Rock All Night(4)

“You just said you don’t have a boyfr– ”

“You use women,” I interrupted.

He got an irritated look on his face. “I sleep with women. I don’t use them.”

“I’m pretty sure some of them wouldn’t see it that way.”

“This isn’t about other women. This is about you.”

“Okay, then: from my perspective, you use other women. And I don’t want to be used.”

He shrugged. “Fair enough.”

Then he just sat there, drinking his drink, not saying anything.

It was a looooong silence.

“What, you don’t have some big speech laid out?” I asked, annoyed.

He grinned. “Was that an intentional pun, ‘laid out’? Or just a Freudian slip?”

I suppose it was a Freudian slip, but I wasn’t about to admit it.

“Pun,” I snapped. “So – let’s have it.”

“That sounds like another Freudian slip,” he teased.

“Why does this conversation remind me of when we were at the gyro place, and you always steered it towards sex?” I asked angrily.

“What, are you going to walk out on me again?” he asked, clearly enjoying himself.

I wanted to. I was weighing the options of having to pay back Rolling Stone for my plane ticket when he started talking again.

“There is no big speech. I just don’t make promises I can’t keep. And to me, it sounds like you want a wedding ring to sleep with a guy, so… no. No big speeches.”

“I don’t want a wedding ring to – ”

“This isn’t like before,” he said, his voice edging towards anger. “I’m not standing in front of you with my heart in my hands. I went down that road once, and I got my heart crushed.”

I felt horrible as he said it, but I didn’t have time to speak.

“So, no – no promises. Just let yourself go for once. Just…”

He put his fingers around an invisible object in the air.

“…pry those fingers out of the cold, hard, controlling grip you have on yourself, and life, and everything… and maybe you’ll have some fun. Just do something for once without a big plan… without any promises… without any contracts… without any expectations… and you might not get let down.”

“‘Might not,’” I mimicked him sarcastically.

He sighed like he was giving up. “I can’t promise you anything, Kaitlyn… except I’ll talk to you for the article. Whatever you want. And the only thing I expect from you is that you’ll be fair to me. Do we have a deal?”

I still could have walked out.

God knows I wanted to.

Even after all these years, he affected me more than any other man I’d ever met.

Annoyed me, infuriated me…

Intoxicated me.

Obsessed me.

And I had discovered, with a kind of sick dread, that I wanted him just as much as before.

But I wasn’t going to cave.

Fuck that.

I was here because I had a job to do, and I wasn’t going to run away from it.

“…deal,” I said, and stuck out my hand.

He grinned, then shook it.

Like so many years before, a surge of electricity, of chemicals, of some sort of primal connection passed between us.

I felt it.

I know he did, because the resignation from earlier suddenly turned into a spark of lust in his eyes.

Had we been in a bedroom, alone, he might have reached out and tried to tear off my clothes…

…and I might have let him.

But instead, we were in a lounge in public, and the emotion in his eyes dimmed as he let go of my hand.

But I noticed it didn’t disappear.

Not completely.

“Okay,” he finally said, finished his drink, and slipped back on his sunglasses. “Let’s go meet the rest of the band.”





3




We walked out of the bar and through the lobby. I looked towards the bank of elevators passing by on our left. “Aren’t we going up?”

“Yeah, but ours is over here,” he said, pointing past the check-in desk.

“You have your own private elevator?”

“Well, they didn’t build it just for me, you know.”

“Where does it go?”

He smirked at me. “The penthouse. We are rock stars, after all.”

“The penthouse has its own private – ”

“I haven’t seen you for four years, and you want to talk about elevators?” he teased me.

“Fine,” I huffed. “What do you want to talk about?”

He shrugged. “I dunno… you graduated, I’m assuming?”

“Yes.”

“Syracuse, wasn’t it?”

Now it was my turn to be impressed. “Good memory.”

“What else have you done?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, what other big things have you written?”

I thought he was making fun of me, so I said sarcastically, “The last Time magazine Person of the Year article.”

He looked over at me, stunned. “What? Really?”