6. Jeremy

“Never again,” Emmy said, wringing sweat from the thick, black bangs that were stuck to her forehead. “Never a-fucking-gain will you drag me to this discotheque masquerading as a gym.”

“The towel at the end was nice,” Phoebe said. “And the music wasn’t terrible.”

“False,” Declan added, stealing a sip of Phoebe’s water. “The music was terrible and my ass is sore.”

“That’s because you have no ass,” Phoebe replied, planting a kiss on his cheek.

“Watch it, Feathers,” he replied in a low voice, eliciting a giggle from Phoebe.

“I had fun,” Ryan said, taking an obnoxiously loud gulp of water.

“It’s not fair. You’re built for cardio,” Emmy grumbled.

“I’ve trained for cardio, sweetheart, and so have you, if you know what I mean.” Ryan waggled his eyebrows at her. Emmy tried to frown, but a slightly embarrassed smile snuck through.

“Blech,” Dec said. “Straights.”

“Coffee?” Foster asked.

“Yes, but I can’t stay long,” Flo said, blowing a chestnut curl out of her face. “I have résumés to look through for the brewery.”

“You’re hiring?” Dec asked. “If you need a bartender, Lina would pick up a shift or two.”

“Nah, we’re good on bartenders, but I finally need an assistant brewer.”

These were his best friends, he thought as he laughed to himself. They were a chaotic mess that, when his mind wandered to other things, often continued chattering away like a very loud, very academic white noise machine. The chatter continued as they meandered down the street, the couples pairing off on the walk to the coffee shop. Foster, single again, dropped back next to Jeremy’s side.

“Good music this morning,” Foster said.

“Yeah.”

“Nice weather.”

“Yep.”

“Crazy to hear about that alien landing yesterday.”

“Sure.” Jeremy’s lack of engagement was rewarded with a punch to his upper bicep from Foster. “What the hell was that for?”

“Just bringing you back to the present moment. Your mind is all over the place.” Foster, as he said this, slipped his phone out of his pocket and subtly checked for messages.

“Really? I’m the one who isn’t in the present moment?” Jeremy asked, rolling his eyes.

“It’s business.”

“Funny business.”

“You’re not a comedian. Don’t quit your day job, Jer,” Foster said, laughing. The group approached the coffee shop, placed their orders, and settled around a low table. Emmy and Ryan took the couch in the middle. Phoebe pulled her feet up underneath her as she folded into a chair. Dec found the armchair next to hers, and Foster pulled up a stool. Jeremy perched on a footstool, something coursing through his veins today in a way that made it impossible for him to sit still.

Even though the tea selection was horrible, he had a decent affection for the Jumping Goat. It was close to campus and his friends loved it. If he needed to actually work, he would head to the Tea House and focus. Today, he craved community. Needed a reminder of the life he had built here. It was worth suffering through their Earl Grey.

“Jeremy Philip Rinci,” Emmy said, turning her body to face Jeremy, away from where Ryan was discussing baseball with Declan. “Distract me from these boys and their sports talk. What’s new with you? I feel like you’ve been a ghost recently.”

“Are you sure you’re not distracted by the flames of new love?” Jeremy replied sarcastically.

“Bah!” Emmy said. “He’s fine. I’m only with him for the house.” Though she played it off casually, Jeremy had been privy to Emmy’s nerves about moving in with Ryan. How she loved him but was used to her independence and solitude. Jeremy had shared the way his parents kept separate spaces that the other never went into— his mother had her studio where she painted her professional work, and his father had a small corner where he tinkered with radios and other small electronics. Emmy and Jeremy were the singular only children in their group of friends and had often bonded over their love of quiet and their need to recharge away from their friends who had grown up with siblings. Emmy also knew enough about Jeremy’s background that she didn’t ask prying questions. She was content to trust Jeremy to share when things were necessary. Jeremy was grateful for friends who minded their own business.

“Whatever you say, Em,” he replied. “Things are good.”

“House things? Work things? Love things? Life things?”

“I need fewer friends who have gone to therapy,” Jeremy said as a response. When Emmy raised her eyebrows into her blunt bangs and simply stared, Jeremy relented. “House things are a mess. My garbage disposal is broken, so my trash smells horrible. Work things are fine, but boring—”

“God knows we needed some silence in the office,” Emmy interjected.

“You and your man are the cause of the majority of my work stress,” Jeremy replied, but there was no heat behind the accusation. Emmy and Ryan had brought national attention to their tiny museum with their collaborative exhibition, and they were both anxious for the next exhibit to top their first.

“You love me,” Emmy replied, wrinkling her nose.

“I guess. I’ve been consulting again, and I started a new exhibit design—” And before he could get to life things and talk about how he was feeling stuck at their shared workplace, Emmy pounced.

“What kind of exhibit are you working on? Can you chat about it? Have you signed an NDA? Who’s the client?” she asked in rapid fire succession, setting her dirty chai down on the table to lean forward, closer to Jeremy.

He rolled his eyes. “It’s nothing fancy. Just a visitor center out in the forest.”

“What forest?” Phoebe asked, jumping into the conversation.

“Klarluft, right by where Colin and June live.”

“I think he leads some summer overnights through their wilderness space,” she said, pulling out her phone to either google or text her brother. “What’s the exhibit on?” she asked, typing and swiping as she talked.

Jeremy didn’t quite know yet. Davis had a lot of ideas, and the forest was beautiful, but he wanted to pick his friends’ brains. “The forest?” he replied. “It’s about bringing people in and teaching them. But I don’t want them to be lectured to or to be bored.”

And all of a sudden, here were seven people adding ideas, and Jeremy’s hand couldn’t work fast enough to write them all down.

“Make sure there’s a good photo shoot location for social media, because that’s free advertising for the forest,” Phoebe mused.

“Have you reached out to tribal consultants?” Emmy asked. “Oh! And you should probably talk about the history of American preservation and its ties to white supremacy.”

“You’re such a ray of sunshine, darling,” Ryan said, wryly, to which Emmy rolled her eyes. “Even though it’s accurate.” Ryan sipped a vanilla latte. “Did you know the Rockies are some of the youngest mountains in the world, and they’re still growing every year?”

“Why would any normal person know that?” Dec added, resulting in Phoebe pinching him in the side.

“Do they want to open an attached tasting room for the brewery?” Foster asked. “I can also help with budgeting and production connections. We had a great fabricator who made all of our signs for the Great American Beer Festival last year, and I know good suppliers for the brewery’s furniture.” Foster was already pulling out his phone to text Jeremy but made a surprised noise when he found a series of alerts on the screen.

“You know, we could use spruce tips from the forest to add to an IPA and have some of the proceeds benefit the national forest,” Flo said, fixing the bandanna that tamed her curly hair.

“Slow down, slow down,” Jeremy said, holding his hands up and mimicking pumping the brakes in his car. “My brain doesn’t work this quickly, and neither does my hand.” He made a dramatic show of rolling his wrist. “Plus, I don’t want to get ahead of myself. I’m not the content expert. I’m just the facilitator.” It wasn’t that Jeremy didn’t like learning— you couldn’t work in this field without being a bit of a nerd about everything— but the what of an exhibit wasn’t as important to him as the how. The challenge and craft of taking complex ideas formulated by experts and translating them in a beautiful way to the general public? That was what made Jeremy’s brain zing. It was the same way that historic research affected Emmy, or event planning got Foster firing on all cylinders. For the content of the exhibit, he’d defer to Davis. And something about that man, his new colleague, his client, made Jeremy want to take things easy and slow. To make him feel comfortable and not push too hard, but to communicate excitement. To be a partner in this design process.

The conversation transitioned away from ideas for Jeremy’s exhibit (the exhibit for thenational forest, he internally corrected himself) to plans for the upcoming long weekend, which allowed Jeremy to slip back into his comfortable role of observer of his friends.

Dec mentioned a showing of City Lights he wanted to attend, which led to Emmy and Phoebe chatting about the development of talkies and how it limited the opportunities for actors with accents. Ryan had turned to Foster and attempted to make idle small talk about the upcoming college football season, to which Foster reminded him that he hated organized sports. Ryan, rolling his eyes, grumbled, “I’ll just text Julian, he gets me,” while Foster contented himself, smiling at his own phone. Flo and Phoebe batted ideas back and forth for beer names. Phoebe’s love of wordplay came in handy as she suggested more and more double entendre–laced rhymes with pale ale.

Jeremy smiled, content with the band of buffoons he had chosen to surround himself with. This was what he had hoped for when he moved to Colorado. The type of community his parents had cultivated in Greenwich Village. There was always someone joining their family of three for dinner. Sometimes it was an author that his mother was illustrating for or a visiting professor that Jeremy’s father had charmed into giving a talk at his engineering firm. Often, though, it was one of the friends his parents had accumulated since their move to New York City— playwrights, activists, dancers, poets, ham radio broadcasters, chefs, and journalists for the Village Voice. It’s why Jeremy had purchased his house, hoping to open it up to his friends. He also imagined that someone would be there with him as he opened it up, but Jeremy, for all his talk of embracing change, was fearful. Because love meant loss and risk. Friendship love was a beautiful thing, and Jeremy was lucky to experience that.

Unprovoked, Davis’s face floated into Jeremy’s mind as Ryan and Foster engaged in an arm-wrestling contest.

How was he spending his long weekend?

More importantly, why did Jeremy care?