CHAPTER 9 #2
And at the end of the night, Geoffrey had pecked him on the lips and fled into the night like a spooked deer.
It didn’t feel romantic, but once again, this was a beautiful man.
Jeremy was desperate enough to hope the strange alien creature would take off all his clothes.
Plus, having someone as beautiful as a warm morning on his arm at the reunion would be a triumph – just as long as he didn’t talk to anyone.
‘Anyway, how are you guys doing with the love life? Any news?’ Jeremy asked.
Anna shrugged, and Liz kicked a can moodily, earning her several glares from the other volunteers.
‘I feel like I’ve hit the polyamory ceiling,’ Liz said. ‘There’s just no room for more girlfriends. Another girlfriend might break me. But you know what? Girlfriends are so pretty and I want more. I want to collect them like stamps. I want to catch ’em all.’
What did you say to that?
‘Maybe some kind of rotating girlfriend roster system?’ suggested Anna, which made Liz brighten with interest.
While they discussed the practicalities of a polyamory spreadsheet and fixed-term partners, Jeremy opened his phone, found the hottest picture of him and Liz and Anna posing with garbage and sent it to Sam. He captioned it with Get a load of Greta Thunberg over here.
Geoffrey suddenly appeared in front of them, looking hot and excited.
He was artfully scuffed with dirt, like when fashion runways try to be edgy.
He didn’t look dirty; he looked contoured by grime.
He held out a clenched fist and when Jeremy tentatively accepted the offering, a pile of old bottle caps tumbled into his fingers.
Geoffrey nodded solemnly as Jeremy looked stupidly at the small collection of rubbish, and then ran off before Jeremy could even say ‘Thank you!’ or ‘What the fuck?’
But he swiftly forgot the tarnished gift when a reply from Sam popped up on his phone. He smiled at the message, ignoring Geoffrey, who was running across six lanes of traffic.
After they’d put in a few hours of appearing to pick up rubbish – Anna had several bags full, Jeremy one, and Liz none – Jeremy reluctantly took himself back to the PopBuzz office.
He’d been allowed the morning away because it was technically helping out their ad campaign, and he was dreading the amount of work that would probably await him when he returned.
But, as much as he knew he’d be slammed, he’d actually been enjoying his work lately, the fuzziness of boredom receding enough so that he was actually excited to think of fun ways to cover the release of new TV shows, to think deeply about the latest Oscar-bait film, to edit the work of people much smarter than him and learn about how the senate actually worked (they were doing a ‘politics for dummies’ series at the moment, to get ready for the next election, which had made Jeremy realise he was the ‘dummy’ in question).
When Jeremy walked into the office, already scrolling through emails on his phone, he was surprised to see Aidan literally bouncing up to greet him, a sailor’s cap sat jauntily on his head spinning away, such was the force of his jaunt.
‘Can I write a 5000 word homage to Nicole Kidman’s wigs?’ he said, incredibly fast.
‘Uhh,’ Jeremy stalled. The answer was always going to be yes, but he had to think through it, in case there was a trap somewhere – but he didn’t even get a chance to respond because he’d spotted Sasha crying in the corner of the office.
Another member of the team, Bill, a normally solid music critic who kept to themselves and occasionally got cancelled online for giving Taylor Swift albums 4/5 stars, was typing furiously on a mechanical keyboard and sweating profusely, the sound like bullets richocheting off a bank vault door.
Sarah-Jessica was yelling hysterically into her phone.
The signs were grim – ‘Sandstorm’ by Darude was playing at high volume (the Gen Z staff were obsessed with ‘cringe throwback music’), the interns were actually using the table tennis table to play table tennis, and Gina had the door to her office closed with the blinds down.
‘Did Harry Styles die? Why is everyone freaking out?’ Jeremy asked.
‘Oh, we got sent a barrel of free cold brew coffee,’ Aidan answered, gesturing to his mug full of ice and inky black liquid. His eyes were wide and red tinged.
Jeremy sniffed the coffee and made a face. ‘This is basically rocket fuel!’
‘Oh yeah, it’s poison, we’ve all drunk so much and everyone has cried today and I think I have a heart arrythmia. But we’ve also done a lot of work! It’s not very good, but there is a lot of it’.
Jeremy laughed helplessly – Aidan was speaking a thousand miles an hour, and his left leg was jittering the entire time.
He sat down at his desk, ignoring the fact that Sasha had returned and was openly weeping beside him.
His phone flashed, and he saw that Sam had sent him a screenshot of the Clean Up Australia Instagram, which had a photo of Jeremy looking annoyed while gingerly holding up an old McDonald’s burger package to the camera.
The message simply said: I’m so proud of you! and even though Jeremy knew he didn’t deserve Sam’s pride, he still felt warm inside. He could only imagine what it would feel like to actually earn it.