“Okay,” she said from the bathroom.
“You’re ready?” he asked.
“Not at all,” she replied. “Please note that I am doing all of this against my will.”
“Birdie, I can’t think of a single thing you’ve ever done against your will.” He flipped off the lights and took a long look around like he could be forgetting something.
“Hostage video, Exhibit A.”
“Apology video,” he corrected. “And point taken.” Elliot thought of the article he’d filed with Francesca just an hour ago. How he’d tried to report objectively while still making Birdie shine. He couldn’t do all that much to salvage her humiliation in today’s story, and he knew it, so he mostly stuck to factual reporting. Still, it was something.
He closed his apartment door behind him and dead-bolted the lock, just in case Jaren got any ideas about breaking in under the guise of investigative reporting, and Birdie jabbed the elevator button down to the garage.
The elevator doors opened quickly, she stepped in, and Elliot followed, acutely aware of how closely they were standing, as if he could feel her body heat. Maybe hecouldfeel her body heat. Maybe the only thing he wanted in the world was to feel her body heat.
“Look.” Birdie sighed. “All I’m saying is that I’m a sinking ship. I suggest you jump while you still can.”
He said nothing because she wasn’t wrong, and she said nothing because she knew that she wasn’t wrong. That’s how it had always been between them. One hundred percent honest until it became too difficult to speak the truth.
But he wasn’t jumping, he knew. If she wanted him gone, she was going to have to march him down a plank and push.
18
BIRDIE
If Birdie hadbeen reading about anyone other than herself, she would have thought that Elliot was an outstanding writer. As it was, he was indeed an outstanding writer, but since the article outlined her humiliations from the past evening, she could not bring herself to compliment him. They were cruising through the South Bay now, having managed to eke out a narrow escape from Jaren—Birdie wondered, what sort of name was Jaren?—and she was poring back over every sentence, every nuance.
Elliot kept glancing over at her from the driver’s seat. He’d tried to soften the blows, she could tell. He didn’t mention how Ian had screeched at her to never set foot in Chez Nous again, how he didn’t care if she made ten million a movie (she held her tongue on her actual fee), how he would have been entirelywonderfulif he never had to see her face on another billboard again. How he’d thought her last movie with “one of the Chrises” was a pile of dog shit (that was a direct quote), how it was beyond him that anyone thought she could be the lovable girl from across the street with the heart of gold.
So that was nice of Elliot. To strike all that.
He cleared his throat. “Francesca is super happy. Evidently, it’s getting record traffic, and it’s only been up for an hour.”
“Oh, well, if Francesca is happy,” Birdie said.
“Have you checked your notifications?” he asked, ignoring her tone. “Facebook? Instagram? Email? Text? Twitter?” She flopped her shoulders. “Birdie, I promise I’m on your side here. This might take a few bites of the apple. Give me a chance to build my case.”
Birdie didn’t reply. Her hand found its way to the buttons on Elliot’s oxford shirt, and she closed it up to her neck. She liked how it felt, to be enveloped in his things, but also, she was too raw, too vulnerable, to feel protected by it.
“You don’t believe me?” he asked.
“I’m not in a position these days to trust anyone,” she said.
“Anyone... or me?” he asked.
Birdie’s heart accelerated. She knew it would probably be prudent to discuss their one night together, to dig in and pull it up from the roots, but she also firmly, surely, certainly didnotwant to discuss anything about it. It would be so much less mortifying if they just let it all go unspoken, that she had been pie-in-the-sky in love with him, and still, she hadn’t been anything more than another woman in another bed on another night for him. That still, he left.
“Not just you,” she said finally, and hoped he didn’t notice the burn in her cheeks, though Elliot noticed everything. “I mean, obviously, everyone. The studio that told me to work with Sebastian, then didn’t have my back. Imani and Sydney, who told me to do the apology video, then, well, look at how that went. Jesus, one night home, and even Nelson Pratt is now my mortal enemy.”
“I think we can agree that Nelson Pratt is a dweebish knob.”
“A knob?”
“Simon taught me that,” he said, as if bringing up Simon was a way to remind her of their mission here. That Elliot was literally steering her toward a reunion with someone else. Birdie’s gut churned with something like emotional acid at her naivete, that she’d run her hands up his spine last night, that part of her probably hoped he’d roll over and kiss her. Not probably. Definitely. Birdie didn’t know what she wanted from Elliot any more than she knew what she wanted out of this whole mission. She’d told herself it was simply for professional redemption, but seeing Ian changed something about that. Maybe it was too simplistic, that it could rebuild her in the public’s eyes. Maybe she could hope for something more profound. It wasn’t that she needed a man or a husband or a boyfriend. But a partner, that sounded nice. Someone to call after bruising days, someone to come home to instead of her empty king-sized bed and a phone full of work emails. Someone who understood her in the moments between action and cut. Someone who looked at her the way Elliot used to in carpool when they were alone.
“But me,” Elliot asked again. “You still don’t trust me? I promise you, you’ll never have a reason not to, not with work, not with this.”
Not with work. Not with this.
