Ava stared at her. “Wait, doesn’t he own Browning, Keller, and Mason?”
Maddie grinned slowly and nodded. “Yes. We went over his briefs with meticulous attention. The man has got a tongue that will take you to another world. I may have to go out with him a few more times before I let him go.”
All of them giggled and she raised her eyebrows at them naughtily and popped the olive from her martini into her mouth.
They talked a while longer, their conversation moving from men and sex to business, fashion, and family. After enjoying a light dinner, they said goodbye to each other and went on their ways. Mia caught a cab again, and took it to her apartment several floors up in a high rise that overlooked Central Park.
Closing her front door behind her, she leaned against it for a moment and sighed, leaving the day behind her as she looked around her living room and felt her body relax in the sanctuary of her home. A long sigh escaped her and she pushed herself from the door and stepped forward into the room. Mia strode the length of the living room and pulled her heels off along the way, sinking down into the sofa beside the floor to ceiling window that overlooked the teeming city below. She looked up at the shelf beside the window, her gaze drifting over the series of framed photographs there. They were all different sizes and shapes, each one of them holding a memory or a person precious to her.
She paused at the image of her older sister sitting in the grass at a park, holding her younger daughter while her two-year-old son played happily beside her. Serena was happy living in the country with her husband and two children. She loved a simple life, focused on family and peace.
She was so different from Mia. Mia craved the fast paced beat of the city and a life centered in the thriving heart of near chaos. She loved all the buildings, the stores, the business that she did, and the knowledge that at any time she could walk out of her door and something would be going on somewhere. It was never a dull moment. No quiet family life for her, and she preferred it that way. Serena and she had come to terms with their differences years before, and had cherished those differences in each other, staying close as their shared days of childhood faded away and they grew into adulthood.
Mia was grateful that they hadn’t grown apart while growing older. She knew she had a friend and a confidant in her sister; one that she would have all of her life, and she wouldn’t have traded Serena with all her differences for anything or anyone in the world. She loved having a niece and nephew, especially since they were likely to be the only children she would have in her life. She had no interest in having her own children, and being able to spoil her sister’s kids was an indulgent delight of hers.
She wasn’t even sure she wanted a permanent or serious relationship in her life. She was so busy having fun, making memories with her friends and making money, that she had no real interest in anything long term with any man she knew, and that suited her just fine. Her friends; Liam, Ava, and Maddie, all felt the same as she did, although she suspected that Ava would want to settle down someday, no matter how much she played around with men until that day came. She seemed to have such a romantic side that settling down with some great man at the end of her wild days would be the perfect scenario for her, although Mia would never say it to her.
Maddie was too independent, strong-willed, and adventurous to settle down. Mia could see her spending her life making money and traveling the world, taking lovers as she went and leaving them behind when it was time to go. She could see Maddie keeping her friends close, but no one else. Liam wasn’t much different; changing lovers often and enjoying his free lifestyle, but that seemed like a typical standard for the gay men in his circle of friends. None of them were really the marrying kind.
Mia looked at the photograph of her parents. Her father was holding her mother with his arm wrapped around her at his side. They were smiling pleasantly. She had always remembered them as happy, before he passed away. Her mother lived in a retirement community, and spent all her time with her friends there, or visiting Serena and the kids.
Her parents had enjoyed a long and loving marriage, and Mia knew that Serena would as well. Sometimes she wondered if she might be doing things wrong or outside of her family’s expectations, although they accepted her lifestyle with no judgment and no argument. As a younger woman, she wondered if she would meet a man she would want to spend the rest of her life with, but she had met so many of them over the years that she had come to realize that there couldn’t be one she would want to spend all of her life with. She liked too many different things about too many different men, and there had never been a single man who had all of the qualities she admired most. She was certain that she would never fall in love deeply, and that forever with one love was not in her future, and the realization of that gave her a peace of sorts. She knew it, and she took comfort in it. She, like Maddie, loved living her life on her own. It was her comfort zone, and nothing and no one would ever change that.