Page 36 of If This Was a Movie

“And after?” Harper asks.

“After?”

“What happens after Christmas when her place is fixed, and he doesn’t need her to play this game with him?” she says, speaking my nerves aloud. I know how torn apart I felt the first time when we’d barely spent two days together. What happens if I have time to become attached, not only to Nate but his daughter, and it goes bad? “Then what?”

“I don’t know, but we won’t find out if she doesn’t try.”

“Jesus, Ava—” Harper starts, but I hear it then, Ava stepping onto her soapbox.

“Who says it has to end in January? You told us last year you’d felt it—that instant, once-in-a-lifetime feeling. Now we know he wasn’t a douchebag. Why not give it a shot?”

“I’m scared,” I whisper my confession.

“Well, duh. It wouldn’t be worth it if you weren’t scared. That’s the fun part, Jules. Grab hold of that man’s hand and jump in.” She smiles at her words, as if they bring back a happy memory, and I love that for her.

I want that for me, but I don’t know if I’m brave enough.

“You’re the brave one,” I say. Her smile goes wider.

“Anyone can be brave if they want it bad enough, Jules. You know what I say: Shoulder back, tits out, bitch. You were born for big things.”

And then we all dissolve into giggles.

FOURTEEN

NATE

“Daddy, are you going to fall in love with Jules?”

“What?” I ask, pretending I didn’t hear what my daughter asked as I turn left onto Main Street. It’s not the normal way I drive to my parents’ house that’s on the other side of our two-square-mile town, but I want to pass by First Position and make sure everything looks okay.

“You and Jules. Are you going to fall in love with her?”

“I, uh,” I start, unsure of how to answer. We pass the studio that, despite a sign on the front door from the township stating it’s closed for renovations, looks pretty much the same as last night. Crazy to think I’ve driven past that place a hundred times since I last saw Jules in January and never once bumped into her in town.

“I just think that you should, you know? Because I asked Santa to make you a real life Ashlyn, and then we saw her, and that seems like a miracle.” It sure as fuck does, doesn’t it? “So you should marry her,” she declares, and I snort out a laugh, shaking my head and turning onto my parents’ street.

“Not really how that works, kiddo,” I say. Especially not when the girl you’ve got your sights set on clearly has a lotto unpack, including the shit you put her through a year ago, unintentionally or not.

“Then how does it work?”

“Well, you meet someone, you talk a lot, and you become good friends, then best friends, then you get married,” I explain as simply as humanly possible

“Hmm,” she says. “So what step are we on?” The way she says “we”makes me laugh, but it stops abruptly when I approach my childhood home and see two extra cars parked on the street.

Sutton and Sloane.

Fuck.

“I, uh…” I start, parking and sighing, knowing this is about to be a fucking ambush. “I don’t know.”

“Well, we talked yesterday. So maybe good friends?”

As I park, I think about how when I originally offered Jules a place to stay, insisting she spend at least last night in the cottage, I thought it would end there. She was making it very clear that she wasn’t looking to date and that whatever was once between us was no longer something she was interested in. I got the impression that after she got over the hurt of my not telling her about Sophie, she also got over the idea of us.

And then I found that matchbook she’d been carrying in her purse. It was a different purse than the one she had that night at the bar—I know because I took note of every tiny detail of Jules that night, replaying it over and over again over the last year—so that means she moved that matchbook from one bag to the next instead of throwing out the reminder of us.

And when that nervous blush crept over her cheeks and down her chest, I knew she kept it because it meant something to her.

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