If This Was a Movie (Evergreen Park #2)

Chapter 15 – Jules

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.”

I shrug even though I know the answer.

“It’s much more economical to take my time and do it myself,” I say, giving the easy answer.

“I could finish it, you know. A couple of men, a couple of hours…it wouldn’t take much or cost much, and we’ll already?—”

“No,” I say, cutting him off loud and firm, the word echoing around the empty room. His head snaps to me, confusion written across his face. I shake my head. “I’m sorry, that was rude. But I’ve got it. I like doing it myself, and you’re already helping me a lot.”

“It really wouldn’t?—”

“I can do it, Nate. I like knowing I built this place all by myself. No one will ever believe in me the way I do, and this place is a testament to that in a way. I just need help getting the rest of the place back to whatever standard Evergreen Park needs for me to move back in here in a reasonable time frame.”

He looks at me, reading every muscle, every shift of my eyes before he nods.

“All right. Got it. Let’s get you upstairs to start packing while I make some more notes.”

With a sigh of relief that he won’t push the subject, I nod and then follow him back upstairs.

brEAK

An hour later, I’ve finished packing up my clothes and putting anything I don’t need to bring to Nate’s into the big plastic bins he brought so we can keep everything clean during construction. He’s carrying what I packed so far down to the truck while I stare at my movie shelf, trying to decide which I absolutely need to bring when he walks up behind me.

“Anything else ready?”

I topple over from my crouch, holding a hand to my chest as my heart pounds. “Jesus, you scared me!”

He lets out a chuckle as he offers me a hand to get back up. When I stand, we’re face-to-face, barely a few inches between us, and I hold my breath at the closeness. It wouldn’t take much to move up to my toes or for him to dip his head down just a bit, graze his lips over mine, press my body to his, and pretend like there isn’t a year standing between us.

He stares at me, and somehow I know he’s thinking the same exact thing, his hand still holding mine, his thumb shifting the tiniest bit to graze against my skin, calluses catching in a way that makes me remember what his hands felt like everywhere.

“What are those?” Nate asks, tipping his head to the small bookshelf in the corner of my bedroom and breaking me from my daydream.

I step back quickly, looking at where my DVDs are stacked up.

“You’re not that old,” I say, knowing he’s barely six years older than me. “I’m sure you’ve seen a DVD before.”

“I just didn’t know anyone had them anymore.” He walks up to the shelf, reading the titles. “I’ve only heard of a third of these,” he says.

“They’re all romantic comedies.”

“I remember you saying you liked romance movies. I’m glad that hasn’t changed. Is Love Actually still your favorite?” he says, and I shrug, secretly wondering what else he remembers about me. My favorite coffee, my favorite movies…

“Christmas wise, yeah. But romance movies are the best. Predictable and funny, they always end happily. My favorite kind of stories.”

“Why DVDs?” he asks, sifting through them.

Suddenly, I feel self-conscious, like he was finding something about me I wasn’t ready to show.

“I, uh,” I start, stacking up the DVDs I’m bringing. “I find them secondhand. Most of them are on streaming services, but it’s across like a million of them. I would have to pay a couple hundred dollars a month just to watch whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted.”

“So you watch these often?”

“Every night.”

“Maybe you’ll have to come over one night; make me watch some of your favorites,” he says, voice low, eyes locked on the movies before him.

I don’t open my mouth, for fear I might tell him just how much I’d like that.