She smiled and reached for him. “Very.”
Afterward, they lay there together, warm, comfortable, happy. She rested her head on his broad chest and moved her fingers through the springy hair there. She turned her head and kissed his chest, and he took her hand and raised it to his lips.
“Hey, Beau?” she said.
“Mmm?” She could feel his chest vibrate against her.
“Do we have the ingredients for more of those waffles?”
He laughed and turned so they were face-to-face. “Are you telling me that after everything I’ve already done this morning, you want me to go into the kitchen and make you waffles?”
She traced his freckles with her finger. “That’s exactly what I’m telling you,” she said. “Remember, I like them with butter and—”
“Maple syrup,” he finished as he threw the covers back and got out of bed. “I bet you want coffee and bacon with that, too, don’t you?”
Izzy pulled the covers up to her chin and grinned at him. “Oh yeah. I definitely do.”
They didn’t work in the library that day, for the first time in over a month. They had too many distractions. The next day, though, Izzy turned to Beau after he’d brought her breakfast in bed again—pancakes this time.
“I feel guilty about yesterday,” she said.
He raised an eyebrow at her, and she giggled.
“Not that part of yesterday. We didn’t—”
“Oh, we can change that right now,” he said, and reached for her. She put her hand over his mouth.
“Oh my God, no, that’s not what I’m saying! We didn’t do any work yesterday, that’s what I mean. We both have work to do—I’m going to take a shower and meet you in the library in thirty minutes, okay?”
Beau’s lips curved into a pout. Izzy forced herself to resist the impulse to kiss him.
“You mean the room I’m not allowed to touch you in?”
Izzy nodded. “That’s exactly the room I mean. One hour. Maybe two. You can hold out that long. You did last week.”
Beau put his hand on her hip and smiled at her. “Yes, but that was before,” he said. “It’s going to be a lot harder now that I know—”
Izzy jumped out of bed. “Finish that sentence after we leave the library.”
They went out to dinner that night, to a small place where they sat in the garden in the back, surrounded by heat lamps and the smell of jasmine. The waiter smiled at them as he took their order—if he recognized Beau, he didn’t show it.
“We’ve spent a lot of time talking about my book,” Beau said, “but not much time talking about yours. Can I ask you how it’s going, or do you not want to talk about it?”
Izzy liked the way he’d phrased that. “Yeah, you can ask,” she said. “It might be just the honeymoon period, or I’m reenergized about writing because of working with you, or, I don’t know, just being here, but it’s really flowing, in a way that feels so rare.” She tried to figure out how to explain what she meant. “I feel like I’m living with these people, not just writing them. Like I can’t wait to see what they do next. I wake up in the morning happy that I’m going to get to work on the book that day. I’ve even been waking up a little early to work on it…well, except for today.” They grinned at each other. “I guess I’m falling in love with it in a way, and it feels wonderful.”
The waiter brought their appetizers just then, thank God, because Izzy could feel her last sentence hanging in the air. Falling in love with it. Did she have to use those exact words?
Had she used those exact words for a reason? Was she falling in love with more than just her book? She didn’t want to think about that right now, with Beau sitting across from her, the candlelight from the table warm on his skin, his strong hands reaching for his water glass, his chuckle at a bad joke from the waiter making her smile.
The waiter walked away, and Beau put some of the salad they were sharing on her plate.
“That’s great that it’s going so well.” She breathed a sigh of relief that he’d brought the conversation back to writing. “Are you working on the other one, too?”
She shook her head. “I made a bunch of notes for myself on it, but now I’m trying to let them marinate. I don’t want to rush it.” She grinned. “Plus, I’ve been a little busy this week.”
He reached across the table for her hand, and they smiled at each other.
That week it got even harder to hide everything going on between them from Michaela, especially since Izzy woke up in Beau’s bed every morning. Granted, she usually woke up well before Michaela arrived, kissed a sleeping Beau on the cheek, and then ran back up to her room to start work. But especially since her route back to her room took her past the kitchen, Michaela’s office, and the front door, she was always afraid that Michaela would get to the house early one day, see her race by in a tank top and pajama pants, and know exactly where she’d come from.
She wasn’t sure exactly why they were both doing so much to hide their relationship from Michaela—it’s not like she didn’t know what could happen when two people in their twenties lived in a house together. They weren’t really hiding it from the world at large; they’d gone out to dinner together twice, they’d made out on the beach like teenagers multiple times.
Was it because neither of them wanted to—or was ready to—answer questions from Michaela about what was going on between them?
She didn’t know what was going to happen once she had to go back to New York. She’d avoided thinking about it as much as possible. She usually liked to plan for the future, but all she wanted was to live in the right now as long as she could.
Izzy smiled as she walked into the library on Thursday. Just two more hours until Michaela left for the day, and she and Beau would be all alone. And then just one more day until they had the house to themselves for the weekend.
They both got to work quickly, and when the timer went off, Beau pushed his laptop and the notebook back across the table to Izzy. She read over what was on the screen. It was his revised, cleaned-up version of the day he’d discovered everything about his dad and his mom, and how he’d fled to Santa Barbara, how he’d tried and failed to write for months. She stared at it for a while as she thought about what to say.
“You have that look on your face again,” he said. “Like something’s wrong.”
She looked at him and tried to smile, and he made an exaggerated grimace.
“Okay, please never make that face again. That was some weird kind of half-frown-half-fake-smile hybrid, and it was terrifying.”
She laughed, and he did, too, for a second.
“Come on, Izzy. What is it?”
She sighed. “It’s not that—”
“Yes, yes, I know, it’s not that something’s wrong. You know what I mean.”
She did know what he meant. “Yeah. Okay. This is super readable, you tell this part of the story really well, readers are going to be very invested in it. But the thing is, this book is your memoir, your story. People want to know about you. You don’t say why you lashed out at your mom the way you did, how you felt about what you said to your mom when you discovered everything, or why it took you so long to reach out to her. The facts are important, sure, but the most important thing is how you felt about everyone, and about yourself.”
He crossed his arms and sat back. That stony look was back on his face. “But you know all of that,” he said.
She wanted to soften her voice, but she tried to keep it businesslike between the two of them in the library when they talked about work, so she didn’t.
“Yes, I know all of that,” she said. “But the reader doesn’t. People can guess why, but they’ll guess all sorts of things. Maybe you’re planning to talk about it in a subsequent chapter, but if so, you should lay at least a little groundwork here so it doesn’t feel like it’s just…missing.”
He looked angry. Again. She’d thought this conversation would be easier than it had been the last time, because of everything that had happened between them since. But it was just as hard. At least, it was for her.
He dropped his palms flat on the table. “I can’t believe you would—” He stood up. “I need a break.”
And before she could say anything else, he’d left the library.
Izzy looked after him, stunned. He was just going to walk out on her like that? She thought he would come back right away, but when he hadn’t returned after ten minutes, she grabbed her laptop and notebook and walked up to her room.