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“I am NOT!”
“Whatever, Ms. ‘De Nile Ain’t Just A River In Egypt.’”
“Can we talk about something else?” I fumed.
“Okay… how’s the article coming?”
I groaned. “Next topic.”
She waved her hand. “I get it, I get it – you’re too busy ‘researching’ right now. You can write it when you get home. When are you headed back?”
Again, my stomach started roiling – but for a different reason this time. “I… don’t know.”
“Well, you can’t stay in Never-Never Land forever, Tinkerbell.”
My immediate reaction – from the depths of my subconscious – was, Why not?
But I didn’t say anything.
She frowned at my silence. “Kaitlyn… you’re going to have to come back to real life sooner or later.”
“I know,” I grumbled.
She continued offhandedly as she took a bite of French toast, “And he’s going to go back to his.”
“What does that mean?”
She gave me a You’re an idiot look. “Seriously?”
“Yes.”
She doubled down on the look. “You really need me to fuckin’ spell it out?”
Now my hackles were up. “Yeah. Fuckin’ spell it out for me.”
“He’s a rock star, honey. And a scorchin’ hot one, at that. You’ll go home, back to your life, and write a great article… and he’ll go back on tour, singing to throngs of adoring models and groupies every night… and… doing what rock stars do with models and groupies.”
She edited the end of that sentence out of deference to me. She must have seen the pain on my face.
“I’m not saying you guys won’t hook up every once in awhile and have an incredible weekend,” she continued in an effort to soothe me. “I’m not saying he won’t fly you out to the occasional show, and you won’t still have mind-blowing sex and a lot of fun and – ”
“You’re wrong,” I said, my voice low and angry.
“What, you won’t have mind-blowing sex and a lot of fun?”
“It could work,” I insisted.
“What could work?”
“A… a relationship.”
“Yeah, if you’re all three of those ‘See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil’ monkeys rolled into one,” she snorted. “Although I guess it’d be more like ‘See No Sexin’, Hear No Sexin’, Speak No Sexin’.”
When I didn’t hit her with a comeback, she stared at me for a moment – then looked around like she was searching for a hidden camera. “Wait a second, am I being punked? Are you the same Kaitlyn Reynolds who almost didn’t come out here because Derek Kane is a man-whore who uses women by the dozen – excuse me, the hundreds?”
I bristled. “I was afraid about crossing a line – as a journalist. And about everything I might have lost when I walked away from him in college. And if I did sleep with him, maybe I’d built it up too much over the years and it would never match up to reality – ”
She rolled her hand in the air like Come on, keep going. “…aaaand I seem to recall something in there about him sleeping with lots of other chicks.”
“I was wrong.”
“What, that he slept with lots of other chicks? And that he’ll continue to sleep with other chicks? No, I don’t think you were wrong about that one.”
I gritted my teeth and didn’t say anything.
She sighed again and reached out across the table to touch my hands.
I pulled my fingers back as though her touch had scorched me.
“Kaitlyn,” she said in a kind but tired voice, “I would love nothing more for you than for Derek to fall completely in love and give you everything you want, which I assume is a big-ass rock on your finger and him never looking at another woman’s ass till death do you part. But honey… you’re not looking at this realistically – ”
“He said I was his girlfriend,” I blurted out.
That stopped her.
For a second.
She raised one eyebrow. “…really.”
“Yes.”
“He said the actual word ‘girlfriend’? About you?”
“Yes,” I snapped. “Is that so hard to believe?”
“No, no, I just… did he use the ‘L’ word?”
I froze. The fact that he hadn’t yet… bothered me.
“…no.”
“Were you guys arguing at the time, maybe?”
I didn’t say anything.
She narrowed her eyes, seeing she had hit pay dirt. “And was anybody naked at the time, or did a certain someone want to get naked, and the other someone didn’t?”
My memories of that night were scrambled and hard to pin down… but more than anything, I remembered the trancelike sex and the many, many orgasms.
I looked down at the table in silence.
“Kaitlyn… I’m not saying he didn’t mean it… but you know his past. Do you really think he’s going to change his spots just because of you?”
I glared at her – mostly because she was voicing every insecurity I had. “You’re saying it’s impossible?”
“No, I’m not – well, yeah, sort of. Guys like Derek Kane don’t change everything about themselves like that. They might say it, and they might mean it, and they might actually follow through for awhile… but… in the end… Derek’s Derek. He is who he is.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means he’s a player.”
“So what does that make me?”
“A fuckin’ pendulum. You swung from one extreme of ‘No no no no no’ to the other extreme of marriage and houses and 2.5 kids – ”
“I’m not thinking about those things,” I hissed.
“Okay, then, you’re just thinking you’ll be the long-distance girlfriend of a guy who’s slept with way more people than I have, which is saying something. And you think he’ll be loyal, and faithful, and never ever step out with one of the supermodels on the Sports Illustrated bathing suit cover who’s throwing herself at – ”
“You were the one who said I should come here and sleep with him,” I interrupted.
“Yeah – sleep with. Have a good time. Get your rocks off. Not fall head over heels in love and expect a future full of roses and ponies.”
“So what are you saying I should do?” I asked coldly.
She shrugged. “Enjoy the ride. Enjoy the hell out of it.”
“And then?”
“And then… come back to reality, babe. ‘Cause wherever your head is right now, reality ain’t it.”
79
My goodbye to Shanna wasn’t exactly the warmest in the history of our friendship. We switched to slightly less incendiary topics – like all the drama surrounding her sex life, which was always a conversational winner with her – and then I saw her off to her taxi.
“You know I wasn’t trying to bust your balls, right?” she slurred before she climbed into the cab. She’d had a couple of ‘the world’s best hangover cures’ by the end of breakfast, not to mention a few mimosas. “You know I’m just worried about you, right?”
“Yeah,” I grumped, though I said it more to get rid of her than out of any sort of real agreement.
“My original advice still stands.”
“Which was what?”
“Go live life – and write the fuckin’ article.”
“That’s what I’m doing. Well… except for the writing part.”
“Yeah, I know. But I have a collorary… corror…”
“Corollary?”
“Yeah, that’s it,” she said, and pointed at me like I’d said the magic word. “Little fucker’s hard to say when you’re drunk… coro…lary…”
“Which is…?” I said impatiently.
“What? Oh, yeah – go live life… but make sure it’s actually real life.”
I frowned. “Versus what?”
“Versus a fantasy.” She said it like vershus a fantasy as she stumbled towards the cab. “Fantasies are awesome – fuck yeah they’re awesome – but sometimes you gotta know when to come home and write the fuckin’ article.”
“What if real life can be a fantasy?” I challenged her.
She paused, halfway into the cab.
“If you figure that one out, let me know how to do it,” she said, toppled into the backseat, and waved as the cab took off into the sea of San Francisco traffic.
80
I was pretty pissed at Shanna, and definitely riled up. I wanted to yell and vent – but the one person I couldn’t yell and vent to was the one sleeping in my bed.
Make that his bed.
That I had slept in.
See, it was already complicated.
And it was complicated even more by the fact that I was afraid everything Shanna was saying might be the truth… even if I wouldn’t admit it to myself.
If I hadn’t still been feeling nauseated, I might have gone back to the restaurant and started a bender. (A Kaitlyn-sized bender, not a Shanna or – God forbid – Riley-sized bender.) But I still felt like somebody had dumped a whole bunch of ick into my stomach, so I headed up for the band’s suite instead. I reasoned that Derek was still sleeping, and there was no way that Riley was up… so no danger there. And I might just be able to catch a sympathetic ear from Ryan.
