Birds of California(73)

She’s quiet for a moment longer, rubbing her thumb back and forth over a fray at the hem of her jeans. “I was a late bloomer,” she finally tells him. “But you weren’t my first kiss.”

Sam looks at her curiously. “Okay . . .” he says, shaking his head like he thinks she’s setting him up for some kind of riddle. “Who was your first kiss?”

“Jamie Hartley.”

For a too-long beat Sam just stares at her like she’s fried his motherboard, like his brain is glitching and he needs to unplug himself and wait thirty seconds to reconnect. “I—what?” he finally says.

Fiona hesitates, not particularly wanting to repeat it. Makes herself say it again. “Jamie Hartley was my first kiss.”

“Jamie Hartley is, like, pushing fifty years old.”

“Is he?” Fiona barks another laugh, dry and brittle. “No shit, Sam.”

And—yeah. He gets it this time. Fiona watches as everything reshuffles in his head like those Magic Eye books Claudia used to like when she was a kid—how suddenly he can see the secret picture hidden inside what happened that day at the UBC lot. Inside what happened when she heard him on the phone the other morning.

Inside what happened at the end of her career.

“Fuck,” he says slowly, reaching back and running a rough hand over the back of his head, yanking a little at his hair. “I—fuck, Fiona.”

“Yeah,” Fiona agrees, lips twisting; she’s trying to sound tough and nonchalant about it all but her voice wobbles, dangerous. “That too.”

Sam doesn’t say anything for a moment. Fiona keeps her eyes on her sneakers, wanting to postpone the inevitability of whatever blame or incredulity or disgust she’s going to see in his expression, but when she finally pulls herself together and glances over in his direction the only thing she finds on his face is—

“So first of all, you were wrong,” Sam says quietly. He catches her gaze and holds it, steady on. “I still love you. I still don’t need to qualify it. And I am really, really fucking sorry that happened.”

Fiona blinks. She thought she was prepared for every possible reaction on his part—that by now she’d lost the ability to be surprised—but somehow she didn’t account for this one. “I could have said no,” she points out, worried that maybe he isn’t understanding. “I knew it was wrong, I knew it was messed up. I wasn’t so divorced from reality that when he said Don’t tell anyone I thought he was, like, protecting our true and abiding love. I could have said no. And I didn’t. Not at first.”

“Are you kidding me?” Right away, Sam shakes his head. “You were, what, seventeen? Eighteen? If it happened to your sister, would you say, Well, you didn’t say no?”

“Of course not,” Fiona says immediately, the thought of Claudia like a bucket of ice water dumped directly over her head. “That’s different.”

“How is it different?”

“It’s just different, Sam!” She scrubs a hand over her face. Of course she knows it isn’t different, not really. But there’s an entire world of shame and weirdness between knowing something intellectually and feeling it in her cells. “Anyway. It went on for . . . a while. And I didn’t know how to tell him I wanted him to stop. So instead I told him I wanted to quit the show.”

Sam raises his eyebrows. “And I bet he was just falling all over himself to let you out of your contract.”

“He fully laughed at me,” Fiona remembers, her cheeks warming with old embarrassment. She hasn’t let herself think about it in a long time. “So then I told my parents I wanted to quit, but I had already kind of started acting like a freak by then—”

“Understandable,” Sam points out.

“I mean, sure,” Fiona allows, “but they were already getting tired of my bullshit. My mom especially, even though she was up in Seattle by then. She told me I’d signed a contract, I’d made a choice. I didn’t have to re-sign if I didn’t want to. But I had to see it through until then.”

Sam winces. “So that was—”

“Right around the end of your last season, yeah,” Fiona says. She remembers the night of the cast party: Sam finding her hand and pulling her closer, his warm smile pressed against hers. How just for a moment he’d made her feel like a normal person. How for one moment she’d been able to forget.

“I just kind of lost it after that,” she says now, making a conscious effort to drop her aching shoulders; she’s been hunching without meaning to do it, her whole body up around her ears. “I’d started doing all this batshit stuff—stealing, constantly yelling at everybody, crashing my car—and then it was like I couldn’t stop.”

“You were trying to get fired,” Sam says reasonably, but Fiona shakes her head.

“It wasn’t like that,” she confesses. “That makes it sound like I had a plan, like it was calculated, and it wasn’t. I wasn’t. I was just . . . flailing.”

“Nobody helped you?”

“Nobody knew,” Fiona points out. “I mean, Thandie suspected. She flat-out asked me once. But I told her she was crazy, and projecting, and that she was the one who had a crush on Jamie to begin with. I pushed her away and I pushed her away until finally—you know. She went away.” She clears her throat. “Anyway. Eventually I did get fired, obviously, but by then it was like I’d created this whole other person and I didn’t know how to quit being her. Or even if I wanted to quit.” She shrugs, looking out at the empty theater. Remembering how safe it can feel to play a part. “Sometimes I still want to be her, to be completely honest with you. She’s tough.”