Jake and I were both cocooned underneath the sheets. He was flat on his back, his eyes shut tight, his arm tucked behind me. I snuggled in closer to him. We'd walked back to the cabin after the karaoke night, Jake stone-faced and pissed off. I'd grabbed his hand and asked him to tell me everything that had happened. He told me, his voice measured and even, and I flashed back to the clerk at the store. He said Hackerman had grabbed him first and that he'd had no choice but to fight with him. I believed him. He may have had a hair-trigger temper, but he wasn't a fighter. He'd walked away from plenty of confrontations before. But he was about as mad as I'd ever seen him. He'd downed a beer as soon as we'd gotten back to the cabin, draining the bottle in two long swallows. After, it had taken nearly fifteen minutes for my feminine wiles to kick in and for me to lure him into the bedroom for some much-needed distraction. If Rhonda had gone back to the black monstrosity and listened closely, she might've heard us.
