Rock All Night

16




I stood on the outside of the tile shower room and listened as the hiss of water filled the air. Steam started to drift out.

“So, I wanted to ask you about the album cover for Bigger Than – ”

“What?” Derek yelled, his voice sounding hollow from bouncing on the tile.

“I said, I wanted to ask you about – ”

“I can’t hear you over the water – you’re going to have to come in here.”

A*shole.

I was pretty damn sure he could hear me just fine.

But I steeled myself and walked around the corner into the shower room, my heels clicking on the tile.

I almost choked.

He was standing there, outlined against the white tiled wall, soap suds sliding down his body, his hair wet and slick, his skin luscious and shiny under the jet of water.

I recalled a story about some movie studio mogul who wanted to cast an Olympic female swimmer in a movie. In everyday life, she was kind of plain, but put her in a bathing suit and a pool, and she looked amazing. The studio mogul’s comment was, “Dry she ain’t much – but wet, she’s a star.”

Well, Derek Kane dry was damn good-looking… but wet and naked, he was heart-stopping.

His skin shone. Water droplets seemed to dance in the air. His muscles bulged and cast off spray all around him. He was that Obsession ad by Calvin Klein, times ten.

And though his growing erection had seemingly died down a little, it still swayed tantalizingly, with a sluice of water cascading down over it like the most beautiful waterfall you’ve ever seen.

My panties were wetter than the shower tiles, I was certain of that.

He pulled his face out of the jet of water and caught me staring at his crotch.

It immediately started to get bigger again.

F*ck!

I snapped my eyes back up to his face.

He grinned saucily. “… you were saying?”

I blushed again. “Um, the, uh, the cover for your first album – was that a dig at Killian?”

He rolled his eyes. “That f*cking story? The one Spin or whoever made up?”

“You heard about it?”

“I didn’t read it, but Ryan told me people kept asking about it on Facebook.”

“…so was it?”

“No, it wasn’t a dig at Killian. I begged Killian to come join the band. He’s like a f*ckin’ Mozart on guitar. I know it sounds insane to say it, but I think he’s just as good as Jimmy Page or Hendrix. Why the f*ck would I want to insult him?”

“Well, why those guns, then?”

“The real question is, why do guns at all? That’s what you’re really asking. I mean, I’m soooo obsessed with the size of my cock, I just HAD to put it on an album cover, right?” he grinned.

I gritted my teeth. “I guess someone might think that.”

He shook his head, casting water everywhere. “It was all a big joke. Once we had the name, we knew what everybody was going to think it was about, even though it was Riley who came up with it.”

That was another big, contentious debate about the band name – where it had come from. Nobody knew for sure.

“How’d she come up with it?”

“I’ll let her tell you, she tells it better. Anyway, we knew what people were going to think, so we just ran with it. Played it up. ‘Rock out with your cock out.’ ‘Cock rock.’ To tell the truth, for the first cover I think I wanted a Mac truck next to one of those little two-seater electric cars. It was Killian who suggested the guns.”

Derek switched to his hilariously bad English accent.

“‘You yanks are all about your guns, aren’t you? Love your guns, right? We should have guns on the cover. Yeah, guns.’ So I suggested a cannon, but Killian was like, ‘This isn’t the 18th century, mate.’ So we were like, ‘What’s the biggest f*cking gun you can have?’ We thought about a machinegun or something, but Riley insisted on the .44 Magnum. She’s a big Clint Eastwood fan.”

I would never have guessed that, but okay.

“And then we needed a dinky gun, and of all the dinky guns out there, James Bond’s gun was the most famous, and it’s small – which, you know, for a spy trying to conceal a firearm is actually a good thing, but whatever. So we did the cover shoot and immediately people start talking shit and saying I was dissing Killian when it was Killian’s idea to use guns in the first place. F*ckin’ idiots.”

“Why didn’t you just set the record straight?”

“Why would I wanna do that? It’s more fun to hear them argue over what we meant. They come up with some pretty hilarious shit. Besides, we don’t talk to the press, remember?”

Unless you’re naked and they’re in the shower with you, apparently.

“Why is that?”

“Because they’re not interested in the truth. They’re not interested in a fair or accurate picture. They’re interested in sensationalism, and shocking headlines, all so they can get the big scoop and advance their careers, or whore themselves out for advertising money.”

“I’m a journalist, and I’m standing right here – you do remember that, right?”

He grinned. “Sorry. Not you, personally. Just your… profession in general. Go listen to the first verse of 99 Problems by Jay-Z. He lays it out pretty well.”

Derek had just dissed me, so I felt like pushing it. “Some people would say that you just have an overly thin skin and can’t handle criticism. Like some of the bad reviews on your first album.”

“Yeah, well, ‘some people’ can go f*ck themselves.”

“Saying that doesn’t really help with the ‘thin-skinned’ impression.”

“Yeah? Okay, here it is: did those first reviews hurt? Yeah, of course. It pissed me off royally. Those were songs I wrote about you. About us. And they shat all over them.”


Oh my God… I’d never thought about it like that before.

I felt like I wanted to cry a little, I was so touched.

Derek didn’t notice, just kept talking. “But that was just the final straw. You wanna know where it really started?”

“Of course.”

“Back in Athens, when me and Ryan still had Inward Spiral – you remember Inward Spiral, don’t you?”

“Did you ever write that song, ‘Recipe for Disaster’?”

He laughed. “You do remember. No, that’s still on the docket – same as ‘According to Kaitlyn.’ Actually, ‘According to Kaitlyn’ was my working title for ‘Girl, Please Stay.’ Did you know that?”

A flush of heat went through my chest. I got a little choked up again.

“…no, I didn’t.”

“Well, it was. Anyway, there was some nerdy music guy from the Red & Black, the UGA newspaper, at one of the shows, and he wanted an interview. So we gave him one. And the entire f*cking time, he obviously had this huge chip on his shoulder. He was haughty and stuck-up and just loooved him some Velvet Underground, and anybody who wasn’t the Velvet Underground or Lou Reed basically sucked ass. Have you ever noticed that critics – at least indie critics and college critics – all f*cking hate the stuff they review? They’re so above it all. If it’s a movie critic, they hate 95% of all movies except foreign stuff. If it’s a music critic, they hate everything except one or two ‘cool’ bands from the past and a bunch of obscure shit nobody’s ever heard of. And they sneer at everything else because they’re just too f*cking cool. Me? I love everything. I love Chuck Berry, I love Elvis, I love the Beatles, the Stones, Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Prince, Michael Jackson, NWA, Metallica, Tupac, No Doubt – I love f*ckin’ Earth Wind and Fire, for God’s sake – ”

“You don’t love Savage Garden,” I said.

He almost bust a gut laughing. “No, that’s true. I don’t love Savage Garden.”

“Or Maroon 5.”

“I gave Maroon 5 a bad rap. They’re okay.”

“Really.”

“Yeah, I met ‘em at a show a year ago.”

Of course you did.

“They’re really good guys. I realized I was just jealous of all the attention that Adam Levine got, so I gave them another listen… and yeah, they’re alright. So there you go – that can be your headline: Derek Kane Loves Maroon 5.”

“But then I’d be a sensationalizing media whore, right?” I asked in a smartass tone of voice.

He grinned. “You said it, not me. Anyway, back to the college music critic. The little prick hated everything. And he obviously hated us. Ryan was being so f*cking polite to him, so earnest, so… Ryan. And I just sat there the whole time staring at that punk with his little hipster glasses, thinking, ‘This a*shole is just going to write whatever he was going to write anyway, and he’ll cherry-pick everything we say to support whatever shit he’s already decided.’ And did he? Of course he did. He wrote this scathing review, making us sound like dumbshits and calling us a mediocre, derivative rip-off of some band I’d never heard of. And when I went and tracked them down on Youtube, they sounded nothing like us. So I confronted him the next time I saw him at another band’s show.”

“You didn’t,” I said, and laughed in spite of myself.

“I did. He was there with this little jaded alternative chick. I asked him why he’d written all those lies.

“‘They weren’t lies.’

“‘Yes they were. For one, we don’t sound even remotely like My Bloody Valentine.’

“‘It’s obvious you do.’

“‘It’s pretty f*ckin’ obvious we don’t.’

“‘Well, if you think that, it’s obvious you don’t know the first thing about music.’

“And then I got up in his face and started telling him that what was obvious is that he was a pathetic loser who wanted to be a musician and didn’t have the balls to get up on stage. He got all scared and said he was going to press charges if I touched him, which I wasn’t going to do at all, and then he takes his girl and splits. And THEN – THEN, like the little chickenshit that he is, he runs ANOTHER review of one of our shows, and starts insinuating I’m gay and that Ryan and I are lovers, and then he says how I would be better at giving blowjobs for ten bucks a pop behind the 40 Watt rather than singing inside of it.”

I put my hand to my mouth and had to suppress a laugh. That was just too funny.

Derek laughed, too. “Nothing against gay dudes, but don’t f*cking call me gay; I’m not gay. Do you know how many chicks I lost out on ‘cause they read that article?”

I doubted it was that many, but I didn’t like thinking about ‘all the chicks he missed out on,’ so I kept my mouth shut.

“So I see him and his girlfriend again at another band’s show, and as soon as he sees me coming, he runs. Doesn’t even grab his girlfriend, just bugs out for the hills. And I walk over to her, and I say, ‘Do you know who I am?’

“‘Yeah,’ she says. She’s kind of interested in me, I can tell.

“‘I f*ckin’ HATE your boyfriend,’ I say.

“‘I figured,’ she says, all cool, like she doesn’t care about him much, either.

“‘You know what he’s been writing about me?’ I say.

“‘Yeah.’

“‘You know it’s all lies, right?’

“‘Yeah.’

“‘He told you it was lies?’

“‘You should have heard him talking about it when he wrote it. He was more worked up than I’ve ever seen him before. Even when we have sex.’

“She kind of looked me up and down when she said that last part about sex, and I knew I had her.

“‘You know how I’m going to get him back?’ I asked her.

“‘How.’

“‘I’m going to take you back to my place and I’m going to f*ck your brains out and make you come so many times you won’t be able to remember your own name. You down for that?’”

As soon as Derek said it, my stomach twisted… and jealousy began to gnaw at me again.

“She was totally down. So I took her back to my place and I pulled out all the stops – I mean, I used every trick in the book. Made her come about a dozen times. And, with her full knowledge and consent, mind you, I recorded the whole thing with some of Ryan’s sound equipment that was laying around. It took three hours before we were finished – and then I mailed CD copies to the music critic department at the Red & Black with a note: ‘I respectfully disagree with your critic Bryce Dunkel’s last column. If he doesn’t think much of me as a musician, I at least would be better as a gigolo than what he suggested. You can listen and decide for yourself. Or just ask his former girlfriend. Sincerely, Derek Kane.’”

Now my stomach was churning.

Pulled out all the stops.

Used every trick in the book.

Made her come about a dozen times.

It took three hours before we were finished.

My jealousy was eating me alive.

Along with a certain queasiness at what he had done.

“You didn’t,” I gasped.

“I did,” he grinned. “I heard from some other dude on the newspaper staff that the little shit walked in right in the middle of hour two, and found the entire staff of the newspaper – all 60 of them – gathered around listening to his girlfriend scream my name and tell me about how her boyfriend had never given her an orgasm, and that he liked to wear women’s underwear and screamed out ‘Mommy’ when he came.”


I clapped my hand over my mouth and burst out laughing despite my nausea at the whole story. “OH MY GOD.”

“Yeah. Mr. Bryce Dunkel never showed his face again at the Red & Black, and I pretty much decided after that I was never going to f*ckin’ talk to a member of the press, ever.”

“Until now.”

“Until now.”

We just stood there in the shower, the steam rising around us – me standing there with a digital recorder in hand, him standing there naked, soap and water streaming down his perfect body and his long, thick, gorgeous cock –

And then, as I realized I was staring at it, it began to get erect again.

Quickly.

Bigger.

Thicker.

Harder.

“You know… you don’t have to just stand there. You could come over here with me,” he said huskily. “You can even turn off the recorder if you want. Or not. Your choice.”

By the time he finished, his cock was fully erect, pulsing in the stream of water, even more beautiful and amazing than in my dreams from four years ago.

I remembered how I’d fantasized in the dorm shower the morning after. About how I wanted him to come in and pin me against the wall and take me, ravage me, make me come –

And now, I could have it. His body – his muscles – the water – the steam – his thick, gorgeous hard-on – I could have it if I wanted it.

Pulled out all the stops.

Used every trick in the book.

Made her come about a dozen times.

Three hours before we were finished.

But the thought of what he’d done with that music critic’s girlfriend made me stop.

I turned around and walked back into the locker room without saying anything.