“Me,” Birdwine said, and that, at least, was clear. He should hold all his answers to one syllable.
“What are you looking at?” asked Julian, bringing the water over. He handed the Hulk cup to Birdwine, who guzzled at it in a noisy, greedy way that could not possibly have been any less attractive.
“It’s not about Hana. I’ll search his other files in a sec, okay? But can you . . .” I paused, casting about for a reason, any reason, to get him from the room. I wanted to ask Birdwine why the hell he was stalking his ex-wife. More than that, I needed thirty seconds to get myself in hand. “ . . . Go change his sheets? We should put him to bed, and they’re probably disgusting.”
Julian looked alarmed. “You want me to, like, open all his drawers and look for sheets?”
“The spare set’s in the linen closet. It’s a narrow door halfway down the hall, beside the bathroom. Then his bedroom is at the very end.”
“You know this place real well, huh?” he asked me, his head tilting to the side.
“Julian, please?” I said. “He could pass out any second, and we’ll never get him moved.”
Julian’s mouth scrunched up into a wad that made him look like all those disapproving rabbits on the Internet, but he went.
I looked back at the screen. The former Stella Birdwine, now Martin, was one of those people who said yes to any friend request. She had almost six hundred, making it easy for Birdwine to invent a profile and friend her on the sly. Now he could watch her life like it was television.
“This seems really healthy,” I said to him.
Birdwine nodded, drunk-wry, and the movement almost tipped him from the chair. I felt inclined to let him fall. Let him smash himself up a little more. What was another black eye between friends?
Better question—why was I so pissed that he was mooning over Stella? I didn’t like the implications. Right before he left to go find Hana, I’d realized that he’d once been in love with me. I hadn’t asked myself the natural follow-up. Had I been in love back?
I must have been, at least a little.
I hadn’t noticed. But in retrospect, I could see that I’d gone about systematically killing it. I hadn’t had to think about it. I knew how. I’d had plenty of practice.
I’d fallen for my best friend, William, back in high school. I’d slept with him once. Hell, I’d slept with him first, but I had never followed up. I’d started screwing college fellows, and I’d helped William land the girl of his dreams. The three of us had ended up best friends. In law school, Nick and I had a thing that could have turned out serious. He’d wanted that, at one point. I made it clear that I was nothing like monogamous, telling him stories of my conquests like we were bar buddies. I started acting as his wingman, both in mock trials and when he noticed a girl. The sex petered out, and we ended up business partners.
Then Birdwine. I looked across the table at him, blood-crusted, smelling like roadkill. Ye gods help me, I hadn’t killed whatever was between us. Not all the way. Sure, I’d made him into a colleague and a friend, roles with much longer shelf lives than my lovers got, exactly as I had with William and Nick. But almost without noticing, I’d stopped looking for new men. I’d given up my friendly late-night calls to exes. And I sure as hell hadn’t worked to put other women on his radar.
No matter. Son of a bitch had done a fine job tracking his ex-wife all on his own.
Birdwine’s eye was swollen almost shut. I got up and checked his freezer. Both ice trays were dead empty. There was a bag of store-brand frozen peas, though. I brought them over.
“Hold these,” I told him, smacking the peas against his eye. He grunted, but he managed to get a big paw up and hold them in place. He smelled like old sweat and older bourbon, with the copper tang of blood just under that.
When I tried to turn away, he grabbed my wrist with his free hand. He stared up at me with his one good eye bleary and mumbled out a string of urgent words.
Between the smashed lips and the quarts of liquor, it took me a moment to parse out the meaning, but then I got it:
I don’t give two shits about Stella.
He held my gaze, and I didn’t think that he was lying.
“Well, what do I care,” I said, but my voice had softened, and all ye gods and little fishes, it sure seemed like I did.
Not in my usual take-it-or-leave-it way, either, though he seemed like my type, on the surface: easygoing, fucked up enough to be forgettable. I hadn’t forgotten him, though, had I? Funny, I’d always told myself he was an expendable convenience, but looking back, my actions told a different story. I’d even stalked his ass to get him back into my orbit. I’d treated him like he was Nick or William: quality stuff.