Birdie hadn’t been to Vegas in years. She’d had invites to conventions, to restaurant openings, to front-row seats at pop-star residencies, and it wasn’t that she wasn’t tempted, but Vegas elicited nothing but bad memories. The last time she had been to Vegas was with Kai. Well, not with him. They’d hadn’t arrived together since they were technicallynottogether, and they were in the habit of dodging the press to keep the rumors at bay. It was a few months after Carter had kicked him off her property, and so also a few months since she and Carter had split.
Kai was not a particularly good poker player but, like many rich men with bulging egos, he had an outsized impression of his talents, so enjoyed a weekend or two every month at the casinos, losing money that he didn’t bother counting, ogling women whose names he didn’t bother learning. He always booked a suite on the top floor of the Wynn, like he enjoyed making it easy for fans and paparazzi to track him down. He waved to the cameras when he saw them; he routinely stopped for autographs when asked. Photos were even better. Sometimes he kissed chubby babies, and sometimes his publicist planted stories, like he’d performedthe Heimlich on a patron at the breakfast buffet (Kai drank only protein drinks for breakfast, soas ifhe would be at a breakfast buffet, Birdie had thought at the time). Whatever served the narrative was what Kai Carol served the public. A fake fiancée, a fake breakup, it didn’t matter.
He had texted her back then and begged her to come. Said he had big news that he couldn’t wait to share with her. Birdie hated herself for how much she wanted to hear that. That maybe finally he had chosen her, called off the ruse with Haley. That maybe, six years after she met him on set at twenty-five, they finally could go somewhere in public together, hands entwined, heads high.
He’d booked her a room at the Venetian so no one would link them, and said he’d have his assistant leave her his key at the Venetian’s front desk. By then, Birdie could barely go anywhere without being recognized, so he reserved a tinted-window SUV that could meet her at the parking garage and drive her down the Strip to the Wynn. Birdie had a wig that she had kept from one of her sets that she wore whenever she just needed to blend in—mousy-brown hair, medium-cut bob (her character had been a third-grade teacher who fell in love with a widowed dad who happened to be a secret billionaire; it opened to the biggest weekend in romantic comedy history to date)—so she wore that too.
On her way to meet him, tucked inside this monstrously sized vehicle, under a pile of fake hair, she caught a glimpse of her reflection and thought:What has happened to you that you equate all of this with happiness?
Kai was waiting for her in his room, and despite the PR stint in rehab a few years back, he’d been drinking, though only to the point of being ludicrously charming. Birdie loved how he tasted with liquor on his tongue, and he swept her up in his arms, literally, and swung her around.
He set her down and kissed her again, and Birdie remembered, even now staring out at the oncoming lights of the Vegas Strip with Andie driving beside her, that it didn’t feel like she thought it would, how it used to. She leaned in to him again, pressing herself so close that there wasn’t even a sliver of light between their bodies. She went through the motions—sighing and little gasps of breath and smiling when their lips came apart—but it felt like another role she was playing, and if someone had calledcut, she wouldn’t have had any problem turning it all off. Kai tugged her shirt over her head, and her wig went lopsided, and he laughed and straightened it, as if maybe this was all pretend for him, too, as if he liked her better when she was an amalgamation of whoever he wanted her to be.
And for some reason, there with her slightly crooked wig and down to her bra, Birdie thought of Elliot. And how he was one of the few people in her life, or had been anyway, who hadn’t asked her to change. How he embraced her imperfections, how he met her exactly where she was, even if he’d walked away. It had been almost four years by then since their weekend together, and Birdie was shocked that he was the one she thought of now.
“What’s your news?” Birdie had said to Kai. She didn’t want to think of Elliot and tried to squash him from her mind.
His face wrinkled in confusion and then opened into surprise, like he’d forgotten why he arranged this. Birdie thought,Please pick me please pick me please pick me please leave her please leave her please leave her please love me. Even if this all felt flat now. She was in too deep, sunk costs, and it was easier to keep going.
And he said, “Oh right! I’m signed on to do Marvel. Highest payday in history when you add in back end.” He looked absolutely fucking delighted.
Birdie took a step away from him, folding her arms around herself like a straitjacket.
“You called me here, urgently, after years of being apart, not even speaking, to tell me that yousigned on to Marvel?”
He looked only slightly less delighted when he said, “Well... yeah? Jesus, Birdie, I thought you’d be happy for me.”
“You thought I’d be happy for you?”
He reached for her hand, which would have meant uncovering her half-exposed breast in her demi-bra, so she did not reach back.
“Well, yeah,” he said, then moved toward the bar to pour himself another drink. “You know that Haley doesn’t get it, she’s not in the industry. I thought you would.”
“You thought I’d get it?” Birdie couldn’t decide if she was angrier at the audacity of mentioning his real/fake fiancée to her or at the audacity of this entire thing.
He put his palms on his hips like he was an elementary school principal. “The point is: you were the only person I wanted to share this with. So I thought you’d be happy. I thought we could celebrate.”
Birdie felt like such a fucking idiot. She swiped her shirt off the floor and frantically tugged it over her head. The wig was entirely crooked now, but who cared? What was the difference? Acid rose in her throat, and if she’d bothered to eat that day (she had not), she would have vomited all over his stupid fucking suite. She wished she’d eaten that day just so she could do so.
“Birdie,” Kai said, once her hand was on the door. “Come on, babe. Don’t be like that. We have a good thing here. You and me.”
But they didn’t. Kai had a good thing. Birdie had nothing but years of waiting for him to decide she was worth it.
“Okay,” he said to her back as she swung open the door and steeled herself to walk away from Kai Carol forever. “But I think you’re gonna regret this.”
She heard him shaking a martini shaker like he was James goddamn Bond. She adjusted her wig and slammed the door behind her. The SUV was still idling in the garage. She managed to wait until she made it back to the Venetian to absolutely come undone. Of all the things that Birdie Maxwell hated, of all the things she’d been running from since she was eighteen, it was being a fool.
Now, three years later, Andie had her head out the window, screaming at a guy in a sedan on the Strip who refused to let her over. The Boulevard was the next turn-in, and Birdie honestly would have found it poetic if they’d missed it and had to circle back. Circle back to Simon. Circle back to Elliot. Taking the long way around. That was a metaphor she could appreciate.
But then the sedan driver rolled his eyes and waved Andie in, and then, in no time at all, they were at the valet.
“You ready for this?” Andie asked before a kid hustled over to open the door, take her keys.
“No,” Birdie said.
“Awesome,” Andie replied. “That’s what makes it even better. For once in her life, the actress goes in totally cold.”
41
