She read for twenty more minutes. If you could call it reading when she watched Beau swim the length of the pool and back and looked down whenever she thought he might catch her. She didn’t absorb a single word of the manuscript.
Finally, she checked her phone. It was after noon! That meant she should go inside, get lunch. Excellent, great, that’s what she would do. And then she’d go back to her room and watch something very G-rated on her laptop. Peaceful, relaxing, with no attractive men in it that would make her think…things.
She got up to leave just as Beau reached the shallow end of the pool again.
“Going inside?” he asked.
She slid her flats back on. “Yeah. I, um, I think I’m going to get lunch. More of that lasagna, I think. I didn’t really eat breakfast, so I’m starving now.”
He grinned at her. “Leave some for me.”
Damn it, why did he have to smile at her like that? Now she understood why he’d been such a heartthrob as a teenager. And probably in his twenties, too. Even with that scraggly beard, his smile made him seem so alluring.
She turned toward the house.
“Can I ask you a question?”
She looked back at him. He wasn’t smiling like that anymore. Now he almost looked nervous.
“Okay.”
“I’ve been wondering something. That first night…after you left the dining room, I sort of expected you to leave right away, go back to New York. Why didn’t you?”
She sat back down. “I’ll answer that if you answer something for me. When you say you ‘sort of expected’ me to leave right away—is that what you intended?”
A week ago, she wouldn’t have asked him that. But then, a lot had changed this week.
He looked embarrassed. “I don’t think my thought process was particularly intentional. I was pretty angry. I kind of assumed that you were just here because you wanted to see the asshole Beau Towers in real life. And I was also kind of…ashamed, I guess, that I’d been ignoring your emails for so long. So yeah, on some level I was probably trying to drive you away.” He reached for his water bottle but didn’t take a sip. “Wow, does that sound shitty when I put it that way.” He looked up at her. “I’m sorry.”
She looked back at him. She could see, now that she knew him better, how much he really meant his apology.
“It’s okay,” she said. And then she bit her lip. “I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed with my answer now, about why I stayed.”
He smiled at her. “Now I can’t wait to hear this,” he said.
She sighed. “I had too much wine! When I went back to my room, I did intend to grab my stuff and leave right away, but then I realized the wine had gone straight to my head. And then you brought the food, and then it felt too late to drive back to LA. And then Marta called in the morning, and, well…”
The smile on his face had widened as she talked, but it disappeared when she mentioned Marta. “Did she make you stay? That wasn’t—When I emailed her, I was just trying to make it up to you, say something nice to your boss about you, so she wouldn’t be mad at you because of me. I didn’t mean to back you into a corner.”
“No, you didn’t at all,” Izzy said. “Honestly, I really needed the break from the office, so when Marta called, and I was looking out my bedroom window at the bright blue sky, it felt like a gift to get to stay longer.”
The furrow on his brow cleared. “Well, then.” He put down his water bottle. “Thanks. For answering my question.”
“No problem.” She stood up. “I should…um, get lunch. See you in the library?”
He nodded. “Yeah. See you there.”
As she walked back to the house, she thought she heard something else.
“I’m glad you stayed.”
She turned around, but Beau was swimming. She must be hearing things again.
Monday midmorning, Izzy walked into the kitchen to refresh her coffee.
“Morning, Izzy,” Michaela said.
Izzy reached for the knife to slice herself a piece of lemon pound cake. “Morning. I hope you had a good weekend.”
Michaela dropped a tea bag into her mug. “I did, thank you. Oh, by the way, Izzy, it was so nice of you, but you don’t have to wash the dishes here. You know there’s a housekeeper who does all the cleaning, right?”
Izzy grinned at her. “Oh, I didn’t wash the dishes. Beau did that.”
Michaela stared. “Beau? Washed the dishes? Beau Towers?”
Izzy laughed as she turned to leave the kitchen. “Ask him.”
She and Beau worked together in the library that afternoon, and every day that week. By Wednesday, she realized that she’d started to look forward to that hour—sometimes more—in the library with him. Unlike the rest of her job, the time with Beau was fun, challenging in a good way, interesting, and strangely, not at all stressful. She didn’t write every time, but at least she thought about it.
“Can I ask you a question?” he said on Wednesday afternoon.
She looked up from her notebook. “Of course.”
“What if I don’t totally remember exact conversations? Like, I remember they happened, I know that, and I remember a few things perfectly, but the rest I remember in a sort of general way. You know what I mean? How do I…What do I do then?”
Beau hadn’t asked her a real question about writing until now.
“I think the most important thing is to talk about how those conversations made you feel, what impact they had on you, both then and now. Like, you don’t remember word for word exactly what you said, or what other people said, but you remember your emotions during those conversations, right? And if those emotions have changed as you’ve gotten older, or if you have different perspectives on them as the years have gone on, you know that. So lean into that, concentrate on that. This book is about you. So talk about you, and how you felt, and how you feel now.”
He looked at her, and then down at the screen. “Okay. That makes sense.” He tried to smile, though she could tell it was an effort. “That sounds really hard, but it makes sense.”
She laughed, and after a moment, so did he.
Without even talking about it, they had dinner together every night that week. They met in the kitchen every night, loaded up their plates together, and then either ate at the kitchen table—if Izzy was tired, or if she had more work to do that night after dinner—or in the TV room. And now Beau always loaded the dishwasher after dinner.
Izzy didn’t go back out to the pool, though. It was too dangerous out there. She and Beau were working together. She couldn’t get her mind all full of Beau’s bare arms and shoulders and back and dear God, his chest. At least he’d been in the pool the whole time and she hadn’t been able to see the rest of his body. Better to stay inside, where there was no chance of that.
On Friday, when she walked into the library at three, Beau was already there, his laptop open, the tray of snacks on the table, and the bottle of green juice at Izzy’s seat.
She sat down and twisted the cap off. “Okay, where were we?” She pushed Beau’s notebook across the table to him. “You know what? It’s Friday, you’ve worked hard all week, let’s do something fun: Today, why don’t you write down your favorite story about yourself. You know the one I mean, the funny one you tell at parties, some adventure you went on, something fun you did as a kid, whatever. Write as much as you can get to today; this weekend you can type it up and work on it. Starting…now.”
Izzy set the timer. She looked down at her phone and sighed. She had more work to do, but she didn’t have the heart for it today.
All of a sudden, Beau flipped closed his notebook and pushed it back across the table to her. She looked up from her phone. “What—”
“Today is a break day,” he said. “I decree it.”
Break day. What a concept.
“Oh, you decree it? Then it must be true.” She took his notebook. “It’s fine if you need a break, we all do sometimes.” She started to get up. “Okay, well—”
“No,” he said. “Not just me. We both need a break. It’s Friday, and you’ve been working with me every day for almost two weeks. You need a break even more than I do.” He stood up. “The thing I started writing was actually fun, but it reminded me that it’s too beautiful a day to be inside. Get your stuff, we’re going to the beach.”
She stayed where she was and looked up at him. “Oh, I don’t have…beach stuff here. I actually haven’t been to the beach yet.”
He looked at her, his mouth in a perfect O. “You haven’t been to the beach?” She started to explain, but he kept going. “This is unacceptable. We have to teach you the true meaning of fun. There are plenty of places to buy everything you need. Be at the car in ten minutes.”
He left the room before she could argue with him.
Izzy stood up slowly. The beach. It did feel sort of criminal that she’d been here for over two weeks and hadn’t been to the beach yet. She looked out at the Pacific Ocean from her bedroom window every single day, but she’d never seen it up close. Beau was probably right; she should do something about that.