Ugly Love is a story by Colleen Hoover. This isn’t a book review but an actual summary of what happens in the story so keep in mind there will be spoilers ahead.
- Book Title: Ugly Love
- Author: Colleen Hoover
- Publication Date: August 5, 2014
- Category: New Adult Romance
- Print Length: 333 Pages
When Tate Collins meets airline pilot Miles Archer, she doesn’t think it’s love at first sight. They wouldn’t even go so far as to consider themselves friends. The only thing Tate and Miles have in common is an undeniable mutual attraction. Once their desires are out in the open, they realize they have the perfect set-up. He doesn’t want love, she doesn’t have time for love, so that just leaves the sex. Their arrangement could be surprisingly seamless, as long as Tate can stick to the only two rules Miles has for her.
Never ask about the past.
Don’t expect a future.They think they can handle it, but realize almost immediately they can’t handle it at all.
Hearts get infiltrated.
Promises get broken.
Rules get shattered.
Love gets ugly.
The story starts when a young woman – Tate, is moving temporarily to her brother’s apartment but when she gets there she realizes she cannot enter it because there is a drunk stranger guy sleeping in front of it. Tate calls her brother who is at work, so at least he can be on the phone if the stranger attempts to hurt her.
She tries to enter the apartment but the drunk guy wakes up, grasps her ankle, and scares her to death before Tate finally manages to enter the door and lock it behind her unfortunately leaving all of her stuff outside with him. When she focuses on her phone again, her brother Corbin tells her that he recognizes the voice of the drunk guy that just hurt her leg trying to get into the apartment with her and it is his neighbor and very good friend – Miles. Corbin also asks her to get Miles inside so he can sleep on the couch.
Unwillingly, Tate opens the door again and gets Miles inside but when she thinks he is already asleep on the couch he starts talking and she hears him saying the name Rachel and that he is sorry many times before he starts crying so hard he can’t even breath. Tate walks to him and holds his hand until he relaxes and falls asleep again while she is wondering what had he done to be so devastated and sorry about it.
The next day Tate wakes up to find Miles sober and rude, so they start fighting before they even get to know each other, but later when they meet again he tries to start on the right foot and pretends they just met like Tate suggested during their fight.
A few days later and while Corbin is still away for work, Tate gets into the apartment to find Miles and two more guys inside. When she asks why are they there Miles explains that they gather up every once a week to watch the game together and only Corbin has cable television. He seems to be rude again but she realizes that must be his usual self.
When Tate asks them to keep the voice lower because she has to study, Miles offers her to go study in his apartment until the game is over. When he goes back home that night he tries to apologize for the way they met and Tate reminds him that he said the name Rachel that night. Miles suddenly tenses and stares at her seriously for a while before he leaves the room with nothing more than a goodnight.
For the two weeks that Miles is away for work, Tate tries to not think about all that, but when she and her brother are invited to their parent’s house for Thanksgiving, Corbin says that Miles is going with him every year too. While the three of them are going there Tate sitting in the backseat studies Miles and tries to understand why is he always so serious and never even smiles when she sees him watching her from the rear-view mirror. Their eyes meet again and again until he finally gives her a small smile.
Once there, Miles get hurt while helping in the kitchen and Tate takes care of his wound since she is studying to be a nurse, but when they come closer and touch each other they end up kissing before she realizes it. When the kiss ends though, Miles seems like he regretted it leaving her once again full of questions.
Later that night they bump into each other in the kitchen while everyone else is in bed, and they continue the funny conversation Corbin started at dinner revealing unintentionally that Miles hasn’t had a relationship in six years for a mysterious reason that he seems to hide just like everything else. The only thing he is willing to admit is that he doesn’t want any kind of relationship, not even a sexual one, and he hasn’t had any all those years. But his actions are making it obvious that he wants to be with Tate. They end up kissing again before Tate’s father interrupts them.
When the trip is over Miles and Tate both can’t deny the attraction they feel, so they agree to start having casual sex as friends with benefits, following his two rules: she won’t ask about his past and she won’t expect a future. Everything goes well until Tate realizes that she can’t follow his rules anymore. She feels a deeper connection with Miles and after their first night together she understands that she is going to fall in love with him and it will be hard for her, but she doesn’t want to end it when they just started so she pretends everything is okay.
Miles is showing her that he wants to be with her but he is telling her that he doesn’t. He plans for them to do things that couples do, and he has fun, but he doesn’t even allow himself to believe that he really wants her in his life. Until the day he realizes that he is leading her way too much than he should and he asks her to end their agreement.
After three weeks of not talking Miles sees Tate going home with another guy and he gets jealous. He waits outside her door for hours until the other guy leaves and then starts asking her question like she is supposed to tell him everything. She is not, but she does it anyway. She tells him that it was just a guy that studies with her sometimes. They end up in bed again but they get interrupted by Corbin who is a very strict brother that doesn’t want Tate with any of his friends.
Corbin and Miles have a fight in which Miles says that he is not going to love Tate because he can’t and then he leaves. Tate follows him into his apartment so they can talk about all that and Miles admits for the first time that he was jealous and that he really likes spending time with her as they used to, but he doesn’t want to give her false hope. He breaks her heart but at the same time, he also says that if he could love anyone again it would be her. After that, they both agree on continuing as they were as long as they both feel good about it and if it gets too hard for any of them they should call it off for real.
A few days later Tate gets a shocking call from her mother that asks her if she has any idea where Corbin is because there was a plane crash with a plane of his airline. Tate is worried for both her brother and Miles that are pilots for the same airline, but since her mom tried to call Corbin already, Tate calls Miles.
Thankfully he answers immediately and he doesn’t even know about the crash yet because he was on the way home. He goes to her place and calls some of his colleagues to ask the names of the crew that was in the plane that crashed. When they tell him it wasn’t neither Corbin, nor their best friend Ian, Miles and Tate are relieved and spend the afternoon together laughing and having fun, ending up in bed, and falling asleep together for the first time, which it’s not unnoticeable by Tate.
When Miles arrives home after ten days of working away, he knocks on Tate’s door before he even gets his luggage inside. Tate asks him spontaneously if he missed her but he tries to avoid answering and for the first time Tate doesn’t want to change the subject. She asks him again and when he says that they are not supposed to say things like that, Tate gets mad and tells him the truth she was swallowing for weeks: that he has been showing her more of himself than before, that he has been making love to her instead of sex for months, and that he was missing her when he was away, but he wouldn’t ever admit it.
Then, still furious she crosses his lines and asks him the big question: What did Rachel do to him to get him to be like this? Miles gets to his breaking point and starts to cry seeming devastated like the first night Tate found him in front of her door. She tries to stop the pain he feels and want’s to take her words back understanding that his soft spot should have stayed untouched. Miles hugs her and tries to calm down, and he kisses her, and eventually, he starts making love to her still upset and calls her Rachel.
Tate starts crying then but even though Miles is sincerely apologizing, she asks him to “just finish” making love to her because the only thing she is thinking about is to set that as a closure so she can leave and finish their “friendship”.
She moves out of Corbin’s apartment after two weeks but not without going to say goodbye to Miles. He lets her leave with a simple goodbye but his best friend Ian who witnessed the scene and knows everything about Miles, tells him that he is an idiot for letting her go.
He also tells him that after six years it is time to finally open his heart to someone, and time to leave all the bad memories behind convincing him to talk with Rachel after all that time and see if she has moved on in her life making him realize that is okay to do it too.
While all this is Tate’s story, the book goes back and forth using Miles’s story from six years back when he met Rachel in high school. Miles and Rachel liked each other from the moment they met. But their teenage worlds fall apart when Miles’s father announced to him that after a year that his wife had passed away, he had found a woman that he wanted Miles to meet, and she arrived home with her daughter, Rachel.
Miles and Rachel decided to keep their relationship in secret for the rest of the school year and end things up when they would leave for college, but in the meantime, they completely fall in love and Rachel got pregnant. When three months later their parents announced to them that they just got married in Las Vegas, Miles decided it was time for them to know about the pregnancy and that he will be there for Rachel no matter what.
After ups and downs in the family, things got better when the baby was born. Two days after that, Miles was driving Rachel and the baby home when they got into an accident and the car flipped into the lake. Miles managed to save Rachel unconscious while the car was already full of water and the baby was stuck in the back. Miles woke up to people saying how sorry they are and that they couldn’t do anything. He was convinced that Rahel hated him for saving her first.
Rachel and Miles cried and mourned together for a long. When Rachel stopped crying and asked Miles to make love to her, she told him the exact words Tate used the last time – just finish. After that, Rachel and her mother moved away and Miles never saw or heard of them again.
He spent the next six years in pain and regret about the day his son died until the day he met Tate and he saw that he can feel happy feelings again but he was too scared. After Ian tells him to, Miles goes to visit Rachel and see how and if she has moved on with her life.
Rachel is shocked to see him after so long and understands why he is visiting before he even tells her. She tells him she is married and has a little girl to make her happy again. Rachel explains to Miles that everything gets better when you find that one person to understand, and wait, and fight for you, even though the pain is never going to leave, and that he should allow his heart to feel happiness and love again.
Miles feels relief after seeing Rachel and drives to Tate’s new apartment. Once they see each other he tells her that he missed her for the first time and that he hadn’t felt like that for a long time but now he is ready to slowly move on. He also tells her that he had a son but he is not ready to talk about it yet and Tate finally gets some answers.
He proposes a few days later and the book ends two years after they marry, on the day they become the parents of a little girl. The day that Miles feels complete again and happy tears fall from his eyes for the first time since he had his son, realizing that he is going to remember and fear for the worst forever, but that shouldn’t be a reason to not live that happiness.
