Climbing the Rock

Chapter 10B: Exposures

Jake was actually quite concerned that Mindy would do just as he'd suggested and call an end to the relationship in the name of imagery. He knew, based on phone calls the two of them had shared, that Georgette was pressuring her to stay as far away from Jake as possible and to start repairing the damage the photos had inflicted.

"She's trying to set me up with Joseph Clark," Mindy told him during one such conversation. "Can you believe that?"

"Joseph Clark?" Jake asked, lying in bed in his underwear and smoking a cigarette, the phone pushed to his ear. "Are you serious?"

Joseph Clark was the young, fair-haired lead singer of a musical group called The Marchers — a group that performed Christian tunes. They were one of the most popular of the genre, which meant that their last album had sold almost two hundred thousand copies, and had been nominated for a Grammy the previous year in the "Best Gospel Performance" category.

"I'm dead serious," she said. "She even had the arrangements half made. She got in touch with Clark's agent and suggested we be seen together in public. She had this whole campaign mapped out where we would be America's sweethearts. There would be shots of us sitting in ice cream stores together or going to movies or where I would attend his concerts and clap for him. We'd release press statement saying that we were both virgins and were committed to remaining so until we were married. She was even suggesting we tour high schools and lecture kids on abstinence."

"Do you even know Joseph Clark?" he asked.

"Never met him in my life," she said. "From what I hear though, he's very fond of the young Christian girls who attend his concerts. Extremely fond, if you know what I mean. There have been quite a few abortions paid for by Savior Music two months after The Marchers did a concert."

In the end, however, Mindy had done what Jake had hoped she would do and had told Georgette to go pound sand. There would be no contrived romance with Joseph Clark. She would keep seeing Jake as long as she wished and she would not give in to pressure to discontinue the relationship. Georgette had threatened to quit being her agent, which was of course a bluff that Mindy called, and had eventually extracted from her the same promise Jake had given to Crow — the promise of discretion.

The first time they were able to get together after the release of the photos was the following Sunday. Jake ordered a limo driver to take him to one of his favorite lunch spots. Halfway there he suddenly commanded the driver to stop. He stepped out and walked away, disappearing down a downtown Los Angeles street, cutting through an alley, and stepping into Mindy's Mercedes. They went directly to her place, ate a quick and satisfying lunch prepared by Marcella, and then rode the horses up to Mindy's secret place in the mountains. There they fell into each other's arms and were soon lustfully screwing atop the checkered blanket, Mindy shouting out her profane encouragements the entire time.

After Jake emptied himself into her body they lay twined together for a few moments, enjoying the closeness of their sweaty bodies. When their breathing returned to normal Mindy squirmed out from beneath and walked over to the horses — who had watched their naked, noisy antics impassively — and reached into a compartment on her saddle. When she returned to the blanket Jake saw she had a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. Jake's eyes widened in surprise as she put one in her mouth and sparked up.

"You smoke?" he asked.

She smiled guiltily. "Yes," she said. "I have for years. I've been avoiding it when I'm around you — you know? The image thing? — but the one after sex is just so divine. I couldn't hold off any more."

Jake shook his head in bemused amazement.

"What?" she asked. "Did I finally manage to spoil your vision of me?"

"Not at all. It's just that all this time I've been not smoking around you because I thought you didn't approve of it. I've been dying for a smoke for hours."

They laughed together. She gave Jake one of her cigarettes and they lay back on the blanket, smoking and staring up at the sky.

Later, after riding back to her house, she revealed another of her vices by mixing them up a pitcher of vodka martinis. They were very strong and not much to Jake's liking but Mindy downed them like they were water. Soon she was drunk, giggly, and very affectionate. They retired to the bedroom where she became profane and extremely nasty — nastier than her usual level of bedroom nastiness.

While engaging her in the classic rear-entry position on the floor at the foot of the bed — and breathing heavily from her demands to do it faster and harder — she suddenly reached back and spread her own butt cheeks as widely as physically possible.

"Put it up my ass!" she yelled.

"Are you sure?" Jake asked doubtfully. Her anal opening looked awfully small.

"Fuck yeah I'm sure," she told him. "Get it in there!"

And so, ever the obedient soul, Jake pulled himself out of her dripping pussy and put the head of his cock against her puckered anus. He pushed slowly, intending to work himself inside over a few minutes, but Mindy was having none of this.

"Cram it in there!" she ordered. "Rape that fucking ass!"

He did as she asked, finding at once that she wasn't nearly as tight here as he thought she'd be. She moaned blissfully at the intrusion and immediately began telling him to fuck harder.

"Oh yeah," she cried as he pistoned in and out. "Now hold me down by the neck — Yeah... like that! Pull my fuckin hair... harder... harder! Oh yeah... fuck yeah!"

Late the next morning Jake was once again tired, scratched up, sore, abraded, and quite satiated. Instead of dropping him off around the corner, Mindy pulled right into the circular drop-off in front of his building.

"Are you sure this is a good idea?" he asked her, already seeing the astonished faces of the doorman and two of the minor league celebrities as they stared at them from the lobby.

"Well, they already know we're seeing each other, don't they?"

"True," he said. "But what about that discretion we promised?"

She leaned over and kissed him firmly on the mouth. "I'm being discrete by not sticking my tongue down your throat," she told him.

"I see."

"Call me tonight?"

"You bet."

And he did. They talked for more than an hour and made plans for the following Sunday. Mindy suggested that since it was already known by the various National Records spies that inhabited the building that they were seeing each other there would be no harm in her visiting him in his condo. She was dying — she said — to try one of the exotic dinners his manservant was known for. Jake was forced to agree with this logic and extended a formal invitation.

Crow was not terribly happy about it when he found out (and Jake didn't even bother asking how he'd found out — the information had come to him less than twelve hours after Jake had told Manny he would be having Mindy for dinner on Sunday).

"This is your idea of being discrete?" Crow asked after calling Jake up to his office. "You invite her into your very building, where anyone and everyone can see that she's going up to your condo? How long do you think it will be until one of those local newscasters that lives in that place starts to think they're real reporters and feeds that to the news desk?"

Jake, knowing that there was little Crow was willing or able to do about it, simply shrugged off his concerns and told him to mind his own business. And, of course, Crow was right. When Mindy entered the Esnob Pinchazo building on Sunday afternoon she found herself waiting at the elevator with none other than Steve O'Riley, the flamboyant local weatherman. O'Riley pretended to make small talk with her for a moment and then, just as the elevator arrived, flat out asked her if she was here to visit Jake Kingsley.

"Whatever would make you think that?" she replied.

This confused O'Riley for a moment. "Uh... well... because it's been reported that you two are seeing each other and he lives in this building."

"Does he?" she asked innocently. "I didn't know that."

"You didn't?"

"No. Isn't that a fantastic coincidence? I'm here to see one of my girlfriends though."

"Oh," he said, disappointed. "I see."

O'Riley pushed the button for his floor. Mindy pushed the button for number twenty-four.

O'Riley chewed his lip for a moment. "Your friend lives on the twenty-fourth floor?" he asked.

She nodded. "Yep. She sure does."

"That's Jake Kingsley's floor as well."

"Is it?" she said. "That's another amazing coincidence, isn't it?"

When the doors opened at number nine O'Riley stepped reluctantly out. He cast one last glance at Mindy Snow, who was smiling her friendly smile at him.

"Bye now," she told him. "And if you see Jake around tell him I said hi, okay?"

"Okay," O'Riley said, his head spinning. He walked slowly down the hall and had put his key in the door when it occurred to him that maybe it really wasn't just a fantastic coincidence. Could it be that Mindy Snow really was up there with Jake Kingsley?

When he got inside he made a phone call to the television station. The news director agreed with his logic. Within an hour a news crew, packing a telephoto video recorder, was discretely staking out the lobby.

Meanwhile Jake was having another of his illusions of Mindy's innocence shattered. She had just been introduced to Manny and had just given her drink order to him (a double Vodka martini). As Manny went off to the bar to construct it, she turned to Jake and asked. "You got any pot? I really want to get stoned."

He did. They smoked several hits out of his bong and then retired to Jake's bedroom for a long, luxuriant session of sex, during which Mindy presented her bare ass to him and ordered him to spank her.

"Harder!" she said at his first feeble swats. "Leave some fucking marks on me, goddammit!"

He left some marks and produced a few shocked looks from Manny when they finally emerged from the bedroom. The sharp cracks of his hand hitting her flesh had been clearly audible to him as he'd fussed over his shrimp soup and Parisian chicken.

They ate Manny's meal, drank some more alcohol, smoked some more weed, and then engaged in a two hour sex session in Jake's bedroom. Mindy slipped out the door just before eleven that night, leaving a snoring Jake naked beneath the covers. Reeking of sexual musk she found Manny watching television in the main living room. She kissed his cheek, thanked him for a wonderful meal, and let herself out the door. Down in the lobby the news crew spotted her the moment she emerged from the elevator. They filmed her as she walked across the lobby to the valet and while she waited for her Mercedes to be brought around. The moment it was parked in front of the door she stepped outside, they fell upon her like vampires.

"Mindy," the heavily made-up female reporter shouted, stepping forward and shoving her microphone in Mindy's face. "Do you have a minute?"

"No," she said, taking her keys from the valet and slipping him a ten-dollar bill.

"I understand you've been up on the twenty-fourth floor for the past eight hours. Was it Jake Kingsley you were visiting?"

"No comment," she said, pushing her way around the woman and getting into her car.

"But Mindy," the reporter persisted. "In light of the recent pictures of you and Jake Kingsley together, it could hardly be a coincidence that you just happened to be in the same building where he lives for eight hours, could it?"

"No comment," she repeated, closing her door and locking it.

The cameraman stepped close and zoomed on her through the window as she put the car in drive and pulled away. He continued to film the vehicle until it disappeared from sight around the next corner.

The next morning Jake, who had no idea that any of this had transpired, came limping out the front door to get into his limousine for the trip to the recording studio. A large group of reporters, paparazzi, photographers, and news cameramen swarmed him, blocking his access.

"What the fuck?" Jake muttered, blinded by the flashbulbs, his ears ringing from a hundred shouted questions. His confusion was understandable. Though the press hounded him endlessly wherever he went, this was the first time he'd actually encountered them outside of his building. They either hadn't known where he lived before, or they had been observing some unwritten rule about not disturbing celebrities at their house — he knew not which. But whichever, they were certainly bothering him now. He strained to listen to what they were shouting.

"Was Mindy here last night?"

"What were you two doing up there all night?"

"Are you going to acknowledge a romantic relationship with Mindy?"

"Were the two of you intimate?"

Jake sighed, keeping his expression as neutral as possible. "No comment, no comment," he said as he pushed his way through the crowd and dove into the back of the limo. They continued to shout questions at him as the car pulled away. And when he arrived at the National Records building, there was a similar throng waiting there as well.

Crow was infuriated. "Why the hell don't you just take out a goddamn ad in the LA Times and announce that you're banging Mindy Snow? The whole fucking world knows about it now anyway!"

Jake refused to feel apologetic towards Crow or anyone else at National Records. He did touch bases with Mindy and with Shaver, both of whom advised that the best thing to do was to deny everything and to hide behind a wall of "no comment". When contacted later that day Shaver and Georgette both stated for the record — with straight faces no less — that Mindy and Jake had not been together last night, that Mindy had merely been visiting another, unnamed friend, who coincidentally lived in the same building.

The story, the film of Mindy in Jake's building, and the pathetic, unbelievable denials, were played throughout the day on nearly every channel in the United States. Newspaper entertainment sections printed the story the following day. The following week several entertainment magazines had full-length articles about the growing rumors of a Kingsley/Snow relationship. The amount of reporters and paparazzi stalking the two of them doubled.

A month went by and things settled down a bit. There was still endless speculation and rumors printed in a variety of magazines or touted on a variety of entertainment shows, but nothing new added to the fever. Jake and the rest of the band were locked into the grueling routine of recording and Mindy had several public relations jaunts she had to undergo in addition to two readings for upcoming film roles.

"They turned me down for the part in Focus On The Dream," Mindy told Jake during one of the few phone conversations they managed. Focus was a teen oriented film about a girl's softball team and their struggle for respect and recognition in an early seventies college known for its football team. It was just the sort of cutesy feel-good movie that exploited the Mindy Snow image to the maximum. The lead role had in fact been written with the specific intent that Mindy would play it. She had been told beforehand that the reading was nothing more than a formality. Apparently, however, that had not been the case.

"What happened?" Jake asked. "Was it because of... you know... you and me?"

"Yeah," she said. "It was. The producer told me that with the recent controversy that has cropped up between me and 'that lowlife musician', they had decided to go with Jessica Coriander instead."

Jake felt horrible about this. He had cost her a part that would have paid eight million dollars. "I'm so sorry," he told her. "This is exactly what Georgette told you would happen. And she was right."

"Don't worry about it," she said. "It's not your fault."

"Maybe we should think about... uh... not seeing each other anymore," he suggested. "I don't want to..."

"Don't you like me anymore, Jake?" she asked, her voice quivering.

"Yes," he said. "I like you very much. I love spending time with you, but I'm hurting your career."

"Let me worry about my career," she said. "That was just another wholesome little girl part anyway. Fuck them if they're afraid my personal life will detract from it."

"But, Mindy..."

"There will be other parts for me," she said. "Trust me. Now when can we see each other again? I'm having a severe case of Jake-withdrawal."

That turned out to be the following Sunday. She gave him cryptic instructions to have a limousine drop him off at an intersection in Beverly Hills at ten o'clock in the morning. He followed the directions and found himself standing in front of a high-end Chevrolet dealership. Mindy's car was not parked out front as he was expecting. While he puzzling over this, Mindy came walking out from within the showroom wearing a red spaghetti strap top and a pair of white shorts. She ran up to him and gave him a big hug, kissing him repeatedly on the mouth.

"Mindy," he hissed at her. "We're in public. There are people watching us."

"Fuck 'em," she said. "They all know we're together anyway, don't they? Is there any point in pretending?"

This threw him for a bit of a loop. "Are you saying we should go public?"

"No," she said, "but I'm tired of sneaking around like a teenager trying to hide something from her parents. Let's just get together when we want, do what we want, and say nothing to the vultures. Let them draw their own conclusions."

"Its not too hard to draw one when we're kissing in front of a car dealership."

She smiled her sexy smile — the one she usually only displayed during foreplay. "Like I said, fuck 'em. They can make of it what they will." And with that, she kissed him soundly, sticking her tongue in his mouth this time.

He was a bit breathless when she released him, and more than a little aroused. But he was curious as well. "What are we doing here?" he asked. "Where's your car?"

"It's at home," she said. "I had a limo drop me here."

"How come?"

"Because it's becoming quite the pain in the ass to pick you up from your condo," she said. "And as I told you before, I'm an old-fashioned girl. I like my man to pick me up for a date at my place, in his own car."

"But I don't have a car," he said, although that wasn't strictly true. His battered old 1976 Datsun sub-compact was still in a storage facility outside Hollywood, rotting along with all of his other pre-fame belongings. But its battery was undoubtedly dead and corroded beyond repair, it's engine gummed up with disuse. Nor was it currently registered or insured. Even if it were running, however, he certainly wouldn't use it to transport Mindy around in.

"I know you don't," Mindy said. "And that's what we're going to fix today."

"Excuse me?" he asked. She wasn't suggesting what he thought she was suggesting, was she?

She was. "Didn't you tell me once that you always wanted a Corvette? Well they got a butt-load of them here. The eighty-fours are out now. That's the new re-vamped model, you know. I was just looking at them. They're bad-ass."

"Mindy, I can't afford a Corvette," he said. "I can't even afford a used beater car."

"But I can," she said. "Come on. Let's go get you one."

"Wait a minute," he said. "You're saying you want to buy me a Corvette?"

"You got it," she said. "What color do you want?"

He was shaking his head. "Nope, sorry," he told her. "I mean, I appreciate the offer and all, but there's no way I'm going to let you buy me a car."

She seemed undaunted by his refusal. "Why not?"

"Well... because... I just can't," he said. "A Corvette runs more than twenty grand. That's way too expensive of a gift."

"Jake," she said, "I'm a multi-millionaire, remember? You hooked up with a rich bitch who likes to spend. Twenty grand is pocket change to me. Now come on. I won't take no for an answer. We are leaving here in your new Corvette or we're not leaving here at all."

She wore him down. In truth, it didn't take too much. The moment he laid his eyes on the new Corvette, his resolve started crumbling. When the sales manager — who was the only person Mindy would deal with — took him out for a test drive, his resolve disintegrated to dust. He picked out a metallic blue model with all the bells and whistles. The out-the-door price turned out to be $24,688. Mindy called her accountant and had him wire the money directly to the car dealership's account.

"Put the registration in Mr. Kingsley's name," she told the sales manager as he filled out the final paperwork.

"Yes, Ms. Snow," he said.

"And I trust that you and your employees will employ complete discretion about the details of this purchase?"

"Of course, Ms. Snow," he said, seemingly appalled that she would even suggest otherwise.

"Up to and including the fact that we were even here in the first place," Jake added.

"Of course," he said. He paused in his paperworking. "So... it's true what they say about the two of you?" he asked.

"No comment," they both said, smiling.

They left the lot less than ninety minutes after Jake's arrival, tearing out of the parking lot in his new car. Jake drove to the PCH and headed north. The moment they were out of the city Mindy reached in her purse and pulled out a baggie of high-grade marijuana and a marble pipe.

"Let's burn, baby," she said, stuffing a large load into the pipe. "A new car isn't properly broken in until you've done two things in it. And one of them is hotboxing it."

Jake laughed as she lit up and took a tremendous hit. "Mindy," he said. "You never fail to amaze me."

Ten minutes later they were both quite stoned. It was then that she showed him the second thing that needed to be done to break in a new car. She leaned over, opened his pants, and gave him a slow, sensuous blowjob while he twisted and turned along the winding coast highway. Somehow he managed to avoid driving his new car over a cliff while she sucked and slurped and eventually brought him to a powerful orgasm.

They drove on, following the PCH all the way to Ventura where they had lunch in a small café and then checked into a pricey hotel for four hours of enthusiastic sex. Jake then drove Mindy home and spent the night in her bed. The next morning he phoned the doorman at his building and told him to tell the limo driver he wouldn't be requiring a ride today. He drove himself to the recording studio only to find that the entire world already knew about his new Corvette.

No one on the staff of the dealership had squealed, but there had been plenty of customers in the dealership while the two celebrities had conducted their business and more than one of them had felt compelled to call a reporter and tell all they'd seen. As a result, it was assumed that Jake had been the one to purchase the car. Having the world know that Mindy had bought it for him was the only indignity he was spared.

"After purchasing the new car," an entertainment reporter narrated on Celebrity News — a ten o'clock gossip show aimed at housewives, "the couple showed up an hour and a half later at a small Ventura restaurant, where staff members tell us they dined on cheeseburgers, fries, and chocolate milkshakes. From there they went to the Oceanside Resort Hotel, where an anonymous staff member informs us they rented a suite and spent the better part of four hours in there."

"Well," Crow sighed as he watched the show with Jake, Matt, and Bill, "it's as good as official now. There's really no way to deny you two are screwing each other."

"I guess not," Jake said.

"Did she get all freaky on you again, Jake?" Matt asked.

"Actually she was pretty tame, relatively that is. I'm not even limping today."

Matt laughed. "God I love this shit." He turned to Bill. "Has he been telling you what this bitch is into? Holy fucking shit!"

"Yes, he's given me a few details," Bill said. "She is quite the unorthodox sexual companion, that's for sure."

"Would you save your locker room talk for later?" Crow cried, exasperated. "What the hell am I going to do with you, Jake? You got Mindy Snow buying you a damn Corvette and then checking into a hotel with you! Did you guys really think no one was going to find out about this?"

Jake shrugged. "I guess we didn't really care," he said. "Should we get back to work now?"

Crow let his head drop to his desk. "Yes," he mumbled. "Get back to work."

They got back to work and the recording of their second album continued with remarkably little strife between the band and the record company. Having mostly gotten their way in the matter of the album's content, Jake and Matt and the others kept their discontent to themselves about such things as the overdubs and extra rhythm guitar tracks. What strife there was had to do with the cover art and the proposed videos.

It was decided that the title of the album would be The Thrill of Doing Business, named for one of Matt's songs, the subject of which had to do with buying and selling drugs and sex. Of course the National Records art department, sticking with the Satanism theme, had designed a bleak album cover in which the five band members were dressed in black and sitting around a table with candles, a pentagram, and a yellow scroll with the word CONTRACT on top, indecipherable calligraphy covering the middle, and the small but legible signatures of the band members on the bottom. All five of them were leaning to the left. On that side of the album cover a wicked looking hand with pale skin and long, claw-like nails, was protruding from a black cape, beckoning to the five of them. The implication, of course, was that the five of them had just sold their souls to Satan and were having them removed. The band protested this cover as sternly as they could.

"The song is not about doing business with the fucking devil," Matt had screamed at Crow. "It's about creeping through alleys to buy pot and blow. Its about hiring hookers to suck my fucking dick for me!"

Crow stood firm, however, spouting the same line as Acardio before him. "It doesn't matter what your perception of the song is. The title goes along with the satanic imagery Intemperance is associated with. This will be the cover, guys. Get used to it."

They didn't get used to it, but they didn't protest anymore. The photo-shoot for the cover took almost an entire day to complete because the band members had a difficult time putting the proper expressions on their faces, but it was completed and sent to the manufacturer for mass production, with a quarter of a million ordered for the first printing.

During the recording process itself, all five of them paid a lot more attention to the actual mechanics of putting music on tape than they had during the making of Descent Into Nothing. Since they were no longer intimidated or awed by the mere fact they were making an album, and since they had garnered the respect and admiration of the technical crew by virtue of the continuing success of Descent Into Nothing (it was still holding firm at number one on the album sales chart, although Point of Futility had finally dropped out of the top 40), they had more time, inclination, and cooperation to pay attention to the ins and outs of production. Bill and Jake were both prodigious in this pursuit, spending every free moment they had observing how the sound board and the mixing board were used, learning the finer points of levels and how to best combine them. They learned so much, in fact, that by the time they started working on the third track of the album the techs were actually taking suggestions from the two of them, not out of hero worship or complicity, but because they were actually good suggestions, garnered from their newfound knowledge of the process of recording coupled with their considerable pre-existing musical knowledge.

"We're actually ahead of schedule," Stuart Myers, the head technician who was producing the album, reported to Crow during a staff meeting just before the Labor Day weekend. "At this rate we'll be done by late October."

"Beautiful," Crow said. "Of course we won't release the album until Descent starts to fall off the chart. It wouldn't be prudent of us to have the new album knock the old album out of number one."

"So are we gonna get a break between recording and hitting the road?" asked Coop.

"Fuck yeah," Matt said. "I'm down with a little vacation myself. I was thinking Cabo or even Rio."

"Let's go to Rio, dude," Darren said. "They have cheap pot there and all the bitches walk around on the beach with their titties hangin' out."

"I was thinking Hawaii myself," Jake said whimsically. Mindy had a winter home on Molokai and had already invited him to stay in it with her whenever he got the chance.

"Well, there will probably be a window available for a brief vacation period," Crow said. "Say a week or maybe ten days. And we do have some resorts we can set you up with in all of the above mentioned destinations, and quite a few others as well."

"Only ten days?" Coop asked.

"That will be all we can spare," Crow said. "We'll need you to start putting together the tour even if we won't be sending you out just yet. This tour is going to be much more elaborate than the first."

"It is?" Darren asked.

"Indeed," Crow replied. "We're planning on lots of fizz and sparkle, as well as some advanced technology. There will be pyrotechnics and a video screen. We're also working on a laser light display. Its all the latest rage."

"That sounds kind of expensive," Jake said. "That money comes out of our recoupables."

"We're paying for half of it," Crow said reasonably. "Besides, you made money on the last tour — that's almost unheard of. We might as well spend some of the surplus on production."

"Yeah," Jake said bitterly. "You might as well."

As Mindy had suggested, she and Jake no longer bothered trying to sneak around and keep their relationship a secret. They had dinner together and went out to clubs together. They lounged on public beaches and took walks in public parks. At each place they went they were swarmed by fans snapping pictures, asking for autographs, and enquiring what exactly the relationship between the two of them was. Swarms of paparazzi and other media hounds converged upon them as well, asking the same questions.

"We're just friends," both would insist whenever it was asked. This was the official line from Shaver and Georgette as well (as appalled as both were over the publicity and the refusal of their clients to have a little shame).

"What about the hotel room in Ventura?" they were always asked.

"That never happened," was the standard reply. Shaver and Georgette both expanded on this denial by damning it as a false rumor started by a lowlife hotel staff member trying to cash in by selling completely made-up information. Since the hotel itself refused to release any registration information, or even to confirm that the couple had actually checked in, a seed of doubt remained in the minds of the public and a good number of people continued to believe that there was no sexual relationship between the two of them.

"Like Mindy Snow would have anything to do with that loser," was the common argument advanced by the hard-core Mindy fans.

"Like Jake Kingsley would be tappin' that goody two shoes bitch," argued the hard-core Intemperance fans. "You damn sure know she ain't gonna let him snort no coke out of her ass."

Even though there were shots of the two of them kissing each other — one taken on a dance floor at the Flamingo club, one taken as they climbed into Jake's car at a popular restaurant — they were not considered proof that the two celebrities were getting it on.

"They're very good friends," Georgette explained in each instance. "And Mindy is very affectionate with her friends. I assure you, those kisses are no more than sisterly in nature."

"Sisterly?" Matt laughed when he heard this one. "Holy fucking shit. I wish I had me a sister like that."

And then came the Labor Day weekend. Jake and Mindy left early on Sunday morning (after spending the previous night at Mindy's house, boffing themselves silly) and drove in Jake's Corvette to Lake Casitas, a large, fairly isolated man-made lake twenty miles northwest of Ventura. There, Mindy rented a cabin cruiser and they spent the day cruising around, drinking beer and smoking weed. They worked their way to the western edge of a large island that stood in the middle of the lake and anchored the boat about two hundred yards offshore. This was by far the emptiest portion of the lake. They ate a picnic lunch on the bow of the boat and then retired to the cabin where they stripped off their bathing suits and spent an hour pleasuring each other in a variety of ways.

After enjoying their after-sex smokes and drinking another beer — by now they were both quite intoxicated — Mindy suggested they jump in the water to wash themselves off.

"Let's do it," Jake agreed, standing and picking up his swimming trunks.

Mindy scoffed at him. "Don't be a puss," she said. "There's no one around. Let's swim naked."

And before he could protest she walked out of the cabin, perched herself on the edge of the boat, and dove into the water on the island side.

Jake looked around outside and saw no other signs of human habitation within a mile. "What the hell?" he mumbled. He dropped his suit back on the deck and then cannonballed in after her.

They swam around in the warm water for about twenty minutes, splashing each other and playing like teenagers. At one point Jake picked her up by the waist and hoisted her over his shoulders, sending her crashing back into the water behind him. Finally, their energy waning, they floated near the stern of the boat, Jake holding onto the ladder with one hand while Mindy snuggled herself up against him, her bare breasts pushing into his chest. Soon they were kissing each other, the exchange starting out friendly and playful but quickly working its way up to passionate.

"I want you again," Mindy whispered as he fondled her breast with his free hand and she stroked his erection beneath the water.

"Let's go back inside," he told her.

"Lets."

They went back inside and had another extended session. Later, they had dinner and, though it was illegal, they slept the night away in the cabin, holding each other's naked body.

It was Tuesday morning, when Jake returned to the recording studio to start the new week, that he found out their little love nest was not as isolated as he'd thought. Crow called him into his office about ten o'clock, interrupting his session at the microphone.

"What's up?" he asked as he sat down in the chair before Crow's desk. Crow did not look happy.

"I just got a call from Shaver," Crow said. "The American Watcher just contacted him, enquiring about pictures they reportedly have of you and Mindy Snow swimming naked at Lake Casitas this weekend."

Jake was shocked. How the hell had they gotten pictures of that? There had been no one anywhere near them!

"It seems," Crow explained, "that they have shots of the two of you walking around naked on the deck of a cabin cruiser, jumping naked into the water, splashing and playing and throwing each other's naked bodies into the air, and then having a serious make-out session next to the boat. Although they can't print an unedited picture of this, they do have a shot of you climbing back into the boat after her, still naked, and with a 'raging erection' as I'm told."

"Jesus," Jake said. "This is kind of embarrassing."

"No shit," Crow said. "When they print those pictures and release the story of what was seen next Friday, there will no longer be any doubt whatsoever that you and Mindy are getting it on."

"No," Jake said. "I don't suppose there will be."

Crow started to get mad. "Is that all you have to say?"

Jake shrugged. "What do you want me to say?" he asked. "I'd rather not have my dick or my girlfriend's naked body plastered all over the fucking Watcher, but what's there to do about it? Who took the shots anyway? The only place someone could have been close enough was that island."

"I don't know who the fuck took the shots!" Crow yelled. "What the fuck difference does that make? I want to know what we're going to do about this!"

Jake longed for a cigarette, but since he was singing today he resisted the temptation. Instead, he took a piece of gum from his pocket and put it in his mouth. "Let me talk to Mindy," he said. "But I think it's probably about time that we just go ahead and tell the truth."

"Are you mad?" Crow asked, appalled. "The truth? You want to admit that you're having a sexual relationship with the girl from The Slow Lane? That will destroy both of you!"

Jake hummed the verse from Que Sera, Sera and then sang softly, "Whatever will be, will be."

This did not make Crow feel any better.

At lunchtime Jake called Mindy. She already knew about the shots. Georgette had called her about an hour earlier after a reporter from American Watcher called her.

"We're totally busted," Mindy agreed. "And there's nothing to do now but come clean. Even Georgette agrees with that."

"Yeah, Shaver pretty much said the same thing," Jake said. "When do we do it?"

"We wait until after the next issue comes out," Mindy said. "Then we have Shaver and Georgette admit our involvement. We throw in a bunch of stuff about how we're appalled at the lack of privacy and all that."

"Why do we wait until after the issue comes out?"

"It gives us a little of the moral high ground," she said. "We can claim we were only trying to be a normal couple and that the evil press forced our relationship into the light."

"Ahh, I see," he said. He sighed. "I'm sorry about all this, Mindy. If I would've known it was going to cost you movie rolls to be involved with me, I never would have done it."

She remained cheerful. "Don't worry about it, Jake. Things will work out. They always do."

The rumors and reports of the next issue of American Watcher began to circulate before the end of the day. Every publication, every news channel, every gossip network began to talk about naked pictures of Jake Kingsley and Mindy Snow.

When the actual issue came out on Friday morning, it broke all previous sales records within hours.

The headline, printed in huge typeface, read: JAKE KINGSLEY AND MINDY SNOW CAPTURED IN THE BUFF AT SECLUDED LAKESIDE LOVENEST!! The picture on the front was one of the two of them against the boat, kissing with open-mouthed passion, their naked shoulders sticking up, the top of Mindy's obviously naked breasts just visible. The inside shots were a collection of near pornographic images that had been carefully censored to avoid obscenity charges. There was one of Mindy standing on the edge of the boat, about to dive in. There was one of Jake throwing Mindy over his shoulders. There were several of the two of them kissing hotly next to the boat. There were two of them climbing out to get back in the boat. In all of the shots black lines had been added to cover butts and genitals and Mindy's breasts, but what was shown left little to the imagination. There could be little doubt — especially in light of the previous sightings — that the two of them were very intimate with each other.

Jake had been expecting all of this when he opened the issue at the recording studio on Friday morning. He knew what the two of them had done and the angle of the shots did nothing but confirm his suspicion that they had been taken from a hidden enclave on the island they'd anchored next to. What he wasn't expecting were the words in the article that accompanied the photos.

World renowned photojournalist Paul Peterson, acting on a tip, followed the two lovers to their secluded love nest and took a series of shots of the two of them frolicking naked in the placid waters of Lake Casitas.

Paul Peterson? He had taken the shots of them on the beach too, had supposedly just happened across them by coincidence. And now he had just happened to receive a tip that Mindy and Jake were going to be at this particular lake?

"Something smells funny here," Jake mumbled.

"What's that?" Crow asked.

"Jake!" Matt yelled from his own copy of the tabloid. "These are some premium fucking shots, brother! Do you think you can get your stinky little hands on some copies that don't have these fucking lines across her snatch and titties?"

Jake ignored him. "I need to go," he told Crow.

"Go? What are you talking about?"

"I'll come in on Sunday if you want and make up for the lost time, but I need to take the rest of the day off."

"For what?" Crow yelled. "Jake, we have a crisis here!"

He said no further. He left the building, climbed in his Corvette, and started heading towards the freeway.