Rock All Night (The Rock Star's Seduction #2) (3 page)

Ryan turned back to the other two band members. “Kaitlyn’s here to interview us for Rolling Stone.”

Again Killian’s fingers froze on the guitar, and he looked at Derek for confirmation. “What, she’s the one?”

Derek nodded.

“She’s the one you’re breaking your famous embargo for?”

“Yup.”

The guitarist shook his head in wonder and went back to playing. “This just gets curiouser and curiouser…”

“Waaaait a minute,” Riley scowled. “How is it that the same chick you mooned over is the one who –
ohhhhhhh
. You couldn’t seal the deal back in the day, so you thought you’d bring her here and dangle that big exclusive in front of her so you can getchoo some, huh?”

Actually, that had been
my
working theory, too… although I wouldn’t have put it quite that way.

Neither would Derek, because he flipped her the bird.

Riley threw a drumstick at him. Just whipped her arm back and sent it pinwheeling through the air.

I let out a little scream.

Derek sidestepped out of the way just in time, and the drumstick
clanked!
against the row of bottles behind him.

“JESUS!” Miles shouted.

“Yeah, respect the booze, Riley,” Derek said, completely unfazed, like flying drumsticks happened all the time.

“Shut up or I’ll shove the next one up your ass.” Riley turned back to me. “So, Blondie, what do you wanna ask me first? How I like my women? Cuz I like ‘em like
you.
”

“…that wasn’t on my list, no.”

“What
is
on your list?” Ryan asked.

“Um… uh…”

I actually hadn’t gotten that far yet.

I’d been too preoccupied with seeing Derek for the first time in four years to actually think of any questions.

Riley shook her head. “Woooow. You
really
must wanna tap that ass, D, cuz she sucks at being a reporter.”

“Journalist,” I corrected.

“Well, you suck at that, too,” she assured me cheerily.

“No time for chitchat, we have sound check in an hour.” Miles clapped his hands. “Let’s go, let’s go! Limo’s waiting for us downstairs!”

Killian stood up and took his guitar. Riley followed him. Derek snagged a bottle from the bar and headed for the door.

“I need to go get my stuff first,” I protested.

“Then you get to the concert on your own,” Miles snapped.

“But – ”

Ryan saved the day. “What do you need?”

“I left my tape recorder in my bag, which is in my room. I
hope.
”

Since I hadn’t even
been
to my room yet.

He reached over by a laptop computer and grabbed something. When he handed it to me, I saw that it looked like a digital recorder with a fat, wide microphone at the top. ZOOM was printed across the front, above a control panel of tiny buttons.

“Here, take this. There’s a flash card in it – there should be, like, 24 hours of recording time on it.”

“Don’t you need it?”

“I’ve got plenty just lying around.”

“‘Just lying around’?”

“We record practice on them in case somebody comes up with something great. Plus, when inspiration strikes, I always want to have something around to record it.”

“Okay…”

“Press that button there… see the red blinking light? That means you’re on standby. Hit it again and you get a continuous red light, which means you’re recording. Then just hit that button to stop recording.”

“Thanks,” I said gratefully.

“Teach her to do her fuckin’ job in the limo!” Miles said, herding everyone towards the door. “Let’s go, let’s go! Right!”

The elevator ride down was gross. Killian reeked of weed, Derek smelled like bourbon, and Riley just stank.

I wasn’t the only one who thought so.

“God, it’s like ridin’ the underground in Paris in the summertime,” Miles muttered.

“What do you mean?” Ryan asked.

“Buncha Frogs without any deodorant, and they still smelled better’n
you
lot. Come on, out, out!” he yelled as the elevator door dinged open.

The walk through the lobby was fairly uneventful, but once we got out front, there were twenty paparazzi waiting, flashes going off. Derek smiled winningly for the cameras and hoisted up his bottle of scotch; Riley stuck out her tongue a là Miley Cyrus and flipped them off. Ryan, Killian, and Miles just ignored them.

The photographers probably got plenty of shots of me in the background, goggling at them like I had never seen a camera before.

Inside the black stretch limo, seating order was Killian, Derek, and me. Ryan sat opposite and facing me, and next to him were Riley and then Miles.

As I sat next to Derek, I was distinctly aware of his thigh pressing against mine. I was getting a little turned on being right next to him – and it was pissing me off.

Derek turned to me as the limo drove off. “So – having fun yet?”

“It’s interesting,” I admitted.

“Aaaah, you ain’t seen nothing yet.” He turned to the other members of the band. “Set list – anybody got any requests?”

Ryan – who was sitting across from me – pulled out a piece of paper and a pen from his jacket. “I’m assuming we’re keeping our own stuff in the same order?”

“Fine by me,” Derek said.

“Fine,” Killian agreed.

“I wanna do ‘Moby Dick!’” Riley shouted.

“NO,” Derek said.

I looked bewildered.

Ryan smiled. “We do our own songs in the same order every night, but every third song we throw in a cover. ‘Moby Dick’ is a Zeppelin tune that’s basically one big drum solo.”

“And everybody fuckin’ hates it,” Derek said.

“No they don’t!” Riley complained.

“Everybody except
you.
NO.”

“My sisters are going to be there tonight – can we do something for them?” Ryan asked. “Maybe some Katy Perry?”

“Your sisters are here in LA?” I asked, surprised.

“Yeah, I flew my family in, they all went to Disneyland and then they’re coming to see the show,” Ryan grinned, then turned to Derek. “So keep the antics on the clean side, okay?”

“I’ll try. How ‘bout ‘Roar’?”

“Cool,” Ryan nodded, and wrote it down. “I’ll put it after… ‘If There’s A Next Time.’”

“Fine,” Killian agreed.

“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida!” Riley shouted.

I looked at Ryan.

“Another epic drum solo,” he explained.

“NO,” Derek snapped.

They went back and forth, suggesting songs, with Derek clearly in control of the final selection. In the end, they settled on about seven songs, and let Riley have ‘Hot For Teacher’ by Van Halen.

“We have to give her one big drum solo song per show or she’s impossible to live with,” Ryan said.

“Don’t
you
start in on me, Ry,” she threatened, and leapt up and gave him a good-natured noogie. He laughed and pushed her away.

“I know how you two formed the band,” I said to Ryan and Derek, then looked over at Killian. “And I’ve heard the story about how they met you. Was it true?”

“More or less,” he smiled as his fingers
plinked
over his guitar strings.

“But… how did
you
join the band?” I asked Riley.

“They promised me they’d give me a really hot blonde from Rolling Stone,” she said, wiggling her eyebrows.

Derek kicked her. Riley kicked him back, and within seconds it had turned into them trying to stomp each other as fast as they could, boots flailing at each other across the short interior of the limo.

“CHILDREN, CHILDREN!” Miles screamed. “DON’T MAKE ME STOP THIS CAR!”

Derek and Riley settled down and glared at each other, exactly like feuding siblings.

“I’ll answer this one,” Ryan said. “You got your recorder turned on?”

I pressed the button twice and got the solid red light. “Okay.”

“So, the summer after you… met us,” Ryan said, hesitating the tiniest bit, “we found a local drummer and guitarist. They weren’t very good – nobody
good
wanted to play with us. They all wanted to play with the more established bands in Athens, and we were pretty young. So we settled. But the guitarist and drummer we got were good enough. I started going to UGA in August, and in September we started booking frat party gigs.”

“A thousand a show,” Derek laughed. “Remember when I was over the moon when we used to get 250 each?”

Actually, the way my finances were at the moment, 250 dollars for one night’s work sounded pretty damn good… even if I
was
staying in a luxury hotel doing an interview for
Rolling Stone
.

“Except we didn’t make that our first couple of shows,” Ryan told me. “In fact, we had to
bribe
somebody to let us play our first gig.”

“Two kegs of beer,” Derek remembered.

“They paid you in beer?” I asked.

“No,
we
had to pay
THEM
to play. Two kegs of beer in exchange for letting us do three songs. They let us play before the opening act for the main band,
if
we paid them two kegs of beer,” Ryan clarified.

“What’d we play?” Derek asked, trying to remember. “‘Paradise City’ – ”

“‘Give It Away Now’ by the Chili Peppers,” Ryan continued.

“And ‘Sweet Home Alabama,’” Riley finished up.

I looked at her in surprise. “Were you with them at that point?”

“No, but I’ve heard this fuckin’ story a million times.”

“How’d you get the beer?” I asked Ryan. “I’m assuming your parents wouldn’t buy it for you.”

“
Ohhhhhhh
no,” he laughed. “No, no, no.”

“I knew somebody,” Derek explained.

“He fucked some sorority chick who was over 21,” Riley crowed, “and
she
bought it for ‘em.”

Ew.

I actually hadn’t needed to hear that.

“Thanks,” Derek said sarcastically. I could tell he was actually pissed at her now.

“Awwww, does Blondie not know how many bitches you bang after the shows?” Riley clucked in fake sympathy. “Am I ruining your chances of gettin’ in her pants?”

EWWWWW.

Derek immediately kicked her again, which led to another flurry of kung fu kicks across the aisle.

“CHILDREN!” Miles screamed, and they stopped.

“Anyway, we had to pay to play,” Ryan said.

“But we blew the other bands
AWAY,
” Derek chuckled. “We had, like, two offers for other gigs as soon as we walked off stage.”

“So we started playing regular gigs after that – at least one a weekend, usually two, sometimes even three.”

“We were
rollin’
in the money,” Derek laughed.

“Did you move out of that horrible house?” I asked.

“Nooooo… that house had
character,
” he said, as though offended I would even suggest otherwise.

“But we eventually traded up guitarists and drummers,” Ryan said. “Only problem was, as a cover band we couldn’t get any gigs opening for other bands at the 40 Watt or the Georgia Theater… and we couldn’t play any of our own stuff at the frat parties. They only wanted to hear ‘Sweet Home Alabama.’”

“But your songs are really good,” I said.

“Our early stuff was okay,” Derek said unenthusiastically.

“Yeah,” Ryan agreed, “but our guitarists and drummers weren’t. No real chops, no real contribution to the song writing, basically just wanted to get drunk and get laid. We knew that if we wanted people to take us seriously, we were going to have to get serious.”

“So I fired all of them and we called Killian,” Derek said.

“Just like that?”

“Well, actually we emailed him,” Ryan admitted. “And sent him some digital recordings of our covers, plus some original stuff.”

I looked at Killian at the other end of the limo. “And you just picked up and moved across the Atlantic?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t really have anything going on at the time.”

“What about that band you were in? God – Gob – ”

“Gobsmacked? Uhh,” he groaned slightly. “Biggest bunch of wankers I’ve ever had the misfortune of playing with.”

“Besides us,” Riley teased him.

“Besides
you
in particular, yes,” Killian smiled.

“So… you were just sitting around in your apartment, doing nothing – ”

“Nooo – he’s too modest to tell you,” Ryan said, “but he was doing tons of session work in London at the time.”

I looked at him blankly.

“Session work is where the individual members of a band aren’t good enough to nail a part on an album, so the producer hires really good outside guys to play their parts just for that recording session,” Ryan explained. “Killian was doing
tons
of session work after Gobsmacked broke up – but as soon as he heard the recordings I sent him, he came on over.”

“You remembered them?” I asked Killian.

The guitarist smiled and took a drag on his joint. “Oh yes. Derek made quite the impression.”

He tends to do that
.

“I guess nobody else ever came up to you and said, ‘I’m going to start a band and I want you to join it.’”

“Yes. He was quite ballsy, even then.”

“That’s what I want on my tombstone,” Derek said. He motioned in the air like he was laying out the words as he spoke in a British accent: “He was quite ballsy.”

Killian laughed.

“Soooo… what about Riley?”

“Well, Killian moved in with Derek – ”

I looked over at Killian in shock. “In
that
house? You’re kidding me.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” Derek snapped.

“It was terrible,” Ryan laughed.

“It was a place to stay,” Killian said diplomatically.

“You don’t… still live there, do you?” I asked.

“Fuck no,” Riley said. “They were crampin’ my style.”

Ryan smiled. “We bought separate houses – much
nicer
houses – a while back. Anyway, we started looking for drummers, but there weren’t really any
great
ones around Athens or Atlanta. Anybody really good was already in a bigger band.”

“I said we should go to New York and have a look around there,” Killian said.

“So we road-tripped up to New York City. We stayed in this horrible flea-bag hotel – ”

“It was fine,” Killian said mildly.

“
You
had a bed all to yourself. I had to sleep next to
him,
” Ryan complained as he pointed at Derek.

“Woooo! Didja tap that ass, Ryan?” Riley hooted.

“We don’t kiss and tell,” Derek said, in a voice that suggested he was keeping a secret.

“No I did not,” Ryan said emphatically.

“Didja tap Ryan’s ass, D?”

“Wellllll – ”

“NO,” Ryan said. “Shut up, both of you. Anyway, Killian had played a lot of shows with some American bands during Gobsmacked’s tour, and he couldn’t stop talking about this one crazy chick in a punk rock band.”

Killian leaned forward. “What was the name of that group again, luv?”

“Pussy Killz,” Riley said matter-of-factly. “With a ‘z.’”

Figures.

“So we go to see… um, that band on Friday night, and
she
gets up on stage,” Ryan said, jerking his thumb at Riley. “And she just blew us away.”

“The rest of the band kind of sucked, but she was awesome,” Derek agreed. “We figured we’d play her some stuff we’d rerecorded with Killian – songs that were
ten
times better than what we’d used to get him onboard, and a
hundred
times better than anything
her
band could do. Then she’d say ‘okay’ and we’d get our drummer. Easy.”

“So we write her a note and send it backstage, and ask if we can buy her a drink afterwards,” Killian said, “and explain our proposition. It was a perfectly lovely note. And she writes back over the original text in big red letters,
Fuck off.
That’s her answer.”

I looked at Riley. She shrugged.

“I saw ‘em from up on stage. I thought they were fuckin’ weirdos. Nobody at our shows ever looked like them.”

“Yeah, it was an unusually large crowd of bull dykes,” Derek said.

“And every one of ‘em had a bigger dick than
you,
” Riley jeered.

Derek just laughed at her.

Killian blew out a mouthful of smoke. “So Derek, being Derek, goes and asks the bartender what the drummer of Pussy Killz likes to drink. Then he buys a fifth of whiskey off him and proceeds to bully his way backstage.”

“The whole band was in there, sitting around the table in this shitty dressing room, and I went in there and slammed the Jack down and said, ‘We want you in our band,’” Derek said.

“Just like with Killian,” I recalled.

“Yeah, except – ”

“I told ‘em to fuck off again,” Riley grinned. “But I drank their booze.”

“We tried to talk to her, but she just kept telling us to fuck off,” Derek laughed. “It was like, ‘Fuck off. Fuck
off.
Fuuuuck off. FUCK off. FUCK OFF. Fuck… off.’ Two dozen different ways to say ‘fuck off.’”

“Literally?” I asked.

“Oh yeah,” Derek nodded. “I’d say, ‘We heard you play.’ She’d nod and say, ‘Fuck off.’ ‘We think you’re really good – ’ ‘Yeah? Fuck off.’ ‘We’ve got a really unusual sound – can we let you hear some of our songs?’ ‘Um – FUCK OFF.’ It was the first time in my life I ever wanted to punch a chick.”

“You woulda drawn back a bloody stump, asshole,” Riley smirked.

“Anyway, I left her a CD we’d burned, and we just walked out, figuring that was that,” Ryan said.

“And I stole the Jack Daniels bottle back and told her to go drink on somebody else’s dime,” Derek said.

“Yeah, I was
pissed
about that,” Riley laughed.

Derek pointed at her. “But that was what made you listen to the CD.”

She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. “Hardly.”

“Anyway, so we go to a bunch of other shows and talk to some other drummers, but none of them are interested in moving down to Athens,” Ryan continued. “We go back home five days later, all depressed – ”

“And who walks out of my house when we finally drive up but
this
bitch right here,” Derek said, pointing at Riley.

I stared at her. “You were in his
house?”

She frowned defensively. “I needed someplace to stay.”

“We weren’t even
home yet,
” Derek laughed.

“His roommates just let you stay there?”

Riley waved her hand like
Pff.
“One dude was so stoned out of his mind, he thought I was his roommate already… and the drag queen was cool. I just told ‘em Derek was expecting me. They didn’t give a shit.”

“Except Derek
wasn’t
expecting you, though, right?” I asked.

“His roommates didn’t know that.”

“How’d you find out where he lived?”

“I went to the clubs and said there was this buff musclehead and a tall geek and an English pothead, and everybody knew who I was talking about immediately. One of the bartenders told me where Derek lived, and I just drove around till I found it.”

“Tell her what you said when you opened the door and saw us,” Derek said.

“‘Saddle up, bitches – I came to
play!’”
she hollered gleefully.

“No, before that.”

“Oh, yeah – ‘What took you so long?’”

“Why’d you change your mind and leave New York?” I asked.

“You ever been in a band with three other chicks, Blondie?”

“No.”

“So I guess you’ve never been in a band with three other chicks you’ve fucked, then.”

“That would definitely be ‘no.’”

“Well, I can let you in on a little secret: it’s
too much fuckin’ drama
.” Riley gestured to her bandmates. “As soon as these fuckers left, Sibyl – she was the lead singer – started screaming at me, telling me I wouldn’t dare quit the band, I was a traitor, I was fuckin’ guys behind her back, yadda yadda yadda. I wasn’t even seriously considering listening to the CD until she went off – then I was like, ‘Oh yeah? FUCK YOU, BITCH.’ And then I listened to the CD, and, well…”

“She liked us,” Killian said.

“I wouldn’t go
that
far. But you didn’t suck
too
bad,” Riley teased him.

“And you just picked up and left?”

“Yup. Said, ‘Fuck all y’all bitches, I’m OUT,’ and drove my van down… and the rest is history.”

“And you guys went on to record your first album,” I marveled.

“Oh, oh – wait – Ryan hasn’t told you the part where he almost pussied out,” Riley said excitedly.

“I didn’t…
wimp
out,” Ryan said.

“You just pussied out right there, you big pussy,” Riley snorted.

“Ryan was getting a lot of flack from his parents,” Derek explained. “He wanted to be a music major, and they wanted him to be a business major. They were even pressuring him to quit the band – ”

“And he almost fuckin’ did!” Riley shouted in disbelief.

“No I didn’t,” Ryan said, shaking his head and giving me a look like
Don’t listen to them.

“Yes he did,” Riley said, pushing his head up against the window of the limo and getting up in my face. “The drag queen was moving out and we wanted Ryan to move in so we could work on the album, and he was all like
Uhhhh
and
Waaaah
– ” she said, imitating a baby’s cries.

“I was not!” Ryan said indignantly as he pried Riley’s nicotine-stained fingers off his face.

“So I was like, ‘Bitch – this is decision time here,’” Riley said dramatically. “‘There ain’t no Plan B. I came all the way down here from New York, and Killian flew all the way over from England.
We
believe in this band – do
you
believe in this band? Because you’re either all the way in, or you’re all the way out. And you had better not pussy out on me now.’”

I looked at Ryan. “What did you do?”

“He did me proud!” Riley shouted happily, leapt up, and gave Ryan a noogie. He laughed and tried to bat her off, but she was like a monkey with an extremely strong grip.