She pulled her knees up to her chest. “You’re not going to take no for an answer on this one, are you?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Absolutely not. But then, you wouldn’t have told me about this if you wanted that from me.”
He was probably right about that.
He put his hand on her back. She wanted to lean into it, reach out for him, but she didn’t.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go home. We have lots of snacks waiting for us.”
She jumped up. “You’re right. I bet the snack cabinet misses us. It’s probably making up little songs, just to be ready for us to come back.”
When they got back to the car, Beau tossed her a hoodie from the backseat. “Here. You look cold.”
She was cold—she should have worn something other than a sleeveless dress to the beach in this weather. As she slipped it on, he cleared his throat.
“I know you said not to apologize again. But I just need to say this. I can be a real asshole, but if I’d known that, about you and writing, I never would have said what I said yesterday. I really hate that I hurt you like that.”
She touched his arm. “I know.”
They were mostly quiet on the way home. Izzy was glad she’d suggested surfing. Things felt better between them. Not back to how it had been before—that was impossible. Good in a different way, though.
Izzy checked her phone when she got back to the house.
Met a hot medical student last night, friend of my cousin. Keep your fingers crossed he asks me out!
Izzy laughed. Priya always managed to find hot guys wherever she went.
Fingers and toes are crossed!
When Izzy got back downstairs after a shower, she wandered to the kitchen. When she got there, she stopped and stared.
Beau stood at the kitchen island, his hands—and part of his T-shirt—dusted in flour, rolling out dough.
“What…What are you doing?”
He looked up from the dough to her. “Making croissants. I started them last night, after you went to bed. They take forever, but now it’s time to laminate the dough.”
“Laminate the dough…What are you talking about?” Then it suddenly hit her. “Wait. You make the baked goods?”
He laughed. “Yes, of course I make them, where did you think they came from?”
She walked over to the island to look at what he was doing. “I don’t know, I thought maybe the mixer and the oven became sentient and just popped them out on their own after we went to bed.” She grinned at him. “That, or Michaela.”
He went back to rolling the dough. “Michaela does do everything important around here, but no, it was me.” He shrugged. “When I got here, I had nothing to do other than just sit around and feel bad about everything. And I did that for a while, and then one night when I was up late—I haven’t slept all that well in…a while—I watched some cooking show. One of the old ones, where no one looked camera-ready and they were all kind of boring and pedantic, but I sort of got into it. And so I dug out some of my grandmother’s old cookbooks from the library and tried to make biscuits.” He shook his head. “They were terrible, that first time. Heavy and dense. But it just made me want to try to get them right. And once I did, I kept trying, with other stuff.” He looked down at the dough, and then turned to open the refrigerator. “I tried croissants once before, and they were good, but I knew I could do better. It’s been a while, though, so we’ll see how they turn out. But I figured I’d wait until I really needed to, and last night felt like the right time.”
He took a flat square of something out of the fridge and peeled the plastic wrap from around it.
“What do you mean, wait until you really needed to?” she asked.
He set the square in the center of the dough.
“It’s—this is going to sound stupid—a good distraction for me, when things are…difficult. And the more complicated the recipe is, the better it is at taking my mind off things. I mean, it’s fun, too, don’t get me wrong, I’ve gotten very dorky about different kinds of flours, and I now have a favorite brand of vanilla, please don’t ever tell anyone I said that. But having to do a million steps means I can’t think about anything else. And croissants take a lot of concentration.”
He folded the dough around the square and pinched the corners together. She couldn’t take it any longer.
“Is that butter? Because if so, that’s a LOT of butter.”