Glen cleared his throat. It was obvious he wanted to explode – and obvious why he couldn’t.
Because Derek was right: Glen was a weasel who would do anything for a story.
“Look, Derek – I understand you’re upset – ”
“Oh, you do, do you?”
“And I understand you’ve had some bad experiences with the press in the past. But I’m not like that, okay? I respect you.”
“Really? You respect me?”
“Yes. Immensely.”
“Awesome. While you’re at it, have some goddamn respect for my girlfriend, since she’s the only reason I’m fucking talking to you at all.”
Silence on Glen’s side of the line.
“From now on, Glen, don’t call her. She’ll call you.”
And with that, Derek hung up the phone.
87
I loved him for that.
I loved him for standing up for me. I loved him for being my knight in shining armor. I loved him for ripping Glen a new one (even if Glen had a point, and even if Derek did it partly because he had his own issues with the press).
In that moment, all the other crap fell away, and I absolutely, positively loved him.
What bothered me, though, was that neither he nor I ever said it.
The ‘L’ word.
And the longer it went on like that, the more it bothered me.
I had wanted desperately to say it to him right after he hung up the phone –
…but…
…I didn’t.
I’d always felt that the guy should say it first.
Partly because guys are a whole lot more freaky about it in general, and you don’t want to spook the horse before he gets to the water.
Also, I’d heard plenty of horror stories about the girl going first. My favorite one (as in the most cringe-worthy) was a story in some national magazine – Esquire, I think. In it, the author has been dating this woman for a few months, and he really, really likes her.
Anyway, they go away together on a weekend trip for the first time. They get a room, and the guy opens the curtains, looks outside, and says, “Lovely view.”
The woman mishears him and says, “Awww – I love you, too!”
And the last line of the article was, “I broke up with her the next day.”
Stories like that were what kept me from saying anything at all.
Besides, it wasn’t like he hadn’t already said it… albeit four years ago.
I’m in love with your roommate.
Maybe you can’t LOVE somebody if you don’t know them, but you can definitely fall in love. You know how I know? Because I’ve already fallen in love with you.
What’s wrong? The girl I’m totally in love with is leaving next week to go a thousand miles away, that’s what’s wrong.
Have a wonderful life. I love you.
What had happened in the last four years?
What had happened that he couldn’t say it now?
Was it that we’d spent four years apart, and his feelings had changed?
Was it that I’d done something wrong?
Had our moment just passed, and now it was over?
What worried me most was that maybe he didn’t have any stories, or any insecurities, or anything at all keeping him from saying it. Maybe he just didn’t even think of saying it.
Because it wasn’t true.
That was the worst possibility of all.
88
Speaking of stories in major national magazines, I had one to write. So I got started on it.
It was, without question, the hardest thing I’d ever attempted.
Part of it was the pressure. When you’re writing crap articles for crap indie papers for crap money, you don’t place any particular importance on them. It’s not that you half-ass them (although, yes, I’ve done that once or twice); it’s that you’re waiting for your Big Break, so anything that’s not your Big Break, you don’t fret over. Most of the stuff I had written in the past I didn’t attach any world-shaking importance to, I just did it. Without thinking, without worrying – I just did it. Like a rookie quarterback who gets shoved into the game without expecting it at all, so he has no time to develop nerves and sabotage himself.
But the Big Break was finally here.
And I couldn’t stop fretting about it.
Glen was right, in his assholish way: despite the repetition and the grind of the Road, I was living out a sort of fantasy vacation. I was sleeping with the man of my dreams, I was hanging out with the hottest rock band in the world, and I was writing for the biggest music magazine ever.
It was the ‘writing’ part that was the problem.
There were sooooo many things to distract me. (One of them was tattooed and very, very sexy.) And so I let them distract me, because it was easier than gearing down and actually doing the work.
Because the possibility of failure was terrifying.
I was like the rookie football player in his first pro game ever – but they’d told him a couple of weeks beforehand. And he’d taken every opportunity in that time to worry, and obsess, and convince himself how bad he was going to suck.
And now it was time to dress out for the game, and he was a nervous wreck.
I tried to write the article. I did. I started it five dozen times, and scrapped every single one of them.
In desperation, I looked at other Rolling Stone articles online and… well… I’m not proud to admit it, but kinda, sorta copied their opening passages. As a way of jumping into the story. They fell into a dozen different categories: the Big Pronouncement. (“Bigger is arguably the hottest band in the world right now… and I am watching them implode before my very eyes.”) The In Media Res. (“We are walking down the concrete passageways of the Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre, and the roar of the crowd reverberates all around us like the crashing waves of the ocean.”) The Stolen Detail, with a bit of Poetic License thrown in for good measure. (“Derek Kane’s eyes glimmer in the late-afternoon sunlight as he reads the lyrics he has just written. His irises are emerald green, and breathtakingly beautiful – a fact which his millions of female fans do not know, because he’s never taken off his sunglasses in front of them. Until now.”)
And so on and so forth.
But none of it felt right. It felt… artificial. Fake. Blegh.
Now you know why I deleted them all. (Especially after you’ve read them.)
When I couldn’t get the beginning, I decided to try to write bits and pieces from the middle and patch them together later. I wrote huge swaths, thousands upon thousands of words – about the concerts. About the song-writing session I’d witnessed (and later got chewed out for). About the tour bus and the after-parties and the fans.
All of it felt like crap. Like I was a sophomore back at Syracuse, struggling through my first Journalism 101 class, trying to string together two sentences that didn’t sound like I was fresh off the high school paper writing about an ‘awesome’ pep rally.
So I put it off. With sex with Derek. With fights with Derek. With make-up sex with Derek. With talks with Ryan. With listening to Killian improvise. With concerts. With after-concert partying. With long, bored stretches of staring out the tour bus windows as rural countryside flew past.
And with the one last thing I felt I had to do, which was probably going to be even harder than writing the article itself:
Interviewing Riley.
89
It wasn’t like she wouldn’t talk to me. She already had, back on my very first day on the tour bus:
To fuck hot chicks.
I… what?
To fuck hot chicks.
What are you talking about?
Why I do it. To fuck hot chicks.
That wasn’t what I was going to ask.
Oh. Well, that’s the answer, anyway. To fuck hot chicks.
O-kaaaay… moving on. What’s the best part of being a rock star?
Fucking hot chicks. I mean fucking chicks that’r
e hot. Not chicks who are fuckin’ hot. I mean, I want ‘em fuckin’ hot, but if you don’t get to fuck ‘em, what’s the fuckin’ point, right?
She was perfectly willing to be interviewed… if you can call that an ‘interview.’
No, I wanted more. The real person, not the caricature. What Killian had given me on the ride out to the desert.
Which Riley was apparently willing to give me, too. But just like Killian, she had a price.
With Killian, it had been participating in a psychedelic holiday.
With Riley, it was a bit more… Rileyesque.
“I really need to do an interview with you,” I told her one afternoon, after her morning hangover had faded to where she was semi-coherent.
“Okay, shoot,” she said as she took a pull from a bottle of Jack.
“No, I’m serious. A real interview. One where you actually talk about real stuff, and not just – ”
“Yeah, yeah, I said okay, let’s fuckin’ do it,” she said crossly.
I couldn’t believe my luck. Had I hit on exactly the right moment to ask her? Had all her defenses dropped by the wayside long enough for me to get to know the real person beneath the insane punk-rock-chick-drummer persona?
“Okay… what’s your first memory of – ”
“Tits.”
“…what?”
“Tits. That’s my first memory.”
I sighed and hung my head as she continued on her reverie, holding her hands out in front of her like the ‘huge… tracts of land’ guy in Monty Python’s The Holy Grail. “Big ol’ fuckin’ tits – firm ones, big as my head, with – ”
“RILEY.”
“What?”
“I SAID A REAL INTERVIEW.”
“That’s what I’m givin’ ya, Blondie.”
“No you’re not. You’re just talking about your favorite subject, is all.”
“After pussy. Favorite subject, after pussy. We could talk about that instead, if you want. Maybe, say… your pussy? My pussy? Bumpin’ pussies?”
I just scowled at her.
She gave me an impish little smile, then stopped drinking long enough to fish a cigarette out of a pack, light it up, and take a drag. “You fucked Derek.”
I scowled at her harder. “That’s none of your goddamn business.”
“Ooooh, Blondie gettin’ a backbone! Hawt! But that’s not what I’m talkin’ about.”
I stayed silent, waiting to see where this went.
“You fucked Derek, and he gave it up. His story, I mean. That’s all I want.”
Now I wasn’t scowling, I was frowning in confusion. “…what?”
She gestured with her cigarette, as though pointing to a series of invisible blocks in a logical arrangement. “You fucked Derek… you got his story. You want my story… you fuck me. That’s the deal.”
She settled back in her chair and grinned with glee as shock and revulsion washed over my face.
“I am NOT sleeping with you for a fucking interview!” I shouted.
“It doesn’t have to be a fuckin’ interview. We can do it after we’re done fuckin’.”
“I didn’t sleep with Ryan or Killian for an interview!”
“If you haven’t figured it out yet, Killian doesn’t really give a damn about fuckin’ you – or anybody else. And we both know Ry wants to fuck you, he’s just too nice to put it out there. Plus he knows he’d lose out to D.”
My stomach turned when she said that.
Mostly because I knew she was right.
Furious, I got up from my chair to go.
“C’mon – think of it as… what’s that Hannibal dude say? ‘Lend me a quid, Clair-eeeeeeeese…’”
I narrowed my eyes. “I think you mean ‘quid pro quo.’”
“Oh yeah. ‘Quid pro quo.’ Just think of it as… ‘quid pro coochie,’” she said, and snorted like a three-year-old hearing her favorite poop joke.
I sighed in disgust and walked out of the room.
“Quid pro coochie, Clair-eeeeeese!” she yelled after me, then started laughing maniacally again.
90
Poor Ryan.
I wound up discussing the Riley situation with him. Actually, venting to him is a more accurate description.
Derek was no good for that; he was more of a ‘Bulldoze through it or quit bitching’ kind of a guy, so trying to get any sympathy from him was like extracting water from a stone.
I’d already had one bad experience with Killian’s weird, so-not-comforting take on Aesop’s fables.
Miles? I’m laughing right now as I type this.
And Riley was the source of the problem.
Which left poor, longsuffering Ryan to listen to me rant. On several occasions.
He was sympathetic every time, and very kindly never pointed out the obvious – that I was just using Riley’s obstinacy as an excuse to procrastinate.
After I complained to him for fifteen minutes, I would usually feel a little better, after which I would go along my way and find other reasons to avoid writing the article.
After a half-dozen encounters with Riley, ranging from annoying to infuriating, I had written off ever getting any sort of a real interview from her.
Until I heard her talking to Ryan.
I didn’t think anyone had that kind of influence over her.
I was wrong.
91
It all happened during the band’s stay in Seattle. Ryan and Riley were in the kitchen together, which was separated from the rest of the penthouse. Anybody inside the kitchen couldn’t see much of the rest of the suite, which is why they didn’t know I was there.
And no, I wasn’t intentionally eavesdropping.
Although I didn’t exactly announce my presence, either.
Derek was in his room writing lyrics, and Killian was off in his getting baked or taking a nap or God knows what. I was attempting to avoid writing the article when I walked in and heard their voices over the sound of pouring drinks – ice clinking against glass, the glug glug of liquid.
“Riley, I need you to do me a favor.”
She sighed theatrically. “Alright, fuck it. Whip it out, I know it ain’t been sucked in awhile.”
“UGH. Gross,” Ryan groaned, mirroring my own thoughts exactly.
Riley cackled. “Just kiddin’, Ry. I love you man, but you got one part too many, dude.”
“Well, we can both be glad about that, then. But I need your help.”
“Need me to get some chicks for you? Tired of moonin’ over Blondie?”
As soon as I heard my nickname, I froze in my tracks – still out of sight. More than anything, I didn’t want to see the look on Ryan’s face if he found out I had heard that comment.
“I’m serious.”
“So’m I. You need to get the fuck over that shit, man. You’re too fuckin’ good for her, anyway.”
My heart alternately swelled a little at her sweetness towards Ryan – and prickled at her bitchiness towards me.
Ryan used his ‘stern dad’ voice. “Riley…”
She huffed in annoyance. “Fine. What.”
“I need you to do the interview with Kaitlyn. A real interview, not some cutesy crap.”
I frowned in surprise.
What?
“Hahaha! That’s a good one, Ry.”
There was a long silence from the kitchen. I could almost see Ryan’s look in my mind’s eye: head tilted down, the I’m not kidding expression.
Judging from Riley’s reaction, my imagination was spot on.
“Aw, man – seriously? Come ON.”
“I really need you to do this for me.”
“Bullshit – this isn’t for you!”
“It is for me. You’d be doing this for me, not her.”
“Fuck that! This isn’t gonna make her fall in love with you, or whatever the fuck you want!”
“I know that. I’m not asking because of that.”
“You’re askin’ cuz you’re totally fuckin’ in love with
that bitch, and she goes after the fuckin’ moron instead of you! Seriously, man, why do you do this to yourself?”
Again, mixed emotions: my heart broke for Ryan, while my stomach raged on Derek’s behalf… and a little bit on my own, too.
“Riley… please? For me?”
“God dammit…” she grumbled. “…quit lookin’ at me like that…”
“Thank you.”
There were a couple of seconds of silence. Somehow I knew instinctively that Ryan was hugging her, and it made my heart hurt even more.
I must have been right, because after a couple of seconds, Riley started groaning again. “Aw, cut it out, don’t get all fuckin’ mushy on me…”
“And don’t hit on her, okay? Don’t get her drunk and make passes at her, alright?”
“Maaaaan – ”
“Riley, I’m serious.”
“Does this chick even know how much you’re into her?”
Now I do, I thought, and I felt sick to my stomach that I was listening in on something so achingly private.
“And don’t tell her that, either, okay? …okay?”
“Okay, OKAY! Why are you doing this, anyway? Is it cause you want her to get the hell out of Dodge so you don’t have to watch Derek banging her? That would be a halfway decent reason.”
“No.”
“Then why?”
“Because I want her to succeed. It’s important to me.”
My heart broke a little more, and for the first time ever, I wished that maybe I hadn’t met Derek first.
Riley sighed heavily. “For you. Only for you.”
“Thanks. I owe you one.”
“Hell yeah you owe me one.”
Before they could come out of the kitchen and discover me, I silently slipped out of the suite and back into the hallway.
When I came in five minutes later, I pretended I didn’t know anything.
Out of the blue, Riley told me – in a very annoyed voice – that she’d had a change of heart, and that maybe we should actually go ahead and do the interview for real.
I acted shocked, then suspicious, then warily happy – after extracting numerous promises of no ‘quid pro coochie.’
She grumpily agreed, and threw a couple of not-so-subtle scowls at Ryan.
Rock All Night (The Rock Star's Seduction #2) Page 32