"And you're gonna take me to my room and fuck me all night, aren't you?" she asked.
"Yes," he said, "I'm gonna fuck you all night!"
The elevator came to a stop. The doors opened. They went to Mindy's room and they fucked all night.
Chapter 17a
Heritage, California
October 31, 1989
The sound of knocking, gentle but insistent, woke Jake up. He slowly opened his eyes, feeling the familiar dryness in his throat, the mild pounding in his temples, that came from drinking a few too many the night before. He took in the wood paneling that surrounded him, the ceiling that was only eight feet above his head, the tight confines of the bedroom. It was both alien and nostalgically familiar to him, as was the surface he was lying upon. He was in the bedroom he had grown up in, in his parent's house, in the bed that they had bought for him back in 1974 or so, a super-twin that was too short for his fully-grown legs.
"Jake?" his father's voice called through the closed door. "It's eight o'clock. Time to get up. Mom has breakfast cooking."
"Wow," Jake whispered, shaking his head in awe, a powerful sense of déjà vu sweeping over him. He had heard those words in this bed from that man hundreds of times in the past, usually on Sunday mornings when he was a child. The smells were even the same — the odor of bacon frying, bread toasting, coffee brewing. From outside the window above his head he could hear the chirping of birds and the rustling of branches from the old elm tree as they blew in the gentle morning breeze.
"Jake?" his dad called, giving a few more knocks. "Are you in there?"
"I'm here, Dad," he called back, intensifying the sensation. "I'll be out in a few minutes."
"Right," his dad said. "Breakfast in twenty minutes."
Nerdly's wedding was today, the reception of the semi-traditional Jewish ceremony beginning at one o'clock in the community center hall of Heritage's McAndrew's Park. Jake had flown his plane to Heritage yesterday afternoon and had spent the night in his old bedroom for the first time in almost twelve years. He could have stayed in a hotel room, of course, but Rabbi Mark Levenstein — the Cohen family rabbi who had been flown in from Los Angeles to officiate over the ceremony — had asked that both Nerdly and Jake, Nerdly's best man (as much as such a thing existed in a Jewish wedding) stay in their respective parents' houses, in their old rooms, as a symbolic gesture of the sanctity of the family. The rabbi was a very likable man — and a good sport, since he agreed to wear a Star Trek Next Generation outfit like the rest of the wedding party — and the request was both sincere and heartfelt enough that both Jake and Nerdly agreed to honor it.
And so now, here Jake was, waking up after a late night pounding beers with his father while watching sports highlights on cable television, feeling perhaps the eeriest sensation of déjà vu he'd ever experienced. Little had changed in the room since he'd moved out at the age of eighteen. They had never turned it into a storage room or a sewing room or an office. They had maintained it instead as a rarely used guest room. The walls were the same, the bed was the same, the furniture was the same. All that was missing were the rock star posters and album covers that had once covered the walls like wallpaper.
One thing was markedly different, however. There was a naked female body curled up next to him. Though he had gotten laid in this bed more than once as a teenager (and a couple of times in his parent's bed as well), he had never had a girl actually stay the night with him. He reached out and caressed Helen's shoulder, gently waking her, taking comfort from the reality of her presence.
"Wazzit?" she mumbled, her eyes slowly opening. She had pounded a few beers the night before as well (the promise of temperance she'd made after her three-day hangover had long since been revoked) and was a little fuzzy on the uptake.
"Breakfast," Jake told her. "In twenty minutes."
"Breakfast?" she moaned. "I don't know about that."
"And coffee, and juice too," he added.
She yawned, stretching out her body a little. The sheet fell away from her chest, showing her bare breasts. Jake admired the way her stretching pushed them outward. "I guess that sounds good," she muttered.
He leaned down and kissed her softly on the lips. She did not resist or even passively submit. She kissed him back — a long, wet, sweet kiss full of affection.
"That was nice," he told her, stroking her hair.
"Yes," she said with a slight smile. "It was."
"I had a great time last night," he told her. "You were very... uh... passionate."
"I guess I was just in the mood this time," she said.
"I guess you were," he replied, kissing her again.
Jake wasn't sure what had suddenly come over Helen of late, but he certainly wasn't complaining. Their relationship had seemed to be spiraling down the toilet for the past three months, ever since Jenny Johansen had made her attempt on Helen's life. Though Johansen had not been seen or heard from since (the private investigator Jake had hired to keep tabs on her reported she had lost her job and was currently living in a welfare apartment near downtown), Helen's paranoia had never gone away. She still packed a gun wherever she went and obsessively locked herself in her house whenever she wasn't at work. And, until a few days ago, she seemed to have lost all interest in Jake as a person, as a lover, as a friend.
Ever since Jake's trip to New Zealand to get the ball rolling on his plot of isolated land, this spiral had seemed to increase in speed and volume. Though his transgression with Mindy Snow on the way home had not been discovered — by the press, by Helen, or by anyone else as far as he knew — the change in Helen when he'd arrived back home had been too stark to ignore, too severe to simply pass off as imagination. There had never been anything like overt hatred. That, at least, Jake probably could have dealt with. No, her attitude toward him since then had been an almost rabid indifference, as if he mattered little to her, as if she didn't care if he lived or died, showed up to see her or didn't. The sex life had ground to a complete and total standstill. She would still kiss him on occasion, but they were chaste kisses of the sort reserved for a sibling. She would offer to let him have sex with her, but it was always clear that she didn't really want to, that she planned no active participation in the event.
It had gotten to the point just a few days before that they hadn't seen each other in almost two weeks, that they hadn't even spoken on the phone in eight days. Jake had been starting to wonder if they'd silently broken up and he started mourning her loss. Helen was more than just a girlfriend to him. He loved her. He loved her more than he'd ever loved a woman before and it hurt him to think that it was over.
And then, just two days ago, Sunday afternoon, he landed his plane at Brannigan airport after a weekend trip to Heritage where he'd been rehearsing a musical number that he, his mother, and Nerdly's mother were planning to perform at the after-ceremony wedding festivities. After pushing his plane into its hangar, shouldering his overnight bag, and preparing to make the long trek to his car for the even longer drive home, he found Helen there, standing before him.
"Hi," she said brightly, leaning in and giving him a kiss on the mouth. "How was your flight?"
He looked at her strangely. This was the first time in two weeks he'd seen her, the first time in months he'd heard anything like animation in her voice, and she was acting like none of it had ever happened. "It was uh... fine," he told her. "I was rehearsing the song we're going to do at the wedding."
"How is it coming out?" she asked.
"I think we got it down," he said carefully. "I hope so, anyway. That was the last time before the wedding that we'll get to practice it."
"It's very sweet of you to write a song to play at Nerdly's wedding," she said. "And to play it with your mom and Nerdly's mom... I can't wait to hear it."