If This Was a Movie (Evergreen Park #2)

Chapter 26 – Jules

TWENTY-SIX

JULES

A few hours later, we’re at Ava’s nearly finished place. We’re watching her and Jaime bicker as they tend to do while Sophie pets Ava’s orange cat, Peach.

“I want a kitty just like Peach,” Sophie says with a wistful look, scratching the cat behind her ears the way Ava showed her Peach likes it.

“You can probably just go in an alleyway and find one. That’s how Ava found hers,” Jaime says under his breath, and Ava elbows him in the side.

“Are you insane? That’s not safe, Jaime.”

He raises a thick, dark eyebrow at her, tilting his head. “So you admit it was a bad idea.”

Ava glares at her fiancé, jaw tight. “I will do no such thing.”

Jaime lets out a bark of a laugh.

“You absolutely did, Princess. You just said it was unsafe for Sophie to do it. One would assume that it would also be unsafe for a famous pageant queen with a stalker to run off from her bodyguard into an alleyway to get a cat.”

Ava sighs, throwing her hands into the air.

“Would you rather Peach just be motherless in some alleyway right now? You’re cruel, Jaime Wilde,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest and glaring at him.

“I’m pretty sure we covered this; Peach absolutely had a mother already, and you stole her from her.”

She waves him off with a hand, and I smile, watching them go at it like a tennis match. I’ve never met two people more meant to be together who also bicker about anything and everything.

“Are they always like this?” Sophie asks, and I snort, nodding.

“Pretty much. It’s all in good fun, though,” I tell her. “They love each other; they just show it funny.”

Sophie nods in that all-knowing, wise way of hers.

“Just like you and Dad?” I choke on my sip of coffee before she continues to answer. “You two pretend you don’t like each other, but you secretly love each other.” I open my mouth to say something, but she just keeps going. “Actually, it’s really just you pretending. Daddy is obviously in love with you. Aunt Sloane says girls like to play hard to get sometimes. Is that what this is?”

I gape at the little girl, and Jaime lets out a deep belly laugh.

“I like you, kid,” Jaime says, bending to grab Sophie and putting her on his hip, Peach cradled in his other arm.

“You’re not bad,” she says nonchalantly. “My dad says you should go on a double date with Jules,” she tells him, looking up at the big man. “I think you and my dad will be friends.”

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

“You’re both really, really big, and you give Ava the same gooey look my dad gives Jules.”

“A gooey look, huh?” Jaime says, a small smile on his lips, that dimple Ava loves coming out. He sets her back down to the ground, ruffling her hair a bit.

“Oh yeah. Jules’s my Christmas wish, you know. So they’re going to fall in love and give me a little sister.”

“A sister,” Ava shouts with a laugh.

I shake my head, frozen in shock at how this cute little wish has truly evolved into utter chaos.

“Yeah, Dad has three sisters, and Aunt Claire said having a brother is kind of boring. You can’t dress them up.”

“You know what, girl? That’s so true,” Ava says, a smile all over her face as she turns to face me. “What do you think, Jules? Are you gonna give Soph here a little sister or a boring brother?”

I glare at her. “I think I should have known better than to put the two of you in a room together.”

Jaime lets out a laugh at my response. He tries to disguise it as a cough when he sees my expression, but fails miserably. Ava snaps her head in his direction and gives him a glare that could kill.

“Excuse me?” Her hands go to her hips, and with her long blonde hair in curls, she looks shockingly like Nate’s daughter, who is standing the same way.

“You and a tiny version of you are the kind of shit scientists should study. A cataclysmic event could happen, nuclear warfare level,” Jaime grumbles.

Ava’s face goes smug. “Yeah? And what happens when we have a little girl, huh?”

He laughs again, shaking his head. “Only boys for me, Princess. Don’t ever have to worry about that.”

Her mouth drops open as she stares at him, then smacks him in the chest. “But I want a little girl! A mini me to dress up.”

He sighs, staring at her, then pulls her into his arms and presses a kiss to her hair. “Then you’ll get it, Ava. When have I ever been able to tell you no?”

Ava smiles, turning into Jaime’s chest and sighing.

I smile blissfully at my best friend and her happily ever after, and for the first time since they got together, I don’t feel that guilt-laden jealousy eating at me.

And even if that should scare me, it doesn’t. Instead, I send a text to Nate with a photo of Sophie holding Peach.

“Hey Jules?” Sophie asks hours later, laying on the couch, her head in my lap.

My fingers move, brushing her hair back, gently untangling the knots that, even though I brushed her hair an hour ago, still seem to be there.

We went to lunch before coming back home and getting right into jammies to bake cookies, do facials and our nails, then eat a girl dinner, which consisted of a menagerie of snacks and probably too many cookies before we got ready for bed and put a movie on.

“Yeah, sweetie?”

“Do you like my dad?”

“What?” I ask, my fingers stilling for a moment before continuing their movement as I try to play it cool despite my pounding heart.

“Do you like my dad?”

“Well, of course, honey. He’s a good friend.”

She turns to look up at me.

“I mean, like like. Do you want to marry him?”

I sigh, trying to figure out how to answer this.

“I…I think your dad is really great, Sophie, but I don’t know him that well. You don’t just marry anyone, you know? That would be silly. You have to get to know them, make them your best friend, then decide if you want to spend every day with them.” There’s a long pause that has me holding my breath before she seems to accept what I’m saying, nodding against my legs.

“That makes sense.” I let out the breath I didn’t realize I was holding. “But I think I’d really like it if you were my mom, Jules,” she says, and a part of me breaks at that, at a little girl lost in the world.

I get it; after all, I was that girl once. I think I am still, in more ways than I care to recognize.

“You’re the coolest kid I know, Sophie. Whoever ends up marrying your dad is going to be the luckiest girl on earth,” I say.

That seems to appease her as she turns back to the movie.

It doesn’t take long before her breathing evens out and she falls asleep in my lap. But her words never stop swirling around my head. And the scariest part isn’t that she said it out loud; it’s that I think I’d like to be a part of this family too much.