Fireflies (Double Love Series Part 2)

It's Our Love Affair

Penn Castle
Dorset, United Kingdom
Christmas Eve
Saturday, December 24, 2022
(7:00 am)
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The first time Lindsey had stood at an altar with a woman in white, he had been trying hard not to cry.

It was February 15, 2000, and he was on a tropical island with Kristen, who'd informed him not too long before that she was pregnant with their second child, and it seemed silly not to have gotten married by now. A part of him had actually agreed; their son was going on two years old, a second baby was on the way, and he had his mother's voice in his head, one of the last things she'd told him before she died, telling him he should "move on from her" and "make an honest woman" of Kristen. The "her" to whom Ruth Buckingham had been referring was, of course, Stevie; he'd told his mother before they'd taken The Dance on the road that he and Stevie were in love again and he wanted to marry her when the tour was over. Ruth hadn't lived to see him "make an honest woman" out of Kristen Messner, or see her granddaughters born, but she knew...or at least that's what Stevie had told him one night when he'd cried in her arms in her hotel room on the Say You Will tour when her death anniversary had come along and he'd suddenly found his grief as fresh as it had been at the funeral in 1999...the first time Stevie had held him as he cried over losing his mother.

Lindsey had made it all through the small beach wedding without crying. He hadn't even cried when the officiant had spoken about embarking on a new life together and facing the unknown as a unit and all he could see in his mind was a beautiful girl with long blonde hair flying around the inside of his old Toyota from the wind through the open window as "Joy To The World" by Three Dog Night played on the radio and she'd alternated between singing along and nuzzling his neck as he drove, her kisses from his neck to his ear distracting him from the road ahead as they drove down the sunny California coastline on their way from San Francisco to Los Angeles in search of their new life, the unknown, a bag full of demo tapes and Keith Olsen's contact information in the trunk so they could share their perfect harmony with the world.

It was after the ceremony and just before the reception when Lindsey had ducked into the men's room at the resort, already a bit drunker than he'd intended to be so early in the evening because it had taken more liquid courage than he'd planned to promise God and the onlookers he'd love this woman who wasn't Stevie till death parted them. He'd cried alone in a bathroom stall before pulling out the old-fashioned year-2000 version of a cell phone he'd owned then to call Stevie. She was just recently home from her "Pondering The Millennium" tour, he knew, and she'd scolded him through tears for calling.

"You can't do this to me, Lindsey...it's not fucking fair!" She was trying to hide the fact that she was crying, but he knew better.

"Fair? Goddamn it, Stevie, NONE of this is fair!" He kicked the toilet a bit harder than he'd expected; his toes began to throb. "Do you think it's fair that I have another child on the way without you? Do you think it's fair that I had to tell Kristen let's get married on the fifteenth instead of the fourteenth because it's corny to get married on Valentine's Day...when the real reason is I couldn't bring myself to do that because I'll be damned if anyone else is ever my Valentine but you?" He had begun to sob into the phone as he spoke, sitting down on the toilet lid with his face in his free hand. He could hear her crying on her end, not hiding her own sobs anymore. All he wanted to do in that moment was hire a private jet off this damn island and fly home and crawl into bed beside her and hold her until Valentine's Day came around again so he could marry her instead in a sea of red roses.

"Lindsey, please..." Stevie's voice was tiny, helpless, and the fact that the pain he heard in her pathetic little sobs was because of him made him want to die. He felt like he already was.