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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 fuck 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 fucking 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.
We exited through an alleyway where a limo was waiting. The boys all piled in, Miles shoved me in next, and the big bruiser threw Riley in like a wailing, scratching cat. Miles came last and shut the door behind us, and the limo took off.
“You stupid little FUCKER,” Riley raged at Miles. “I was having a fucking good time, and you had to go ruin it like you always – ”
Miles thrust a bottle of Jack Daniels in her face. “Suck on that an’ shut the fuck up.”
She grabbed it and immediately chugged.
“Like a baby to a bottle,” Miles muttered grimly.
This time around I was sitting next to Ryan. He looked over at me and smiled. “Did you have fun?”
“Um… I guess?” I said hesitantly. I’d been an onlooker rather than a participant, so it hadn’t really been ‘fun’ so much as informative. And occasionally shocking.
“Crazy, huh?” he asked.
That was the understatement of the evening.
“Hey Blondie,” Riley slurred the second she took the bottle out of her mouth, “wanna fuck?”
“…uh, NO.”
“Too bad,” she giggled, and leaned over and put her grubby little hand on my knee. I tried jerking away, but she just slid it further up my thigh.
“Keep your fuckin’ hands to yourself,” Derek barked from two spots over.
“Fuck off, D,” Riley sneered. “Just cuz you can’t seal the deal dudn’t mean I can’t.”
Derek looked like he was about to leap across the limo and strangle her when Ryan simply reached out and placed his hand lightly on hers.
“Riley,” Ryan said, his voice soft but full of warning.
As soon as he did that, Riley looked him in the face – and let go of my leg.
“I was just playin’,” she said petulantly, like a child who had been scolded.
“Wait till the hotel and play with somebody who wants to play.”
“Fine,” she grumbled. “Sorry, Blondie.”
I suddenly flashed onto a scene from 16 Candles. Molly Ringwald is being slobbered over by a nerdy little dweeb, and she forcefully rebuffs him. He sheepishly and dejectedly apologizes. She feels bad for him, so she says consolingly, “It’s fine…”
…whereupon he launches back in, thinking she meant ‘It’s fine to kiss me.’
I did SO not want a reenactment of that scene, so I just said, “Apology accepted.”
“Didja fuck him in the shower?” she asked without missing a beat.
“Riley!” Ryan snapped.
“NO, she didn’t,” Derek answered for me.
“Ha HAAA,” Riley snorted at him. Then she looked at me and wiggled her eyebrows. “I’m a whole lot better in bed than he is, FYI.”
EW.
“Drink,” Miles said, tipping the bottle up towards her face.
She went back to chugging it down.
“Like a piglet at the teat,” Miles grunted.
She popped the bottle out of her mouth. “I’m not Piglet, I’m – I’m TIGGER.”
In answer, he just tilted the bottle back up, and she went back to chugging.
“Aren’t you afraid you guys are going to kill her one day?” I whispered to Ryan.
“Relax – it’s so watered down, it’s like drinking wine,” Ryan whispered back. “Bad, but not 40 proof at least. Miles does it after every show. She’s so plastered she can’t even taste anything anyway.”
“Hey Riley, tell Kaitlyn how you came up with the band name,” Derek said.
“OH, OH!” she cried out, sloshing watered-down Jack all over her wifebeater. “Yeah, I named the band – did you know that?” she asked me like an overexcited kid.
