be our new leading man.”
Chapter Twenty
Sam
A week later, Sam stands in the humid dark of the tiny backstage at the Angel City Playhouse, sweating his ass off in a mothball-smelling Goodwill suit. “Can’t I just wear my own clothes?” he begged Fiona again this morning, but she shook her head and told him it was a nonstarter.
“People are going to have a hard enough time forgetting you’re you to begin with,” she pointed out, gesturing across the room at his closet. “If you wear some skinny little Hugo Boss or whatever the fuck expensive getup you’ve got hanging in there, there’s no way they’re ever going to look at anybody else.”
Sam raised his eyebrows. “It’s Tom Ford, actually,” he told her, trying without a lot of luck to bite back his smile. “And I’m sorry, was that you telling me I’m distractingly handsome?”
“No,” Fiona countered immediately, and since she happened to be naked on top of him as she was saying it, Sam didn’t argue. “It was me telling you that I’m the director, and you have to do what I say.”
Sam nodded, swallowing hard as she raked her short nailsthrough the hair at the nape of his neck. “Yes, ma’am,” he promised solemnly, and flipped her onto her back.
Now he takes a deep breath as the stage manager calls two minutes, running his tongue over the back of his teeth. He hasn’t been in a play since he made his stage debut as the Tin Man in his eighth-grade production ofThe Wizard of Oz. He doesn’t think he’s been this nervous since that night, either.
