Birds of California(31)
“Okay,” she says.
Sam blinks at her. “Seriously?” That is . . . not what he was expecting her to say. If she’d said good night, gone outside, and set his house on fire, he would not be more surprised. “You want to stay?”
Fiona’s eyes narrow. “Do you not want me to stay?”
“Of course I want you to stay,” he says, and for once he honestly doesn’t even give a crap about how eager it sounds. “That’s why I asked.”
“I’m not going to have sex with you,” she reminds him. “This isn’t some cute thing where I’m playing hard to get but I secretly want you to convince me to—”
“Fiona,” he interrupts, because he likes to think that fundamentally he’s not a piece of shit, “I know.”
She studies him hard for another long second, like she’s looking for the catch, and he doesn’t know what she sees in his face, but it must satisfy her, because she nods again. “Okay,” she says, sounding more sure about it this time. “I’ll stay.”
Sam feels his whole body relax. It’s the feeling of swerving just in time to avoid hitting another car or making it to your seat just before the plane door closes, the flight attendant floating by to offer you a drink. “Okay,” he echoes, trying not to smile. “Good.”
Fiona relaxes, too, her shoulders dropping as she perches on the arm of the sofa. “We have to watch serial killer documentaries,” she informs him. “That’s what I watch to fall asleep.”
Sam laughs, then realizes she’s not kidding. “Wait,” he says, “really?”
Fiona frowns. “Look, I can go,” she says immediately, gesturing toward the door. “You’re the one who—”
“No no no,” Sam says again, holding both hands up in surrender. “Have it your way. You’re missing out, though. Usually when girls sleep over I read to them by candlelight from The Alchemist.”
Fiona laughs.
She pads down the hallway behind him, hovering barefoot in the doorway as he smooths the blankets over his unmade bed. Once they’re in he turns off the light and opens up his laptop, then realizes as the screen blinks to life that he hasn’t used it since the other night: sure enough, the cartoon boobs from the porn site are still bouncing merrily away. “Friend of yours?” Fiona asks, her voice completely even.
“I read it for the articles,” he shoots back, clicking over to Netflix. “So, is one serial killer documentary as good as another? Or do you have, like, a greatest hits list you like to work from?”
Fiona smiles magnanimously. “You can pick.”
In the end they watch some grisly fucking thing about the Mansons—a cheesy sixties rock score played over shot after shot of Sharon Tate’s yellow hair and round, pregnant belly. Sam tries not to flinch. He likes a slasher flick as much as the next guy, but true crime has always weirded him out—the luridness of it, he guesses, low-end producers making money off the worst day of other people’s lives.
Also, it always makes him a little nervous he’s about to get serial murdered.
Still, he likes having Fiona propped up on one elbow beside him, the ends of her long hair just brushing his arm. It’s not like he’s trying to look or anything, but the collar of her tank top gapes open a little so he can see the tops of her breasts out of the corner of his eye, a handful of freckles scattered across her chest like glitter. He can feel the heat radiating off her skin. Something about the whole setup has Sam afraid to move too much, like how his mom always made Adam and him hold still when deer showed up in their yard while they were playing football. He doesn’t want to scare her away.
“Okay,” he says finally, grimacing as the narrator reports the findings of Sharon Tate’s autopsy in excruciatingly minute detail. “Can we turn this off, please?”
Fiona sighs loudly, flopping over onto her back. “I guess,” she agrees. “But if I wind up lying awake all night it’s your fault.”
Sam looks at her pointedly. “I might say the same thing to you, cutie-pie.”
In any case, she’s passed out what feels like two seconds later—hogging all the blankets, her chilly feet brushing his underneath the sheets. Sam looks over at her, squinting to try and see her in the darkness. The sound of her breathing is the last thing he hears before he falls asleep.
Chapter Nine
Fiona
The first thing Fiona registers when she wakes up the following morning is how nice the sheets are, crisp white cotton percale with what must be a thread count in the thousands.
The second thing she registers is that she’s lying in Sam Fox’s bed.
With Sam Fox.
Shit.
He’s still sleeping, thank fuck, sacked out on the mattress beside her with one tanned, muscled arm slung over his face—lean and bare-chested, the sun streaming through the trees outside his bedroom window casting patterns of shadow and light across his smooth, unblemished skin.
Fiona pushes the covers back and sits up as quietly as possible so she doesn’t wake him, lifting a careful hand to her mouth. Her lips feel swollen and itchy, bruised in a good way. Fiona shivers. She hasn’t kissed anyone like that in—she doesn’t know if she’s ever kissed anyone like that, actually. Kissing Sam felt like how she imagines it would have been to make out in someone’s car in high school: like she physically couldn’t get enough of him, like all this time there was a secret string of explosives rigged inside her body and he methodically set about tripping every single one. She curls her toes against the plush shag of the area rug and lets herself stare at him for a minute, the jut of his hip bones and the trail of dark hair beneath his navel and his stupid perfect pectoral muscles, the kind you only get if you’re a goober who goes to the gym every day and is obsessed with his own physique.