The Dance (Original Series Part 2)

Stay With Me Awhile

How do they get away with calling this stuff coffee?

That was what Lindsey Buckingham thought when he took a sip of the cup of coffee someone had handed him in a styrofoam cup while he and everyone else waited for the photographers to get their equipment ready to take various pictures of Fleetwood Mac, the Rumors lineup, just one in a series of many engagements he and the other four members of the band had been through since they had announced the reunion concert for VH1. The coffee he'd just sipped somehow managed to be weak and bitter at the same time, and he hoped no one saw the face he made when he swallowed it, knowing Stevie would have flipped out if she'd tasted it. Stevie took her coffee very seriously. She was the only one of the five Fleetwood Mac members to still be in the dressing room, he noticed, and he wondered if he should go back into the dressing room area to check on her. He stood apart from everyone else, watching as John concentrated on smoking a cigarette in the corner with entirely too much vigor, sitting on one of the equipment trunks as Christine stood with the makeup woman in a mild panic about her appearance, smoothing down parts of her blonde hair which she'd just cut visibly shorter not long ago. Mick had been keeping to himself standing in the corner, and looking on, vaguely interested in the video camera someone was holding over his shoulder. Lindsey discreetly abandoned his terrible cup of coffee and went to go check on Stevie, partly because they were all ready to start and partly because he hoped she wasn't still having the panic attack she'd been having the night before as he'd held her under the covers, upstairs in her bedroom in the four-poster bed she kept covered with fluffy down bedding and entirely too many vintage embroidered pillows.

"You're worrying for nothing, you know," Lindsey had said to her as she sat straight up in bed against the pillows, staring directly ahead so that it appeared as though she were watching the rerun of Cheers that had started playing on the TV after the news, but he knew better. Her hands were bunching up the deep purple top sheet almost as if she were collecting tiny flowers in her hands, and he reached over to kiss the side of her head. "Everyone is totally into this, like flipped out that we're actually back. What's the problem, baby?"

Stevie continued to stare straight ahead. On the screen in front of her, on an episode of Cheers she had seen a hundred times, Norm Peterson was trying every possible tactic to get Rebecca Howe out of the closet of her sleeping boss, on whom she had a crush. Stevie was starting to feel like Rebecca in the closet, a dirty secret, the woman Lindsey had been keeping in the closet since they had started working with Fleetwood Mac again a few months ago. She didn't move her gaze at all but continued to stare in one direction, saying simply, "I'm old and I'm sober and I'm freaking out about the whole project. That's what's wrong."

"Okay, I'm not even going to entertain the idea of your being old, Stevie," Lindsey said. He kissed the bare shoulder that poked out from the strap of her nightgown - the little white silk one she'd worn because she knew he loved it. That was when Stevie finally turned to him, but she kept her grip on the sheet.

"Hey man, you still have a year left," she said. "Forty-nine is coming next month and that's the last one before fifty! You'll see what I mean next year when it happens to you!"

"Well I don't care if you're forty-nine or fifty-nine or eighty-nine, angel," he said. "You're beautiful, you're amazing...and you're Stevie Nicks! You'll be fine tomorrow."

"Stay close by me tomorrow?"  She looked at him with hopeful eyes. "Like sit next to me if we're sitting down to be interviewed, stand by me if they make us stand a lot...please? I haven't done this without some kind of substance since 1975 and I don't know if I'm going to make it. Will you please stay close to me?"

"Try and send me away, sweet girl."  He smiled at her and then kissed her, and he used his hands over hers to help her release her grip on the purple sheet she had wrinkled by how tight she'd been gripping it in anxiety. "There you go," he said when the sheet was out of her hands, and he kissed her fingertips before letting go of her hands. She still had a stricken look on in her eyes, and he knew it was going to take awhile for her to be comfortable with all of this.