She found herself getting quite aroused by looking at the shots. And then it occurred to her that there was one activity she was set up for.
She returned to her bedroom and took off all of her clothes. She then reached into the little drawer on the bedside table and pulled out her dildo and her vibrating butterfly. She went to work on herself, quickly getting into it.
As she tuned her own instrument, her thoughts first turned to Suzie, the pilot, and the things she wanted to do to and with her. She and Suzie (as well as Suzie and Laura) were still maintaining their normal flirtation and teasing but had gone no further than that. Was it maybe time for that to change?
After all, she was single now. She no longer had that issue of fidelity to worry about.
After returning from their ten-day trip to New Zealand, Jake and Laura left the two sets of parents in Los Angeles to get in a little more visit time with their respective grandchildren but they themselves flew back to Oceano to enjoy some alone time before Laura had to leave again for another three months on the road.
On April 23, 1996, the Celia Valdez tour was scheduled to start its second leg with a show in Boise, Idaho. From there, the tour would take advantage of the spring and early summer weather to pound out dates across the northern portion of the United States, and not just the big cities like Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Chicago and Detroit. The practice of charging market value for concert tickets had suddenly made it profitable to perform in small cities with small venues that otherwise would have been overlooked. As such, places like Cheyenne, Butte, Helena, Billings, Fargo, Pierre and Madison were on the schedule. After working their way to upstate New York and New England, they would pause for another break and then work their way back to the west, hitting all the major and minor Canadian cities just north of the US border until wrapping up the final date in Victoria, British Colombia.
The couple spent much of their time just enjoying the life they had built. They had coffee together in the mornings and then ate whatever breakfast Elsa had concocted. They went for long walks on the cliffside, usually working their way down to the dunes of Pismo Beach to sit on the beach for a while before climbing their way back up and heading home. In the evenings they would eat Elsa’s dinner and then sip wine out on the deck or smoke a little ganga out in the hot tub (or both). They would then go to bed and fuck, sometimes quickly, usually a longer session, before drifting off to sleep in each other’s arms. It was a good week in which they felt almost like a normal upper crust married couple living a normal upper crust married life. They bickered little but when they did it was usually over a trivial matter with a tone more good natured than one of real conflict.
But the togetherness had to come to an end. It was part of the life they had chosen.
On the late afternoon of April 21, they drove back to Oceano Airport and climbed back into Jake’s Chancellor for the flight back to Whiteman. Forty minutes later, they were back in LA. They spent the night in the Granada Hills home, eating a few of the freezer meals for dinner, drinking a lot of wine, and then engaging in a lengthy session of sexual congress, knowing it would be their last for a while.
On the morning of April 22, Jake drove Laura to Van Nuys Airport, where Celia and the rest of the band were waiting, along with Suzie, Njord, and the King Air aircraft that would take them to Boise to start getting ready for the first show of the new leg.
“How are you doing, C?” Jake asked the singer as Laura reported to the pilots for the weigh-in of herself and her travel bag.
“I’m doing well,” she assured him, and indeed she looked like she might be telling the truth. The haggard look on her face had pretty much faded away and the lines on her face were no longer prominent. The bags on her eyes were gone as well. “Ready to get back to the grind.”
He passed a few words with everyone—shaking hands, giving hugs, offering words of encouragement and friendship—except Njord. He had not done much to conceal the fact that he disliked the copilot when he had hung out with the band back in February. Njord had picked up on this and tended to keep his distance.
Finally, he watched as everyone loaded into the plane. Laura was the last to board. He gave her one last hug, one last kiss, told her that he loved her, and then watched the aircraft swallow her up. He stayed on the tarmac, watching as the King Air’s engines fired up, as it taxied away onto the airfield itself, came to the head of Runway 34L, and then roared into the air and headed off to the north. He watched until it disappeared into the distance and then climbed back in his truck and drove back to Whiteman.
Thirty minutes after that he was back in the Chancellor. An hour after that, he was back home in Oceano, alone except for Elsa. He missed Laura already.
Two days later, just as he was settling into the routine of nothingness and starting to think about getting to work on some new material (his guitar had never come out of its case the entire time he had been in New Zealand), he returned from his morning run and was told by Elsa that Jill the accountant had called and wanted him to give her a call at her office as soon as possible.
Wondering what this was about—they had already filed his 1995 taxes and made adjustments for the next quarter—he put off his shower for now and went immediately to his office. He opened the phone book next to the phone and flipped through to the Y section, quickly finding the number for the offices of Yamashito, Yamashito and Yamashito. He dialed a one, the area code 916, and then the seven-digit number.
The phone rang twice before being picked up. The Yamashitos employed no receptionist or secretary so it was John Yamashito, Jill’s father, who’s voice he heard.
“Hey, Mr. Yamashito,” Jake greeted. “It’s Jake Kingsley.”
“How are you doing, Jake?” John asked politely.
“I’m doing good. Living the good life here on a cliff over the ocean.”
“Ahhh yes,” John said. “Your multi-million-dollar home that you did not really need.”
“Life is too short to just focus on needs, Mr. Yamashito,” Jake told him. “You have to go after some wants as well.”
“Perhaps,” John said, although he did not sound even remotely convinced of this.
“Anyway,” Jake said, “I got a message that Jill called for me.”
“That is correct,” John said. “I’m afraid she has some bad news to share with you.”
Jake felt a little sinking in the pit of his stomach. Bad news? What kind of bad news could an accountant share? There was only one thing he could think of. “Am I being audited?”
John chuckled a little. “No, nothing like that. This is bad news of the nature that you will consider good news, I’m sure. You are just unaware that it is, in fact, bad news.”
Jake blinked. What kind of Zen-Buddha shit was this old Japanese guy spouting? “Uh ... I’m not sure I’m following you, Mr. Yamashito.”
Another chuckle. “I’ll let Jill share the news with you,” he said. “Hang on. I’ll put you on hold.”
The phone clicked and went silent. There was no on-hold music to keep him entertained while he waited, probably because the Yamashitos were too cheap to pay for the service. Jake did not consider this to be a bad thing. The only on-hold music he had ever enjoyed were the cuts that had Laura playing sax in them, and those were few and far between these days.
The phone clicked again, and Jill’s voice was suddenly in his ear. “Hey, Jake,” she greeted. “Thanks for calling me back.”
“I always call my accountant back,” he told her. “What’s up? Your old man says you have bad news for me.”
Jill chuckled this time. “He would say that,” she said.
“It’s not bad news?”
“From the perspective of the accountant, it is bad news. From your perspective, it will undoubtedly be great news.”