Summer of Love (The Love You Want #1)

Chapter 1

One

CLARA

“W hat is this, Clara?”

I was so lost in my own world, cooking dinner and listening to the Spice Girls the wrong side of too loud, that I hadn’t heard Drew come through the door of our flat. In the silence between ‘Stop’ ending and the next song starting, he made his presence known.

The surprise of seeing him casually leaning in the doorway of the kitchen, in the early evening glow of a London sunset, caught me off guard. So off guard that I almost didn’t notice that he was holding the black box I was supposed to have hidden before he got home from work. He was studying the box like an ancient relic. His hazel eyes kept shifting between it and me.

‘Viva Forever’ started blasting through the flat. I asked the speaker, nestled in the corner of our kitchen, to stop playing music and true silence blanketed us.

Drew eventually let his gaze settle on me, and then he started to take in the mess of the kitchen around me. A reminder that it was Thursday. Thursday was date night.

Tonight was my turn to cook dinner, and I was halfway through making a lasagne.

In an ideal world, dinner would have been ready before he returned from work, but you know what they say about best-laid plans.

Everything that could have gone wrong while making this lasagne had gone wrong, and it was nowhere near close to being ready. Made more obvious by the fact that Drew was holding that damn box.

“It’s a…box?” I said, placing a sheet of pasta in the well-loved oven dish my mum had given me before I went off to uni. I was trying to play it cool, even though my face was prickling with sweat. Tonight was supposed to be romantic. For someone who had written so many grand gestures in my career, I was apparently incapable of pulling them off in real life. I hadn’t even had time to change out of my ratty, faded joggers and sauce-stained T-shirt. My curls were in the most haphazard bun imaginable as I couldn’t find a hairband with enough stretch in it to tie properly.

“Yeah, I know that, but what’s in it?” Drew sounded more annoyed than I expected him to be. It was a velvet box. We both knew what was in there.

Not quite a ring but a pair of silver cufflinks. One had a sunflower engraved on it, the other a rose. I didn’t remember how it started, but somewhere along the way, we decided that those were the flowers that best represented us. The cufflinks were supposed to go with his wedding suit.

“Have you opened it?” I asked slowly.

“No, because if I open it, then I have to accept that it’s real, and that leaves me in an awkward position.”

I felt my heartbeat start to quicken as I finally noticed his body language. Drew did not look like a man who had just ruined his own proposal but was still excited about the prospect of being asked. His face was closed off, especially his hazel eyes. Jaw tense. His broad shoulders were too pinned back. He was looking every inch of his six-foot-one, but there was an insincerity to it. A stiffness to him that was usually reserved for extended family gatherings where everyone awkwardly cooed over how big he was now like he wasn’t in his twenties.

“Why would it be awkward? It’s just a proposal.” I tried to keep my tone light, but a tremor of panic laced my words.

Drew stared at me as he stepped properly into the room and set the box down on the kitchen island next to my remaining fresh pasta sheets.

“Because my answer wouldn’t be yes.” Drew struck the fatal blow on our relationship as casually as if he had just told me he’d picked up my favourite pastry on his way home as a Thursday night treat.

My eyes involuntarily slid shut, and I took a deep breath. When I opened them again, his eyes were staring at my socked feet. I took another breath to try and unclench my jaw and stifle the urge to shout my next sentence at him.

“How could it not be yes? We’ve been together for ten years. You said you wanted marriage,” I said, my voice a too-steady cadence.

“I do, but I want it within a relationship that is functioning. I don’t think this is working anymore.” Drew didn’t possess enough common decency to look at me as he tore up the very fabric of our lives.

I gripped the edge of the kitchen counter. “What exactly isn’t working anymore, Andrew?” It was the use of his full name that got him to finally look at me. I didn’t know if that was better or worse when I saw no sadness in his eyes. I wanted to turn away from that look, but I held his gaze defiantly.

“This.” He gestured between us before he buried his hands in the pockets of his black work trousers. “Us. It feels…different. Don’t you think it feels like we’ve just been treading water to stay alive recently?”

My mouth dropped open for a breath before I clenched it back shut. “I wouldn’t say that. Yes, it feels different, but that’s just growing up, isn’t it? Things change. They evolve.” The words felt like a lie on my tongue, even though somewhere inside me, I believed them. Nothing stayed the same. But that wasn’t a bad thing.

Drew nodded slowly, one of his hands making their way from his pocket to rub at the back of his neck. The action seemed to happen in slow motion and made the pause before he started speaking seem to last for minutes rather than seconds.

“You aren’t the person I fell in love with.” My eyes closed at hearing those words. I forced them back open as he continued. “I don’t think you have been for a while, but I held on to the hope that the spark would come back because we’ve always worked well together, and I didn’t want to lose you. But that spark between us is still missing, and I think if we got married, we’d just grow to resent each other.”

Suddenly, any anger bubbling under the surface—over the fact that my boyfriend of a decade was casually breaking up with me while the box I had planned to propose to him with was sat between us—shifted into understanding.

And annoyance.

Two weeks after our second date, my dad almost died of a heart attack. In the weeks that followed, I lived in a semi-grief-stricken state, getting caught up in thinking about the what-ifs and the maybes. Drew had stuck around through a time when I didn’t even know who I was. When I had nothing to give to meeting new people. Worse than that, I felt overly clingy, and I started asking more of the people around me. Drew had been all too happy to let me need him like that. He made no secret about the fact that he loved that he could be the one solid thing I could lean against as I tried to reconcile with the fact that my dad wasn’t as invincible as I had always thought. Drew took the role of being my rock very seriously, and I let him.

I needed him.

However, Dad took the wake-up call for what it was and made changes. He handed over the reins of his successful solicitors’ firm and left that industry completely, instead choosing to open a restaurant with his best friend, Xander. Was the idea of him leaving one business just to start another one terrifying at the time? Yes. But Dad took finding a work-life balance much more seriously in his second career. As things settled back down, the crippling fear that had been present for a lot of the early part of our relationship quietened. I stopped needing to stand against another person to feel tethered to the world again.

Ever since graduation eight years ago, I had moved from strength to strength. I was the one who worked hard to make her dreams of being a full-time author come true. He was the one who took the first sales job he could find, one that he hated before he even started. It was because of my career that I could own the flat that we lived in near Hampstead Heath. I was the one who funded the holidays we went on and got to construct my days the way I wanted while he was stuck in the middle of the corporate ladder, unable to get higher.

Yes, I wasn’t the girl he fell in love with anymore. I no longer needed saving.

I looked at Drew as we stood in our kitchen and wondered when exactly everything changed. When had he started resenting me for being more successful than either of us could have dreamed? Was it because the high-flying life he thought he was going to waltz into post-graduation still hadn’t come to fruition? When was the first time he woke up next to my still sleeping body and thought maybe I don’t love her anymore ? How many times a day did he wish that I would fall apart just so he could feel like he was serving a purpose? That nothing less than my complete vulnerability would make him feel like that? I wondered how long he would have let this relationship go on if I hadn’t forced his hand with this—now failed—proposal. Just how long had he been waiting for the spark to come back?

Mostly, I wondered what the hell had happened to me.

When did I become the kind of person who settled for ‘fine’? When did I start to resent hearing the key in the door because it meant I would have to support him and his life dramas in a way that had long stopped being reciprocated? When had I started clinging to stories to remind me that love was real because I was becoming cynical about romantic love in my own life? Why hadn’t I dissected the fact that I had only been driven to propose to him because I thought I should marry the man I had spent the last decade with, not because I was desperate to be married to this man?

I’m not one to take signs from the universe, but the fact that making this lasagne had gone wrong at almost every stage—when I had been making it for years without issue—probably meant something .

And, if I was being honest, now that the initial hot flush of anger had cooled, the overriding emotion I was feeling was relief.

Because deep down, I knew he was right.

We weren’t in love with each other anymore.

When I thought about how a relationship would end, I’d always imagined that it would go down in a blaze of fire. There would be screaming and slamming doors. In actual fact, it was just two people looking at each other in a messy kitchen, realising they were no longer what the other person needed. Or wanted.

The bones that knew Drew as if he were part of my marrow told me to fight. To not throw away ten years of companionship and love so quickly. There had been good times. There had been great times. There had been days when being loved by Drew made me feel like I could conquer the world. And I should hold on to that.

However, my gut, and, more importantly, my heart told me it wasn’t worth it. Fighting for Drew and this relationship wouldn’t bring me happiness anymore. It hadn’t for a while.

“Then I think you’re right. This isn’t working anymore.” My voice was stunted, punctuating the silence cleanly.

Drew flinched at my words, and I finally saw a hint of sadness in his eyes. He nodded once, before lifting his chin too high to be comfortable. He took a deep breath and turned to leave the kitchen without saying a word.

The click of the front door echoed throughout the flat.

I waited for the world to feel like it had ended. I waited for the tears to come. I waited to feel like I was drowning in sorrow over someone so important in my life. Who just walked out without so much as a goodbye.

Nothing happened.

Maybe it was due to shock, and when that passed, I was going to be overcome with the kind of full-body sobs that steal your breath.

But as the silence Drew left in his wake hung over me, I went back to assembling my dinner. I hadn’t put this much effort into a lasagne for it to go to waste.

“Hey, Siri, resume music.”

As I let the Spice Girls fill up the silence of my flat, I suddenly remembered Drew and I were both meant to be in Becky and Gavin’s wedding party next month. As I spooned ragu into the oven dish, I made a mental note to talk to my best friend about that potential mess.