Chapter 9B: Rebellious Souls

They met with Steve Crow. He was a young, hip-talking man in a loud but fashionable suit. He had long platinum blonde hair styled in punk rock fashion. He wore sunglasses even though he was indoors. He was intelligent and articulate and he sat and went over each of the previously rejected tracks with them, rating each on its relative merits.

"The only one you're absolutely forbidden to record is Its In The Book," he told them.

"Which is one of our best songs ever," Matt said sourly.

"Hey, guys," Steve said. "I'm trying to work with you here. I agree it's a bitchin tune, but the bosses say no go on that one. That's the only thing they're standing firm on."

In the end, they picked two of Matt's songs and one of Jake's — all of them the more recent numbers — songs they'd written after maturing a bit by performing at D Street West. That gave them a complete list of ten tunes for the next album, every one of them an Intemperance original.

"Looks like we're set," Steve told them. "I'll get Bailey and his merry men working on a song order and an album title right away. In the meantime, I want you guys to be prepared to start hitting the studio in two weeks. That means lots of rehearsals, okay? Janice's publicity trips aside, I'd like you to do at least four hours a day in your warehouse. Tune that sound in tighter than a schoolgirl's ass."

"You got it," Matt said.

Steve smiled, shook their hands again, and then dismissed them.

As they rode the elevator down to the lobby level, Matt asked, "What do you think? Did they cave to us, or are they raising up a hammer to drop on our fuckin heads."

"They caved," Jake said. "Doolittle was trying to make it seem that all of the resistance was just Acardio's little quirks."

"Which is a bunch of bullshit," Matt said.

"Agreed. But that was just their face-saving measure to make it seem like we didn't really win."

"But we did."

"Yeah," Jake said. "I think we did."

Matt grinned. "Let's get the rest of the guys together tonight and go hit the Flamingo. This is a cause for celebration."

Jake and Mindy were not able to get together much. Mindy was still heavily promoting Thinner Than Water, which had been released across the country and was currently the most popular movie in theaters, and Jake was spending at least a portion of every day rehearsing the ten tunes they were to record. They were able to talk on the phone almost every night and usually spent at least an hour doing so. Manny no longer bothered enquiring who was calling when she called (she never told him) and had stopped trying to backhandedly pry the information out of Jake.

Still, there were a few times where their schedules did coincide and they were able to make each other's acquaintance. When this happened, she would always park a few blocks away from his building and he would simply walk out the door without giving anything like advanced notice to Manny. Manny learned not to ask or to try to stop him, although Jake had no doubt he was still calling up Steve Crow to let him no another AWOL session was taking place.

The two times they did get together, Mindy drove him up to her place. The first was an almost exact repeat of their first date. They went horseback riding up into the hills, had a picnic next to the stream, and spent a few minutes making out on the blanket. Though this make-out session was a little heavier and a little longer lasting, she allowed him to progress no further than kissing her neck and stroking her bare legs. He rode back for an hour with a throbbing case of blue balls.

The second time they skipped the horseback riding and instead went for a long drive in her Porsche through the hills and canyons of rural Los Angeles County. Jake took the wheel for this and she navigated, directing him from back road to back road until he was hopelessly lost and disoriented. She, however, seemed to know the area like the back of her hand and unerringly led him to a dead-end lookout eight hundred feet above a place called Fish Canyon. The view was very impressive. It was a rugged, narrow canyon with a small river running down the middle of it. They were also utterly alone. They spent a few minutes enjoying the view and nearly an hour enjoying the sensation of each other's bodies pressed together, their tongues in each other's mouths, their hands touching bare legs and bare stomachs, but staying well away from anything else. She did allow Jake to briefly feel her left breast through her shirt — and a fine breast it was — but she called an end to the session when he tried to unbutton her shirt.

He kept his humor up as they drove back to her house. Though it was frustrating beyond belief, and though his balls were not appreciating the forced congestion too much, he relished the challenge and the underlying romance of this relationship. It had been a very long time indeed since a girl had made him work his way up the sexual ladder and the novelty of it was something he both appreciated and respected.

On the way back to her house that day she did something that was slightly out of character. She stopped at a mom and pop restaurant in a small, rural town called Sleepy Valley and insisted that they go inside and have dinner.

"Do you think that's a good idea?" he asked. "I mean, I know it's a small town but people will see us together. Aren't we supposed to be avoiding that?"

"I stop here all the time," she said. "They know me in here. It's a nice older couple that runs the place. They would never tell anyone we were here."

And indeed the couple that ran the place did know her and Mindy addressed them affectionately by their first names. They doted over the two of them, setting them up with a farmhand style home-cooked meal complete with all the fixings. Jake had no trouble believing that the owners themselves would keep their mouths shut about their famous visitors but there were other customers in the restaurant too, and most of them spent their entire meal staring at the beautiful actress and the longhaired rock star, whispering behind closed hands. When Jake asked her about this on the drive back to his building, she simply shrugged it off.

"They're all small town folks," she said. "They know how to mind their own business. I grew up in a small town, remember?"

"I suppose," he said and then refused to worry about it any further.

And indeed, a week passed and there was no mention in the various tabloids and entertainment reports of a reported sighting of Mindy Snow and Jake Kingsley eating dinner together in a small town restaurant. Jake knew from personal experience that had there been even the slightest whisper of such a meeting to any of the various reporters who wrote for such rags that their names would have been on the front page. He should know. His name had been up there many times in the past. Whenever he went out to a club or to dinner or to virtually any other place in public, someone was always popping up out of nowhere and snapping his picture. If he met up with a girl, there would be a report on it, sometimes with a blow-by-blow description of their activities provided by the girl herself. These reports both infuriated and embarrassed Jake (although Matt — who encountered the same thing, relished them) but he knew there was nothing that could be done about it. It was yet another thing that fell under the heading of the life we choose.

During that week, Jake and Mindy were unable to get together at all, were in fact not even able to talk on the phone. Mindy had been whisked off on a tour of Florida to promote her movie and Jake took two trips himself, one to Atlanta to do a promo radio station interview, and one to Boise to sign autographs at a new record store.

The night after he returned from Boise — a Thursday night — Mindy called him at home just as he was getting to bed. She too had just got back into town and was very anxious to get together with him.

"Are you rehearsing tomorrow?" she asked.

"Yes, it's our final rehearsal day. Starting Monday we go into the studio and start recording."

"And then your schedule gets a little busier?"

"A lot busier," he said sadly. "We'll be pulling ten hour days Monday through Saturday for the foreseeable future."

"Rats," she said. "We'll hardly ever get to see each other then."

"I know," he said, a bit bummed about that himself.

"Well what time are you going to be done tomorrow?" she asked.

"We're gonna start at nine," he said. "Since it's the last day we're not going to go the full four hours. We'll probably knock off around noon or so."

"I'm totally free tomorrow," she said. "How about I meet you after you rehearse and we go to the beach together?"

"The beach?" he asked. "Isn't that kind of... you know... public?"

"Have faith in me," she said. "I'm the queen of the greater LA rural area. I know all the places where no one else goes."

He took her at her word for that and they arranged for him to make another one of his mysterious departures, this time from the rehearsal warehouse.

He climbed into her car at 12:10 PM, two blocks from the entrance to the warehouse where the two National employed security guards and the limousine driver were still puzzling over what they were supposed to do when one of their charges just walked off on them in the middle of a not-too-terribly-attractive neighborhood. While the rest of the band — all of whom knew what Jake was doing — explained that they should just mind their own fucking business, Jake drank in the sight of Mindy dressed in a pair of blue jean short shorts and a tank-top that clearly revealed the red bikini top beneath.

"You are gorgeous," Jake told her. Unable to resist, he leaned over and gave her a long, lingering kiss on the mouth.

"Mmmm," she said when the kiss finally broke. "That was nice. I missed you."

"I missed you too."

She drove off, winding expertly through gray and dingy streets, darting in and out of lunchtime traffic, and eventually accessing Interstate 10 heading west, toward the ocean. She rested her right hand on Jake's leg as she drove, removing it only when she had to change gears. They talked of their trips and the adventures they'd had on them. When they got to Santa Monica she took the offramp for Highway 1, the Pacific Coast Highway, or PCH, as it was known. She headed north on the winding, twisting coastal road, the sparkling blue Pacific to their left, a series of hills and cliffs with million dollar mansions poised upon them on their right.

They drove for miles, passing out of the densely populated area and into the more undeveloped section of seacoast (as far as such a thing was possible in southern California anyway). Less than five miles from the Ventura County line, they came to a small turnoff that led to a place called Point Dume Beach. She turned here and descended down a steep road to a white stretch of beach. It wasn't completely deserted — there were a few people walking dogs, a few surfers down by the southern end, and a small family gathering near the northern end — but for the LA area it was about as deserted as a stretch of seacoast could possibly be.

"Do I know emptiness, or what?" she asked, parking the car in a small lot.

"I am impressed," Jake admitted.

They gathered a blanket, a picnic basket, their beach bags, and a small cooler and carried it down to the beach, finding a spot to deploy that was roughly in the middle of the biggest stretch of emptiness. The nearest person to them was more than three hundred yards away.

Jake had showered, shaved, and changed his clothes before leaving the warehouse. As such, he was now wearing his swimming trunks, a pair of sandals, and a Corona T-shirt. He took the T-shirt off and tossed it in his beach bag. Mindy whistled appreciatively as he bared his chest and ran her hand softly over it.

"Nice," she said, pinching a little on his upper abdomen.

"It's all those aerobic classes and personal trainer sessions they make us go to," he said, enjoying her touch upon him.

"Oh I know how that is," she assured him. "I go three times a week for two hours. That's why I can eat all that fried food and ice cream." She shrugged. "It beats anorexia or bulimia. That's how a lot of the actresses keep their shape. That's how Veronica does it."

"Really?"

"Oh yeah," she said. "While we were filming Thinner Than Water she was off barfing in her trailer six or seven times a day sometimes. When she wasn't getting it on with her agent, that is."

Jake pondered that little bit of inside Hollywood information for a moment but lost the image of Veronica puking and munching muff the moment Mindy grasped the bottom of her tank top and pulled it over her head.

"Wow," was all he could say as he gazed upon more flesh than any Mindy Snow fan had ever seen on the big screen or on television. Her bikini top was certainly not risqué, but it wasn't terribly conservative either. Her perfectly rounded breasts molded the red cups with a form that could only be considered excellence personified. And when she undid her shorts and pushed them down, showing the almost skimpy bikini bottoms, Jake had to fight to keep from drooling.

"What do you think?" Mindy asked, seeing his interest. "Is my workout regiment effective?"

"You're beautiful," Jake said. "You're an absolute work of art."

She gave him her shy smile. "Would you mind rubbing some sunscreen on this work of art? I wouldn't want to burn it."

He didn't mind at all. In fact, he had to fight furiously to keep from springing an embarrassing bulge in his shorts as he slathered the coconut scented liquid over her shoulders and back, going from her neck all the way down to the top of her bikini bottoms. Her skin was soft and silky and oh so smooth. He longed to put his mouth on it but held off for the time being.

"Should I do the front too?" he asked when he'd rubbed and touched her as much as he could get away with.

She giggled. "I think I can get that part myself," she said. And she did, but the sight of her rubbing lotion into the tops of her breasts and her smooth stomach and her sexy legs was almost more erotic than touching her with his hands.

When she was completely covered with sun block, she offered to do him as well. He gladly turned his back to her and spent a very pleasurable five minutes feeling her soft hands slide over his flesh, rubbing oil on his shoulders, his back, his neck.

"You can do my front," he offered once the job was complete.

She smiled and dropped the bottle of lotion into his hands. "I would," she said, "but you might think I was taking advantage of you."

"Spoilsport," he said.

Once he was as oiled as she, they broke into the picnic basket. Inside they found roasted turkey sandwiches, potato salad, and fresh cantaloupe slices, all prepared by Carmella. That ate the food and washed it all down with ice cold cokes. They then lay down next to each other and listened to the crashing of the waves on the shore. Jake wanted to hold her hand but she kept it firmly atop her stomach, out of his reach.

In all, they stayed for almost three hours, mostly just laying around and talking, but occasionally going out into the surf to play a little. They dodged waves and picked up shells. They did some body surfing until a particularly ferocious wave picked Jake up and slammed him down into the sand hard enough to knock the wind out of him. They walked up and down the length of the beach a few times, taking care to stay as far away as possible from any of the other beachgoers, outside of what Mindy called the "zone of recognition". And while they touched each other a few times while in the surf, they did not kiss or make out. And while they held hands while walking on the beach, they did not embrace here either.

"It's too public of a setting," Mindy told him the one time he'd tried to kiss her.

"But there's nobody else around," he said.

"I know, but its better safe than sorry." She offered him a seductive look. "There will be time for that later."

He tried no further, pacified by the implied promise she'd offered.

They climbed into the Porsche just after four o'clock, Jake behind the wheel this time. They were still wearing their wet bathing suits — although Mindy had put her tank top back on — so they sat on their towels to protect the seats.

"Let's go to my place," Mindy told him. "Do you know the way?"

He didn't actually, but she was glad to direct him. As he piloted the car through the winding roads Mindy snuggled up next to him, resting her head on his shoulder, her hand on his leg. A few times, during the straightaway portions, she would angle her head upward and give him soft, drawn out kisses on the mouth. They talked little, and what conversation they did have was of unimportant things. Jake didn't mind. He was immensely enjoying the feel of her body against his.