BIRDIE
Hey. Sorry. Been busy.
He replied immediately, like he was clutching his phone in his palm, staring at it until it buzzed.
KAI
I need to see you. In NYC. Coming now.
And she knew that Kai wasn’t what she wanted. Wasn’twhoshe wanted. But she wasn’t in any emotional state to deal with her heartbreak alone.
She pushed herself to standing, then stumbled to the bathroom to brush her teeth. She typed back:OK.
She was applying mascara when she heard her front door open, then close.
“Hello?” she called, surprised that Kai had made it there so quickly or that her doorman had buzzed him up without asking, but then she wasn’t thinking clearly. She wandered to the living room and found Elliot standing there with a bag of bagels.
“Hey,” he said, holding them aloft. “Bagels.”
“Oh,” she replied, trying to steady her voice. “I thought you left.” Her brain felt staticky, her tongue thick. She started to say more but then couldn’t figure out what it was that she wanted to articulate.
“Look,” he said, staring down at her feet. Her stomach coiled. He sighed. Set down the bag on her dining table, ran his fingers over his face, his two-day-old stubble. “I think, this has been—” He stopped, stuttered, then stopped again, seemingly no more sure of what he wanted to convey than she was. Like in the bright light of the morning, he’d reconsidered everything. Birdie hadn’t. Birdie would have flown to the moon and the stars for him, she thought, but then she realized that she’d invited Kai over so easily, so quickly. Maybe she didn’t know what she wanted any more than Elliot did. But it was irrelevant. Because he kept talking.
“I just—” he tried again. “Mona called me,” he said finally. “Birdie, I don’t want—”
“It’s okay,” she said, not because it was in any way okay but because she didn’t want him to see how much he was about to wreck her. She didn’t want to hear his excuses. Didn’t even know if they were true. Maybe he just wanted to get her out of his system, an itch that needed to be scratched. He wouldn’t be the first guy who had just wanted to fuck someone famous.
Her panic was rising like a tide—she needed to pull it together before Kai turned up. Not even because she cared if sheoffended him, but because she’d be absolutely humiliated if Elliot knew that she’d agreed to fill his side of the bed before it grew cold. She didn’t evenwantto fill his side of the bed; she was certainlynotgoing to sleep with Kai regardless of what sort of grand gesture he pulled off this time. She wasn’t sure how this had all happened—Elliot and bagels and Mona and her action star who seemed to call only when she was on the cusp of forgetting him. Maybe she really did go into a fugue state, a place of make-believe, when everything got hard.
“No,” Elliot replied as her brain spiraled. “It’s not okay. Not really. None of this is okay. Nothing about it is okay.”
Birdie didn’t know if he was saying that he regretted their night or he just regretted the clarity with which he now saw the situation, but she resolved that she didn’t want to find out, didn’t want to hear just how deep his regret ran. To learn that she was now disposable, it was just unbearable, too much.
“Itisokay. It’s totally fine.” She nodded. “We’re consenting adults. It’s not a big deal. You should go. I think your jacket is bunched up in the foyer.” She really was a spectacular actress.
“Birdie,” he said. “Please, let me explain. Can we talk about this—”
The phone on her wall buzzed—her doorman. Her brain buzzed along with it.
“That’s work,” she managed, though it nearly broke her. “I actually need to start my day. We can pretend this never happened.”
“Birdie, that’s not—” Elliot started, but she had brushed past him, scooping up his tuxedo jacket in one hand, swinging her door open with the other, as if she were ushering him out. She was, although she didn’t understand why. But the doorman was still ringing, and Kai was downstairs waiting. Birdie didn’t wantKai the way she wanted—had always wanted—Elliot, and she didn’t necessarily even want a man, but god, if she had one, she wanted someone who was going to lay it all on the line for her. Elliot was already backpedaling away from the line.
“Right.” Elliot nodded and shoved his hands in his pockets. He stopped right in front of her in the doorframe, met her eyes, and it was all Birdie could do not to crater. “I’m sorry about all of this. I’m sorry to walk away from you.”
And Birdie wanted to scream,Then, don’t, goddammit, do not!but, well, Elliot O’Brien had always been out of her league and maybe she’d forgotten that.
He got into the elevator, and that was the last time Birdie saw Elliot until seven years later in Monads.
“So you never even heard him out?” Andie said last night. They were both drunk on the vodka by then, and Birdie’s stomach was beginning to curdle.
“I didn’t need to hear him explicitly reject me even more than he had.” Birdie shoved her face into a pillow on her bed, then thought better of it and curled around it, like that might ease her digestion.
“Birdie, you are such a fucking moron.” Andie sighed. “This is like the cliché in one of your movies where the guy is trying to pour his heart out and the girl is too stupid to listen.”
“No,” Birdie said. “He was always going to choose Mona. If that was even a legitimate excuse, not just a reason to bolt. But, like, for my own ego, let’s pretend that it was real... How can I blame him for that?”
“Elliot isn’t a liar, so stop it with that,” Andie said. “He’s a lot of things, and definitely a bit of a slut—”
