Birds of California(43)
“Can you not be full of shit for one second?” Erin asks, setting her glass down. “Like, now that I’m actually looking at your face I’m realizing I’ve been kind of an asshole about the whole thing, so I probably owe you an apology, but putting that aside for a minute, it doesn’t have to be some bullshit game of who can be the coolest guy in Hollywood. If you like her, which you clearly do, and she’s going through a thing, which”—she gestures at the TV—“shit, she clearly is, then what are you doing sitting here with me? Go be a decent human person and make sure she’s okay.”
“It’s not—” Sam breaks off. “I mean, we aren’t—” He sighs. “She’s not taking my calls, okay? I tried her last night, and again this morning, but she doesn’t want to talk to me. Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“Yes, actually.” Erin smiles, reaching for her glass again before kicking him gently underneath the bar. “I am sorry, for the record. I wouldn’t have been so cavalier if I knew it was, like, a real thing.”
“It’s not,” Sam says reflexively. “But maybe it could be?” He drops his head back. “I don’t fucking know.”
“Liar,” Erin says cheerfully. Sam orders another beer.
When he gets home there’s a residuals check waiting for him from a Hallmark movie he did a couple of Christmases ago, which cheers him up for a minute, though after he pays down his credit card enough to be able to use it he’s basically right back where he started. Sam frowns. He hasn’t been this broke since he was living with Erin, doing push-ups on the nasty carpet in their tiny apartment and splurging on ten-dollar haircuts. He can’t believe he let himself wind up here again.
He walks around the apartment for a while. He eats half a bag of baby carrots standing up at the sink. He thinks about taking a nap, but he can’t settle, even after he jerks off and watches two episodes of an afternoon court show and checks to see if maybe Russ emailed him with news about the firefighter thing, which he has not. He pulls up Fiona’s video one more time. He remembers a night back in the third or fourth season of Birds, a big party at a fancy hotel out in Malibu—the network threw one every year the week of the Television Critics Association press tour, when everyone came out to LA to watch next season’s pilots and take corny pictures of themselves in front of the Hollywood sign. The party was always black tie, candles floating in the pool and tuxedoed waiters scurrying by balancing trays of champagne and canapés. Thandie and Fiona used to call it the Sexless Prom.
Attendance, while not strictly mandatory, was strongly encouraged, and though Sam had dutifully shown up every year he’d been on the show, the whole thing never got less weird to him, all the big Family Network names mingling together: the second lead from a vaguely racist period piece about a feisty pioneer nurse chatting up the host of a morning talk show that was best known for showcasing new and novel recipes for ground beef every single day. He was angling for a little bit of face time with the star of a marquee drama about a small-town sheriff—the guy had just booked a role in a Coen Brothers movie, and Sam wanted to know how—when he spotted Fiona standing near the edge of the pool talking to a couple of older women from one of the executive teams, clutching a rocks glass in one hand and tiny appetizer plate piled with a mountain of fruit from the cheese board in the other. Judging by the expression on her face, she was seriously considering drowning herself in the shallow end.
“There you are,” Sam said, striding over and swinging an arm around her shoulders before he quite knew he was going to do it. “I’ve been looking for you. We’re all getting in the photo booth.” He grinned his most winsome grin at the executives. “Sorry, ladies. Need to find this gal a feather boa and some novelty sunglasses, stat.”
“What the hell?” Fiona asked once they were alone, sitting down hard on the edge of a massive stone planter overflowing with tropical flowers and taking a sip of her drink. “How do you know I wasn’t dying to talk to those women?”
Sam raised his eyebrows. “Were you?”
“No,” she admitted. She was wearing a short, fringe-y dress and sky-high heels, a bunch of chunky rings on her fingers. Also, though she was holding it together decently well—not to mention the fact that she was only eighteen—he was pretty sure she was shit-faced. She’d started showing up on the gossip sites by then, a few dicey scenes at clubs in West Hollywood and a well-publicized fling with a two-bit pop star whose biggest hit featured a chorus that consisted entirely of the words my junk, my junk repeated over and over. Sam had asked Thandie about it when they’d broken up, just casually, in response to which Thandie had fixed him with an extremely dubious look and told him that if he was interested in Fiona’s personal life for any particular reason, he could damn well ask Fiona about it. “But I could have been.”
“You could have been,” he agreed, “and I apologize.”
“I forgive you,” she said politely.
“Magnanimous,” Sam teased, plucking a grape from her plate. He wasn’t interested in Fiona’s personal life for any particular reason, for the record. He’d just been curious, that was all. “Worried about getting scurvy?” he asked, nodding down at the pile of fruit.
“Cute.” Fiona rolled her eyes, fingers brushing his as she picked up a strawberry and popped it into her mouth. “I’m on a diet, technically.”