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.