She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and hoped he didn’t notice.
“I think,” Elliot said after another long beat, “that I don’t really know you anymore, Bird. So how can I even begin to answer?”
15
ELLIOT
Elliot wished thathe had answered Birdie differently. All it would have taken was a quick “of course you’re not full of shit, Bird, you’re the girl I’ve always loved” to placate her, to dial down the temperature, but, of course, he’d been a bumbling idiot and been honest. They were in his entryway, and Birdie was still sniffling, her posture in a slouch, her chin quaking as if tears were both imminent and unpredictable. Elliot had no problem with small white lies nearly all the time. What about Birdie made it impossible for him?
He took a step inside, glanced around his apartment, and tried to view the place from Birdie’s perspective. He was rarely home, and when he was, décor was not a priority. He sometimes brought women back here, true, but the lights were always low, and they spent most of the time in the bedroom, so he didn’t have to apologize for the couch whose foot had broken so it sat lopsided, for the rug that he had spilled coffee on two years back and never bothered to replace.
Birdie plopped at his kitchen counter, with her face in herhands, moaning. Both their phones had buzzed with a new article:IS BIRDIE ROBINSON BAD FOR WOMEN AND WHY IS THE ANSWER YES?Elliot knew the reporter vaguely—they’d had drinks at some press event years back—and honestly, she was smart and pithy and didn’t take shots below the belt, so he couldn’t blame Birdie for moaning.
“Am I bad for women,am I bad for women?” She raised her face, which was ruddy and also simultaneously waxy and pale, and cried, “Can’t you do something about this? How quickly can you write your article saying that they have it all wrong? That you were there too?”
He plunked down next to her on a wobbly stool and rested his hand on her back. He felt her flinch, then soften, so he left his palm there, wondering if she felt the same buzz of electricity that he did.No, no, no. What was wrong with him?Of course she didn’t, and this wasn’t the time. Birdie was in trouble, so why did it feel like there was a fire brewing in him that was going to run wild, too hot to put out when it eventually sparked. Besides, this wasn’t one of her romantic comedies where the good guy who made poor decisions was granted a second chance.
Birdie pulled up the hood of that god-awful neon sweatshirt and tugged the cord, as if she wanted to disappear.
“Hey,” he said. “Don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?”
“Try to make yourself invisible.”
“In this thing, that’s impossible,” she replied. Then she turned toward him with her red-rimmed eyes. “I really think Andie was trying to make sure that I was visible from space. This sweatshirt is like a tracking device.”
“Maybe that’s where we went wrong tonight. The Target hoody.”
“Let’s blame Andie,” Birdie sniffed.
“Absolutely,” Elliot said. “This is all her fault.”
Birdie emitted a bark of a sad laugh, then sighed. “I really can’t believe that in trying to do the right thing in telling Sebastian Carol to fuck right off, I’ve been branded the worst person alive.”
“Well, surely you’re notthe worstperson alive,” Elliot said. “There are dictators out there, you know?”
“So one step below a dictator,” Birdie said.
“Well, also there are serial murderers,” he offered.
“So not as bad as aDatelineepisode,” she said. “Well, thank god. That’s a relief.”
“I never said that,” he replied. “SomeDatelineepisodes have killers you root for anyway.”
She curled her hand into a fist and punched his left shoulder.
“Ow,” he said. “That hurt!”
“I meant it to,” she said. “Why else would someone punch you if not to make it hurt?”
Elliot made a show of massaging his shoulder, which wasn’t all that painful, but he liked the way they were bantering, like maybe he was distracting her from her phone, which hadn’t stopped vibrating, like maybe he was distracting himself from writing an article about the Chez Nous massacre.
“Can I ask you something?” he said.
“I already told you, you can ask me anything you like.”
“Right.” Elliot nodded. She had said that. “I guess, well, this isn’t so much a question but something that I don’t quite understand. If Sebastian was so awful, why did you agree to work with him? He didn’t...” Elliot felt his anger rise as he worked up the nerve to ask her the next part. “He didn’t do anything to you, right? Put his hands on you?” His blood was at a low simmer, just envisioning it.
