Chapter 4
Four
JESSE
A wiser man would have said no when the girl next door invited him on a week-long holiday to her best friend’s wedding.
But I wasn’t a wise man, and I had never been able to say no to Clara.
Since day one, when I was moving into my flat and she opened her front door looking both stressed and stunning and asked me to keep it down, I had never been able to say no to her.
Just like I always knew when something was wrong.
That first day, although I didn’t know what it was exactly, I could tell that something wasn’t right. So the next day, I impulsively decided to grab coffee and baked goods from a bakery I’d found while I was on my first run in the area. It was partially to make sure that she was okay, but mostly to try and make a better second impression on my new neighbour.
I’d knocked on the door and started counting. If I reached thirty and it stayed closed, then I would turn around and resign myself to friendly hellos if I saw her around the building. When I got to fifteen, the door opened, and my world tilted on its axis.
Clara had been wearing what I now knew was one of her default outfits. Her long brown curls were half tied up in a bun on top of her head with three pens sticking out of it, and half cascading over her shoulders. She was wearing a black crop that was barely longer than the pink bra peeking out, a beacon against her medium-brown skin. Black, high-waisted shorts made her legs look impossibly long. To complete the look, there were silver rings on almost every finger, and she had striped ankle socks and fuzzy leopard slippers on. Her brown eyes looked at me suspiciously as I hovered in the doorway.
“You looked stressed yesterday, thought maybe you could use a break,” I had stuttered out as I thrust a latte and cookies at her.
“I’m three days away from handing a book in,” she responded as she plucked the latte from my hand, gesturing for me to enter her flat. She led me into the kitchen, and in a move that felt like it had been orchestrated by the Fates themselves, I recognised the red cover splayed on the kitchen island.
“Please tell me you like it.” I pointed to the book and looked at her. Her eyes widened over the rim of the coffee cup as she recognised the mild panic of a fellow author desperate for validation. The need to know that the thing they spent so much time on was good.
“I’ve only just started, but so far, so good.” She slipped into a bar stool behind her laptop, and I leaned on the opposite side of the counter.
“Clara. Henry. Clara Henry.” She stumbled over her name like she wasn’t sure of the whole thing. The barest of blushes kissed the top of her cheekbones. If I hadn’t been looking right at her, I would have missed it. I had to pinch my thigh to stop my thoughts from fixating on whether any other parts of her turned a deeper shade of pink when she was embarrassed. Or turned on.
“Jesse,” I supplied, even though we both knew that. “What’s your book about?”
“Sex, love, and rock and roll.” I groaned internally while she laughed at her own response. “It’s funny. I obviously know what it’s about, but I’m at the stage where I’ve lost sight of the point of it.” She paused to take a sip of her coffee and reached for a cookie.
“It’s about soulmates,” she continued. “How do you live your life without the colour red because you’ve never found your romantic soulmate? How do you cope when you’re always reminded of what you lack, even when you’ve made peace with that never being in the cards for you? And then how do you feel when red suddenly appears and you have to figure out who you are again? Do you resist because you’ve been a whole person without them and now you have to factor someone else into your life? Sorry. I’m rambling. It’s about soulmates.”
I watched in real-time as she turned in on herself like she was ashamed of talking so freely about something she clearly loved.
“Don’t be sorry. It sounds interesting.” She sighed and tilted her head back. I tried to ignore the long line of her neck because, apparently, my brain thought it was pubescent again. “What’s the problem?” I asked.
She tipped her head back down and looked at me.
“I can’t figure out why this scene still isn’t working. It feels like it’s a crucial scene, so I can’t cut it, but I also can’t make it work properly and it’s holding me up.”
“What’s the issue?”
The rest of the afternoon had passed in what felt like mere moments but was actually several hours. Once Clara managed to talk her way through her problem, her fingers started flying over the keyboard. She’d go whole stretches of time without saying anything, but it was never an uncomfortable silence. Every time I thought I should leave her to it, she spoke and kept me in place.
Clara quickly became someone I always wanted in my orbit, and it took about a week of knowing her to know that the hot flush of a crush I had experienced when I first saw her wasn’t going to die down. Instead, it was going to stay at a low, steady simmer. Always in the background.
Which is why I shouldn’t have agreed to go to her best friend’s wedding with her. Especially a week-long event in the South of France.
And she was now single.
The rational part of my brain knew that Drew was probably also going to be in attendance, and just because they had broken up didn’t mean they would stay broken up under the hazy, loving glow of a wedding. So, getting my hopes up was a terrible idea.
But hope was a nice thing to hold on to, and my mind couldn’t stop remembering hot pink bras against tanned skin and sweeps of mostly hidden black ink that I was desperate to uncover.
I was so fucked.