Rock All Night (The Rock Star's Seduction #2) (9 page)

The backstage party was crazy.

I basically kept to the fringes, continuing my anthropological mindset and watching everything with a dispassionate eye.

It’s not that I don’t like to have fun. I do. But I was working, for one thing. At least, that’s what I told myself. Plus, nobody was interested in me. I wasn’t famous, and amongst the women gathered here, I was downright average. The few guys who tried to hit on me, I shot down immediately. They didn’t care; they turned ten inches to the left and immediately started hitting on a much more receptive target.

At some point – after Riley had manhandled the asses of basically every woman in the room and gotten slapped by half of them; after enough women had thrown themselves all over Derek, and he’d signed at least another two dozen sets of boobs; after Killian and Mike had jammed on acoustic with the opening band; after Ryan had talked to virtually every music producer and big-name musical act in the room; after Derek and Riley got into a shoving match and she wound up tearing his shirt off (much to the delight of the women in the room); after I saw several mirrored trays of cocaine making the rounds; after multiple bottles of champagne got fired off like a 21-gun salute, spraying the crowd with corks and fizzing wine; after Riley slipped and fell in a drunken heap with two topless, giggling girls; after a fight broke out in the corner, and Miles showed up with three security men and threw half the crowd out – at some point after all that, Derek stood up on a table amidst the now-empty platters of food and yelled, “AFTER PARTY AT THE DUBAI!”

The crowd roared their approval and began to disperse. Derek jumped back down to the floor and disappeared into the throng of adoring women.

A hand grabbed my elbow. I looked over in surprise and saw Miles’s scowling face.

“Your presence is requested in the limo,” he growled.

He put his other arm straight out and battering-rammed his way through the crowd, dragging me along behind him.

“Is it like this after every concert?” I shouted at Miles over the din.

“No. It’s a slow night,” he shouted back.

“
This
is a slow night?!”

“No one’s bleeding or unconscious, and I haven’t caught Riley fucking some slag in a corner yet, so yeah, slow night,” he yelled.

Once we were out of the room, things were fairly easy sailing. We joined the rest of the band and hustled along the concrete corridors. Derek was surrounded by security guards who kept back the screaming, pawing, female fans; Ryan and Killian were more sparsely (and politely) mobbed, and they signed autographs as they walked. Riley was slung over the shoulder of one of the biggest human beings I have ever seen: 6 foot 7 at least, 400 pounds if he was two, a mountain of a man made of equal parts muscle and dense fat. And Riley was still giving him hell. She was kicking and beating on his back and clubbing his spine with her fists and trying to bite him through his windbreaker. He mostly ignored it, but every once in a while she would get a good mouthful of jacket and flesh. He would yelp, then snap her whole body like somebody cracking a whip. She would go limp… look like she was going to puke… and then go right back to slapping and biting.

We exited through an alleyway where a limo was waiting. The boys all piled in, Miles shoved me in next, and the big bruiser threw Riley in like a wailing, scratching cat. Miles came last and shut the door behind us, and the limo took off.

“You stupid little FUCKER,” Riley raged at Miles. “I was having a fucking good time, and you had to go ruin it like you always – ”

Miles thrust a bottle of Jack Daniels in her face. “Suck on that an’ shut the fuck up.”

She grabbed it and immediately chugged.

“Like a baby to a bottle,” Miles muttered grimly.

This time around I was sitting next to Ryan. He looked over at me and smiled. “Did you have fun?”

“Um… I guess?” I said hesitantly. I’d been an onlooker rather than a participant, so it hadn’t really been ‘fun’ so much as informative. And occasionally shocking.

“Crazy, huh?” he asked.

That
was the understatement of the evening.

“Hey Blondie,” Riley slurred the second she took the bottle out of her mouth, “wanna fuck?”

“…uh, NO.”

“Too bad,” she giggled, and leaned over and put her grubby little hand on my knee. I tried jerking away, but she just slid it further up my thigh.

“Keep your fuckin’ hands to yourself,” Derek barked from two spots over.

“Fuck off, D,” Riley sneered. “Just cuz you can’t seal the deal dudn’t mean
I
can’t.”

Derek looked like he was about to leap across the limo and strangle her when Ryan simply reached out and placed his hand lightly on hers.

“Riley,” Ryan said, his voice soft but full of warning.

As soon as he did that, Riley looked him in the face – and let go of my leg.

“I was just playin’,” she said petulantly, like a child who had been scolded.

“Wait till the hotel and play with somebody who
wants
to play.”

“Fine,” she grumbled. “Sorry, Blondie.”

I suddenly flashed onto a scene from
16 Candles.
Molly Ringwald is being slobbered over by a nerdy little dweeb, and she forcefully rebuffs him. He sheepishly and dejectedly apologizes. She feels bad for him, so she says consolingly, “It’s fine…”

…whereupon he launches back in, thinking she meant ‘It’s fine to kiss me.’

I did SO not want a reenactment of that scene, so I just said, “Apology accepted.”

“Didja fuck him in the shower?” she asked without missing a beat.

“Riley!” Ryan snapped.

“NO, she
didn’t,
” Derek answered for me.

“Ha HAAA,” Riley snorted at him. Then she looked at me and wiggled her eyebrows. “I’m a
whole
lot better in bed than he is, FYI.”

EW.

“Drink,” Miles said, tipping the bottle up towards her face.

She went back to chugging it down.

“Like a piglet at the teat,” Miles grunted.

She popped the bottle out of her mouth. “I’m not Piglet, I’m – I’m TIGGER.”

In answer, he just tilted the bottle back up, and she went back to chugging.

“Aren’t you afraid you guys are going to kill her one day?” I whispered to Ryan.

“Relax – it’s so watered down, it’s like drinking wine,” Ryan whispered back. “Bad, but not 40 proof at least. Miles does it after every show. She’s so plastered she can’t even taste anything anyway.”

“Hey Riley, tell Kaitlyn how you came up with the band name,” Derek said.

“OH, OH!” she cried out, sloshing watered-down Jack all over her wifebeater. “Yeah, I named the band – did you know that?” she asked me like an overexcited kid.

“That’s what Derek said, yeah.”

“You know why it’s called Bigger?” she grinned.

“No, why?”

“Cuz that’s what Derek says every time he gets another cock in his ass!” she howled. “Bigger!
Bigger!
BIGGERRRRRR!”

And then she collapsed against Miles in a drunken fit of laughter and tears. Miles looked both disgusted and wearily stoic, like the most beleaguered dog you could imagine as the family’s toddler crawls all over it.

I looked over at Derek. He gave me a half-grin. “I couldn’t take that simple joy away from her.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You
really
want me to publish that in
Rolling Stone?”

He laughed. “I don’t give a fuck what you publish in
Rolling Stone
.”

“Okay, okay, no, that’s not the real story,” Riley said, suddenly sitting up and rejoining the conversation. “Here’s the real story. So we were sitting around in Derek’s house in Athens tryin’ to come up with a name. And they’re tossin’ out stupid fuckin’ shit like – what were some of those stupid-ass band names you idiots came up with? Like,
Dharma and Greg –
”

“Dharma House,” Killian corrected her as he plinked away at his guitar.

“Yeah,
Dharma House,
” Riley snorted.

“Shelter,” Derek said.

“Shelter! What the fuck is
that?!”
Riley hooted.

“It’s from ‘Gimme Shelter’ by the Rolling Sto– ”

“I know what the fuck it’s from, fucker!” Riley shouted. “Shut the fuck up!”

“Strike First,” Ryan said.

“That’s a TERRIBLE fucking name!” Riley chortled.

“It’s from the original
Karate Kid –
” Ryan started, until Riley waved her hands in his face drunkenly.

“Shhhh! Shut the fuck up! No one cares where it’s from, cuz it’s fucking
stupid!”
she hollered. Then she turned to me. “So they’re saying these stupid fuckin’ names, and I’m like, ‘No, you guys are thinkin’ too small. It’s gotta be bigger than that.’ And they’d say somethin’ else lame, like Death Star, or Heisenberg, or Straight Flush, or something stupid, and I’d be like, ‘No – bigger!’ And they’d say somethin’ else, and I’d be like, ‘BIGGER!’ and they kept sayin’ stupid shit, and I was like, ‘BIGGERRRR!’ – and then we all stopped and just kind of looked around at each other… and that was it. Bigger.” She plopped back in the seat, evidently pleased with herself. “That was how we came up with the name.”

I looked over at the other band members for confirmation.

Ryan nodded.

“Yup,” Derek agreed.

“Word for word,” Killian said mildly as he took a drag off a fresh joint.

“BOOYAH,” Riley said happily, throwing up her hands in gang signs, and then took another slug off her whiskey. Then she made a face and looked at the bottle. “Yo, Miles, are you sure this stuff is legit? It tastes watered down as
shit.
”

In answer, Miles just tipped the bottom of the bottle back with one finger, and she went right back to slurping it down.

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. Fucking 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
de
pressed, 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 fuck 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.”