Izzy found Off to the Cupboard relatively easily, though she had to pay an arm and a leg for parking. She saw the boxes of Michaela’s tea and got her four boxes with the money Beau had given her. They cost more than she’d ever expected tea to cost, but then, she’d always been more of a coffee person. There was an empty table by the window, so she ordered herself some tea and a slice of chocolate cake, and sat down.
Then she stared at her laptop. All week, she’d been trying to make herself open the file for her old novel again, read it, and try to decide, now that she’d had time and space away, if she wanted to keep working on it. After this month with Beau, she no longer believed that Gavin was right about her talent and potential. Now she knew that she wanted this enough to work hard, to fight through setbacks, and to conquer the Gavins of the world.
But she was still scared to open this manuscript.
She set her jaw. If Beau could text his mom, could drive back to LA to see her, could walk into her house to apologize to her, despite how hard all of that was for him, she could at least open this damn document.
She had to search for the file. She’d hidden it away from herself, so she wouldn’t have to see it every time she opened her laptop and wouldn’t be tempted to delete it. Huh, maybe she and Beau had more in common than she’d thought. She finally found it, tucked away in a folder called Misc, in another folder called Taxes, and another folder called Spreadsheets. Izzy took a sip of tea and a bite of cake. And then she opened it.
She spent the next hour reading, skimming, then reading again. She found a lot she wanted to fix: paragraphs, whole pages that dragged, characters that she needed to tweak, plot points that didn’t make sense. But sometimes, she stopped thinking about what she had to fix, or cut, or add, and just got swept away in the story. Her story.
Finally, she sat back in her chair and gulped the last of her now cold tea. Her book wasn’t perfect, and she had a lot of work to do. But she knew it was good. She knew it, to her core. She knew it, the same way she knew that it meant something, something that she wasn’t quite ready to interrogate, that she could still feel the imprint of Beau’s hands on her back from their hug, hear the way he’d breathed her in, smell that scent of salt water and fresh air that always lingered around him.
She shook that off. She flipped to the beginning of the manuscript again, opened her notebook to a page in the back, and started to make notes of all the things she wanted to fix, chapter by chapter.
She was through the first half of the book when her phone buzzed.
You can come whenever you’re ready
She’d lost track of time, but now she realized that Beau had been with his mom for almost three hours. But the curtness of his text made her worried.
She texted him back right away.
Fifteen minutes
His response came quickly.
Ok. Let me know when you’re outside
And then, a few seconds later.
I’m glad I came
When Beau came out of the house to meet Izzy, he wasn’t alone. A tall, elegant Black woman was with him. Beau looked a lot like his mom, Izzy realized.
They both walked toward the car. As they got closer, Izzy could see from Beau’s facial expression, from his body language, that it had gone well. He looked calmer, more at peace. Happy.
Izzy got out of the car as they approached, and Beau smiled at her.
“Izzy, I’d like to introduce you to my mom, Nina Russell. Mom, this is Isabelle Marlowe.”
Izzy held out her hand, and Beau’s mom took it in both of hers.
“It’s very nice to meet you, Isabelle,” she said. “Beau has told me so much about you. Thank you, for everything you’ve done for him.”
Izzy blushed as Beau’s mom smiled down at her.
“Nice to meet you, too, Ms. Russell,” Izzy said. “And it wasn’t…I didn’t…”
Beau’s mom laughed. “Nina, please.” She patted Izzy’s hand and released it. “I won’t keep you two, but I hope I’ll be able to get to know you better soon.”
Izzy smiled at her. “I’d like that, too,” she said. She turned to get into the passenger side of the car; she wanted to let Beau and his mom say goodbye without her standing there. “It was really nice to meet you.”
Beau turned to his mom and gave her a short, but very tight, hug and then said something to her that made her laugh and hug him again. He got in the car, rolled his window down, and waved.
“Bye, Mom,” he said. “See you soon.”
Beau didn’t say anything as they drove away, navigated to the freeway, and merged into traffic. Music was on, the same hip-hop playlist they’d listened to on their way there. Izzy took her cue from him and didn’t ask any questions.
He didn’t have to tell her what happened with his mom, obviously. Even though she was dying to know.
When he pulled into a gas station again, he turned off the car and finally looked at her.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t want to talk about this while I was driving.”
Then he didn’t say anything for a moment.
“It was great to meet her,” Izzy said, to help him along. “You both seemed happy.”
He ran his hand through his hair and smiled. He looked embarrassed but pleased. It was nice to see him like that.
“Yeah,” he said. “I think so. But at first…I didn’t know what to say, or how to start. For a while, we just made awkward conversation about the weather and her house and the Santa Barbara house. I wanted to apologize for real, but it was so hard. So finally I pulled up one of the chapters on my phone, one I’ve been working on this week, about what I discovered that night, and how awful I felt, and feel, about what I said to her, and what he did, and everything else. I handed my phone to her and asked her to read it. And then she started crying and I hugged her and she hugged me and then we talked hard for the next two hours about everything.” He laughed. “Well, maybe not everything. We have a lot more to talk about, years to catch up on, but we talked about a lot. It was really…hard. But good.”
Izzy touched his hand. “I’m so glad” was all she said. She wanted to say more, about how happy and relieved she was for him, but from the way Beau squeezed her hand and smiled at her, she could tell he understood what she meant.
“Me too.” He let go of her hand. “Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that. And to thank you, for helping me do this. I wouldn’t have done it without you.”
She almost said, “Oh, I didn’t do anything,” or “Yes, you would have” but she stopped herself. It was true. He wouldn’t have done it without her.
“You’re welcome,” she said instead.
He turned back to the steering wheel and then stopped. “Wait. We actually do need gas this time.”
They both laughed as he got out of the car.
They didn’t talk a lot on the drive back to Santa Barbara, but the silence didn’t seem tense. She didn’t occupy herself with her phone, scrolling through social media and sending meaningless texts to Priya like she had done on the way to LA. Instead, she just sat there in the passenger seat and daydreamed.
When they pulled up to the house, Beau stopped the car but didn’t get out.
“You have your keys, right? I think I want to go down to the beach for a little while,” he said.
She dug through her bag and found the keys. She opened the car door, but then she turned to him. “Do you want company?”
He smiled at her. “Only if the company is you.”
Izzy looked away so he wouldn’t see her smiling. Her cheeks felt warm—was she blushing? If she was, at least Beau wouldn’t be able to tell.
They got to the beach just as the sun was starting to set. Beau spread an old blanket from the trunk onto the sand, and they sat down. For a while, they both just stared in silence at the pink-and-orange horizon.
“I could use another one of those hugs, if that’s still on offer,” Beau said.
Izzy immediately turned to him. He wrapped his arms around her and rested his hands right in the small of her back, where they’d been before. She tucked her face into that little divot in his shoulder. He dropped his head down onto her shoulder and let out a long sigh.
After a little while, his fingers moved gently up and down her back. It made her whole body tingle. She didn’t want it to stop. She didn’t want this to stop. She didn’t want to let go of him. She just wanted to sit here, with him, so close there was no space between them, feeling his touch, breathing in and out together, listening to the waves crashing into shore.
But after a little while, she could feel him start to pull away, so she forced herself to let go of him, sit back. He moved away slowly and stopped to face her, when they were still so close, when her hands were still touching his shoulders, when his palms were on her upper arms.
“When I told my mom about you,” he said, “about these last few weeks, everything you’ve done for me, she said something else. She said she was so glad I had you. She said how lucky I was, to have someone like you.”
Izzy tried to say something, but for once, she had no idea what to say.