Page 60 of Goode to Be Bad

He chuckled, kissed me on the temple. “Fair enough.” He cast one last glance at Ketchikan, visible in the far distance, across the Passage. “Well? Ready for this?”

“Not even a little.”

“Too bad. Tokyo, here we come.”

We touched down in LA,and were joined by band members Brand, Zan, Jupiter, and their manager Mick. Mick had been planning on getting his own ride to Tokyo, but decided to check out the new ride, and so I met Mick––who looked to be in his late fifties with salt-and-pepper hair in a ponytail which was doing a poor job of hiding male pattern baldness. He had a brilliant white smile and an easygoing manner, and I was sure he had lots of stories to tell about his career in talent management.

It was a long, boring flight; the guys turned on a shoot-em-up movie with lots of boobs and explosions. They didn’t drink all that much, and Myles not at all—I think he was still feeling it from his bender the night before. I sat with Myles, half watched the movie, and read a book. It was…well, homey. Except for the occasional blip of turbulence, it was remarkably like being in a fancy condo with some guy friends.

The problem with boredom is that it left me way too much time trying not to think about this morning.

Him, bare inside me. How perfect it had felt.

How badly I’d wanted him like that, how badly I wanted him like that all the time.

I tried to not think about how he’d tasted. There’d just been too much to swallow, and it had almost been hotter for that.

He probably didn’t realize the panic attack I’d had the entire time I had him in my mouth—how I’d fought it, hard. I’d fought to keep breathing, to ward off the terrible, dark, evil memory. I’d kept my eyes on him, reminding myself this was Myles. No one else—just Myles. Sweet, sexy, amazing Myles.

Myles who had looked at me, during and afterward, as if I’d given him a gift he could never repay.

He had no idea how hard that had been for me.

I’d wanted to stop and just cry, not because of him or anything he’d done, and not because I hadn’t enjoyed how he tasted, how he felt, how he’d reacted—because I had enjoyed that. But because I’d been fighting a battle he knew nothing about and I wanted more than anything in life to be able to tell him.

But I couldn’t.

It was ingrained, imprinted. Seared into me—never tell.

No one. Ever.

He’d know.

Logic told me otherwise, but logic was utterly helpless in the face of some things.

Myles nudged me. “Hey.”

I jerked, pulled out of my reverie, and shut the book. “What? Hey.”

“You were somewhere around Mars, it looked like.”

“Just…thinking.”

He’d been on his iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard attached, clicking and clacking, answering emails, plugging back into work mode. He eyed me. Glanced past me, at Mick, who was sprawled out in a chair, staring out the window at the clouds. “Mick.”

Mick glanced up, nodded at Myles’s gesture to join us. Mick crossed the isle and sat down opposite Myles. “What’s up?”

Myles opened a window on his iPad—a YouTube window. The title of the video was “Myles North with Crow and Lexie Goode” and it was an original song we’d done for the acoustic album.

“Mick, I want you to check out this video we made up in Alaska. Give you a little taste of what’s coming for the band.”

“Oh shit. Really?” I watched the video along with Myles and Mick. “You made a video?”

“When Corin realized several people had been recording our jam sessions, he got them to send in all the footage, then stitched it together into video, and tracked the song over it. Fuckin’ genius.”

“It’s…live? Like, it’s out there?” I felt faint.

He pointed at the screen. “Went live on YouTube this morning, and it’s got six million hits already.”