“Look, Kingsley,” Dr. Dave said. “I don’t know what you’re doing here, but...”
Jake took a step toward him, letting the amusement drain away from his face, putting a look of intimidation there instead. “You don’t know what I’m doing here?” he asked incredulously. “Are you fucking with me right now?”
“Uh ... no,” he said, taking a step backward. “I’m not ... uh ... not doing that.”
“Laura broke up with you, dude,” Jake said. “She told you this on the phone on several occasions. She told you not to contact her anymore, not to come to her house. She told you she was with me now. And, despite all this, you went to her house and went inside, uninvited, where she told you once again that she was done with you. And then you tried to rape her.”
“Rape her?” Dave said, shaking his head violently. “That is not what happened at all!”
“You put your fucking hands on her, asshole. You did not take your hands off of her when you were told to. You tried to rape her. And now you actually have to balls to say to me that you don’t know what I’m doing here?”
“Look now,” Dave said, trying to sound reasonable, putting his hands up in appeasement. “This is all just a big misunderstanding.”
“Well, Dr. Dave,” Jake told him, “that is what I am doing here. We are going to clear up any and all misunderstandings, right here and right now. You are going to stay away from Laura Best for the rest of your natural life. You will not call her. You will not go to her house. You will not go to the school where she works. You will make no contact of any kind with her at any point, ever again.”
“You have no right to tell me something like that!” the dentist barked at him, his face red.
Jake took an angry step forward. “I have every fucking right in the world to tell you something like that. Laura is with me now and she has expressed to me, in no uncertain terms, that she does not want to see you ever again. You will stay away from her or the consequences are going to be quite severe.”
“You’re threatening me?” he asked, trying to sound tough.
“Hell to the yeah I’m threatening you,” Jake told him plainly. “Have you heard of a restraining order?”
“Laura would never put out a restraining order on me,” he scoffed.
“She already has,” Jake explained. “And I’m fucking serving that order on you right now, right here. It is not a restraining order issued by the court, however. It is a restraining order issued by me. It is not in writing. You just need to absorb the terms of it with your fucking ears. You will not come within two hundred yards of Laura Best, anyone she knows, anyone you might think she knows. You will not come within a mile of her place of work, of her home, of my home, of anyone’s home she might be visiting. You will not show up at any place that Laura Best is visiting or patronizing or doing anything else in. If you are in a public place and Laura Best just happens to coincidentally show up there, you will immediately leave that place without making any attempt to contact her or make eyes at her. In short, if you’re in the fucking coffee shop, minding your own business and Laura Best walks in, you will leave as quick as you can and get as far away as you can. If you’re about to give a speech before the fucking Nobel Prize committee in Stockholm because you’ve invented some new dentist shit and Laura Best pops up in the audience, you fucking leave right then. Am I making myself clear here, Dr. Dave?”
“You cannot dictate terms like that to me!” he said petulantly.
“I am dictating terms like that to you,” Jake told him. “And you will follow them, or I will find you. I know where you work, as is quite obvious by my presence here. I also know where you live.”
“You do not!” Dave spat. “My house is unlisted.”
“Two-nine-one-seven Morning Glory Lane,” Jake said, repeating the information that Pauline’s shady ‘associates’ had dug up and that Jake himself had memorized during the flight. “Nice neighborhood. Not as nice as mine, of course, but decent enough.”
This made an impression on the dentist. He paled a bit, but tried to keep up the tough façade. “So you know where I live,” he said. “What good does that do you?”
“It makes it easy to find you,” Jake told him. “And when I do find you, I will beat the living shit out of you. And that is only if you simply violate the proximity clause of this restraining order. If you actually talk to her or make any contact with her, I will put you in the fucking hospital.”
“And you would go to jail,” the dentist told him. “You’re not going to bluff me that easily, Kingsley. In fact, I have half a mind to simply call the police now and report this terroristic threat you’re trying to put on me.”
“You have half a mind all right,” Jake informed him. “Do you really think I give a flying fuck if I go to jail for beating your ass? Hell, I’ve been to jail numerous times for more serious shit than kicking the ass of some dentist. I’m a rich motherfucker, Dr. Dave, and I’m a celebrity on top of that. I have high-priced lawyers who get me out of any shit that I get myself into. Hell, I could beat you to within an inch of your life, leave you sitting in a hospital bed with broken bones everywhere and breathing through a tube in your neck, and I wouldn’t spend more than a day or two in the slam before they got me out of there.
“But you know what would happen if you decided to go down that road—other than the fact that you would be in the hospital sucking air through a trach tube? The press would be all over that shit. Not just those sleazy entertainment rags, but the mainstream press as well. It’s way too fucking juicy of a story for them to not cover it. Jake Kingsley beats some dentist’s ass and puts him in the hospital! The fucking headlines would be screaming that shit. And, of course, they would make me out to be the bad guy—they love to demonize me, sometimes quite literally—but they would also dig into you like a pig in a trough. They would dig into Laura as well. All the stinky details of your relationship with Laura would be on front page headlines in every newspaper in the nation, with pictures and everything.” He looked at the Dr. Dave pointedly. “What do you suppose your wife would think about all that?”
This actually made Dr. Dave turn a whiter shade of pale—as it were. He swallowed slowly. “Well now ... there is no real proof that Laura I were actually ... uh...”
Jake chuckled. “Proof?” he scoffed. “The press doesn’t need proof to print something. What fucking world do you live in? Is it warm there?”
“Uh ... well...”
“Look, doc,” Jake told him. “I’m a reasonable man, which is a good thing for you. If you’d a pulled this shit on Matt Tisdale, you’d probably be wrapped in chains and sinking to the bottom of the ocean off the deck of a fishing boat about now. I’m not like that, however. I just want to solve this particular problem, you dig?”
“Uh ... yeah, I think I dig,” Dave said slowly.
“Now I must admit, when I got that call from Laura and she told me what you’d done, I really wanted to do some serious physical violence to your person. I still do, really, to tell you the truth. But I can control my basic instincts in matters such as this, and I will continue to do so as long as I’m confident that you understand the terms of this restraining order I’ve just laid out for you. You come near Laura again, even accidentally, and I will put you in the hospital. If I put you in the hospital, everything about you and Laura is going to be printed in every newspaper in the country and your little wifey is going to know about where you’ve been putting that little dick of yours. If you abide by the terms of the restraining order, however, you go about your life, me and Laura go about ours, you stay out of the hospital, and no one knows about any of this shit. You’re free to go find yourself a new chick to put it in and pump a few times. Does this sound reasonable to you?”