Rock All Night

20




The backstage party had been crazy.

The after-party at the Dubai was crazier.

For one, there were more people. In fact, there was already a crowd in the bar by the time we arrived.

Two, backstage security at the Staples Center had more or less admitted people (and by that, I mean women) in an orderly manner. Some would come out, more would go in.

Here, anybody who wanted to walk in off the street could.

And had.

In fact, I think every groupie at the concert had tweeted or Facebooked ‘Derek Kane afterparty at the Dubai!’ because it seemed like half the female population of LA – or half the model-actress-wannabe population of LA, anyway – had shown up.

And three, there was a lot more booze available at the Dubai’s bar.

When we first got there, there had to have been 500 people inside. It was basically standing room only. The hotel staff quickly realized they had a problem and installed a velvet rope outside, but that only slowed the numbers going in. It did nothing about the people already inside.

The band got out of the limo, and fireworks of paparazzi flashes went off. It was like we were in a strobe-filled nightclub even before we set foot indoors.

In the hotel lobby, a coterie of security guards from the concert surrounded us and escorted us to the bar. Not that they had much to guard against; in the cavernous lobby, most of the guests merely turned around and stared quietly.

Inside the bar was a different matter.

Once Derek walked in, it was like somebody turned up the dial to eleven. People starting shouting and clapping. Nearby women screamed and reached out their hands to grope at him. The place was already like a giant dance club, what with the music they were piping in over the sound system. But now the energy amped up and people started gyrating in every open spot available.

The circle of guards moved like a giant amoeba through the crowd, with me, Miles, and the band at the center. They shuttled us all the way to the back to a giant alcove with a circular table, close to the spot where I had seen Derek just hours before. There was a lazy Susan filled with bottles of alcohol, crystal glasses, and buckets of ice: bottle service on steroids. A waitress appeared to let us know if we wanted anything else just to holler, she was there for us and us alone.

I ordered a glass of wine, then slipped across the leather seats, followed by Ryan and Killian – but Riley grabbed a bottle of vodka and plunged right into the crowd, while Derek waded out to meet his adoring female fans.

Miles basically stood at attention and kept an eye on his charges, dispatching security guards to deal with trouble spots and keep tiny sparks from turning into a forest fire.

Killian happily smoked his doobie and tinkered away on the strings of his guitar while Ryan lounged beside me. Occasionally people would come up and talk to them, and they would engage in conversation – Killian might even offer them a hit – but the table wasn’t where the action was. Derek was.

He was swamped by women. He had an arm draped over the shoulders of two attractive ones – a bodacious Latina and a porcelain-skinned redhead – and he was joking with another half-dozen hotties who were practically running their hands across his chest.

Whoop – up went the first top, out came the sharpie, and there he was, signing boobs again. The tallest one in the group – a six-foot Amazon – surprised him when she smashed her bare tits in his face. He responded by motorboating her, which made all the women around him shriek with laughter – and led a few more to volunteer to be next.

Unbelievable. F*cking unbelievable.

The waitress came back with our drinks – a glass of wine for me, a bottle of beer for Ryan, and a mineral water for Killian.

Guy smoked weed all day long, but drank Perrier in a bar? Weird.

“You okay?” Ryan asked in my ear, making himself audible above the chatter and loud music.

I looked over at him in surprise. “Yeah – why?”

“Cause you look like you’re about to go kill somebody.”

I stepped back into my own body and realized my hands were clenched so tightly – one in my lap, the other around the wine glass stem – that they hurt. My jaw ached from grinding my teeth.

I sighed at first – and then gradually became more heated as I went on. “It’s just… they throw themselves at him like that! It’s disgusting!”


“It’s pretty outrageous,” Ryan agreed.

“Outrageous doesn’t even begin to cover it! Don’t they have any self-respect?”

He was repressing a smile.

“What?” I asked defensively.

“Little jealous?”

“What?! No. Why would I be jealous?”

“Come on, Kaitlyn. You two had something pretty special four years ago.”

“No we didn’t,” I protested.

He gave me a Give me a break kind of look.

“We didn’t,” I insisted. “And even if we did, that was four years ago. That was ages ago.”

“Feelings can still be pretty strong even four years later.”

I watched as Derek posed for a picture as an Asian beauty and a stunning blonde each kissed opposite sides of his face.

“Not for everybody, apparently,” I griped.

Ryan looked over at his best friend’s escapades. “You shouldn’t let this get to you.”

“I’m not,” I snapped, even though it was obvious to anyone with functioning eyeballs that I was.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” he said.

“That’s kind of what bothers me.”

Now some other girl was taking a selfie with Derek – and she quite boldly took his hand and placed it on her boob as she smushed up next to him.

UGH.

I turned away from the spectacle and looked at Ryan, if for no other reason than I couldn’t bear to watch anymore. “Why aren’t you out there, soaking up the female attention?”

He laughed. “Been there, done that, got the t-shirt and the hat.”

That was interesting.

I raised an eyebrow. “What does that mean, exactly?”

“It means exactly what it sounds like.”

I cocked my head and inclined it slightly, an expression that said …aaaand?

He grinned. “You’re not going to let this go, are you?”

“I am a journalist, you know.”

“Fine. Yeah, I’ve done the wild nights and empty sex, and it just doesn’t really hold any allure for me anymore.”

“Seriously.”

“Yeah. Seriously.”

I swept my arm out at the dance floor. “You could have any one of these gorgeous women tonight, and you’re going to tell me that, naaaah, you’re not interested? What are you, a monk?”

He laughed. “I don’t know if I could have any one of them.”

“You could pretty much have your pick.”

He shrugged. “Maybe.”

“So why don’t you?”

He looked straight into my eyes, and I could feel the earnestness and warmth radiating from them. “Because it doesn’t mean anything.”

“Explain.”

“I got tired of sleeping with girls ten minutes after I met them. I got tired of waking up next to strangers whose names I couldn’t remember. I got tired of the utter meaningless of it all. There was no depth, no connection… no passion. It was like somebody lining up an endless series of shots on a bar. The first twenty or so were fun… and then you start to get sick of it. Just like alcohol poisoning. And then you realize that it’s doing something to you… making you numb and dead inside, disconnecting me from what I set out to do in the first place, which was make amazing music… and it wasn’t fun anymore. It was just something to do, a way to ease the boredom and the loneliness on the road.”

“Daaaaaamn,” I said, really impressed – and depressed, all at the same time. “You make it sound awful.”

“It was. Well, not at first… like I said, the first twenty were fun. You know what made me stop?”

“What?”

“I’d just slept with a woman I kind of liked. She seemed really cool and friendly, and I was thinking about having her stay the night when I overheard her in the bathroom talking on her cell phone. ‘Guess who I just slept with – the bass player for Bigger!’”

“Ew,” I said, wrinkling up my nose. “Gross.”

“Yeah – but that’s not the best part. There was this pause like her friend was asking her a question, and then she says, ‘No, I couldn’t f*ck Derek, he was already with some other bitch – but I’ll use the bass player to get to him, just watch.’”

My face contorted in horror. “OH MY GOD, THAT’S HORRIBLE!”

Ryan just laughed. “Yeah. That was the last time I ever slept with anybody I met the same night. Actually…” He seemed to count off a number. “…that was the last time I slept with anybody I met the same week.”

“So… it sounds like you’ve slept with somebody else since then,” I prodded.

“Yeah, I dated a girl in another band for awhile. We met at a show where they opened for us.”

Kristin Longforth, lead singer of the indie band the Troublemakers, currently doing pretty well for themselves on the Billboard 100. Nowhere near Bigger’s status, though.

Last I’d heard, though, she and Ryan were still dating.

“Aren’t you seeing her anymore?”

Ryan shook his head and took a sip of his beer. “Nope. Broke up about a month ago.”

“What happened?”

He shrugged. “She’s a great girl, it just… it got to be too tough coordinating our schedules. She’s got her life, I’ve got mine… and they just never seemed to sync up.”

I put a hand on his. “I’m sorry.”

He smiled at me. “It’s okay. It’s not the end of the world.”

“Yeah… but it still sucks, though.”

“It does, but… life goes on. Now, tit for tat – what’s going on with you and Derek?”

That was a good question – but not one I wanted to answer, so I neatly sidestepped it. “‘Tit for tat’ – that sounds a little risqué coming from a nice boy like you.”

“I’m thinking of it for the title of the song I’m writing about Derek and his groupies.”

In spite of the little jab of pain it caused me, I laughed. It was pretty funny.

“Or it could be about Riley,” I suggested.

“No, that would be ‘Tats for Tits.’”

I laughed out loud, and searched the crowd, careful to avoid Derek and his circle of debauchery. “Where is Riley, anyway?”

“Hitting on anything with a pulse and a vagina, most likely.”

“What, and hope that she runs across a lesbian?”

“Oh no,” he scoffed. “That’d be too easy. Riley loves seducing straight girls. The girlier the better. ‘Turning ‘em out,’ as she calls it.”

“EW. Does that work?”

Ryan gave me a look like Are you crazy? “Oh yeah. She’s in the hottest band in the world. Of course it works.”

“Yeah, but she’s… ugh. Even if I were into women, which I’m not, I would never sleep with her.”

“Some women would. Some women do.”

“Straight girls,” I said in disbelief.

“Yup. Well… they say they’re straight, anyway.”

“Girls that look like that,” I said, and pointed to the nearest Playboy centerfold wannabe.

“Oh yeah.”

“WHY?”

He shrugged. “She’s famous.”

His words echoed Derek’s earlier assertion: They’re only acting like this because I’m famous… whoever said power is the greatest aphrodisiac had it wrong; it’s fame.

“That’s enough?”

“Welllll… in Riley’s case, because she doesn’t go out of her way to be… um… ‘presentable’…”


“Or even smell good,” I interjected.

Ryan laughed. “Or even smell good… she basically has to play the numbers game and hit on a lot of women. But Riley is perfectly willing to hit on a LOT of women, all day, all night. Plus, she’s dominant and she never gives up. Which seems to do pretty well for her.”

I shivered, thinking what horrors the phrase She never gives up might hold in store for me. “Still.”

“Yeah, well, alcohol helps, too,” Ryan grinned.

“Social lubricant and seduction aid throughout the ages.”

“Yup. By the way, you never answered my question about you and Derek.”

I looked at him from the corner of my eye. “Noticed that, huh?”

“Yeah.”

I smiled. “Hey – I’m the journalist here. I’m supposed to ask the questions.”

“I didn’t ask many. Just the one.”

Dammit.

I shrugged. “There’s not much to tell.”

“Give me a break, Kaitlyn.”

“There’s not,” I insisted. “He wants to screw me, I don’t want to be a cheap lay, end of story.”

He laughed and tilted back his head, then got a weird expression on his face, like Do I do this or not?

“What?” I asked.

He looked at me hesitantly. “I don’t even know why I’m telling you this, but… it’s not like that with him. Not when it comes to you.”

My face hardened. “Yeah, right.”

“It’s not,” he insisted. “I think it’s safe to say that you mean more to Derek than any girl he’s ever been with in his entire life. I mean, he wrote an entire album of songs about you. I don’t know any other girl he’s written a single song about, ever.”

That was like a punch to the gut.

I could feel my throat tightening and my eyes starting to water. “He said you… you saw what happened to him after we… after I left…”

Ryan nodded. “It was bad. It was real bad. Not suicidal bad or anything, but… I’ve never seen him that depressed. Never. Didn’t want to leave the house, lost his job at the 40 Watt… just sat around all day and watched crappy reality TV. He basically became a hermit for three months. And if you know Derek, that’s not the kind of guy he is.”

“What made him snap out of it?”

Ryan gave a wry little grin. “He got really angry at you and decided he wasn’t going to mope over you anymore.”

Ouch.

“It was like somebody flicked a light switch. One day he was sitting around with two weeks’ worth of stubble and Cheetos dust on his lips, and the next he was showered and ready to go find a guitarist and a drummer and start recording. And the shit that poured out of him… it was dark. At first. And then, finally, the good stuff won out… the good memories. And that was the stuff that eventually made it on the first album. So, yeah, I think it’s probably safe to say that you mean more to him than any other woman that I’ve ever seen him with.”

My heart was racing in my chest. It was filled with pain for Derek… and tenderness… and the hope that maybe, just maybe, I’d been wrong.

Then I made the mistake of looking out at the dance floor.

Reality rudely intruded.

“Great,” I said bitterly. “So I mean more to him than that.”

Ryan looked over.

Derek had his shirt off and was grinding on the floor with five or six different women, their hands running over his bare chest, grabbing the front of his jeans, clutching his ass.

Ryan sighed. “This is going to sound crazy, but… I think he’s doing this because of you.”

I stared at him. “What?”

“I think he’s trying to make you jealous.”

Mission accomplished.

“You’re saying he doesn’t do this every night?”

Ryan shifted uncomfortably. “You understand that no matter what I say, it’s not going to sound very good, right? But you shouldn’t hold that against him. I mean, he didn’t even know you were still alive until a few days ago – ”

“Just spit it out.”

He sighed. “Derek doesn’t do dancing. He doesn’t do after-parties. He doesn’t do photos – not like this. He’ll take pictures with kids, yeah, but not club girls. After a show’s over, he picks a woman… sometimes two or three… and immediately takes them up to his room. Or he’ll get Miles to send up a selection, like room service. He never hangs out at these things afterwards. Never. I’ve never seen him act like this, not once over the last two years.”

Despite my nausea at hearing about Derek’s sexual antics, my surprise was even greater. I stared at Ryan in open-mouthed shock. “…really?”

“Hey Killian,” Ryan called across the table as he pointed into the crowd. “Is what Derek’s doing normal? I mean, for him?”

Killian looked up from doodling on his guitar and followed Ryan’s finger.

“What, he’s still here?” the guitarist asked, confused – though I wondered if it wasn’t the ganja.

“Exactly,” Ryan said with a pointed look at me. Then he asked his bandmate, “You ever seen him do that before?”

Killian shook his head, mystified. “That’s a first.”

Then he pulled the joint out of his mouth and looked down at it comically, as though maybe he had accidentally gotten the extra-super-strength version without knowing it.

I could almost read his thoughts, like word bubbles in a cartoon:

Whoa… this is some gooooood shit…

I looked out at the dance floor and watched a woman, her miniskirt riding halfway up her ass cheeks, grinding her derriere into the front of Derek’s pants. I saw others raking their nails across his chest, rubbing their flesh against his –

I had to look away, nauseated.

“Yeah, well, he’s a real class act, then,” I said bitterly.

Ryan took a sip of his beer and said philosophically, “Yeah, he’s kind of messing things up. I told him not to do this sort of crap. I told him you were a nice girl, and he should just be cool and a gentleman with you, and not do this player jealousy routine.”

I stared at him again. “You two were talking about me?”

Ryan blushed a little. “Well… yeah. I was the first one he told when the Rolling Stone guy emailed Miles your name.”

“And you strategized with him?”

He groaned. “Don’t make it sound like that.”

“What should I make it sound like, then, exactly?” I asked, pissed.

“Like a guy trying to help his best friend get the girl who broke his heart.”

Oof.

That brought me up short.

“Is that what you’re doing now?” I asked warily.

He gave a short, mirthless laugh and looked away. “I guess.”

Him looking away reminded me of earlier, of that weird expression he’d had, like Do I do this or not?

So I asked, “What do you mean, ‘you guess’?”

He didn’t look back at me, just took another sip of beer.

“Ryan – earlier you said, ‘I don’t even know why I’m telling you this.’ What did you mean by that?”

He finally looked over at me, and his eyes were soft and gentle.

“It means that Derek wasn’t the only one who fell for you years ago.”

My heart leapt into my throat.

I didn’t know whether to be alarmed, or flattered, or to feel horrible, because I just didn’t feel that way about him.


It wasn’t because he wasn’t cute, because he most definitely was. He was talented, and smart, and sweet –

– but he wasn’t Derek.

He saw my reaction and smiled gently. “I’m not hitting on you, Kaitlyn. You’re Derek’s girl.”

My hackles raised up. “I’m nobody’s ‘girl.’”

He laughed. “Okay, forget that part – but I know you’re in love with him, and you always have been, even if you won’t admit it to yourself. You guys have a lot of unfinished business to attend to… and I think you should. I’m not saying that just because I’m his best friend, but because… I know what it’s like to want something for a long time and never get it.”

I wanted to reach out and touch him, to comfort him, but I knew that would be a bad idea. It would quite possibly be cruel.

He kept talking. “And if you can have it, then you ought to go for it. Reach out and take it. Regretting things you did is a whole lot less painful than regretting things you didn’t do because you were afraid. Just… one word of advice: be careful. He’s my best friend, but… just be careful. Don’t give too much of yourself away. Not completely.”

He took another sip of beer. When I didn’t say anything and just sat there with my mouth open, he put down the bottle and said with exaggerated humor, “Well, this isn’t awkward at all. If you don’t mind, I think I’m going to excuse myself. Maybe go break my rule about hooking up the same night.”

He moved to stand –

“Ryan…” I said feebly.

“Kaitlyn, it’s cool,” he said, and gave me another smile that almost broke my heart. “I didn’t tell you those things for any other reason than to let you know I care about you. So when I tell you this, you know I’m telling you the truth: he’s in love with you. He just has a messed-up way of showing it. And you ought to let go. Let yourself live a little. Just… be careful. I like you way too much to see you get hurt.”

I nodded mutely, sad that such a great guy was saying such amazing things –

Had felt this way about me for so long –

…and yet I just couldn’t return his feelings.

He paused, waiting to see if I would say something… and then he smiled sadly, resigned. “Have a good night, Kaitlyn. See you tomorrow.”

“You, too,” I said quietly.

Then he got up, gave me a wink, and took his beer and waded into the crowd.

I should’ve felt better, because he was almost immediately set upon by a half-dozen cute girls.

But I didn’t.

I just felt hollow and sad.

Then I looked over at Derek, clowning on the dance floor, surrounded by women trying to f*ck him in public –

And I got furious.

I stood up from the table.

“Leaving so soon?” Killian asked in a mellow haze.

I looked over at him in surprise, having forgotten he was still there. “Yeah, I… I’m taking off. Goodnight, Killian.”

“Goodnight, luv,” he said amiably.

I forced my way into the crowd and left the bar.