Well, that was a clear change of subject.
“Both, obviously,” she said, “but I’m not picky on what kind.”
After they sat down at the table, Beau looked over at her. “Sorry. I’m just a little talked out, if that’s okay.”
Izzy reached for a pig in a blanket. “That’s totally okay.” And then she stopped. “Also—if you want to be alone now, that’s okay, too. I can just—”
He shook his head. “I don’t. I was actually kind of…looking forward to this.”
She looked at him for a second, then down at her plate. “Me too.”
They didn’t talk about anything else hard, for the rest of the night. They just ate dinner, and finished the croissant dough, and made cookies, and watched TV. But somehow, she felt closer to him at the end of the night than she had at the beginning.
On Monday afternoon, Izzy met Beau in the library. He raised his eyebrows at her as she sat down.
“Are you still up for our deal?” Beau asked. “About us both writing, I mean.”
Izzy gestured to the notebooks she’d brought with her. One was Beau’s, the one they passed back and forth every time. The other was her own.
“I’m not one to back out of a deal,” she said. “Haven’t you learned that about me yet?”
There was a certain amount of bravado in her voice, bravery she didn’t exactly feel. Yes, she’d been tinkering with an idea for the past few weeks, jotting down notes, tiny scenes, here and there. But she was scared to really commit to writing again.
She was glad, in a way, that this deal with Beau would force her to write. But another part of her was terrified. That she’d discover Gavin was right, this was too hard for her, she was no good at this. Or, even worse, that her experiences with writing and publishing over the past few years had taken away all her joy in writing, that joy she used to have when she was a teenager, sitting on her bed with her notebook for hours, deep into a world she’d created.
But it scared her even more to never try again, to leave that part of her life, of her dreams, behind.
She pushed Beau’s notebook across the table to him and took out her phone to set the timer. This time it was for her, not for him.
She took a deep breath as she opened her own notebook.
“Hey,” Beau said from across the table.
She looked up at him.
He was smiling softly at her. “You’re gonna be great. You know that, right?”
She could tell from the look on his face that he wasn’t fooled by her. He knew she was nervous about writing again.
She swallowed. “Thanks.” She wanted to say more, to say it helped for him to say that, it helped to have him there, sitting across the table from her, it helped to know he believed in her, but she couldn’t get anything else out. But she thought he might already know all of that.
She picked up her phone again. “Okay.” She pressed start. “Go.”
And then she looked at her notes from the past few weeks. The ones she’d barely admitted to herself that she had envisioned as a book. Okay. She could do this.
She flipped to a blank page in her notebook.
When the timer went off, she sat up with a jolt. It had been slow going, at first. She’d hesitated over names, places, transitions. She’d wanted to reach for her phone more than once, to look something up, to distract herself from the hard parts, to see if Priya had texted her. But instead, she’d made herself keep going, partly because of the timer, mostly because Beau was sitting across from her. And eventually, after a while, she’d forgotten to worry about whether that name was right, or if that place was really spelled like that, or if Priya had gone out yet with that hot medical student she’d met at the wedding. She’d even forgotten Beau was there. She’d just fallen headfirst into her own words, her own story, her own imagination.
And it felt great.
Beau’s smile was wide this time as he looked at her.
“It was good?” he asked.
She nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “It was good.”
When it was time to leave the library, he started to say something, then shook his head and stood up.
She stayed in her seat. “What?”
He sat back down. “Sorry. It’s just…I wanted to ask you something, but I think it’s probably…” He looked at her face and laughed. “Okay.” He sighed. “This is your last week here.”
The smile fell from her face. “Yeah. It is.”
He nodded. “I’d sort of managed to ignore that, until your friend said something, and…maybe that’s why I was so on edge the other day.” He sort of smiled. “I mean, one of the reasons I was so on edge.”