Rock All Night

85




So the sex was super-hot that once… although it rarely was after that.

Part of it was me – but part of it was definitely him. He almost seemed to go out of his way to be a dick sometimes. Paying more and more attention to really hot groupies backstage, or flirting more brazenly with attractive women.

For awhile I thought maybe he was doing it to provoke a reaction in me – maybe stoke the same fires that had fueled our little bout of ‘hate sex.’

And it kind of did work that once.

But you know how it feels really good sometimes to get angry? Just righteously pissed off? Super-f*cking mad?

It’s powerful. Like you have a nuclear-powered engine inside you.

But the problem is, if you don’t get over it, it starts sapping energy out of you instead of creating it. It takes a lot of fuel to keep anger going, and it starts leeching off of the energy reserves that power everything else.

And I found myself getting angry, and staying angry, more and more often.

Angry and jealous and insecure and depressed.

So if he meant it to provoke me and turn me on, it backfired. I actually stopped being responsive and wanting sex as much because I was just hurting.

And when we did have sex after that, I noticed it became less and less about foreplay and sensuality, and more just… ‘banging.’ He tended to do a perfunctory warm-up to get me halfway going, then we cut straight to the main act.

Don’t get me wrong, what we did do was really good… better than the best sex I’d had with anybody else. But that heightened sense of sexual tension back in my dorm room four years ago? The hallucinatory sensuality of the desert? The way he had touched me and seduced me when I was angry at him?

Those things virtually disappeared. It was like they receded in the rearview mirror as we drove away, leaving them in the dust. I caught glimpses of them again, but the glimpses were always fleeting – and then it was ‘wham, bam, thank you ma’am’ (even if the ‘wham-bam’ part lasted a good fifteen or twenty minutes).

But in the end, I don’t think he flirted with other women to provoke me and turn me on.

He did it because that was what he was, and that was what he did. He sought out female attention and validation, however he could get it. And he wasn’t going to change it for anybody.

Which, to my mind, was being a dick.

If you’ve got a woman in front of you who you say is your girlfriend, but you still act like you’re a single guy out to get his next piece of ass?

You’re a dick.

I know, I know, I shouldn’t have expected to hook up with one of the most desirable men on the planet and then believe that he would want to settle down.

Except I kind of did.

When a guy tells me I’m his girlfriend, I expect him to f*cking act like I’m his girlfriend. Not just when he wants a little ooh-la-la.

Killian’s words kept returning to me. Not the part about Derek lack of maliciousness, or how his actions were just part of his ‘nay-chuh.’ If I’d actually concentrated on those things, then maybe I would have dealt with everything better.

No, I kept asking myself, Is this Derek being a scorpion?

And is this me being the frog?

I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop – to feel that horrible pain when we were halfway across the river, and for the both of us to drown.