The Dance (Original Series Part 2)

Shatter Your Illusions Of Love

Special thanks to Nicole Barker, fellow Buckingham Nicks enthusiast, who posted the video of  "Landslide" in Connecticut on 9/17/97  that inspired me. <3

"Can I sail through the changing ocean tides, can I handle the seasons of my life? Mmm-mmm, I don't know..."

The crowd at the arena in Hartford, Connecticut was going wild. Stevie was singing "Landslide" amidst cheers from the audience that made her almost forget the panic attack she'd had before stepping out onstage for Fleetwood Mac's first performance on the tour. Lindsey was to her left as he'd always been, finger-picking his way through the song as he had thousands of times, and as his guitar break came up in the middle of the song, she wondered if, subconsciously, Lindsey had always stood to her left on stage because the left side was where the heart was. She'd asked him that years ago on their first Fleetwood Mac tour, floating together in a hotel pool in Texas, and he'd just smiled and said, "Definitely."

The conversation they'd had about the state of their relationship last month, however, had not been as easy. They had been all over each other when they'd gotten back to her house the night of The Dance on television, but because Stevie had been told by her doctor to avoid intercourse for a month after her miscarriage, they had wound up just holding each other upstairs in her bed as they had been doing all summer, kissing occasionally but mostly just pawing at each other like tiger cubs, exchanging terms of endearment and happy memories of the past whispered into the darkness, and alternating between wiping each other's tears and kissing any visible patches of skin on one another they could find. Lindsey had eventually gotten up to go to the bathroom to try to calm himself down, and when he returned Stevie had been sound asleep, so exhausted from the events of the past two weeks he couldn't blame her at all. He'd crept under the covers and pulled them over both of them, and she'd turned into him in her sleep and spent the whole night curled up against him, both of them facing into each other, Stevie's face buried so close to his chest he wondered how she was able to breathe.

Then had come their lengthy conversation. Stevie made coffee in the morning, awake hours before she normally was, and they had taken their coffee onto the deck off the kitchen, overlooking the backyard. Lindsey had formally apologized for snatching back Kristen's card from the trash, and Stevie accepted his apology. The reasons why he'd kept it, however, and the reason why she'd gotten so mad, had been more difficult to discuss.

"It's like I am always an option to you," Stevie told him, sitting across from him at the table on the deck. "It's like, 'Gee, I love Stevie, but this other girl is cute, too, so maybe I'll keep my options open because Stevie will break down and let me in.' You wrote a song about it!" They were silent for a moment, realizing the song to which she was referring had been the one they had sung to their unborn baby not too long ago.

"You've got it backwards, Stevie. The OTHER women have been the options. Carol Ann was an option, Cheri was an option...I feel like a terrible person for admitting it, but I am just biding my time with other women, holding out hope for you."

"It's still the same thing, Lindsey. If you're out there with some woman, biding time because I'm not giving you what you want, then you're not open to me, you're not risking anything to be with me, and all that tells me is that I am who ELSE you want."

"You can't tell me you haven't done the same thing, Stevie."

"What do you mean?" She looked like he'd just told her she was ugly or fat, or some other low blow, and he saw the hurt in her eyes.

"You walked around for years parading men around me but then would crawl into bed with me the minute one of them treated you unkindly. Remember Mirage in France? You were hiding out upstairs writing Wild Heart and talking in hushed tones to Jimmy, but every night I'd be lying there and you'd come into my room and lay down and ask me to hold you. I felt like an option too! The night before you married Kim, where were you, Stevie? Riddle me that."