Say You Will Part 2: The Tour

I Remember That Place

Phoenix, Arizona
Sunday , July 20, 2003
*********************

"Linds...baby...we can't...we only have twenty minutes before the car comes."

Stevie was lying against a series of down pillows on a big fluffy bed in her hotel suite in Phoenix, Arizona, trying to muster up the will to actually stop Lindsey from going any further as he lay pressed up against her on his side, nuzzling into her neck and capturing her pale, delicate skin in his lips, and sometimes his teeth, as she moaned lightly at the sensation of his mouth on her skin that made it almost impossible to tell him to stop.

"The driver will wait; I need to taste my sweet girl." Lindsey's mouth moved from her neck down to her collarbone, where he left a string of soft, tiny kisses before moving back up her neck towards her ear. He heard Stevie let out a small, contented sigh, and she could feel his lips curl into a smile behind her ear.

"Baby...I am not just your sweet girl...I am also Jess and Barbara Nicks' daughter, and they are expecting us." A car was set to arrive in twenty minutes to drive them into Paradise Valley to Lori and Christopher's house, where the Nicks family barbecues, a summer tradition, would contain two special guests - Stevie and Lindsey. Barbara was the most excited, not having seen Lindsey in years, even if she had seen his car driving away over Thanksgiving weekend, when they'd been staying at Stevie's house in Santa Monica and he'd come over late at night. Stevie had sworn her mother to secrecy, and so far no one else in the Nicks family knew what was happening. As far as they were concerned, Lindsey was coming to the barbecue because it has been a long time and he wanted to catch up with the people who had, for all purposes, been his in-law for many years. Lindsey pulled his mouth, and the rest of himself, away from Stevie slowly, reluctantly, and they finished getting ready to go.

Stevie had not asked Lindsey any questions about his time at home and he hadn't volunteered the information. She had told him at the very beginning of this new love affair that she didn't want to know; she wouldn't have known whether to feel jealous or guilty or both. They had each showed up at the venues in Los Angeles and Anaheim every afternoon for sound check, stealing a few kisses and intimate moments in hidden corners as they always did, but at night, when Lindsey's limo took him home to his wife instead of to a hotel where he pretended to be staying in a suite of his own but went directly to Stevie's door, it was different. Stevie took Sulamith into the bedroom at her usual sunrise bedtime and slept fitfully alone, and Lindsey slept beside a woman he felt terrible saying he was growing to despise. He felt awful about letting Kristen rope him into having sex a few nights ago, even after telling her that he was tired and he was all wrapped up in the tour and not in the right headspace to do much else. She'd worn him down and suddenly there he was on a random Wednesday night at home, having sex with his wife and feeling oddly as if he were cheating on the woman he loved.

He hated comparing two women and had always hated when other men around him would do that, but the thing he noticed that was most different between them was connection, intimacy. Even from the beginning of their relationship, Lindsey had struggled to get to a place in his mind where he truly felt close to Kristen in bed, something about her always a bit detached and even clinical...or maybe it was just that he'd just spent a year in bed with the woman he'd loved for all of his adult life and the distinction between the two was unbearable. There had been a time when he'd told himself he was in love with Kristen - she could be fun at times, silly and playful, making funny faces at the kids when they were babies to get them to eat, singing along to pop songs on the radio on long drives and smiling at him with her hand on his thigh, talking to him about art and real estate and home decor and things he had to admit they actually had very much in common - but with each passing year, and when Fleetwood Mac was in his daily life, he noticed that Kristen slowly fading away, and she'd become simply two things - the mother of his children and the woman who stood in the way of him living the way he wanted to with the person he wanted to. When she'd gotten up to go to the bathroom after sex on Wednesday night and he'd watched her walk naked through the open doorway, he'd felt nothing but ashamed and alone.