Different Circles

Chapter 6: Coming Together and Falling Apart

Washington DC, USA

October 29^th, 1991

Matt stood on the stage under the bright spotlights, his iconic black and white Fender Stratocaster—the only guitar he had ever played before an audience—in his hands, his fingers moving surely and steadily over the fretboard with a skill and talent nearly unequaled among current guitarists. He was alone on the stage, ten minutes into a long, drawn-out guitar solo he had composed just for his live performances. The members of his band—John Engle on bass and Steve Calhoun on the drums—were sitting backstage at the moment, waiting for the end of the solo and their cue to return for the final number before the encore break.

The cheers from the audience as he played his instrument were loud and enthusiastic, but not deafening by any means. They were certainly nowhere near the volume he’d received regularly when he’d done his requisite live solos while playing with Intemperance. A big part of that was the size of the audience. Though the arena he was playing in—the same one where the Washington Bullets played hoop for the hometown crowd—had a capacity of more than sixteen thousand for concerts, it was not even half full for tonight’s Matt Tisdale concert (with Breakdown, a new death metal band recently signed by National, opening for him). This was typical so far, at least after the first fifteen dates of the east coast leg of the tour. He had not sold out a single venue since then. The scalpers weren’t even bothering with him, as there were always tickets available at the door on show nights. According to Greg Gahn, his tour manager, the night-of-show tickets accounted for approximately twenty-five percent of all ticket sales on any given night. That was absolutely pathetic, Matt had to admit to himself. Especially when Intemperance tickets, during their prime, had been going for several hundred dollars apiece on the illicit resale market, which was arguably—since it was the free market system truly unrestrained—the best marker of how popular a band really was.

He did not let his mind think about any of this as he played. Above all else in life, he was a professional and he gave his all to the seven thousand some-odd fans out there watching him. Sweat poured down his face and onto his chest—he had removed his shirt shortly after the third song of the set. He was cold sober currently, as he refused to allow himself or his band members to engage in any intoxicating substance for at least four hours prior to any show. He played with a focus and intent that was almost supernatural, pouring out his heart and his soul into the licks coming out of the Strat. When he sang, his vocals came out powerfully and with all the emotion he could wring from them.

And he knew it wasn’t what the people wanted. That fact had been painfully driven home to him over the past three months in a variety of ways.

His album was selling dismally. Only three hundred thousand copies so far, well over two-thirds of that within the first month of release. Sales were only a trickle now, a few thousand each week at best. It was quite apparent to him that he was not even going to make Gold before the end of the year, let alone the Platinum required for him to win the wager with National Records and keep control of the post-production of his next album.

He wanted to blame the National executives for this pathetic album performance—wanted to do that with every fiber of his being, with every paranoid and suspicious bone in his body—but he just couldn’t. They had held up their end of the bargain. He knew that. They had pulled out all the stops to promote the album and push for airplay of his tracks with all of their connections across the nation. He had been monitoring their efforts during every step of the process. Uncharacteristically, they had done their best, probably, he figured now, so they could say they told him so and not be accused of trying to sabotage the deal.

Where the fuck did I go wrong? he asked himself over and over again. My shit rocks! It’s some of the best guitar work in the history of the fucking guitar! Why the fuck aren’t people buying it? Why the fuck aren’t the radio stations playing it?

Sadly, he thought he knew what the answers to these questions were, and they were all the same answer. It wasn’t Intemperance. He had inadvertently type-cast himself by playing with those fucking traitors and it was now coming back to haunt him.

The reason his initial concerts had sold out large halls was not because of Matt himself, but because National, in promoting the tour, had heavily implied—though not actually promised—that Intemperance songs would be performed as part of the set. They were not. Though Crow and the boys had begged, threatened, demanded, and begged some more for him to lay down some of the tracks he had written for Intemp, the contract Matt had signed with them gave him control over the set list and composition of any tour. And there was no way in hell that Matt was going to perform any Intemperance tunes on his fucking tour.

And so, National, being National, had employed a little innuendo and bending of the truth when announcing the tour dates in the localities they were scheduled in.

MATT TISDALE – The legendary guitarist for Intemperance performs his material LIVE IN CONCERT! read the posters, announcements, and promos done by DJs across the nation.

It only took about fourteen shows for word to spread across the nation that Matt was not, in fact, laying down any Intemp after all. There was no Who Needs Love?, no This Life I Live, no Grandeur, no The Thrill of Doing Business. Once that rumor became verified by word of mouth, ticket sales plunged into the proverbial toilet. Now, the hope that this tour—which was reasonably low budget due to the lack of any technological flourishes such as lasers, complex lighting, complex sets, or pyrotechnics—would actually turn a profit was all but dashed. They were losing upwards of thirty thousand dollars per show, sometimes more depending on the venue.

“Why?” Crow, Doolittle, and other bigwigs from National management had demanded of him when it became clear he would not be doing any of the Intemp material. “Why are you cutting your throat like this? Don’t you know that this is what they want to see?”

“They’ll get my new shit,” was Matt’s only reply. “The tour is to promote my new album, not to play a bunch of shit from a job I used to have.”

“It was that job that made you what you are!” Crow nearly screamed at him when he heard this.

But Matt did not budge an inch. He would not play so much as a single riff from any Intemperance tune. He gave the National executives no explanation. He gave the many rock media reporters who questioned him about this no explanation either. Unfortunately, however, he could not hide the explanation from himself. He knew all too well why he was not performing any Intemperance material: his voice work could not compete with Jake Kingsley’s. He had a decent singing voice and he could carry a tune with it well—that was evident enough on the tracks for Next Phase—but he could not carry those tunes the way Jake had. He knew that. He fucking knew it. And he was not going to be compared unfavorably to that traitorous asshole. Not while he was still drawing air on this Earth.

I will never sing a song that fucking Kingsley has sung before me, he vowed with the same level of zeal and determination with which he’d vowed he would never play anything onstage but his old Strat.

That old Strat was screaming now, as Matt played out the final, furious crescendo of his fourteen minute long guitar solo—the second of two such solos in the set. He let the final note fade slowly away while the crowd cheered enthusiastically in response. While they were cheering, John and Steve came back out on the stage, the former picking up his bass guitar, the latter taking a seat back behind the double bass drum set.

“You like that shit?” Matt asked the crowd.

They liked that shit—after all, anyone who had bothered to show up had to be a Matt Tisdale fanatic—and they let him know they liked it by increasing the decibel level of their cheers, standing up on their seats, and holding their lighters in the air to create an artificial starfield out in the arena.

“Fuck yeah,” Matt said. “Let’s do one more here, then I gotta get the fuck on down the road, you know what I mean?” He turned to the band. “Let’s do it, boys.”

They did it, Matt churning out the intro to Into the Pain, the only song on the album that had been played on any radio station in the Washington/Baltimore region. John and Steve chimed in to set the rhythm. The crowd went wild once again.

The tune was seven minutes and twenty-three seconds on the album. In concert, it ran nine-fifteen thanks to Matt extending two of the guitar solos and the entire band making a huge production out of the finish to the song since it was the final number of the main set. At last, however, they finished it up and left the stage. They were not done yet, of course. The crowd cheered and yelled, stamped their feet, and shouted for more.

Matt and the boys gave them more. They did a two-song encore that lasted another eighteen minutes. The first song was Coming Down Fast, an unrecorded piece that had been worked up but not included on Next Phase due to time constraints. Matt intended to put it on the next album, although he was already cringing when he thought of what those sound engineers in the studio were going to make him do to it. The final song was Stir it Up, the multi-tempoed, multi-guitar soloed final cut on Next Phase—the song that had been Matt’s favorite of them all.

At last, they put their instruments down and left the stage after taking their bows. The house lights came up, signaling to the audience that it really was over this time. As the crowd began making its way to the exits, Matt, Steve, and John headed back to the dressing room, where the requisite food trays, tubs of beer, and, of course, marijuana and cocaine, would be laid out.

“Not a bad show, guys,” Matt told his band as they each grabbed a bottle of beer out of the ice and popped them open.

“Thanks, Matt,” said Steve. “I felt like we were really clicking up there tonight.”

“Yeah,” agreed John. “Me too. We were really in the groove.”

“I guess,” Matt said with a shrug. “Of course, you are both nothing but studio hackers, remember? There is only so much groove you can actually slide into.”

“Well ... just because we worked in the studio before hooking up with you...” started Steve.

“Don’t give me that fucking shit again,” Matt said. “Granted, you’re the best of the studio hackers, but you are still, by definition, studio hackers. Ass sucking little moles employed by the biggest ass in existence. Just because you’re not shitty, don’t let that shit go to your head.”

“Right,” Steve said sourly.

John simply grunted.

“Now then,” Matt said, picking up the cocaine kit that had been placed next to the beer cooler. “Anyone want to light up their life?”

All three of them did. Matt, though not the kindest boss in the world, was at least generous. They each snorted up two lines of pure, uncut Peruvian flake. That put everyone in a better mood—or at least it did until the dressing room door opened and Greg Gahn walked in.

“What the fuck are you doing in here?” Matt demanded of him. “I thought I was very clear in my tour instructions that I wanted to see as little of your hypocritical ass as humanly possible.”

“You made it quite clear,” Greg said. He was looking a bit haggard these days as well. Greg was quite fond of the white powder himself—this despite being an allegedly devout Mormon. Unlike when he went out on other tours, however, he was not allowed to imbibe in the drug, at least not from the supply that Matt maintained for himself and his inner circle. This was not out of any concern for his health or well-being, or even his performance, but for financial reasons. Cocaine was expensive and Matt’s contract stipulated that “entertainment expenses”, i.e. the cocaine, marijuana, and alcohol that flowed each night, did not cover National management members. Though Greg was a well-paid National Records employee, he was not well paid enough to finance his own considerable habit. And so, he was currently in a clean phase, having been dumped in a rehab center just prior to the tour heading out.

“Then explain yourself,” Matt said, holding up the cocaine mirror. “Did you come to offer to suck somebody’s dick for a little hit of this shit?”

“He ain’t sucking my dick,” said Steve.

“Mine either,” put in John.

“I do not and would not engage in homosexual sex!” Greg said firmly. “Not for anything in the world. And as for the devil’s powder, I am now almost eighty days clean. Heavenly Father has, once again, guided me out of the addiction.”

Matt simply shook his head. “You’re so full of bullshit,” he said. “What do you want, Greg? Speak and get the fuck out.”

“Well ... it has to do with the upcoming tour dates,” Greg said. “It’s good news, really.”

“The upcoming tour dates?” Matt asked, alarmed. “What about them? They’re not fucking canceling us, are they? I’ll fucking kill someone!”

“No, no,” Greg said hurriedly. “It’s nothing like that. As I said, this is actually good news. There are going to be some changes of venue, that’s all.”

“Changes of venue?” Matt said. “What do you mean?”

“Well,” Greg said, pulling a sheet of paper out of the jacket of his tailored suit, “starting with the show in New York, which will be November 5, you’ll be moving to smaller arenas whenever we can make the arrangements.”

“Smaller arenas?” Matt asked. “What the fuck?”

“Yes, smaller,” Greg confirmed. “You won’t be playing Madison Square Garden in New York. Instead, you’ll be playing Queens Memorial Auditorium.

“They’re pulling me out of MSG?” Matt asked angrily, his cocaine cheer evaporating in an instant. “Why?”

“I would think that would be obvious, Matt,” Greg told him. “The decision is financial in nature. We’ve only sold seven thousand tickets for the New York show. Why would we pay to rent MSG with eighteen thousand seats when Queens Memorial, with a capacity of eight thousand, rents for half the price, even with the cancellation fee for MSG thrown in.”

“They can’t do that!” Matt nearly screamed.

“Oh, but they can and they have,” Greg countered. “Tour composition and set list are yours to do with as you please under the contract. But tour management, including venues, cities, and ticket prices are the exclusive responsibility of National Records. And they are exercising their management powers to downgrade the venues across the map. There’re nothing you can do about it, Matt.”

Matt clenched his fists nearly hard enough to draw blood in his palms. “Those motherfuckers,” he grunted.

“You’re looking at this the wrong way, Matt,” Greg told him. “As I said, this is good news.”

“How the fuck is this shit good news?”

“I would think that would be obvious,” Greg said. “With the reduced costs of venue rental, the tour may end up being profitable after all. In New York, for instance, instead of losing thirty-eight thousand dollars, we’ll be in the black by more than five thousand, and that’s without even accounting for merchandise receipts.”

“Fucking money,” Matt said in disgust. “That’s what it’s always about with you dickwads. I thought you were always spouting off about how the purpose of a tour is not to make money, but to promote the album.”

“That is true,” Greg said. “But the purpose of the tour is not to lose money hand over fist when the same promotion aspect can be accomplished at a lower cost. There is no downside to this, Matt. I don’t understand why you’re protesting so much.”

Matt was not about to explain it to the grinning freak, but he knew why he was protesting. Madison Square Garden was where top acts performed when in New York City. It was where Intemperance had performed every single time they’d visited the Big Apple. Queens Memorial—which Matt had never even fucking heard of—was a second-rate arena. It was where second-rate acts were booked. And now they had booked him there. Matt fucking Tisdale at Queens Memorial? That was humiliating! And New York was only the start. They were going to do this shit to him all across the country, moving him from top billing to second-rate status just to save a little money.

“Get the fuck out of here, Greg,” Matt told him.

“Don’t you want to go over the...”

“I don’t want to go over shit,” Matt said. “Get out of my dressing room before I decide to vent some steam by twisting your fuckin’ head around and then bending you backward so you kiss your own ass.”

“But...”

“Go, Greg!” Matt barked.

“I think I would go if I were you,” Steve suggested mildly.

Greg went, shutting the door behind him.

“Assholes,” Matt said, taking a long drink of his beer.

“You all right, Matt?” John asked carefully.

“Yeah,” Matt spat, setting the cocaine mirror back down and then crunching up another two lines. “What can you do?”

“Not much, I guess,” the bassist allowed.

They ate some of the food that had been laid out for them. Matt chomped down on some ribs and potato salad, washing it down with two beers. John and Steve each made a sandwich out of the fixings. More than half of the food was still there when they were done.

“All right,” Matt said with a sigh as he tossed his latest beer bottle in the general direction of the garbage can. “I guess I’m gonna hit the shower.”

“Sounds good, Matt,” said Steve, who was loading himself up a nice bonghit from the tray.

“I’ll be in right after you,” said John, who was putting together a gin and tonic.

Before heading to the shower, Matt opened up the dressing room door. Standing outside was Brian Browning, one of the security guys. “Hey, Bri,” Matt greeted.

“What’s up, Matt?” Brian returned.

“I’m hitting the shower now. Have Jack bring the bitches back in about ten minutes.”

“Will do,” Brian said, picking up his portable radio and putting it to his mouth.

Matt hit the shower, taking off his stage clothes of jeans and a sleeveless shirt and putting them in the laundry bin. He rinsed and cleaned the sweat from his body, washed out his long hair, and then stepped out to dry off. Once dry, he put on his after-show clothes, which consisted of a pair of jeans and a sleeveless shirt.

He was still quite upset about the change of venues. When he emerged back into the dressing room and saw what Jack had brought for him and the boys, his mood did not improve.

There were four girls out there. Two were well into their thirties. The other two, while in their twenties, were not the most impressive examples of young female adulthood. The one with the fake blonde hair was at least thirty pounds overweight, her body squeezed into a denim miniskirt that was perhaps two sizes too small. It rode quite high on her chunky legs, which were covered with a pair of fishnet stockings. A roll of fat bulged out from beneath her top. The other young one was painfully skinny, her face somewhat pockmarked with acne, and she had no tits at all. Her legs were knobby little sticks that looked like they had been drawn on. Of the older two, one, though marginally cute, was clearly inebriated to the point that she was about to pass out. The other was even fatter and more inappropriately dressed than the young fatty.

“Oh my God, it’s you!” the young fatty yelled when she saw him emerge from the shower room.

“It is!” screamed the young skinny one. Is she that skinny because of fucking meth? Matt had to wonder. He strongly suspected that was the case, particularly when he saw she was missing a few teeth.

The four of them ran over to him and began telling him how much they loved him, how they were so into his music, how they would do anything he wanted them to do.

“It’s nice to meet you all,” Matt told them. “No need to tell me your names. Y’all know the rules.”

“No names!” the inebriated one squealed, delighted. “Everyone knows that Matt doesn’t wanna know your fuckin’ name!”

“Just call me nameless,” said the old fatty, as she reached down and ran the back of her hand across his crotch.

“All right then,” Matt said, twisting away from her probing hand. “Why don’t you bitches grab something to drink, or...” He looked at the fatties. “ ... or some grub if you want. Give me just a second.”

They practically ran to the bar and food spread and began helping themselves. Matt watched them for a second and then walked over to the door, where Jack Ferguson, head of tour security and procurer of the groupies, was standing.

“What the fuck is up with this bunch, Jack?” Matt asked him. “I don’t recall asking you to find the skankiest bitches in the arena.”

“Sorry, Matt,” he apologized, “but the pickings are a little slim. These are the best I can do.”

“Seriously?” Matt asked. While it was true that the quality of groupie on this tour was considerably less than what he had enjoyed during the Intemperance tours, Jack was usually able to come up with four to six acceptable bitches each show. What he was seeing now was bottom of the barrel shit.

“We’ve been over this before,” Jack told him. “Unlike in the Intemp days, your solo fans are mostly male. Greg tells me that eight out of every ten patrons coming through the door has a fuckin’ dick swinging between their legs. And of that twenty percent that have a twat, probably five out of every six are only here because a boyfriend or a husband dragged them here. I’m telling you, it’s hard to find any groupies out in the crowd who even want to come back and entertain you and the boys, let alone pay the price they have to pay to get back here.”

“I know,” Matt sighed. “I understand all that and I appreciate what you do, Jack. You know I think of you as a brother, right?”

“I know, Matt,” Jack said.

“But these four?” Matt whispered to him, jerking his head in the direction of the women. “Is that seriously the pick of the litter?”

“For Washington, District of Columbia, it is,” Jack confirmed. “The male to female ratio in this town is higher than the average because it’s a government capital region. That eighty-twenty mix of male to female we see in the other venues was about ninety-two to eight here. We had a hell of a time even finding these four.”

Matt looked them over again, shaking his head sadly. “That’s a damn shame,” he said.

“You want me to get rid of them?” Jack asked. “Maybe you can score something a little better when we get back to the hotel.”

Matt thought it over for a few seconds. “Naw,” he said. “Let ‘em stay. I guess I can bag the two heifers. Hell, maybe I’ll be inspired to write a song about it like Brian May.”

“Anything can happen,” Jack said. “And if it makes you feel better, the older one sucks a mean dick.”

“Yeah?” Matt said, his interest growing a bit now.

“Yeah,” Jack assured him.

“Well, maybe there’s something to be salvaged from this night after all.”

Meanwhile, about four hundred air miles to the northwest, in Detroit, Michigan, another show was just wrapping up as well. The contrast between Matt’s show and the concert by Veteran could not have been greater.

Veteran was playing in famed Cobo Arena, on the north bank of the Detroit River, just a hundred feet from the Canadian border. Twelve thousand screaming fans filled the bleacher seats. Another two thousand were on the floor before the stage. A large screen showed live views of the show while a complex scaffolding hung above, flashing hundreds of computer controlled lights of different colors onto the five-man group. Intermittently, lasers would fire through clouds of carbon dioxide gas generated by machines fueled with dry ice. Explosions would echo from time to time as well, to the delight of the crowd.

Coop sat behind his drum set, his shirt off, his blonde hair flapping wildly about, sweat dripping from his body as he pounded his sticks down during the final number of the main set. He was playing his best, giving all his energy, all his heart, all his soul to the performance.

Unfortunately, his bandmates were not doing the same.

Coop was stone cold sober as he played. He was the only one of the five that could make that claim. He had learned the hard way back when he and Darren had started playing around with smoking weed, then drinking prior to performances when out on the road. Matt was a supreme asshole to the tenth degree, but his rule against imbibing for at least four hours prior to a show was a good rule that made a lot of sense. It was a rule that, when disregarded, had led to Darren getting his stupid ass blown through the air like a fucking soda can over a firecracker one night in Austin, Texas. It was the injuries from that incident that had led first Darren and then Coop himself to get started down the nasty road of heroin addiction. Coop had managed to walk away from that road. Darren had not, and, because he had not, he was now dead, buried in a cemetery in Heritage, California with only thirty years between the two dates on the tombstone.

There was no such rule in the band Veteran.

Every night, before every show, Mike Hamm, Jerry Hawk, Rob Wilkes, and Steve Carl drank no less than eight beers, snorted endless lines of cocaine, and smoked bonghit after bonghit while waiting backstage for their opening band to finish up. By the time they took the stage each night, all four of them were cruising far above the stratosphere and in considerably less than ideal shape for putting on a concert.

Hamm and Wilkes were the worst of the bunch, and the most prone to making the errors that went along with gross intoxication. Rare was the show where Hamm didn’t start playing the wrong part of the rhythm for at least one of the songs, or didn’t lead through a switchover the way he was supposed to, or sang out a backing vocal at the wrong time, when he wasn’t supposed to be singing. And Wilkes ... it was amazing that he made it through any of the shows at all. He could barely walk at times up on the stage. His lyrics were slurred and he often sang the wrong verses, or came in late, or missed his cue entirely. And his between-song banter! He couldn’t remember what the hell he was supposed to be saying half the time. When he did speak, his slurring was even worse and the audience could barely understand him. Twice now he had actually gone off into rants about anti-nuclear shit and banning the fur trade—topics that were most assuredly not scripted into the banter.

Coop had tried to reason with them, had tried to explain that they would put on a much better show if they could simply hold to a four hour window of sobriety once a day when they were scheduled to perform, but his pleas had fallen on deaf and hostile ears.

“That’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard!” declared Hamm when the suggestion was first put to them. “We’re fucking rock stars! Getting wasted before a show is what we do.”

“Fuck yeah,” agreed Wilkes. “Our fans expect us to be fucked up.”

And the truth of the matter was, that actually seemed to be the case. Whenever there was a screw-up onstage, the fans cheered louder and held their lighters higher. The reviews of their shows—which Coop considered to be pathetic shadows of what they truly could be with a little discipline and effort—were almost universally positive. All of this pleased Aristocrat management in general and Larry Candid—their tour manager—in particular.

“You boys just keep doing what you’re doing,” Larry told them after each review came out. “You’re killing this tour. Absolutely fucking killing it!”

We’re killing it all right, Coop thought now, as they prepared to close out the Detroit show. Fucking Wilkes had just sung the wrong verse again, putting the third verse where the second one was supposed to be. Coop followed along the mistake, leading the rest of the band through it as well, but that meant that they’d skipped the entire bridge section and the guitar solo. And no one onstage even seemed to realize it!

The audience did, however. They were playing Off Track, the second release from the album, a song that was now in the midst of heavy airplay on the radio. A chorus of boos erupted when it was realized that they were closing out the song without the solo. But even the boos seemed playful and understanding, more amused than angry.

Coop sighed as he played out the outro to the tune. They had just started the second leg of the tour. There were two more to go after this one and he had even heard talk of an international tour of Europe and Asia. He wasn’t sure how much more of this he could take.

The tune mercifully ended and the crowd cheered with their normal enthusiasm despite the screw-up. Coop threw his drumsticks into the crowd and stepped down from his set.

“Thank you, Cleveland!” Wilkes shouted out to them. “We love you! Thank you and good night!”

Another chorus of boos erupted from the crowd, this one considerably louder and angrier.

Jesus fucking Christ, Coop thought helplessly. Fucking Cleveland? Cleveland was where they had played last night! That drunk asshole had just shouted out the wrong goddamn city—an unforgiveable blunder.

Coop grabbed the singer with one hand, the bass player with another, and dragged them off the stage, wondering how they were going to fix this fuck-up. Should Wilkes apologize to them? Should he just not mention it when they came out for the encore set? He didn’t know. This was a little beyond simply missing a solo.

“What are those fuckers booing us for?” Wilkes shouted once they were safely in the stage left area.

“You shouted out ‘thank you, Cleveland’,” Coop barked at him. “We’re in fucking Detroit, you moron!”

Wilkes looked surprised for a moment and then started laughing hysterically, as if that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “Did I really say that shit?” he asked.

“You really said it,” confirmed Larry, who was looking at the singer sternly. Though the musical screwups did not bother him, he did not seem amused by this particular brand of fuck up at all.

Wilkes laughed even harder. “Fucking classic!” he declared. “Oh my God, I’m fucking wasted!”

“Yeah, no shit,” Coop said.

From out on the arena floor, the sounds of stamping feet had begun, calling for the encore. The audience was chanting something as well, and it wasn’t “more, more, more” or some variation of that, the normal encore call. They were chanting, “We’re NOT Cleveland! We’re NOT Cleveland!”

“All right,” Larry barked over the noise, “this is how we handle this. Wilkes, when you go out for the encore, you need to...”

The sound of violent retching interrupted him. Everyone turned to see that Mike Hamm was now bent over a storage box, emptying his stomach onto the wooden stage floor. The vomit smelled strongly of beer and had chunks of hot dog in it.

“Fuck me!” Larry said, shaking his head. He pointed to one of the roadies. “Go get some towels so we can clean that shit up!”

“Right,” the roadie said, rushing away toward the bathroom area.

The retching went on for the better part of two minutes. The chants of “We’re NOT Cleveland!” continued unabated, as did the angry stamping of thousands of feet. When the vomit finally stopped pouring out of Hamm’s body, he remained in that position, slumped over the storage box, drool running out of his mouth.

“All right, Mike,” Larry said, putting his hand on Hamm’s shoulder. “You got it all out, now let’s get you boys back out there for the encore.”

But Hamm did not respond to him. He remained as he was, only grunting when Larry shook his shoulder and told him to wake the fuck up.

“He’s fucking passed out!” Coop said in disgust.

“I can see that,” Larry said. “Do you have anything helpful to add, Coop?”

“Yeah,” Coop said. “This is why we shouldn’t get wasted before a show. This ain’t the way the world is supposed to work, Larry!”

Larry dismissed that with an angry shake of the head. “He’ll be fine in a minute,” he said, pulling his radio from a holder on his belt. He keyed it up. “This is Head Man,” he told whoever was on the other end, using his official code name (with its double meaning). “Bring me two lines of coke as quick as you can fucking get them here.”

“Right!” squeaked a voice from the speaker, not bothering to ask for clarification of any kind. Such was life on a rock tour.

While they were waiting, Larry went back to Wilkes, who was still giggling about his Cleveland snafu.

“Listen up, you idiot,” Larry told him. “You need to go out there and make this shit right. Tell them that you’re tired from the road and from doing show after show and you apologize for calling them Cleveland. Tell them Cleveland is a fucking shithole and you’re appalled that you made an error like that. Hell, you can tell them you’re fucking wasted if you want, but you’ve got to apologize to them before they storm the fucking stage and lynch your ass!”

Wilkes, who had nodded through all this as if he was agreeing, remained silent. He just kept nodding.

“Do you fucking understand that?” Larry demanded.

“Understand what?” Wilkes asked.

“Fuck me!” Larry barked in frustration.

Tim Bollinger, one of the security guys, came bursting into the stage left area, a mirror and a plastic baggie in hand. “Got the shit!” he told Larry.

“Give it to me!” Larry said, holding out his hand.

Tim gave it to him. Larry quickly dumped a sizeable amount of the white powder onto the surface of the mirror and then pulled a razor blade from his shirt pocket. He quickly chopped up the cocaine and formed it into two fat lines. He then walked over to Hamm and grabbed him by his long hair, forcing his head up. He set the mirror down before him and then whipped out a plastic drink straw that had been cut in half.

“Mike!” he yelled, jerking his head back and forth. “Got some blow for you! Snort this shit up!”

Hamm did not wake up, so Larry began slapping the side of his face, first one cheek and then the other, until the bass player finally opened his eyes.

“What ... what ... what the fuck!” Hamm yelled.

“Snort this shit!” Larry told him. “We need to get you back out there!”

“I don’t...” Hamm started.

“You do!” Larry barked, cramming the straw into his nose and forcing his head down toward the mirror. “Fucking hit this shit!”

Hamm finally got the idea. He snorted up the first line and then Larry forcibly moved his head a little, so he was lined up with the second. Hamm sucked up that one as well.

“All right!” Larry said. “Now on your feet. Help me get him up, Coop!”

Coop, still shaking his head at all of this, walked over and grabbed underneath Hamm’s right arm. Larry grabbed under the left. They bodily jerked him to his feet. At first, his feet didn’t want to hold him up, but after a few seconds, as the stimulant made its way into his brain cells, he got the idea.

“All right, all right, all fucking right!” Hamm barked. “I’m up. Get your fucking hands off me!”

“You cool now?” Larry asked him.

“I’m fine!” he said, then promptly stumbled forward. Only the fact that Coop and Larry were holding him kept him from face planting.

“You better get fine, quick!” Larry said. He turned to Coop. “Walk him around a little, let that shit circulate some. I need to get moron number two in order.”

“Good luck with that,” Coop said as Larry let go of the bass player and walked back over to the singer.

While Wilkes was having his apology barked at him again and as the crowd continued to chant—their words were now, “We’re NOT fucking Cleveland! We’re NOT fucking Cleveland!”—Coop pulled on Hamm’s arm. “Let’s walk,” he told him.

But Hamm did not want to walk. As was often the case when he snorted cocaine atop alcohol, he became mean and belligerent. “Get your fuckin’ hand off of me!” he barked, trying to pull away.

“You need to walk, Hamm!” Coop told him. “We have to go out and do the encore!”

“Fuck the encore!” Hamm spat, jerking himself free of Coop’s grip. This caused him to stagger backwards again, flirting with the edge of balance. Steve Carl, the keyboardist, who had been watching everything with the detachment of the ruinously stoned, reached over and grabbed Hamm’s arm to steady him. Hamm did not appreciate the gesture. He jerked himself free from this grip and then pushed the keyboardist forcibly in the chest, causing him to fall backwards to his butt.

“Motherfucker!” Carl barked, jumping back to his feet. “You don’t put your fuckin’ hands on me!”

“Fuck you, motherfucker!” Hamm barked back. “You don’t put your fuckin’ hands on me!”

“Hamm, chill!” Coop said, stepping up behind him and putting his hand on Hamm’s shoulder.

“I said not to fucking touch me!” Hamm yelled, spinning and throwing a right cross at Coop’s head. His fist connected with the side of Coop’s face, stunning him momentarily, and causing an intense flare of red anger to go rushing through him.

“That’s your ass, dickwad!” Coop told him, throwing a straight right jab. And since Coop was both sober and the veteran of more than a few barroom brawls thanks to his former friendship with Matt Tisdale, his fist did a lot more damage. The first blow shattered Hamm’s nose. He followed it up with a left cross that connected with the bassist’s right temple, dropping him to the stage floor in an untidy heap.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Larry yelled, rushing over. “What did you do that for?”

“He fucking punched me first!” Coop said. “No motherfucker punches me without getting my fist in return! That’s the way the fuckin’ world works, dude!”

“He had that shit coming,” Carl said. “If Coop wouldn’t have done it, I would’ve.”

“Fuck me,” Larry said, kneeling down next to the now unconscious bass player. He shook him a few times but Hamm would not wake up. Blood continued to pour from his nose onto the wooden floor.

“Did I fuckin’ kill him?” Coop asked, half hoping that he had.

“He’ll live,” Larry sighed, “but he’s gonna need to take a trip to the hospital.” He shook his head. “I think we better start making a strategic withdrawal from ‘Cleveland’, huh?”

“I’m thinking so,” Coop agreed.

And that was why Detroit missed out on the three song encore, and how Indianapolis and Cincinnati both had their shows cancelled completely on account of the bass player suffering from a significant concussion that put him out of action for almost a week. It was also how Veteran got their first scathing concert review.

It would not be their last.

Pauline got the call about the Detroit incident at nine o’clock, Pacific Time, the night it happened. She was spending the month in the rented house in Coos Bay now that she had been recruited by Celia as a backup singer. Her nightly lessons with Celia and Jake had just wrapped up and she was enjoying a glass of wine on the couch in the sitting room, trying to purge her brain of all the keys and timbres and exercises she had been doing—all things that had turned an enjoyable pastime she had once enjoyed into a freaking chore.

“Sing from your fucking diaphragm,” she muttered to herself, repeating a phrase she had been told at least a hundred times. “Let me hear that middle C.” She gunned down a healthy slug of the chardonnay. “I’ve got your fucking middle C right here.”

At least the house was not as crowded these days. Since the basic rhythm tracks had all been put down—at last! It had taken a few heart to heart talks with the Nerdlys about easing up on their anal retentive obsessions with perfection to finally get them done—Ted and Ben had both gone home to Los Angeles for now. They would need to come back when the overdubs began in another month or so, but for now, they actually had spare bedrooms in the house and a lot less drama going on.

Not that Pauline was completely happy about the situation. They were still paying Ben and Ted even though they were not here and were not producing anything. Jake and Celia had insisted upon it. Both had taken leaves of absence from their normal jobs in order to participate in the recording process, thus cutting off that income source. Since it was unreasonable for them to ask their respective employers if they could come back from their LOAs and then go back out again when the overdubs and mixing process began, it was decided—not by her, to be sure—that the best solution was for them to just stay on the LOAs and KVA Records would pay them what they would have been making had they gone back to work. That meant the LLC was shelling out the equivalent of both a community college professor’s salary and a paramedic’s salary every two weeks. It was not as much as they had been paying them as musicians, but they weren’t getting anything in return out of the deal.

It now seemed inevitable that the owners of the LLC that was KVA were all going to have to shell out a little more money before this project was said and done. The only question was how much? She did not look forward to telling this news to Greg, who had been staying in the house for the past week now. That conversation would have to be had soon, probably when Jill made her next visit on the 15^th of November, just about two weeks from now.

She heard the phone ringing in the entertainment room, noticing it only because of its rarity. They did not get many phone calls here, as hardly anyone in the world knew they were here. Greg called Celia sometimes, but Greg was already here, so it couldn’t be him. Laura’s fiancé had not called her a single time, although he had been given the number. So who could this be? A wrong number, perhaps? She sincerely hoped so. Because they only other reason someone would call would be if there was an issue with...

“Paulie!” Jake’s voice called to her. “Phone call!”

“Fuck,” she muttered, taking another slug of her wine before getting up to see what this latest shit was all about.

Jake handed his sister the phone and then went back to the pool table, where he and Laura were having a friendly little game of eight ball with Greg and Celia. It was Greg’s turn and he lined up carefully on the fifteen ball, examining the shot from several angles, trying to work out the best way to nudge it into the corner pocket while getting the cue to bounce back and line him up for the twelve.

“This is Pauline,” Jake heard her say into the mouthpiece. “What’s up?” She listened for a moment and he saw her scowl. She then said, “You’re fucking kidding me.”

Apparently whoever was on the other end of the line—the caller had not introduced himself when Jake answered the phone—was not fucking kidding her.

“Jesus Christ,” Pauline said. “The hospital? How bad is it?” Another pause, another shake of the head. “A week? Seriously? That means they’re going to miss at least three dates, right?”

Jake had now lost interest in the game entirely. Obviously something had gone wrong on the Veteran tour, something that had landed someone in a hospital. Was it Coop?

Pauline was now talking about something else entirely, something about how the hospital and a couple of missed shows was not the worst part of the story. “He didn’t?” she asked. “They do?” Another pause. “He actually said that to your face?” A shake of the head. “Jesus Christ. I’m assuming that alcohol was involved in all this?” Another scowl. “Don’t fucking bullshit me, Candid! Were they drunk?” A shake of the head to go with the scowl. “Uh huh. So it would seem you did not introduce that little sobriety before performance rule that Coop and I suggested?” A pause, a sigh. “Yeah. I believe that about as much as I believe in Santa Claus. All right. I’ll get there as soon as I can and see if I can put Humpty back together again. I’m in fucking coastal Oregon right now though, so it’ll probably be late evening tomorrow at best.” Another pause. “All right. Bracken Memorial Hospital. Got it. I’ll let you know when I’m close.”

She slammed the phone down and shook her head again.

“Trouble on the tour?” Jake asked.

“Yeah,” she sighed. “Coop and Hamm got into a fight after the show in Detroit—or actually during the show, since it happened at the encore break. Coop put him in the hospital with a broken nasal bone and a concussion.”

Jake nodded appreciably. “Nice going, Coop,” he said.

“It is not nice going,” Pauline said. “They’re going to miss the next two dates at least because of this shit. That’s the best-case scenario. The bigger problem is that Hamm says he won’t ever go onstage with Coop again, that they can just cancel the whole tour unless they fire Coop’s ass and get another drummer.”

Jake raised his eyebrows. “That’s not exactly a rational declaration,” he said. “It would take at least a month to train up a new drummer for the tour.”

“Or a new bass player,” Pauline said. “Coop is spouting the same shit. He says he won’t go back onstage with Hamm.”

“What was the fight about?” asked Greg, who had been listening in as well.

“Who the fuck knows?” Pauline said. “Candid, their tour manager, was just blowing smoke up my ass about that part. It seems pretty clear that alcohol, at the very least, was a catalyst.”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “When we toured with Earthstone after Descent was released, they liked to party hard before their shows, particularly Mike Hamm. And he was a mean drunk too. The kind of guy that tries to deliberately pick fights.”

“Sounds like he bit off a bit more than he could chew,” suggested Greg.

“Sounds like it,” Pauline agreed. She turned back to Jake. “I need to get to Detroit as soon as I can and try to sort through this mess and get them back on the road.”

“Understood,” Jake said. “You need me to fly you to Portland?” Since it was now almost winter, the offseason on the coast of Oregon, the commuter airline that provided service to and from Portland International Airport had cut down the number of flights from one per day to two per week. And those flights were on Fridays and Wednesdays. Tomorrow was Sunday. Jake’s plane, however, was currently parked at North Bend Municipal and had been the entire time the band had been in Coos Bay. So far, he had not had occasion to fly it, so busy had they been.

“Yeah,” Pauline said. “I’m gonna get on the horn and see what time the earliest flight to Detroit leaves in the morning.”

“I’m at your disposal,” Jake assured her, already looking forward to climbing behind the controls and taking to the sky, even if it just for the one hour hop to Portland and back.

“Thanks,” she said, picking up the phone book that was stored beneath the table. She opened it up and began to flip through it.

“It’s your turn, Jake,” Laura told him, pointing at the pool table.

“Right,” Jake said, picking up his pool cue and examining the table. There were three solids left, not including the eight ball. As he was lining up on the three ball, something occurred to him. “Hey,” he said, abandoning the shot and turning to Laura. “Why don’t you come with us to Portland tomorrow?”

“Me?” she asked. “What for?”

“Two words,” Jake said. “Soprano sax.”

She knew immediately what he was talking about. A few weeks earlier, while working on the basic melody track for one of Jake’s songs: South Island Blur, a heavy acoustical guitar piece he had penned about the drunken stupor he’d been in while on exile in New Zealand, it had been agreed upon by Jake, Celia, and the Nerdlys that the song was missing something. And so they’d experimented with having Laura play her alto sax as a secondary melody atop the primary one. It fit, and it had improved the sound of the tune, but it had been just a little too heavy. They needed an instrument that could play higher notes. It was Laura who suggested a soprano saxophone might do the trick.

“Can you play one?” Jake had asked her.

“Sure,” she said with a shrug. “I played around with one back when I was in the marching band in high school. It might take me a few days to get plugged back into it—you know, because of the breathing and the differences in projection and all that—but I can do it.”

The problem, however, was that she did not own a soprano saxophone and the one small music store in the Coos Bay region did not carry one either. And so the experiment had been shelved for the time being as other, more pressing concerns popped up with the recording process. But now, since he had to fly to Portland anyway, and since somewhere in the Portland metropolitan region there had to be a major music store ... well, perhaps things happened for a reason.

“I don’t know,” Laura said now. “It seems like an awful lot of trouble just for one song. And we don’t even know what it will sound like.”

“There’s only one way to find out,” Jake said.

She was still doubtful. In fact, Laura had been in somewhat of a funk the past two weeks, moping around, going back to those uncommunicative ways she had displayed when they’d first hired her on. Though her musical expression hadn’t suffered, she had gone back to speaking only when spoken to, hiding out in her room for much of the off time, and those precious flashes of her smile and her deliciously quick wit had all but disappeared. Tonight was the first time she had actually socialized with her bandmates since the funk had started, and that was only because Jake had actually ordered her to report to the entertainment room for a few games of pool.

It did not take a rocket scientist to figure out what the reason for this funk was. Three weeks ago, just after the rhythm tracks had been laid down and they were getting ready to start the primary melodies, Laura, who would not be needed for the first steps, had asked if she could take a week off to fly home. They had granted her wish and she’d climbed onto the puddle jumper out of North Bend her normal self, happy, bubbly, and excited to go see her fiancé.

When she’d returned a week later, she was in the midst of the funk. She did not speak of what had happened while she had been home. She, in fact, denied that there was anything wrong with her at all. But it was quite obvious that something had gone wrong during her visit, something that had sapped a good portion of the life right out of her.

“A good soprano sax is not going to be cheap,” she told Jake now. “We’re talking at least fifteen hundred dollars for one that will produce recording quality sound. Maybe even two thousand.”

“Don’t worry about what it costs,” Jake said.

This drew the attention of Pauline. “Jake,” she said sternly, “I think she makes a good point there. Two grand is a lot of money. You know how far over budget we are.”

“Over budget?” Greg said, looking at her. “How far are we over budget?”

“It’s not that bad, Greg,” Jake assured him. “Look. I won’t use KVA funds for the sax. I’ll pay for it out of my pocket. After all, I’ve got fresh royalties coming in from that Greatest Hits album, right?”

“Are you sure you want to do that, Jake?” Celia asked. “The tune stands up on its own.”

“I’m sure,” he said. “I really think that sax will help set the tune to the emotion I’m trying to convey.” He turned back to the redhead. “What do you say, Laura? Let’s go out and find us some sax, huh?”

That actually brought a smile to her face. The first one they had seen since her return from LA. “All right,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

There were no direct flights from Portland to Detroit. The best that Pauline could do was to book an 8:20 AM flight to Denver, change planes and wait out a two hour layover, and then hop on a connecting flight to Detroit that would arrive at almost 10:00 PM, Detroit time. And in order to get to the airport in Portland on time, Jake’s plane needed to be wheels-up from North Bend Municipal by 6:00 AM.

“This is going to be a long, miserable fucking day,” Pauline declared as she, Jake, and Laura piled into Jake’s BMW at 5:30 AM that morning.

Fortunately, the weather was cooperative. A few scattered clouds at ten thousand, a light onshore wind, and the temperature in the low fifties. Jake filed his flight plan and did his preflight on the aircraft. Laura, who was a little nervous about flying in such a small plane—her only flying experience in her life had been the flights she had taken to get to Coos Bay and then return home and back two weeks ago—was offered the copilot’s seat by Pauline.

“Shouldn’t you be sitting there?” Laura asked her.

“Why?” Pauline asked. “I can’t fly this thing any more than you can.”

“You can’t?”

“I can’t,” she confirmed. “Besides, I can doze off a bit back here.”

They strapped in and Jake took off on schedule, barreling down Runway 22 into the breeze and lifting off for the one hour flight.

Laura quickly got comfortable with the trip as Jake explained everything he was doing and why he was doing it as he did it. She picked up instinctively on what Jake always had to explain to Celia—as long as he didn’t look nervous, there was nothing to worry about.

They landed at Hillsboro Airport, a municipal general aviation field just west of Portland, at 7:03 AM. Jake taxied over to the GA terminal and secured the plane. From there, they made their way to the rental car area and Jake procured a Lexus sedan for the day. Since it was a Sunday, the drive to PDX, as Portland International was known, only took about fifteen minutes. They dropped Pauline and her single bag off in front of the terminal for her airline.

“Have fun, sis,” Jake told her.

“Not fucking likely,” she muttered and then walked off, disappearing through the sliding doors.

Jake looked at his watch and then at Laura. “Well now,” he said. “I don’t think any music stores are going to be open on a Sunday before nine.”

“Probably not,” she said with a yawn. It was obvious she was not a fan of getting up so early.

“How about we go downtown and grab some breakfast? My treat.”

“Okay,” she said. “I could use a little something in my stomach.”

Jake had been to Portland before, a few times when he was a kid and on every tour that Intemperance had done, but he had never driven around in it before. Still, he was a good navigator with an instinctive grasp of direction and a pilot’s knowledge of the geography of the region. He drove them through the city, heading west and then north, until reaching the downtown area with its high rises and bridges over both the Willamette and the Columbia Rivers. On the Columbia waterfront, in the heart of downtown, he found a little café overlooking the huge river. It conveniently had a parking spot directly in front of it.

“This looks like the place,” Jake said as he pulled in.

There were only a few people in the restaurant and they were seated right away, at a booth near the window. A middle-aged waitress wearing a green uniform put menus and glasses of water before them.

“Can I start you folks off with some coffee?” she asked. “Or maybe something a little stronger?”

“Stronger?” Laura asked, raising her eyebrows.

“We’re famous for our bloody Marys,” the waitress told her. “It’ll kick you right into the morning, if you know what I mean.”

“Hmm,” she said. “I’ve never had one of those before. People really drink them this early?”

“That’s why they exist,” Jake told her. “Bloody Marys and mimosas are the two drinks we, as western society, have deemed socially acceptable to consume before noon. You can have one at eight in the morning and no one will look twice at you. However, if you ask for a rum and coke at eight in the morning, they think you’re an alky.”

“Interesting,” Laura said thoughtfully.

“You wanna try one?” the waitress asked. “You won’t be sorry.”

She hesitated. “Well...” She looked at Jake. “Will you have one too?”

He chuckled. “I try to stay away from the hard stuff when I have to fly later in the day. It’s one of those FAA things, you know.”

“Oh ... yeah,” she said. “I guess that makes sense.”

“But far be it from me to rain on someone else’s parade,” he said. “Go ahead and fire up. You don’t have to fly a plane, right?”

She nodded. “No, I guess I don’t.” She looked at the waitress. “Hit me.”

The waitress smiled in approval. “One bloody Mary, coming up,” she said. “And you, sir?”

“Coffee,” he said. “And keep it coming.”

They perused the menus in silence, with Jake settling on the southwest scramble. When the waitress came back with their drinks, Laura ordered a simple plate with two scrambled eggs, sausage, and whole wheat toast.

“Kind of boring,” Jake chastised.

She simply shrugged and then tried a tentative drink of her bloody Mary. Her eyes lit up a bit as she rolled the flavor around in her mouth. “Hey,” she said, “this is pretty good.”

“Yeah?” Jake asked, a little jealous.

“It’s got a nice, spicy bite to it,” she said, and then took another, larger drink. “You can hardly taste the booze at all.”

“You’re making me drool,” he said sourly.

Another tiny hint of a smile. “Sorry,” she said.

Silence reigned again, becoming almost awkward, until Laura got about half of the potent bloody Mary in her empty stomach. And then, clearly feeling the effects, she started to speak again, at first just making a few remarks about the instrument they were going to search out, and then moving into more personal matters.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” she said, her green eyes looking at Jake’s face over her glass.

“What’s that?”

“The cocaine from the butt crack thing. Did you ... you know ... actually do that?”

He gave an embarrassed smile. “What do you think?”

She considered. “Well ... it’s pretty depraved,” she said. “Exactly the sort of thing I would’ve thought you would do based on your reputation. You have quite the reputation, you know.”

“Oh, I know all right,” he assured her. “Let’s see. I’m a Satanist, that’s the most common one. I’m a drug addict, that’s a close second. I beat my girlfriends regularly. I once threw a girl off of a boat after raping her because she wanted to break up with me. I’m a serial cheater when I do have a relationship. Have I covered all the high points?”

“They’ve been saying you’re bisexual now,” she added. “That because you’ve slept with so many women, you’ve gotten bored with it and are giving guys a try.”

“Really?” he said with a chuckle. “I haven’t heard that one.”

“Why do you think Phil was so excited to make your acquaintance?” she asked. “He was really hoping that one would be true.”

“Alas, it is not,” Jake said. “I haven’t quite gotten that bored with the female sex yet.”

“He’s still holding out hope for it though,” she said with a giggle. It was nice to hear the sound come out of her mouth. “Anyway, you didn’t answer my question.”

“About the butt crack?”

“About the butt crack,” she said. “I’ve gotten to know you well enough that I have a hard time believing some of that other stuff. For instance, I know you’re not a Satanist and I know you’re not a drug addict. As for beating your girlfriends ... well ... I’m not the most sophisticated judge of men, I’ll be the first to admit, but I just can’t picture that either. You’re too even tempered. You always seem to stop and think before you do something.”

Jake laughed. “Yeah ... I’ve gotten into plenty of trouble in my time because I didn’t stop and think about something, although that was back during my heavy drinking days, and there was usually alcohol involved when I made a particularly poor decision.”

“Like what?” she asked, taking another sip of her drink.

“Where do I begin?” he asked with another chuckle. “Hooking up with that redheaded groupie in Cabo San Lucas while I was dating someone ... that was a bad decision. Getting involved with Mindy Snow for the second time ... while she was married ... that was a bad decision, and one that I just kept repeating.”

“You were involved with her a second time?” Laura asked, eyes wide.

“Guilty,” he said. “We met by chance in Fiji, and...”

“Fiji?” Laura asked incredulously. “How do you meet someone by chance in Fiji?”

“It was quite the coincidence,” he said. “She was there filming Tropical Dreams, that flick about World War II and the romance between a nurse and a wounded soldier. I was coming back from a visit to New Zealand and had a layover that I turned into a day on the beach. We were both staying in the luxury hotel on the beach.” He shrugged. “It was almost inevitable that we would run into each other once the coincidence of both of us being there at the same time was fulfilled. Anyway, that was a mistake, fueled by alcohol. We kept the relationship on the downlow since she was married to Scott Adams Winslow at the time.” He shook his head. “What a pompous asshole that guy was. I mean, Greg is pompous, but he’s almost charming in how he carries it off. Winslow was just a prick. Really thought he was superior to everyone. That’s part of what made it easy to justify boning his wife, really. Well, that and Mindy was...” He blushed a little. “Oh ... never mind. You don’t need to hear about this.”

“Actually,” she said, “this is pretty fascinating to hear about. Mindy Snow is one of my favorite actresses. I grew up watching The Slow Lane and I’ve seen every movie she’s been in since. She was what?”

“She was really good in bed,” Jake told her. “The best I’ve ever experienced, truth be told.”

“Really?” Laura said, wide eyed. “That’s remarkable considering how many women you’ve been with—I mean, unless that’s just a story as well.”

“Let’s just say that I’ve had my fair share of experience with the opposite sex.” And maybe ten or fifteen other guys’ shares as well, he did not add.

“So ... we’re talking more than ... like, thirty girls you’ve slept with in your life?”

He nibbled his lip a little. “Uh ... yeah,” he said. “We’ll go with that number.” Thirty? That’s her idea of a lot of sex? He had fucked more women than that on the first leg of the first Intemperance tour.

“And with all that, Mindy Snow was the best?”

“Hands down,” Jake assured her. “She had an appetite for sex that knew no boundaries. She was aggressive about pursuing it and quite skillful in execution. Though I regret the relationship with her—both of them, since she was using me both times—I don’t regret the things we did together.”

Laura’s face suddenly lit up with understanding. “Your song Nothing’s Different Now,” she said. “That’s about Mindy Snow, isn’t it?”

He nodded. “On the nosey,” he told her.

“I was wondering who you were singing it about,” she said. “Wow, this is really interesting stuff, Jake.”

“Yes, my tales of failed relationships are fascinating, aren’t they?”

“And the other song you sing,” she said. “Hit the Highway. Is that about her as well?”

“No,” he said. “That’s about Helen, my latest failed relationship.”

“She was the flight instructor? The one they accused you of paying off and sleeping with so you could get your license?”

“The one and only,” he said with a sigh. Thinking about Helen was still painful—a wound that had closed but had not completely healed.

“And none of that was true either, right? I mean, I watched you in the cockpit today and you certainly don’t seem to be someone who cheated his way through flight school.”

“It’s pretty much impossible to cheat your way through flight school,” Jake assured her. “For one, you have to ride with an FAA guy to get your license. For another thing, I wouldn’t have cheated even if I could. When matters concern my own life, I take them very seriously.”

“But ... were you and she actually ... you know ... doing it while she was teaching you?”

“Well ... yeah,” he admitted, “but that didn’t matter. Helen was ... is a professional. She never would have signed me off if I didn’t know what I was doing, even if we were rubbing pee-pees at every opportunity.”

“What happened with her?” Laura asked. By now, her drink was almost completely in her stomach.

Jake sighed. “We really loved each other,” he said. “But our lifestyles were incompatible. She couldn’t take the life of being involved with a celebrity. She thought she could at first, she took a lot of things in stride—having her picture in the American Watcher, having reporters stalking her and asking her how often I beat her, having women dropping domestic violence cards in her hand and urging her to get help—but then things started to escalate.”

“There was a crazy woman, right?” Laura said. “I seem to remember that some psycho tried to kidnap her.”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “That’s what pushed her over the edge. She went a little nutso after that—understandable, really, I guess—and our days were pretty much numbered from that point on.”

The waitress returned, now carrying their breakfast plates. She set them down before them, asked if they needed anything else—Laura declined the offer of a second bloody Mary—and then left them to their cuisine.

“You still miss her?” Laura asked when she was gone.

“Yeah,” he said. “I do. You know the song we’re working on, the one we’re here to get the sax for?”

“South Island Blur,” she said. “It’s about being in a drunken stupor in New Zealand, right?”

“Right,” he said. “An autobiographical piece if there ever was one. The inspiration for that tune was the months I spent there, hiding from the world, drowning my sorrows. One of those sorrows was that Intemperance had just broken up and my musical prospects weren’t looking too good. The other was the breakup with Helen.”

“It’s kind of a depressing song,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong, I like it and I can feel the melody when I play it, but it’s sad, almost hopeless.”

“It was a hopeless time,” he told her. “Writing songs about such things helps with the healing process, I think.”

She nodded, putting a bite in her mouth and chewing thoughtfully. She swallowed and then wiped her mouth with a napkin. She then looked at him pointedly. “You still haven’t answered my question.”

“The butt crack thing?”

“The butt crack thing,” she confirmed with a smile. “True or false? I have to know.”

“You have to know, huh?”

“I will die if you don’t tell me,” she said.

He chuckled again, shaking his head. “It was our first tour, back when we were still living the lifestyle that National wanted us to live. I was a twenty-two year old punk, finding myself in a situation where people adored me, would do anything for me, where security guys led a bunch of naked women into our showers every night after a show. It was kind of hard to turn some of the stuff down.”

“Naked women in the showers, huh?” she said. “And they did this every night?”

“Every night,” he said. “But that was just the warm up. The real partying took place back at whatever hotel we stayed at after the show. They’d bring a bunch of groupies with us and ply us with booze and pot and cocaine. And then ... well ... things sometimes got a little wild.”

“Wilder than women in the showers?” she asked. “I can’t even imagine things much wilder than that.”

“Some of the stuff we did defies imagination,” Jake agreed. “Anyway, on the night in question, a Spinning Rock reporter was hanging out with us, doing an article about a day in the life of Intemperance. The record company was pushing hard for us to have that reputation as oversexed degenerates, so they encouraged us to be wild and crazy and oversexed and obliterated with drugs and alcohol. I guess we were kind of living up to the reputation back then. Anyway, Matt—Matt Tisdale, Intemperance’s guitar player?”

“The one who swears he’ll never play with you again?”

“That’s him,” Jake confirmed. “He decided to rise to the occasion. It was his idea to snort coke out of the groupie’s butt crack. He had her bent over on the floor, her face in the crotch of another groupie and...”

“Wait a minute,” Laura said, wide eyed again. “The girls were doing it to each other? In front of other people?”

Jake shrugged. “Yeah, you know how it is.”

It was obvious that she did not know how it is. “That is so depraved,” she whispered, almost in awe.

Jake shrugged again. “We were twenty-two,” he said. “Didn’t you do dumb things when you were twenty-two?”

“Uh ... yeah,” she said. “Things along the line of locking my keys in my car or forgetting to turn off the iron when I left the house. Nothing quite on the level of group sex in a hotel room with another girl.”

Jake nodded. “I guess there are degrees of stupidity at twenty-two. I never did lock my keys in the car or leave the iron on.”

She giggled. “Fair enough,” she said. “Please finish the story. I am completely enthralled with it.”

“Well, not much to tell,” he said. “I was in another room with a couple of groupies of my own.”

“A couple?”

“A couple,” he confirmed. “You have to understand that I was pretty wasted at the time. I barely remember any of this. Anyway, Matt calls me out of the room, telling me he’s got something cool to show me, so I go out there and...”

“You go out there?” she interrupted again. “Were you ... you know ... naked at the time?”

“Not quite,” he said. “I had a condom on.”

A slow blink. “I see.”

“So, anyway, Matt’s got the two groupies doing their thing on the floor, and he’s standing behind the one with her butt up in the air, and ... well ... he did it. He poured some coke in her crack and snorted it up. And then one of the other groupies snorted some too.”

“One of the other groupies? There was a third girl involved in this?”

“She didn’t do anything other than hold the girl’s cheeks apart and then snort the coke out of her butt. Some of those girls aren’t into the whole dyking out thing.”

“Nobody’s perfect, I guess,” Laura said with a smile.

“Exactly!” Jake told her. “So ... anyway, once the girl was done snorting up, Matt pours a little more coke in the crack and he offered the straw to me.”

“And you took it?”

“I took it,” he said. Another shrug. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. And it was only that one time. It wasn’t like we did that as a regular gig. Nobody would have even known about it if that Spinning Rock reporter hadn’t put it in her article. And for some reason, Matt doesn’t ever get associated with that, only me. But that’s my legacy now. And that’s the story of the coke from the butt crack incident. I hope I didn’t shock you too much.”

“I found that story strangely fascinating,” she told him.

“It’s nothing I’m particularly proud of,” Jake admitted. “You’re one of only a handful of people I’ve even admitted the truth of the tale to.”

“Well, I appreciate your trust in me,” she said. “It certainly a lot more interesting than any of my stories.”

“I don’t know,” Jake said. “You’ll have to tell me some of them and let me make the call.”

Just south of the downtown proper, they found a large music store named, appropriately enough, Portland Music Store. They arrived just after nine o’clock and found three clerks on duty and perhaps ten customers browsing through the collection of instruments. As in most music stores Jake had been in in his life, the floorspace was divided up into four main sections; one for stringed instruments, one for percussion, one for brass and woodwinds, and one for electronic instruments.

“Can I help you find something?” a long-haired clerk asked them as they looked at the display of horns, flutes, and clarinets.

“We need a soprano sax,” Laura told him.

“Right this way,” he said, leading them to a display of saxophones on the wall. He pulled a straight sax off and held it up for her perusal. “This is the basic beginner model of the instrument. The Xanadu 1500. It goes for a hundred and ninety-nine normally, but this week we’re having a sale and I can offer it to you for only...”

“It’s a piece of crap,” Laura told him, making no move to take it. “Good for an elementary school kid learning how to blow for the first time, but not much else.” She pointed to a locked display case that held several saxophones of various size, two trombones, a couple of flutes, and a clarinet. “I see you have a Yamaha YSS there. Can I have a look at it?”

The clerk raised his brows a bit. “That is a fine instrument,” he said, “but it’s pricey.”

“How much?” Jake asked.

“Twenty-four ninety-nine is the asking price,” the clerk told them.

“A little more than I thought,” Laura said.

Jake simply shrugged. “It’s only money,” he said. “Is the instrument worth that much?”

Laura turned back to the clerk. “What model YSS is it?” she asked him.

“Uh ... it’s the 875,” he said. “Perhaps the finest of the YSS series as far as construction and sound production, but, as you can see, that kind of quality comes with a steep price.”

Laura turned back to Jake. “The 875 is about the best you can get in a soprano,” she said. “At least among the straight ones. There’s a school of thought that the curved sopranos have superior sound quality, but they’re also pricier.”

“Is that school of thought valid?” Jake asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve only played the cheap models back in high school, remember. I don’t have enough experience with the instrument to have an opinion one way or the other.”

“Well ... how about we take that thing out and you give it a blow?” Jake suggested.

“That would be the logical next step,” she agreed. She turned back to the clerk. “Can you pull that thing out for us so I can try it out?”

He made no move toward the cabinet. “You certainly seem to know your saxophones,” he told her, “but are you sure that that instrument is in your price range? We have several other models that I can let you...”

“Hey, partner,” Jake interrupted. “Can I ask you something real quick?”

“Uh ... sure,” the clerk said.

“What is your name? You never introduced yourself to us.”

“I’m Frank,” he said.

“Okay, Frank. One more question. Do you work on commission?”

“Well ... yes, I do,” Frank confirmed.

“I thought you might,” Jake said. “Let me tell you something, Frank. We are both professional musicians and we are quite serious about purchasing a high-quality soprano saxophone for a project we’re working on. We have money to spend right here and right now if we like that instrument. I would suggest you check your snobby attitude immediately, because you’re just one more condescending remark away from losing out on a hefty commission. You dig?”

Frank dug. “My apologies,” he said, with what sounded like actual sincerity. “Let me just unlock that case for you.”

He unlocked the case and brought out the instrument. It was highly polished and of solid construction. Laura looked it up and down for a moment then put her fingers on the keys and manipulated them one by one. She seemed pleased with the mechanical action. She then put her mouth on the instrument and blew. She winced at the note that came out. She manipulated the keys a little and winced some more. Jake’s ear understood why.

“It’s out of tune,” he told Frank.

“Uh ... well ... yeah,” he said. “It’s a brand new instrument.”

“Can you get her a tuning fork?” Jake asked.

“That’s okay,” Laura said. “I can do it by ear.”

“You can?” Frank asked, surprised.

“She is a professional saxophone player, remember?” Jake replied.

Laura began fussing with the mouthpiece, first pushing it in and playing what was supposed to be the A note and then the F note, and then pulling it back out and repeating the process. After five or six repetitions of this, the notes were coming out more or less like they were supposed to. She then played out a middle C, which also came out sounding pretty much normal.

“Okay,” she said. “Close enough. Let me do some scales now and warm this thing up.”

She ran through the major scales for the soprano sax. As always when she was warming up, the notes came out sounding like music even though they were just exercises. It didn’t sound quite as beautiful as when she played her alto sax, but that was probably just her unfamiliarity with the instrument. As she continued, the notes became more fluid, more expressive, cleaner.

“She really is pretty good with that thing,” Frank observed, a measure of respect showing plainly in his eyes now.

“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” Jake told him.

As soon as she felt the instrument was warm enough, she launched immediately into the melody that Jake wanted her to play for Island (as they called it). It was a little rough at first, only half tempo from what it would be on the actual recording, but Jake liked it. He liked it a lot.

“I think we’re onto something here, Laura,” he told her.

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s a good instrument. I need to adjust my breathing of course, and the keys are a little smaller and closer together, but it’s nothing I won’t be able to work out with a little practice.”

“What song is that?” Frank asked her. “I’ve never heard it before, but I kind of like the way it flows.”

“It’s an original composition,” Jake said. “A little something we’ve been working on.” He turned back to Laura. “I’d like to hear it with my part accompanying before we commit to this.”

“I think that’s a good idea,” she said. She looked at Frank. “Can you get him a guitar?”

“A guitar?” Frank asked, as if he had never heard of such a thing.

“I’m a guitarist,” Jake told him. “The piece we’re working on is primarily acoustic guitar and soprano sax for the melody, with some piano thrown in for fill. We’d like to hear the blend and how they mix. You do have acoustic guitars in this place, right?”

“Uh ... yeah, of course we do,” Frank said. “It’s just that ... well ... I’m not trying to be insulting here, but if my boss saw me walk away from you two while you’re holding a twenty-five hundred dollar instrument in your hands, he’ll have my ass.”

Laura was insulted. “You think I would steal it?” she asked.

“No no!” Frank said, shaking his head almost violently. “I don’t think that at all, but it’s store policy that...”

“It’s okay, Frank,” Jake said. “I get where you’re coming from. There’s an easy solution here. How about we just all walk over to the guitar section together and try the experiment there?”

“Uh ... oh, yeah,” Frank said. “I guess that’ll work.”

They made the walk, Frank trailing behind them. The guitar section was where most of the current customers and browsers were congregated. Two guys in their late teens or early twenties were messing around with a Brogan Strat knockoff over in one corner. An older guy with gray hair was playing around with an acoustic-electric. Two other people were just looking at the displays.

“What kind of guitar do you need?” Frank asked. “As you can see, we have quite a collection of various...”

“Any old acoustic that is reasonably in tune,” Jake said. He pointed to one on the wall, a Yamaha model that was advertised on sale for three hundred dollars. “How about that one?”

“Okay,” Frank said, reaching up and pulling it down. He handed it across to Jake.

“Guitar pick?” Jake asked.

“Right,” Frank said, trotting over to a jar on the counter that had picks with the name of the store on them. He pulled one out and brought it to Jake.

“Thanks,” Jake said, sitting down in a chair and resting the guitar on his lap. He strummed it a few times, listening to the sound. It was not in tune, but he was able to quickly make it so by ear. Once he was happy with it, he looked up at Laura. “You ready?”

“I’m ready,” she said, putting her mouth to the sax.

Jake began to play out his melody, not bothering with half time, just going straight to full tempo. The moment he started, everyone else in the guitar section stopped whatever they had been doing and turned to watch.

“Nice,” Frank said as the melody recycled for the third time.

“Thanks,” Jake said. “You ready to hop in, Laura?”

She nodded. The next time the melody came around, she played her part. As before, it was a little on the rough side and she missed a few notes, but it was clear that this was the sound they had been looking for.

“I like it,” Jake told her. “Let’s smooth it out a little.”

They continued to play and each repetition sounded better, mixed a little smoother. Laura instinctively brought the volume down to match what Jake was putting out and he nodded in encouragement, his foot tapping to the rhythm. The other customers, meanwhile, were enjoying the show. They all wandered over to get a closer look, a closer listen. Soon, most of them were tapping their feet as well.

“These two are good,” one of the teens said respectfully.

“Hell yeah,” agreed the older man. “What is that they’re playing?”

“I heard him say it was an original piece,” said someone else.

“No shit?” the man asked.

“No shit,” Jake told him, his fingers still strumming.

As the melody came around again, Jake suddenly began to sing the lyrics.

“I climbed on a jet plane

Flew ten thousand miles away

Left behind everything and everyone that I knew

Didn’t plan to stay long

But there was just too many things wrong

So I stay on this island and don’t think of you

“Hiding away from it all on the South Island

Watching the days tick by in a haze

Drinking the time away

Keeping the pain at bay

The South Island blur, I think I’ll just stay”

“Wow,” Frank said, now quite obviously awed by what he was seeing.

“He sounds familiar,” one of the younger guys said.

“Yeah,” agreed the older guy.

Jake ignored them and sang out the second verse, this one dealing with visiting the waterfront bars, hooking up with questionable women, and waking up at home with no memory of arriving there. After singing out the chorus again, about hiding away from it all, he brought the guitar to a halt. The bridge portion was a little more than he thought they could pull off in such an impromptu manner and, being the showman that he was, he didn’t want to leave this small audience remembering the imperfections that would surely result.

“That was awesome, dude!” the younger guy declared once Laura stopped playing her part.

“Yeah!” agreed the older man. “Did I hear that you’re a professional musician?”

“I make a living at it,” Jake told him.

“I swear I’ve heard your voice before,” the other younger guy said. “Who do you play with?”

“Nobody of significance,” Jake told him. “What did you all think of Laura here? Can she blow the horn, or what?”

They all agreed that she was pretty badass herself.

“You see?” Jake told her. “The audience has spoken. What do you think of the horn?”

“I love it,” she said. “But the price...”

“I’ll worry about the price,” Jake said. He turned back to Frank. “It’s listed at twenty-five hundred, you say?”

“That’s correct,” Frank said.

“I’ll give you two grand for it right here, right now,” Jake countered.

“Uh ... I’m afraid the price is not negotiable,” Frank said.

“Sure it is,” Jake said. “Everything is negotiable.”

“Well ... I don’t have the authority to...”

“Then go get whoever does have the authority,” Jake suggested.

That turned out to be the store manager, a mid-forties man who claimed he had once played with the Philadelphia Symphony. He too claimed the prices of the instruments were not negotiable.

“Really?” Jake asked. “How long has that instrument been sitting in your inventory?”

“Uh ... a few years at least,” he admitted. “That is often the case with the higher end instruments.”

“Right,” Jake said. “So if I leave here because you won’t come down on the price, it’ll probably sit up there for a few more years, won’t it?”

“Possibly, but...”

“No buts,” Jake said. “What’s the wholesale on something like that? Maybe fifteen hundred bucks at the most?”

“I don’t have that information before me,” the manager said.

“I would think closer to twelve hundred,” Laura suggested.

“I assure you it’s more than that,” the manager said stiffly.

“All right,” Jake said with a sigh. “I’ll tell you what. How about twenty-two hundred? That’s my final offer. There are other music stores in Portland, after all.”

“Well ... I guess I could let it go for twenty-two hundred,” he said.

“Excellent,” Jake said with a smile. “And, of course, you’ll throw in a case for it, right?”

“A case?”

“You know, to carry and store it in? And don’t be trying to pan off one of those cheap cases on us either. An instrument like that should be stored properly, wouldn’t you agree?”

He agreed. For the price of two thousand, two hundred dollars, Jake was sold the Yamaha soprano sax and a mahogany, felt lined case to carry it in.

“And how will you be paying for this?” Frank asked once the horn was in the case and they were ready for check-out.

Jake pulled out his trusty Visa platinum card, the one with a sixty thousand dollar limit that Jill the accountant paid off each month with money from his royalty accounts. Frank took the card from him and looked at the name on it. It took him a few seconds, but his eyes finally widened.

“Jake Kingsley?” he said, looking from the card to Jake’s face and then back again.

“That’s what they call me,” Jake allowed.

“Holy shit!” Frank blurted. “The Jake Kingsley?”

“It’s the name my mother gave me,” he confirmed. “Can we wrap this up?”

“Oh ... sure,” Frank said. “I’ll just need to see some ID to go with the card.”

Jack passed him his California driver’s license. Frank stared in awe again at the name and the address. “Los Angeles,” he whispered, as if that was the final confirmation. “I just want you to know, Jake, that I’ve always been a fan.”

“Thanks,” Jake said. “Do you mind sliding the card through the little thingy there so we can get on with this?”

“Oh ... right,” he said. “That song you sung ... are you working on new Intemperance material?”

“No,” Jake said plainly. “I’m not.”

“That’s a bummer,” Frank told him.

“A bummer is in the eye of the beholder. Now swipe the card, please.”

He swiped the card. The little machine did its thing and, after only two minutes or so, got an approval of the charge and spit out a little piece of paper. Jake signed it and then he and Laura left the store, sax in hand.

As soon as the door shut behind them, Frank rushed back out onto the sales floor to tell everyone that they had just witnessed an unplugged performance by Jake Kingsley.

They got back to Jake’s plane just before noon. After checking the weather in the airport office and finding that skies were currently clear all along the Oregon coast, he turned to Laura, who was sitting next to him, still clutching the saxophone case.

“It’s VFR conditions all the way back,” he told her.

“VFR?”

“Visual flight rules,” he said. “That means I can just putter along where I want and whatever altitude I want once I get out of the Class B airspace around PDX.”

“Okay,” she said slowly. “And that’s good?”

“It means we can fly lower and do a little sightseeing if you want,” he said. “Feel like taking the long way home?”

“How long?”

“Maybe closer to two hours,” he said. “I was thinking of following the Columbia River to the ocean and then hanging a left and flying along the coastline back to North Bend. Once we’re over the water I can drop down to four thousand or so. I’ll burn more fuel but the scenery should be spectacular.”

She nodded. “That sounds like fun,” she said.

“Let’s do it then,” he said. “I’ll file the flight plan real quick. Be sure you go pee before we board.”

“Right,” she said. “Can you watch the sax while I pee?”

“I’m on it,” he told her.

They lifted off at 12:03 and climbed into the blue sky. By 12:20 they were out of the controlled airspace and flying sixty-five hundred feet over the Columbia River, heading west. Jake maintained manual control of the aircraft, giving the autopilot the day off so he could steer them along the course of the river.

“I had a good time today, Jake,” Laura told him, her voice coming through the headphones.

“Me too,” he said. “It was nice to get away from the studio and the house and all that for the day. And I’m glad we got the instrument you needed. It’s really going to enhance Island.”

“I still can’t believe you spent twenty-two hundred dollars on a sax we’re only going to need for one song. That’s crazy.”

“I’ve been accused of that.”

“What are we going to do with the sax when we’re done?” she asked. “Sell it back to them? Sell it to someone else?”

“It’s yours to keep,” Jake told her. “Do with it whatever you want.”

She looked at him. “Mine to keep? Jake, I can’t accept something this expensive.”

“Sure you can,” he assured her. “I sure as hell don’t have any use for it, and going to the trouble of selling it will be more trouble than it’s worth to me. You’re a saxophonist, and officially a professional one now. Use it in your future endeavors. Being able to play both the alto and the soprano is something else to add to that resume, right?”

“Well, yeah ... but...”

“No yeah-buts,” Jake said firmly. “The instrument is yours to keep. Consider it a bonus for doing such a good job.”

She was genuinely touched by this. “Thank you, Jake,” she said. “I’ll treasure it always.”

He reached over with his hand and rubbed her left shoulder. “It was worth it just to see you smile again,” he told her. “You’ve been kind of bummed out lately. I’m glad I was able to cheer you up some.”

She flushed a little, whether from his touch or his words he did not know, and looked down into her lap. “Yeah,” she said. “I guess I have been a little sour lately. I’m sorry. It wasn’t directed at any of you.”

“I don’t think anyone took it personally,” Jake assured her.

“No?”

“No. I think everyone kind of suspects what the issue is.”

She looked back up at him. “They do?”

He nodded. “It’s not hard to figure out, hon. You left to go visit your fiancé in a good mood. You came back in a bad mood that has been lingering for a few weeks now. It’s only logical that something happened during that visit to get you like that, right?”

She sighed. “Very perceptive,” she said bitterly.

Jake shrugged. “Like I said, it’s not rocket science. You want to talk about it?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Suit yourself,” he said. “But it really does help to talk about these things. And I’m a good listener.”

“I appreciate the offer,” she said, “but it’s very personal.”

“More personal than the stuff I was telling you earlier?”

She giggled a little. “Maybe not that personal,” she said. “There are no butt cracks or cocaine in my story.” She hesitated for a moment, and then blurted, “Although there is an asshole.”

“I see,” Jake said. “That would be your dentist?”

She took a deep breath and then let it out slowly. She then tapped the headset on her ears. “Is everything we’re saying being recorded?”

“There’s no CVR on this aircraft,” he assured her. “It’s not required on a private plane. The only time anything is recorded is when I’m talking to ATC with the microphone keyed.”

She looked at him sternly. “You’re not bullshitting me, right?”

“I’m not bullshitting you,” he promised.

“All right,” she said. “What the hell? If you can tell your butt crack story, I guess I can tell mine. I went home because Dave—that’s my fiancé—had a week off from work. When I called about two weeks before, he told me that and that’s when I started asking if I could take a break, remember?”

“I remember,” Jake said.

“He owns a rental condo in Palm Springs. He told me that if I came home, we could spend the week there together. I’ve been there with him before, although usually only on the occasional weekend, and once you and Celia told me I could have the time off, he told me we were in. We were going to leave as soon as I got home and stay the whole week. I was really looking forward to it. After all the time we’ve been apart while I was working on the album, I really wanted to reconnect with him.”

“Understandable,” Jake said. “What happened?”

“When I got home, he was already in Palm Springs. He’d left the day before I arrived.” Another deep breath. “That bitch he’s still married to was there with him.”

“That bitch he’s still married to, huh?”

“Yeah,” she spat. “Apparently she insisted on going with him on the trip. He didn’t even tell me in person! He left a message with Phil. Can you believe that?”

“It’s a little unbelievable all right,” Jake said. “Do you mind if I make an observation here?”

“Sure,” she said.

“When you say, ‘that bitch he’s still married to’, you’re talking about his wife, correct?”

She shook her head sternly. “They’re only still married because of the kids,” she said. “Once they graduate high school, he’ll finally be able to divorce her.”

“But they’re still living together now?” Jake asked.

“Yes,” she said. “He has to keep letting her live there for now or she’ll take the whole house and get half of the profits from his practice. They’re mostly just roommates. They haven’t slept in the same bedroom for years and they don’t have sex anymore—at least not with each other. She’s always going out and sleeping around though. Dave says she’s a real slut.”

“I see,” Jake said. “And ... well ... have you ever actually met her before?”

“No,” she said, appalled. “Why the hell would I want to do that?”

“All right, different tack here,” Jake said. “You say that he can’t leave her now because of the kids and because she’ll take half of his practice and the house, right?”

“Right.”

“Why, once the kids are graduated, wouldn’t she still be able to take half the practice and the house?”

“Well ... she still will be able to do that,” Laura said, “but at least the kids will be on their own. It’ll be easier if she can’t use them as a weapon. He says the divorce will be more amicable that way and she won’t be able to get child support on top of everything else.”

“I see,” Jake said again. “So, you never got to see him at all on your trip back?”

“Oh, I saw him all right,” she said. “He came home on Friday night. Saturday morning, he showed up at my apartment. He was dressed in golf clothes because that’s where he told that bitch he was going. He only stayed long enough to ... you know?”

“To have sex with you?”

She nodded. “He was in and out of the house in less than an hour, just long enough to get what he wanted and then take a shower. He didn’t apologize for going to Palm Springs without me. He didn’t listen to me when I tried to tell him about our recording sessions and how things were going in Coos Bay. He didn’t tell me...” She wiped at her eyes a bit. “He didn’t tell me he missed me. It was like I hadn’t even been away at all.”

“He sounds like a real prince,” Jake said.

She shook her head, wiping at her eyes again. “I don’t know what to think anymore. I love him, but ... well ... sometimes I have to wonder if he really loves me. I’ve never really been in a relationship before, Jake. Is this how people act?”

“It’s not how people in love are supposed to act.”

“I want more out of the relationship than he’s giving me,” she said. “Do you know that he hasn’t called me a single time since I came up to Oregon? Not even once, just to see how I was doing, just to check up on me. And then he takes that bitch to Palm Springs and doesn’t even have the nerve to tell me to my face, or even on the phone. What the hell?”

Jake made a quick scan of his instruments and then another scan outside. Everything was as it should be. He made a quick bank to the left to follow a southward bend in the river far below. When the plane was level again he looked at the redhead sitting next to him. “Do you want to hear what I really think?” he asked her.

“Probably not,” she said.

“Fair enough,” he said. “I’ll keep my thoughts to myself.”

“No,” she said. “Go ahead. I started this conversation. Might as well finish it.”

“All right,” Jake said. “Let me start off by saying I’m not judging you. Far be it from me—a man who has sniffed coke out of an ass crack, who has had an ongoing affair with a woman I knew was married, who actually boned said woman in her very marital bed while her husband was downstairs, who has gotten it on with groupies two and sometimes three at a time—to lay any judgements on you for sleeping with a married man.”

“Two and three at a time?” Laura asked.

“Everyone needs a hobby,” Jake said. “Anyway, my point is, that despite how you label her, how her husband describes her to you, you are, in fact, sleeping with a married man. A married man who still lives with his wife, who still, if I have my facts correct, wears a wedding ring, right?”

Her face soured. “Phil’s got a big mouth.”

“I understand that’s quite an asset in the gay community,” Jake said. “In any case, I think, based on what I’ve heard and what I know about the male species, that your dentist is playing you for a fool.”

The sour look turned to a scowl. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“Happily married men cheat on their wives all the time,” Jake said. “But they also know that most single women won’t knowingly give themselves up if they know the man is happily married. And so, they almost always tell whatever piece on the side they’re trying to land that they’re in an unhappy marriage, that they don’t have sex with their wives, that they’re staying for the children, that their wife cheats on them. It’s really kind of a classic, almost a cliché.”

She chewed on her lip for a moment. “You’re trying to say that Dave’s wife is not actually a bitch? That he’s been making all of this up all of this time?”

“I don’t know for sure,” Jake said, “since I’ve never met either one of them, but I strongly suspect that this is the case, yes.”

She was shaking her head. “No,” she said. “Impossible. I may be naïve—I’ll be the first to admit it—but I’m not that naïve. There is no way that he could lie to me that smoothly, that convincingly. You’ve got your wires crossed on this one, Jake.”

“Perhaps,” Jake said. “Like I said, I don’t know either one of them. But maybe it’s time you really started thinking about the kind of relationship you’re in. You’re sleeping with a married man, Laura, and one who seems to do nothing but show up to have sex with you and then leave. Have you ever been to his house?”

“No,” she said.

“Have you ever met his children?”

“No.”

“When you go to your dentist appointments, does he acknowledge your relationship to his coworkers in any way?”

Another sigh. “No,” she said. “He tells me we have to be discrete.”

“Put yourself in someone else’s shoes for a minute,” Jake suggested. “Pretend you’re Pauline, or Celia maybe. Pretend you were told the story you just told me and you were able to look at it with the detachment that comes with not being involved. What would you think?”

She looked out the window, refusing to meet his eyes. “I don’t know,” she said at last.

They didn’t speak much more on the rest of the flight, and when they did, the subjects remained neutral. Jake flew them at 4500 feet along the coast, both of them watching the scenery go by impassively until they circled into land on Runway 4 just after two o’clock.

Laura disappeared into her room as soon as they got back to the house, not even bothering to show anyone her new instrument.

“What’s with her?” Celia asked.

“She’s got a lot on her mind,” Jake replied.

Celia let it go at that.

Dinner that night was pot roast prepared by Cindy. Laura came out for dinner but contributed little to the conversation. She helped clean up the dishes and the kitchen and then retreated back to her room. Shortly after that, the sound of her practicing notes on her new saxophone came drifting out.

“She sounds pretty good with that thing,” Celia observed.

“Yeah,” Jake said appreciatively. “I think maybe that was a trip worth taking.”

Jake went upstairs and changed into his bathing suit for his nightly ritual hot tub soak. He came downstairs, grabbed himself a beer, and then headed out. He saw that the lid was already open and someone was in the tub. It was Laura. She had a glass of wine with her. Though Laura was not a nightly visitor to the tub as Jake was, she typically came out once or twice a week. Since returning from her trip home, however, she had not been out a single time.

“Well, hello,” Jake greeted, setting his beer down and dropping his robe. “Decided to join the living again?”

“Yeah,” she said with a sigh. “I think maybe it’s time for that.”

Jake climbed in and settled down, stretching his legs out before him. He took a few drinks of his beer and then looked at his companion, who was looking out over the dark ocean. “I’m sorry if I upset you earlier,” he told her. “That was not my intention.”

“I know,” she said quietly. “And I’m not upset ... at least not with you.”

“No?”

“No,” she said. “On the contrary. You gave me a lot to think about.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she said, finally looking at him. Tears were running down her eyes. “And I’ve concluded that I’m such a fucking idiot.” She broke down completely, sobs coming out of her uncontrollably.

“Hey now,” Jake said, quickly scooting around the perimeter of the tub until he was next to her. He put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her to him. She came willingly, burying her face into the side of his neck. “It’s okay,” he soothed.

“I’m such a fool,” she said. “You were right, Jake. He is just using me. Everything you said makes perfect sense!” She sobbed again, her hot tears spilling onto his shoulder.

He held her, rubbing his hand up and down her back, part of him quite enjoying the silky smoothness of her flesh, the press of her wet breasts against his side, the feel of her soft leg pushing against his. It had been a while since he had held a woman in his arms. His weekly trysts with club girls had come to an end when he’d traveled to Coos Bay and gone to work. He fought back his natural inclination, which was to pull her closer, into a more intimate embrace. He could not fight back the natural biological response, however. Blood began to flow down below, stiffening his member, which did not know or care that this was not that kind of situation.

The sobs continued for the better part of five minutes and then began to peter out. She clung onto him almost desperately, her arms going around his back, her hands moving up and down on his shoulder blades. He whispered soothing things into her ear, telling her it was going to be all right. Finally, she became capable of coherent speech.

“I’m sorry,” she said against his neck. “I’m usually much more in control of my emotions.”

“It’s okay,” he told her, still stroking her back. “You’ve had a hell of a revelation.”

“Yeah,” she said bitterly.

“What are you going to do now?” he asked her.

“Well ... I’d say I was going to give him back his ring, but he never fucking gave me one.”

“Yeah ... I guess that eliminates that step,” he agreed. “So, you’re not going to see him anymore?”

“I ... I don’t know,” she said. “I’m very confused right now. I don’t know what to think, what to do. Part of me keeps trying to say that you’re full of shit, that I’m in a perfectly happy relationship, but ... well ... most of me knows you were right. I think a part of me has known it all along.”

“I think maybe you’re right,” Jake said. “That would explain why you always refused to talk about the relationship. You knew it was wrong.”

“Yeah,” she said with a sigh. And then she adjusted herself a little, probably trying to shift and release the embrace they held. But as she did so, her hand slid under the water to brace herself. And as it did, it brushed across the bulging erection that was tenting out his bathing suit. She jerked her hand away the moment she realized what she had touched, but her eyes grew wide. She looked up him, startled.

“Uh ... I’m sorry,” he said weakly.

“You ... you have a boner,” she said, her voice full of wonder.

“Uh ... yeah,” he said. “I’m sorry. It’s kind of a ... a natural response when ... you know ... a girl in a bathing suit is...”

“I gave that boner to you?” she asked.

“Well ... yeah, kind of,” he said.

“Wow,” she whispered, still full of awe, not the least bit angry. “Does that mean ... you know ... that you’re attracted to me?”

“Yes, I’m attracted to you,” he said. “You’re a very beautiful woman. It’s only natural that...”

“Kiss me!” she suddenly said.

“What?”

“Kiss me!” she said again, putting her arms around his neck. “Don’t you want to?”

“Well...” he said, uncharacteristically awkward all of a sudden. What the hell was going on here? “Uh ... I hadn’t really ... I mean...”

She took matters into her own hand, or at least her own lips. She leaned forward and put her mouth against his. Her tongue slid out and forced its way between his teeth. On reflex, he put his own tongue out to meet it. The two organs began to dance. She was not the best kisser in the world, but she was certainly enthusiastic about it. They swirled tongues and pressed lips for the better part of a minute. As they kissed, her hands began to move up and down his back.

Finally, they broke the kiss, but she did not let go of him.

“Laura,” he breathed. “What’s going on here?”

“I ... I think I’m making a pass at you,” she breathed back. “Am I doing it right?”

“Uh ... yeah, you’re doing just fine, but ... why are you doing this?”

“Can I touch it again?” she asked.

“What!?”

“Your boner,” she said, her left hand dropping below the water line. “I only got a quick feel of it the first time.”

Without waiting for the answer, her hand found the bulge in his suit again. This time she grasped it and began to squeeze and palpate it. He groaned at the sensation, feeling his rational self, the part that wanted an explanation for this behavior, starting to move toward the back seat.

“It’s so big,” she whispered. “So hard.”

“Yeah,” he grunted, “but...”

“Let’s go upstairs,” she said.

“Upstairs?”

“To your room,” she said. “Take me up there and ... and fuck me.”

“Why?” he asked again, holding onto his self-control by the slimmest of margins.

She gave a little growl of frustration and then looked him in the eyes. Her hand was still squeezing his manhood through his shorts. “Because I want you, Jake,” she hissed. “Jesus Christ. Are you going to make me beg?”

“You want me? When did this happen?”

“I’ve been hot for you for several months now, but I’ve been keeping it hidden. I think it started about the time we really started clicking together as a band. I’ve been pushing it to the side all this time, not letting anyone see it, because I didn’t want to be unfaithful to my fiancé.” She barked out a laugh. “What a joke that turned out to be. And I didn’t think you liked me—not that way anyway, but when I felt your boner, when I realized that you really are attracted to me ... for God’s sake, Jake. Why are we still sitting here?”

“I’m not sure this is really a good idea, Laura,” he said. “We have to work together. Shouldn’t we maybe take things kind of slow if we decide to go down this road?”

“Do you like me, Jake?” she asked pointedly.

“Yes, of course I like you,” he said.

“Are you sexually attracted to me?”

He looked down to where her hand was still gripping him. “Obviously,” he said.

“Then let’s not think. Let’s fuck. Do you want to do it right here, in the hot tub? I’ve never done that before.”

“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” he said.

“Upstairs then?”

“Laura, listen...” he started.

She kissed him again, driving her tongue into his mouth. With the hand that was not stroking his erection, she grabbed his hand and put it on her breast. It was a soft, very squeezable breast. He longed to see it bare, to touch it.

She broke the kiss and then removed her hand from him. “Upstairs?” she asked again.

He nodded. “Upstairs,” he agreed.

Getting there required a little bit of logistics. First of all, Jake had to wait for his hard-on to deflate a bit. Even with the towel and the robe, a noticeable bulge would have been present. Second of all, everyone except Stan and Cindy were still awake. Celia and Greg were watching TV in the entertainment room. The Nerdlys were on the computer. Though nobody would think twice about Jake and Laura coming in from out in the hot tub, the eyebrows would certainly go up if they were seen going upstairs together.

Jake created a distraction. The Nerdlys were not much to worry about since they were absorbed in whatever they were doing, but Celia and Greg were another story. From their position on the couch, they would only have to turn their head the slightest bit to see someone going up the main staircase. He went over and talked to them, asking Greg about an idea he had been tossing around about investing in a golf course project just north of Coos Bay.

Greg, quite animated when discussing this possible project, did not notice at all when the small, redheaded figure in a robe and bathing suit went creeping up the staircase. Celia, on the other hand, heard the small squeak of a stair riser under foot and looked up just in time to see a pair of pale, feminine legs disappearing over the first landing. She bit her lip a little, but said nothing.

When Greg’s enthusiasm finally ran its course, Jake excused himself.

“Going to bed early tonight?” Celia asked him.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s been a long day.”

“Well, sleep tight,” she said. Her eyes bored into his in a manner that could only be described as intense. “Don’t let anything bite.”

He gave her a look for a moment—what the hell was that supposed to mean? he wondered—but her face gave no further clue as to what was on her mind. He shrugged this off and headed up the stairs, still thinking that what he was about to do might not be the best idea, but also knowing that he was going to do it anyway.

Laura’s aggressive manner seemed to have been left down in the hot tub. When he entered the room, she was sitting nervously on the edge of his bed, her robe still around her, her butt on the towel. She was chewing her lips and wringing her hands.

“Are you okay?” Jake asked her after shutting and locking the bedroom door.

She nodded slowly. “I’ve uh ... never done anything like this before,” she said. “You know ... seducing someone.”

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked her. “It’s not too late to call it a night.”

“I’m very attracted to you, Jake,” she said. “I never would’ve thought I’d feel like this when I first met you, but ... yeah, I’m sure I want to do this. I’ve never wanted to do it with anyone before—I’ve just done it because I knew that it was expected of me—but I ... I think about you all the time.”

“Do you?” he asked, feeling a little burst of pride and warmth at her words.

“I do,” she said. “And I want to do it with you. I want it very badly.”

He nodded slowly. Truth be told, he wanted to do it with her as well, very badly. And not just because he hadn’t been laid in a while. He wanted Laura the person, not just her body. “All right then,” he said, slipping his robe off and letting it fall to the floor. His bathing suit was once again bulging out before him.

Laura smiled. She stood and let her own robe to the floor. She then reached up for the straps of her bathing suit. “How do you want me?” she asked.

Jake raised his eyebrows. “How do I want you?”

“Yeah,” she said. “What position?”

“Uh ... well, why don’t we put ourselves together and see what inspires us?”

“Huh?” she asked. This seemed a completely foreign concept to her.

“I mean, how about we don’t choreograph this thing, don’t plan it out in advance. How about we just do what feels right? That’s the best way to go about this procedure, I’ve found.”

“Uh ... okay,” she said nervously. She took a step toward him. “Should I ... you know ... take off my bathing suit now?”

He smiled and took her in his arms. He lifted her chin up, so he was looking in her eyes. “I think maybe I’d like to do that,” he told her.

“Oh ... okay,” she said. “But what about...”

“Laura,” he said.

“What?”

“Shut up,” he said, and then brought his lips to hers.

Their tongues began the dance again and her arms went around him. He stroked the bare skin of her back and then let his hands trail downward, until they were moving over the cheeks of her buttocks. He squeezed them, liking the firmness. She enjoyed the touch as well. She held him tighter, grinding her stomach into his erection.

“You’re a really good kisser,” she panted when their mouths finally parted.

“I like to kiss,” he whispered in her ear. “You can’t kiss just anyone, you know?”

“How’s that?”

“Never mind,” he said. “Let’s do it some more.”

They did it some more, long, tongue swirling, passionate kisses that heated both of them up. Jake let his hands go back upwards and he ran his fingers through her red hair. He broke the kiss and moved his lips to her neck, kissing and nibbling the salty flesh there.

“Oh God, Jake,” she whispered. “That feels so good.”

“It’s not supposed to feel bad,” he said.

They kissed some more. This time, Jake let his hands slide over to the straps of her bathing suit. He twirled his fingers in them a few times, getting the feel of the terrain, and then he slowly began to push them down. He broke the kiss and moved his head back a little, so he could cast his eyes on what he was about to reveal. Laura was blushing furiously, her pale skin almost lobster red in her excitement and nervousness. The tops of her breasts came into view as he pushed the suit lower on her body.

“Go ahead,” she told him, her voice husky. “Make me naked.”

He pulled the suit down further and her small breasts came fully into view. The size of apples, they were capped with pink nipples the size of pencil erasers. They were standing up proudly, just aching to be suckled.

“Beautiful,” Jake whispered to her, letting his finger slide over her left nipple.

She gasped a little at his touch. “You don’t ... don’t think they’re too small?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think that at all.”

He turned himself around, turning her with him, and then planted his butt on the edge of the bed. This put his head on the same level as her breasts. He took immediate advantage of the situation by sucking her left nipple into his mouth.

“Mmm, God,” Laura breathed, her hands going to the back of his head, pulling him closer.

His hands, meanwhile, continued working on the bathing suit. He pushed it lower, baring her pubic region, pushing it down her legs to puddle at her feet. He took his mouth off the nipple so she could step out of it. As she did so, he took the opportunity to gaze upon her nakedness for the first time. Her body was beautiful, pale and lightly freckled. He was a bit startled, however, to see the unruly nest of copper colored pubic hair surrounding her womanhood.

Wow, he could not help but think. That’s quite the bush she’s sporting there.

Not that it was a deal breaker. Though modern grooming standards favored women keeping themselves trimmed down there, he had come of sexual age in an era where wild and untamed had been the rule. A hairy bush did not bother him in the least. He just hadn’t seen one in a while. And when his nostrils got a whiff of her odor, the sharp, exciting tang of female sexual arousal that was coming off of her in waves, all thoughts of anything else were pretty much driven from his mind.

“You’re beautiful, Laura,” he told her. “Absolutely beautiful.”

“Thank you,” she said softly, her body trembling. “Can we do it now? I really really want to.”

“Well,” he said. “If you really really want to, I guess we should.”

That earned him a giggle. “Take off your shorts,” she told him.

He stood and slid them down his legs, freeing his straining member. Her eyes took it in and she nodded appreciably. “It’s nice,” she said.

Nice? he thought. That’s how she describes my cock? Nice? Well, at least she didn’t say cute.

“I should probably go get a condom,” Jake told her. “There’s some in my nightstand.”

“I’m on the pill,” she told him. “I promise.”

He looked up at her, sensing no deceit in her eyes. “What about me though?” he asked. “I know I’m clean, but are you sure you want to take the chance?”

“I trust you,” she told him. “I’ve never done it before without a condom. I’d really like ... you know ... to try it. If you trust me, that is.”

“I trust you,” he told her. He sat on the bed again. “Come on. Let’s get in bed.”

She nodded. “Okay,” she said. “But ... well ... do you have any ... you know, hand lotion or anything like that?”

“Hand lotion?”

“For lube,” she said. “You see, I have this medical condition ... I probably should have brought this up before now, but, I don’t get ... you know ... wet like I’m supposed to.”

“Really?” Jake asked. His nose was certainly telling a different story.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I really should have ... uhhhhh, oh my God!”

Her exclamation was because Jake had just slid two fingers into her body. She was tight, hot, and extremely wet. They had penetrated her without any problem whatsoever. He pulled them back out and showed them to her. They were glistening quite plainly with her juices.

“I think maybe I cured you,” he told her, running the fingers over the side of her face, transferring that moisture to her cheek.

She took in a deep breath. “Fuck me right now!” she demanded.

“Right,” he said, taking her in his arms and propelling her onto the bed.

She lay on her back and he climbed atop her, pushing her legs apart with his knees. He took himself in hand and then slid inside of her, feeling her muscles gripping him, sinking all the way in to the hilt.

“Oh my sweet Lord!” she exclaimed as she felt the intrusion.

“My thoughts exactly,” he said. He kissed her again and began to thrust inside of her.

She wrapped her legs around his body and dug her fingernails into his back as he powered in and out. He gave her all of his best moves, angling upward on the downstroke, grinding his pubis into hers, moving side to side on the upstroke. He alternated kissing her lips, her neck, her ears as he ground his body against her. He stroked her with his hands, touching her breasts, her butt, her hair. Sweat formed on his face and began to drip down on her.

Soon she was panting, her breath dragging in and out loudly, her face flushed and red. Her pelvis began to thrust back at him, meeting him on each downstroke.

“Jake ... Jake,” she breathed. “Something ... something is happening to me.”

“Is it a good something?” he breathed back.

“I ... I ... oh my God. Oh my sweet Lord, Jake!”

“Shhh,” he hushed. “There are other people in the house.”

“Jake! Something ... Oh my Godddd!”

He covered her mouth with his, jamming his tongue through her teeth, trying to shut her up. She kissed back instinctively but she continued to moan into his mouth, her pelvic thrusts now erratic and spasmodic. Her fingernails dug painfully into his back as she let out a final grunt and moan and then pulled his body into hers with a tremendous amount of strength.

He slowed his thrusts down as she regained control of herself. He finally broke the kiss.

“Oh my God,” she breathed. “I just had an orgasm.”

“No shit,” Jake said with a chuckle. “I think it entirely possible that everyone in the house knows that.”

“You don’t understand,” she said. “I’ve never had one before.”

“You mean during sex?” he asked.

“I mean never,” she said. “I kind of thought that maybe the whole orgasm thing was just a myth. Oh my God. That was intense.”

“Wow,” Jake said, in awe. “I feel kind of honored.”

“That was incredible,” she said. “I kind of see what all the fuss is about now.”

“Well,” Jake said. “How about another one?”

“Another one? I can do that more than once a night?”

“I guess we’ll find that out, huh?”

He began to thrust harder again. It turned out she could have more than one.