Playing It Safe

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

I’ve spent the last six hours knee-deep in Muggles, Squibs, wizards, and witches. But it paid off because Alex’s house and backyard looks like Harry Potter took a dump all over it and then some. In other words, it looks so freaking awesome that it might even give Universal in Orlando a run for its money.

From the makeshift brick wall in his foyer emulating platform nine and three-quarters and the broomstick parking spot affixed to it—since the children invited were told to bring a broom of their own for a Quidditch match later in the day—to the Sorting Hat area and a replica of Professor Trelawney's and Professor Snape’s classrooms just to name a few, everything looks amazing, and I couldn’t be more pleased.

All of this might have propelled me to super-duper geekdom status, but I’ll gladly wear the moniker because when Josie arrives in a few minutes she is going to flip her lid.

I leave Lisette running around outside directing the caterers while I duck inside to take another shower and get dressed again. This time though I put on something a little nicer in the form of a strapless black maxi dress with embellished sandals, and I work a French braid into the front of my hair that ends in a side ponytail. I am racing around Alex’s bedroom looking for my earrings when he steps inside and leans against one of the bedposts, watching me run around like a chicken with its head cut off.

“My parents just called me and said they’ll be here any minute,” he says casually.

Um, yeah, I kind of completely blanked out on his parents being here too and that I would be meeting them for the first time today.

I freeze in mid-step and throw him an oh shit look because now I’m all kinds of nervous. Granted, I’ve met his sister and obviously his niece, but this is pretty huge. Especially for me, since I never get far enough with a guy I’m seeing to meet his parents, and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named doesn’t count. In fact, let’s just forget about him, shall we? Sounds like a plan.

“What’s wrong?” Alex asks, concerned and coming over to where I’m standing.

I mumble something unintelligible under my breath, trying to play it off like everything is cool when it’s totally not.

He rubs my arms up and down as a small smile plays on his lips. “Are you nervous that you’re going to meet my parents?”

“Maybe a little,” I admit.

Truth be told, I’m scared shitless.

“Julia Boyd, the toughest woman I know, is afraid of my parents. Well, this just got all kinds of interesting.”

I roll my eyes and smack him lightly on the arm. “Alex, it’s not funny. This is kind of a big deal, and I’d like to make a good impression.”

With his thumb and index finger, he lifts my chin and brushes his lips against mine while still smiling. “You have nothing to be nervous about. I promise you that they’re going to love you.”

“That’s easy for you to say.”

He cocks his eyebrow in response. It takes me a second, but I realize that I somewhat intimated that he loves me with my answer, and yeah, that would be a little presumptuous seeing as how we haven’t gone there with each other yet.

I hastily backpedal my response. “What I mean to say is you know me, truck-driver mouth and all. They don’t, so … yeah, that’s about all I got right now, and …”

Alex bites his bottom lip to keep from laughing while I ramble on. He pulls me into his arms, his lips poised over mine, and he quietly says, “Shut up, Julia.”

“Don’t tell me to shut up.”

“I just did.”

“Yeah, well, don’t do it again.”

“Are you going to keep talking, or are you going to let me kiss you?”

“Not if you tell me to shut up again.”

“Are you done talking now?”

“Are you really asking me that?”

“Are you answering my question with a question?”

I open my mouth to say something back to him that is not in the form of a question, but he starts to kiss me, and quite frankly, I don’t give a rat’s ass anymore because he can shut me up like this anytime he likes.

The doorbell rings, and we reluctantly break off the kiss.

“Remind me to pick this up later right where we just left off,” he says in a low voice that makes my insides squirm.

“You’ve got yourself a deal.”

The doorbell sounds off again. I grab the backs of my earrings and put them on as I’m walking toward the front door to answer it, Alex following behind me.


I peek through the side glass panels and see that it’s Josie and Vanessa on the other side. Without a minute to waste, I swing the door open to find Josie smiling so wide all I see is her braces. God, she is so freaking cute.

“Julia!” she squeals and throws her arms around my waist.

“Hey, girlie!”

Vanessa pushes her sunglasses up on her head and sighs. “She’s been awake and fully dressed since seven o’clock this morning, asking me every ten minutes if it’s time to go yet.”

“Seriously?” I ask her, but Josie answers instead with a resounding yes.

Alex appears beside me and bends his head down to Josie’s level. “You’re not even going to say hello to me, are you?”

“Don’t be silly, Uncle Alex,” she says in a matter-of-fact voice and releases me.

It gives me a chance to properly say hello to Vanessa while Alex scoops Josie up in his arms. Her feet dangle at least two feet off the ground, her blond curls bouncing down her back.

When he puts her down, Alex gives his sister a big hug and kiss on the cheek as Josie looks on impatiently.

“Okay, girlie, are you ready to enter Hogwarts?”

She clasps her hands underneath her chin and nods.

“Give me your hand and close your eyes,” I instruct her.

I walk a couple of feet to the end of the foyer where the platform nine and three-quarters wall is waiting to be pulled back.

“Open your eyes, Josie.”

She complies and bounces from foot to foot, staring in awe at the sign painted to look exactly like the one from the movie. If she’s this excited by a fake wall, wait until she sees the rest of the place!

“Can I open it?” she asks in wonderment.

“Yup.”

Josie’s hand inches up and snatches the end of the fabric, pulling it back slowly and peeking her head through to take a look at the other side. She drops the curtain, and it falls back in place, her face in a stoic expression.

I bend my knees until I’m at eye level with her. With my hand I brush back a loose curl from her forehead. “Is everything okay?”

She nods but doesn’t say a word. I look up at Vanessa and Alex, who are just as confused as I am. “Josie,” I say quietly, “why aren’t you saying anything?”

She wraps her arms around my neck and hugs me to the point of choking. Through choked-up tears, she whispers in my ear. “It’s amazing.”

I’m sure the PMS hormones have something to do with it because I start to get teary-eyed and all emotional by her display of gratitude.

Jesus Christ, what the f*ck is happening to me? I’m turning into a mushy person, and I actually like it.

I peek up at Alex, who gives me a sweet smile with a wink, and I swear I have to avert my gaze to the floor before I start to really bawl like a baby. I quickly pull myself together and thank God I do before the waterworks really start for me. It’s one thing to see a child cry but quite another for a grown woman. And really nobody should have to see me cry. It’s downright frightening. I do the whole bottom lip quivering thing, and my nose gets as red as Rudolph’s. Seriously, it’s not pretty.

“But you haven’t seen everything yet,” I say, patting her back softly. “Come on, let me show you the rest.”

“Okay.”

She lets me go so I can stand up, and I grab her hand in mine again. I pull back the curtain and step over the threshold into party central, which has been separated into three specific quadrants. A Sorting Hat section that has a walkie-talkie attached to the back of the chair so that whenever a guest sits in the chair with the hat on, an actor I hired stationed in another room is signaled to speak. Once a guest has been assigned to his or her respective house, there’s a rack of rented authentic robes that have one of the four crests on it. The second quadrant is a potions section that has a giant witch’s cauldron filled to the brim with dry ice bubbling over and bottles lined up in front of it with the following ingredients: dragon’s blood, mandrake root, salamander blood, pickled slugs, eel eye, and goosegrass, to name a few.

To the left what was once Alex’s living room is now a large white fabric tent that has a small opening at the bottom left corner. I nudge Josie forward with my hand and crouch down, lifting the corner of the tent up so she can look inside.

“It’s Professor Trelawney’s Divination class!” she yells back to her mom, who is trailing behind us with a huge smile on her face.

Inside the tent is an array of eclectic pillows surrounding a table with a big crystal ball on it. The actor I hired looks so much like the real Professor Trelawney that it even freaks me out, so I can only imagine how Josie is feeling.

We step back out, standing up, and I walk us toward the set of French doors that leads to Alex’s backyard. The pool has several ivory candles floating around it, mirroring the look of the floating candles in the Great Hall. Past the pool and taking up the large open space of the yard is a Quidditch field with hoops on each end.

“Oh my God!” Josie yells. “It’s a freaking Quidditch field!”

“Hey,” Vanessa warns with a laugh. “Watch your mouth, kid.”

Through a laugh of my own, I say, “I can’t say as I blame you, girlie. It’s pretty freaking awesome, if I do say so myself.”

“Alex?” a woman’s voice calls out from inside the house.

We all turn around to see what I assume must be Alex’s parents walking toward us in amazement. Jesus Christ, no wonder their children are so good-looking. These two look like they just stepped out of the pages of a Calvin Klein advertisement. No, not the Kate Moss, emaciated heroin-chic kind either. I’m talking the elegant and perfectly put together kind of models—if they were in their fifties—which they aren’t usually, but whatever, you get the picture.

His mother is dressed in a white blouse tucked into a pair of black checkered capri pants, and her blond hair is cut in a smart bob that falls around her jawline. From where I’m standing, I can see where Alex gets his bright blue eyes as hers sparkle in the sunlight when she gives her son a hug and kiss on his cheek. His dad, for lack of a better way of putting it, is one smooth and handsome-looking man, and I can tell that’s where Alex gets his suave and sexy swagger.

“Grandma, Grandpop, did you see everything Julia did to make Uncle Alex’s house look like Harry Potter’s world?” Josie says in a rush, running over to them.

“I did,” Alex’s mom answers and looks up at me.

I take it as a signal that I should introduce myself, so I bite the bullet and pray to the deodorant gods that my pits aren’t sweating and walk over to her with my hand extended.

Before I reach them, Alex wraps his arm around my waist and says, “Mom, Dad, this is Julia, my girlfriend and the person responsible for all of this.” He tops it off by kissing my temple as I look down at Josie, who has both her thumbs up and a joker-like grin on her face.

Okay, up until this point I’d been thinking that he was kind of sort of my boyfriend, but I never publicly said that to anyone or even addressed him as such during any of our conversations. To hear him say it out loud is surprising, but in a really good way.

“Hi, it’s very nice to meet you, Mr. and Mrs. Holt,” I say, my voice sounding way more calm than I thought it would.

Alex’s mom takes my hand in hers. “Oh dear, please don’t call me that. It reminds me of my mother-in-law. Call me Allison. I insist.”


I nod as she lets go of my hand, and his dad steps up and takes it in his for a firm shake. “Don’t listen to her or whatever she has to say about my mother. She’s still upset that she didn’t approve of our wedding color choices over thirty years ago.” I laugh in spite of myself as he goes on. “But she’s right, please call me Alex.”

My head turns to my right to look up at my Alex. “You never said you were a junior.”

“Because I never tell people that,” he answers under his breath.

Josie steps in then and commands the attention of her grandparents, taking their hands in hers and dragging them along back toward the house.

Over her shoulder as we watch them walk away, his mom says, “It was very nice to meet you, and we’ll catch up more later.”

Vanessa smacks my butt as she brushes past me, making me jump in surprise. “See, you had nothing to be nervous about, Julia.”

She laughs as she walks away, trying to catch up to Josie and her parents, and leaving Alex and me outside.

“That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“You told her I was nervous?” I ask him in disbelief.

“I did.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Because I thought it was cute.”

“Listen up, Junior.” His eyes squint in jest, and he smiles. “Don’t be telling people things I say to you in private.”

“Even if I think it’s adorable and cute as hell?”

He turns me around and wraps both arms around me while waiting for me to answer.

“If I answer you with a question, will you keep asking me questions again?”

“Too late, you just asked me a question, so I’ll take that to mean it’s okay for me to tell people when I think my girlfriend is being cute as hell.”

“Yeah about that,” I coyly say.

“Here we go.” His voice drops to a low murmur. “I was waiting for you to freak out about that.”

“Actually, all I was going to say was … I like it.”

His eyes light up, and he grazes his lips against mine. In the background I hear Josie squealing again, signaling the arrival of her first guests. Which means she’s also probably just finding out that each guest received a personalized Hogwarts acceptance letter. I really outdid myself with those, and it might be my favorite thing out of all this stuff.

I let go of him, and we walk back toward the house. He goes off on his own while I catch up with Lisette, who is overseeing the catering staff in the kitchen. After getting the lowdown from her for a while and confirming she’s got everything under control as usual, I start to walk around and get a lay of the land.

After about a half hour of making sure everything is running smoothly, which thank God it is, I make my way back outside where the kids are all gathering for the first round of Quidditch. Approaching the small crowd of spectators on the edge of the field, I’m trying to squeeze through the last grouping of bodies when I hear a familiar woman’s voice mention my name.

So what do I do?

Yup, I eavesdrop like you know you would too.

“I can’t believe she’s here,” Marisa says, clear as a bell and loudly enough that I can hear, along with anyone else within a five-foot radius.

I shimmy over to her left and around a couple who are cheering for their child so that I’m standing right at the front, keeping Marisa in my peripheral to make sure she doesn’t notice me so she’ll keep talking. And she does.

“Seriously, she’s like white trash, and he’s way too good for her,” she rattles off to the person she’s talking to.

“So why is he with her then?” an unknown woman’s voice asks.

“He’s not … or at least he won’t be for too long,” Marisa answers.

I’m going to freeze right here and remind you all how I had a feeling about her when I first met her—the whole women’s intuition thingy. Yeah, about that. Well, after Alex told me the history behind Marisa, I felt terrible about how I had labeled her a whiny bitch and treated her awfully.

Now is about the time that I say aha! in my head because I was so right about her from the very beginning. Really? I’m trash? Who the f*ck does she think she is? And that nonsense about me not being good enough for Alex? Bitch, please.

Yes, I admit it, I’m in love with him, but that’s not important right now. What’s important is getting Miss Teen USA to shut the f*ck up in the most reasonable way possible in front of all these people without making a scene.

At this point I’m craning my neck sideways to look over to where she’s standing so I can get her attention, but her back’s turned my way. The next thing I know, I get pelted in the face hard by something. I don’t know what it is, but it’s hard enough that it knocks me on my ass until I’m lying flat on the ground.

Well it worked—she shut up.

That might be because everyone is crowding around me to see if I’m okay. My hand is covering the left side of my face, which feels like it’s already black and blue, and I can only see out of one eye when Vanessa crouches alongside of me.

“Are you okay?”

“I think so.” I go to sit up, and she helps me. “What hit me?”

She smirks and says, “A Quaffle ball.”

“Awesome.”

“Come on, let’s get you up and inside to check out your eye.”

Vanessa gets me to stand up and leads me toward the house, but not before I catch a glance from Marisa, who is smiling like the conniving bitch that she is from ear to ear.

“Bitch,” I say under my breath.

“Who’s a bitch?”

“Nobody, never mind.”

“Uh-huh, right,” she says quietly and then turns around to the crowd still standing around staring. “She’s fine. Go back to enjoying the party; we’ll be right back.”

She leads me straight to the bathroom in Alex’s bedroom. Sitting me down on the closed toilet seat, Vanessa proceeds to turn on the water in the sink. She grabs a hand towel, running it under the stream to get it wet. She wrings it free of excess water and then comes over to me.

“Okay, let’s see it.”

I shake my head, afraid of what my face must look like by now.

Growing exasperated at my childish behavior, she starts to pry my fingers away from my face.

She blows a long whistle after the big reveal and says, “Nice welt, sweetie.”

“That bad?”

“Honestly?” She takes a breath and blows on the area for a second or two. “It’s pretty bad.”

I stand up and go to the mirror to see for myself. The left side of my face just below my eye is swollen and already has a purplish hue to it. You have got to be shitting me.

“Here.” She hands me the wet towel. “Put this on it for a little bit to help with the swelling and sit down.”

Feeling defeated because I look like I’ve gone a full twelve rounds in the ring with Mike Tyson, I sit back down on the toilet seat. After a few moments of silence, Vanessa finally speaks up.

“So this has to do with Marisa, huh?”

“What makes you say that?”

“Women’s intuition.” She leans against the wall casually and crosses her arms.

I can’t help but laugh a little at that, but it starts to hurt my face. Plus, now I have a pounding headache, so yeah, it sucks.

“Julia, don’t worry about her. She’s been trying to get her claws into Alex for a while, but he wants nothing to do with her. Trust me when I tell you that I have not seen my brother this happy in a very long time, and that’s all because of you.”


“Really?”

“Scout’s honor.”

And speak of the devil, Alex appears in the doorway of his bathroom looking concerned and worried.

“What the hell happened?”

He bends down and kneels in front of me while Vanessa tells him I got nailed in the face by a f*cking prop.

He kisses my forehead and tries to gently tug my hand away. “Let me see.”

“Nope, it looks ugly as all hell, and I don’t care if that makes me a vain person, but you definitely don’t need to see this.”

Vanessa chuckles and starts to walk out of the bathroom. “You two lovebirds can figure this out while I go find Julia some aspirin.” She gives me a wink over her shoulder and closes the door behind her.

Alex tries again to pry my hand away, but I don’t budge. “Baby, no matter what it looks like, you’ll still be gorgeous to me.”

I breathe in through my mouth and blow it out through my nose. Closing my eyes and on the count of three, I drop the towel from my face.

He doesn’t say a word, so I open my eyes. “It’s awful, isn’t it?”

Alex leans forward and ever so gently places a kiss over the welt on my face. He pulls back an inch until he is all I can see with the one eye because the left one is squinty at this point.

“Gorgeous. Perfect,” he whispers.

I smile. “You’re just saying that because you’re my boyfriend and you know I’d kick your ass if you didn’t.”

He chuckles and brushes the ponytail off my shoulder. “You would, wouldn’t you?”

“Not right now, but definitely in the foreseeable future.” I bring my hand up to lightly touch my face and add, “I’m going to have to wear a goddamn eye patch or something and look like a freaking pirate, aren’t I?”

“You’d be the sexiest pirate I know.”

“I’d be the only pirate you know.”

He brings the towel back up to my face and gets me to stand up. When he opens the bathroom door, he makes sure that his bedroom door is closed before leading me to his bed.

“Alex, what are you doing? We can’t be fooling around while the party is going on. Plus, I have to go and keep an eye on everything.”

“Shhh, stop talking,” he says and sits me down on the bed.

He arranges the pillows behind me on the headboard and pulls my feet off the floor and onto the mattress.

“Okay, before the stop talking thing was really cute, but now … not so much.”

He ignores my commentary but grins anyway as he arranges me until I’m propped up with the pillows on his bed. He sits down beside me on my right side and throws his arm around my shoulders.

“Stop worrying about the party. I’m sure Lisette can handle it for a bit by herself while you rest.”

“You have a house full of people. You really don’t need to stay with me. I’ll just rest for a while, and I’ll meet up with you later,” I say.

“Vanessa will take care of the guests.”

“But—”

“But nothing,” he insists. “Lean into me and relax for a little while.”

Well this certainly isn’t how I thought the day would go, I think, resting my head on his shoulder. On top of that, I feel terrible that I’m taking him away from his family on such a big day.

“Alex, this sucks, and I’m sorry that you’re stuck in here with me when you have a house full of people over for your niece’s birthday party.”

He tilts my face up carefully. “I’d rather be here with you right now than with anyone else at this party.”

“Don’t let Josie hear you say that,” I say through a chuckle.

“You know what I mean,” he says, his voice growing sincere.

I do know what he means, and it makes me feel incredibly happy. I’m sure I’m grinning like a one-eyed pirate at him right now because of it.

He ducks his head to press a feather-soft kiss on the top of my head before letting me adjust myself on his shoulder again. “Get some rest, baby. I’ll be here when you wake up.”

My heart may have just skipped a beat or two. It definitely does a few seconds later when his hand starts to rub small circles on my back. Melting farther into his warmth, I let him lull me into a state of complete relaxation. My eyes grow heavy, and I have no choice but to give in to sleep, where I dream about Marisa getting pelted with Quaffle ball after Quaffle ball until she’s covered in huge, ugly welts. Best dream ever.