If You Were My Love (Double Love Series Part 1)

Prologue: I Tried To Explain It

Brentwood, California
Sunday, August 28, 2022
(8:30 am)
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Why Christine McVie initially was "terrified" of Mick Fleetwood.

Lindsey Buckingham laughed out loud when that headline appeared on his Google newsfeed as he scrolled through the usual apps on his phone in bed. It was an article from a publication called Far Out Magazine, and as he read through the article, expecting to find new information about a woman he had known for nearly fifty years, he found that nothing, not a single quote from her, was new. She was "terrified" when she first met Mick as a member of Chicken Shack in England, a fan of Fleetwood Mac in the early blues days with Peter Green, because he was tall and thin and had a big personality.

What a succinct way to describe the man who had given both of them a start to their careers while building up his own, Lindsey thought. He was sitting up in bed and reading the news and clearing notifications on his phone, reading glasses on the tip of his nose now, added to his routine about twenty-five years ago when he realized he was getting older and the words on the page were no longer coming in clearly.

Stevie had been with him, he recalled, when he first brought home a pair of reading glasses. He'd used them for the first time upstairs in her bed in the summer of 1997, shortly before they went out on tour with the band for The Dance, sitting up against too many of her fluffy, frilly pillows in only a pair of boxer shorts and the gold-rimmed glasses on the tip of his nose, reading an article in the Los Angeles Times about Amsterdam tourism and the Red Light District crackdown. Stevie's response to his new accessory had been to climb on top of him in bed and tell him he looked like a sexy Santa the way the glasses sat at the bridge of his nose, and then straddle his lap and take them off so she could clear a path to wrap her arms around his neck, sink her fingers into his hair and kiss him so passionately that he forgot all about Amsterdam, forgot he was almost forty-eight years old and needed reading glasses, and within seconds he'd flipped her over and he hadn't had a moment to finish reading anything all night.

You see, these are the memories your therapist old you not to spin out about in your head whenever something as simple as using a pair of glasses makes you think of the past. He often had to remind himself not to think of Stevie at random times, whenever anything came up - good or bad - that reminded him of something they had been through together. But how could he avoid it, he thought, when he'd known her in one form or another since he was sixteen years old and he would be turning seventy-fucking-three in about six weeks? He'd spent his entire life building memories with Stevie - memories of love her, trying to hate her, worrying about her, avoiding her, running back to her, pushing her away, being pushed away by her, longing for her, hating himself for longing for her.

Sometimes the memories were so strong, so vivid, he almost expected to look over to the other side of the bed and see her sitting calmly beside him, her own glasses on, in a little nightgown or a pair of silk pajamas, a little dog at her feet, furiously scribbling in a fancy notebook and occasionally looking over at him with a smile, the one where her teeth didn't really show but her lips curled up in such an adorable way that he usually removed the book from her lap to make room to kiss her, the same as she had with his reading glasses that summer night when they were old enough to be past the hard times but still young enough to figure out how to make it the rest of the way together, the way they'd always planned to back when they were just two kids on a mattress on the floor and the memories he had today had begun.

You quite literally made your bed, he told himself as he closed the Google app with a shrug and saw the text from his wife downstairs in the kitchen where nobody made a mess, nobody ever just relaxed, and everything was timed to perfection and lacked the adorable, messy atmosphere of a tiny blonde girl who danced when she was making an omelette at the stove and used the spatula as a microphone, who turned up the radio in the kitchen and shouted over every song that came on, "This is my favorite one!", who let her dogs eat on countertops and still made coffee the old-fashioned way and not from an overpriced pod, and drank it black because she lived four or five lives and she was just a five-foot girl who got tired easily and needed the caffeine to help her be as fabulous as she was.