Rock All Night(28)

Derek loved it all. He raised his arms triumphantly and shouted, “HEY – where’s the f*ckin’ PARTY?!” The entire room roared, and then he was slapping backs and doing fist bumps with everyone he passed as he made his way through the crowd.

I followed in his wake, a ghost, completely ignored.

We ended up at the back of the room with Ryan and his family. Security held back a few of the more enthusiastic supplicants while Derek hugged Mara and Casey. Then he turned to Mr. and Mrs. Miller. “Did you enjoy the show?”

“Top notch – great time!” Mr. Miller agreed.

Mrs. Miller squinted at him disapprovingly. “You were a little provocative, Derek.”

Ryan started laughing silently behind his hand.

A little provocative.

HA.

If only she’d seen what had gone on out in the hallway.

Or in the locker room, for that matter.

Derek just grinned. “It’s all a part of the show, Mrs. Miller.” Then he looked down at Mara and Casey. “Wait until you’re in college before you have a serious boyfriend, okay, girls? Besides, I’M your boyfriend, and I get jealous. And no drinking or doing drugs and do what your mom tells you, okay?”

Casey nodded eagerly like a puppy dog… but Mara gave him big, limpid eyes that suggested she wanted to do anything but wait until she was in college.

Derek tweaked her nose, then looked up at Mrs. Miller. “Anything else?”

“And get good grades,” Mrs. Miller said.

“And get good grades,” Derek lectured the girls, upon which Mrs. Miller seemed satisfied.

“It was a very nice show,” she agreed, then looked over with obvious distaste at Killian and Snoop about twenty feet away. “But we should be getting back to the hotel.”

“AWWWWW, MOOOOM!” the girls both cried out in unison.

“I’ll see you soon, don’t worry,” Derek said, and kissed both of them on the tops of their heads. “Go on, do what your mom tells you to.”

After a few more hugs and handshakes, the Millers filed out of the room.


Ryan shook his head with a grin. “You got off easy. You should have heard the lecture I got. ‘Corrupting America’s youth’ this, ‘bad example to your sisters’ that.”

“You just gotta know how to charm ‘em, my brotha,” Derek laughed, then looked around as he shouted, “Hey – who I gotta f*ck to get a drink around here?”

Magically, a bottle of expensive scotch suddenly appeared in his hand as celebrities and unknowns alike howled with laughter.

“‘Scuse me, Kaitlyn… I gotta go press the flesh,” he said with a wink, and disappeared into the crowd.

I seethed inwardly as I watched him go…

…and something pathetic inside me feared that I had lost him once again.





19




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 f*cking 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.