Reese took a step forward and rolled his eyes at their bantering. “We’re not in college anymore, guys. We don’t need to turn everything into a drinking game.”
“Game?” Marley pretended to be outraged. “It’s not a game. This is serious business.”
Reese rubbed a hand over his closely shaven head. “You guys are incorrigible when we all get together. How you manage to hold it together on a daily basis when you’re pretending to be grownups, I don’t know.”
I grinned. “Some of us don’t have to pretend anything. There’s work, then there’s play. This is play.”
“Don’t you have arcade games at your office?” Colt asked. “Last time I came to visit before we went out to lunch, we spent twenty minutes shooting hoops.”
“Fair point,” I said. “Maybe I’m just the genius who figured out how to turn work into play and get paid for it.”
“Do you remember when we used to sit around dreaming about becoming moguls?” Josh asked. “We should’ve known even then that Parker would find a way to have fun with his job.”
“I have fun at my job,” Marley said. “I’d even venture to say that I have way more fun than Parker. Maybe I’m not a mogul, but I don’t want to own resorts or companies. Just the thought of all that stress makes me want to break out in hives.”
“We were all fools back then,” Colt said. “It sure was fun, but moguls? Come on.”
Reese shrugged and cleared his throat. “If you think about it, we’re all successful in our own ways. That makes us moguls in our own minds, doesn’t it?”
“Nah.” Marley shook his head. “The real success is in finding someone to love.”
Josh nodded enthusiastically, raising his glass. “I don’t want to get all mushy, but he’s right. Finding the love of your life is worth more than all the money in the world. There’s nothing more important than hanging on to the love of your life once you find her.”
“Hear hear,” Colt agreed, clinking his beer against Josh’s glass. “To love. The best thing that could’ve happened for any of us.”
Even Reese fell into the mushy trap, joining the others with his glass in the air. “I can’t wait to see you all walk down the aisle or to stand at the end of it myself. You’re right, guys. That is the only real success that matters.”
Marley shrugged, waggling his brows at them. “Follow me for more secrets of life. You’ll all be moving to the island in no time, eager to join me and my bride in paradise and to stay there.”
I gaped at them. “I can’t believe you guys.”
But even as I said it, I could kind of see where they were coming from. When I thought about Isabella, about how cute she was when she got mad and how much I liked to ruffle her feathers, I could imagine getting to that point with her. Or someone like her, but mostly with her.
The more I got to know her, the more I liked her. They’d all known their significant others for at least a couple years. If I already liked Isabella as much as I did and it hadn’t been anywhere near that long, then I supposed that—had we been dating—I very well might’ve felt the same way about her in two years’ time.
As things were, though, I was just happy she’d boarded the plane. I would take a few days with her over no days with her. That was for sure.
Even if sharing a room with her was damn near going to kill me.