Rock All Night (The Rock Star's Seduction #2) (30 page)

In the midst of all this angst, Glen from
Rolling Stone
started calling more often.

At first it was just to check in, with a slight note of urgency.
Hey, how’s it going? Are you getting good stuff? When are you coming back?

But then the conversations began to get more and more charged. More negative. More domineering.

Look, you need to wrap this up.

This is going on way too long.

We’re not spending any more money on this.

It was the money part that really ticked me off. When he told me that, I hadn’t had my own hotel room for twelve days, and I hadn’t charged a goddamn thing on the
Rolling Stone
credit card for ten. I ate with Derek, either alone or with the rest of the band, and everything else was essentially free.

I told him that.

“I don’t care,”
he shot back.
“We sent you out there to do a job, not go off on your own little fantasy vacation.”

Asshole!

He absolutely had a point: I was here to do a job. And I wasn’t doing it.

But it was obvious he was just using the money angle to manipulate me.

It felt like he didn’t give a fuck about
me;
that all he wanted was the story, and if I was the only way he could get it, fine… but I was just a means to an end. Nothing more.

He finished up with,
“This is verging on the EXTREMELY unprofessional.”

This
from the guy who didn’t care that I slept with the interview subject.

But… to be fair… I was a nobody with a shot at a
Rolling Stone
cover article, who wasn’t holding up her end of the bargain.

So I gritted my teeth and said I would do better.

Finally, though, there came a conversation that was like a sucker punch to the gut.

Thank god Derek was there to hear it.

I was in the hotel room when Glen called. Derek was scribbling out some lyrics on hotel stationary at a big wooden desk in the corner.

“That’s it, you’re out,”
Glen snapped in my ear.

“…what?” I asked, stunned.

“This has gone on long enough. Get on the next flight back to New York from wherever the hell you are.”

“But – but I’m not costing you guys money anymore – ”

“I don’t give a shit, Kaitlyn. It’s obvious to me that you’re just taking advantage of the magazine.”

“I’m not taking advantage of you! I’m doing what you asked!”

“You’re not doing what I asked – you’re not doing anything REMOTELY close to what I asked.”

“Yes I am! I’m doing interviews with the band members, I’m getting background stories, I’m actually starting to write the article – ”

“STARTING to write the article?! Jesus Christ! Maybe you forget that you’re on a deadline!”

“You never gave me a deadline!” I said, my voice rising in panic.

At this point Derek looked around in curiosity. He could tell I was in fight-or-flight mode, and he frowned as he heard more of my side of the conversation.

“It was IMPLIED that we needed this as quickly as possible!”
Glen yelled.

“You never told me that! You never told me that you needed it by any specific date!”

“Well I’m telling you NOW! Stop acting like a freshman in college, get the fuck back to New York, and do your goddamn job!”

At this point tears were welling up in my eyes.

As soon as Derek saw that, he got up from the desk and held out his hand for the phone.

Fear bloomed inside me.

“No,” I said, shaking my head, afraid of what he might say. My relationship with Glen was already dangling by a thread. I could only imagine what the Rock Star Who Despised The Press would do if I gave him the chance.

Unfortunately, Glen thought I was saying ‘No’ to him.

“WHAT the fuck did you just say?!”

“Oh – sorry, Glen, I wasn’t talking to – ”

“FUCK YOU. You do NOT tell me  – ”

Derek didn’t give me a choice. He just grabbed the phone away from me and hit the ‘Speakerphone’ icon on the screen.

I went sick to my stomach. I tried to wrest it away from him, but he turned away and kept me at arm’s length.

Glen was still talking.
“ – ‘no,’ I tell YOU ‘no,’ and NOW I’m telling you to leave your fucking entitled bullshit at the door and get back here and act like a professional, for Christ’s sake! I knew this was going to happen – I should have had my fucking head examined for – ”

“Hey, what’s up!” Derek said loudly, like he was entering a party and announcing himself. But not in a friendly way.

Glen went silent – but only for a second.
“Kaitlyn, are you there?”

“She’s here, she’s listening in on speakerphone.”

“Um… I need to talk to Kaitlyn – ”

“Oh, you can still do that. AFTER you talk to me.”

“Um… who is this?”

“This is Derek Kane.”

Glen’s attitude turned around 180 degrees in a tenth of a second flat.

“Derek, hi! This is Glen Smith from Rolling Stone – I’m a big, big fan – you guys are phenomenal – especially you, I personally think you’re quite possibly the most gifted singer/songwriter of your generation – ”

“Hey, Glen? Take your tongue outta my ass, buddy.”

Despite how afraid I was, I couldn’t help laughing – and had to stifle it with my hand.

Glen didn’t take it well. Although he retained a lot more cool-headedness than he’d displayed with me.

“Hey, there’s no call for that. I’m just being friendly and letting you know – ”

“‘Friendly’? Really? That’s funny, coming from a guy who was berating my girlfriend just a few seconds ago.”

My girlfriend.

My heart thudded in my chest.

Glen tried to keep up a valiant front.
“Oh… uh, look, I can appreciate that she’s special to you, but she has a job to do. I mean, if somebody in your organization wasn’t doing their job, I’m sure you would – ”

“Glen!” Derek barked. “Why is she here?”

There was a pause.

“Um… I thought you knew…”

“Oh,
I
know why, I’m just wondering if YOU do. So, tell me – why is she here?”

“…um… to do a story on you and the band – ”

“EXACTLY! To do a story on me and the band. And she’s the
only
reason you’re getting that story, Glen. Do you know why?”

“Um… well… you’re not a big fan of the press – ”

“That is one way to put it. That is definitely one way to put it. But more specifically, it’s because I fucking
hate
little cocksucking weasels like you. Did you know that, Glen? I fucking DESPISE little cocksucking weasels like you. And let me be clear, because you might try to misquote me to make me look bad, which you and your cocksucking weasel friends do all the fucking time. So write this down, Glen, ‘cause I’m going on record: I couldn’t care less if you’re gay. Doesn’t matter to me in the least. But the fact that you’re trying to be my best friend and suck my cock – for a
story?
Trying to stroke me off so I’ll give you a couple of quotes for your magazine, all while you’re verbally abusing my girlfriend? Fuck you, Glen. FUCK YOU. Why don’t you go and print that?”

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.

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.

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.