Elliot smiled.Sweet dreams are made of cheese.
“But we’re grown-ups now. You know that, right? You know that we can be friends with one another, and it’s not like I have dibs on Birdie. Maybe I thought that when we were, like, thirteen. Or,” she said more quietly, “at prom. But that’s because youhad this whole goddamn town on your side. I just had Birdie.” She paused, as if to make sure that he heard her. “You can call her up now and chew her out for being a narcissist, or you can call her up and tell her that you’re sorry you guys are fighting. You don’t have to worry about me having my feelings hurt because I’m the third wheel on this. You’re allowed to be friends without me.”
Friends.
Okay.
“I’ve called her nine times today,” he said.
“Well, you know Birdie, she never met a dramatic arc that she didn’t want to make at least one scene longer.”
He did know Birdie, and he thought her love of the dramatic arc might just be the cure for the thing that ailed him. Maybe he needed more fantasy in his life, maybe he needed to get swept up in the electricity of her wild imagination. But of course, then there was Francesca.
“I’m going to Vegas tomorrow,” he said, “with or without Birdie.”
Mona bounced her head. “The dogged reporter until the bitter end.”
“Would you want to come?” he asked, startling himself but in only a good way. “I mean, I’d like it if you came.”
Mona’s face cracked open into a smile, her eyes dancing with surprise. “Absolutely. I’ll have someone cover the bar.”
“The O’Brien twins take a road trip.” Elliot grinned.
“Vegas, baby,” Mona said. “You know I’ve always liked to gamble.”
36
BIRDIE
Birdie woke themorning after her confession to Andie feeling like she’d consumed all the cheap vodka in the Barton vicinity. Shehadconsumed all the cheap vodka (the cheapest) in the Barton vicinity. Andie was still asleep and snoring beside her with red plastic cups and an emptied bottle on her floor. They’d made a 7-Eleven run last night after dark because their parents had drained their liquor cabinet before they left for Spain. The 7-Eleven was the only place nearby that was open past 10 p.m., and since they were merely looking for something—anything—with alcohol, it worked out just fine. Birdie had worn a baseball hat nearly down to the top of her nose and tugged Andie’s neon hoodie over her head, but even then, the cashier had raised his eyebrows and said, “Whoa, Birdie Robinson. Rough out there for you these days.”
And Andie had snapped, “Oh shut up, Matthew, and mind your own business,” which surprised Birdie perhaps more than it surprised Matthew, and she lost herself to a fit of giggles that she couldn’t control until they were halfway home.
Once she was properly boozy, Birdie had finally told Andie the whole story about Elliot. Which was also a story about Kai.
The night of the premiere, when she ran into Elliot for the first time in years, she had been obsessing over Kai. She knew he was terrible for her; she knew that whenever she thought of him, her stomach cratered out and her anxiety spiked. They’d been entangled for two long years, off and on, in fits and starts, with Kai returning to her on unpredictable whims, as if his entire purpose was to keep her off-balance. It had started on set, as Andie had already pieced together when Birdie was relaying all of this. He was a superstar by then, seven years older, famous beyond famous. Birdie was the hot new ingenue, having landed the lead opposite him after one of the casting directors saw something in that Oregon lighthouse indie film and decided she should be a bona fide movie star. Kai knocked on her trailer door the first day with a bouquet of flowers the size of a St. Bernard, and Birdie was smitten. That he made the effort, that he noticed her.
Within two weeks, they were spending all their free hours in his trailer (his was much nicer than hers), and one day, he leaned over and kissed her, and Birdie’s brain short-circuited, like his kiss was so potent that it scrambled her mind. He stood up and locked the door to his trailer, and then he proceeded to take off her clothes, followed by all of his. The whole time, Birdie was thinking,I cannot believe that Kai Carol wants to sleep with me, Birdie Maxwell, from Barton, California.
Even though she’d already been with Ian, and Ian was objectively wonderful. But he wasn’t worldly like Kai. He wasn’t beloved like Kai. He wasn’t magnetic and powerful, which Birdie knew weren’t reasons to fall in love with someone, but that he chose her? Well, she’d be a liar to say that it didn’t matter. It did. Kai Carol could choose anyone on the planet, literally, and he chose her.
Once the movie wrapped, they kept going quietly, stealthily, like the secrecy was half the fun—Birdie flying into wherever he was whenever they both had a free weekend. Until it was announced that Kai was engaged. Birdie learned about it from a gossip site in a retweet on Twitter. She cried and called him up and screamed at him, and he assured her it was just for show. That audiences wanted him to be the sort of man who married his high school sweetheart, not an up-and-coming starlet or else sure, babe, of course he would have been thrilled to go public with her instead. But Birdie was the one he loved, she was the one he needed. She was the one he dreamt about.
The night she ran into Elliot at the premiere seven years back, Kai had called her to wish her good luck. She hadn’t heard from him in four months, since the engagement. That night, he called to say that he was working out a plan to end it, that he couldn’t go on another day without her.
“Wait for me, baby. Give me a little time. Then it will be you and me. I want us to get married. I wantusto have babies.”
Birdie demurred. She’d been clear with him that as long as he was with Haley, contracted or not, he was off-limits. She had her own memories of her mom leaving them, and even when Kai tugged at all of her seams, she tried to be stalwart, she tried to hold steady. But she heard the promise in his voice and wanted to believe him. She was too embarrassed by the moral squishiness of it to share with Mona, and she didn’t have many other friends.
And then she ran into Elliot (literally). In a tuxedo. At the bar.
The only boy she had ever loved in a pure, perfect, uncomplicated way, the only boy who had made her feel like she wasn’t settling if she was only Birdie Maxwell. Maybe Ian had made her feel that too, but then Ian wasn’t Elliot, and that, Birdie supposed now, was never his fault.
It had been electric from their first hello. Everything else became background noise at the party other than Elliot, here, in front of her, all grown up. He wiped his drink off her dress, then leaned in to kiss her cheek, and her whole body nearly detonated. The only thing she cared about was getting him home, letting him do whatever he wanted to her, letting her do whatever she wanted to him. They replenished their gin and tonics until she was buzzed enough to let him follow her to the bathroom, where he pushed her up against the wall as if they both understood that they were combustible. He lingered an inch away from her, breathing, just breathing, until a noise rose in his throat as if to say,Are we doing this? I think we are doing this, and she nodded, because mostly, she wanted to just devour him whole. And then he closed the inch between them, and Birdie thought her heart might give out.
“Do you want to see my new apartment?” she’d asked, pointedly, clearly, when she found the will to pull back from his lips.
“Yes,” he replied simply, hungrily. “Yes.”
