Page 78 of Goode to Be Bad
No matter how I tried, I couldn’t get Lexie onstage—she flat out refused, and became angrier than she’d ever been when I tried to force it. So I let it go.
Moscow was followed by three dates in Germany, and more refusals to perform. I would hear her playing my guitar or her ukulele, knew she was writing new songs, testing out melodies and snatches of chorus, tweaking. I knew music was coming back to her and that she wanted it.
Paris, Barcelona, Lisbon. Some of the most beautiful cities in the world, and I made sure she saw them. We took time away from everything, just me and her in a blacked-out SUV, seeing the sights and hitting little cafes, sipping wine. The shows were all sold out and every single one was a huge success. We were making big bank on this tour and Mick was thrilled.
We haven’t had sex in over a week. I refused to let her blow me instead of being intimate, and she refused to let me go down on her unless she could do the same to me.
It was all falling apart.
She refused to perform.
Hid in the bathroom or sat on the balcony playing my guitar and ignoring me.
Ignoring calls from her mom and sisters.
She was coming apart.
We were coming apart.
It was all disintegrating. Dissolving. Breaking at the seams, crumbling at the cracks.
Prague. Four a.m. local time.
She was asleep. Well, passed out—that’s the other thing: she’s started drinking herself to sleep and I hated it.
But I couldn’t just…leave her here, obviously. Couldn’t and wouldn’t stick her on a plane ride home. On a certain level, this whole thing was nuts. Why was I putting myself through this? Why was I continuing to accept her endless parade of bullshit? Especially now, as she increasingly fell apart.
Because at night, as she fell asleep, she’d cling to me. Clutch me close and tight and hard, and nuzzle against me as if I were the only thing holding her in place, keeping her together. She’d wake up and sigh, and wriggle against me, fall back asleep, and in those moments of tenderness and sweetness, I knew why I was doing all this. And sometimes, there’d be hints of sweetness from her. She went off exploring on her own, and brought back souvenirs for the guys and me, and another time went out while we were rehearsing and doing sound check and came back with a bottle of local whiskey and junk food. Little things, but gestures like that meant something, coming from Lexie.
I didn’t know what else I could do. And then I had an idea. It would mean breaking things wide open. It was risky. It constituted an invasion of her privacy. She’d be angry with me—beyond angry. She may never talk to me again, if I did this. Yet, I felt I had to take that chance—that if I didn’t bring things to a head, we’d never have a future together.
I unplugged my phone, grabbed the bottle of whiskey she’d gotten me, cracked the top and took a slug. I was still wide awake after our concert tonight, so I took the bottle and my phone out on the balcony and closed the door behind me. Sitting on a chair, I got comfortable and brought up the video of Lexie I took a couple weeks ago in Tokyo.
I watched it…again. For the tenth or twentieth time.
Goddamn,she’s good. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that if I posted this to my socials, it would go viral. Millions of views in a matter of hours. She’sgorgeous. Her voice is haunting. It’s a hypnotic, mesmerizing video.
Pure talent. Pure unadulterated star power, raw and unpolished.
I uploaded it to my socials. I hesitated.
I could lose her over this.
But I was losing her anyway.
She deserved her time in the sun—and the world deserved her music.
She was too afraid of…of fuckingeverythingto put herself out there.
This video—more than her appearance on the Myles & Crow album, more than the other videos, even more than her encore with me in Tokyo—would put her on the map.
I turned to look at her. Sleeping in my bed. Our bed. A hotel bed. Arm across her face, an empty wine bottle on the bedside table.
I had to shake her out of this.
This was the only way I knew.
I hit the publish button.