She pushed Beau’s notebook across the table to him and took out her phone to set the timer. This time it was for her, not for him.
She took a deep breath as she opened her own notebook.
“Hey,” Beau said from across the table.
She looked up at him.
He was smiling softly at her. “You’re gonna be great. You know that, right?”
She could tell from the look on his face that he wasn’t fooled by her. He knew she was nervous about writing again.
She swallowed. “Thanks.” She wanted to say more, to say it helped for him to say that, it helped to have him there, sitting across the table from her, it helped to know he believed in her, but she couldn’t get anything else out. But she thought he might already know all of that.
She picked up her phone again. “Okay.” She pressed start. “Go.”
And then she looked at her notes from the past few weeks. The ones she’d barely admitted to herself that she had envisioned as a book. Okay. She could do this.
She flipped to a blank page in her notebook.
When the timer went off, she sat up with a jolt. It had been slow going, at first. She’d hesitated over names, places, transitions. She’d wanted to reach for her phone more than once, to look something up, to distract herself from the hard parts, to see if Priya had texted her. But instead, she’d made herself keep going, partly because of the timer, mostly because Beau was sitting across from her. And eventually, after a while, she’d forgotten to worry about whether that name was right, or if that place was really spelled like that, or if Priya had gone out yet with that hot medical student she’d met at the wedding. She’d even forgotten Beau was there. She’d just fallen headfirst into her own words, her own story, her own imagination.
And it felt great.
Beau’s smile was wide this time as he looked at her.
“It was good?” he asked.
She nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “It was good.”
When it was time to leave the library, he started to say something, then shook his head and stood up.
She stayed in her seat. “What?”
He sat back down. “Sorry. It’s just…I wanted to ask you something, but I think it’s probably…” He looked at her face and laughed. “Okay.” He sighed. “This is your last week here.”
The smile fell from her face. “Yeah. It is.”
He nodded. “I’d sort of managed to ignore that, until your friend said something, and…maybe that’s why I was so on edge the other day.” He sort of smiled. “I mean, one of the reasons I was so on edge.”
He thought maybe he was on edge because…he was upset about her leaving? Was that what he meant? She didn’t have a chance to linger on that question.
“Anyway, what I was going to ask was, do you think maybe you could stay? For a little while longer? Until I feel—” He stopped and then smiled at her. “Until I feel like I can actually do this without you is I guess the only honest way I can end that sentence.”
“Yes,” she said. “I can stay.”
She didn’t have to stop to think. She knew she wanted to stay.
“But this time,” she finished, “you have to ask Marta.”
His face fell at her last words. “Right. That makes sense.” He sighed. “Have I mentioned that she scares me?”
Izzy laughed. “Oh, don’t worry about that—she scares everybody.”
“Well, at least it’s not just me,” he said.
He pulled his computer toward him, but Izzy shook her head.
“You can’t email her about this. You have to call her.”
He looked at her, wide-eyed. “Call her? On the PHONE?”
Izzy nodded. “I know. Trust me, I know. But Marta does everything important on the phone. If you email her, she’ll do one of three things: She’ll ignore it; she’ll say no right away; or she’ll call you. Wouldn’t you rather be the one to call? Plus, Marta respects that.”
He pulled his phone out of his pocket. “I have to do this right now. Don’t I?”
Izzy didn’t say anything.
“Fine,” he said. “But you have to stay here, okay?”
Like she would miss this.
“I’ll be right here,” she said. “Do you have her number? She’ll probably still be in the office right now, but if not, I can give you her cell. Here.”
She pulled out her phone and texted him Marta’s numbers. He stared at her as he called.
“Hi, Marta, this is Beau Towers,” he said when she answered the phone. His voice got deeper, which made Izzy have to hold back a giggle. He shook his finger at her.
“Yes, yes, everything is going well with Isabelle, I’m making a lot of progress on the memoir. That’s actually why I called. I was wondering if I could borrow her for a while longer. She’s been a great asset to me, you know.”
A great asset? Izzy pressed her lips together so she wouldn’t laugh out loud, and Beau grinned at her.
He nodded. “Yes, I’ve talked to Isabelle about this, but of course you’ll need to talk to her as well to make sure she’d like to stay longer.”
She could hear Marta’s voice, but she couldn’t hear what she was saying.
But she suddenly knew. Oh no, she should have prepped Beau better before he made this call.
She says how long? he mouthed to her.
She ripped out a piece of paper from her notebook and started writing.
“Um, I was thinking…a month?” he said. He made a panicked face at Izzy, and she almost laughed. “After the week we already have remaining, of course.”
Marta was still talking, but Izzy knew exactly what she was saying.
She held up her note so he could see it.
NEGOTIATE!!!
His eyes widened, and he nodded at her. “I don’t think an additional two weeks is enough time,” he said, in a much more assured voice. “Especially given where I am in the book. But an extra three weeks might do it.”
He listened for a second, and then grinned at her. “Excellent,” he said. “I’ll let her know.”
Izzy grinned back at him, but his attention went back to the phone. Beau’s smile faded.
“Okay,” he said after a while. “Of course.”
Izzy raised her eyebrows at him, but he shook his head. What did Marta say? Did she change her mind?
“Okay. Thanks, Marta. I appreciate it.” He hung up the phone and stood up. “We did it!”
Izzy jumped up. “We did it!”
He came around the table and enveloped her in a hug. She hugged him back.
“She’s even scarier than I remembered,” he said. “Thank God you were there for that. I never would have made it out alive on my own.”
She leaned into the hug. She’d forgotten how good this felt. For him to hold her like this. It had only happened one time before, that accidental time in the kitchen, but this time it was on purpose, for both of them. He was so big, and strong, and it just felt so…right, to have his arms around her like this. She didn’t want him to ever let go.
As soon as she thought that—as soon as she realized that she’d thought that—she made herself drop her arms and take a step back. He was smiling down at her, with a look on his face that…She swallowed and looked away.
“I, um, I should have prepped you better for it, though,” she said. “I forgot to warn you that with Marta, everything is a negotiation.” She looked back up at him. “What did she say to you, at the end there?”
He turned to the door. “Oh, just that she’d confirm this with you, to make sure you want to stay. And that she’s looking forward to the book.”
That all made sense, but Izzy had thought there had been something else. Maybe she’d just imagined that anxious look on Beau’s face.
Beau stopped, just after they’d gotten out of the library. “I should teach you to bake a cake tonight so we can celebrate.”
She put a confused look on her face. “A cake? But I didn’t see any cake mix in the pantry?”
He looked horrified. “Mix? You think I’d make you cake out of a mix?”
She laughed out loud. She knew that would get him. He glared at her, but she could see the smile underneath.
“Oh, that was a joke, was it? You think I’m just that easy to antagonize?”
She laughed again as she turned to go upstairs.
When she walked into the library on Friday afternoon, she could tell something was wrong with Beau. He had that tense look on his face that she now knew meant he was stressed, not angry.
“Everything okay?” she asked him when she sat down.
“Everything’s fine, why wouldn’t it be?” He took the notebook that she pushed across the table to him. They were well past the point when either of them was worried that he’d delete a part of his book—at least, she was pretty sure they were—but they still exchanged the notebook every day.
“No reason. You just seem out of sorts, that’s all,” she said.
“I’m fine,” he said, without looking at her.
Okay, then.
She opened her own notebook and pulled out her phone to start the timer. They wrote in silence for a minute or two.
“I’m nervous,” he said.