She took another sip of wine and glanced at Beau. Why was he looking at her like that? Like just the sight of her made him mad. He was the one who had invited her to dinner, or did he not remember that? Well, if that counted as an invitation.
He looked away for a second and then looked back at her. “Okay, go,” he said.
Izzy tilted her head and looked at him. Wow, that tone in his voice infuriated her. “Excuse me?” Had no one ever taught this guy to say please or thank you? “Go?”
He nodded. “Yes, go. You said you gave great pep talks. Well? Show me what you can do.”
Izzy stared at him for a moment over her glass of wine. Fine, okay. She would show him what she could do.
“Okay, you want to get right to it.” She set her wineglass down on the table. “Great. Why don’t you tell me what your struggles have been with the book so far? When I know what you’re dealing with, I’ll be better able to help and to give advice.”
Beau picked up a taco. “No,” he said, and took a bite.
Izzy took a deep breath. “No?”
He finished chewing. “No. I’m not going to tell you my ‘struggles.’” That sarcastic tone in his voice made her want to throw her glass of wine in his face. She took a gulp of it, just to remind herself not to waste good wine. “I don’t have to tell you anything. That wasn’t part of the deal. The deal was that you give me a pep talk. So, like I said. Go.”
He’d apparently invited her to dinner just to make her perform for him. Luckily, she was good at this. In college, she’d worked as a writing tutor, and while a lot of that work was on the page, even more of it was talking to writers, encouraging them, listening to their problems and helping them figure out solutions. It was one of the things that had made her good at this part of her job. Izzy took another long sip of wine and set her glass on the table.
“Okay. One thing I often tell writers is to just get words on the page. It’s impossible to work with a blank page, but as long as you have a first draft—no matter how bad you think it is, or how much work you think it needs—that’s a victory right there. I know it feels overwhelming to write a whole book—don’t think about it like that. Just think about it step-by-step, page by page.”
He was looking straight at her, and seemed to be…listening? Paying attention? She hadn’t really expected that. She drained the wine from her glass and kept going.
“Just give yourself an hour a day to start with: You can even break it up into thirty minutes at a time, or even fifteen minutes, if you’re feeling antsy. Just write as much as you can during that time, and don’t let yourself edit or stress about it, just go.”
Izzy was getting invested in this. Maybe, despite everything, she could actually get through to Beau Towers.
“You also don’t have to write in chronological order! I know that trips people up a lot—they hit a difficult scene, or in a memoir, a difficult period in their life, and they just stall. Instead, you can jump around. Write your way into it. Start with favorite memories as a kid, or a pivotal moment in your life, a conversation you overheard once that you always think about, a time you stayed up all night, whatever stands out to—”
Beau burst out laughing. It was that mean laughter again. Directed at her.
No wonder this jerk lived alone in this house. He’d clearly been expelled from society.
“Is that all you’ve got?” he said, still with that mean look on his face. “Start with a pivotal moment in my life. Wow, what insight. Anything else?”
Izzy looked at him for one long moment. She forced herself to blink back the angry tears that had come to her eyes.
She was furious at herself for almost crying because of something Beau Towers, of all people, said to her. But she was even more furious at Beau Towers for saying it.
She didn’t have to do this. She was already sick of her job, and she’d already done far more than she’d had to here. She neither wanted to, nor had to, smile at this asshole.
Or even sit there and eat with him.
She stood up and dropped her napkin on the table.
“Wait, where are you going?” he said as she walked to the door. “Aren’t you going to eat?”
She turned around and looked him in the eye. “That wasn’t part of the deal,” she said. And walked out the door.
Izzy ran up the staircase to her room. She couldn’t believe she’d wasted an actual good pep talk on Beau Towers. She knew he was a jerk; she should have just given him some lackluster “we believe in you” nonsense, and then ignored him and eaten as many of Michaela’s delicious fish tacos as she could handle before he told her to go away.
The worst part was that for a brief moment, while she’d been talking to him, she’d thought she’d seen a real person behind that beast sitting across the table from her. She’d thought, for a few seconds, that he was listening to her, wanted to hear what she had to say. It had felt, just for a little while, like this was the job she not only wanted to be doing but was meant to be doing. So she’d actually tried to help him. She’d tried to give him good advice.
She should have known it was all a trick.
She felt silly for being duped, but most of all, she felt silly for how disappointed she’d felt. Some part of her had thought she could really be the one to get through to Beau Towers. Well, that made her feel ridiculous.
But damn, had it felt good to walk out on him. She never let herself do things like that. She’d always just smiled, taken notes, done what she had to do, worked as hard as she could, and didn’t let people see her mad. Often, she didn’t even let herself really get mad. She knew being angry, let alone showing it, was dangerous for someone like her, working in the industry she wanted to work in. No matter how she felt, she just had to act cheerful, easygoing, not let anything get to her, and definitely never let anyone see her angry. But now she was furious and she’d let Beau Towers know it. And it felt great.
She walked into her room, ready to grab her tote bag and her suitcase and leave. She’d drive to LA, maybe see if she could still get on that original flight at LAX, maybe just stay at an airport hotel that night until her flight the next day, whatever. She just had to get the hell out of here.
She grabbed her suitcase, then stumbled. And then she sat down hard on the bed.
Oh no. The wine. She’d had two glasses of wine—two large glasses—in the past hour. Less than an hour really. And all she’d eaten today was breakfast at the hotel, a granola bar on the road, and three bites of a fish taco. And while she wasn’t exactly drunk, she was certainly tipsy. She couldn’t drive anywhere now, much less all the way back to Los Angeles. She could kick herself for asking Michaela for wine in the first place.
Now she just had to sit here, in this stupid, perfect room with the incredible view and comfortable bed and glorious bathtub, and wait until she was sober enough to drive.
She wished she could tiptoe downstairs and get some food. A few more tacos would certainly help absorb all of that wine. But Beau was probably sitting there in the dining room eating the entire platter of food like some lord of a manor; she couldn’t ruin her dramatic exit by walking back in to pick up her plate.
She dug through her tote bag to see if she had any more snacks in there. Nothing.
She sat there fuming for ten minutes. She was mad at herself for not stocking her bag with more snacks…no, wait, she was mad at herself for eating all her snacks already, she was mad at Beau Towers for being such a jerk, and she was mad at California for being so stupid and big that she’d had to rent a car to drive to his house instead of just taking a rideshare like in a civilized place.
Was that a knock at the door?
Normal Izzy would have gone to the door, smiled at that jerk Beau Towers, and told him yes she knew he wanted her the hell out of his house, she was on her way. But angry, tipsy, out-of-character Izzy ignored the knock. Even though she thought for a second it might be Michaela, who maybe hadn’t actually left, who maybe had come all the way up the stairs on her sprained ankle, she didn’t move. No matter who was at her door right now, she didn’t want to deal with them. Thank goodness whoever was there went away after just two knocks.
A few minutes later she got up. She definitely wasn’t okay to drive yet, but she’d just go out to the car with her stuff anyway, sit there, and sober up, instead of here. Plus, she’d been sure she’d had a bag of potato chips; maybe it had fallen out of her bag in the car.
She slung her tote bag over her shoulder and grabbed her suitcase. She opened the door and stopped. There, sitting in front of her door, was a tray full of food. A plate of fish tacos—her half-eaten one, plus three more—a bowl full of slaw, and a stack of chocolate chip cookies. And another glass of wine.
Where had all this come from?