Funeral Games – Chapter 2

When Jake got back from the gym, after he had showered and changed and tossed his sweat-soaked workout clothes into the laundry hamper, he started dinner. He did it mechanically, moving from the bedroom to the kitchen without checking the time, without even thinking that it was getting late.

His life had become automatic.

He wouldn't say it was routine. No, it wasn't exactly that. It was more like practicing a one-two punch on the heavy bag for so long that the next time some meathead lunged at you, you dropped him just like that, without even knowing that you were going to do it until it was done.

But even that was not a perfect comparison, Jake thought as he stood in front of the open refrigerator, scrutinizing its contents. He already knew what was there. Years spent living hand to mouth had made him meticulous and fussy about food. Even without looking he knew exactly what they had, right down to the last cold cut and fuzzed-over plastic container of leftovers.

All the same, this wasn't a matter of life or death, not like war, or like knocking some big oaf flat on his ass. It was just dinner, which Jake tried to have ready right at 7:31. That was when Sherry would walk through the door, unless she had missed her train again, and she'd be hungry, because she had probably worked through lunch again.

Jake didn't go around trying to pass himself off as enlightened or anything because he stayed home while Sherry worked. After the thing in China, she'd been transferred to a desk job, and the paycheck she brought home was plenty to support both of them. Jake, who had never been much good at anything but cracking heads, didn't really see the point in going out and trying to make nice in the post-employment economy when he didn't have to.

He stayed home. Cleaned, cooked, ran errands, hit the gym five days a week. A lot of times when he was out during the day, he'd see some young guy in a suit, a guy about his age, with a phone glued to his ear and a surge in his stride and a shrewd and starving look on his face.

Thank god that's not me, Jake always told himself, as a black barb of jealousy lodged itself a little deeper in his heart.

He took some hamburger that had been thawing out of the fridge, then added a red onion, a couple of potatoes, and some mushrooms that looked like they were about to go bad to his little pile of supplies on the counter. Jake's mother had taught him how to make pirogues when he was still a kid. They'd never really gotten enough to eat back in those days, but when you chopped everything up and mixed it with enough cheap starch, sometimes you actually felt full for a few minutes afterwards.

Anyway, Sherry seemed to like them pretty well.

Jake got out a knife and started to mince the onion in neat, unhurried strokes. He had checked out again, and he was moving without even being conscious of what he was doing. His hand did not need to be told to bring the knife down, to scrape the chopped onions off the cutting board and into a mixing bowl when he was finished.

It wasn't that he was distracted, or deep in thought. In fact he wasn't really thinking about anything at all. Occasionally, a few lines of an old conversation, a few bars or a song he had heard once, would pass through his mind. That was all, though.

He finished cutting up the vegetables and turned around to rinse the knife in the sink. All at once, an image of his father's face came untethered from some place in the depths of his subconscious and floated up to flash briefly before his eyes.

Jake stopped what he was doing. He looked down at his hands. One was on the hilt of the knife, and the other held a dishtowel which he was using to dry the blade. For a single horrible instant, he had no idea where he was, or why, or even how he had gotten here.

Carefully, he set the knife down on the counter, then he planted both palms in the edge of the sink. His eyes drifted out of focus, staring off into the middle distance. This time, though, his mind wasn't wandering. The gears were turning up there, all to some definite purpose.

He tried to picture his father's face. What came to mind was not the self-assured and imposing figure that Wesker had cut in the years leading up to his death, but instead only the twitchy and perpetually startled-looking kid he had been at seventeen. If he walked through the door right now, Jake thought, they would have nothing to say to each other. He would have no way to explain to that man he had always hated why he was cooped up in some mid-market condo outside Washington, DC, making dinner, picking up the dry cleaning, going to the supermarket, being utterly unremarkable in every way.

When he did hear the front door open, Jake jumped about a mile. For a second, he really was convinced that somehow his father had clawed his way out of hell just so he could let Jake know how disappointed he was in him. Any moment now he would start down the hall, his Calvin Klein suit matted with the dirt of the grave, dragging his spectral chains behind him…

"Hello?" Sherry called from the foyer. Her voice dragged him roughly back to reality.

Sheepishly, Jake looked around the kitchen, remembering the half-made pirogues sitting forgotten on the counter. He sucked in a deep breath. "In here, babe," he called back. He had wanted it to sound careless, casual, like there was nothing to see here. He didn't think he had pulled it off.

Sherry came down the hall and poked her head into the kitchen. "Something smells good," she said, and smiled. Jake hadn't started cooking yet so there wasn't anything, good or bad, for her to have smelled. Still, she said it every night and there was no reason for her to stop now.

"Give me a half hour," Jake said. "I got tied up at the gym. You're not starving are you?"

Sherry shook her head. "I'm okay."

She padded across the kitchen floor in her stocking feet. They'd made it through the fall together, and the winter, and now it was spring, which meant that the roads were grimy with melting snow. Sherry had a very strict policy about tracking mud into the house, and she always left her shoes by the door. Jake liked seeing her off in the morning, liked when she crouched down to zip up her high heeled boots, when she straightened up again, and with the four-inch boost to her height they could suddenly look each other in the eye.

Without those boots, though, Jake had to bend down so that she could kiss him. She did it quickly, brushing her lips over the corner of his mouth, and then she smiled, though her eyes were tense.

"You're too wonderful," she said. "I don't know what I'd do without you."

Sherry looked at him for a second, like she was waiting for something, then she turned on her heels and went silently out.

It was only after she was gone that Jake realized he probably should have said something just then. Something nice, to make her feel good. He looked down at the half-made meal spread out on the counter, the dough webbing his fingers, the flour dusting the front of his shirt. It would have to do in a pinch, he decided. He'd always been good at doing things that needed to get done, and bad at saying things that needed to get said.

He heard the shower come on in the bathroom, a dull rattle reverberating through the thin walls of the condo.

Sherry still didn't know how much he had loathed the idea of moving in with her when she had first brought it up, how much the suggestion had almost sent him running right back to the warm embrace of being a gun for hire. He'd still been mulling over how to tell her when she had showed up in the living room where he was bunking up on the sofa one night and crawled in under the blankets with him.

They'd fooled around for a while without really making much headway. It wasn't that Jake didn't know his way around a warm body, and, just like with all their dealings together, Sherry didn't have any trouble keeping pace with him. But trying to hook up with someone you actually liked, Jake soon discovered, was like trying to unlearn years of bad technique.

Eventually, he tried to turn over on top of her and only managed to roll them right off the couch.

Laying there in the blue light of the muted television, half covered by the blankets they had dragged after them, with one of Sherry's sharp little hipbones digging into his stomach, Jake started to laugh. Sherry didn't ask him why. She didn't want to know what was so funny. She just looked at him perplexed for a moment, and then she laughed a little too.

Squirming out from under him, she offered her hand. They went back to her bedroom together, and Jake spooned up against her back and fell asleep almost immediately, to hell with the boner awkwardly tenting the front of his underwear.

It wasn't until he woke up the next morning that he realized he had all but agreed to stay. He could have kicked himself for that one. It wasn't that he didn't like Sherry; he just wasn't quite sure he liked her more than he liked his freedom.

He shouldn't have worried. Jake didn't know what he had expected exactly, but in truth he hardly saw Sherry at all these days. A few hours in the evening when she was too exhausted from a day at the office to really carry on a conversation; two days on the weekends when they slept late together and then shuffled around the house cleaning the windows and vacuuming.

For the most part, Jake was alone. He was used to it. Being alone had always suited him just fine. But it seemed kind of a waste now, kind of sad in a way he wasn't sure he'd be able to articulate.

When he'd finished rolling out the dough for pirogues, Jake wrapped it up into a cylinder. He cut a slice from one end, flattened it out into a little pancake in the palm of his hand, and spooned some of the meat into the middle. Then he folded one end over and pleated the edges of the dough, making little folds and then tucking them under, sealing up the edge of the dumpling.

The whole process had only taken a few seconds. When Sherry had seen him do it for the first time, she had called him an artist. Jake supposed that there was something aesthetically pleasing about creating that perfect seam, but it wasn't like he was doing it to impress anybody. Hell, the damn things just fell all to pieces unless you got them exactly right the first time.

As he started in on the second pirogue, Jake realized that he hadn't thought about his father once in almost ten whole minutes. He was about to break out the tickertape parade for that little achievement, when all at once that old familiar face was dredged to the surface again.

That faded photo, that file degraded from years of being copied and recopied, had become his father's death mask. In it, Wesker's eyes had been hungry. He'd wanted something back then. Whatever else he had done, who could blame him for that? Who could get mad at someone just for wanting?

After a while, Sherry came out of the bathroom. Her hair was damp from the shower and she was dressed in a little pair of cotton shorts and a tank top. Jake wondered if he'd put them on for him. She sure looked like a million bucks.

"How was work?" Jake said as he started to cut up some stuff to make a salad.

"Same as always," Sherry said. "We're drafting a proposal for submission to the DOD. Once it goes through, we'll have access to the old Umbrella Corporation spy satellites."

That name – Umbrella – was like a sudden weight dropped into the pit of his stomach. Jake felt the little hairs on the back of his neck rise, but he managed to keep his voice pretty casual. "You sure that's such a good idea?"

"Someone might as well get some use out of them," Sherry said. "They're just sitting up there rusting. Do things rust in space?"

"I don't know," Jake said.

"I'll look it up." Sherry slid her phone out of the waistband of those little shorts. While she pulled up Google and typed with one hand, she got a couple of beers out of the fridge with the other.

"It says that metal can't rust without oxygen, but exposure to ultraviolet light can trigger a similar process."

"Cool," Jake said.

"Yeah." She nudged the cold side of one of the beer bottles against his wrist, and Jake took it and had a long swallow. When he went back to folding the last of the pirogues, Sherry leaned against the counter watching him.

"You have beautiful hands," she said quietly.

"And you've got great tits, but I'm not allowed to stare at those."

Sherry kicked him in the ankle for that one. She was just playing around, but it was still hard enough to hurt a little.

"Does it really bother you that we're going to use those satellites?" Sherry asked.

"It bothers me that they're up there at all more than it bothers me that you're going to have access to them," Jake said. He finished up the last pirogue placed it on the steamer. "It all seems kind of… you know."

"You make it sound like I'm doing something wrong."

"It's not that. I just think that, if it were me, I'd want to leave those old dead things alone."

"Now you sound superstitious." Sherry took a drink of beer, but not so quickly that she managed hide the grin that flashed across her face.

"I guess I do. It doesn't really matter how I sound, though. You'll do just what you want."

Sherry slowly lowered the beer bottle. She wasn't smiling anymore. Jake knew that he had said the wrong thing, that what he had meant to say had come out in the worst possible way.

"Because you know what's best," he amended quickly. "Now, grab a couple of plates. These are just about ready to eat."

After dinner, Sherry did the dishes and then came out to curl up on the couch and get a movie from Netflix. She stretched out with her legs in Jake's lap, which was just fine by him. About twenty minutes in, when it became pretty clear that the movie wasn't going anywhere interesting, Jake slipped a hand under the blanket and began to stroke her calf.

She sighed and arched back against him. Encouraged, he went on, cupping his hand around one of her knees. Her skin was soft; every time he touched her he was surprised by how soft she really was. Though she was small, she wasn't slight. That always surprised him too, that she was a creature of real weight and substance. He had gotten used to translucent girls, there with him in form but already halfway out the door.

Jake moved his hand up over the bulge of her thigh. He was trying to go slow, as slow as he could, dragging it out to tease her a little. Sherry didn't seem to be taking the bait, though. When Jake glanced towards her face, he found it turned away from him, facing the television. In the glow from the screen, the tips of her blonde hair looked blue.

When his hand reached the taut little tendon on the inside of her thigh, he expected her to flinch. It wasn't, Jake was all but positive, that she didn't like it when he touched her. But she still tensed up in a kind of shivery, nervous anticipation when things started to get hot and heavy. At first, Jake had thought it was because he was doing something wrong. But Sherry had never mentioned anything, and she didn't seem like the type to keep quiet to preserve a guy's feelings. Besides, Jake wasn't about to sprinkle a hundred rose petals all over the bed or anything like that, but he knew that he had some pretty good moves where it counted.

Tonight, however, that nervous little twitch, that winding up of muscle under his hand never came. Maybe, he thought, Sherry was finally getting over her honeymoon jitters. He stretched out two fingers, sliding them under the hem of her shorts until he felt a fringe of downy curls.

Sherry murmured softly and slowly raised her head, propping herself up on her elbow.

Jake frowned. "You fell asleep."

"I was just resting my eyes."

When Jake withdrew his fingers, Sherry sat up slowly to follow them. She swung one leg over his thighs so that she was kneeling across his lap. Her hair was tousled, eyes still half-closed. Her lips twitched into a sleepy smile.

"What were you doing with your hand there?" she said.

"Looking for my keys."

Sherry kissed him. Her lips moved slowly, still numb with sleep. "Did you find them?"

"No." Jake stroked his hands along her sides, lifting her shirt. Then he felt it again, that subtle tensing of muscle, as if she were trying to pull away from him without actually moving.

"Take another look," she said. "I'm positive they're there."

Jake sighed. "It's okay, babe. I guess you had a long day. You should go to bed."

"Are you sure?" Sherry said.

"Yeah, I'm sure. We'll have all Saturday to fool around. And you can have all Sunday to walk around bowlegged like a cowboy."

Sherry rolled her eyes as she climbed off his lap. "You always say the most romantic things, Jake."

He watched her head back towards the bedroom. At the door, she glanced back at him. "Not coming?"

"I'm just going to finish the movie and then I'll be along." He glanced back at the screen. Things had changed, but he couldn't say what. "We should get Hulu Plus or something."

"Maybe when I get that promotion," Sherry said, turning away again. "We'll be able to afford it then."