The Love Square

by Laura Jane Williams

  THE LOVE SQUARE

  Laura Jane Williams

  Copyright

  Published by AVON

  A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

  Copyright © Just Show Up Ltd 2020

  Cover design by Ellie Game © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

  Cover illustrations © Shutterstock.com

  Laura Jane Williams asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780008365431

  Ebook Edition © June 2020 ISBN: 9780008365448

  Version: 2020-07-01

  PRAISE FOR LAURA JANE WILLIAMS

  ‘A joyful, romantic and life-affirming love story’

  Red

  ‘Laura Jane Williams combines sharp, relatable wit and bold, joyful sincerity’

  Dolly Alderton

  ‘Hilarious, heart-warming and truly authentic – your modern rom com must-read’

  Hello!

  ‘A fresh, smart, modern rom com. This is romance seen through the wry eyes of a cynic, and that’s what makes it so special – and, ultimately, so uplifting. It had me totally gripped’

  Beth O’Leary

  ‘LJ’s honesty and voice are unique’

  Stylist

  ‘Laura Jane Williams offers another dose of smart, sisterly storytelling … You can practically feel modern romance evolving as you’re reading it’

  Emma Jane Unsworth

  ‘A perfect summer read that will leave you grinning’

  Closer

  ‘Tender, energetic and authentic … Such a current love story, but so timeless too’

  Daisy Buchanan

  ‘Uplifting and witty, filled with so much real emotion’

  Health & Wellbeing

  ‘Laura Jane Williams’ writing sees you, and gives you so much … Exactly the joyful escapism you need for your next beach holiday’

  Lucy Vine

  ‘This is the laugh-out-loud love story you need to read this summer’

  Glamour

  ‘So funny and wonderful and life-affirming’

  Lorna Cook

  ‘We devoured this book in one sitting!’

  Bella

  ‘This is the feminist rom-com of the summer’

  Holly Bourne

  ‘A cult hit’

  Grazia

  Dedication

  For J & A

  Your love inspires me

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Praise for Laura Jane Williams

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Keep Reading …

  About the Author

  Fiction by the same author

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  ‘That’s the last of it, then,’ he said sadly, looking into the boot of the small hire car loaded with pillows and chairs, vases and lamps. ‘Everything that’s most important to you, packed and ready to go.’

  What he meant was: me. Take me. Ask me to go with you. I’m important. I’m yours, too.

  ‘Great,’ she replied, not meeting his eye. She said it too loudly, too brightly. She was over-compensating. ‘Thanks so much. That was a lot. I’m knackered already!’

  What she meant was: I don’t know how to say goodbye. I wish things were different. I’m scared.

  Francesco Cipolla and Penny Bridge stood looking at anything but each other, both wishing they were back in the flat together, making brunch to sit with knees knocking and tasting food off each other’s forks, like yesterday morning, or in bed, twisting the sheets around them as they giggled, like last night.

  It had only been three weeks. How could this all be ending after only three weeks? It was like leaving a play at the interval, or stopping after the first sip of a salt-rimmed margarita. They were wasting themselves, wasting the potential of what they had. They could be drunk on each other, they could finish falling all the way until they were in love. They were almost there anyway, and god knows Penny had searched hard enough for a man that could make her feel like this. But she couldn’t see how she could physically leave and mentally stay with him – and she really did have to leave. She owed it to her uncle. Trying to stay in a relationship with Francesco was a set-up for failure.

  No, she reasoned with herself. I’m ripping the plaster off. Long-distance doesn’t work, and no way will he leave London for the countryside. I don’t even want to leave London for the countryside. She thought of his touch, his nimble fingers exploring her, how he tasted. He was so, so hot. And kind. And thoughtful. And he listened when she talked and made her laugh and didn’t treat her like a delicate doll that might break, and all of that made him even hotter.

  No, she repeated to herself. We can’t.

  Francesco cleared his throat.

  ‘Are you sure you’re going to be okay driving?’ he forced. ‘Shall we get coffee first, or snacks …?’

  Take me with you.

  ‘Nah,’ Penny replied, knocking her shoulder against his and focusing on the edge of the pavement. ‘I think I’ll get upset if we go back in there to be honest. And I don’t want to have to stop for a wee until I’m at least at the Watford Gap.’

  ‘But you will stop,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, Francesco. I will stop.’ She was amused at his caring, and so finally looked up at him, halting the world on its axis.

  Francesco couldn’t fully explain why he’d be willing to give up his life to go with her, but he would. Penny had no reason to believe he’d be different than every other man who’d left her when things got hard, though. They were in a stand-off. Francesco could only prove he’d stick around by being able to show up for her in the first place, and Penny was holding him at arms’ length, denying him the chance to try.

  ‘Well,’ she said, eventually. ‘I suppose I’ll see you when I see you.’

  ‘This is so weird.’

  ‘Nah,’ intoned Penny, inwardly screaming the opposite. ‘Just give
me a hug and that’s that.’

  Francesco obliged, holding her tight. Even the way she smells turns me on, he thought. Maybe friendship would be impossible after all.

  ‘Here’s to what’s next, then,’ he said into the top of her head, inhaling the scent of her.

  Behind them Stuart appeared, lingering in the doorway of the café. He scowled a bit, a way to ask Francesco if he should interrupt or hang back. Penny sensed him, though, and so squeezed Francesco’s waist twice, a little morse code of release, and then pulled away.

  ‘Don’t ruin my café whilst I’m gone,’ she mock-taunted Stuart, who stepped forward to issue his own hug.

  ‘You have my word, boss,’ he smiled, doing a captain’s salute at her. ‘I’ll send updates all the time, and you can look at the accounts whenever you want.’

  ‘You’re a legend, Stu. Thank you for this.’

  She opened the driver’s door and started the engine. As she slammed the door shut, she could see Francesco panic that that was it, that their goodbye was over and she would be gone. She laughed through both her tears and the glass, winding down the window.

  ‘Don’t look so worried,’ she insisted. ‘Everything is going to be fine.’ She wiped her eyes, all pretence of not crying disappearing. Then: ‘Tell me it’s all going to be fine.’

  ‘It’s all going to be fine,’ Francesco nodded, his own eyes stinging, his own vision blurring.

  Isn’t that how falling in love so often works? Some stranger appears out of nowhere and becomes a fixed star in your universe.

  - Kate Bolick

  1

  A few months ago, in March

  It wasn’t so much that Penny Bridge was unlucky in love as it was that love seemingly didn’t know she existed. It had been five years since her last proper relationship – five years since romance, prolonged passion, or even since a bloke had stayed interested for longer than a week. It was getting pretty hard to pretend it might ever be any different, and keeping positive was really starting to take its toll, especially after last night.

  ‘I just can’t believe I’m here again,’ she sighed, explaining to her head barista Stuart about the text she’d received after getting home from her date. It had read:

  Hey, so I didn’t know how to say this earlier but my ex is kind of back in the picture. I don’t want to string you along or anything, so I don’t think we should see each other again. All the best!! xx

  ‘Ah,’ replied Stuart. ‘That really sucks.’

  Cristian had been a Romanian mathematician who worked for Virgin Galactic, and for their second date they’d gone to a very promising sing-along showing of La La Land at the Hackney Picturehouse and then next door to the Wetherspoon’s. Penny had already decided that it was the night to have sex with him – she’d shaved her bikini line especially, and changed her bed sheets – but on her way back from the bathroom at the pub she’d seen the familiar yellow interface of the dating app on his phone, and realized he was obviously messaging somebody else whilst she was having a wee. Why had he lied after? He didn’t need to say that his ex was making moves on him. She was a big girl. She could withstand the truth. Obviously he was just not that into her. But why? Why weren’t any of them just not that into her? And why hadn’t she called him out on his terrible etiquette right there and then instead of finishing her drink and making vague grumbles about it ‘getting late’?

  She knew the answer to that, actually. It’s because it felt like she was in an episode of Sex and the City – the one where Charlotte screams at a sky that should have been raining men, ‘I’ve been dating since I was fifteen! I’m exhausted! Where is he?!’ Penny was too exhausted to teach Cristian about basic manners – that’s why she’d finished the drink she’d paid for and left without bringing it up. She simply couldn’t be arsed. His text message after was unnecessary salt in the wound.

  What is so wrong with me that no bloke wants to be my boyfriend? she wondered.

  Last month she’d spent five nights in a row with Trevor, a deputy head of maths on half term who, once school started back up again, fell off the face of the earth until a random 1 a.m. text asking if he’d left his protractor at her flat. Before Christmas there’d been an Iraqi estate agent from Camberwell who’d really made her laugh – and she, him – but who was so inexplicably embarrassed by what he’d asked her to do to his prostate when he was drunk that he blocked not only her phone number, but everything across all social media, too. Before him there’d been a string of first dates that never seemed to become second ones, a summer off dating entirely, and three trips to the Skirt Club to sate her light bi-curiosity but that didn’t lead to much dating, either – Penny had figured out quickly enough that she was doomed with an attraction to men. (She did, though, get the name of an amazing seamstress in Canonbury, and made friends with two women who were now a couple and who she still saw every couple of months for drinks.)

  Penny thought of herself as an entertaining date – interesting and interested. She had friends and family she loved, a business she was proud of, some fun stories and – so she’d been told – eyes that danced with mischief. Did she spit when she laughed, and nobody had ever mentioned it? Did she talk about herself too much? Was it her cup size, or her dress size, or her hair colour? Weren’t redheads supposed to be a novelty? Was it because she asked too many questions?

  She didn’t know how to be anybody but herself, and yet herself, Penny Bridge, was apparently repulsive to all mankind because none of them wanted to actually be with her. She had half a mind to text Cristian back and ask him straight: why didn’t any of her dates ever pan out? If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, Penny was officially bonkers. She kept hoping that the next date might be different, that the next man might be different, but they never were. Maybe Cristian could tell her what needed to change. Would it be weird to ask him? He was, after all, one of the people best placed to make suggestions. What did the other women on the dating app have that Penny didn’t?

  ‘You don’t need to change a thing,’ urged Stuart, kindly. ‘You only have to get it right once. This space engineer is a fool if he’s blowing you off. A damned idiot.’

  Penny sat across from Stuart at the serving counter, watching him arrange the grapefruit-orange crostatas and a goat’s cheese double crumb cake she’d just brought up from the kitchen. This was Stoke Newington, one of the more achingly bougie boroughs of North London, so he was using breeze-blocks as support for the charcoal slate trays, all at varying heights. It was terribly hipster but genuinely quite good to look at, so she let him do as he pleased. Bridges was her café, and she cooked, but his aesthetics defined the space where the customers ate.

  ‘But I’m so tired, Stu. I’m so sick of this feeling – of holding my breath to get some stupid validation from a stupid man, and then feeling like I need to eat a pint of ice cream and cry-wank to The Notebook when it doesn’t happen. Do I smell like desperation?’

  ‘You smell like burnt cream and boiled ham, Pen, like you do every day.’

  ‘Ha, ha. Thanks.’ She rolled her eyes at him playfully. She did smell, though – that was the life of a chef in a small breakfast and lunch café, to carry the faint odour of cooking from 7 a.m. until 4 p.m., Tuesday to Saturday.

  ‘I feel like I really should plan to be single forever. Have a baby solo. I keep threatening to go for it. Maybe I should take the hint the universe or whatever is throwing at me. I just want to live my life, man. It feels pathetic to be somehow waiting.’ She sighed dramatically. Stuart didn’t need to know that before her cancer treatment she’d both harvested eggs and had them fertilized with donor sperm. Making embryos as a single woman with cancer had been a complicated decision, and one even some of her family hadn’t understood. She’d have to use a surrogate when she wanted kids, but that wasn’t the point right now. The point was, she really did think she might have to proceed without a partner by her side. So why shouldn’t she do that soo
ner rather than later? Evidently that partner wasn’t anywhere close to making himself known.

  ‘I could introduce you to some friends, you know,’ Stuart said, wiping down stray specks from around his display. Stuart was a twenty-five-year-old art school graduate who treated coffee like as much of a craft as his own pottery. Slim build and black skin, he wore straight-leg jeans rolled twice, socks on show, and bulky sneakers that seemingly never got grubby – as well as a t-shirt with two rolls of the sleeve and a single pierced ear. ‘If you wanted somebody pre-vetted for ghosting, or lying, or general romantic ambivalence.’

  Penny stood and walked behind the counter to make another coffee, her third of the morning. ‘Aw, thanks. But I don’t think you should be setting your boss up.’

  Stuart stepped out of her way. ‘You have too many rules.’

  ‘If I dated one of your friends – who, you know, let’s be fair, would be too young for me anyway – in three dates’ time I wouldn’t want to be running into him because he’s here to meet you after your shift, but had told me he had to move to Kazakhstan for a work assignment and that’s why he couldn’t be with me. When I get ghosted, I really do expect to never see them again. It’d be added mortification otherwise, and I haven’t got the stomach for it.’

  ‘Just promise me you won’t give up,’ Stuart soothed. ‘Dating is hard for everyone until it’s not. You only have to get it right once, that’s what my pa says. Your soulmate could be just around the corner. He could appear at any minute, and it’d be a shame to miss him because your head is too far up your own self-pitying—’

  Stuart was interrupted by the sound of three knocks against the glass of the café door, forcing both of them to look over. Stood on the pavement was a dark-haired, olive-skinned man in a beanie hat and puffer vest, accessorized with an armful of sourdough loaves. Stuart immediately issued Penny a smirk. She didn’t catch it.

  ‘Ah, yeah – I meant to say,’ she started, already in business mode, holding up a hand to the man outside to signal she was coming. ‘The bread delivery is going to be late today because Safiya had an issue with somebody falling off a bike and so had to ask her friend to help out.’ She bent down to unlock the bottom part of the door, opening it up to say, ‘Are you Safiya’s man-who-can? Come in.’