Fiona barks a laugh. “A rough go?” Just like that she’s suddenly furious: at her dad for being too out of it to run his own business and at Richie for being late to work again, at her own traitorous heart for the way it’s banging around in her rib cage, slamming away against the inside of her chest like an animal trying to get free. At Jamie, always. At Sam most of all. She can feel the anger leaking out of her, bright red and orange. They ought to use it to print banners. “Is that what you heard I had?”
“Sorry,” Sam repeats immediately—palms out, trepidation written all over his pretty face, like he’s afraid she’s going to lunge across the counter and rip his throat out. She’s been arrested for assault on two separate occasions. “I didn’t mean, like—”
“Hey, boss.” That’s Richie coming into the shop in cargo shorts and a Bob Marley T-shirt, an enormous blue Slurpee in one hand. He once told Fiona that he drinks two of them every day, one in the morning and one to wind down before bed. “Everything okay?”
Fiona nods. “Yeah, Richie,” she says, eyes still locked on Sam across the counter. “Everything’s fine.”
Richie hesitates for a moment, gaze darting back and forth between them, then nods and heads back into the workshop. “That your bodyguard?” Sam asks once he’s gone.
“I guard my own body, thank you.” Fiona feels herself sag a little, suddenly exhausted. She’s always imagined this going differently. “Look,” she finally says, “if you don’t need something copied, then you’re just loitering. And we have a policy about that.”
Sam looks at the firmly worded sign on the door, then back at her. “Do you guys have a problem with loiterers?” he asks.
She raises her eyebrows. “Apparently so.”
“Ohhhkay,” he says, digging around in the back pocket of his jeans until he comes up with a crumpled CVS receipt.” Can I get a copy of this, then?”
Fiona doesn’t take it. “The minimum we do is ten at a time.”
Sam rolls his eyes. “Fine,” he agrees. “Ten copies.”
She snatches the receipt from his outstretched hand, sneaking a look at it before she smooths it out against her thigh and lays it facedown on the glass. It’s from this morning; he bought condoms and a hippie-brand energy bar and a VitaminWater in the hangover-buster flavor, thus confirming him as exactly the kind of person Fiona has always assumed he is. They stand there in silence while the machine whirs to life. When she glances up he’s gazing back at her, curious. “You look different,” he observes quietly.
Fiona shrugs at the copier, reflexively wondering if he means good different or bad different and telling herself it doesn’t matter. “You look the same.” It’s a bald-faced lie, obviously. Sam was always cute, with dark hair and a crooked, bashful smile—she remembers watching him in the mirror in the makeup trailer right when the show first started, his eyes closed, his long lashes casting tiny shadows on his cheekbones—but he was barely out of his teens back then, with skinny ribs and acne the makeup girls used to cover with thick pancake every morning. Now he looks like a grown-ass man, all broad chest and tan forearms and a day’s worth of beard that Fiona recognizes from the sleepy Saturday morning shots he posts to his Instagram stories sometimes.
Not that she looks at his Instagram stories.
Well. She certainly doesn’t follow him on Instagram, that’s for damn sure.
“Why don’t you want to do it?” Sam asks as his copies pile up on the tray one after the other, a tidy stack. “The show, I mean.”
“Why do you want to?”
“I asked you first.”
Fiona sighs noisily, turning to face him. She knows that Pam, her old therapist, would remind her that it’s not her responsibility to satisfy every random jabroni’s curiosity about her personal life and mental wellness; still, she finds herself ticking the reasons off on her fingers. “I don’t act anymore,” she informs him. “I don’t have any interest in acting anymore. And not for nothing, but Darcy Sinclair finally stopped waiting outside my house trying to get a photo of me taking a dump on the curb like an animal, or whatever the hell else she thought I was going to do next.”
It’s more than she meant to say—to anyone, but especially to Sam Fox, with his narrow hips and SAG card and perfectly capped teeth—but to her surprise it actually seems to register. “That must have sucked,” he says softly. “The stuff with Darcy’s website, I mean.”
Fiona turns back to the copier, taking longer than necessary to pull the original off the glass. “It wasn’t a big deal,” she lies. “But I’m out.”
“Hey, I hear you,” Sam promises. “I guess I just thought it sounded kind of fun, that’s all.”
Fiona scoffs. “I think that is exactly the opposite of what it would be, actually.”
“Oh, come on!” he protests. “We used to have a good time, right? You and me and Thandie and what’s his name, the little ginger kid who played the cousin.”
“Seriously?” She rolls her eyes. “His name is Max, and we worked with him for five years. God, you really are just as douchey as you look, huh?”
For a second Sam seems stung by that, which is surprising—she’s never thought of him as an actual person capable of having his feelings hurt—but then he blinks and it’s gone. “Douchier, probably,” he admits with a crooked aren’t I charming smile. “But I mean it. I think you should reconsider.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. Here,” Fiona says, handing him the stack of copies across the counter. They’re a little blurry, actually, now that she’s looking. If her dad was here he’d make her redo them.
Sam doesn’t care. “Keep ’em,” he says, waving her off with one hand and pulling his wallet out with the other. “What do I owe you?”
Fiona rings him up, running his debit card through the ancient machine. It’s weird to see his full name printed on the plastic, a strange reminder that this whole time he’s just been out there in the world, charging things. Existing. As she’s handing it back their fingers brush, just for a second. Fiona feels the zing of it all the way up her arm.
“Well,” Sam says finally, tucking his wallet back into his jeans pocket and adjusting his dopey hat on his head. “I had to try, anyway. I’ll let you get back to work.”
“Yeah,” Fiona agrees, though obviously it’s not like anybody else is clamoring for her attention. Still, she doesn’t want to encourage him. At least, she doesn’t think she does. “I should probably . . . do that.”
Sam smiles one more time, easy, generous as a newly crowned king. “It was good to see you, Fee.”
He’s gone before Fiona can decide if was good to see him too.
Chapter Four
Sam
So, okay, Sam thinks as he peels away from the curb outside the print shop. That’s definitely not going to happen, then. Which is fine. He didn’t even want it to. Who wants to play second banana in a reboot of a show they did half a lifetime ago, anyway? He’s trying to move forward here, not back.
He spends the rest of the afternoon getting ready for his audition and trying not to think about Fiona. It was a total mindfuck, seeing her again after all this time. Which isn’t to say she didn’t look good; she looked sort of incredible, actually, dark eyes and sharp cheekbones and those long, tan limbs. She’s put on some weight in a way that makes him think of girls from back home in Wisconsin—the dramatic curves of her body, the roundness of her ass in her jeans.
None of which actually matters, he reminds himself, turning back to his script. The audition is for a half-hour comedy pilot about a pair of newlyweds who have to move back in with the guy’s parents after his startup collapses. It’s cheesy as all hell and has at least two jokes Sam is definitely uncomfortable with, but it’s a lead, so he preps for it with the same attention he’s given to any of the other hundreds of auditions he’s been on since he moved to LA fifteen years ago. He remembers his first day on set for Birds of California, the way his heart stuttered when he saw their names on the doors of their trailers: Sam Fox. Jamie Hartley. Fiona St. James.
Fuck, he should try to stop thinking about Fiona.
He runs through his lines, irons his button-down. Messes with his hair for a while. There’s a tiny part of him that worries it’s thinning, even though he’s only thirty-one. “Hi,” he says once he’s finally satisfied, smiling his most charismatic smile into the mirror and hoping the casting director is more taken with him than some other people he could name. “I’m Sam Fox.”
The audition goes decently, he thinks, though even after all this time he can still never really tell what they’re thinking back there behind the folding table. He’s hopeful, at least. He texts Erin from the car when he’s finished to see if she wants to meet at their usual place and get drinks.
Can’t, she texts back. Dinner with hipster glasses girl.