“Do you want to hear if Carter regrets it or do you want to argue with me over if my tone offends you?” he asked.
“Do I want to argue with you... over if your toneoffendsme?” Birdie raised her voice. “Is that supposed to be an olive branch over your slightly less offensive tone?”
She was racing down the winding Silver Lake roads, knowing they had a limited window before her anonymity ran out, and ran straight through a stop sign. In her defense, she didn’t see the mini Cooper that slammed on its brakes just before it nearly T-boned into the side of the RV, and Elliot clutched his armrests and shouted, “Holy shit! I’ve had safer drives in Afghanistan!” which Birdie took as a reminder that he was doing her a favor here. Which she hadn’t asked for. Or maybe she had. But she didn’t want it to feel like she owed him at all.
She finally hit Sunset Boulevard and crossed two lanes at once aiming for the freeway exit.
“Where are you even going?” Elliot bleated. “Why are you driving like we’ve robbed a bank? What exactly did you do in the thirty minutes that I was gone?”
Birdie didn’t know herself, so she certainly didn’t want to explain herself to Elliot. She only knew that if Carter’s neighbor posted a photo of her behind the wheel of Mona’s Winnebago, then she really wouldn’t have any peace, and yes, she knew that ostensibly she had embarked on this endeavor to drum up the very publicity she was now fleeing—but, as she would have said to Mona when she forced her into playing hooky for a day,Life comes at you fast.
“I’m going home,” she said, which she hadn’t even meant to say, but there it was.
“To New York? You’re driving us back to New York in this thing?”
As if on cue, the motor let out a belch, and Birdie held her breath wondering if the RV was going to blow. Maybe that wasjust something that happened in movies, but she couldn’t be sure, having never driven such a monstrosity, much less having never driven a monstrosity with an engine that sounded like it last had a tune-up when she was still in diapers.
“Not to New York,” Birdie said. “Barton.”
“So Barton is now home? Interesting,” he replied.
“What’s that supposed to—” Birdie hissed, then stopped herself. She knew exactly what it was supposed to mean. That she only fled to Barton when it was convenient. That she only considered it home when it was on her terms. She didn’t know why Elliot was judging. He wasn’t all that different. She thwacked her blinker and lunged over one more lane, just narrowly missing a Tesla, toward the ramp to the freeway. She knew that Elliot was swallowing whatever he wanted to say about her driving, which—and she knew this wasn’t great, okay?—made her drive even more erratically. He was grunting and hemming and hawing and blowing air out of his nose until, finally, they were through the slug of traffic on the ramp and into the slug of traffic on the four-lane highway.
They sat there, unmoving, and occasionally inching forward, in silence. Birdie could feel his irritation radiating off him, and she hoped that he could intuit her own. She didn’t even know what she was angry with, but it was like an acting exercise from her early days: you mirrored the emotion of the partner in front of you, and eventually “hello” became “hello,” which became “HELLO,” and suddenly you were screamingHELLOin a stew of rage that hadn’t been there at the start.
The sun was starting to dip in the sky when Elliot sighed, fidgeted, and sighed again.
Finally, he asked, “Who was the other guy who was around when you were with Carter?”
“What?” She felt her breath quicken. She didn’t know what Carter had said, but she wasn’t expecting this. “I never cheated on Carter.” Was this why Elliot was angry? “And besides, who are you to point fingers about juggling?”
“I didn’t say anything about cheating.” He was using his stupid reporter voice again. “And I didn’t ask anything about juggling. So you don’t get to make this about me.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said. She did, though.
“What is it that you’re not telling me?”
“Elliot, I have been an open book!” She was overcorrecting, going too dramatic. She knew this would be the director’s note—We need you to pare it back about ten degrees, Birdie, let’s go again on one—but she couldn’t help herself.
“Then why is Carter dropping blind items, why is Carter telling me that you were never his because there was always someone else?” His voice was no longer level. Birdie would have been turned on if she weren’t genuinely irritated about what he’d intimated previously, that he was the one with the clean track record, that he was the one who was wholly honest, completely forthcoming.
The windows were down, and Birdie knew that their voices were carrying in the clog of traffic. She needed to be more prudent; it was only a matter of time before someone heard her, spotted her, called the media. It was so exhausting, never having anything for herself. She reached for his baseball hat on the dashboard and slapped it on her head.
“You don’t get to do that,” he said. “Hide.”
“I’m not hiding from you,” she said. Though that could have been it too.
“Thenwho?” he shouted. “How am I expected to write this story if you’re not being honest with me?”
Birdie didn’t want to say it. She wanted him to ask it. She wanted him to say:Was it me? Who you were pining over?Just so she could have the satisfaction of sayingno. Even if that wasn’t entirely true. Deep down, she had been pining for him nearly her whole life. But she found that in the heat of the moment, she wanted to cut him, bruise him, hurt him so that he knew what it felt like.
Because seven years later, he still had the power to take her breath away.
23
ELLIOT
Elliot wanted totell Birdie to slow down, that the last thing they needed was to have some overzealous cop pull over a rickety motor home and discover that the most famous actress in the world was flying up the 405, but it had been an hour, and they still weren’t speaking. And he wasn’t going to be the first one to break, even though it wasn’t a tough ask for him to apologize. But if he apologized, he’d have to explain that he was behaving like a jealous twit, and if he admitted that he was behaving like a jealous twit, then she’d be well within her rights to ask why, and then all his emotions would spill wide open onto the RV floor.
