Total pages in book: 101
Estimated words: 96284 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96284 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
He nodded impatiently and all but pushed away my hands. “I know—I eat from the sides first.”
I chuckled and threw a couple nachos into my mouth. Then I debated whether to offer Jake a hand, but he seemed to be on top of things. Cas leaned over his container of fish and chips and munched away, a pro at covering his face in ketchup.
“Bear, you wanna decide our spotlight tonight?” Jake asked. The king of multitasking, feeding his daughter with one hand, making sure neither kid fell off his lap, and popping cheese curds into his mouth.
“Issa and Linda!” Colin replied.
Jake and I smirked. Colin wanted to highlight Issa and Linda’s food truck every week. Lord knew they had plenty of visibility on our Instagram.
“I guess we can have more than one,” Jake settled for saying.
“Did Haley post the announcement yet?” I asked.
We had more to celebrate today than just the best day of the week.
“I’m gonna say yes without knowing for sure,” he replied, “because some woman walked up to me at Ralph’s today, asked for a selfie, and congratulated us on the nominations.”
Oh, and he lived to tell me about it? I was shocked. Jake still got so uncomfortable when we were recognized, which wasn’t rare these days.
“I’m proud of you, bro. You survived another selfie,” I said.
He smirked and scratched his eyebrow with his middle finger.
Nice.
“Dada, uhhh!” Cas stretched his arms to reach his juice box, so I moved it closer to him.
Once Sam was done and wanted to get back into her stroller, Jake could tuck into his own food. Our perfect sunset dinner continued with stretches of comfortable silence, Colin telling us about his kindergarten adventures, Cas demanding more ketchup, and minor shop talk.
Jake had missed the first of our two weekly meetings with Seth and Haley; the one today, he’d had some errands to run, so I filled him in. The two nominations for the News & Documentary Emmy Awards were obviously the biggest update all week, and I suspected we would ride that wave till fall. But we had the numbers too. Two million viewers and listeners per episode was a huge milestone, one we’d finally reached. Off Topic was doing well.
We were also getting ready to move into production for our upcoming documentary series, Currahee.
Unlike our previous projects, this one focused on people, and I was getting to know another side of Jake in the process. He’d always been a perfectionist with filming, but he was displaying a solemn dedication and obsessive focus to Currahee I hadn’t witnessed before. It almost made me worried.
For as well as I knew him, and for as much as I knew he confided in me, I believed he carried a lot on his shoulders that he shared with no one. And it was pouring out in his concentration and determination to make Currahee possibly our best production yet.
There’d be no comedy in Currahee. The word itself meant “stand alone,” and it’d been used in multiple ways, but maybe most famously as a motto for a branch of the Army during the Second World War. The entire series would center around our armed forces and first responders, and though we would capture what they did on the job too, the focus was on what happened afterward. After a soldier came home from war, after a police officer had been shot, after a paramedic had lost someone, after a firefighter had spent thirty years running in and out of burning buildings. After disaster, after mayday.
It’d been Jake’s idea. He’d come up with the name for the series too. He’d told me that after everything was over and done with, the danger had passed, the war had ended, that was when a first responder truly stood alone.
Abso-fucking-lutely, the investigative journalist in me had fired on all cylinders during his somber pitch—which, in reality, had just been Jake talking one night on the patio after a few beers. But the rest of me had been all in from the get, too. He’d shared some stories about friends who’d never gotten the help they needed. Veterans whose PTSD had won and either sent them to the nearest addiction or…worse. And I certainly had my fair share of similar stories.
I came from a family of first responders, after all. Then 9/11 had broken the trend and turned our younger generation—my generation—into soldiers. Into Marines. Basically, everyone except my sister and me. As the babies in the family, we’d been guilted out of it.
So this was going to be a heavy project for me as well, but considering I was so fucked in the head when it came to Jake fuckin’ Denver, I was studying him more than anything else.
This used to be my bedroom.
Simpler times.
It’d briefly been a guest room too, but now it was our office. I gathered my iPad, my notebook, and a few documents I’d printed out, and then left again. Jake was rummaging around in the only room that hadn’t changed much. The main suite he’d once shared with Colin, now a play area for the kids when we brought them to work.