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

This Night Outside My Window

It's long, it's sappy, there are tears...it's what we've been waiting for...

Santa Monica, California
Monday, August 29, 2022
(10:45 pm)
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"Do you always trust your first initial feeling...Special knowledge holds truth, bears believing..."

It was not until "Without A Leg To Stand On" ended and "Crystal" began that Stevie and Lindsey began to come to their senses enough to realize they were two people in their seventies who were lying on the living room floor.

They were locked in a passionate embrace, Lindsey lying over Stevie as she wrapped all four limbs around him as she always wound up doing when they were this way, her fingers running through his gray and white curls at the back and her legs around his waist, urging him closer. She could feel his hardness pressed against her and she was beginning to get dizzy again, feeling like she had been lit on fire, arching herself up into him as she kissed him with all that she had. She couldn't possibly get close enough; she'd open him up and crawl inside of him if she could. Her back was starting to hurt against the small tan carpet that sat atop the hardwood floor and he could tell it was getting hard for her to move with him this way, so he gradually pulled away and then pulled himself to a sitting position, and Stevie still lay on her back on the floor, her hands running up through her own hair as she took a heaving breath, so overwhelmed by what they had been doing that she was rendered speechless. That was when Lindsey smiled gently at her and extended a hand, saying exactly what he'd been saying to her for four years in her dreams.

"It's okay, sweet girl. I've got you."

Stevie had tears in her eyes as he slowly helped her up with him to a sitting position before they rose together, hand in hand, to stand. She took just a moment to look into his eyes to be sure he hadn't been rethinking everything, but then he brought her hand up to his lips to kiss each of her fingers one by one as he stared back at her with love, and she knew he hadn't. His lips on her fingers, coupled with him calling her sweet girl for the first time in four years, made a small sob escape her. She still kept waiting to wake up...but this was real. It was probably "Crystal" playing in the background, she thought, that made her mind stray to "Ebb Tide" by the Righteous Brothers, a song that had always been one of "their" songs, and the lyric, "You are love, you are real." Lindsey was love. Lindsey was real. Lindsey took her hand securely in his own and followed her through the corridor to the darkness of her bedroom. Behind them, his voice from fifty years earlier with the song that she'd written with all of the love he'd poured into writing "Stephanie" for her followed them as they made their way home...

"I turned around around, and the water was closing all around...like a glove, like the love that had finally, finally found me...Then I knew, in the crystalline knowledge of you."

Lindsey had not been in her bedroom since January 2018, a few nights before MusiCares, but the moment he followed her into the familiar darkness, he felt as though he had never left. Stevie stood against the wall beside the open door and looked up at him helplessly, and only then did he realize she had not said anything but his name in a long time. He stood against her, trapping her with both of his hands pressed to the wall on either side of her, and said, "Please tell me you want this as much as I do, angel...this isn't at all how I expected this night to go, but my God, Stephanie...I need you..." He was just inches away from her mouth again as his whispered words fell warm against her lips. Finally, she found the courage to speak.

"I've been dreaming about this moment for four years," she confessed in a whisper. She reached up to him for a kiss before she added, their foreheads meeting again, "Please make love to me."