"Okay," she said at last. "Everything seems to be in order." She holstered her weapon.
"Good," Jake said with a nod, letting the subject of her armed recon drop. The one time he'd brought it up, asking her if maybe she was going a bit overboard with the paranoia, it had led to a vicious, irrational verbal attack in which she'd thrown him out of the house and didn't speak to him for three days. Nor did she apologize to him when she did start speaking to him again.
"I'm gonna go get changed," she said.
"Sounds like a good idea," Jake agreed. He had a plethora of clothing, including sleepwear, stored in Helen's dresser. "I've been in these clothes since Winnemucca."
They went to her bedroom, the bedroom where Jake had slept with her, had sex with her, had made her scream out in passion and squirt her copious juices countless times. She pulled a pair of grey sweatpants and an oversized T-shirt out of a dresser drawer. Standing near the corner of the bed, she kicked off her shoes and then pulled off her socks. She dropped her jeans to the floor and removed her blouse, leaving her standing in a pair of sterile white panties and a matching underwire bra that barely contained her enormous breasts. Jake, allured by the sight of her partial nudity, reached out to her, clasping his hands around her middle, his fingertips stroking the soft skin of her midriff.
"I missed you," he told her.
She did not return the sentiment. Instead, she pried his fingers off of her body and stepped away from him, out of his reach.
"What's the matter?" he asked, biting back on his frustration. She had been increasingly unresponsive to his sexual advances over the past few weeks.
"I'm just not in the mood right now," she said, matter-of-factly. It was her standard answer to such inquiries.
"Helen," he said gently, "we haven't seen each other in three days. We haven't been with each other in more than a week now."
"I'm sorry, Jake," she said, sounding anything but. "I'm not in the mood. Maybe later."
She pulled the sweatpants on and then dropped the T-shirt over her torso, not bothering to take the brassiere off first — something he'd never seen her do when in the privacy of his or her home and dressing down for the evening. Helen's breasts were so large that she always took the bra off at night because the straps would cut into her shoulders.
Jake slowly undressed until he was completely nude. His manhood was half-erect just from seeing her body, from imaging the possibility of getting it on with her. She didn't comment on it as she normally did, didn't even glance at it. He pulled on a pair of sweatpants of his own and put nothing else on. By the time he was done, Helen was already out of the room
They watched television for about an hour, sitting on opposite ends of the couch. Finally, at around nine o'clock, she announced she was tired and heading up to bed. Jake followed her up.
She climbed into bed without removing any of her clothing. Jake climbed in after her. He reached for and began to caress her shoulder. She didn't stop him. She didn't acknowledge the touch either.
Finally, in frustration, he sighed and rolled over. Helen stayed on the other side of the bed, leaving nearly two feet of space between them.
"If you want to have sex with me, go ahead," she said, a tired resignation in her voice. "I'll do it."
"That's okay," Jake told her. "I don't enjoy it very much when I'm just being accommodated."
She did not reply. Within ten minutes her breathing took on the slow, regular pattern of sleep. Jake lay awake for quite some time, tossing, turning, unable to get comfortable. He was tired but his troubled mind just didn't want to shut down. Finally, at around midnight, he drifted off.
His dreams were vivid and unpleasant, frequently waking him with their intensity. This was something that had been occurring over the past month or so, becoming more recurrent these past few weeks. He dreamed most frequently of being in an airplane — usually his 172 but tonight, his new airplane — flying high above the ocean or the mountains, somewhere it was impossible to land, and having the engines suddenly die on him, leaving him to desperately try to restart them before he crashed. In the dream, his radios didn't work so he couldn't call for help, couldn't even let anyone know he was going down. The ground grew closer and closer while he kept futilely trying to restart the engines before he crashed. He always woke up before the fatal moment came, usually sweating, his heart hammering in his chest, adrenaline flowing freely in his veins.
He awoke just after seven o'clock the next morning, feeling tired and strung out. Helen had already showered, dressed, and eaten breakfast. He caught her just before she was about to walk out the door to head to the airport, where she had four training flights scheduled for the morning and two classes to teach in the afternoon.
"Bye," she told him as he poured a cup of coffee. She gave him a perfunctory peck on the lips and headed out the door. "Be sure to set the alarm when you leave."
"Right," he told her.
"Are you coming back here tonight?"
"No," he said. "I think I'll crash at home tonight."
She nodded. "Okay," she told him, not trying to change his mind as she had once habitually done. She pulled her gun out so she could clear the path to her car and left the house, closing the door behind her.
Jake stared at the door for a few moments and then carried his coffee to the bathroom so he could get dressed. He too had a long day before him.
Jake arrived at the Intemperance rehearsal warehouse at nine o'clock that morning, parking his BMW in his accustomed spot in front of the door. He was dressed in his standard rehearsal garb of blue jean shorts, a plain t-shirt, and tennis shoes. He punched in the security code for the main entrance and entered, walking across the mostly empty floor space to the very back, where the band's equipment was set up. Everyone else was already there. Nerdly was fussing with the soundboard. Coop and Charlie were sitting over by Coop's drum set, talking softly to each other about something. Matt sat by himself next to the main amplifier stack. He was smoking a cigarette and going over some of his music sheets. He was the only one not to greet Jake's arrival. Once again, business as usual.
Matt didn't greet anybody anymore. He didn't talk to anybody unless it was absolutely necessary. He showed up for their composition session each day and did what was required of him and that was about it. He didn't smoke marijuana with the rest of the band, didn't drink beer with them, and went out of his way to stay well away from them whenever they weren't actually playing. It wasn't a very productive way to do things, but it was, after five weeks, a far sight better than the way things had gone in the first five or six sessions.
The hostility between Matt and the rest of the band — particularly between Matt and Jake and Matt and Charlie — had been venomous at first. Yelling and screaming matches, threats of violence, and wild accusations had flown left and right over every issue, major, minor, or even completely irrelevant to the great scheme of things. Jake had started to think that they weren't going to be able to accomplish anything at all, especially not a twelve-song demo tape by their September 15 deadline.
This acrimony was at its absolute worst when they actually got their instruments turned on and tried to start composing on those first days. They tried to start with neutral ground, by rehashing the one song they'd agreed to do way back in 1988, before National had derailed their creative efforts in favor of the double live album. That one song was She Cut Me Loose, Jake's tribute to his break-up with Rachel, the waitress. Cut Me Loose had been about nine-tenths dialed in when they'd stopped working on it. It should have been a simple matter of re-acquainting with the tune and then working out the final details of producing it — the intro, the ending, and the specifics of the lead-in to the bridge were all that was left to put together. It didn't quite work out that way.