All Chapters of Affair with the Rockstar : Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

We walked from the elevator into a luxurious hallway lined with works of art. Miles had already disappeared through an open doorway at the end; I could hear a young woman’s voice laughing and chatting loudly in the next room, along with a few thumps and crashes from a drum set. There was some sort of brief conversation, including a few explosive phrases in a British accent, and then a familiar face met us at the door.Ryan.Except radically different from how I remembered him.He was just as tall, but now he had longer, shaggier hair that was perfectly tousled and styled. His face was leaner, with more pronounced cheekbones, and he sported a couple days’ worth of fashionable stubble. He wore high-end jeans, pointed-toe leather shoes, a black t-shirt with the Union Jack and pictures of four band members on it, a fancy leather jacket, and a small rawhide necklace that looked like he’d picked it up surfing in South America or on some other exotic adventure.My first thought was, Damn, R

The Staples Center was a massive arena usually reserved for sports events and the biggest of the big music acts. It has room for 20,000 people; at the moment, there were only 100, and so it felt cavernously empty.The hundred in question were working getting the stage, lighting, and equipment ready for the show. There were teams futzing with the electronics, and others messing with the sound system. Feedback whined through the speakers and echoed in the empty spaces above the upper rafters.“Christ, never on time, never on schedule,” Miles spat, pronouncing ‘schedule’ as ‘shed-yull.’ Then he stomped down to the stage and started yelling at some long-haired sound guys.“What do we do now?” I asked.“We go eat,” Derek said, and led the way.We walked up onstage and passed through a bunch of scaffolding. Derek called out to and joked with almost everyone we passed. Ryan and Killian got a lot of enthusiastic hellos; Riley got a few shout-outs, but mostly everybody seemed scared of her.We

The first thing I heard was the roaring. It was like the pounding of the ocean surf, but made out of human voices.As we cleared the concrete tunnel, I could see the spotlights flashing out in the darkness – just quick glimpses of them, interrupted by the framework of the stage.Ryan’s family was waiting by the exit. Casey looked like she was about to pee, she was so excited. Mara was trying to be cool, but she was hopping up and down just a centimeter, like she wanted to jump but was holding it back. Ryan hugged his parents – said “Don’t worry, they’ll be fine” to his very worried mother – and then his parents departed, and a bald security guard fell in lockstep with us as Mara and Casey joined the group.We made it to the wings of the stage when a group of crew guys handed Ryan his bass and plugged some kind of a transmitter into Killian’s guitar.Suddenly a voice reverberated over the speakers.“AND NOW… GIVE IT UP… FOR… BIGGEEEEEERRRR!”The pounding surf of voices became a massive

I stood on the outside of the tile shower room and listened as the hiss of water filled the air. Steam started to drift out.“So, I wanted to ask you about the album cover for Bigger Than – ”“What?” Derek yelled, his voice sounding hollow from bouncing on the tile.“I said, I wanted to ask you about – ”“I can’t hear you over the water – you’re going to have to come in here.”Asshole.I was pretty damn sure he could hear me just fine.But I steeled myself and walked around the corner into the shower room, my heels clicking on the tile.I almost choked.He was standing there, outlined against the white tiled wall, soap suds sliding down his body, his hair wet and slick, his skin luscious and shiny under the jet of water.I recalled a story about some movie studio mogul who wanted to cast an Olympic female swimmer in a movie. In everyday life, she was kind of plain, but put her in a bathing suit and a pool, and she looked amazing. The studio mogul’s comment was, “Dry she ain’t much – b

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