Page 39 of If This Was a Movie

“God, I’ve been waiting all my life for this moment,” Sloane says, a near evil smile on her face. “Mom, do you have a pen and paper?”

“Fuck.”

FIFTEEN

JULES

Nate offers to pick me up from his house and bring me to the studio to come to get whatever stuff I need and check my place out, but being trapped in his car with him seems like an absolute recipe for disaster, so I take a cab to the coffee shop around the corner and wait for him to tell me he’s here.

The only way I’ll survive the next few weeks while Nate fixes my place is to maintain whatever distance I can. I need it for my sanity, because just one morning with him and I’m suddenly rethinking my assertion that we wouldn’t work.

But I wrote off dating for a reason, and I need to stick to it.

When we walk into my place, I realize that in the light of day, it’s even more of a gut punch than it was last night. There are wet towels piled up in the sink and spread around on floors, though the bulk of the water seems to have dried, thanks to half a dozen industrial fans and dehumidifiers placed all around. My rugs are rolled up and in the hall to be thrown out, and anything on the floor that wasn’t damaged has been raised.

“Who did all of this?” I ask, looking around. Last night, there was still a thin layer of water over the entire floor, my feet squishing in it as I went.

“I got the go-ahead from Mark as soon as I dropped off Sophie. I wanted to come in before I brought you over to do what I could to make it less scary.”

“You didn’t have to do that,” I say, my words soft and filled with appreciation even to my ears.

“I know,” he says, looking at me. We’re both quiet for a moment, and a million different things are silently transmitted before he clears his throat. “It needs work, but honestly, Jules, I’ve seen worse. We mostly need to fix the cracked pipe and insulate it wherever we need it so this doesn’t happen.

“Some of the floors need to be pulled up and replaced, but not a ton. You have tile in most of the rooms, which makes things easier than if you had wood floors that absorbed all of that water. Downstairs got water, but not nearly as much as up here, so it’s looking like it’s just a few places where the walls and the ceilings got wet.

“I’ll double-check the structural beams, but I’m optimistic they won’t need replacing. Once it’s relatively dry, I can check to see what drywall we’ll need to replace. I think the kitchen cabinets might need replacing, but…overall, it shouldn’t be too bad. You should be back in here in a couple of weeks.”

I try not to panic at the long list of what needs fixing and instead focus on the positive. It sounds like I’ll be back in my home in a few weeks and able to start the studio back up as normal with the new year.

“Come on, let me show you the second floor, I have a few questions,” he says, stepping toward the front door of my condo. “Then we can come back up and pack what you’ll need for the next few weeks.”

We make our way down the stairs to the second floor of my building, where, thankfully, there isn’t much that was finished, so even if it flooded completely, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world.

“What’s this room?” Nate asks, poking his head into one of the studios I’d been working on. I tore down the walls and the floor, and in the corner, there’s a case of mirrors and hardwood stacked, ready to be installed.

“Another studio. Next to that is an unfinished dressing room-slash-greenroom.”

“Who’s working on it?” He steps out to look at the other room.

“I am.” He turns to look at me with shock in his eyes—shock I’m very used to seeing at this point. My ex-boyfriend, Jared, never understood my need to do everything by myself. He told me over and over that my little hobby would be much easier if I just let him handle all of the man’s work and hire it out.

Let’s just say we didn’t last long for a reason.

“You don’t have a professional doing it?”

I shrug. “I had someone come in to do the wiring and make sure it was safe and got the plans approved by the township. When I was doing the initial renovations to open, I had a team come in to do one of the two studios downstairs. I asked them to teach me the basics, and I finished the second studio. This is the third.”

“You finished the studio downstairs yourself?” he asks, clearly impressed.

A warmth of pride runs through me, and I nod.

“My friends help occasionally.” I give him a smile. “Actually, your sister helped demo this room.”

He rolls his eyes. “I’m sure she loved that.”

“She did. Maybe a bit too much,” I say, remembering how scary it was watching Claire with a sledgehammer.

“Why not have someone else do it? It would be quicker.”

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