Birds of California(28)

“The one where we what, exactly?” Sam tilts his face to the side. He’s fucking with her, obviously. He just wants to see if she’ll say it. He remembers standing outside in the alley beside her, the cigarette burning down between his fingers and the safety light catching the neon streak in her hair.

Fiona shakes her head, popping the last fry into her mouth and gathering up their garbage. “Okay, you know what?” she says. “Fuck you.”

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding. I remember.” He smiles. “No reason to get defensive just because I was your first kiss.”

Fiona scoffs. “Oh, is that what you think?”

Sam raises his eyebrows. “Was I not?”

“I was nineteen, asshole.”

“No shame in being a late bloomer.” Sam grins. “Who was your first kiss, then?” he asks, surprised to find he’s actually curious. His first kiss was his neighbor Mallory back in Wisconsin, which he would tell Fiona if she seemed at all interested, which she does not. She did something different with her hair tonight, he can’t help but notice. When she walked into the bar he did an actual double take—her tan shoulders and the sharp cliffs of her collarbone, the hourglass curve of her body—then purposely talked to his friend Anto for an extra two minutes before he went over to her so that he wouldn’t look eager and pathetic and like he was waiting for her to show up, which he had been. His mom would slap his face if she knew that.

Fiona stuffs the last of their trash into the paper bag, standing up and waving to the girls across the patio. “Come on,” is all she says.

The grease and the sugar went a long way toward sobering him up, but Fiona insists on driving him home anyway, leaning hard on the gas as they cruise down Fountain in the balmy purple night. Sam keeps glancing over at her, her face half-light and half-shadow in the pale green glow of the dashboard. Her cheekbones are very sharp.

“What?” she asks, the third time he does it.

“Nothing,” he says, fishing his phone out of his pocket and scrolling industriously. Fiona hums a quiet sound of disbelief in reply.

“Here we are, sweet pea,” she says when she pulls up to the curb underneath the massive jacaranda tree outside his building. Back in Milwaukee, Sam imagined all apartments in LA looked like this, a two-story U-shaped stucco situation with a courtyard at its center, a fountain burbling quietly away. Then he got here and spent ten years living in a series of particleboard dumps. “I’m going to call a car.”

As she reaches for her purse on the dashboard, Sam gets a whiff of her hair—vanilla and sandalwood. “Do you want to come in?” he hears himself ask.

Fiona laughs out loud. “No.”

Sam rolls his eyes. It’s not like he’s dying for her to take him up on the offer or anything, but he doesn’t know what there is to sound quite so incredulous about. “What do you think, I’m going to put a move on you?” he asks, leaning back against the passenger side window. “I’m not going to put a move on you.”

“Oh, right,” Fiona says, “you just want me to come in so you can show me your record collection.”

“I don’t have a record collection,” he says. Then, before he can think better of it: “Do you want me to put a move on you?”

Fiona laughs again. “You got me,” she says with a twist of her lips. “It was literally all I could think about on the ride over here.”

Sam lifts an eyebrow. “Really?” he asks, though of course he knows she’s just giving him shit. “What did you think?”

“I—” That flusters her, Sam can tell, which was the point, but it has the unintended consequence of flustering him a little, too. He imagines it in high definition before he can stop himself: his hands on the ladder of her rib cage, her soft-looking mouth on his jaw. Neither one of them says anything for a full second too long.

Fiona pulls it together first. “I think I probably should have made you get an STD test before I even got in the car,” she says finally, but it’s weak as far as insults go, and before he can answer she’s sighing theatrically, opening the door, and climbing out into the warm, humid night.

“Fine,” she announces imperiously, “one drink.”

Sam smiles.

Sam’s apartment is on the second floor, up an outdoor staircase laid with painted terra-cotta tile in reds and greens and yellows. Bright pink snapdragons vine along the wrought iron railing lining the catwalk. He moved in here as soon as The Heart Surgeon pilot got picked up, the same week he leased the Tesla. A couple of years in this place, he thought, then a house with a view in Laurel Canyon, the ghost of Mama Cass wandering around humming to herself early in the mornings. Then—once he finally broke out in movies like Russ keeps saying he’s going to—a mansion in the Palisades, next door to Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn.

That was the plan, anyway.

For now he’ll be lucky if he can pay next month’s rent.

Sam unlocks the heavy wooden door and flicks on the lights in the foyer, heading straight for the bar cart in the living room. He grabs two glasses and doubles back toward the kitchen for ice. “I have tequila,” he calls over his shoulder. He feels nervous all of a sudden, though he isn’t entirely sure why. “You want a lime?”

“Um, sure,” Fiona calls back, though he gets the impression she isn’t really listening. Sure enough, a moment later: “This is your place?” she asks, the surprise audible in her voice. “This is . . . nice.”