“You promised me that you would have my back,” she said.
“It wasn’t meant to get published,” he said again. “I promise on...” He tried to drill down to something that only she would understand, some shared sense of intimacy that meant something to them both. “I promise on... our prom date.”
Birdie blanched at the reference, like either she never thought of that night or she was surprised that he still did. Her glare had gone unreadable, the woman who Elliot was always so sure he could read. Before she could say another word, Imani’s phone clattered loudly on the RV table. All four of them jumped.
“Oh,” Imani said, hopping up and running down the front steps, like nothing about this fight was permanent. “Mechanic is here.” Sydney clapped her hands together, as if she, too, was done with this, trailing Birdie’s publicist out the door.
“Thank god someone here can perform cleanup,” Birdie said, then turned to follow her team.
“Birdie—” Elliot started. “Come on. We can’t get through this if we’re fighting.”
She froze with her back still to him, then spun quickly and marched right up to the tip of his nose. Under any other circumstances, Elliot would clasp both of her cheeks in his palms and kiss her until she couldn’t breathe.
“There is nothing to get through anymore, Elliot,” she spat. “We’re not doing any ofthisanymore. Call your editor, tell her I’m out. I don’t need to invite more scrutiny, and I certainly didn’texpect that scrutiny to come from the one person I’m supposed to have trusted.”
Then she stormed out of the camper and slammed the rickety door behind her.
It figured, Elliot thought, that the first woman to ever really leave him would be the only one he ever wanted to beg to stay.
28
BIRDIE
Birdie was done.Done with Elliot. Done with driving this ridiculous landboat. Done with this whole notion of being sunny and compliant because somehow demanding respect both on set and occasionally off it now mandated that a woman seek the company of a man to rehabilitate her reputation. She never should have trusted Elliot O’Brien—a reporter!—to take care with her story, to protect her vulnerability. Such a thing only worked out in her movies, and there was a reason that her rom-coms were fiction.Fiction, she huffed to herself while the mechanic rattled around in the engine and whistled that they were lucky that the entire thing didn’t catch fire and explode.
The RV, it turned out, was rusting from the inside out and also needed a new belt of some sort, and of course, Mona had neglected to change the oil in god knew how long. Imani offered to drive her back to LA while the mechanic fiddled around under the hood, but Birdie found that she just wanted to go home. She didn’t have any rational explanation for this—she’d spent a decade pretending that Barton was irrelevant in her story—but thethought of Los Angeles and its ghosts was too haunting, and the thought of New York and her empty apartment was too pathetic. She wanted to see Mona, and she wouldn’t have even minded the company of Andie, a notion that caught her off guard.
“So you’ll be okay driving home with him?” Imani had nudged her head toward the RV.
“I think the better question is if he’ll be okay driving home withme,” she replied. Elliot had disappeared inside to call his editor, and though Birdie was itching for another fight, she heard him on the phone, sounding chastised and embarrassed, and she decided to wait it out, not out of kindness, but so that he’d feel pain not all in one blow but bit by bit for the rest of the day. She was angry at herself for kissing him. She was angry with him for kissing her back. She was angry that she couldn’t kiss him forever, actually, but she couldn’t, she shouldn’t, she mustn’t.
An hour later, she was sitting in the back of the RV, unwilling to even meet him midway at the dinette, make small talk, listen to the radio the way they used to in carpool or had on the way down to LA.Sweet dreams are made of cheese.She felt the curl of her smile but recalibrated. She wouldn’t make this easy for him; she wouldn’t just roll over and forgive him, which she figured he expected her to do because he was used to women going easy on him.
No.No.If Elliot had something to say, if Elliot had something todo(to her), kissing her—even if she started it, she knew she started it, okay?!—after publicly humiliating her, not to mention walking out of her apartment all those years ago, was not the proper order of things.You don’t just get to kiss a girl and have her swoon, have her world spin differently on its axis, she thought. Even if that’s exactly what would have unfolded in one of her movies. In fact, hehadjust kissed a girl, and shehadjust swooned,but only for a minute, and Birdie was wise enough, strong enough, to pull herself out before she spiraled. She stared toward the front windshield, at Elliot’s back, and knew how easy it would be to spiral for Elliot O’Brien.
She’d been spiraling since she was twelve. Now, at nearly thirty-five, she wanted to think that she knew better, that she was wiser. She worried, however, that neither of those things was particularly true.
29
ELLIOT
Elliot had alwaysconsidered himself to be excellent at reading his subjects, and yet now he had absolutely no idea what to do next with Birdie. It had been hours since she’d spoken to him, and even as he curved the RV into his parents’ old driveway, Birdie was as stony, as impassive, as she had been when she first read today’s story.
Mona was waiting for them outside the house, and she was a markedly easier read. Elliot knew immediately that she was furious with him. Not because of twintuition. Because of the look on her face. Lines pointing downward, a glare that stretched from her forehead to her chin. Birdie glanced out the window and saw it too.
“Christ,” she said, like Mona was angry with her too.
“It’s me, not you,” Elliot replied.
Birdie stared at him like she was waiting for him to say something more. But Elliot had already apologized. He’d reached Francesca back in the parking lot, as promised to Birdie. He was mortified that he’d even written such a thing—that BirdieRobinson needed a man like she needed oxygen. He knew that he had humiliated himself even more than he had humiliated her, even if the internet piled on her, the easy mark.
“It wasn’t a draft, O’Brien. Why would I have run with a piece marked ‘draft’?” Francesca had asked, like she needed her already-on-thin-ice hotshot reporter second-guessing her. “This isn’t my first rodeo. If you think I’d just publish something because it’s been graced with your byline, you should lasso in your ego, although if I gave you enough rope, I think we both know what would happen.”
She was speaking in metaphors, but yes, he understood this to mean that he’d hang himself on his own hubris. Like he’d done with the payoffs, like he’d done with his sourcing.
“Fact-checking verified the piece,” she said. “It wasn’t Carter. And he is engaged.”
Elliot wondered how fact-checking could ever verify how love soared and faltered, but he wasn’t in a position to argue.
