She couldn’t believe she’d really volunteered stay here longer and work with Beau Towers on his book. Why had she done that?
Because of that look on his face. That look of shame, and longing, and pain when he’d talked about his book, and how hard it was for him, and how he didn’t think he could do it. That look, and everything else he’d said, made her think he really cared about it and had something he wanted to say. And suddenly, she wanted to help him say it. When she’d first gotten here, she’d been so focused on escaping from the office and proving that she could do this job—to herself and to Marta—that she hadn’t cared at all about the actual book. But now she did.
Well, she’d been looking for an answer to the question of what to do about her job, whether to stay and fight or give up and go. Beau Towers had just given her a way to figure that out, once and for all. If she really managed to do this—coach him through writing his book by the time she had to go back to New York—then she would stay at TAOAT and keep fighting for that dream. But if she couldn’t do it, or gave up, or if he did, that was it: She was done with all this. Beau Towers, and his book, would make this decision for her.
Beau returned to the kitchen, a bottle of wine in one hand and a set of keys in another.
“I got the wine.” He handed her the keys. “And these are for you.”
One looked like a house key, but the other…She looked up at him, not sure what this meant.
“The car’s parked in the garage; use it whenever you want,” he said. “I should have given you the keys on your first day here. I’m sorry you had to walk all the way up the hill in the rain, that’s my fault.”
She hadn’t expected him to do this. “Thank you, but are you sure…？”
He nodded. “Yes, of course. I don’t use the car that much anyway. And I don’t want you to feel like you’re a prisoner here. If you’re going to stay here and help me with this, I want you to feel free to come and go, and go to the beach and the coffee shop and wherever you went today—”
“The bookstore,” she said.
“The bookstore, sure, there, too. I mean, if you’re stuck in California babysitting me, you might as well get to enjoy being in California, you know?”
She looked up at him, an apology on her lips about that babysitting crack, but he had a grin on his face. It made him look different—younger, more relaxed, a little playful. And very attractive.
She pushed that last thought out of her mind.
“It’s definitely been nice to be in sixty-three-degree and sunny weather all week when it was in the twenties in New York, that’s for sure.” She looked outside. “I guess that’s why it didn’t even occur to me that it could rain here.”
He pulled out a tray from the side of the fridge and put their bowls of soup on it. “We do have weather in Southern California,” he said. “It’s just within a much smaller range of possibilities than you have in New York.” He picked up the tray and nodded at the wine bottle. “Can you get the wine and wineglasses?”
She took a corkscrew out of a drawer and grabbed the bottle and glasses. She followed him down the hall to the TV room, a room that she’d still never stepped inside. When Beau pushed open the door with his shoulder, Izzy stopped and stared.
The TV in this room was larger than any TV she’d ever seen in person. Maybe that’s why she hadn’t seen any other TVs in this house; there had originally been five or six, and this TV had just eaten them all.
Beau set the tray on the coffee table in front of the couch and then turned around to see Izzy still staring at the TV.
“I know, it’s a little absurd.” He looked embarrassed. “When I moved in here, it was kind of sudden. I’d only planned to come for a long weekend, to kind of…clear my head. And then I just stayed. It used to be my grandparents’ house.”
Oh. A few things made more sense now.
Izzy sat down on the couch and reached for her bowl of soup. It tasted as good as it smelled. She was glad there was more in the kitchen, since she had a feeling she’d eat this entire bowl and then some.
Beau picked up the corkscrew and reached for the bottle of wine.
“A lot of the furniture and stuff here is still theirs, but they had a really old TV, the picture was terrible, it barely got cable, and I knew I needed something else.” He laughed. “I told Michaela I needed a new TV, and when she asked what I wanted, I said I didn’t care, I just wanted the biggest TV they had. And so, well, that’s what she got me.”