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It was exactly what friendship was meant to be.

It was complete and utter respect and love, without question.

When Haley brought her face back, she showed cheeks blotchy with tears.

“There you are,” she breathed.

As Elise led Haley back into the house, her mind fizzed with memories of their over-twenty-year friendship. Memories of the dorm in which they had eaten candy and drank bad vodka and gossiped about boys and the apartment where they had sat on the floor and dreamed up screenwriting lives. The world they’d crafted—one of wealth and marriage and babies.

Now, they were off to a new phase.

Maybe it didn’t mean that anything had to change.

“Let me pour you a glass of wine,” Elise said brightly. Nerves rollicked through her voice.

Wayne appeared in the doorway of the kitchen as Rob sauntered through, a wine bottle of his own lifted. “Hey there,” Wayne said to him. “I’m Wayne. Good to meet you.”

Haley waggled her eyebrows and whispered, “Is that what you brought home?”

Elise grinned madly. “You know he’s right there, right? You can’t just talk about him like he’s a slab of cut meat.”

Haley cackled outright. “If you say so, cutie.” She sipped the first bit of her wine, tapped her lips together, and then said, “I guess we have a lot to catch up on, don’t we?”

“It’s almost impossible to describe just how much,” Elise offered.

At that moment, Mia’s squeal burst out from the front door. She appeared seconds later with her own bottle of wine lifted and her eyes pinned straight for Elise.

“So. Matt’s reports that you’re off your rocker weren’t entirely correct, I see,” she said.

“Matt?” Wayne said, his eyebrows lifted. “Oh, I know, Matt. Me and Matt go way back.”

Mia gave Wayne an up-down and formed her lips into a circle. “Haley, I think I might have a hunch why Matt was so upset with Elise.”

Elise rolled her eyes as she rushed forward to hug Mia. “So Matt’s still up in arms about his surprise visit to Mackinac?”

“He still won’t say your name,” Mia affirmed. “Me and Haley are just glad he didn’t decide to kick us out of the writing room because of our association with you.”

“I guess you can’t please everyone,” Elise said with a heavy sigh.

Mia’s eyes again turned toward Wayne. “I guess not. Not when you have someone better to please—”

Elise cut her off with a big-eyed grunt. “Mia!” When she turned her eyes back toward Wayne, she found him on the verge of raucous laughter. “I’m sorry about her.”

“When we get together, we act like teenagers,” Haley affirmed to Wayne. “Have you not shown him your wild side, Elise?”

Max appeared at that moment, providing calm in the midst of the storm, as neither Elise nor Wayne had ever met him. It was Elise’s turn to do the up-down and give her approval, which she did, even before she learned that Max was an engineer, the sort of “stable” guy Mia didn’t normally go for.

“What can I say?” Mia said as she poured herself a second glass of wine, only a few minutes before her first. “Maybe I’ve finally decided to grow up.”

“Yeah. You look really grown up, Mia,” Elise teased.

They sat out on the patio—Max, Rob, and Wayne all in a little gathering, their glasses filled with expensive whiskey, and Elise, Mia, and Haley in a separate circle all on their own. They drank and ate and laughed as soft music pulsed out from Elise’s stereo system, which Sean had insisted on installing some five years before.

“Just so you know, I saw Sean the other day when I had a meeting in Silver Lake,” Mia said conspiratorially.

Elise marveled at how little this news mattered to her. “Really? How was he?”

“He ducked away from me like I was an attack dog,” Mia said with a laugh. “In all honesty, he looked tired and like his clothes didn’t fit him. Like an older man trying on all the clothes at Abercrombie and Fitch.”

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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