If This Was a Movie (Evergreen Park #2)

Chapter 14 – Nate

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 lot to 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.

That was when I decided that one way or another, I was going to convince Jules to give me another shot. I just needed to figure out how. Maybe it isn’t so bad that my sisters are here today, because I could use all the help I can get.

“Grandma!” Sophie shouts as she bounds into my childhood home. My mom is standing in the living room and scooping her up when she reaches her. It’s a well-practiced routine at this point, and every time, it makes me smile wide. “Grandma! Daddy met the real-life Ashlyn, and she’s living in Aunt Claire’s house, and they’re going to fall in love!”

The smile melts off my face as I look to the ceiling and groan aloud.

My mom’s head jerks back in surprise, a smile on her lips before she looks at me. “Are they now?”

“Yup! It was my Christmas wish.”

“Well, it sounds like we have a little cupid on our hands, don’t we?”

“No, just a really good wisher,” my daughter says matter-of-factly as my mom shifts her onto her hip.

“Yeah, Nate’s in love with Ashlyn,” Sutton says as she walks into the living room, making kissy noises. She’s twenty-five and barely acts older than my daughter. I glare at her. “We need to figure out how to make her fall in love with him. That’s going to be the harder part since he’s…well…Nate.”

“Well, hold on because last night, Nate said he wanted us to ease off him,” Sloane, my oldest sister and the most level-headed, says as she enters the fray. “He didn’t want to force her into anything.”

“Thank you, Sloa—” I start, but she cuts me off.

“Even though he’s clearly head over heels in love with her.”

“Jesus,” I grumble.

“He told me falling in love is the step right before getting married!” Sophie says, clapping her hands excitedly.

“Sophie,” I start, ready to warn her not to get her hopes up too high, but my mom saves my ass as she tends to do.

“Hey, Sophie, baby, can you go find Grandpa? He wants to show you something in his workshop,” she says, setting Sophie on the floor.

Eagerly, knowing that in the workshop there’s a bowl of candy my dad thinks I forgot exists, she runs off.

“So, tell me everything,” my mom says, sitting down on the couch and smoothing out the skirt of her apron. For a split second, I contemplate lying or avoiding the subject altogether, but I know three things as facts in this world.

One, my mom can always tell when I’m lying.

Two, my sisters have big fucking mouths.

And three, nothing stays a secret long in Evergreen Park, especially when a Donovan is involved.

So with a sigh, I sit on the loveseat across from her and spill, telling my mom and sisters the whole story. How I met Jules in a bar, how I took her home (leaving out all of the gory details, of course), and we got snowed in. I tell them about how I felt that feeling Dad always talked about—that gut knowledge that I found my person—only to have her disappear from my life completely. Finally, I filled my mom in on last night about meeting Jules again and finding out the true reason she stopped talking to me and how it was all just a messy, stupid string of events.

“I wasn’t going to push any kind of romance on her, I swear,” I say finally, getting to the end of my story. “I just wanted to give her somewhere safe to stay, and with my workload being light this month, I have the time to fix her place without having to charge an arm and a leg. You know how Pete down in approvals can be a dick about recertifying the occupancy.” My mom nods, knowing all too well about peers. “But then I found out she’d been keeping this matchbook in her bag.” I pull it out of my pocket and show them.

“Why?” Sloane asks, looking at me like I’m insane, which is valid since it’s a fucking matchbook.

“Is she a smoker?” Sutton asks through a grimace.

I laugh and shake my head. “No, I was fidgeting the night we met and?—”

“Always were a fidgeter when you got nervous,” my mom says with a smile.

I roll my eyes and continue my story.

“And I was playing with it. She asked me about it, and I told her I fidget when I’m nervous, like when I’m talking to a pretty girl.” My sisters let out a small aww. “She kept it all this time. If she was done with me, if there was nothing between us, I think she would have gotten rid of it, right?”

My mom nods before giving me a knowing glance, and I know why. The night my dad met my mom, he bought her a soda. She ran off with her friends before he could get her number, but she kept the bottle cap from it. When they met again later, she still had that bottle cap, and he knew they were something special. It’s in a frame now, hanging over the sofa she’s sitting at, a part of a gallery wall containing memories and photos of their life together.

I can’t help but wonder what this matchbook would look like framed in my living room as I flip it mindlessly between my fingers.

“So you’re going to go for it,” Sloane says with a smile, now understanding.

“I’m going to go for it,” I say with a nod. “But she’s scared, and I’m afraid if I go too hard, I’ll scare her off. So for now, I’ve convinced her to pretend we’re a thing as a favor to me, to help with Sophie’s wish.”

“Ooh, good call. She says no, she’s ruining Christmas magic,” Sutton says, nodding.

“So what’s your plan?” Sloane asks.

“What?”

‘Your plan of attack. How are you going to convince her to stay forever?”

“I don’t think I should be?—”

“She swore off men because of you, you know,” Sutton says, instantly quieting my protests.

“What?”

“I got drinks with her and Claire a while ago. She told me this whole story about this guy she met, thought he was it. Her romantic comedy come to life.” My gut drops knowing where this is going now that I’ve got the full picture. “Then she saw him out and about with his wife and kid.”

“It was Sloane! I don’t have a wife!”

“I know that dumbass. I’m just saying, that was…it was her final straw, according to her. She’s had some shit luck with men, and I think there’s some daddy issues there, too. She decided it’s not worth her time. Dating. Men. The whole nine.”

There’s silence as I take that in before my mother cheerfully says, “So now it’s your job to fix it.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You messed it up, now it's your job to fix it. Show her she wasn’t wrong to believe in whatever is so very clearly sparking between you two.” I open my mouth, and she says, “No, not that I want to know about any of that, Nathan Donovan.”

“So again, I ask what you’re going to do to convince her to stay forever?” Sloane asks, bored with the subject.

“Well, for one, I’m not going to try and get her to stay forever,” I say with a shake of my head. I just want her to give me a chance to make things right. Maybe if we got past that first hurdle, we could take things further, but step one is getting her to trust me and trust in me again.

“Why not?” Sutton asks, aghast.

“Uh, because she’s an adult with her own thoughts and feelings.”

“Shmoughts and shmeelings, Nate. She’s your dream girl, and she’s Sophie’s Christmas wish! It’s meant to be,” my mom says with a wave of her hand.

“Mom—”

“No, listen to me. You’re telling me your daughter makes some obscure Christmas wish out of the blue when she has never once told any of us that’s something she wants and you walk out to find exactly that and it’s not some miracle?”

I sigh, reluctant to agree, even though that same thought kept me up half the night. I just know if I do, my mom and my sisters will never stop pushing.

“I want to keep things easy. Yes, I like her, yes, she’s the girl I thought I’d lost, but she’s also incredibly hesitant, and it’s not just my emotions at play here. If I bring her into the fold, it’s her emotions and Sophie’s.”

“Okay, so what’s your plan?” Sloane says impatiently, and I groan. Maybe this was a terrible idea. I should have known better than to think my family would be levelheaded in any sense of the word. “Look, I get it and I agree—we should play things safe. But you need a plan.”

“You can’t fuck this up, Donovan,” Sutton says. “Or you’re going to have all of us on your ass. Even Sophie.”

“She’s right, Nate. I’m going to be very disappointed if you fumble this,” my mom says.

“Why can’t I have been born into a normal fucking family?”

“If you were, you wouldn’t have Jules sleeping under your roof right now, would you? You can thank Claire for that.”

She has a point, though I don’t want to give it to her. Long moments pass before finally, I let out a sigh in resignation. “Fine. What do I do?”

“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.”