Birds of California(10)
Jesus Christ. “Why are you here?”
“I was looking for you,” he tells her, and just for one second her heart stops dead inside her chest. “I wanted to talk to you about the reboot.”
Oh. “Oh.” Fiona wills herself not to deflate. Of course that’s what he wants from her. She doesn’t know how she didn’t figure it out as soon as he walked in. Him showing up here sideswiped her somehow, turned her into the kind of naïve, slow-thinking bonehead she was back when she was seventeen. “Well, you could have saved yourself a trip,” she announces, somehow managing to keep her voice even, “because there’s nothing to talk about. I already told them I’m not going to do it.”
“Yeah, I heard.” Sam nods. “How are you?” he asks, after exactly one beat too long. “Sorry, I probably should have led with that.”
“I’m fine.”
“Yeah?” he asks, taking the cap off and running a hand through his thick, messy hair. “That’s good. I know you kind of had a rough go there for a while.”
Fiona barks a laugh. “A rough go?” Just like that she’s suddenly furious: at her dad for being too out of it to run his own business and at Richie for being late to work again, at her own traitorous heart for the way it’s banging around in her rib cage, slamming away against the inside of her chest like an animal trying to get free. At Jamie, always. At Sam most of all. She can feel the anger leaking out of her, bright red and orange. They ought to use it to print banners. “Is that what you heard I had?”
“Sorry,” Sam repeats immediately—palms out, trepidation written all over his pretty face, like he’s afraid she’s going to lunge across the counter and rip his throat out. She’s been arrested for assault on two separate occasions. “I didn’t mean, like—”
“Hey, boss.” That’s Richie coming into the shop in cargo shorts and a Bob Marley T-shirt, an enormous blue Slurpee in one hand. He once told Fiona that he drinks two of them every day, one in the morning and one to wind down before bed. “Everything okay?”
Fiona nods. “Yeah, Richie,” she says, eyes still locked on Sam across the counter. “Everything’s fine.”
Richie hesitates for a moment, gaze darting back and forth between them, then nods and heads back into the workshop. “That your bodyguard?” Sam asks once he’s gone.
“I guard my own body, thank you.” Fiona feels herself sag a little, suddenly exhausted. She’s always imagined this going differently. “Look,” she finally says, “if you don’t need something copied, then you’re just loitering. And we have a policy about that.”
Sam looks at the firmly worded sign on the door, then back at her. “Do you guys have a problem with loiterers?” he asks.
She raises her eyebrows. “Apparently so.”
“Ohhhkay,” he says, digging around in the back pocket of his jeans until he comes up with a crumpled CVS receipt.” Can I get a copy of this, then?”
Fiona doesn’t take it. “The minimum we do is ten at a time.”
Sam rolls his eyes. “Fine,” he agrees. “Ten copies.”
She snatches the receipt from his outstretched hand, sneaking a look at it before she smooths it out against her thigh and lays it facedown on the glass. It’s from this morning; he bought condoms and a hippie-brand energy bar and a VitaminWater in the hangover-buster flavor, thus confirming him as exactly the kind of person Fiona has always assumed he is. They stand there in silence while the machine whirs to life. When she glances up he’s gazing back at her, curious. “You look different,” he observes quietly.
Fiona shrugs at the copier, reflexively wondering if he means good different or bad different and telling herself it doesn’t matter. “You look the same.” It’s a bald-faced lie, obviously. Sam was always cute, with dark hair and a crooked, bashful smile—she remembers watching him in the mirror in the makeup trailer right when the show first started, his eyes closed, his long lashes casting tiny shadows on his cheekbones—but he was barely out of his teens back then, with skinny ribs and acne the makeup girls used to cover with thick pancake every morning. Now he looks like a grown-ass man, all broad chest and tan forearms and a day’s worth of beard that Fiona recognizes from the sleepy Saturday morning shots he posts to his Instagram stories sometimes.
Not that she looks at his Instagram stories.
Well. She certainly doesn’t follow him on Instagram, that’s for damn sure.
“Why don’t you want to do it?” Sam asks as his copies pile up on the tray one after the other, a tidy stack. “The show, I mean.”
“Why do you want to?”
“I asked you first.”
Fiona sighs noisily, turning to face him. She knows that Pam, her old therapist, would remind her that it’s not her responsibility to satisfy every random jabroni’s curiosity about her personal life and mental wellness; still, she finds herself ticking the reasons off on her fingers. “I don’t act anymore,” she informs him. “I don’t have any interest in acting anymore. And not for nothing, but Darcy Sinclair finally stopped waiting outside my house trying to get a photo of me taking a dump on the curb like an animal, or whatever the hell else she thought I was going to do next.”