‘I appreciate your faith in me, Lara, but you can’t know me better than I know myself.’
‘I can trust you more than you trust yourself. That much is clear. I already do.’
She folded her arms, and he knew that he wasn’t going to persuade her that she was wrong. Well, that was fine. He didn’t need to persuade her. A relationship didn’t exist without both parties being in it, and he had already decided he was out.
‘I’m not negotiating here, Lara. I’m telling you. I’m sorry to be blunt, but I think we both need that. No more fake dating. No more fake engagement.’
‘And your sponsorship? Spencer?’ Of course her first thought was his career.
‘They’ve already signed the contract; the launch is in a month. They can’t take it back now. I’ll be a disappointment to them, of course, but that can’t be helped.’
Her expression turned hard, determined. ‘You are not a disappointment, Jannes,’ she said. ‘I’m going to the launch. You can pretend to date me or marry me or not to know me, if you want, but I’m going to be there to support you either way.’
* * *
‘I want us to still be friends,’ he said, and Lara nodded, because what else could she do? She didn’t want to lose him completely, but she knew that their friendship was never going back to what it had been before. How could it possibly, when her feelings had changed so much?
‘I can’t not have you in my life, Lara. I can’t look at you and wonder what will happen if I mess up. If you want something and I’m not able to give it to you and you walk away again. You mean too much to me to take a risk like that.’
‘But think about if it worked, Jannes. I can’t promise that it will. We both know that. But just...what if it did? Because I love you—that’s not a secret, and I know that you love me too. But there are all these other ways of loving each other that we’ve only just begun to explore, and I think that if we were brave, and decided to go for it, there’s something really special there. Something that I don’t know if we would ever find with anyone else.’
‘I’m not saying no because I think I’m going to find something better with someone else.’
‘But you are saying no?’
‘I’m saying that I feel the same way. But the risks are too great, Lara. These last couple of days with things not being right between us—it’s been awful. I don’t want to go through that again.’
‘So we make a commitment to each other—we promise that, whatever happens, we stay in one another’s lives.’
‘And what happens when we can’t keep our promises?’ Jannes asked, his voice gravelly.
She didn’t have an answer to that and, honestly, she didn’t know whether she was relieved or sad. Because he had made up his mind, that much was clear. And she had only just started to sort through her own issues, the things that had been stopping her from committing. She couldn’t solve Jannes’s problems as well.
She squeezed his hand for a second, before letting it drop. Just for a minute there, she’d been able to imagine her life if this had all worked out, and it was something shining and brilliant, and now completely out of reach.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
JANNES SAT ON the deck of his yacht, the water calm as a millpond around him. If there had been even a breath of wind then there would be something for him to do, but still and calm like this, there was nothing to do for now but sit and think.
It was meant to be easier out here: that was why he’d come. He’d thought he would suddenly feel a whole lot better than he had when he’d walked away from Lara in the park at London Fields. But he didn’t. He didn’t feel better on land. Being on the water didn’t help either. Which meant he had only one idea left, and he’d been putting that off for as long as he could.
Even as he was walking up the steps to Mormor’s apartment, after she buzzed him in from the street, he knew that he was walking into a nightmare. There was no way she was going to look at his miserable face—and there was no way that his face wasn’t miserable, given that that was how he felt—and not tell him that he had made an enormous mistake in letting Lara go. They’d said that they were just going to go back to how they were before. That they’d pretend that the dating thing had never happened. But he couldn’t. She couldn’t. Too much had changed in the last few weeks.
‘Älskling,’ Mormor said as soon as she answered the door. ‘Come in and tell me why you are being so stupid.’
He smiled. This was going to go exactly how he’d expected. But something told him that Mormor’s tough love was going to be the only thing that helped.
‘So you’re not getting married any more,’ Mormor said, a cup of black coffee steaming in front of her crossed arms.
He sighed melodramatically, thinking that that might get through to her, and shook his head. ‘We were never getting married, Mormor. You know that. We told you that. Repeatedly. Don’t pretend that you’ve forgotten.’
She huffed in his face, which was precisely the reaction that he’d expected. ‘Of course I haven’t forgotten, Jannes. Just because I am in my nineties doesn’t mean I am an idiot, you know. Anyone with any sense could see that you and Lara were falling in love and going to get married. It’s not my fault if you couldn’t.’
‘Well, we’ve broken up,’ he said, regretting the air of certainty and finality. ‘Real us and fake us. It’s all over, so you were wrong.’
Her eyes softened as she passed him a cup of coffee and a cinnamon bun. ‘I don’t know about that. But come on, tell me why you broke up.’
‘We weren’t right for each other,’ he lied.
‘Pfft! You’re perfect for one another. Try again.’
‘I’ll end up hurting her,’ he said, which was the truth. But he didn’t think that Mormor would accept it.
‘Closer. Not true, but closer to what you’re really scared about.’
He shook his head, feeling the words—the fear—bubbling up and not able to stop it. ‘She’ll leave me. Of course she will. Even my own parents would drive away from me twice a year without a backwards glance. I know they never looked back because I watched, every time, to see if they would. Or even glance in a mirror. And they never did. I decided a long time ago that I was never going to let that happen again.’
Mormor laid a hand on his shoulder and made a soothing noise. ‘And you think Lara would do that to you?’ she asked.
‘I know that she wouldn’t mean to,’ Jannes said, looking down at his clenched hands. ‘But eventually the novelty would wear off. We’d fight. She’d walk away. I know how these things go. But what’s worse is that I won’t be content to wait for it to happen. At the first sign of something being wrong I’ll be out of there, and I’ll hurt her in the process.’
Mormor looked up, tried to catch his eye, but he kept his eyes down, because he didn’t need her to see how far down this sadness went.
‘I don’t think that you do know everything, sötnos. I see how much she loves you.’
‘Then I’ll hurt her, trying to protect myself,’ he argued.
Mormor smiled. ‘You know, you can just choose not to do that. I’m not saying it’s an easy choice. But you can choose it. You just have to decide how brave you want to be. I think you have it in you to make this work. I think you deserve to be happy with Lara. I think she deserves to be happy with you. But that’s not going to happen until you decide to make a change. You have to let go of what your parents did to you and decide that you’re going to do better than they did. I know at least one person who would never walk away from you. Who has never thought twice about how important you are. Who knows that you would never, ever hurt her. If you can trust yourself to love me, älskling, you can trust yourself to love Lara. She deserves it. And you deserve to be happy.’
‘I think I need to go for a walk.’
He headed out of the apartment with no idea where he was going, o
nly that he needed to be moving to think about what his grandmother had said. She was right—he’d loved his grandmother since before he could remember, and he’d never once wondered whether she loved him back. Whether it was safe to love her. So whatever damage his parents had done when they’d dumped him in that school, it hadn’t touched every part of him. There was a part of his heart that was still undamaged, and he wondered if he knew how to find it. To tap into it. To make it grow.
Because that was what he wanted—he had to admit that now, if nothing else. They might not be able to make it work, but he wanted Lara in his heart. Or wanted to give her more of it, because he really was as stupid as Mormor liked to tell him he was if he thought that she didn’t have a place in there already. He’d loved her as a friend for three years, and in that time he had never doubted that she shared his feelings, that she wouldn’t want to hurt him. So why did he think that would change if the way that they loved each other changed? Either he trusted her, or he didn’t. He trusted himself to be there for her, or he didn’t. And if he couldn’t trust himself to do those things in a romantic relationship, then he had no right claiming a place in her life at all. Because she deserved better than that.
She deserved someone who would love her wholly, and he did.
He loved her, he trusted her, and he trusted himself to always feel that way.
He half sprinted back to Mormor’s apartment with this revelation, a new fear sinking in.
‘I don’t know if she’ll even take me back,’ he said, the minute that he was through the door.
‘And I can’t promise that she will,’ Mormor said, waiting for him as if she already knew this was exactly where their earlier conversation had been leading. ‘Only you two can work this out. But I can promise you that she loves you. Any old fool can see that much. And I can promise you that, however it goes, I will still be here for you.’
He wrapped his arms around her and rested his chin on the top of her head.
‘Thank you, Mormor. I don’t know what I’d do without you.’
‘You’d do fine,’ she answered from somewhere below his chin. ‘And you will do, when I’m not here any more to look out for you. But I’d be a lot happier knowing that you had someone else who loves you and trusts you as much as I do.’
He smiled over the top of her head. ‘How do I do it? Any ideas?’
‘Oh, älskling,’ she said with a sigh. ‘You know her the best. What does she like? What’s important to her?’
Well, he knew the answer to that, of course. Her community, the friends and family she had made for herself, when she couldn’t rely on one of the people who should always have her back.
‘I follow her on Instagram, you know,’ Mormor said.
‘I had heard something along those lines.’
‘And she follows me back. So if there was something that you wanted to say, if there was a grand gesture you wanted to make, for instance...’
But he was already ahead of her, thinking about how quickly he could make it happen, how many people he would have to contact to make it work. He opened his app and checked Lara’s account. Okay. A lot. But he could do it, he was sure. He wasn’t giving up on her, or on himself. It was time to bring out the big guns.
He pulled up the software that he’d seen Lara use sometimes. Downloaded the picture of them with her engagement ring from the regatta and set to work.
An hour later his hands were hurting from the copying and pasting, and he had a complicated spreadsheet on the go, logging responses from everyone that Lara followed from her feed. If he was going to take it over completely, he needed buy-in from every single person that she followed. Anything other than perfect just wasn’t going to fly here. He’d colour-coded everyone’s responses, and as soon as he got to the bottom of the list he circled back to the top, making a note of time zones and response time to chase most effectively.
Finally he was doing something. He didn’t know if it would work. Even if it did, he couldn’t be sure that Lara would have him back, but he was finally ready to be brave and he just had to hope that it wasn’t going to be too late. He would find out soon enough. This was a one shot deal.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
LARA SAT AT her keyboard a week later, hoping for inspiration to strike. She’d just spent an hour on the phone with Jess, hoping that it would lift her out of this funk that was leaving her unable to think of a single word to say to the friends she had made online.
Jess was still determinedly in the honeymoon phase, and as much as she had sympathised with Lara over Jannes, there had been no way to keep the treacly sound of happiness out of her voice. And Lara knew precisely what, or who, had put it there. She could hardly begrudge Jess her happiness; it was everything she wanted for her friend and more. But she couldn’t help but think that she’d be able to enjoy it with her friend more if her own recent attempts at having a love life hadn’t turned out quite so dismally.
She turned back to her scheduling, tried moving some posts around to see if it helped inspiration strike. But since she’d stopped lying to her followers, and Jannes had disappeared from her feed, she found that she had little to say. Not when she couldn’t share her heartbreak with her followers. It was easier to concentrate on her studying, on her consulting clients, anything to take her mind off her own life.
They’d done their best to keep their breakup quiet, trying to avoid the publicity that had prompted the fake dating in the first place, and led to everything that had come after. But that was only viable for so long. It had been over a week now since she and Jannes had been in public together. And though she couldn’t bring herself to take off the ring they had picked out together, every time she saw it, it made her just a little sadder that they hadn’t been brave enough or bold enough to make this work.
When she closed her eyes she could smell the woodland glade where it had all gone wrong. Could feel the speckled sunlight on her closed eyelids, feel Jannes’s shirt beneath her hands and her mouth hard on his. And when she opened her eyes, and knew that it was all an impossibility, it hurt more every time. She’d thought that it would be getting better, that she would be learning to live with this hole in her chest. But it wasn’t.
And she knew better now than to think that those sort of emotional wounds just healed themselves. Which was why she’d finally agreed to a session of family therapy, just with her mum to start with. Perhaps she’d work with the rest of the family in future too, but she figured that her and her mum, and the spectre of her dad, had quite enough work to be going on with. The therapist had been really quite insistent that it wasn’t her fault that her father had left. Which, intellectually, Lara was sure that she already knew. It turned out it was harder to believe it than to know it. But she was working on that.
She turned to her feed, scrolling through, hoping to find some solace or inspiration in the posts of one of her followers. She’d so often drawn comfort from the community on here. But as she scrolled she frowned and drew back, because something was wrong. Every post was the same—and it was one of hers. The shot of her with Jannes in Harbourside, showing off her engagement ring for the first time. Had she done this somehow? She checked her profile, but no. It had been weeks since she’d posted that picture, and there were plenty of posts since. She clicked back onto the main feed and opened the caption.
Just a hashtag.
#Janneslovesyou
Okay, that was weird. She clicked the next post. The same hashtag. Oh, this had Mormor’s fingerprints all over it. It had to be her. She was up to something and she was the only person she knew who could wreak this sort of mischief. She searched for her profile and—surprise, surprise—she found the same post.
Her hands shaking, she clicked through to Jannes’s profile and found the same picture, but this one had a caption.
I love you, I need you, I want to marry you. Come to church with me tomorrow?
; She closed the laptop, drawing in a shaky breath. Her first guess had been that this was Mormor’s doing. Was this him...trying to win her back? For real, or just for some publicity thing? She couldn’t get her thoughts straight. Was that what she wanted? She had thrown herself at him twice now, and had had to recover from the fallout of him turning her down. Was she really going to put herself out there only to get knocked back again?
No. She couldn’t let herself think like that. Couldn’t let herself hope, because she was only going to end up disappointed.
But she had been doing the work, hadn’t she? She had been to therapy and heard that everything that she told herself about herself was flawed. That the people who had hurt her had made her scared, and she had spent her whole adult life letting that fear win. Well, she had a choice now, didn’t she? She could let fear win again, like Jannes had, she recognised, when he had pushed her away. Or she could accept that they were both imperfect and still learning, and still in love with each other, and see what happened when they were both brave at the same time.
She texted him, because the things that she had to say to him didn’t belong in church.
I saw your messages. I think we need to talk. My place? An hour?
I’ll be there.
She glanced at the clock. She couldn’t decide whether that was going to go by in a heartbeat or an eternity. She decided to throw herself into the shower and worry about it from there.
The last time she’d seen Jannes, he’d been walking away from her in London Fields. Walking away because he was afraid that she would leave him. Because he couldn’t trust that someone could love him enough to stay. What had changed in the last week? she wondered. Had anything? Because if this was just because he missed her, and not because he had realised that they needed to do things differently, then it was all going to end in tears.
She was never going to find out, though, if she didn’t talk to him.
She mused it over in the shower, wondering how he had managed to make sure that she’d seen those posts. It was only when she got out of the shower and checked her feed again, scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, that she realised what he had done. Every single person. He had managed to get every single person that she followed to post that picture of them, of that moment when they had been so happy, so excited, those emotions real, even under the falsities that surrounded them.
From Best Friend to Fiancée Page 14