Rock All Night

74




The second call – which I was not looking forward to – was to Glen, my Rolling Stone editor.

“Finally,” he said with a little too much snark in his voice for my tastes.

“I’m sorry, it’s been a busy couple of days.”

“Are you getting good stuff?”

“Um… yes… you could say that…”

“Why do I detect a note of hesitation in your voice?”

“Uh… because… I slept with Derek Kane.”

I winced and waited for the yelling to start.

It did – but it turned out to be yelling of a different kind than what I was expecting.

“Are you KIDDING me?! That’s great! I mean, of course, you’ve got to handle it correctly…”

“What do you mean?” I asked, shocked that he hadn’t bitten off my head.

“Well, don’t piss him off, we don’t want any problems with getting a photo shoot.”

You could have knocked me over with a feather.

“Aren’t you mad?”

“Yeah, you should’ve called me earlier. When I call you, CALL ME BACK.”

“No, I mean…”

“What?”

“I slept with him.”

“I heard you the first time.”

“But… that was totally over the line! It was a major breach of journalistic ethics!”

He chuckled. “This is the real world, Kaitlyn. Not that I condone what you did – not officially, anyway – but you gotta do what you gotta do to get the story.”

Now I was starting to get pissed off.

“I didn’t do it to get the story,” I said, irritated.

“Well, then, it’s just a happy by-product.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. The fact that he was more concerned about getting Derek to pose for pictures, rather than my lapse in professionalism, was making me angry.

I know it might sound stupid to most people. After all, I was the one who had slept with Derek (and kept sleeping with him), and here I was, mad at my boss for not ripping me a new one.

But… his attitude made me feel cheap.

And I don’t like feeling cheap.

“What else have you been up to?”

“Well,” I said, my hackles fully raised and caution thrown to the wind, “I spent all yesterday tripping on mushrooms with Derek and Killian Lee.”


“AWESOME,” he hooted. “Oh my God, this is great. I imagine THAT yielded some fantastic material.”

“…I guess…?”

“Excellent. Look, when do you think you can wrap up and head back to New York?”

“Um… I don’t know… I hadn’t thought about it…”

Mostly because I didn’t want to wrap up and head back to New York.

“Most of our interviews occur over three to six hours or a series of short meetings. Considering who your subject is, and how press-averse he is, and the sort of stuff you’re getting, I’m not going to pull the plug – yet. But wrap it up as soon as possible. Expense accounts aren’t unlimited, you know.”

I didn’t feel like pointing out that I was probably going to be staying in Derek’s room from now on, and that I hadn’t exactly been busting the budget anyway.

So I just grit my teeth instead. “Yeah. Okay.”

“Alright, good job – now get back to work!”

And then he hung up the phone.