"Exactly," Mindy said brightly. "So I should know, right?"
"I suppose," Jake said. "So where's hubby today? Does he know you're over here?"
"Of course not," she said. "He had to fly to San Francisco to oversee some audio overdubs on his last film. He won't be back until Monday afternoon."
"I see," Jake said, finding his eyes drawn to the swelling of her breasts beneath her sweater. They really were a premium set, perhaps the finest natural boobs in Hollywood.
Mindy pretended not to notice his gaze. Instead, she looked around at the living room and the staircase. "Nice looking place you got here," she said. "I like the way you've decorated."
"It's someplace to lay my head when I'm stuck in LA," he said.
"Can I have a tour?"
"Sure," he said. "Let's show you around."
The tour only lasted about three minutes. Like always when showing his house to someone, he started upstairs in the master bedroom. They went in and they didn't come back out for almost two hours. And that was just to get a bottle of wine and some cheese and crackers before commencing with round two.
Mindy stayed at his house until Monday morning. Elsa was due back to work in an hour and Mindy's husband was due back at LAX in four hours. Jake needed to be at the rehearsal warehouse by nine o'clock to start the first day of tour rehearsal. Mindy gave him a wet, sensual kiss just before stepping out the door.
"I'll see you Friday night?" she asked. Her husband was going to be out of town again the following weekend — to Orlando this time for a few editing re-takes — and she had invited Jake to spend that time at her mountain home.
"I'll be there," he assured her.
"You remember how to get there?"
"Oh yes," he said. And he did. Some of the most intense sexual experiences of his life had taken place in and around that house.
She gave him one more kiss, softer but still quite sensual, and then she was gone. Jake stared at the closed door for a few moments, knowing he should feel guilty about sleeping with a married woman, knowing he should feel even guiltier for making plans to do more of it. He did feel some guilt, did know that Mindy was bad news, that every association he'd ever had with her had turned out negatively, but the guilt and the negativity only added to the sheer ecstasy of having sex with her. She was pleasure personified, her every move seemingly custom designed to bring sexual satisfaction and need.
Jake was tired. He was covered from head to toe in sexual musk, old and fresh. He was extremely sore, particularly in his groin muscles, upper thighs, and prostate. He also couldn't wait until Friday so he could do it all over again.
With a contented sigh, he turned away from the door and limped his way upstairs for a much-needed shower.
On December 11th, the same day Intemperance started tour rehearsal (although they spent much of that first day arguing about the opening song), and nine days before the United States invasion of Panama known as Operation Just Cause, copies of the new Intemperance studio album, titled Lines On The Map, and the album's first single, She Cut Me Loose, arrived at radio stations across the country for advance airplay and review by the critics.
She Cut Me Loose immediately started receiving heavy airplay on both rock and pop stations and was well-received by both the hardcore Jake-leaning Intemperance fans and the more fickle mainstream pop fans. This popularity was given a significant boost by the subject matter of the song. Since Jake and Helen's break-up had been headline entertainment news only six weeks before (complete with news conferences and a brief flurry of paparazzi stalking of both of them), it was assumed that the "she" Jake was singing about was Helen. Neither Jake nor Helen bothered correcting this misconception, mostly because to do so was more trouble than it was worth. The song was given an additional boost when the PMRC and the Family Values Coalition both condemned it because it contained the lyrics "I'll just have another drink and those feelings go away" and therefore glorified underage drinking (since many Intemperance fans were under twenty-one) and alcohol abuse in general.
By December 14th, there were a flurry of advance reviews of the album printed in newspapers, entertainment magazines, and music magazines. Generally the more mainstream publications, as they always had in the past, crucified the band's latest effort, calling Lines On The Map their worst effort yet. The more left-leaning music magazines and entertainment publications, which had always tended to like Intemperance's work, called it a genuine maturation of musical style. Both camps agreed on one thing, however: the album was a marked difference from their earlier style of music.
On December 22, both the album and the single went on sale to the general public. The single sales were strong and steady, but not record-breaking by any means. Album sales, on the other hand, took off like a shot. In the first forty-eight hours, before the Christmas holiday closed all the stores, Lines On The Map sold ninety-four thousand copies — not as many as It's In The Book sold in its first forty-eight hours, but not all that far behind.
Meanwhile, in the rehearsal studio, the disagreements and animosity were renewed as Jake, Matt, and Nerdly argued constantly over the song selection and the song order for the tour. Matt wanted to open with Grandstand, his hard-rock rap tune.
"It's fucking perfect for the opening piece," he argued again and again. "It has the fast-tempo power riff at the beginning that can start playing as soon as the lights go up. Then it transitions into the machine-gun rap-style to get the audience pumped up."
Neither Jake nor Nerdly agreed with this logic.
"It's a non-traditional piece," Jake always countered. "We need to open with a classic Intemperance sound and then put the non-traditional stuff mid-show, or maybe as one of the encores."
"I think we should open with a true Intemperance classic," Nerdly said. "Either Descent Into Nothing or The Thrill Of Doing Business."
And both Matt and Jake were against this idea.
"You're out of your fucking mind, Nerdly!" Matt yelled when this was suggested. "We always open a show with material from the latest album. You fucking know that."
"Where does it say that?" Nerdly demanded. "We're enough of an icon now that we can open with whatever we want."
"No, I have to agree with Matt here, Nerdly," Jake would say. "It's traditional to open with new material. I'm thinking that Lines On The Map is a good bet. It's traditional Intemperance sound and it's new."
"You just want it first because it's your fucking song!" Matt would then accuse. "Isn't it fucking enough that I caved and let you name the goddamn album after that tune? Now you want to open the fucking show with it?"
And round and round they went, just like always on any subject these days. Finally, after returning from their brief Christmas break on December 27th, did they come to a compromise of sorts and agree to open the show with My Life — Matt's song about the life of a rock star. It wasn't exactly traditional Intemperance sound, but it was not quite as non-traditional as Grandstand.
The next argument came ten minutes after deciding what to open with. It had to do with Jake's song I See You. Jake wanted to put it in as the fourth song of the set, the first slow song they would perform. Nerdly agreed it would make a good transition after Who Needs Love? to start a three-song string of mellow pieces. Matt, however, didn't want I See You in the lineup at all.