Birds of California(47)
“Come over,” is what comes out.
Fiona raises one eyebrow, the possibility of it unspooling between them like the first day of summer. “Are you going to promise not to put a move on me again?”
“No,” Sam says quietly.
Fiona gazes at him for a long minute. Then she nods. “Okay,” she says. She scoops her keys up off the hood of the car, metal glinting in the setting sun. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Thirteen
Fiona
Sam takes her hand as they climb the steps to his apartment, the skin all over her arms and back prickling at the contact, his thumb just grazing the underside of her wrist. She smells eucalyptus and jasmine and something else, a nighttime-in-Los-Angeles kind of smell that blows hot out of the desert. One of his neighbors is having a party and she can hear the sound of people laughing as Nancy Wilson caterwauls away.
“Do you want a drink?” he asks, once they’re inside.
Fiona shakes her head. As soon as they came in here she gravitated toward the bookcase, her back bumping gently against the shelves. “Not particularly,” she says.
Both of them are quiet for a minute. Fiona can hear the faucet dripping in the kitchen sink. She wants to say, I haven’t had sex with nearly as many people as everyone thinks I have. She wants to suggest they put on Wives with Knives.
Sam looks at her across the living room. “Shit,” he says, rubbing a hand over the back of his head and smiling a little sheepishly. “I don’t know why I’m nervous right now.”
Fiona shrugs. “It’s normal to be nervous your first time,” she manages.
Sam snorts. “Fuck you,” he says, “get over here,” only then he’s the one to close the distance between them and kiss her, and all at once Fiona forgets to be tense.
She wraps her arms around him, her fingertips working through the soft, dark hair at the nape of his neck. He’s starting to smell familiar, his soap and his shampoo and his skin. “Hi,” he mumbles against her mouth, his hands creeping up underneath her shirt as he turns them around and walks her backward down the narrow hallway.
“Hi yourself.” The bedroom is at the back of the apartment, a triptych of arty minimalist movie posters framed on the far wall and the dense branches of a fig tree visible through the window above the dresser. The wall behind the bed is painted a close, moody gray. “I’ve been thinking about your sheets for two days,” Fiona confesses, the backs of her knees bumping the edge of his bed.
“My sheets?” he asks, lifting his head to look at her. “That’s it?”
“Yes,” she says immediately, pushing aside the collar of his T-shirt so she can bite at the hard ridge of bone there. “You were never actually in them.”
Sam nods like he expected about as much. “Makes sense,” he says, nudging at her with his hips and chest until she sits down hard on the mattress. “I can’t land a fucking part to save my life right now.”
Fiona smiles, sliding her hands under his shirt and across his stomach, feeling the muscles flex under her hands. He’s built like a Ken doll, all slopes and sharp curves, and when she runs her nail across the jut of his hip bone she feels his whole body shudder. “Poor you,” she says.
“Poor me,” Sam agrees. He gets one knee up on the bed beside her, kissing her back into the pillows and tugging her T-shirt up over her head. He goes to work on her bra next, flicking the clasp open with two fingers and pulling the straps down her arms, then sits up to gaze at her in the half dark.
“You,” he says slowly, reaching out to touch her with one careful finger. “Are. Really pretty.”
Fiona makes a face, feeling her cheeks get warm. “You don’t have to flatter me,” she tells him, fighting the ridiculous urge to cross her arms across her chest. It’s not that she doesn’t want him to look at her, exactly. It’s more like she’s scared of how much she likes it when he does. “I’m going to sleep with you either way.”
But Sam isn’t laughing. “I mean it,” he says, boosting himself up into a kneel and slinging one leg over her hips, looming a little. He’s still wearing all of his clothes. “You can insult me all you want, that’s fine, I like that. But you are.”
Fiona swallows hard. “Not as pretty as you,” she says. “Heart Surgeon, et cetera.”
Sam makes a face like he’s getting exasperated and for a moment she’s worried she pushed him too far, that he’s going to stop what he’s doing on account of her shitty attitude, so she arches her back underneath him, hooking one leg around his and pulling at his shoulders until he drops all the way down on top of her, close enough to grind against. Sam groans, and she smiles a secret smile over his shoulder.
After that it feels like it’s happening in flashes: She wrestles his shirt off, tossing it onto the rug. Sam peels her shorts down her legs. It’s like he knows instinctively how to touch her, thumbing along the undersides of her breasts and stroking the creases of her elbows, nipping his way down her ribs until her skin feels tight and hot and her whole body is humming. When he hooks his finger in the elastic of her underwear, letting it snap gently back against her hip bone, it’s all she can do not to gasp.
Still: “Sam.” She’s about to tell him he doesn’t have to do that, either, but Sam must know it’s coming because he drops his forehead against the lowermost part of her stomach, the day’s worth of beard on his face scratching against the sensitive skin of her inner thigh.