Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Everyone was so nice to Stevie these days. Perhaps she liked it, but she needed a point of comparison to really be sure. Every day had the pleasant hum of her assistant Karen, never making a mistake. Her brother Chris, always calling when he said he would. The guys in the band, and of course Sharon and Marilyn, telling her that her set list was fine, great, wonderful. They loved that she'd added "Sara," although Stevie herself wasn't feeling too fine, great, and wonderful about that choice. Occasionally Karen would make a big point of showing Stevie a review of the show from some newspaper, and the headline would inevitably be something like, "Stevie Nicks in Madison: Legendary Rocker's Fantastic Performance No Longer Just a Rumor."

It was getting a little old.

Of course, she loved the shows, loved the fans, loved changing just a note in a classic workhorse like "Bella Donna" and seeing if it pleased her. Each night on tour was a weird sort of workshop, and even in a way a reckoning on her past. What was that other verse she had written for "Gypsy"? Would it have worked as well as the ones she left in? What if she'd put something like "Blue Lamp" on Bella Donna? Never mind the argument that would have happened with Jimmy if she'd tried, but what would that musical journey have looked like?

The questions were her constant companions on this tour. She was in Raleigh, North Carolina today, and Karen was telling her it was beautiful outside and wouldn't she like to come out for a little while? But Stevie was fine in her hotel room, pacing back and forth, occasionally looking out the window, and working on a song lyric.

When her tiny flip phone rang later that afternoon, Stevie almost didn't pick it up. Everyone—at least, the ten people who had her cell phone number—knew that she didn't care for surprise phone calls.

But she saw it was Sheryl. And so she clicked the phone on.

"Hello, dear," Stevie said, "what's new in your life?"

"Sitting here in my studio, trying to channel you to help me fix this song I can't finish," Sheryl said, and Stevie could hear the smile in her voice.

"Nothing much new about that," Stevie chided her.

"Don't I know it," Sheryl said. "How's tour treating you? We haven't talked since you were on the west coast! Were you going to tell me that you were coming my way soon, or did you want me to have to figure it out for myself?"

"The cities, these east coast ones, they all blend together sometimes." Stevie looked out the window at this corner of North Carolina, wondering if she believed what she was saying. North Carolina was lovely in the spring. Maybe it was a little too assured in itself, its four neat seasons, its trees that lost and found their leaves. All of the greenness struck her as something Christine would love—god, that ache was going to return at the oddest times, wasn't it? The other day it had been a very Chris-like jacket she'd seen on a fan. Today, the trees. Tomorrow, who knew. And always, singing "Sara" brought it back. 

"Are you still wearing the, ah, curls?" Sheryl was asking, and Stevie realized she'd been quiet for a while. 

"Well, yes," Stevie said, touching her ringlets. "Why break something that's working, right?"

Sheryl made a little sound like "hm!" and Stevie knew that there were various hair-related opinions that were going unsaid. Stevie didn't care. Wearing her hair curly made her think of some of the old tours. In 1979 and '80, she'd worn the tightest and yet messiest curls ever. Her stylist during Tusk was constantly annoyed with her for doing the permed look, grumbling while smoking as she arranged the curls each night. Stevie couldn't remember that woman's name or face at the moment, the person an entire blank save for the cigarette smoke and the hands always working, working, working, with an occasional tug on a curl that made Stevie yelp. That last hour or two before going out on stage in those days was the best part—the arrival of the night's drugs and guests, the anticipation of playing the Tusk songs that had sparked so much tension, both among the band members and among the band and their fans. And then. Well. Between the drugs and the guests, there was time for the band to get in trouble with each other.

It turned out she and Sheryl were on the same wavelength, yet again.

"Your Nashville stop's why I called," Sheryl said. "I was going to be selfish and tell you that you had to come and see me and the boys, but, look. One of my managers told me that Lindsey was going to have some business in Nashville this week. And I was like, hey, is this a coincidence, or did Stevie arrange some—"

"Pure coincidence," Stevie said, having only half-heard everything Sheryl had said after his name. 

"Well, that's kind of magical, isn't it?" 

"Magical. No," Stevie said. "It's just work."

Sheryl scoffed. "Well, can I arrange a little business lunch or something out here at my house? You two haven't seen each other since..."

"No. And let me remind you that we were strangers there." Christine's memorial service, three words that still didn't make sense. 

"Okay. Look, Stevie, that makes me sad as shit." A note of frustration hung in Sheryl's voice. Well, more than a note. "You can't just not speak to him until— what? I know you have a way of not getting in touch with people. You just let time pass. I guess we all do that sometimes, but, really, you more than others. Maybe you're thinking about us—about me, about him, about others—all this time, but we're never going to know unless you tell us!"

Sheryl sounded breathless.

"Sheryl, dear," Stevie said. "I'd absolutely love to come out and see you and the boys."

People still used the term "hung up" the phone these days, but hitting the button and throwing the phone onto the bed wasn't nearly as satisfying as slamming down a receiver would have been.

Here's what she was going to do in Nashville: the show. And then sit in the hotel and look at the trees, just like she was doing now. She tugged at her curls again. Really, really, she told herself, that was all she was going to do. 

Chapter Text

Lindsey Buckingham exuded ex-boyfriend energy. Even though he'd been seeing someone else for a while now, the ex-boyfriendness of him seemed to have taken up permanent residence in his very being ever since Fleetwood Mac had finished recording Rumours. Lindsey had the posture and personality of a frayed nerve. Wired and wiry, cranky and vengeful, hurting and hurtful. Oh, and very, very horny.

They were on the third leg of the Rumours tour and Stevie was feeling just about done with him. Through the U.S. and then Europe and now back in the U.S., he had been utterly consistent in his dickishness, the way he would almost tenderly lead her on stage and off, but needle her at every possible moment during the set. The way he'd puff his stupid, overly potent weed smoke in her face backstage. The way he'd hang all over Carol Ann, singing her Everly Brothers songs and calling her "baby, baby, baby" loud enough for everyone around to hear. 

The way he was still, despite all of this, extremely fuckable. 

The band had just arrived in Nashville following a tour date in Oklahoma City. Nashville was already feeling too warm for May, and Stevie watched sweat drip off Lindsey's brow in the hotel lobby. She stared daggers at him, silently daring him to remove his leather jacket. He didn't. He just pushed his aviator sunglasses out of his thick curly hair and back down onto his sticky face. Besides the jacket, he also had Carol Ann clinging to his right arm.

He didn't look good. Well, no, he did look good, in that stubborn, blue-eyed way he couldn't shake. But overall, he appeared tired and ill, strains of the mono-stricken boy from years ago visible through his rock-star sheen.

Maybe he'd start to pass out from the heat and the unnecessary weight. And then, his lanky body prone on the slick tile floor of this Nashville hotel, his aviators would fall to the side, and he'd stare up at her and mouth, Stevie, you were right.

So satisfying.

But instead, he and Carol managed to hold each other up long enough to make it to the elevator and down a long hall to their room. "Catch you later, Stevie and Stevie's girls!" Lindsey shouted from the end of the hallway. Stevie frequently had her girlfriends on tour with the band, and it was easy for her to round them up and go out on the town. She really didn't ever have to be alone if she didn't want to. But the girls were taking a break from the road right now, and Lindsey was waving to people who weren't there. God, sometimes he was wasted beyond imagining. And tonight, Stevie really, really did want to be alone.

She hadn't accounted for her sorta-boyfriend and his lack of intuition, though.

When the phone on the nightstand rang not five minutes after her luggage had been delivered, Stevie assumed it would be either their tour manager John Courage, aka J.C., or someone from the hotel. Alas, it was not.

"Hey, we're back home from Sweden!" Don said. "You're also going to be at Day on the Green, right?"

She had always liked playing Oakland. No, she explained, the Mac had already done a Day on the Green show earlier in the month. 

"Aw, that's too bad. Wait, where I am calling you now? Why don't I come out and meet you?"

"Nashville," Stevie said. "But, you know, blink and you'll miss us! I can get J.C. to see when our schedule and yours will overlap."

"That's so fucking formal, Stevie," Don said. "I wanna just... I wanna just be at your hotel room door. In four hours. Or tomorrow morning. I'll bring you bagels."

Don was clearly getting her mixed up with some other woman he knew who remembered to eat breakfast. "Oh, that's very nice," she said, because it wasn't worth the discussion, and because she could say almost anything to Don when it was clear he was on a few things. "But, honestly, there won't be time. Look, I'm almost sure our planes are going to cross in June. Can I call you back later?"

She hung up and proceeded to take a luxurious afternoon nap. 

"Hey everyone! Come out, come out, wherever you are!" Mick's voice boomed through the hallway. Stevie smoothed her hair as much as possible and poked her head out of the hotel room door. 

Mick was wearing a suit jacket and shorts. He waved his giant hands around. "On the way here, I saw a restaurant with a sign for Hawaiian barbecue. Let's all go try it. Downstairs in ten minutes, okay?"

It took twenty-five minutes, but they all managed to get into two limos—the five band members, along with J.C., one of the bodyguards, and the ever-present Carol Ann. Just before leaving, Mick convinced their opening act, Kenny Loggins, to join as well. Stevie sat across from Kenny in the limo, and he was far more reserved and less into altered states than the rest of them. She nudged Kenny's loafer with her woven sandal to see if he wanted a bump from whatever J.C. had just had delivered. Kenny shook his head. He was kind of cute, all brown eyes and beard, and she could see him being good for a fun night. She'd keep that thought in her back pocket. 

It turned out nobody had called ahead to the restaurant to let them know a rock band was coming, or to ask if they did, in fact, have Hawaiian barbecue. Apparently Mick's eyes had deceived him in the car earlier, and the sign in the window had simply said, "We have the best barbecue." 

"Well, that's a bitch," Mick said. "But shall we go in anyway?"

Carol Ann mumbled something about how no Tennessee barbecue could match up to the barbecue where she was from, which Stevie recalled vaguely was somewhere in the midwest. No one responded to Carol Ann and the crew went inside. Fortunately, they had only a few minutes of being curiosities to the general barbecue-eating public before the manager set them up in a party room in the back of the restaurant. Stevie situated herself at a table between Chris and Lindsey, and across from Kenny. After ordering, they signed some menus for the staff. Stevie watched Lindsey carefully, since it was clear his girlfriend wasn't going to. His hand had shaken when he signed the menus, but his eyes seemed clearer than they had earlier. But now, he and Mick and the two Johns—Courage and McVie—were starting to slam beers.

Stevie glanced at Christine and she wondered if they were thinking something similar. Where did the urge to take care of these men come from? They—all women, all of them!—were supposed to have been liberated now for, what, seven years? She had felt things changing back then, sure. The feeling that Lindsey shouldn't have been leaving her to tour, that she shouldn't have shouldered all the waitressing and cleaning, both for pay and not for pay. There'd been a shift right around the time she'd been sewing Lindsey's pants, but they were too poor for her to really do anything about it. Now, though, here they were, Chris and John divorced and Stevie and Lindsey split, all of them with more money than they could have imagined, and still, she and Chris's eyes on these men, calculating how much they needed to save the guys from themselves. 

When the food came, the mood changed, because just as the plates were set down, a certain new single came on the restaurant jukebox. 

"Oh, we can never avoid Stevie's paramour, can we?" teased Chris at the opening riff of "Life in the Fast Lane."

"This riff is terrible," Lindsey said.

Mick set down his empty beer glass. "It's pretty good, I think. I heard they built the whole song around it."

"Well, that was a bad decision," Lindsey mumbled, and he bit down into a rib.

Fortunately, the next song to come up was an older Loggins and Messina hit, which gave them all something to talk about and let them center Kenny. They were all big fans of his latest album, and Stevie hadn't been able to get the title track, "Celebrate Me Home," out of her head for weeks. She ate her pulled pork and bread and mashed potatoes as everyone chatted about Kenny's opener set. 

But then, a few songs later, "Life in the Fast Lane" was back. 

"Someone's messing with us," Mick said. Indeed, Hotel California had taken over the top spot on Billboard from Rumours just recently. And people in Nashville knew the charts. 

"It's not worth getting bent out of shape over," J.C. said. 

"It's a dumb fucking song," Lindsey said. 

"Baby, come on." Carol had barbecue sauce on her chin. 

"Shots, anyone?" Stevie raised her voice over the din. The waiter heard her right away and came back with a whole tray of vodka shots. Chris nodded in approval at Stevie's idea and took hers immediately. The others followed. Lindsey grabbed two extras, which Carol Ann downed when she thought no one was looking. And then Lindsey polished off the beer. 

But the song played. Again.

"Fuck, I hate the Eagles!" Lindsey, frayed nerve that he was, seemed to need something to catch the energy fizzing from every part of his body. His eyes landed on a bowl of mashed potatoes and gravy. He picked it up and flung it over the two Johns' heads. It crashed into a corner of the party room. 

He seemed satisfied, at least for a moment.

"Actually, it's just 'Eagles,' you know," said Chris calmly, watching the gravy drip down the wall. "They're too American to need a definite article, apparently."

Back in the limo, Lindsey and Carol Ann were fading away, sitting back to back, their heads sort of rolling, occasionally saying, "Baby, okay?" or "Okay, baby" to each other. 

Mick caught Stevie's eye. "Okay?" he said. 

"Mm, sure." Stevie glanced down at her dress to check for any barbecue sauce stains. "I guess if we need to wake them up, I can just hum the song."

"They'll get through it." Mick shook his head. 

"Hey, so was it actually the best barbecue?" Stevie asked. 

"You know, Stevie," Mick said, smiling, "it really, really was."

Again, she was beside them in the elevator, and then behind them in the long hallway, and then watching them go into their room together. And again, Lindsey slurred something to her, which she didn't respond to. She turned on only the bathroom light in the hotel room and changed into a nightgown her mother had bought for her. She had an urge to call Robin, but what was she going to say? Robin, Lindsey's being stupid and drunk and unwell again, but I still want to fuck him. Was I right to end things and also sort of not end things but at least end things to the point that he thought he could bring his girlfriend on tour? 

And Robin would say, Yes, you were right, Stevie. Now get some rest before your show tomorrow.

There. She'd had the conversation without having to actually have the conversation. She didn't have to bother Robin with the same questions she'd had a thousand times. You were right, Stevie. Her mother always said that women had a strong sense of intuition, that the decisions women made came from a deep place. 

Stevie got into bed.

But sometime later, she heard it. There was no surprise anymore in hearing it. A thud against the door. A hoarse whisper of her name into that tiny, secret space between the door and the wall. "Stevie, Stevie," it came.

She flung the covers aside and was out of bed before she could think too hard about any of it. She opened the door and there he was. It wasn't the first time he nearly fell into the room, bracing against her. 

"Okay, we've been though this. I can't carry you."

Lindsey was wearing jeans and no shirt. He slumped his way across the room to the bed and fell onto it. 

"Carol's passed out," he mumbled. "Too many shots."

"Mm, sober as ever, I see." Stevie came to sit next to him on the bed. One hand on his shoulder, which was clammy, and one hand through his hair, which was warm. 

"You want to go out to one of those honky-tonks with me?" Lindsey, his eyes closed, ran his hands up his still-sweaty face and came to meet Stevie's hand, clasping around her fingers and then her wrist. 

She sort of did. She imagined the two of them showing up, looking absolutely horrendous, but having the emcee or whomever recognize them right away. And someone would hand Lindsey a guitar and ask them to sing something country, and they would break out a favorite from Buckingham Nicks, or maybe one of the songs she'd written that hadn't made it on the album. "That's Alright" was one she really loved. 

But Lindsey really was looking worse for wear. 

"Another time," she whispered. Then she lay next to him, letting him continue to clasp her hand in his, and she sang the first non-Buckingham Nicks song that came to mind, which was "Celebrate Me Home."

"'Play me one more song that I'll always remember.'" She sang-whispered the chorus as he kept his eyes closed and lazily nodded along. "'And I can recall, Whenever I find myself too all alone, I can sing me home.'"

"Baby." The word was tired, barely escaping his lips.

"No, it's Stevie," she said. 

She went back to the song, and she stroked the sweat off his face, and she touched his lips, and she considered all the ways in which she had known and would always know this man. His frayed self. His ex-boyfriendness. His too-blue eyes and long lashes and his non-rockstar name. They had come too far to sing duets at a honky-tonk. They were here now, the endless leg of a world tour, propping up this band and their record label. Lindsey was drifting off to sleep but she knew exactly how to wake him up, if she wanted to. Decisions, indeed. They went deep. She finished the song and slowly pulled her fingers away from his so she could let him rest for a little while. She touched her own hands together, considered this strange moment in the dark. Were you right, Stevie? The warmth of him was so much, sometimes. Were you right? Were you?

Chapter Text

Lindsey wouldn't stop messing with his iPhone. He was using some app to get restaurant recommendations in Nashville, but it just looked like so much typing and then shaking the phone and then typing again. If he really needed a recommendation, Stevie thought, he had a perfectly good assistant he could ask instead of calling upon his much-abused fingers. 

Stevie was two feet away, but the silence and stillness on the Fleetwood Mac touring jet had her feeling like she was watching Lindsey through glass. She tried to get comfortable in her seat as the plane descended slowly. This was the weary part of touring, the pinballing from city to city across the continent, their schedule looking like someone had written a bunch of American places on scraps of paper and mixed them all around to create the Unleashed tour. Last night they had played in Connecticut. Today, they were en route to Nashville and were due to play another arena show tomorrow. It was fair to say that unleashed wasn't a useful way to describe this tour—they had a tight schedule, they did the same set every night, it was a machine that click-clacked along. The tour was doing good numbers. But the band was very much leashed.

Lindsey put his phone down and took out a paperback book. Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell. Stevie had glimpsed it on the nightstand in Lindsey's hotel room, several cities ago. Milwaukee. She hadn't been in his hotel room since. 

"What's your book about?" Stevie dared to break the silence.

"I've already told you," Lindsey said. 

"Well, I'm bored. Tell me again."

"It's about"—Lindsey turned to her for the first time the entire flight —"well, it's several different stories, about people in different places and times, but they're all connected, maybe, through the same consciousness."

"That sounds incredibly confusing," Stevie said. "Why would you read that?"

"Oh, you know, I like to think about possibilities. Space and time, that sort of thing," Lindsey said.

"What space and time possibilities?" Stevie leaned forward, just a little. Her long hair brushed her knees. She fixated on her favorite crease in Lindsey's forehead. 

"Ahh, just like, is it possible that every moment is happening all at once? Like what if I knew Mick, say, three hundred years ago, and we were musicians together in London? And, well, one of us probably gets smallpox and dies a terrible death, but what if, in some sense, that time is still happening, and somewhere in the universe Mick and I are playing together, both then and now?"

"You and Mick."

"Yes."

"Just you and Mick?"

"I mean—okay, three hundred years ago. London. You're probably playing the lute to your seven children. Maybe I'll walk by your window and listen."

Stevie felt her chest becoming lighter. This was the friendliest he'd been in the past few days. "Okay. And this is still happening now, somewhere in the universe?"

Lindsey tapped his overworked fingers on the book. "Maybe. I guess I'll try to come and find you, how about that?"

The thing about the night in Milwaukee was how quickly it had happened, and how far out of sync they had been. Stevie had wanted to hold on to it, the way she might want to catch a waning dream as she was waking up. But Lindsey had been flush-faced and frenzied. He switched off the light while Stevie was still registering the placement of things: that paperback on the bedside table, his jacket draped on a chair, his reliable t-shirt and jeans thrown on the bed. Then darkness. Then him.

Here, on the plane, she smiled and nodded at him to end the conversation. Maybe he was thinking about it now, too. Maybe he was remembering how gently he sucked on her neck, careful not to leave a mark. Or how she traced every angle of him with her nails, as though trying to make another of him she could keep for herself. Or how she whispered, wetly, closer, closer, as he breathed hard. Okay, so they hadn't been entirely out of sync. But then, when the light was back on, she saw the glint of mischief in his blue eyes turning to guilt, and she knew that she'd be on the other side of the hotel room door soon enough. Stevie had always maintained that any way they got into each other was fine because it was them. There was a certain steadfastness to their homewrecking. It was as practiced and assured as the band click-clacking their way across America.

Lindsey had looked away as the plane touched down. Click click click. He was texting his wife. Here in Nashville, the text read. And then, Kisses. And then the phone was dark again. 

Mick, leading the band off the plane, seemed to be in great spirits after his airplane nap, occasionally turning around to look at Stevie and sing, "American woman, stay away from me. American woman, Mama let me be." Stevie pretended to be speeding up to chase him. Mick and John were soon to be heading to Hawaii during the band's upcoming break in the tour, and Stevie could tell that Mick was already mentally there. 

Stevie, Sharon, and Lori got into one of the waiting SUVs, and, after a few minutes, Lindsey scrambled inside as well. He sat in front of Stevie and got back onto his silly phone. Stevie halfway chatted with Lori and Sharon while the car whisked them toward downtown Nashville. While she considered the back of Lindsey's head. 

He wore his leather jacket, as usual. As far as she could tell, he never sent it out to be cleaned, and so it accumulated the smells of so many cities and so many nights. Stevie was about to say, Lindsey, I think your jacket is the convergence of all space and time, but she smiled and kept it to herself, vowing to find a way to use it later, as just the right comeback.

Chapter Text

Stevie woke early in the morning to see Lindsey climbing out of her hotel bed.

That figure hovering above her—she knew it well. He was lanky and sleek, still in his jeans, still exuding a little bit of his ex-boyfriend energy but mostly smelling of sleep and stale smoke. All of it was so familiar, and yet it carried the ache of memory, of flashes of their life together in 1970 and '71 and '72. Lindsey was quiet but through tiny slits in her eyelids Stevie was able to see him looking down at her. Wondering, maybe, if he should say goodbye. If he should brush her shoulder or touch her hair. Maybe.

Instead, he slipped out of the room, and later in the morning, she realized he'd taken with him all the pills and powder she'd left on the dresser. She had to call J.C. for new supplies.

By noon, neither Lindsey nor anyone else had bothered to call her room or knock on her door. Stevie sat on the edge of her bed and untangled some of her gold necklaces. She realized she had an all-over fatigue that most almost-29-year-olds didn't have. She was so tired from growling out the coda to "Rhiannon" every night, from the vocalizing at the end of "Gold Dust Woman," and at the sheer stamina it took to get through the rest of the set. There was the layer of energy it took to face Lindsey while singing, and the layer of energy it took to deal with the crowd, especially when, during "Go Your Own Way," there always seemed to be some chucklehead in the front row absolutely hollering the lyrics directly at her, daring her to eye him. (It was always a him.) She was tired because she had lyrics for about seventeen other songs—new songs, her songs—rolling through her head, and the desire to write them down wasn't currently being matched with the motivation to pick up a pen. 

Stevie put on a handful of the necklaces. And she finally opened the drapes in her room and looked down upon Nashville. You're going to make this place yours tonight, she told herself. Okay, Stephanie? 

She didn't see Lindsey again until it was time to head to the venue for the show. There he was, back in full form, chain-smoking joints and strutting in rhythm to the limo, as though he created the thumping percussion at the start of "Second Hand News" wherever he went. Well, she knew better, as she had seen him in any and all states of being—the hundreds of nights of despair and exhaustion that had preceded this confidence, the days they'd spent blissed out on love and music and time.

"Hey hey." He blew smoke in her face as they climbed into the car. 

Stevie impulsively grabbed the joint from Lindsey's mouth and pressed it into her own. 

"Oh, come on," Lindsey said.

"Baby, there's plenty more," said Carol Ann, situating herself closer to Lindsey and petting his arm. 

Nashville is yours, Stevie reminded herself. And if she really needed someone to hang off her arm, she could always call Don, who seemed at least semi-eager to power through his jet lag for her. 

The thought made her laugh.

"What?" Carol Ann's pout face was, oddly, the one that most resembled Stevie's own. "Did you somehow steal the rest of Lindsey's joints, too?"

"Have you still not realized," Stevie said calmly, after taking a long drag on the joint, "that we have various people employed to make sure we never run out of anything?"

She finished the joint on her own, Lindsey watching the whole time. And when Carol Ann was looking away, Stevie shot a fuck me and / or fuck off expression Lindsey's way. She then disappeared it just as quickly, perhaps leaving Lindsey to wonder if he'd seen it at all. 

Stevie tossed her hair. The humidity was agreeing with her today. 

When they arrived at the auditorium, J.C. showed her to her dressing room, where her trunks of clothing had been delivered. She pulled on one of her black dresses with the flowing sleeves, and then rearranged all her necklaces and other jewelry. She rummaged out a pair of her tallest boots and pulled those on. Then she went down the hall to find Chris so they could help each other with their hair and makeup.

But Chris was already most of the way through her makeup routine. Stevie knew her rhythm was off.

"You okay, Stevie?" Chris said, contemplating whether to add a scarf over her hair. "You look out of sorts. I don't know if I can responsibly hand a curling iron to you right now."

Stevie sat on a stool next to Chris's vanity. "I think I just need to curl the bangs tonight."

"I'll do it," Chris said. "Now please tell me which of your men is messing with your mind."

"Maybe I'm the one messing with my mind." Stevie fiddled with her only important necklace, the half-moon. "I keep getting flashes of things that happened before. You know, like when it was Lindsey and me, and we had our life, and I thought that was going to be it. I keep seeing those moments again, and I know I'm probably looking backward with rose-colored glasses, but some of those times were so beautiful. And I feel like we threw them all away."

Chris had tied on a blue scarf, and now she was readying the curling iron. "No, Stevie." Her voice was always so smooth and comforting. "You'll always have them. I think about me and John like that sometimes. There were some very, very good times among all the terrible ones, and I have my moments where I wonder what would have needed to've been different to make it work."

"And?"

"And? Well, almost everything would have needed to change. No band, that's for sure, at least not for me. And I would've had to put my foot down entirely about his drinking."

"Would you ever want to go back and change things?"

"What, like quit the band in 1970? Hell, no." Beyond them, the crowd noise started to gather into a thick roar. It was time for Kenny to play his set. "I mean," Chris went on, "sometimes that is a bit intimidating to me, still, as you well know. But I would never want to give up our music."

After Kenny's set was done, the band as usual gathered in a spot near where they would enter the auditorium. Stevie fluffed her bangs (Chris had done a great job) and leaned over for J.C.'s customary pre-show hit of adrenaline. Then Lindsey took her by the arm. He always lead her to the stage like this, and she found she could gauge how much of a shit he was going to be during the show by how he held her beforehand.

He leaned toward her, lips nearly brushing her ear. "Have you been writing?"

"Sort of. I mean, it's all up here." She put a hand to her head. She hoped he noticed how fantastic her hair was behaving today. Back in the early 70s, she had often complained about not being able to get it stick-straight like the girls in the fashion magazines. Well. Look at her now. 

Lindsey nodded. He was wearing a loose white shirt, rolled at the sleeves and buttoned up halfway. It was a striking contrast to her flowy black dress. Stevie was definitely getting non-shitty energy from him tonight. "You'll remember it all. I know you will," he told her.

"I hope so," Stevie said. "Maybe tomorrow I'll start writing down some of the lyrics."

"I've written some weird stuff," Lindsey said. 

"Oh yeah? For the band, or just for you?"

"I think for the band." He leaned in again. "But I don't know if anyone else is going to like it."

Stevie looked into his face. Oh, he was worried. But he was stubborn. And clearly these two parts of him were competing. He was going to make sure people heard these new songs, that's what he was trying to say. 

"They're not about me again, are they?" Stevie asked. 

Lindsey had a certain knowing smile that she loved—it was sweet and boyish. It betrayed all the rock star stuff, even here, now, when they were moments away from going onstage. There it was, and he was having to tilt his head from all the feeling. There was too much heart in this man, sometimes.

"Well then," Stevie said. "I look forward to hearing your new songs."

He looked away. But his arm around her arm seemed to tighten, and then they were walking down the hall toward the stage, and the noise from the crowd grew louder. It was sharp, almost metallic, as though shaking the auditorium down to its rafters. 

"We're kinda like George and Gracie," he said as they reached the stage. His sweet smile was back. He was overwhelmed with feeling—though how much for her, she'd never know. Maybe most of that feeling was for music, for this strange life they had somehow created, together but not. 

Yes, she tried to say, but the word couldn't form, and the noise seemed to be fading out. 

Lindsey, she then tried to say, but he was gone. 

Silence. 

She was back in bed at the hotel, waking not with the thickness of sleep but with a startle. She was wearing the white floral ankle-length sundress she'd worn to the barbecue place. Her body was cool with rest. 

And there was Mick's voice outside her room.

"Hey everyone! Come out, come out, wherever you are!"

She poked her head out of the door, just as she'd done the day before. Mick wore the shorts and suit jacket from their trip to the restaurant. And here he was, talking about getting Hawaiian barbecue again. 

"Stevie?" Mick said to her. She realized she'd been staring blankly at him. "You look like you could use a good meal. Come and join us."

She gave him a watery nod, then ducked back into the room. She grappled for the dial on the TV set and turned it on, searching through channels for anything that would give her a clue as to what had happened. Had the band played the gig? Had she been there for it? On a news program, some politician was talking about President Carter and an economic deal he'd signed, but she had no idea when the President had done that, so it was of no help. She put on her woven sandals, grabbed a handbag, and rushed downstairs, where she went to the front desk of the hotel. 

"Can I help you?" the clerk said with a knowing wink.

"Just... today's newspaper, please?" Stevie asked breathlessly.

He handed her a copy of The Tennessean. 

In sturdy black ink at the top of the page was the date: May 20, 1977. Their gig was set for May 21.

At the bottom of the front page was a small news item:

Fleetwood Mac's 'Rumours' tour hits town tomorrow night

Fleetwood Mac might be the biggest band in the world right now, and they're coming to Nashville. The California-based rockers will play a sold-out show at the Nashville Municipal Auditorium on Saturday night. Touring in support of their hit album Rumours, the band promises a show filled with hits such as "Dreams," "Go Your Own Way," and "Say You Love Me." The band's popular frontwoman, Stevie Nicks...

She pushed the paper back across the desk. She didn't need to read any analysis of herself right now. 

Stevie rushed toward the waiting limos. 

The whole dinner outing played out for her just as it had the night before. Sitting across from Kenny Loggins in the limo. Reacting to Mick's surprise that the barbecue place was Tennessean and not Hawaiian. Sitting next to Christine and eyeing each other about the behavior of the men. Beers were slammed, and "Life in the Fast Lane" played and played on the jukebox, and Stevie ordered the shots mostly because she wanted one or two of her own, and then Lindsey tossed the mashed potatoes again and J.C. discreetly paid the bill and apologized for the gravy stains on the wall. 

Stevie realized she'd been mouthing some of the things her bandmates had been saying. Like Mick asking the server if there was any pineapple in the kitchen. Like Chris noting correctly how there was no "the" in front of the name of Don's band.

Kenny was looking at her strangely as they left the restaurant. She ignored him. And then she managed to ignore everyone on the ride back to the hotel, sitting in the limo and letting Lindsey and Carol Ann play out their "baby, baby, baby" act for each other. She didn't engage Mick, and she hoped skipping those conversations didn't fuck anything else up with regard to time. 

Stevie sat in her nightgown on the edge of the bed and waited.

For what, she didn't know. For time to either right itself or for it to get even more bugged-out. For the phone to ring. For Lindsey to arrive. 

Whatever happened, she had to admit she hadn't made Nashville hers at all. In the most dramatic way possible, Nashville had absolutely made her its bitch.

She watched TV until all the channels had signed off for the night. Then she stared into the test pattern as though it had answers for her. 

And, finally, finally, sometime after midnight, that voice at the door: "Stevie, Stevie."

She was prepared this time for him to nearly fall into her, and she caught him by the arms and helped him up. Same jeans-and-shirtless Lindsey. Same hopeless stoner falling into her bed. She crawled in next to him, pressed her legs against his jeans, nuzzled her face against his shoulder. 

"Do you know this day?" she tried. "I mean, does all of this seem too familiar to you?"

"Hrm," Lindsey grunted, half-asleep.

She figured that if her questions had shaken his world, he'd snap out of his semi-consciousness.

"Do you want to go to one of those honky-tonks?" she asked, recalling this from the other night. The same night. Wherever she was.

"Yeah," came Lindsey's faraway response.

"Someday," she said.

And she sang him the song, Kenny's song, just as she'd done before. She did it because she loved the song, and because she loved how peaceful Lindsey looked when she sang it, and she didn't want to lose this moment. She loved that he could sleep, just sleep, because she was here. He had been a champion sleeper when they'd lived together, him passing out soon after hitting the pillow while Stevie often lay awake for a while. It felt like that again, that she would be up cradling all their thoughts and worries, spinning them into doom and then finding a way out. Usually on her own. 

Stevie sang:

I gotta count on being gone,
Come on woman, come on daddy,
Be what you want from me.

"Baby," Lindsey breathed out.

"Still just Stevie."

She was awake all night.

When Lindsey left, wordlessly, in the morning, Stevie pretended to be asleep. And then she spent the rest of the day in a daze, occasionally calling J.C. to ask him to bring her more coffee and whatever uppers he could offer. Time hadn't shifted again. All that had happened was that she'd managed to make herself feel ill. Well, she supposed there were worse things. 

On the way to the venue, Stevie smoked Lindsey's joint again, and Carol whined again, and Stevie hoped against hope that she would actually get to sing tonight. She was sort of missing it. 

"Back again, back again," Kenny sang as they walked through the stage door and through the usual maze of concrete hallways that housed their dressing rooms. Repeating days or not, a lot of these places did seem the same.

But Kenny seemed to be looking pointedly at her. 

She gave him a strange look to one side. She was fine, everything was straightening out and getting back to normal. 

"You look like you've seen a ghost, Kenny," she finally said. 

"You sort of do, too," Kenny replied. 

She hesitated to say more, but resolved to chat with him later, without anyone else from the band around. The opportunity was going to be right after his set, so she took it, rushing to his dressing room and knocking on his door.

"Yes?" He was drinking water and toweling off. 

"I have about five minutes," Stevie said. "But can you please tell me why you're acting oddly to me? Do you... do you know why things are strange right now?"

Kenny ushered her inside the room and shut the door. He looked seriously at her. "I'm going to throw out an idea, and you can tell me if this is something you're going through or if I'm nuts. Okay. Is this maybe... not the first time you're going through this day?"

"Yes." Stevie shakily flopped onto a tired leather sofa. "I was here last night, and so were you, and you got to perform, but we never did. We were about to walk on, me and Lindsey, like we always do, and then the next thing I knew I was back in bed at the hotel."

"1975," Kenny said.

"A better year." Stevie said this so immediately that it surprised her. She put a shaky hand to her face and swiped at her bangs. 

"Not if it's twice as long as it should have been." Kenny popped open a can of beer and handed one to Stevie as well.

"Oh, shit," Stevie whispered.

"I couldn't get out of it," Kenny said. "And I wasn't on tour. I was at home doing some promo interviews over the phone for a covers album that Jim Messina and I did. I think part of the reason the album didn't do so hot is because I sounded bored as hell in those interviews. I did them about three hundred times."

Stevie looked deeply into his face, wondering if there was a time-fuckery giveaway in his gaze. She glanced in the mirror across from the couch and appraised herself: okay, yes, she was pretty glassy-eyed, but she was still very much Stevie. The bangs had been perfected by Chris for a second time. 

"So, wait," Stevie said, at the end of a long sigh, "did time move on without you for a while? Is the band going to go to the next city without me?"

"No, you'll just be looping." Kenny was matter-of-fact, but there was telltale worry lurking around his words. 

"For how long?"

Kenny shook his head. "I wish I knew. And wait, this is about the point in the evening yesterday -- your new yesterday -- that the loop started?"

Stevie chugged some of the beer while nodding. 

"Come talk to me if you loop again, then. Before we go to the non-Hawaiian barbecue restaurant, okay? I don't know if I can help you, but at least I can be your sounding board. And yeah, you're going to have to explain all of this to me again."

"You know I never liked science fiction? My dad wanted me to get into Star Trek but I never could. I like witches and drugs and writing songs."

Kenny laughed a little. "I get it. I really do. But maybe you'll... I don't know. Maybe you'll become someone you didn't think you could be."

She stalked down the hallway in her imposing boots to get her final pre-show bump and to take Lindsey's arm. God, she hoped she would get to sing. But if not, if time was out of her control, then maybe she could try to take control another way. Maybe she could try to spin this day, this ridiculous May 20 and 21, to her liking, in any and all ways that she pleased. 

"Lindsey, wait, I'm here," she called. 

Chapter Text

Stevie was always telling stories on tour. The one about needing a single for Bella Donna and being gifted a wonderful song by dear, late Tom. The one about putting her mattress on the floor to remind her of the long-ago days. That story was a Lindsey-centric one, but she could always mess around with how much of him to include. She was practiced at telling the whole thing without once saying his name. Rather, he was the figure just out of focus, the one smoking all their weed and spending all their money. The one on the other side of the bed.

Tonight, at her show in Raleigh, she decided to give him a name.

The crowd cheered when she said it.

"We love you!" someone shouted into one of the quiet spaces in the story. 

Stevie beamed. Everyone was, indeed, so nice to her. But sometimes, she really needed it.

Another thing she'd done on tour over the years was to cultivate the skill of keeping half her mind on the song and the audience while the other half was free to drift. But drifting sometimes let her subconscious a little too far off its leash, turning instead into her whole life hurtling back at her. Tonight, it was happening during "Sara," as it had been so often lately. Everything, everything hitting her as though it was still somehow happening right then—from being drunk in a limo with Chris during some strange, liquid night in the 80s, to sitting with her mother during her last days, to getting the news that Prince had died. 

"'Oh, when you build your house,'" she sang, "'then call me home.'" Stevie pictured Arizona, then California, and then her tour jet. Her favorite homes. She got herself back on track, away from all the spirits of the past. 

Later, she stood offstage, in the pocket of peace she always found between the main set and the encore, and she kept thinking of Nashville. For all she could remember about everything else in her life, she couldn't remember much about Nashville. She was pretty sure there was a restaurant there she hated. An arena or two she'd sung in. A hotel and an airport and a highway. But tonight, it was his name. It was the dusty days of the early 70s. It was the other side of the bed. 

"What am I forgetting about Nashville, Karen?" Stevie asked. "I didn't have a Buckingham Nicks gig there, did I?"

"No, you're thinking of Birmingham, probably," Karen said. 

"Hm, I guess."

They were on the plane, taking what was going to be a uselessly short flight from Raleigh to Nashville. Karen typed on her phone. Stevie sipped a Diet Coke and thought about that song lyric she'd been working on yesterday when Sheryl called. She had never gotten back to it. Creativity was one of those things that came in waves. It was, in that sense, like love and like grief—sometimes an undercurrent, sometimes unrelenting.

Stevie dug around for her reading glasses. Maybe she would look at the lyric, with no expectations of getting any farther with it today. And maybe, also, she would go forward with something equal parts known and unknown, equal parts dangerous and coming home. 

The plane shuddered, hitting turbulence. A small "ugh" escaped from Karen.

Stevie slipped on her glasses, and without looking at her assistant, said, "Karen. Sheryl told me that Lindsey might be in Nashville, too. When we land, can you check in with Lindsey's people? Can you see if he's actually going to be there this week?"

Another rattle, and a dip.

She and Karen quickly locked eyes. 

"Are you sure?" Karen was bracing herself with both hands on the seat. 

Stevie grabbed an armrest. "I think so."

The plane was rocking from side to side. From the band in the back, there were various "whoas" and swears. She heard Mary, her longtime friend and tour manager, say, "What is going on?" Karen reached over and held Stevie's arm. 

"You might need to remind me again whenever we touch down!" she said. "If we touch down."

Stevie looked at her seriously. "Oh, don't worry, we will."

She was not, after all this, going to miss out on Nashville. 

And then the lights in the plane went out. 

Everything was dark, until suddenly, it wasn't.

Where was she? Had the plane crashed? Had it landed and she'd somehow missed it?

Had she been taken to... the great room of a house she'd been in long ago, sometimes under duress?

Because that's where she appeared to be. 

It was a sleek, California-style home, with the strains of morning light starting to burst through the windows. It was Spanish tile and expensive furniture moved out of the way. It was custom guitars strewn here and there in various corners. It was orange and black decor that probably cost a lot and yet had a gaudy look when there was so much of it.

It was Lindsey and Carol Ann's house from the late 70s, and it was all decked out for one of Fleetwood Mac's notorious Halloween parties.

Not that Stevie was ready for it. For one thing, she was still dressed in the black dress and leggings she'd been wearing on the plane. At some point, she had positioned her reading glasses on top of her head. 

And she was the only one here. 

The absence of sound and life was somehow the loudest thing she'd ever experienced. It was the pounding pulse of nothingness.

"Hello?" Her voice came out roughly and didn't echo. "Lindsey? Mick? Uhhh... Carol Ann? Chris?"

Finally, there were footsteps, and for a brief, bright moment Stevie thought she might have summoned her dear bandmate back from wherever her soul had gone. 

But it wasn't her. It was, alas, another old boyfriend.

"Oh. Hello, Don," Stevie said.

Don, too, was dressed not for the 70s but rather to be in his 70s. He had sauntered into the great room from a dim hallway, clad in all black, as well—a button-down and slacks and loafers. 

"Stevie." Don nodded at her. She hadn't seen him in ages. His face was creased, and his eyes were small and tight. 

"Did you also wind up here from a bumpy plane ride?"

"I'm here because you summoned me." He held up his arms in a shrug, as though this was all obvious. "Sometime in the midst of you breaking spacetime, that's what happened."

"Okay, okay, okay." Stevie ran her hands down her face. "Well, tell me how to get from broken spacetime back to Nashville in 2023."

"That's something you're going to have to figure out for yourself," Don said. He shuffled over to a table, where he rapped on the side of a jack-o-lantern that had been half-carved and then abandoned. The sound he drummed out was sad and hollow, and as matter-of-fact as Don himself. "Besides that, this broken spacetime might be affecting you in other times of your life right now. But there's no way to really know."

"Fuck." Stevie began pacing around. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."

"I'm not even really Don Henley." He picked up the pumpkin and held it to his own face. "I'm just a manifestation of your thoughts."

"Why did I choose you?"

"Well, damn, at least try to be nice," Don said. "I think you chose me because I'm someone you feel pretty neutral toward. At least most of the time."

"Hm." It was true, they had been absolute shits to each other in the 70s, but they'd done a short tour together in the 2000s and it had been pleasant. "Well, I guess that's right. Okay, Stevie-slash-Don, give me some ideas here. Help me get back to Nashville."

Don lay the pumpkin back on the table. "I don't know. Think about home. Think about people who feel like home. Take yourself there."

"That's what I was doing on the plane and look where it got me," Stevie snapped. 

"Well, then, I really don't know. There's a door over there. Should we try it?"

"Is this going to be like the very notable last verse of one of your songs?'

"Not my songs, not my house, not even me." Don shook his head at her. "Come on, let's go."

Chapter Text

She had only ten minutes. Off in the vast beyond of the arena, the crowd was already chanting the band's name, anticipating with noise and lights and smoke this new incarnation of Fleetwood Mac. Stevie stubbed out her cigarette and flipped in her black address book to the Important Numbers page, where she had scrawled it in blue ink at the bottom of the page, unlabeled with a name. It had been a while since she'd called, so she double-checked the number, but really, did she need to? Did she have any chance of forgetting it?

He picked up, his "hello" sounding tired, as if he already sensed who was on the other line.

"Lindsey."

"Oh, hi, Stevie." He dealt her a cautious pause. "How are you?"

"I'm hating this tour. I just had to tell someone."

She had been thinking for days of calling him. She had gone through the whole show the other night in Dallas thinking about it, to the point that she'd nearly missed a cue in "Rhiannon," a song she'd done a thousand times. Mick had once said that when she performed that song for an audience, it was like she was performing an exorcism. Really, though, if she was capable of exorcising anything, she would have removed these thoughts of Lindsey, violently and spiritually. The years and years of love and blame and hurt and want—all of it, let it be gone. 

But in her non-exorcising reality, she had ruminated so much on calling him that she'd convinced herself it was not just a good idea, but rather the only idea.

"Where are you all right now?"

"Tennessee." A dressing room in a college basketball arena with several Tennessee state flags and college flags tacked to the wall. Their road manager was going to knock on her door in, well, less than ten minutes now, to tell her it was time to go on. 

"See, there's your problem."

"Yes, and not even Nashville," Stevie said. "God, we're in Murfreesboro. Do you know where that is?"

"Somewhere outside of Nashville, I'm pretty sure," he said.

"Yes," Stevie said, "and not a good somewhere. Are you still glad you didn't join us?"

"I admit I've been conflicted about it, from time to time. But right here, in this moment? Yeah, I'm happy, Stevie. I'm working on my solo album and—"

"Right, you're so happy, I'm sure."

"I am!" His voice went up. He was, all at once, a little boy, an angry man, and a warning. "Somehow I knew this call was going to come, that you were going to react exactly this way. I want you to let me have this. I need the break. I need the chance to sit with myself and see what else I want to do, just for me." 

"Funny you say that," Stevie retorted, "when I was able to do my solo albums and tours, and still do Fleetwood Mac, and do this fucking tour instead of walking away three seconds before it was supposed to begin."

"I know, I know, you can record an album in six weeks. That's what you're going to tell me next, isn't it? Just throwing the same shit at me all the time." Lindsey sighed loudly. Somewhere in the background of his house, Stevie could faintly hear music. U2, she was pretty sure. She tried to picture him in his house and she couldn't do it. Did he actually have a black leather sofa or was she making that up because she knew he would look good sitting on it and strumming a guitar? Was his girlfriend Cheri there, listening to his conversation? Who were his friends these days? Who was he, these days? 

"We work differently," Lindsey went on. "You know that. Of all people, I thought maybe there was a chance of you understanding why I needed this break. Well, I hate to admit I was wrong."

A rap on her door. "Five minutes!" came their manager's call.

If Lindsey was here, he'd lead her to the stage, arm in arm, just like always.

But tonight he was nothing more than the unfriendly voice on the other end of the phone. Ever since they'd finished the album, Stevie had felt their chances at working together again slipping away. Instead of being able to picture him at home, she could only see a void where their career together could have been. And here she was, just flinging her anger into that void, making everything worse. 

"I'll try to understand," Stevie said after a long moment. She got out another cigarette. "Okay? I really will try."

"You don't have to. You just need to work on getting better."

"Me? I'm fine." Stevie dragged on her cigarette. Her heart rate jumped a little. "I'm on a new medication. It's very calming." And it was. Yet there was no settling her nerves when she was having anything to do with this man. Still.

"I'm glad to hear about the meds, I guess. But you haven't really been well in a long time," Lindsey said, "and it hurts me to see you like that. That's half the reason I quit, okay? I can't watch you destroy yourself anymore."

 Lindsey was so far off. Lindsey was in California. Lindsey was an unstrung guitar.

"Fuck you," Stevie began with a growl that originated deep within her chest. "Fuck you and your solo albums. Fuck your music production. Fuck your mixing boards, Lindsey. Fuck your eighty-five different acoustics and electrics and whatnot."

"God, Stevie, do we have to do this?"

"Yes, we do, if you're going to throw bullshit excuses about concern at me."

"I don't have to listen to this. And I am concerned."

The smoke curled up from her cigarette and caught the light of the bulbs around the vanity mirror. If he were here right now, would they be saying all this? He'd be able to take one look at her, whether dolled up like this, her hair in expansive curls and a black sequin jacket over her dress, or casual and hoarse the day after a show, a tiny bird with an unfinished song, and he would know, instantly, where her mind was at. 

Maybe she didn't need to be calling him anymore.

She was still fucking angry, though.

"I'm going to go," he finally said. 

"If you hang up, you are throwing everything away." She didn't mean to hiss this, but that was how it came out. 

"You're the one who called me!"

"You're the one who quit the band."

"It's not hanging up on you if I say goodbye." Lindsey's mouth must have been right on the phone. "Goodbye."

The dial tone. The waiting crowd. The flags. The whole of Murfreesboro out there, telling her that maybe she shouldn't have come. Another knock of warning on the door.

"I'm doing better," Stevie whispered. She said it to the dial tone. Or maybe to herself. "You have to believe me. I'm so much better these days."

Chapter Text

May 20 - 21, 1977 - again and again

The thing was, Lindsey always came to her room at night, no matter how many tiny messes she made with the events that preceded his whispering into her door. Stevie usually went to the barbecue restaurant with the rest of the band. Sometimes she paid off the restaurant manager to unplug the jukebox so that Eagles wouldn't play over and over, therefore avoiding Lindsey tossing a bowl of mashed potatoes across the room. Sometimes she ordered everyone a round of shots, sometimes she didn't. Sometimes she ordered extra shots. (She quit that after Carol Ann threw up in the limo, dangerously near to Stevie's shoes.) Sometimes she skipped going to dinner entirely and ordered a club sandwich from the hotel. She reread the two books she had with her, a paperback of Dune and a war-torn hardback of Edgar Allen Poe's poetry. 

Once, when she heard Mick's voice outside her hotel room, beckoning everyone to come out to dinner, Stevie opened the door, screamed, "FUCK YOUR FUCKING BARBECUE, MICK!" and then proceeded to stay in her room for the rest of the evening, getting stoned and watching The Rockford Files. 

Lindsey still came by later.

Lindsey was always shirtless and tired. Lindsey's eyes were always bloodshot but beautiful. Lindsey invariably collapsed on her bed and into the sleep of a hundred years. 

Stevie often sang to him. Lately, it had been Joni Mitchell's "Carey":

The wind is in from Africa, and last night I couldn't sleep
You know it sure is hard to leave here, Carey, but it's really not my home.

There was a specificity to the lyrics that she loved. Joni's musical poetry about her days with her lover in a hippie commune somehow brought Stevie back to her days living with Lindsey in California. She slept just like this with him then—so close, one of her legs touching his, their bare shoulders occasionally brushing. Back in Los Angeles, sometimes they would awaken in the night and look at each other and then he would gently press himself inside her. In those still hours of the night, they fucked slowly and sweatily, his strong hands gripping her sides, her arms over her head as she surrendered to her climax. He was so gorgeous and talented she hadn't known what to do with him.

She still didn't.

Stevie got up from the bed and glanced at the clock out of habit. It didn't really matter what time it was anymore. She had looped through this day at least twenty times now. 12:41 AM on May 21 had as much meaning as the tiny scrape on her leg she'd gotten coming out of the limo today, or the grease stain on her white dress. They'd both soon be gone, whisked out of time and space. 

She crept out the door and into the hallway, where she padded in bare feet over to where she could look down into the atrium. One of the glass elevators sailed up from the lobby to another floor. A few partiers spilled into the lobby from elsewhere in the city. Everything was so normal for these people. They didn't have security following them around, they probably didn't care about the Billboard charts, and they would easily slide from May 21 into May 22, 1977.

Why, Stevie asked herself, had she been making such small changes to her days? Was it because she thought doing anything too different might mean Lindsey wouldn't come to visit? Or that if she was just polite enough to the day, if she kept it as close to how it had gone the first time, she'd eventually get to do the concert and move forward in time?

Well, clearly none of that was working.

She needed to create some chaos and see what happened. 

From The Tennessean - morning edition, May 21, 1977

Fleetwood Mac singer-songwriter Nicks missing in Nashville

Stevie Nicks, 28, a singer-songwriter in the band Fleetwood Mac, was reported missing last night from the Hyatt Regency in downtown Nashville. Band members Lindsey Buckingham and Mick Fleetwood, and the band's touring manager, John Courage, alerted authorities in the early morning hours of Saturday that Miss Nicks appeared to have left the hotel without explanation. 

"No one saw her leave," Mr. Courage told The Tennessean. "We spoke with our limo driver, the bellhops, everyone we could think of who might have seen her."

"I had gone to her hotel room to talk," said Mr. Buckingham, a singer-songwriter in Fleetwood Mac and former romantic partner of Miss Nicks. "When she didn't answer the door or the phone, I sensed something could be wrong."

Nashville Police, along with the Tennessee State Patrol, immediately began a search of the downtown area. At press time, there were still no indications of Miss Nicks's whereabouts. 

Fleetwood Mac was slated to perform in Nashville on Saturday night. Updates about the concert are forthcoming. 

May 20, 1977 - again

"Wait, so where did you go?" Kenny asked.

"I walked around downtown Nashville for a while," Stevie said. "I had made terrible shoe choices, though. So eventually I got a taxi and just told the driver to take the highway and keep going."

"Did he know who you were?" Kenny lowered his voice as a couple of bar patrons walked behind their chairs and eyed them.

"No." Stevie was whispering now. "I had washed off all my makeup and I put a scarf over my hair, and, get this, I was wearing khaki pants and a t-shirt."

"I am shocked you own khaki pants." Kenny laughed and drank from his cocktail. "How far out of town did you get?"

"I had the cab driver drop me off in St. Louis in the morning." 

Kenny shook his head at her. "Yeah, this reminds me a lot of some of my most harebrained days in the loop."

"You've gotta tell me about that."

"About what?" came a familiar voice behind them. Christine. Stevie searched her friend's face for any sign of worry or bafflement. She found none—just Chris's usual weary calm. She was holding a big glass of champagne, and Stevie motioned for her to sit at their table. They were at the revolving restaurant at the top of the hotel, and the bar manager had tried to seat them off to the side, but word seemed to have gotten out that they were there.

"We were talking about one of Kenny's other tours," Stevie said. "Oh, wow, does he have some stories!"

"Too scandalous for the moment," Kenny said with a grin, pointing to a couple at the bar who was trying to pretend not to stare at them.

Christine looked knowingly at Kenny, though for once she wasn't grasping the subtext of the conversation. She sipped her drink and looked out the window. "You know, I really think all restaurants should be revolving. That way, you could see a lot of a city without having to actually walk through it."

Stevie laughed. "Chris! You know, Nashville is a pretty interesting place."

"What have you seen of it, Stevie dear?"

Stevie waved her hands around. "You know, just, places! I took a walk. It's nice."

"Stevie, you're in Fleetwood Mac," Chris said. "You can't just take a walk."

***

Stevie and Kenny entered one of the glass elevators. She knew if she looked down as they descended to the lobby, she'd get dizzy. "I can't believe I've been in Nashville for, like, a month," she said, "and no one knows it but you. And tomorrow you won't know that anymore."

Kenny nodded. "Yeah. Sorry about tomorrow-Kenny."

Stevie laughed. "Already forgiven, today-Kenny. But seriously, is there anything you did that you think helped you move forward in time?"

They had reached the lobby. Kenny hit the button for the penthouse floor and they began sailing upward.

"I've been trying to figure that out for two years," Kenny said. "The day that finally stuck was so ordinary. I was so tired from my various attempts to escape the loop that I came back home and did the promo interviews again. I got a burger for dinner. I didn't really see anybody. I went to bed, and the next thing I knew, it was a whole new day."

"Were you relieved?"

"I cried, Stevie," Kenny said. "For a while."

Stevie peered out the glass wall. Someone standing by the railing on one of the upper floors was waving at them, and Stevie smiled widely and waved back. She wanted to stop and ask if they were going to the concert, if they had a favorite Fleetwood Mac song. (With her luck, it would be "Go Your Own Way.")

"Anyway, I know I didn't tell you about the craziest things I did while stuck in time," Kenny said. "All I can say is, sometimes it feels like nothing matters."

"I'm starting to understand that," Stevie said. 

May 20 - 21, 1977 - again

Before heading out to the barbecue restaurant, she called Don at home. "I changed my mind," she told him. "Meet me in Nashville. We'll go out, and then we can sleep late. You can stay for the show if you want."

And then Stevie went out to eat pulled pork again and pay off the restaurant manager to unplug the jukebox, but before she did, she ditched the long white sundress for a dramatic, blood-red dress. It was ankle-length and fitted and cut low, with lace at the bosom. That it was made primarily of cotton made it plausible for her to say, "Oh, this? It's just a summer dress." For a second, she questioned who she was wearing it for. But she realized it was fine—no, preferable—to be wearing it for no one but herself. 

Lindsey and Mick both noticeably eyed her at the restaurant. Stevie pretended to be enjoying the food. 

When Don arrived, it was nearly midnight. He carried a small bag he set down on Stevie's bed, asked her to call J.C. to bring them something to keep them awake, and then spent a solid eight minutes working on his hair. 

She wanted a festive atmosphere—and maybe she didn't want to be alone with Don all night—so she called the rooms of the rest of the band and entourage to invite them along. Predictably, Mick, Lindsey, and Carol Ann were the ones who accepted. She alerted J.C., who said he'd join them and find the right place for them to show up. 

The limo driver took the group to Broadway, where music emanated from club after club. Stevie opened a window and let the night air in. If she had to be living the same day over and over, at least the universe had given her a day with the most beautiful night. She closed her eyes for a minute, pretended that it was May 22 or 23, that she was finally somewhere else. Even as Don tugged on her hand, she let the fantasy continue. 

"I don't want people knowing we're in here," Don said. "They might mob the car."

No one approached the car, but when their crew of five entered the club they attracted plenty of attention. J.C. brought them to a VIP area on the second floor where they could still hear the country and western band playing below. Taking Stevie and Lindsey aside, J.C. pointed out the various music producers and other money men in the room. "And over there, I see at least one publicist I've met before," J.C. said. "And right there, the guy in the smart suit, he's a music journalist."

This seemed to perk up Lindsey, who was always ready to talk about some two-bar bass solo on a song buried on side B of an album that had come out five years ago. Stevie watched as he sipped from his drink—coffee mixed with vodka, heavy on the coffee— and made a tentative step toward the other side of the room.

But Don beat him there, and already had his hand out, ready to let everyone introduce themselves to him. Before long, he had a crowd of VIPs around him, listening to his every word. 

"Stevie!" Don eventually beckoned her over. "If you all don't know Stevie Nicks, well, now you do."

Stevie smiled and greeted everyone. Several of them were planning to come to the show the next day, or had already seen Fleetwood Mac in another city. One of the money men, a portly guy in a gleaming white suit, asked her what the band was doing next. 

She recalled the number of times now that she'd been in conversation with Lindsey on May 21 about his songs for their next album. All that she'd gleaned is that they were weird and they were about her.

Stevie put on her best promo interview demeanor. "Well, all three of us songwriters are working hard on new material!" she said brightly. "But of course we're really enjoying touring and meeting our fans as well. Lindsey, do you have anything to add to that?"

She'd thought Lindsey was right behind her, but, no, he was on a couch on the other side of the room, very conspicuously making out with Carol Ann.

Don laughed at her noticing this, and then all the VIP money men laughed with him.

"Look at that!" Don gestured across the room. "We're here for all of ten minutes and you all are getting to witness some classic Fleetwood Mac drama!"

"Get a load of her face," the white-suit guy said. 

"It's okay, little lady," said another guy, the one J.C. had said was a publicist. "Don't you cry over your old boyfriend. Bet we've got some stuff for you that'll perk you right up." And he motioned to a waiter, who swiftly brought over a silver tray with a couple of lines on it.

It was a fairly standard amount for her, but all the men thought they were witnessing something incredible as she snorted it up. They were whooping and clapping for her, and she hated that she was giving them a show. But she couldn't stop to explain. She couldn't spit back at them and jeopardize the reputation of the band.

"You're gonna be flyin'!" the publicist guy said. "And don't you forget who gave you those wings!"

"Uh huh," she said. "Excuse me, I'm going to the ladies'."

***

She sat in the bathroom for a while, letting the cocaine take hold, letting her mind settle. None of this matters, she kept telling herself. Anything that happens tonight will be undone. She took a few deep breaths, fluffed her hair in front of the mirror, and headed back out.

By now, Mick had cornered the publicist guy and was rambling to him about his plan to have a giant penguin balloon fly over all of Fleetwood Mac's outdoor concerts. Lindsey and Carol Ann remained huddled together, but at least they had left the makeout sofa. And Don was holding court not far from them. Stevie ordered a vodka tonic from one of the wandering waiters and observed the scene. 

A moment later, Don's hand was on her back, leading her into a circle with Lindsey and Carol Ann. 

"Tell me your name again," Don said, gesturing to Carol Ann.

"This is Carol Ann Harris," Lindsey said.

Don nodded, perhaps mock-sagely. "I keep forgetting. Probably because you, Carol Ann, look like Stevie's long-lost twin, you know?"

Stevie cringed internally. Of course everyone had observed this at some point, but only Don, flying in and out, would be the one to say it.

Not that it mattered.

"And you, my man." Don leaned over and put a hand on Lindsey's shoulder. "Do people ever call you Buck?"

"Not really," Lindsey said.

"I'm going to start." Don chuckled. "Bet we can make it catch on. What do you think, Buck?"

"I don't really—" Lindsey started.

"Lindsey is a perfectly good name," Stevie broke in. "Let's just call him that, okay?"

Lindsey and Don were the same height, but Don's hair tonight was taller, and he had a broadness to his chest and arms that Lindsey, with his lanky swimmer's frame, had never had. Don was bulky (at least, above the waist), and he definitely knew it. 

"Now, Stevie. I'm just trying to give Buck a more rock n' roller image. It can't hurt, can it?"

Lindsey turned away, and Don went to get another drink.

Who were she and Lindsey to each other these days? Maybe that was the question she'd been trying to answer all along. What did he owe to her, and she to him? Could she reach out and touch his back and ask him to walk away with her for a moment? Could she really, actually do that in front of Don and Carol Ann? 

It wasn't supposed to matter.

But it sure felt like it did.

Suddenly, there was a presence behind her. Sweaty breath on her neck. "What did I tell you about those wings, Miss Stevie?" came the low voice of the publicist.

"Nothing important," she said.

"Oh, come on," the guy said. He carried with him the now-unmistakable smell of Tennessee barbecue. "You know you're real feeling good right now. Why don't you take a little stroll with me down the hallway?"

His hand slid to her ass. He pinched it.

All of Stevie's instincts came roaring to life. She lunged for the tray of drinks carried by a passing waiter. In a great, icy crash, she smashed all six glasses to the floor.

"Fuck all of y'all!" Stevie shouted. Oh no, she was picking up the local lingo. There was a twang creeping into her angry voice. Everyone in the VIP room stared at her, and down below, the country and western band seemed to be deciding whether to stop or to play louder.

She grabbed a cocaine tray and slammed that to the ground too, just to make sure everyone knew she was serious. 

"I'm sick and tired of this place, and this time, and this day! And I'm tired of all of you, even if haven't even met you yet!"

Across the room, Mick's mouth was hanging open. Carol Ann was clearly trying to stifle a laugh. Lindsey's eyes were glassy or teary, she couldn't tell which.

And Don, well, Don wrapped his arms around her waist, picked her up, hoisted her over his shoulder, and carried her out of the club. "Is this what you wanted?" he hissed as he took her down the stairs. "All the attention of everyone in there? Is that what matters to you? Well, you got it."

May 20, 1977 - again

"Can someone please pass the potatoes?" Stevie asked, and Mick, smiling, obliged.

"Stevie, Stevie." The words were the same as usual, but they were hissed into the space between the door and the wall, thin and angry, like a paper cut.

She flung the door open. For the first time, he had a t-shirt on with his jeans. He smelled like soap and smoke. Stevie, too, had washed every bit of herself, put on fresh clothes, and then loaded up on a few substances. 

"You're early," she said.

"Didn't know I needed an appointment." Lindsey trundled into the room. This time, though, he stopped before flopping onto the bed. 

"You and your silly girlfriend ruin my dress and still you think you can just waltz on in? Okay, then, Lindsey."

"Those potatoes were meant for the wall, not for you." He shrugged his hands into his pockets. He was three feet away. He was half-smiling his impish grin. "You shouldn't have gotten in the way."

"If I'm in the way, then you're a fucking barricade," Stevie said.

"What's that supposed to even mean?"

Stevie shook her head. "Why are you letting her continue to tour? It's not improving her life in any way, is it?"

"She wants to," Lindsey said. 

"She thinks she wants to," Stevie said. "What if you told her to go back home and get a job? Then at least she'd be done with her pretending-to-be-sober bullshit."

"Carol is Carol. She's doing what she wants." Lindsey sat on the bed. "And you're you."

Stevie continued to stand. She felt like Lindsey was definitely looking at her legs in her short nightgown, and this made the backs of her knees prickle with sweat and want. "I don't know how to be with you at all lately," she said. It was true, the easiest and best times with him lately had been all these nights when he'd burst in half-asleep. The singing, the watching his face, the waiting for time. "I don't know who we are to each other."

"We're... you and me." Lindsey sounded flustered, as though he'd walked with the same questions Stevie had and not found a satisfying answer.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means I'm mad at you, but also that you looked beautiful with macaroni on your face."

Stevie cracked a smile.

"I'm so angry with you too," she said, taking two tentative steps toward the bed.

"Yeah." 

"It's good to say it."

"Yeah."

"We should talk about our feelings."

"I feel," Lindsey's voice was soft and raspy, "that you should ditch that robe, and then pull up that nightgown for me."

Stevie took a few steps closer to the bed. Lindsey touched the front of her nightgown in the space between her breasts. "Tell me why you deserve that," Stevie said.

"Maybe I don't deserve it." Lindsey moved to take off his t-shirt. "Maybe I just want it."

Ah, here was her familiar boy of all these timeless days—no shirt, just jeans and a little bit of bewilderment. She met his eyes as she untied the robe and let it drop. She left the nightgown on as she perched on his left knee. "Can't always get what you want," she said, tapping a finger to his nose.

"Give me that." He clutched her finger and drew it into his mouth. Oh, god, when was the last time she'd felt his mouth on her in any way? It was warm and tired. She could tell that if she tasted him—when she tasted him, it was all inevitable now—he would be sweet with weed. 

He circled her finger with his tongue.

"Linds," she whispered, their faces coming closer.

"I swear there's still a hint of mashed potatoes on this finger," he said.

She couldn't take it. She snatched her finger back and swapped it for her mouth. His lips were soft and warm and sweet, just like she'd thought. His hands rushed from the tops of her legs to her chest and then back down again. They were both frayed nerves. If he exuded ex-boyfriend energy, then probably she exuded ex-girlfriend energy. Fuming and firey, exasperated and yearning, all of it at once, all in the movement of their mouths and hands.

She gave him what he wanted, and more. She pulled the nightgown over her head, let it drop to the floor. Still sitting on his knee, she watched as he sucked and kissed each of her breasts, teasing her nipples with his tongue. She led one of his hands to the waist of her pink underwear, let him play with it, drive himself crazy thinking about what he'd soon have. Because of course he would. Because she wanted him to. 

Stevie slid off Lindsey's leg and onto the bed. He followed, and they were lying on their sides, face to face, each breathing hard. Stevie could barely feel his touch without trembling. As she nudged open the button of his jeans, she focused on his eyes, so clear and blue. She needed to do anything possible to be sure she knew those eyes forever.

Lindsey shook off his jeans. He wasn't wearing underwear. 

When they'd lived together, he'd walked around naked sometimes, which she always liked. But she liked even more how comfortable he was with himself when they were like this, wanting and ready. All the lights in the room were on, and Lindsey was on his back, his legs splayed out, his dick rock hard.

Stevie pulled herself toward him, so that they were touching at points from head to toe. They were kissing, they were feeling each other, they were mostly whispering things that didn't make any sense.

But then.

"I fucking love you, Stevie," Lindsey whispered.

"I don't believe you, you piece of shit," Stevie said quietly. "Tell me again. Keep saying it."

"No," he said. "You'll get confused if I keep saying it. We both will."

But was there anyone better to be both loved by and confused by?

In a graceful move with his sure fingers, he pulled down her underwear and tossed it aside. Then he slid himself inside her, and she nearly came apart right then. God, he filled her up so well. 

She had missed so much about him. His cock and his balls, his muscular thighs, the sweat in his chest hair. She had missed him. His stupid, pedantic, weed-soaked Lindsey-ness. She could barely remember now all the things that had led to their breakup, and she needed to resist the urge to put that timeline together.

Does it matter, Stevie?

Were you right, Stevie?

She knew the minute they stopped fucking, she'd be left with nothing but questions. 

"Hang on, hang on," she said. And she nudged him out of her, as much as she wanted him to keep going until she broke open. But, no. She rolled him onto his back again, rubbed his chest and thighs, watched his face and those wide blue eyes as her mouth hovered near his cock. Finally, she dove down, licking his balls, which prompted a long, deep sigh from him. "Fuck, Stevie, I love you," he breathed. 

And she tongued his dick in response, going up and down, tasting herself and him, again not wanting to stop. He was beautiful and familiar and new, all at once. 

She took him to the edge, and then he coaxed her off of him. "You got to taste me," Lindsey said, meeting her mouth for a kiss. "So I get to—" 

He rolled Stevie onto her back and her legs fell open. Of course, of course they did, and of course his mouth on her clit reminded her of ten thousand amazing things, like the first time he'd done this, the way he'd gone so slowly, mapping her folds, drinking in her wetness, learning her. Or the way they'd fucked hard, so hard, when they found out they had their first record deal. All the sweet things he'd said about her talent, her voice, her writing, her. 

"Fuck," she said. "Fuck, I love you and I'm so mad at you." It came out all on one breath, it was out there before she was sure she'd said it, and Lindsey's mouth deepened into her in response. 

"I'm so confused," she whispered. "And I'll never get out of this day."

Fortunately they'd been saying a lot of things that didn't make much sense. 

Lindsey put his head up. "Please let me come inside you, Stevie," he said, his hands rubbing the soft hair and sweat on her inner thighs.

"Yes," she breathed.

He pulled himself up and clung to her, their arms and legs sticky, and he entered her gently, but then he was fucking her hard, his forehead against hers, their mouths parted in surprise and longing and clarity. Clarity that this was what they'd had and what they needed, past, present and future. That this was a beautiful thing they'd created for themselves, that they should never let each other go. 

It would all be gone soon, Stevie reminded herself as the prickle of her climax started in her feet and threatened to come up, up through her legs. Lindsey was getting close too, she could tell. But it would all be gone, lost to time. 

Wouldn't it?

No, like the bruise on her heart from last night, she would always remember this. 

This was a new bruise, a stamp of their love, of their wanting, of everything they ever could have and would be together. 

"Stevie, I love you," Lindsey was saying as he got close to losing control. "Stevie, I love—"

It didn't matter, she had insisted on telling herself. But oh, it did. It did, it did, it did. 

Chapter Text

What Stevie had realized about hotels over the years is that they left a person with nothing to hide.

Without a person's stuff, without their knickknacks and photos and plants and even their pets, they were exposed by those four plain, impersonal walls. There was nothing for a person to do in a hotel room but to be exactly themself. 

But a pitch-dark hotel presented new problems for Stevie, chiefly that she wasn't entirely sure where or who she was right now. 

With the sudden help of a tiny, buzzing emergency light down the hall, Stevie fumbled her way to her hotel room. There was no longer a place on the door for her key card. Rather, there was an old brass doorknob with a keyhole. Stevie didn't have the key, but as it turned out, she didn't need it. She grabbed the knob, and the door fell open. 

A hulking box of a TV set sitting on the dresser. 

Orange lamps and luxuriously thick brown carpet. 

Oh, this was no longer the 21st century. 

On the floor of the darkened room sat her things: a huge foot locker of clothing and shoes, and a smaller leather suitcase that held her accessories. Stevie heaved open the trunk and was met with an overwhelming scent. It was hotels and cleaners and being waited on hand and foot. It was smoke and sweat and weariness. It was these beautiful old dresses, some of which she'd had made, some of which she'd bought. She lifted a long red sundress out of the trunk and held it to her face, and then a floral skirt and white peasant top she recalled wearing at some photo shoot or another. Everything here felt like home in a way--a strange, dysfunctional home, to be sure, but still, a home that was uniquely hers, a home that was a place and time to which she could never truly go back. 

And yet, here she was. 

A thought occurred to her. A person. Could she? Stevie put the clothes down and rushed over to the nightstand that held an old rotary phone and a small notepad that identified this place as the Hyatt Regency. Next to it was her black address book. She flipped it open, scanned through pages of names and lives from the past. And then her eyes found the name she wanted: Robin. 

Stevie dialed the number. The rudimentary digital clock by the phone showed exactly 12:00. Midnight, she supposed. An hour earlier in Phoenix. Robin's phone rang and rang. Stevie didn't know what she'd say if her old best friend picked up, but her heart pounded at the possibility of a conversation, and her nerves all the way from her head to her feet prickled. Maybe, in this moment, it was enough to be dialing her phone at all. It was a real number, connected to a real phone, which a real, living person could pick up. 

There wasn't any voicemail, there wasn't even one of those funny old answering machines with the tapes. There was just the phone ringing fifteen, twenty, twenty-five times. Finally, Stevie put the receiver down. 

She pressed her bare feet deep into the brown carpet. It was all she could think to do at the moment. There was something undeniably familiar about this room, something unnaturally homelike beyond just having her clothes and shoes here. It was too lived-in, in some crucial way that she couldn't place at the moment. There were memories here, vague ones like faded photographs, their outlines undefined. She couldn't explain why, but it felt like there were too many memories. An overstuffed photo album. 

Stevie sat on the bed to calm some of the overwhelm. She smoothed her slim hands over the silky fabric of her white sundress. 

Should she do anything? Maybe even using the phone was too dangerous. She got up and took a few careful steps to the window and pulled the drapes open. It was dark, yes, darker than the cities of 2009, but it was still a living, breathing city. Cars hummed below, and there were lights on in the buildings across the way. She knew instinctively that she was in Nashville, that her location hadn't shifted, only the time. Where would she go in Nashville, in the 70s? And was it even safe? It seemed like there were innumerable things to fuck up.

Maybe she would peek outside. Just for a minute. 

Stevie grabbed a pair of tan platform heels from her trunk and put them on. She caught a glimpse of herself in the wall mirror; it was almost too much. (One thing, she told herself. She would obsess about one aspect of herself. Her hair! God, her hair. It was shiny and wavy in a way she had scarcely appreciated back then.) If she decided she didn't want to go anywhere, she could always just come back here and admire her late-20s self and try on all her old dresses. 

She tugged at the doorknob, and as soon as she did, a great push of wind flung itself around her.  

And then she had returned to the hallway in 2009.

The lights were back on, she was in front of the gold-framed mirror near the elevators, her 1970s self had been whisked away and she was once again older and softer and sadder. She had her black dress and the veins in her hands. Her long blonde hair and her bright red lips—her armor against time and the world.  

Her arms and legs trembled as she tried to walk back to her hotel room. Nothing in the hallway betrayed how she had been taken to the 70s. Did that mean that it could happen again, without warning?

She couldn't face being back in her own room, by herself, mulling over the questions. She didn't want to wind up doing something silly, like ordering drinks to her room and then being hungover on the day of the show. 

No, there was only one place she could think to go.

She knocked on the door of Lindsey's room. "It's me," she said hoarsely into the doorframe. "I just need to talk for a minute."

He opened the door, a look between concern and consternation on his face. "Hey. What's going on?"

Stevie realized it may have only been a minute or two since she'd said goodbye to him. He'd taken off the leather jacket and was in his jeans-and-t-shirt uniform. 

"Can I come in?"

His room was bizarrely large, with two king-size beds and a sofa and chairs, as though their tour manager Marty had thought that Lindsey was bringing his whole family to this outwardly uneventful Nashville tour stop. Stevie carefully sat on the bed that hadn't been touched by Lindsey. 

"I need," she began, "to use your iPhone."

"O-okay?" he stammered. "You need to make a top-secret call that you can't make from your own room?"

"No, I need to look something up," Stevie said, "about this hotel."

"I bet Marty would know." Lindsey seemed thrown off by Stevie's demeanor. And why shouldn't he have been—of all people, he was the one who couldn't be fooled by her attempted mask of calm over her nervous interior. 

"I don't want to bother him with this," Stevie said. "It's probably silly. I just need to know if this is the same place we stayed back in the 70s."

Lindsey shook his head at her and grabbed his phone off the dresser. "All right. Uh, where are we at, the Sheraton? Let's see if it existed back then." He glanced up a couple times while he was typing. "Okay, here we go. In the 70s, this place was new, and it was a Hyatt Regency."

"Yes, that's it!" Stevie clasped her hands together. 

A smile played on Lindsey's face. "Is the Hyatt Regency the key to everything?"

"I'm not sure," Stevie said. "Do you remember anything about that time? Stopping in Nashville on the Rumours tour?"

"Stevie, that year was the biggest blur of my life. Not until I started recording—"

"I know, I know." She had to stop him before he got on a tangent about Tusk. "Help me out here. Do you possibly remember a couple of us going out to party in Nashville and me getting really upset for some reason and then Don Henley carrying me out of some club?"

He shrugged. "I don't remember it, but it was the 70s. Anything's possible."

"Okay, well, do you maybe remember us doing, like, a Buckingham Nicks reunion set?"

"When? On the Rumours tour?"

"Yes."

"I know I just said anything's possible, but that--no, that definitely didn't happen, Stevie."

Stevie looked down at her hands. "I feel like I'm having visions or something."

"Now here you go again." 

"Oh my god, come on." Stevie put her head back and laughed. "I can barely talk to you about anything sometimes." 

"Sorry." Lindsey finally sat down, not on one of the many pieces of furniture in the room, but rather on the space of floor between the two beds. He stretched out his long legs. "What about these visions?"

"I don't know," Stevie said. "I'm not sure what's happening. Maybe I'm just very tired." Stevie lay back on the bed, her head coming to rest against a stack of pillows. She let her black heels fall off her feet. "Tell me again about time. What we were talking about on the plane."

"What else about it?" Lindsey's hand, seemingly instinctively, moved to touch Stevie's hair. A moment after he had his fingers playing with her blonde strands, he seemed to realize what he was doing. Their eyes locked. Stevie considered him. On some level, she'd been considering Lindsey Buckingham every day of her life since the late 60s. But she was really considering him now, his face creased and in need of a shave, his eyes tired but intense. His hands, busy with her. 

Stevie glimpsed his Cloud Atlas book on his nightstand again. Just like in Milwaukee.

He kept playing with her hair in a way that shot little sparks of pleasure all through her. 

"Just, you know, in your opinion," Stevie said, closing her eyes, "everything that ever happened... is still happening? So, like, the Rumours tour? That's happening somehow, somewhere."

"Right," Lindsey said quietly. "That timeline still exists somewhere. Hypothetically."

"Isn't that nice to think about?"

"It is."

Stevie fluttered her eyes open, just for a minute, just long enough to see his face. Him. All the feelings he couldn't hope to hide. 

"Mm, so, tell me about Pet Sounds," Stevie whispered.

"Oh, is it that time again?" 

Stevie nodded, and Lindsey leaned in, brushed aside her bangs, and pressed his lips to her forehead in a quick, gentle kiss. "Need a blanket?" he asked her.

"Maybe later."

"Okay. Well, settle in." Lindsey stayed on the floor and took his hands back (mercifully so, Stevie thought. No way she'd be able to sleep with him petting her hair). "I'll start with 'I Just Wasn't Made For These Times.' It's such a heartbreaking song. I mean, lyrically. But also musically, you've got so many instrumental layers, as well as vocal layers—"

Stevie was asleep in minutes.

She awoke in her dress, and under a blanket, at five in the morning. Lindsey had turned down the air conditioning to an arctic temperature, and even under the blanket, she shivered. 

There was way too much hotel-room-based emotional exposure that could happen if they woke up together, even in separate beds, in the same room. 

Stevie knew they didn't need that. Not on a show day.

She got up, grabbed her shoes, crept past sleeping Lindsey, and opened the heavy door of the room as slowly and quietly as possible.

She padded down the hallway, scrounged her keycard from one of the pockets in her dress, and was relieved to find that her room door had the reliable keycard slot again.

But as soon as the keycard light blinked green, the hallway lights went out. 

Shit. Not this again. Not time itself. 

Something essential was broken. And Stevie had no idea how she might begin to fix it. 

Chapter Text

He had overdone it again—not just too many drugs, but also too much music, and too much time genially and not-so-genially arguing about an arrangement or a single chord with Mick and Ken and Richard. And too much of her. Seeing her, not seeing her, living inside the questions of what his life would look like without her.

Lindsey's life now was this noisy hotbox in Sausalito. Had they been there for a month? More? He recalled a lyric of one of Stevie's songs from a few years ago. I never did believe in time. Sometimes it seemed like there was no point in believing in time here, not for the way the days and nights stretched and bounced and sometimes collapsed in on themselves. There weren't enough windows and he frequently forgot to go outside. 

Mick had told him an hour or so ago that it was Thursday, but really, who cared? Lindsey could explain the idea of Thursday about as well as he could explain why taking stimulants made him want to go to bed.

Which is why his head hit the cushions of a couch in the studio that had seen too much.

Lindsey was no longer in Sausalito. Lindsey was nowhere. 

In his dream, he was swimming. He was in the center of his lane, propelling himself through the water, every stroke swift and effortless, as though the water had almost no weight to it. It was by far the best swim of his life. 

And, dimly, he became aware of others around him, and the typical chaotic thrashing of a race. Freestyle, he surmised, since that was the stroke he was already using. He was winning, right? He had to be. With everything feeling this breezy, there was no way he couldn't be the fastest here. 

Lindsey swam toward the wall. And that's when he noticed the bleachers.

What with the swimming itself being so easy, he could take a moment to concentrate on who was there to cheer him on. His mother and his brothers. Some of his old friends from swim team, looking exactly as they did in the 60s. And... the band? Yes, well, Mick couldn't be mistaken for anyone else, and he was flanked by Chris and John and Stevie. Ken and Richard were there as well. And, strangely, the Everly Brothers and the Kingston Trio. They were all, but for one person, cheering for him.

Stevie was as still and quiet as a photograph. 

He had to make the turn at the wall, and when he did, the water became heavier. Now he was having that good old high school feeling of the fatigue creeping in, his arms and legs flagging, every stroke pushed through with effort. The opposite wall loomed like the gate to the rest of his life. He could make it, he could make it, he could. 

Sometimes when Lindsey tried to envision time as a concept, he thought of a swimming pool, the lane markers ticking out the hours or days, the water clear and undisturbed. And today, with him in what appeared to be one of the center lanes, what did that mean for his place in time? In everything? It seemed arrogant to try and believe he was truly at the center of it all, but there could also be harm in not seeing that correctly.

And anyway, he definitely didn't think he was leading now. 

The others in the lanes today—at first they looked like his brothers, but on closer inspection, they were just him. Other versions of him, from different times. Lindsey who tried to please his father by seeming athletic and practical, which in the world's opinion were the same thing. Lindsey who had given up on practicality and turned himself over to music and perfection. Lindsey who was in love and terrified, the world seeming to crack open every time he saw that beautiful brown-eyed girl.

He reached the wall and turned around. He could see her now.

She was still unmoved, unmoving. And for him, the water may as well have been molasses. Every motion was a decision, an energy-sapping, possibly life-threatening decision. Every muscle ached. The Lindseys around him pushed through their lanes with ease, as though they'd made all the right choices in life, as though he was the one who was going to be left thrashing alone in the water.

But with ninety-five percent of the bleacher section cheering for him, he made it to the wall.

And he hung there, arms and hands on the concrete, spitting water, rubbing his curiously non-goggled eyes. 

Stevie stared him down from the bleachers. She was wearing a button-down of his, and a long skirt, and her hair was down, and she looked like San Francisco. All the carefree confidence in the world, and yet. And yet. He knew what she was silently asking him.

Can you forgive me for the way I ended things?

Ended things? Lindsey spit water again. Ended us, that's what you mean.

Fine. She turned her head. She had the world's greatest profile. Us. Can't you agree with me that we needed to change? For the music? For the album? Can't you agree with me that we can change again, someday?

He shook his head at her, even if he wasn't sure she'd see it. A pair of goggles materialized on the concrete. He grabbed them and put them on. And then he turned around and went back in for another, easier lap. 

Forgiveness, as an idea, couldn't hold itself together in cocaine fever dreams. Forgiveness fell apart in the water. 

Chapter Text

For Stevie, memory was sometimes like the Pacific Ocean—vast, ferocious, and best considered while traveling above it. 

Though she had no choice but to be right in the middle of it now. When she and Don stepped outside what appeared to be Lindsey and Carol Ann's Hollywood home from the late 70s, there was no end to the flood of moments from the past coming back. That palm tree in the yard... she had stood by it after one of Lindsey's parties, having told him she wanted to talk to him alone, waiting for him to emerge from the house, letting an eternity pass while she stood there looking around. Had he ever come out to talk? She didn't think so. 

It was sunny today, though. Stevie swiped a black umbrella from the front step and opened it for shade. 

Don paused by the same consequential palm tree and crossed his arms, and Stevie knew they both felt it. The unreality of everything here. There was no whispering or movement from any of the plants in the yard—the trees stayed silent and still. No birds chirped. Stevie's boots and Don's loafers on the ground seemed to be the only things disturbing the universe at all.

"What's happening here?" Don said quietly.

"I feel like..." Stevie said, looking around, "I feel like we're not anywhere."

"Yeah." Don tapped out a rhythm on the palm tree trunk. "You said this was October 1978?"

"I didn't, but yes, that's right." Stevie took a few tentative steps forward, toward the driveway. 

"You know, I came to some parties here," Don said. "I'd expect to see my Corvette or my Aston Martin parked here or out on the street."

"Sorry to say, but since I can't drive, you probably can't drive, either." Stevie gestured around. "And anyway, do you see any mode of transportation right now beyond our poor old legs?"

"It's true. Let's keep moving."

They headed down the driveway and out onto the road, encountering nothing and no one—no cars or people or intrepid L.A. squirrels. The sun seemed to be directly overhead, as though it was noon, but the way the light hit the road didn't look like midday at all.  

Stevie's umbrella bobbed as she and Don approached the end of the block. At the stop sign on the corner, Don turned to her. "You remember this neighborhood?"

"Unfortunately, yes," Stevie said. "I think, for our best chance of getting out of here, we should take a right."

"Sure."

But when they turned, they were back on the same street they'd just left, walking in the direction of Lindsey's old house. 

"Well, then." Don laughed upon seeing the house again. "Seems like you have some unfinished business with this place."

Stevie shook her head, as though she could stop herself from being overloaded with memories of late-70s Lindsey, who of course arrived burdened with bonus memories of Carol Ann. Those two had lived together, they'd been engaged for a time, they'd been reckless and volatile, seemingly far more so than she and Lindsey had been as a couple. Lindsey and Carol Ann had also been very showy in their affection toward each other, and yet there'd been something sort of unreal about their relationship, perhaps as strange as this replica of L.A. without birds and people. But it stung, still, as Stevie approached the house again and she remembered the first time she'd seen Lindsey kissing Carol, and the sinking feeling when finding out that Carol was coming on tour with the band. She could bring up the sense of it even now: the prickles of anger behind her face, the stomach drop, the weak knees. A feeling on the opposite page of love. Still. Now. Almost fifty years on.

Stevie stopped at the edge of the driveway and stared down the house, as though willing it away.

"Stevie?" Don said. "You need me to throw rocks at this place?"

Really, who would she be, in life and in art, if she were a person who could just let things go?

"Not quite," Stevie said. "But it'd be great if we could escape it eventually."

"Give me a second." Don inspected the gates, the driveway, the street on which no one continued to walk or drive. He called out—to Los Angeles, to the universe—"Is anyone out there?," to no response. Finally, he kicked the mailbox, and within an instant, the entire scene in front of them was different. 

"Damn." Don glanced at the totally different house, and then his shoes, and then back to the house. 

"Bel Air," Stevie murmured. "The house on the hill."

"Buck's bachelor pad," Don said.

"Lindsey's, yes."

"Does this place have better vibes for you?" 

"Oh, absolutely not," Stevie said. "But for some reason I'm dying to see it again."

Stevie found the piano before anything else. She sat, brushed her hair out of the way, uncovered the keys, and played a bit of "Gypsy." "Please, tell us, Stevie, about how you and Lindsey joined Fleetwood Mac," she said to herself under the melody. "Well, sure, Stevie. I've got a thirteen-minute story I can tell you about exactly that."

"Soda, Stevie?" Don called from elsewhere in the house.

"Sure, I'm parched."

He walked in. "Tab or Coke Zero?"

"They still make Tab?"

Don handed her a chilled can, the color and design of which took her instantly back to the mid-80s. Don, meanwhile, cracked open a very modern can of Coke Zero. "Well, they made Tab at some point, and I think that's all that matters. Which is to say, I don't think time has any real meaning here."

"Yeah." Stevie plunked through a melody with one hand while taking a sip with the other. "Oh wow, this is still really good."

"Have you been to this house before?"

"Of course. Just, not always in the best of mental states. Once I remember telling him I hated this house. I told him to burn it down."

"Ahh, this is the one they tore down. The Buckinghams." Don ran his hand down a stucco wall. "But, lucky for us, being outside of space and time, we get to see it back in all its 80s glory."

Stevie was playing the melody of "Secret Love." She didn't really want to think about Kristen Buckingham having the same reaction to the house as she'd had, but Don-slash-Stevie had put the thought there. In the late 90s, Lindsey and Kristen wound up decamping to the Four Seasons instead of living here together. Stevie liked to think that somehow she'd been influential in that decision—that she, as the proto-ex-girlfriend, the one former lover to rule them all, had radiated that house-hating energy to Kristen, costing Lindsey thousands in hotel bills and the eventual demolition of the bachelor pad.

The energy of it all. The love, the hate, the 80s and 90s, the tours and sex and rehab, and all of this time, time, time. 

"Don, how do we get back?" Stevie stood up from the piano, knocking over her soda in the process.

Don shrugged. "I know as much as you."

"No, you seem to know a little bit more," Stevie said. "I think you're my lurking subconscious or something. I thought maybe you'd have some insider info. Look, I need to get back to Nashville and get in touch with Lindsey."

"Are you really going to do that." Don crossed his arms.

"Yes! I even told Karen to call Lindsey's people."

"She's going to ask you again before she actually does that. Are you going to tell her, for sure, to call Lindsey's people?"

"Yes!" Stevie walked out of the music room, through the kitchen, and into a sitting room with one of those big-screen TVs that sat on the floor. Don followed her. "I need to do it. There's something about Nashville, you know? There's something telling me that's the right place and time to talk to him, if only I could get back to that place and time."

"Okay. I believe you, I guess. But there's no time happening here."

Don nodded at the TV. Stevie flopped onto the leather sofa and turned it on. There was a rerun of Miami Vice. On the next channel, a rerun of Columbo. Then Moonlighting and Magnum P.I. and then CSI and Criminal Minds. 

"Your dream," Don said. "Crime shows from across the temporal universe."

Stevie sighed. If there was a conspiracy in the universe to keep her locked here, this might be the evidence of it. She glanced at Don, standing off to the side, always exuding authority even when he knew nothing. Gray and wrinkled in that way men were allowed to be, and to be called distinguished in the midst of it all. In the meantime, Stevie had at least ten people she paid to upkeep her appearance, and still, still, she could look at the backs of her hands and instantly be reminded of her age. Of everything that had come before. Of what she had left.

There was so much she didn't allow herself to think about. If memories were waves, well, sometimes she could shut herself into a metaphorical submarine and avoid them all.

"We have to fix spacetime." Stevie said this slowly, touching one hand to another.

"Yeah." Don came to sit beside her on the couch. With both of them wearing all black, and the sofa being black leather, it looked like they were disappearing.

"Because... the problem is potentially affecting me at other points in time." Stevie stared at Don, trying to read his face. In the background, Columbo revealed the satisfying solution to the crime he'd been investigating. Just one more thing, he always said. 

"In Nashville, right?" Stevie concluded. "It's affecting the timelines in Nashville?"

Don gave her a small nod, his grizzled authority slipping away.

"Don, do you know what's happened to me in Nashville?" Stevie asked, her voice rising toward panic. "Can you tell me?"

"I can't talk about that," Don said. "Not yet."

Chapter Text

May 21, 1977 - again

Stevie tried to walk like someone who hadn't been getting very sweetly railed for hours. She nodded good morning at their bodyguard, Dwayne, who was standing at the entrance to the revolving restaurant. Ah. She had vaguely remembered from some other version of this day that there'd be breakfast for the band and entourage at this restaurant, and she was happy to find that yes, she'd been correct. But right now, only one other person was bothering to take advantage.

"Good morning, Carol Ann," Stevie said brightly.

"Oh! Good morning, Stevie Nicks," Carol replied, gesturing to the chair across from her. 

Stevie sat. Without makeup, the resemblance between her and Carol was a bit less striking. She watched as Carol dug her shaking fingers through her blonde hair. With her other hand, she picked up her coffee cup, considered it, and put it down again. 

"Stevie," she finally said. "I am so sorry about that whole... incident last night. I'm incredibly embarrassed. It was so unlike me."

"It's okay, Carol. I'll send the dress out today to be cleaned. Apology accepted, all right?"

They had said it, she and Lindsey had said it, so many times. I love you, I love you, I fucking love you. Maybe she had known it all along, but she had needed the words alongside the feeling. And then, she'd gotten them. She had looked into his eyes and said them. He had gotten her off four times and he'd said them. Her legs twitched at the memory. She had to hold in her heart the steadily beating thought that he had meant those words, and that the Lindsey of the next May 20 and 21 would feel the same way. 

Carol looked relieved. She had a few sips of coffee while glancing around the room. "This restaurant revolves?"

"Every forty-five minutes, a complete circle, yes," Stevie said.

A waiter brought her a plate, and she tucked into the same eggs benedict and fruit salad that Carol Ann was eating.

"Did you all go out last night? The band?" Carol asked. "To the, ah, cocktail bar or something? Lindsey's sleeping like the dead."

"Yes," said Stevie. "The cocktail bar. It was hopping."

There was the matter of the other thing Lindsey had told her last night: You were right, Stevie. 

He really had said it. He had said she was right for ending the relationship. He'd said that it was better for both of them to not be trying to have a relationship on the road, that having a creative partnership was tough enough before adding a romantic partnership. 

"But you're already in another romantic partnership," Stevie had countered.

"It's different, though," Lindsey had said. "Intellectually and spiritually-speaking."

He had lain on top of her and that had ended the conversation. It didn't escape her that this man who spouted bullshit like intellectually and spiritually-speaking was also incredibly attuned to her body and her brain. Her music. Her whole life. 

Back in the revolving restaurant, Carol put her fork and knife across her plate. "Well, I should probably go and check on Lindsey," she said. "He's so grouchy in the mornings, you know?"

Stevie—her eyes bleary, her legs tired, her heart cracked—just stared at Carol. Finally, she managed to give a little shrug and said, "Oh no, he was never like that with me."

"'When do you say... Budweiser?'" Stevie sang the familiar commercial jingle and held up four cans of beer. 

"When do I say Budweiser?" Kenny was bemused as he ushered Stevie inside and put the beers on a table. "When Stevie Nicks asks me to, I guess."

Stevie ambled toward the familiar sofa in Kenny's dressing room and flopped onto it nearly face first. "Oh, Kenny, this one's been a long one. I have so much on my mind. And I know it's almost over. But this is the first time in a while that I wish that it wasn't."

Kenny had cracked a beer but wasn't drinking it. "I'm not sure of the context of what you're saying."

"Oh! Right." Stevie put a hand to her forehead. "How silly of me. I hadn't told you this round. Time loop, Kenny! Me, time, looping. Twenty-four hours. Stuck in Nashville, apparently for eternity. Much like yours in 1975, except you weren't in Nashville and you escaped yours eventually. That's what I want to talk about."

Kenny sat on the edge of a yellow easy chair in the other corner of the room. He took in a breath. "Okay. Yes. I guess I've told you a bit about some of the things I did to try to escape."

"Some of them, sure," Stevie said. "But I want to try to find patterns this time, Kenny. Let's be strategic. Let's have a diagram."

"We don't have much time until soundcheck."

"Soundcheck smoundcheck." Stevie hopped up from the couch and surveyed the food and other consumables on the table near Kenny's chair. "I mean, I don't know if I'm ever going to play this show. So who cares about soundcheck. Ah. I don't think you're using this so I'm going to. And not for the purpose you think." It was one of J.C.'s standard pre-show trays of powder. Stevie patted down the powder and drew a circle through it. "Okay. See this, Kenny? This is the loop. Twenty-four hours across May 20 and May 21, starting just after 8:30 PM, Central time. And this?" She grabbed a yellow M&M from a bowl. "This is me. And here I go, whoa, here I go, around and around." She dragged the M&M around the circle in the tray. "And here's the rest of you lucky people." She dumped a handful of M&Ms on the tray, and pushed them off and onto the table after they had traversed the cocaine circle only once. "There's an exit, Kenny. There has to be."

Kenny sighed. "There's an exit, sure. But it's mysterious. I tried so many things. You probably have, too. I wound up halfway to Hong Kong one day, thinking, I don't know, if I could be above the Earth's atmosphere, then maybe the loop wouldn't get me. It didn't work."

"Tell me about your last couple days looping." Stevie crunched through a few of the M&Ms that represented the band and entourage. "And tell me about the day that stuck."

He did. They were average, he said. They were when he was resigned to never being able to live outside that one day in 1975, so he'd just decided to make the best of it. "I didn't have any goals anymore, you know?" Kenny took some M&Ms from the bowl. "How could I? There was no future that I could conceive of. It was just one endless present. So it got me to think about what I actually enjoyed doing. I still wrote songs, but only because I really wanted to. I visited friends. Oddly, I went to see the movie Nashville about ten times. Nothing mattered... but also, I guess, I mattered? What I wanted suddenly mattered. And that felt important."

"Okay. Okay." Stevie pushed back her bangs and took in Kenny's words. "That's helpful, I think. But what about the exit?"

"The exit. Well, I think it's not about finding a door from the loop or anything like that. I think it's about jumping outside the loop entirely. Harnessing the way you're currently experiencing time."

"Harnessing time," Stevie said. "I don't think I can harness anything."

"Maybe you're more powerful than you think," Kenny replied. "Maybe I was, too. I just didn't realize it."

Stevie hadn't gotten ready for the show, but after chatting with Kenny, and after soundcheck, she was inspired to do so. What if tonight was the night she finally saw the audience? What if, in just a few short hours, she traversed the loop, she made those formerly impossible post-8:30 hours possible again, and she and Lindsey could sing to each other, their rhythms in perfect sync, their energy emanating to the crowd? What if, after the show, they threw off all notions of rightness and wrongness, and ran away to fuck in the limo? What if Lindsey told her he loved her again? What if she had four orgasms again? What if Carol went home to Nebraska or whatever? What then?

She was open to any and all possibilities.

She appeared after Kenny's set in the usual room. Her hair was curled, her black dress was ironed, the heels of her platform boots sent her up to the heavens (or, well, up to five feet and six inches tall, temporarily). 

Lindsey was there, having a joint. He turned to her.

And for a second they were back in the hotel room together this morning. Between the "I love yous" and the eventual "you were right." That pocket of time. Everything sweet and useless. Everything beautiful and collapsing. 

"Ready?" she asked him.

He nodded. 

The rest of the band arrived. Carol Ann lurked at the doorway. J.C. came around with the pre-show bumps. And Lindsey, as usual, started talking about the songs he was working on for the new album.

"About me," Stevie murmured.

"What?"

"They're about me," she said.

"I mean, in some sense, there's always going to be songs written about certain, uh, subjects—" Lindsey began.

"Tell me a title," Stevie said.

"A title?"

"Of one of your new songs. In case we don't get to talk about this again."

"Uh." Lindsey cleared his throat. "I'm not sure yet. One's maybe called 'Save Me a Place.'"

"Okay," she said, her voice small.

The band milled around them. The crowd shrieked and shouted and clapped. 

What else did she want?

Stevie grabbed Lindsey by the front of his shirt. "Stay," she whispered, looking into his face.

"What?"

"Stay. Stay here. Stay with me."

Lindsey was very stoned and very bewildered. "I'm right here. We're about to go on stage."

"You don't understand. Stay."

"Ready!" J.C. called out, and then Lindsey was walking, and she was walking too, and she grasped his shirt in two places, and he was holding on to her arm as usual, and for once, couldn't that all be enough?

"Stay," Stevie commanded, her voice cracking. 

"Steph," Lindsey said into her ear. "Get into the zone."

"I can't," she said, and they were still walking, and she began chanting, "Stay, stay, stay," to herself, or to Lindsey, or to time itself.

But it wasn't enough.

She felt the familiar fade, the loss of her tether to linear time. She was holding his shirt, and she was chanting. Maybe stay meant "I love you," maybe it meant "let's be together again." She hoped he knew that. If nothing else ever happened, if time was never solid again, she hoped he knew that. 

May 20, 1977 - again

Stevie woke up crying. 

She called J.C. to tell him she was sick and asked him to cancel Saturday's concert. 

May 20, 1977 - again

She was in the bookstore with Dwayne when somebody recognized her. And then somebody else. And then another one. They were coming toward her with paper and pens held out. Someone knocked over a table. 

"Stevie, sorry, this isn't going to work," Dwayne said quietly. "We're moving."

"Can't a girl buy a self-help book in peace?" Stevie tried to laugh it off as Dwayne gently put a hand around her wrist and began leading her out.

She had just chosen the book. It was called Power! How to Get It, How to Use It. All she'd wanted to do was pay for it and go. But no, the universe had bad timing.

As usual.

When she and Dwayne were in the car, she realized she was still holding on to the book. Back at the hotel, she tried to read it, but the words blurred in front of her, and it was clear that she was neither getting nor using power today. She flung the book at the mirror above the dresser and went back to her umpteenth reread of Edgar Allen Poe. 

May 20 - 21, 1977 - again

"LADIES' NI-I-I-IGHT!" Stevie yelled out the window of the limo, while Christine, the only other lady present for said night, slumped on the leather seat, smoking a cigarette.

Stevie didn't remember much of the rest. 

May 20 - 21, 1977 - again

"Do you think Peter Falk would come to a Fleetwood Mac show?" 

"Hm? Who?"

"Peter Falk! Lieutenant Columbo. He's right there." Stevie pointed the joint in the direction of the TV set, then handed the joint to Christine.

"Ohh." Chris narrowed her eyes at the television, where The Tonight Show was on. "Right. That guy. He always looks so rumpled and sad."

"Part of his charm," Stevie said. "He's never not solved the case."

"You like things to be all nice and neat, don't you?" Chris asked.

"Only in TV shows. Life can be more chaotic. Life is more chaotic."

"Doesn't have to be." Chris smiled and leaned forward from the bed, as if she was going to hand the joint back to Stevie, who was sprawled on the carpet. Then she pulled back and went for another toke. 

Stevie watched her slowly blow out the smoke. "Maybe for you." 

"You've got to find the little moments of peace," Chris said. "And if you can't find them, you have to create them."

"Mm hmm." Stevie sipped on the large glass of champagne Chris had poured for her. "Well, then, tell me this, since you're always so damn wise, Chris. If you had one day to do whatever you wanted, what would you do?"

"Probably just fuck off back to England and forget all of you people." 

"Chris!" Stevie sat up and smacked Christine's knees. "I fucking knew you were going to say that!"

Christine handed the joint back to her. "Well, what would you do with your day, Stevie?"

"Ah, well, let me tell you, I've spent a while trying to figure that out. I think, what I'd really like to do is sing. Perform. Just give me a big audience of people who are there for me and I'll be the happiest girl in the world. And then I'd like to work on writing some new songs. And I'd also like to just sit around like we're doing right now. Shooting the shit, watching Lieutenant Columbo, you know."

Chris nodded. "All of that's good. I'll put that last bit in my one day, too. Sitting with friends, having some drinks. Then I won't have to get on a plane and fly back to England."

"See, there you go!"

"Your day, Stevie, doesn't sound too far off from your actual life," Chris said. 

"Oh, but it's just far enough to be kind of a problem."

Stevie finished the joint, and then Christine joined her on the floor and, pleasantly stoned, they stared up at the TV. Johnny Carson was now interviewing the scientist Carl Sagan. Stevie had always been drawn to something about Carl Sagan, maybe his kind eyes or his nice suits. She'd never listened very carefully to what he said on his talk show appearances. 

But this time, Sagan was talking about human intelligence, and she and Chris were hanging on to his every word. 

"Man seems to be, as far as we know, the only species that's aware of his own mortality," Johnny Carson paraphrased some of Sagan's research. "Aware that he's going to die, and also that he can pass on a written history of what he has done..."

"I think that's very important," Sagan broke in. "The idea that we have information stored outside our bodies. For most of the history of life on this planet, the organisms had almost all the information they had to deal with in their genes. Hereditary information. Instinct. Then about maybe a hundred million years ago, a little longer ago than that, there came to be a reptile that for the first time in the history of life, had more information in its brains than in its genes. And, uh, that was a major step, symbolically, in the evolution of life on this planet. Well, now we have an organism—us—which can store more information outside the body altogether than inside the body, and that's in books and computers..."

"I never thought about it like that." Chris's eyes were glassy. "Did you, Stevie?"

"No," Stevie said. "But you know what that means? We have to keep writing and recording and making stuff, right? Or we're no better than like all the little one-celled organisms that could never even hope to do that."

"Oh my God, it's true."

Stevie wished to always know Christine. She probably needed to tell her that, in some way, but she hoped that her stoned, watery smile got at least part of the message across. 

"I think this guy and the other bloke would both enjoy a Fleetwood Mac show," Christine said. "This fellow might need a few songs to loosen up, but he'd understand our whole groove eventually, don't you think?"

"I absolutely think so," Stevie said.

She had been lying on Chris's floor for so long that she had almost certainly missed Lindsey dropping by her room and whispering into her door. Well, that was fine, because she'd had a great idea. And she'd be ready to tell him the next time she returned to the evening of May 20. 

May 20 - 21, 1977 - again

When he arrived, she was there.

"Stevie, Stevie," came the voice at the door.

"Lindsey." She leaned into the doorframe. "Lindsey. We're going to go out, okay?" She opened the door a crack. "Go put on a shirt and shoes and meet me and J.C. downstairs in five minutes."

J.C. had grabbed one of Lindsey's acoustic guitars. The limo was out in front of the hotel. Their bodyguard Greg rode in the front seat with the driver, and Stevie, Lindsey, and J.C. were in back.

"What is this?" Lindsey said, yawning.

"We're going to go to one of the honky-tonks over on Broadway," Stevie said excitedly. "We're just going to show up and sing!"

Lindsey opened his eyes about as wide as they could go at the moment—which was to say, not very wide. But then he gave her his sideways smile, and Stevie knew that they were, in fact, going to walk on that stage.

"What are we going to sing?" he said.

They discussed the setlist. J.C. didn't think they should try to do more than a handful of songs, given that they might be taking stage time from another performer. "I don't think they'll mind," J.C. said. "But let's be aware, and not hog the stage all night."

"Well, I don't think Lindsey's going to last for more than a few songs, anyway," Stevie said.

"No, I'll make it, I'll make it," Lindsey insisted. 

He was wearing a black t-shirt, jeans, and slip-on loafers, and his hair was mussed, but he looked good. Stevie had tried to go breezy and casual for the occasion, as though she had just come up with this idea tonight and not on the last May 20. She was back in the red dress, which of course no longer needed to be sent out for cleaning. As she had pulled it from the trunk this evening, she sort of missed the mashed potato stains. 

She'd put on a little bit of makeup and pulled the front of her hair back with a few pins, but left the rest loose and wavy. No top hats tonight, no jewelry, no huge boots. It was just the two of them and their music. 

J.C. was, of course, prepared with the uppers, and Lindsey had a cup of coffee and did a few lines while J.C. wrote out the agreed-upon setlist:

CRYING IN THE NIGHT

NEVER GOING BACK AGAIN

THAT'S ALRIGHT

DON'T LET ME DOWN AGAIN

"Hm, several things we're not supposed to do 'again,'" Stevie mused.

"Lindsey, are you okay with doing 'Don't Let Me Down' with just the acoustic?" J.C. asked.

"Sure," Lindsey said, as the car slowed along the bar-laden blocks of Broadway. 

"I'm the percussion section," Stevie said with a grin.

"You two will be great," J.C. said. "Okay, any thoughts on which place to barge into? Looks like we've got several options with live music going on tonight."

"Stevie should choose." Lindsey patted her shoulder. 

"I think... this Marvin's Junction place looks good." Stevie pointed to a bar with a sign that seemed to depict a fork in a road. "Let's see if they'll have us."

J.C. had a chat with the manager as soon as they walked in, guitar and tambourine in hand. Greg stood guard in front of Stevie and Lindsey as the guitarist currently onstage wound down his Johnny Cash cover and the bar patrons began to realize that something different was happening. 

"All right, we're having a change in tonight's entertainment," the proprietor, Marvin, said into the microphone. He wore jeans and a Waylon Jennings t-shirt and a brown cowboy hat. "I'll let these folks introduce themselves!"

And then, instinctively, she and Lindsey locked arms and walked up the three steps to the rickety wooden stage. The crowd of about sixty bar patrons cheered. At least a few of them had realized who was here, and word was quickly getting around the bar. 

Lindsey nudged her as he settled his guitar across his body. "You can go ahead."

Stevie smiled and held up her tambourine. "Well, hello there, Nashville! You might know us as part of Fleetwood Mac, but before any of that, we were Buckingham Nicks. And that's who we are tonight!"

They launched into "Crying in the Night." She was that kind of lady, Stevie sang. Times were hard, ohh. She could come curling around you. They had tried to release this song as a single back four years ago, and nothing had come of it, and Stevie had, in fact, cried over it. But it sounded amazing now, maybe better than it ever had, especially when Lindsey's harmony came in on the chorus. The crowd nodded and swayed, and Stevie sang, and she caught Lindsey's eye while he strummed, and she couldn't help but smile her widest smile. 

In "Never Going Back Again," Stevie was transfixed along with everyone else in the bar by Lindsey's superhuman finger-picking. By the time she was due to jump in on the chorus, more people were milling in from outside, having heard a song they'd spun on their turntables at home. A smile played on Lindsey's face as he saw the crowd growing. By the time they launched into "That's Alright," the bar was packed, and Stevie was delighted. She loved this song, a country song, which had yet to make it on any album, and she was so glad for the chance to share it. Meet me down by the railway station. I've been waitin', and I'm through waitin' for you. She couldn't be shocked at how twangy her voice now sounded. It was a dream to sing the song, and it was all at once a dream to be here in Nashville. Only the town itself knew how well-acquainted she was with the place. 

After the gratifying applause for "That's Alright," Lindsey spoke into the mic: "Thanks, everyone, for coming out tonight! We're so thrilled for all the support. We've got just one more for you this evening, and it's another from our debut album."

Lindsey started up the acoustic version of "Don't Let Me Down Again," a bluesy, typically electric song with a fast beat. He sang:

Baby, baby, don't treat me so bad
I'm the best boy that you ever had
You wanna leave now and find a new start
It's gonna kill me if you break my heart

He was sounding great, and he knew it, and Stevie was so glad he did. They locked eyes, she turned more toward him, and she didn't know what any of this meant, not really. Maybe she had slipped into the mode Kenny had: no future, no goals, just the now. And how sweet the now was. Lindsey's voice sailed over the patrons, and she imagined that all of Nashville could hear him, hear their song, and perhaps understand something beautiful and fundamental about the two of them.

Lindsey began the guitar solo at the center of the song. 

But all of a sudden, something wasn't right.

He stopped for a moment. He blinked. He seemed to be staring at a fixed point over the crowd. 

His fingers and his right leg seemed to be twitching.

Stevie leaned toward her microphone. "Lindsey?"

He looked at her again. His eyes were pleading.

Lindsey's fingers strummed aimlessly at the guitar strings. 

The word came to her then: seizure. 

"Lindsey!" She rushed over to him, held him by his waist and his guitar, getting to him just seconds before he collapsed on the stage. 

Chapter Text

May 20 - 21, 1977 - still

"Not only are we probably going to have to cancel the Saturday show, but who knows if he's going to be well enough to travel!" Mick was bending down so as to be right in her face. "And for what? To do your own concert. It's selfish, Stevie. It's bloody selfish is what it is."

"It was four songs," Stevie retorted. "And it was free publicity for the band."

"We don't need free fucking publicity if it takes out the guitarist!"

"He'll be fine, Mick. He could have gotten up and finished the song on his own. J.C. and I just brought him here as a precaution."

This, Stevie figured, was okay to say, because it had only been J.C. in the ambulance with Lindsey and her, and J.C. had disappeared at the first sign of an angry Mick hulking through the hallway of Nashville General Hospital. Stevie knew one of them was going to have to take the brunt, and she was far less fire-able than J.C. 

But even though Lindsey had initially gotten up from the stage on his own, he had started to lose consciousness again in the ambulance. Stevie had gripped his fingers, making sure they stayed warm. She had lightly pushed aside the paramedic and gotten as close to Lindsey as possible, whispering in his ear, "Lindsey, you’ve got to stay with us."

In the hallway of the hospital, Mick shoved his hands in his pockets and paced up and back. "Are they going to let you see him?" he grumbled.

"Maybe," Stevie said. "I mean, I'll stay here until they do. But you should go, Mick. The last thing Lindsey needs is you yelling in his face."

"Are you Mrs. Buckingham?" 

Stevie looked up from the magazine in which she’d been absently turning pages. A nurse stood over her. "What? No."

"Oh, pardon me, darling. Weren't you the one who brought him in?"

"Yes, I'm his, ah... can I go see him?"

"Linds."

He was in bed, a blanket pulled up to his chest, as machines attached to the wall beeped and whirred, proclaiming what Stevie hoped was his health and his life. And as she got closer, she could see that he looked good. His eyes were clear and blue, and his face had its old color back.

He smiled at her. "Well, hi."

"Hi."

She grabbed a chair and pulled it close to his bed. Neither of them said anything for a moment.

"I'm sorry," Stevie began. "I sensed you weren't feeling that well, and I still dragged you over to the honky-tonk and got us up there and—"

"Stevie, hey." Lindsey's hand came to touch hers. "If I hadn't thought I could do it, I would have told you, okay? And all of us are pretty beaten up from the road right now."

"You a bit more than others."

“Yeah.”

"Did you know you were having a seizure? I mean, did you know that you could have a seizure?"

"I knew I was tired, dizzy, out of it." Lindsey's other hand seemed to come instinctively to his forehead. "I thought if I could just push through to the next break, I'd sleep it off and be fine. But every tour stop reminded me something was wrong. Oklahoma City... I blacked out for a minute in the shower."

The words Oklahoma City came to Stevie as if out of a haze. That was their last tour stop prior to Nashville. Technically, she had been there just one day ago. If she thought too long about that, she was liable to get dizzy too. 

"I wish you'd told me," she finally said.

"Well, I didn't need anybody to worry," Lindsey replied.

Did the anybody include Carol Ann?, Stevie wondered. How much had Lindsey told Carol Ann about his health history? Did she think his bout with mono had been no more than a brief cold? She would never know the months of recovery he went through, which Stevie could still feel in her bones. What could Carol know about that, about anything? Did she know Lindsey's mother? Had he taken her to Menlo Park? Had she seen his baby pictures in the Buckingham house?

Out the window, Nashville was still asleep. It was about two in the morning, Central Time, May 21, 1977. Yet again. The city would wake up and time would keep moving. Maybe it was good that Lindsey had a girlfriend who experienced time normally. He didn't need the extra stress that surely came from dating a time-looper. 

It didn't mean she couldn't still love him, though.

"I couldn't risk getting the tour cancelled, you know?" Lindsey went on. "We've worked too hard for this, all of us, the whole band."

The machines beeped on. Stevie wound her fingers around Lindsey's hand, and they were properly holding each other.

"I love," she said, "our songs. All of them."

"Yeah, me too," Lindsey said. "You know, if someone had asked me, back five years ago, what I thought I'd be doing in 1977, I'd have described a scene exactly like the two of us up there tonight."

"I know."

"I always want to be making music with you," Lindsey said.

"You mean that?"

"I do."

As she walked out of Lindsey’s room and back down the hall, a frenzy of blonde hair ran in her direction  

“What did you do to him?” Carol Ann shrieked. “What did you do to my Lindsey?” 

Stevie wordlessly strode past Carol and didn’t let out her breath until she was back in the lobby. 

She rode the elevator down with J.C. A doctor joined them on the fifth floor and his face brightened when he noticed Stevie. He pointed at her, jabbing at the air, seeming to try to place her. 

"You know, I like you guys!" he finally said. "But I liked y'all a lot better when you had Peter Green."

The Nashville show was cancelled, and Lindsey returned from the hospital to rest before the tour was, in linear time, set to move on to South Carolina and then Florida. After Mick and J.C. announced the cancellation, Stevie trundled back to her room and fell on the bed. 

Had she taken control of anything? Had she harnessed time?

No, she was simply doomed to wait through another few hours of May 21 before everything started again.

She picked up the phone and dialed the number she knew so well.

"Mom," she whisper-spoke as soon as Barbara Nicks had picked up. "Mama."

”Teedee!” her mom said. “It’s been a few days!”

Stevie burst into tears. 

“Oh goodness! Get a tissue, my dear girl.”

Her mother’s voice felt like a blanket. She seemed to know that Stevie just wanted to listen for a while, so Barbara talked about what she and Jess had been doing at home, what the weather had been like, about some newspaper clips friends had sent her about the tour, and about some memories she had of visiting Nashville many years ago. "Oh, I remember looking out over the river and thinking about possibilities."

"That sounds nice." Stevie sniffled.

Her mother lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Now, who all there is bothering you?"

"It's just me, Mama," Stevie said after a pause. "No one but me."

"Well, you always know what to do when you're at war with yourself," her mother said. "Write it all out."

"I haven't been able to."

"Just try," her mother said. "You've always had everything you need within you."

When they got off the phone, Stevie took one of her notebooks from her suitcase, despairing for a moment at how long it had been since she'd opened this one, seen these various drafts of "Kind of Woman" and "Planets of the Universe." She turned to a fresh page and started writing in a stream of consciousness, about time and space and Lindsey, about touring and sound and the ocean, about the many queendoms where she ruled with love. All these things that gripped her heart. That she wouldn't have the words on this paper the next day wasn't a reason not to write them down. They needed to come out of her, whether they remained or not. 

She finished the page with what seemed to be a promising lyric: The woman is so tired, and the woman disappears. 

May 20, 1977 - again

She had never been so relieved to be back eating pulled pork. Not ordering the vodka shots. Catching Kenny's eye but betraying nothing about her temporal situation. Watching Lindsey grouse about Eagles on the jukebox. Exchanging knowing looks with Christine. Trying to engage with Mick's dark humor on the ride back to the hotel.

And then, in the hotel—having a joint on her own, writing down her song lyrics again, calling her mother and having her repeat nearly the same thing she'd said the day before. And waiting by the door when Lindsey inevitably stopped by.

Listening to him saying her name.

Not answering the door.

Waiting for him to walk away.

Whispering, "I miss you," into the doorframe in his absence.

She couldn't explain it. It all just needed to happen. 

She hardly saw him until the next day at the theater, at sound check. The sound techs and roadies bustled around, as usual. Chris smoked a cigarette while testing her keyboards, and John sat on the stage with his bass, his head low, as though deep in the heart of either a meditation or a hangover. Stevie took her place by the center microphone, waiting for directions to come from the crew. She was in the usual black dress she put on to do sound check and then never see the audience, but she smiled out at the empty seats as though willing them to fill for her.

"Hey." A nudge in the arm. She looked up with a start.

"Sorry, didn't mean to surprise you," Lindsey said. "I just wanted to show you this."

"What—" This was an entirely new wrinkle to what was generally an uneventful sound check.

"Look at it." Lindsey was patting his guitar like a proud father. "Just delivered today." When Stevie said nothing, he kept going. "I ordered this from Rick months ago, and it's finally here. Alembic Series 1, 12-String. Gonna try 'er out on stage tonight."

"Wow," was all Stevie could get out. A guitar suddenly delivered before sound check shouldn't have been shaking her so fully to the core. But it meant something small had shifted. Something between yesterday and today. 

After sound check, she rushed back to her dressing room to do her makeup, and then to Chris's room to get her bangs curled. She was buzzing with nerves when she arrived in the prep room after Kenny's set. Indeed, she was the first one there. Mick and John shuffled in a little later, and Christine and Lindsey were the last to arrive. 

"Almost showtime, people!" Stevie swigged from a beer and pumped her fist.

Lindsey cracked a smile in her direction, and for a moment she could imagine that he remembered the feeling of the two of them on stage together the other night.

Mick came and put an arm around her. "Stevie! Love the spirit tonight. We’re gonna line ‘em up and knock ‘em down, aren’t we?”

“That’s right.”

The energy was infectious, with even John's low-key drunkenness taking on a hint of hype. Carol Ann lingered by the door, dancing around in a way that made Stevie remember her wild hair on the night of the hospital. Lindsey stationed himself beside Stevie, he took her arm, and waited for J.C. to start leading them to the stage.

Stay, she recalled telling him.

They were walking in step, they were coming to the stage. The sound of the crowd must have been deafening, but Stevie wasn't even hearing it, because she saw the crowd for the first time. Their beautiful faces and mussed hair and cowboy hats and t-shirts. Lindsey must have felt her gasp, because he squeezed her arm a little harder. "Okay?"

Her face broke into a smile in response. Oh, she had never been more okay.

She was back. At her microphone. She turned around and saw Mick settling in at the drums, and John situating his bass across his body.

Lindsey took a moment to welcome the fans, and then the band launched into "Say You Love Me."

Christine's voice was clear and cool, with John's bassline the reliable river underneath. And Lindsey's guitar was ecstatic. The crowd grooved along, and the transformation of Nashville Municipal Auditorium into a brilliant, smoky circus was complete. When Stevie came in on the harmony on the chorus, she felt her voice reverberate from wall to wall, when the lovin' starts circling back to her in a triumphant reminder of the days and days she had lived to get here. Performing was an act, a prayer, an underscoring of her body and her spirit. She caught Lindsey's eye and could see the same spell of the show taking over his being, as well. When the loving starts, indeed. They were always at least a little bit in love during every show.

But as quickly as it had begun, the fade happened.

They were wrapping up the song, getting ready to transition to "Monday Morning," and Stevie knew all at once that she wasn't going to make it out of the set.

She was gone. 

May 20, 1977 - again

She was back at the hotel, but this time, she was standing at the door, as though ready to go out, instead of waking up in bed.

She had lasted ten extra minutes.

"Yes yes yes," she whispered to herself as she made her way down to the limos for dinner. She was going to get some celebratory barbecue.

In the limo, though, Lindsey, who had wisely ditched his leather jacket, kept glancing her way with a look so haunted it reminded her of his empty stare from the night at the honky-tonk, right before he passed out. He was sweating quite a bit now too, but that was likely just because of Nashville. She made it a point to eye him back, to make sure he knew her concern. They could talk like that, through looks, still.

But when they arrived at the home of the not-Hawaiian barbecue, Lindsey was quick to let Carol Ann walk in front of him and drop back to be next to Stevie.

"You okay?" she said. "You're looking a little ill."

He didn't nod. He stared at her, those wide blue eyes that knew her whole life, and he said the last thing she expected him to say. 

"Things are real strange, Stevie." He dropped his voice to a whisper. "I've seen all this before. I've done all this before."

Chapter Text

"Yogurt and fruit for you." Karen placed the tray next to where Stevie lay on the hotel bed, her hair splayed out, her eyes tired. 

"Thanks. I'll get to it." 

Stevie knew she couldn't entirely wait out time, not really. But in the case of time attempting to glitch on her, she'd figured she could just wait for the universe's error to pass. So when the lights had gone out in the hallway at 5 in the morning, when she knew that trying the door of her room would lead her to some unknown destination in the temporal forest, she had simply stood in the hallway, her eyes drooping and her legs tired, and waited. Eventually, she sat and leaned against the wall. "I am not participating in this shit today," she'd whispered to the doors, to the hallway, to herself. "It's too early." 

She had actually fallen asleep in the hallway. And when she woke up, the lights had been back on. 

Here, now, at ten in the morning, with Karen meandering near her, waiting for her to eat, Stevie looked around. She knew she absolutely couldn't stay in this hotel for much longer.

"Karen, let's go shopping today. Tell the girls. Oh, and tell Lindsey."

No one liked antique shopping as much as Stevie, but Sharon wanted to tag along. Lindsey, too, though Stevie wasn't surprised. Ever since her time glitch last night, she had wanted to stay close to him, and he seemed to sense the urgency as well. She wasn't sure what it was all about, but perhaps the simplest explanation fit: that if you'd spent years of your life with someone, there was an instinct to cling to them when all the fundamentals of life seemed wrong. 

They headed out in one of the SUVs through the city. Karen, reliably, had scoped out a couple of antique stores she thought Stevie might like. "There's a well-reviewed one in the Belmont neighborhood, which is a little farther away. But let's start here in downtown." 

Lindsey eyed her as they rode. Sharon and Karen chatted about some casting rumor related to the Twilight movie sequel (which Stevie had to admit she was looking quite forward to). The bodyguard, Phil, sat silently and stared out the window. 

In the antique store, Karen and Sharon went straight to the jewelry case, and Lindsey hung back with Phil. Stevie tried to get her mind off her glitches in time by looking at a half-dozen lamps, touching their shades and thinking about where they would look nice in her house. She couldn't help but think, that in all her years antiquing in Los Angeles, it was a small miracle that she had never run into Lindsey's wife Kristen, herself an interior designer, during any of her shopping escapades. She imagined spotting her across a shop, maybe the big one on Melrose, and recognizing that they both had their eye on the same lamp. After some tense discussion, perhaps Kristen would cede the lamp to her, and Stevie, swishing out of the shop, might whisper to Mrs. Buckingham, "Yes, you got the man, but I got the lamp."

She ducked out of the shop's main room to snicker in private.

The next room over was a small, dark room full of clocks. Wall clocks, floor clocks, cuckoo clocks, old metal alarm clocks on a long blue counter. About half of them ticked, and it would seem none of them were in sync. Stevie had a flashback to Mick removing all the clocks at the studio when they were recording Rumours. In this noisy moment, it was suddenly the best idea that man had ever had. 

She leaned over to observe the handiwork on a cuckoo clock that she knew she would never buy. 

The small lights above her flickered. It was as unsettling as the clocks. 

A flicker. Once, twice, and then again. 

Finally, they were stable, and Stevie pushed through the door of the clock room and back into the main room, only to find that she was now in a very different shop.

It was a western wear store, the lamps and art and furniture replaced with racks of jeans and button-down shirts. The whole back wall of the place was a display of various cowboy boots. 

"Can I help you with anything, miss?"

The older woman coming toward her had long, straight brown hair streaked with gray, and was wearing a brown cowboy hat, one of those snap-front, pearl-button western shirts, and the tightest pair of blue jeans that Stevie had ever seen on a woman over 50. 

Of course, one glance in the wood-framed mirror near a rack of hats showed Stevie that she herself was no longer a woman over 50. 

She was back. Her sundress-wearing Rumours tour self. There she was in the mirror, an impish grin on her face, as though taunting the 61-year-old Stevie whose existence she could somehow sense. But to the rest of the world at the moment—the world of this western wear store—she and her Rumours tour self were one and the same. Beautiful and foolish. Tired and wired, clinging to the band most days, but also sometimes ready to bolt. She was cute, sexy, in the thick of life. And she was in a western wear store. In 1977.

"Ah, well, I love that shirt you have on!" Stevie was surprised at her voice. "Can I see that in my size?"

The woman studied her. "Probably a size 2. Let me see what I have."

"Can I use your phone?" Stevie blurted out.

"Well, sure, if it's just for a moment. I'm expecting a supplier's call any minute, mmkay?"

"No, that's fine. I just need to call my—"

She rushed over to where a phone sat beside a giant beast of a cash register. Who was she calling?

It had been a shot-quick instinct to rush over here, just as it had been last night when she had tried calling Robin. This time, she picked up the phone, and she dialed another number she still recalled over the years. Home.

"Hello?" came the voice on the other end. Gruff and raspy in the most comforting way. All-American. The voice of a thousand tired questions and just as many proclamations of love.

"Daddy?" Stevie whispered. 

"Hello, who's there?" Jess Nicks said. 

"Daddy, it's me, it's Stevie. I'm in Nashville and—"

"Nobody's there? Hello? Well, I'm hanging up now."

"No!" Stevie shrieked.

The saleswoman looked up from the rack of shirts.

"No!" Stevie dropped the receiver and put her hands in her hair. She could barely catch a breath. She did the only thing she could think made sense, which was to hurry back in the direction of the fitting rooms, which were roughly where the doorway to the clock room in 2009 had been.

"You okay, missy?" was the last thing she heard from the saleswoman.

And then it was just clocks again.

Lovely, comforting clocks, ticking their way through 2009.

Stevie tried to breathe a sigh of relief, but her body was still on full danger alert. She gingerly stepped through the door, and found herself back in the antique shop.

She returned to admiring the lamp, and she realized the lamp was shaking because she was shaking, and touching the lamp.

Daddy. She heard herself saying it, in that tiny little voice of hers, the way she trembled down to her veins. Why did she think she'd be able to talk to him? It was impossible. All of this was impossible. 

Stevie picked up the lamp—it was a Tiffany lamp with a little bit of a gothic sensibility—and she waved over to the sales associate. "I'll take this one," she said, her voice back to sounding authoritative. "And all the other ones on this shelf."

In total, she bought sixteen lamps, plus a jade bracelet for Sharon and a pearly one for Karen that Stevie doubted she would wear with any regularity. But Karen thanked Stevie, and popped the bracelet on as she arranged for the shipment of boxes and boxes of antique lamps back to Los Angeles. 

They all went to lunch after that, at a place that purported to have "elevated Southern food," but Stevie bypassed all the local cuisine and got a grilled chicken salad. Sharon ordered the same, and they talked for a while about Sharon's house in Hawaii and some design work she was going to have done. Stevie ate all of the salad and felt normal again. Mostly.

And then Lindsey leaned over.

"Remember how you were talking about things you remembered from the Rumours tour?"

Stevie took a long drink of iced tea. "Ah. Sure."

"Well. I had an interesting memory about that, just this morning."

"Hm, really?"

"Yeah." Lindsey raked a fork through his collard greens. "Okay. I think we were here in Nashville, and I remember the Eagles coming to visit, I think all of them, and there was this, ah, rather destructive party in the hotel. In your room, specifically. And the Eagles—"

"It's just Eagles," Stevie said instinctively.

"Sure, whatever." Lindsey put his fork down beside the one bite of chicken-fried steak he had yet to eat. "Well, they were all there, and they absolutely ruined a whole bunch of your clothes. I think they might have even thrown them out the window. And Joe Walsh brought a chainsaw—"

"Lindsey, I think I'd remember if I had to get all new clothes on the next tour stop," Stevie said. The hand holding the glass of iced tea shook a little. 

"Didn't we say there are a lot of things we don't remember about the 70s?" Lindsey said, his face creased with confusion. "But I just couldn't get rid of this memory. It came up so suddenly this morning, I had to tell you."

"False memories. Isn't that a thing that happens to people?" Stevie asked.

"False memories? That's what you're going to accuse me of?" Lindsey shook his head and went to finish his steak. Stevie had to admit that she liked when Lindsey's voice went up an octave in frustration. 

When they returned to the hotel, Stevie headed back toward her room without saying anything else to Lindsey. That was fine, really. If nothing else, they would inevitably make up on stage tonight. Karen reminded Stevie of her schedule for the afternoon, the times for the soundcheck and some meet-and-greets. “I’ll knock in an hour,” Karen said. “Be ready.” 

Stevie used the key card for the door. The buzz and the little green light were like home to her after so many of these places, these doors and door locks.

But, upon opening the door, she knew that this place, this hotel room, maybe the whole of Nashville, was intent on being like no place else. 

Yes, it had changed again. God, there was the thick carpet, the giant TV set (nobody called it a "set" anymore!), the pleasant bed turned down for the evening, the clock radio on which "Dreams" might be playing on an AM station. The only thing missing from the room, this 1977 room, was the phone. There was just an empty spot on the nightstand where it should have been.

She had avoided all of this early in the morning, and of course 1977 had come back to haunt her while out shopping. If she ran away this time, if she left the room and went to Karen's or Sharon's or lingered in the hallway again, what would happen? Pausing in the doorway, she thought in horror of having to face a time glitch during the show tonight. No, she needed to deal with this. She needed to be here now. 

Stevie entered the room and sat gingerly on the edge of the bed. She grabbed the giant remote control for the TV and turned it on. Johnny Carson filled up the screen. Okay, sure, she could just sit here and watch The Tonight Show and wait for time to pass. She even had a faint memory of having watched this episode, somewhere in the long and fuzzy march of time that was the 70s. Johnny was interviewing an astronomer, Carl Sagan.

Just then.

A knock at the door.

Stevie waited a moment, then called out, "Yes?"

The door swung open. It was Lindsey. His current-year self. The gray hair, the favored crease in the forehead, the standard jeans and t-shirt and leather jacket.

His face was blank. Scared. Like he had watched the universe wipe itself clean but somehow remained here to tell the tale. 

He looked at her, at the bed. "Can I?" he asked.

Stevie motioned for him to join her. And as she did, she noticed that what happened before hadn't occurred this time. She had not become her past self; she was still herself from 2009, her long straight hair and her 61-year-old hands. Something was changing. Ending, maybe. She shuddered at all of the possibilities. 

Lindsey sat beside her on the edge of the bed, his warmth reaching her even though they weren't touching. He was real. She smelled his jacket, glimpsed the same stubble on his face that had been there at lunch. 

"Where are we?" he whispered.

"I think," Stevie said, looking around, considering, "we're in the hotel room at the end of the universe."

"How does the end of the universe have Johnny Carson and Carl Sagan?"

Stevie couldn't help but smile a little. "How could it not?"

She flipped the channel, but on the next one, it was another interview between the same two men. Different suits, and now talking about Star Wars instead of theories of human intelligence. 

"Huh," Lindsey said. And within the moment before Stevie flipped the channel again, Lindsey had grabbed her hand, nestled his fingers beside hers, one by one. His finger, her finger. His skin and hers. Despite the many ways and times they'd touched, every new time felt different. This time, especially. 

On the next channel, Carl Sagan, in a light blue turtleneck and slightly longer hair, was explaining to Johnny Carson about the concept of solar sailing. About being able to travel through space to meet up with Halley's Comet. 

"Would you want to do that?" Lindsey murmured.

Stevie looked into his face. "Oh, absolutely not."

Lindsey laughed softly. "Yeah. I really do need to spend more time than not on the ground."

Stevie dropped the remote and put her other hand on Lindsey's shoulder, fingering the worn-in leather of his jacket. "I think your jacket," she said, "is the convergence of all space and time."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Stevie considered his mouth. His lips. The light sheen of perspiration that had begun to appear on his neck. Maybe because of her. "It was just something I came up with yesterday. Thought it was clever, but maybe it wasn't."

"No," he said. "It is actually clever. You're clever, Stevie. And something about you on this tour stop has been different."

She quirked up her mouth at him. "Do you believe me about the visions now?"

"I don't know what to believe. I don't know what's happening," Lindsey said. "What time is it?"

Stevie glanced over at the clock radio. It flashed 12:00, like it needed to be set by someone who knew the time. Lindsey fumbled his iPhone out of his jacket pocket, but it was blank. Dead.

"No time at all," Stevie said. 

It was all somehow natural to her now, that any of this should be happening. Of course she had come to find herself in the hotel room at the end of the universe. Of course that happened to be in some utterly timeless version of Nashville. Of course Lindsey had found himself here too. And of course he was leaning toward her, gripping her waist in his hands, kissing her gently, and then roughly, hungrily, as though they had to beat time. Their mouths fit together as well as they always had. Soft. Warm. Perfect. 

Lindsey grazed his hand around the low collar of her loose black top. "Stevie, let me touch you," he whispered.

"Ask me nicely," she said. 

"What?"

"I need some politeness out of you, sir," she said. "You know, maybe we're still in the south."

"Please, Stevie," he said raggedly, his fingers still on her shirt. "Let me touch you. Please."

She lifted the top over her head and threw it to the side. Lindsey slid out of his leather jacket and let it drop to the floor. 

"Ask me again," she said.

"Please." His lips seemed to tremble. "Please let me rub your breasts and kiss them. Please let me touch you all over. Let me please you."

"Yes." She had barely gotten the word out before he had her black bra off and his lips on her breast. Then he was licking the space between them. Then he was kissing her mouth and her neck, and saying, shakily, "I believe you, I believe you, you know? The visions, the memories, everything."

There was a set of feelings that came to Stevie these days every time she slept with Lindsey. A surprisingly organized set of feelings. The arousal, of course, but also, at the same time, the disbelief. The question, drenched in kissing, drowning in wetness, of is this really happening? Is he really coming back to me? And the answer, always, was yes and no. Was this real, was it happening? Yes, yes, even in the most unreal hotel room, he was here, his skin was hot, his heart was beating, he was undressing. But also, no, no, he wasn't coming back, not specifically. Not when he was married, but also not when he had never left her. Not fully.

"Last time we went to bed together, did I tell you that you're beautiful?" he asked her.

"If I remember correctly, you didn't say much of anything."

He had taken off his t-shirt, was unbuttoning his jeans. "Well, let me change that." He left the jeans on the floor, bent back down to her, and began kissing her behind her right ear. "You're beautiful, Steph."

After the disbelief came the confirmation, solid and indignant. Yes, we're doing this. She might have a fleeting thought of the woman who called herself Mrs. Buckingham. And then there would be what she called the "of course" realization. Of course this was happening, because of who they were, and the fact that maybe their love had never ended, that instead they just darted in and out of it, scared and wanting. 

"Beautiful," Lindsey repeated, pulling down her underwear, parting her legs, stroking the insides of her thighs.

"Oh god," she whispered, as he came to rest his mouth in between her legs, and she shuddered at the feeling. She was half softness, half electricity as his tongue expertly worked her clit, a feeling that was always exuberant and yet comfortably familiar. He brought her up and down, so close to the edge, and then pulled back, his face in her wetness all the while. The bed smelled like the 70s and Johnny Carson and Carl Sagan were still on the TV, the interview having looped back around to the beginning. She touched Lindsey's forehead, brushed her hands through his hair, which in some lighting could still look more brown than gray. Their eyes met, and she loved him in 1972 and 1977 and 1987 and now, and she was so grateful for all the ridiculous machinery of her life. 

She found herself saying, "Please."

"Please what, Stevie?" he said into her.

"Please make me come," she breathed. "Please, please."

He dove back into her, his lips and tongue going full force, circling her clit, making it ache with feeling. She heaved in breath after breath, her muscles going tense, her mind consumed only with thoughts of him, him, him. This love they couldn't help but share. If this was the end of the universe, well, she was pleased to have lived to be here for it.

Her climax built in her legs, her feet, her chest, her clit. And finally, it was all too much. Stevie let go. She might have screamed. She convulsed and sighed and felt every moment of it. 

Lindsey smiled at her and wiped his face. He stripped off his boxers and moved to turn off the lamp on the bedside table.

"No," she said, still breathless. "Leave it on."

She had the lamp and the man now. 

He fell on top of her and pressed his cock into her, and she felt the waves of pleasure starting again, and she loved Lindsey in such a bone-deep way that she didn't think she had a word for it anymore. She could live a lifetime in a single minute with this man, and sometimes that was a nightmare and sometimes it was this. His arms were wrapped tightly around her, and he was buried deep within her, and he was whispering nonsense about what the fuck were they doing and she was telling him it didn't matter, it didn't matter, it didn't matter. And maybe that was her way of saying I love you, because in this time and space of nothingness, nothing seemed to matter except them. They were the single fact of this existence. 

Lindsey kissed her, and groaned, and she could tell he was getting close. She stroked his back and scratched his neck with her fingernails. He looked at her, smiling, breathless, wanting and having. When they came, it was together, and he called out her name, and she was saying, "Yes, yes, yes," into his neck and hoping for the moment, the fact of them, to never be over.

But there was still enough to a sense of time here to pull them apart. Stevie watched Lindsey get up (still nimble for a 59-year-old, she couldn't help but observe) and grab some tissues from the box on the dresser, and then pull down the covers for them both to lie under the blankets.

But as soon as she did, the lights in the room went out.

Then the TV.

Everything except the clock radio, which still blinked an unnerving 12:00, 12:00, 12:00.

She grabbed Lindsey's arm. "Fuck," she whispered. 

Chapter Text

CAST OF CHARACTERS:

Stevie Nicks - early-mid 50s, your witchy aunt, secretly a time-traveler, singer-songwriter in Fleetwood Mac

Lindsey Buckingham - early-mid 50s, dad vibes, singer-songwriter-guitarist in Fleetwood Mac; possibly also a time-traveler

Mick Fleetwood - mid-50s, the tallest guy you know, drummer in Fleetwood Mac

John McVie - mid-50s, the quietest guy you know, bassist in Fleetwood Mac

Carl Sagan's Ghost - noted astronomer; died in 1996

Bob Welch - an old friend; former Fleetwood Mac member

Walter Egan - another musician and old friend

SCENE 1:  A hallway backstage at the Gaylord Entertainment Complex in Nashville, Tennessee. Fleetwood Mac is due to go onstage shortly. LINDSEY, wearing jeans, a thin leather necklace, and a white shirt buttoned low, appears to be concealing himself behind a Fleetwood Mac equipment locker. STEVIE swoops in, wearing a black dress and boots. She seems to sense her former lover's presence.

STEVIE: Lindsey, there you are. Marty was looking for you. We're on in fifteen, okay?

LINDSEY: Got it. Thanks, Stevie. 

STEVIE: Hey, you look like you're hiding over here. Are you all right?

LINDSEY: Oh, sure. I just needed a moment before, you know, everything. 

(STEVIE exits. LINDSEY steps away from the locker, revealing CARL SAGAN’S GHOST to the audience. The GHOST has gray-black hair and wears a dark suit.) 

LINDSEY: Okay, it's clear. But you heard her. I don't have much time. So whatever you're haunting me about, I really do need to know. 

CARL SAGAN'S GHOST: Was that her?

LINDSEY: Stevie? Yes.

CARL SAGAN'S GHOST: Could you tell me about why the two of you aren't together?

LINDSEY: Sure. Right after you tell me why the ghost of famed scientist Carl Sagan has visited me right before I need to go on stage. I always figured if I did encounter a ghost, it'd be my dad or my brother or somebody, but—

CARL SAGAN'S GHOST: Well, you get who you get. 

LINDSEY: Huh.

CARL SAGAN'S GHOST: Here's what I need from you, Lindsey. I need you to search for the truth.

LINDSEY: That's an intriguing idea, but you do realize I have to do a show. 

CARL SAGAN'S GHOST: The show is compatible with what I asked for, I promise you.

LINDSEY: Okay. Ah, how will I know if I've found the truth? Will you tell me?

CARL SAGAN'S GHOST: No, I'm more than likely going to disappear soon. But you'll know. You may not know right after you find the truth. But I promise you, you'll know.

LINDSEY: Well. Okay. 

CARL SAGAN'S GHOST: Now, were you going to tell me about what happened with you and Stevie?

LINDSEY: (sighs) Stevie and I had a wonderful relationship for a while, but the pressures of music and fame were simply too much to bear once our careers took off. There's always going to be a mutual respect between us—

(CARL SAGAN'S GHOST suddenly disappears, and Lindsey stops his well-worn story.)

LINDSEY: Oh.

(MICK enters.)

MICK: Lindsey, whatchu doing, my man? A little meditation and a finger warm-up?

(LINDSEY is wringing his hands from stress.)

LINDSEY: No, ah, just looking around.

MICK: You know who's here tonight? Bob Welch. He's going to come back and have a drink with us after the show.

LINDSEY: (snapping back to reality) Oh yeah? Walter Egan's here too. I'm pretty sure he's coming backstage as well.

MICK: Fucking excellent! We'll all have ourselves a little party. 

(LINDSEY waves to MICK as he walks down the hallway. Then LINDSEY looks around, confused.)

(BLACKOUT)

(END OF SCENE)

(Between  scenes, "The Chain" being played live is heard from afar. This is the first song of Fleetwood Mac's 5/31/2003 show.)

SCENE 2: The dark passage leading to the arena stage. The song "Come" can be heard. STEVIE is taking a break from the show. There is a flurry of assistants around her. After a moment, she shoos them away and stands alone to drink from a bottle of water. After a moment, CARL SAGAN'S GHOST steps out of the darkness.

CARL SAGAN'S GHOST: Excuse me, Miss Stevie Nicks?

STEVIE: (after a gasp) Please, no photos, no autographs right now. 

CARL SAGAN'S GHOST: Oh, no, I'm not asking for that. My name is Carl Sagan. I just happen to be visiting from another part of the universe.

(STEVIE takes a long pause to sort out what the ghost has just said. Her facial expression changes as it dawns on her who she's speaking to.) 

STEVIE: Look, I'm sure you're very enlightened and all, but you really should avoid scaring women when they're alone in the dark. That's a rule whether you're alive or not. 

CARL SAGAN'S GHOST: I really do apologize, but I don't have much time.

STEVIE: (looking closely at him, as another realization dawns) I feel like... I don't know... I've had some problems with time in the past.

CARL SAGAN'S GHOST: This is true, yes.

STEVIE: Hm. 

CARL SAGAN'S GHOST: I just have one message I'm meant to give to you. And that is, if you ever find yourself staring into the void, do not jump in.

STEVIE: (looking confusedly into his face) Well, thank you for the advice, but I promise you I don't have plans to meet with any voids, okay?

CARL SAGAN'S GHOST: Just don't forget.

(The GHOST disappears. Even though STEVIE is the type of person to own a spirit catcher, she looks around disbelievingly at the spot where he was, doubting the whole experience. She shakes her head, puts down her water bottle, and readies herself to return to the show. Cheers are heard as "Come" ends.)

(BLACKOUT)

(END OF SCENE)

SCENE 3: Backstage at the arena again. LINDSEY walks down the dark passage after the end of the show, trailing the rest of the band. He is drenched in sweat. In the center of the stage, there is a single spotlight. It seems to be waiting for someone. LINDSEY pauses in it, then takes a long breath, and speaks directly to the audience of the play.

LINDSEY (to audience): Inside your head is the voice of someone speaking. 

The thing about Stevie is every time I'm on stage with her, it's 1973 all over again. I know there are others up there with us, but in my eyes, and my mind, and I think hers too, it's just the two of us. And there's a crowd, sure, but she's my primary audience. We're singing to each other. We're performing for each other. I know there's a narrative out there about how we're performing a relationship for the audience, but that's not really—

Well. It's difficult to explain. And I—and I—look, Stevie and I can never be together. For one very obvious reason, I've been married for three years. But further, Stevie and I lost each other for a while, even as friends, back in the 80s, and sometimes I wonder if we ever really repaired ourselves after that time. We spent so much time healing our individual selves that I'm not sure if there are still cracks in the glass that is the very public relationship—partnership, working partnership—we have.

Sometimes when we're together, I miss her. Isn't that a strange thing to say? I could be standing right next to her on stage, playing "Landslide" or whatever, and I'm washed over with the feeling that I miss her. It's been happening like that for a while. I call it a chronic illness. You can ignore it, maybe, for a while, but the diagnosis, that forever missing her, is always there. 

Anyway. I've got to go have a drink with some friends. Thanks for listening. 

(LINDSEY starts to walk away, but the empty spotlight remains.)

LINDSEY: Wait. (He rushes back to the spotlight hanging in the center of the stage.) 

I have to tell you this. I have to tell you something else about Stevie. Something, dare I say, true. (Wiping sweat from his face.)  I just, I have trouble admitting this to myself, but I... I—

(STEVIE enters from stage right.)

STEVIE: Lindsey, are you talking to someone?

LINDSEY: Just myself, as usual.

(STEVIE gives him a small smile.) 

STEVIE: Well, the boys and Walter and Bob are all waiting for you.

LINDSEY: Ah, right. Coming. 

(BLACKOUT)

(END OF SCENE)

SCENE 4: LINDSEY, MICK, and JOHN meet with WALTER EGAN and BOB WELCH. The group is sitting around Lindsey's dressing room with drinks. 

MICK: I love this home base setup we have for this leg of the tour. We're staying the whole week in Atlanta and just flying out daily to the shows around the southeast. Makes it easy to get out for some golf on the days off.

BOB: Golf? Wow, Mick, you really have leaned into your golden years. Lindsey, are you golfing now too?

LINDSEY: Oh, fuck no.

(The group laughs.)

JOHN: Lindsey is usually in his hotel room, just tinkering with his mobile recording studio. 

MICK: It's true, we don't see the guy as much as you'd think. 

JOHN: A regular mirage, he is.

LINDSEY: Hey-o, Johnny with the clever references.

WALTER: Are you working on an album, Lindsey?

LINDSEY: Yeah. Hit a snag with the last one, you know. I think I told you about that the last time I saw you. Don't get me wrong, it's good that a lot of those songs found a new life on the album we're touring for now. But it means I'm starting from scratch.

MICK: Oh, but no one likes scratching out an album as much as Lindsey Buckingham. 

JOHN: Scratch by scratch.

WALTER: Ain't that the truth.

BOB: A toast to Lindsey, the most stressed-out guy in the music business. 

(They clink glasses. LINDSEY shakes his head and laughs.)

BOB: And, hey, good thing you're a family man now. No one needs relationship stress while trying to put a solo album together.

LINDSEY: Isn't that right. 

(JOHN and MICK exchange a look. Just then, there's a crash outside the dressing room.)

LINDSEY: Uh. Let me check on that.

(BLACKOUT)

(END OF SCENE)

SCENE 5: LINDSEY goes out to the hallway to find STEVIE by the same equipment locker where he hid with Carl Sagan's Ghost earlier. A guitar case has fallen to the floor. LINDSEY picks it up.

LINDSEY: What's going on?

STEVIE: I heard something out here and I thought it was, I don't know, a visitor. And then of course I banged my arm into this locker and brought the guitar case down. Sorry.

LINDSEY: Oh, I'm sure the guitar case is okay, but are you?

STEVIE: I think so. I think I'm just ready to leave Nashville this time around.

LINDSEY: Yeah.

(They look at each other.)

LINDSEY: Want to take a walk around?

STEVIE: Sure.

(They walk down several backstage hallways, duck into a dressing room to look around, dodge more equipment lockers, wave hello to a couple of roadies. Eventually, they wind up where they had been earlier—the main arena stage. Most of the equipment has been cleared out. The fans have left. The remaining roadies leave all at once, and suddenly, there are two spotlights, one on either side of the stage. LINDSEY gravitates to one, and STEVIE to the other. They face each other.)

LINDSEY: Stevie, has anyone ever asked you to search for the truth?

STEVIE: Can't say that's happened. Sounds like a tall order.

LINDSEY: You're telling me. 

STEVIE: Who on earth asked you for that? One of your kids?

LINDSEY: If only! With kids, you can keep it pretty simple. (Pauses.) They're coming next week, my family, you know.

STEVIE: Well. I'll miss you, then. (Smiles knowingly.)

LINDSEY: I know.

(LINDSEY takes a couple steps forward, but the spotlight remains behind him. He steps back into it.)

LINDSEY: I miss you most of the time.

STEVIE: Look at me. 

LINDSEY: I am.

STEVIE: No, I mean, really look at me.

LINDSEY: Yes, okay. (He stands still and stares at her. Several moments pass.) I still miss you.

STEVIE: I'm right here. 

LINDSEY: I know, but—

STEVIE: You don't have to miss me. I'll always be here. 

LINDSEY: I don't know if I believe you.

STEVIE: I try not to lie. I hope that's good enough.

LINDSEY: (sighs) Look, I won't forget. 

STEVIE: Yes. Okay. I like that. (She looks around the cavernous arena.) Nashville is really creepy this time around. I don't know if you feel that too.

LINDSEY: Oh, I definitely do. Let's head out.

(They leave the spotlights behind, link arms, and walk off. The spotlights remain for a moment.)

(BLACKOUT)

(END OF SCENE)

Chapter Text

She had always loved being alone with Lindsey in the dark, but something about this aloneness and this darkness felt very treacherous and perhaps very final.

"What's happening?" Lindsey whispered.

"Time glitch," Stevie said. "I'm pretty sure."

"You seem to have some experience in that department?" His voice had tiptoed out of its whisper and into that upper tenor she always liked. Well, not always. Not when Lindsey was drenched in worry. 

"It keeps happening to me." Her fingers stayed wrapped around his arm, her head stayed on his chest. "I don't know what made it start, and I don't know how to get it to stop. But I can't seem to stay put in the here and now."

"And that's how we wound up in this hotel room."

"Excuse me," she said. "You walked into this room just as readily as I did. What happened to bring you here?"

Silence.

"Lindsey."

He rustled around beneath the covers. His lips found the top of her head.

"Lindsey. Come on. We just had sex at the possible end point of the universe. You can at least tell me what brought you to this room. I didn't think anyone could access it but me."

He sighed. "There was... something. In my room. I couldn't stay there, Stevie. The only thing I could think to do was to come and see you. And when I knocked on the door to your room, it fell open and it was this."

"What's in your room?"

"If we can ever get out of here, I'll show you."

Stevie watched the alarm clock pulsating at the two of them. 12:00, 12:00, 12:00. 

"Can you find your clothes?" she asked Lindsey.

"I think so."

"Let's get dressed and try to leave."

They fumbled around by feel, Stevie handing Lindsey his jeans and t-shirt, Stevie finding her top and bra at the other end of the bed. She was just pulling on her black leggings when the lights and the TV flickered back on. But it wasn't Johnny Carson on TV in the 70s anymore—it was the Ellen DeGeneres talk show. And the room had morphed back into its generic 2000s Sheraton hotel chic. 

Stevie caught Lindsey startling at the sudden change, so much so that he fell back on the bed.

"Beds in 2009 are comfier than in 1977, huh?" was all she could think to say. Her heart was pounding in her head.

But Lindsey—oh. Lindsey had his hands raking through his short hair, his chest heaving with breath. He was dressed save for his leather jacket but everything about him was primal and terrified.

Stevie leaned down and lay a hand gently on his side. But he shoved it away.

"Okay. God," Stevie muttered.

"It's not you." He covered his hands with his face. "It's just... there've now been two times today that I wondered if I was ever going to see my kids again. I think it sunk in just now that you told me we were possibly at the end of the universe." He filled his lungs with air and then blew it out again. Some of the tension in his shoulders subsided. But he still wasn't looking at her. "The end of the universe, Stevie? Do we have to talk like that?"

"It's what I felt when I walked in here," Stevie tried to explain. "It's not that the world itself was ending. It's that... I felt I had come to a corner in space and time."

"Sure, whatever." Lindsey moved his hands down by his sides, but his eyes were still closed. 

"You told me not even fifteen minutes ago that you believed me!" Stevie got up and walked into the bathroom. Her present-day hair products and makeup bag were there. She fingered the edges of her hairbrush and comb, touched the soft leather of the bag where she kept some of her necklaces. 

In the other room, Lindsey said nothing. She heard him getting up from the bed, grabbing his jacket. On TV, Ellen was interviewing an American Idol contestant. ("What was the rush like when you found out you were going to Hollywood?") And then Lindsey was in the doorway of the bathroom.

"My kids, Stevie," Lindsey said, nearly in tears. "The thought that I'd gone on tour and I was maybe never going to see them again. I just can't..."

"You think I don't understand, I can't understand, is that right?" Stevie spun around to face him.

"I didn't say that!"

"But you're thinking it."

"What was happening was... I thought of them, and I couldn't face the thoughts I was having, and so I went to you."

"I don't know how I'm supposed to take that, Lindsey."

He shook his head. He put on the leather jacket. The convergence of all space and time. 

"Maybe the thing in the other room is still there." He wiped at his eyes. "Come with me."

Lindsey used his key card as usual, though his hand trembled as he did. Stevie kept behind him as they made their way back into his oversized room. He stood by the door to the closet. 

"It was in here." He was breathing deeply. "Just stay back, and don't make any quick moves, okay?"

Stevie felt her heartbeat quicken, and she wrapped her arms around herself. "You're not giving me any confidence that we're going to make it to soundcheck."

Lindsey opened the closet.

"Oh, shit," Stevie said immediately.

Not in the whole of her life had she so clearly witnessed the experience of nothing. It was the idea of nothing, the word nothing, the feeling of nothing, right in front of her and Lindsey's eyes. It was black, but also something so beyond black that she wouldn't have been able to describe it with the help of every shade of black clothing in her ever-bulging closet. This closet, this hotel room closet in the year 2009, was home to the deepest, blackest void that Stevie could imagine.

"Yeah," Lindsey whispered.

"Uh, here's all I know about voids," Stevie said. "Whatever you do, don't jump in." 

"Trust me, Stevie, I have no intention of doing so."

It was advice given to her on a previous supernatural experience here in Nashville, an experience so brief and strange that she had filed it away as a waking dream, a vision. But now it was clear that that time, and this time, were all too real.

Lindsey closed the closet. "I can't stay here tonight."

"You don't have to. We're flying to New Orleans after the show."

"Ah. Right." Lindsey put a hand to his forehead. He was usually the one to be on top of the travel schedule. 

"Just get ready now and then go have a drink with Mick or Brett or whomever," Stevie said. For once, she was feeling the acute need for a break from Lindsey and all his bewilderment. She needed to step back into the real world, the one with Karen and her schedule, the one with Sharon and Lori and their spa days, the one without all of this space-time garbage.

"Wait," Lindsey said, seeing Stevie begin to leave. "Tell me about your... time glitches? I just can't get a handle on what's happening here."

"Trust me, I can't either," Stevie said. "But I'll tell you more later. You're fine, your kids are fine, just get out of your head and don't you dare open that closet, okay?"

Lindsey was chatty on the short ride to the arena—social, small-talk chatty, not monologuing-for-ten-minutes-about-music-production chatty. He was asking Mick about his golf game that morning and John about his sailing plans for the upcoming break. Stevie could do little more but shake her head and listen. Eventually she gave a brief summary to the other guys about the publicly disclosable parts of her day. "I bought some lamps downtown and then we had lunch," she said, smiling pleasantly. 

Sure. That was it. 

At the arena, the band was dropped off at the backstage door and headed inside. Stevie could feel Lindsey right behind her and Karen as they made their ways to dressing rooms. But she didn't turn around. 

Stevie was aware—both pleasantly and terribly—of how much of her life existed in memory. The obvious part of this was that she was 61 years old, and though she'd made peace with the idea that she had more life behind her than ahead, it wasn't an idea she chose to sit with very often. But the other side of memory was how often the rest of the world asked her to unfurl her memories for entertainment. Usually she was happy to oblige. It had been her notion to do a little onstage ramble about being in San Francisco and playing with Janis Joplin before launching into "Gypsy." And she couldn't argue with the whole tour essentially being a greatest hits tour, with her and the band playing people's memories night after night. But still, there was a tinge of sadness to it all. Arena after arena, filled with people looking back, and using the band as their symbol of the past here in the present. 

She put on the black sparkly outfit she wore for the first half of the show. Karen came in and helped her straighten out her hair. She searched Lindsey's face at soundcheck and found nothing to be concerned about. He was anxious, perfectionistic, a little impatient with everyone—in other words, the usual Lindsey. They soundchecked "Gypsy" and "Big Love" and "Second Hand News" and then were set free until showtime.

Lindsey fell in step with her as they walked offstage. "You doing okay?" he said, leaning in slightly.

"Mm hmm," she said. "You?"

"I think so," he said. "But can we talk?"

"Not right now," Stevie said. "I think I have a dying fan I'm supposed to meet."

Another thing about memories, Stevie thought, was how determinedly she was trying to make new ones on this tour. Okay, maybe sleeping with Lindsey, whether or not at the end of the universe, was not the most socially-acceptable memory to be making. But it was what she did, both to break up the monotony of the tour and to fulfill something she'd always felt about the endlessness of their love. 

She was thinking about this when she was in the meet-and-greet area with the woman who had paid a lot of money or pulled a lot of strings with tour management to be there, Stevie wasn't sure which. But the woman did indeed have terminal cancer, and she was a good twenty years younger than Stevie, which hit her hard. 

Stevie gave her a half-moon necklace. "Just do everything you want to do," she said into the woman's face. "As soon as you can, okay? You've got to be really damn stubborn about it. Just punch time in the face, or in the balls. Whichever makes sense."

They laughed, and the woman cried, which made Stevie cry too.

Stevie had Sharon come in to her dressing room to help her retouch her makeup before the show, and she watched in the mirror as Sharon's careful hands worked on her dark eye makeup. She focused on her face and tried to meditate as best as she could on not glitching in time during the set.

You will stay in this year.

You will stay. 

You will.

She repeated this over and over. In her head, or so she thought. 

"Stop moving your lips," Sharon said. "I don't want this brush to go straight in your eye."

Stevie concentrated on keeping the words in her mind, and she thought about memory, and all the ones that had gotten lost over the years. It was strange how the memories of some shows were crystal clear, and others just floated in a murky soup of recollection. And sometimes, a single moment would emerge at the top. 

This time, for whatever reason, she had started thinking about Kenny Loggins, their opener for the Rumours tour, and something he said to her at one of the tour stops. Advice he'd given her. It was about as aggravating as Sharon trying to work on her waterline, because for all her searching, she couldn't remember what the advice was, only that it had been useful. 

The year after they'd finished the main legs of the Rumours tour, she'd sung a duet with Kenny for his album, and there was a refrain of that song that had come back to her over the years, often dragging more meaning with it each time it returned:

Now I know my life has given me more than memories
Day by day, we can see
In every moment there's a reason to carry on

More than memory. That was Stevie that night at the 51st show of the Unleashed tour. As soon as she launched herself onstage, she was power, she was light, she was beauty and electricity and terror and joy. She was every memory she'd ever had, bursting out in fits of song, raining on the crowds so as to propel them back and forth in time. They did "Monday Morning," "The Chain," "Dreams," "I Know I'm Not Wrong," and "Gypsy" before Stevie had a moment to take a break during "Go Insane." She stepped away to get some water, but the energy remained, and she used it next for "Rhiannon" and especially for "Sara."

All the while, Lindsey kept catching her eye, asking her questions with every look.

Stevie, what's going on?

Stevie, can you stay put in time?

Stevie, are we dying? Is the universe?

She tried to shoot an answer back. Lindsey, these questions both are and aren't too big for this moment right now. Because maybe every song we sing together is the answer to them all.

She didn't think he got this answer. Not quite.

They kept singing. She changed into her red dress. They careened through the rest of the set. She thought she could see through time, in a good way, maybe in the best way. She could see ahead to the continuation of the tour, looking into this man's eyes every night, flinging every lyric his way, daring him to make meaning out of these old songs, these memories. She could see their arguments, their touches, the way they walked through years together. She could imagine fucking him somewhere interesting. Copenhagen, maybe, or Dublin. She could see it all, and she loved it all.

Chapter Text

Stevie drank another Tab in the kitchen while doing some calculations. Don had told her that he couldn't explain how her breaking space and time had affected the other timelines in Nashville. Well, "not yet," he had said.

This meant that he knew. Which meant that somewhere, deep down, she knew, too.

She paced around the kitchen and thought about Nashville. Then, she wandered into the rain room and was surprised at her ability to instinctively flip the correct switch for the artificial rain to start. The gentle patter of water on the roof helped her thoughts. Stevie recalled the arena in Nashville, another one that had been through a bunch of different names and sponsorships, but was still, always, a cavernous space, devoid of meaning until it was filled with people. She remembered touring with Rod Stewart, and with Don, and with Tom, and with The Pretenders, and she couldn't sort out at the moment which of those tours had gone through Nashville. Of course, she also recalled touring with the band, and all of the different dynamics at play when having to deal with the whims of three or four other people.

Don sauntered in just then. He was having Coke from a can.

"What the hell," he grumbled. "This doesn't taste right."

"I bet you're drinking New Coke," Stevie said. "Remember that? It was garbage, everyone hated it. They had to switch the recipe back."

"I'm going to get one of your Tabs," Don said. 

"Wait," Stevie said. "Are you good at, like, emotional recall? Or meditation?"

"As good at it as you are."

"Right. Well, sit with me. Please? I'm trying to remember what happened to me in Nashville."

Don sighed and put the Coke on a table. "Okay. But I really don't know if this is a good idea."

Stevie leaned against the pine tree that, somehow, grew through the center of the room. She slowly brought herself to the floor. Being in Lindsey's house from the 80s was like being in a dream, with all the seemingly out-of-place items and feelings that swam in one's subconscious. She had always liked dreaming, and enjoyed trying to figure out which aspects of her dreams were symbolic and what they could mean, but this place, this house, was one she would very much like to wake up from. There was something distinctly and dangerously alive about Lindsey's house at this moment, as though a pissed-off Lindsey (with that terrible Eraserhead hair. What had he been thinking?) could burst into the room at any second.

Don sat behind her and also leaned against the tree. He sighed a long, deep, unsatisfied sigh. 

Stevie began, "Okay. I'm thinking about Nashville. I'm trying to bring up any memories, any emotions, anything like that."

"Do some free association," Don suggested. 

"Yes." Stevie closed her eyes. She hummed a little. "Okay, ahh, country music. Boots. Guitars. Lindsey."

Don chortled. "Didn't take you long to get there."

"I'm not done," Stevie said. "Let me backtrack. Country music. My grandfather. Uhhh, singing harmonies with my grandfather. Singing harmonies with Lindsey."

"Oh, good god," Don said.

"Trying one more time. Nashville. Country music. All those bars on the main drag near the arena. Wait... I think, you. I think you were there, Don."

"For the tour?"

"Maybe. But I think... before that, too. Years and decades before. And I'm sorry, but I think it was terrible." Stevie opened her eyes. Outside the beautiful windows of Lindsey's home, palm trees shone in the sunlight. They didn't move. "I think you were terrible."

"Huh." Don peered around the tree to look at Stevie. "We were generally terrible to each other back then."

"I think you were especially awful on this particular day," Stevie replied. "I just can't seem to remember what it was exactly that you did. Am I really that old? Don't answer that."

"I mean, sorry, we've both been around a while," Don said. "But I don't think it's that. I think you're struggling with memories from the other timelines that are altering themselves."

"Shit." Stevie struggled up from the floor and went to get her soda. 

"You're basically having new memories downloaded into your brain."

"Oh, thank you, Don, that's fucking terrifying."

Don put up his hands. "Do not shoot the messenger, Stevie."

Stevie pushed her long hair out of her face as she sipped from the soda can and walked in a circle around the rain room. "There's something else, though. About Nashville. I can feel it now, a little bit better. There's fear. There's, ah, a sort of weariness. There's fear again. There's—"

Stevie stopped walking. Don looked up at her from where he still sat by the tree. "What is it?" he asked.

"There's something here. A doorway. A way back." She dropped her empty soda can by the indoor tree. Don picked it up.

Stevie was already striding out of the rain room and toward the staircase. She took the steps as fast as she could go, Don following somewhat more slowly behind her. And at the top of the stairs, she found it. Lindsey's bedroom. A bedroom belonging to Lindsey that she, actually, had never been in. Maybe the lack of time here, time with him, was what made the 80s hard to think about for her. Well, that was part of it, at least. 

She steeled herself and went in. She'd had a vision of what she'd find here.

Stevie made a beeline toward the bedroom closet.

"Stevie, no," Don said, winded after coming up the stairs. "I know what you're thinking and do not touch that closet, dammit."

"Why not." Stevie felt a profound sense of calm as she swung the closet door open, revealing the black void within. She put her hands to her forehead as her memories churned. Nashville. A closet at the hotel. Lindsey, a stubbly, sexy study of sweat and panic. No more than a few minutes before, they'd been covered in each other. A chill went through her as she recalled reaching over and laying a hand on his jacketed arm. A moment of tenderness and tension. A delicate strand of love that wound through them both, sometimes tangling, never dying. 

A new memory.

"Stevie, do not move closer," Don said. "Do you hear me?"

"Oh, fuck off, Don," Stevie said, and she leaped in.

Three things she felt: the sensation of tiredness. Her hair brushing her wrist. The leather seat under her.

It was like when she was in the hospital all those years back and trying to stave off a panic attack.

Two things she tasted: iron, maybe? Perhaps her lip was bleeding. And then came the stale saliva of a long night's sleep.

Three things she saw: Karen's face. Mary's face. And the unmistakable interior of the plane.

She was awake, she was here. Oh, she was here, here, here.

"Stevie!" Mary put a hand on her shoulder. "There you are. We were about to throw cold water on your face."

"Or find a doctor," Karen mumbled.

"Did the plane land?" Stevie asked hoarsely.

"Of course it did," Karen said. "I'm shocked you were asleep during that turbulence. I could barely keep my dinner down."

Stevie shook her head and sat up as much as she could. There was a fatigue throughout her body that she didn't want to disclose to Karen, at least not yet. She glanced out the window nearest her seat. "Where are we?"

"Nashville," Karen and Mary said together.

"Shit," Stevie said.

Karen insisted on having a doctor sent to the hotel. As Stevie lay in bed while the doctor took her vitals, she imagined what she might say to explain the facts of the whole ordeal to Karen. You see, Karen, I had to travel back here from the void in spacetime. Don Henley—who wasn't actually Don Henley, but, oh, never mind—didn't want me to go, but I felt such a pull to jump through the void. The thing is, space and time jumping takes a bit of a toll on the seventy-plus year-old body, no matter how energetic I usually am. But I'm recovering, honestly. I feel more lively already. Let's get through the show and get out of Nashville.

"I'm recovering, honestly," Stevie told the doctor. "Sometimes I don't sleep well at night, you see, so I just nap throughout the day. This was an extra-deep nap."

"Hmm," the doctor said. He was a young white guy, probably barely into his 40s. "A woman your age, and with your schedule... you should really be shooting for at least eight hours a night."

"Doctor, I haven't gotten that in years, and yet I've still managed touring," Stevie said.

"Well, maybe when you get home, you can talk to your doctor about a prescription for sleep," the doctor said. 

Stevie slanted her mouth at him. She'd tried that route and it had gone poorly. Anyway, she didn't want more sleep—she wanted more time.

The doctor left and Karen came back in. "Well, he's cleared you to play the show," she said with a bit of a grumble. "But if you want to postpone, we still can. We just need to get on it."

Stevie was thinking about time. How it stretched and contracted. How it played with one's mind. Time as the trickster. Time as the impatient toddler. Time as the infuriating constant, sure as the sun and the moon hanging in a black-as-a-void sky.

And yet, so much of it had been given to her. She felt that maybe she'd tricked time, perhaps on a few occasions. The ordeal at Betty Ford. Or when she bumped her head on her friend's fireplace and wound up back in the hospital, detoxing from Klonopin. But that couldn't have anything to do with why time was broken now. 

"I never said anything about wanting to postpone," Stevie said. "I'm fine."

Karen warily shook her head.

"Karen, I—" Stevie started. She took in a breath. How could she even start? What context would Karen need to even begin to understand?

She let out the breath. "Karen, I'm going to give Sheryl a quick call," she finally said. 

Karen left the room, and Stevie dug her tiny flip phone out of her purse. 

Sheryl was delighted to hear from her. Stevie recalled that she'd basically hung up on her the other day. 

"Stevie! Are you in town?"

Stevie looked out the window of the hotel room. She was right downtown this time, only a minute or two from the arena. There was Nashville below her in all its glory. At once gray and neon, old and new, progressive and not. "Oh yes, I'm here."

"That's wonderful! I'm excited to see you when—"

"I want to talk about that," Stevie said. "You were right yesterday. About having a dinner with me and you and Lindsey."

A small gasp from Sheryl's end of the call. "Wait, really?"

"Yes. Yes, let's do it."

Time was unwieldy and twisted sometimes. Time was tired and antsy and full of whim. And yet. She had learned to be careful around time. She couldn't let it run out. 

Chapter Text

May 20, 1977 - again

Stevie looked up from the pulled pork she was eating for roughly the thirty-fourth time. Across the table, Lindsey had been trying to meet her gaze since they had sat down. What do I do? he mouthed to her, his hands shaking, his face flushed and desperate.

Stevie shrugged as if to say, Whatever it is, we're doing it now. 

Lindsey was looping in time. They'd barely had a chance before going into the restaurant with the band to speak about it, but he was looping, and he was not pleased.

She ordered a tray of shots for the table. He didn't take one. He just sat there, staring off into the wood-paneled walls, while Carol Ann insistently tapped his arm. 

Stevie couldn't stand to see him like this. She hopped up from the table, announced she was going to the restroom, and waited in the hallway by the bathroom doors to wait for Lindsey's inevitable arrival. 

"I've been looping for well over a month now," she whispered as soon as he was there. "Actually, going on two months." 

"What?" A drip of sweat ran down the side of Lindsey's face. 

"It's true."

"So you don't know how to get out of this?"

"I'm working on it. Sort of. Sometimes with Kenny."

"Wait, Kenny's also in a loop?"

"Oh, not anymore. Back in '75. But he's not sure what he did to get out."

"Fuck!" Lindsey raked his hands through his thick curls. "How do we handle this? How have you been handling this?"

Stevie leaned back against the wall and thought about it. Another restaurant patron brushed past, doing a double-take at Lindsey and Stevie but staying quiet. The men's room door opened and shut. "Well," Stevie began. "First I flipped out a little. Then I decided nothing mattered. Then I did a lot of weird stuff. Then I decided everything mattered. Then I tried to find my power. And I just, I don't know. I kept trying."

She knew Lindsey well enough to know that he wouldn't be a fan of any of this. And she was right. The strain in his voice as he asked her more questions betrayed the truest strand of his curiosity. "How do we get out of this?" actually meant Why do I have to keep trying so hard? Because Lindsey was always trying, trying, trying at everything. Writing songs for the new album. Acquiring new and better guitars for the current tour. Getting along with the band and the entourage. Having a relationship (however flawed) with Carol Ann.

And now this.

"I don't know yet," she told him, and then led him back to their table.

Considering the state Lindsey was in, Stevie wasn't sure if he would drop by her hotel room later.

But then.

"Stevie, Stevie." The usual whisper, the usual rhythm. It was the one time all day that she appreciated the sameness. 

She opened the door. He was actually dressed this time, a regular button-down shirt and jeans and even shoes. Despite the neater appearance, he still stumbled in as though he'd been taking whatever substances he could find. She helped him over to the bed, just like before. This time, though, he lay on his side and curled his long legs under him as he buried his face in the pillow. Oh god, he was so overwhelmed. 

Stevie sat on the edge of the bed and carefully put a hand on his shoulder. "Linds." She rubbed at the soft fabric of his shirt. "Linds, it's okay. Do you know how much crazy shit I've been able to do here in Nashville?"

He uncovered just enough of his face for Stevie to see one bloodshot eye. "I don't want to do crazy shit in Nashville. I want to do the tour. I want to make the next album."

Stevie's mind was about as devoid of answers as the blank glass of the television set across the room. "When did you start your loop? Like, what time was it when you came back to today?"

"I dunno. We'd gone to the venue for the show, but I didn't even make it to soundcheck."

When Stevie explained that she generally looped back when she and Lindsey were about to go onstage at the Nashville Municipal Auditorium, he was amazed. He sat up in bed, asking her to tell him about the future. She laughed. There were so many different versions of those few hours in the day, the ones he was, for some reason, missing, and the ones she was, for some reason, getting. She told him about the loop that she herself couldn't stop thinking about, the most recent one. The version of the day in which she finally got to go onstage. The day she'd managed to stretch out for ten more crucial minutes.

"I was there on stage with you," Lindsey said. "In the future."

"Yes!" Stevie leaped up from the bed. "Somehow, in some timeline, you actually do make it to the future."

Lindsey wiped at his face while Stevie paced around the room. "Maybe the trick is that you can't keep doing the same thing," she said to him. "In these loops. You have to keep testing yourself. You have to keep testing time."

"All of this feels insane, Stevie," Lindsey said.

"I know," Stevie said. "But it's where we are right now, isn't it?"

She watched Lindsey flop back onto the bed, and then she picked up the telephone on the nightstand. She paused. Was she going to bug Kenny again? Not that he knew how many times she'd pestered him for help about escaping the loop, but she felt like she would probably project a subconscious tiredness about asking him for advice. 

"What are you doing?" Lindsey asked.

"Just arranging a meeting of the minds," Stevie replied.

It was Christine and J.C. who arrived a few minutes later. Stevie had called Chris because of her general levelheadedness, and J.C. because there was no way they were getting through this loop in a sober state. Chris, carrying a cocktail, wore a silk robe over her jeans and blouse. J.C. leaned against the dresser and smoked a cigarette. "All right, Stevie, who do you need me to yell at?" he asked.

"It's nothing like that," Stevie said. "I asked you both here because, see, we're looping through time. Lindsey and me."

J.C. sighed. "Haven't I told you that there are a lot better drugs to get into than LSD?"

"This isn't a trip!" Stevie said. "I wish it were."

J.C. produced two joints, lit them, and started passing them around, while Stevie tried to explain the mechanics of the time loop. Chris stared coolly at her, occasionally shaking her head. J.C. managed a chuckle now and then. Stevie talked about all the times she had been to the barbecue restaurant and to soundcheck, all the different things she had tried to do, and all the times she had wound up back at the hotel, watching the same Peter Falk and Carl Sagan interviews on The Tonight Show. 

"You even watched with me once, Chris!" Stevie said. "But you don't remember."

"Oh, there are plenty of nights on this tour I don't remember." Christine swished the ice in her cocktail. 

"Fine, you don't have to believe me." Stevie returned to the bed, where Lindsey was back in the fetal position. When she inhaled from the joint, she felt like she was taking in everything: the past and the present and the billions of timelines for the future, all flung from different directions, all coming to rest, somehow, inside of her. She shivered. She nudged Lindsey to pass him the joint.

Lindsey turned to her, and their eyes met. He looked at her as though he was seeing all those timelines, all those beautiful and terrible universes. He looked at her as if sinking into the realization that they were back to where they began—the two of them, together, navigating an unfamiliar world. He looked at her as if he was a tangle of love and regrets and memory and exhaustion. Just like her.

She blew out the smoke. 

What she meant to say was, sometimes the great mystery and joy of life is simply finding out what happens next. But what came out was just, "Time is so fucking beautiful."

"Yeah," said Lindsey.

"Say it, J.C. Say it, Chris," Stevie commanded. "Time is so fucking beautiful."

"Time is so fucking beautiful," J.C. and Chris chorused, though Chris seemed to put a question mark on the end of her statement.

"It's true," Stevie said, though she was still looking at Lindsey.

And then Lindsey shakily stood up. Holding the joint in one hand, he grabbed a pen and notepad from Stevie's nightstand. As Stevie watched, he scrawled two short sentences on the top sheet of paper:

We're done. Please leave the tour. 

"Hang on." Lindsey ripped the sheet from the notepad. "I'll be back."

Now it was Lindsey proposing that they all go out to do "crazy shit in Nashville." And he was just convincing enough that Chris and J.C. shrugged and said they'd join. Heading out of the hotel room, though, they were waylaid by a familiar figure.

"You fucker!" Carol Ann blazed down the hallway. She tossed the balled-up note from Lindsey in his direction. Then she threw a shoe—one of her flats—toward the group, where it narrowly missed J.C.'s head. "Lindsey Buckingham, you are the world's biggest asshole!"

"Run, you guys," Lindsey said. "Just go. I'll be right behind you."

"Fuck you, and you, and you!" Carol shouted. "And you especially, Stevie Nicks! And by the way, the two of you are fucking terrible for each other!"

Stevie, Christine, and J.C. took Lindsey's advice to run, and were able to quickly board one of the glass elevators. When they got to the lobby, Stevie was pleased to see that Lindsey was, in fact, on the next elevator down. She recalled what he'd said ages ago (though it was probably just twenty or so loops ago), when they'd slept together and he'd declared that his relationship with Carol Ann was different, "intellectually and spiritually-speaking." Of course, it had sounded like bullshit then, though it rang in her head for days afterward. But as he strode toward them and fell in step with her this evening, everything felt different. Renewed. So what if time wasn't right? There was a rightness to her and Lindsey again, and she knew from the way he'd looked at her while smoking that he felt it too.

J.C. was able to get one of their limos ready quickly, and they headed out on the town. Christine eyed Stevie and Lindsey curiously, and perhaps wearily, as they rode through the streets. "Lindsey," she said. "Do you, ah, need to process anything about your very recent breakup? Need to discuss anything with your esteemed colleagues here? Does it have anything to do with your drug trip—I mean, your time loop?"

Lindsey's mouth slanted. He was already sitting next to Stevie, but she felt him shift closer to her. "No," he said. "No. It was just... something that needed to happen. Things had run their course."

"Mmm." Christine nodded, but said nothing more.

"Hey, does anyone want to play pool?" Lindsey said, pointing out the window at a pool hall.

***

Stevie and Christine were the only two women in the place. And Stevie was the only person who didn't know how to shoot pool. At first, she hung back while the other three grabbed their cues and set up the table. She sipped a beer she didn't really want. J.C. readied his cue to take the first shot, and when he pushed back his blonde hair, Stevie called out, "Okay, Sister Golden Hair!" and J.C., rattled, messed up his shot.

"Nice work, Stevie!" Chris said.

"Interference," J.C. grumbled.

"Wait." Stevie hopped up from her barstool. "Let me play, too."

You have to keep testing yourself.

You have to keep testing time.

Lindsey, fortunately, picked up what she was putting down. He put a hand on her back and led her to the pool table. "Chris, you go ahead. I'm going to teach Stevie here how to hold her cue." Lindsey was looking at Stevie as he said this.

"Okay. Now, you want to hold the stick around hip level. Put your right hand there at the bottom, maybe about five inches up." Lindsey took her hand lightly and placed it on the stick. He touched the tender skin between her thumb and forefinger. He pressed his palm on top of her hand. The warmth of him, again. It was so much.

"What's next?" Stevie asked.

Lindsey brushed against her, his jeans against her usual white silk floral dress. His thigh against her thigh. "Uh. Your other hand goes at the front of the cue. Like, you rest it on the table, and have your thumb and two fingers on it, sort of."

"Show me."

"Yes, please take your shot, Lindsey," Chris said. 

Around them, The Doors played from a jukebox, glasses and bottles clanged behind the bar, and smoke curled up from every pool table. Stevie considered that every night of her loop, every night she'd been running around Nashville or just watching Johnny Carson, this same scene had played out. These guys and their pool. It was comforting, really. She smiled, and Lindsey was smiling down at her. Those denim-blue eyes. That lanky frame. It got her every time.

Were you right, Stevie?

Maybe rightness and wrongness couldn't be counted on or defined when time itself wasn't right.

Lindsey aimed his stick toward the cue ball and a red striped ball, took the shot, and sunk the ball.

"You see?" he said to Stevie.

"I guess." Stevie tried to line up a shot in the same way, though she cared mostly about Lindsey being right behind her. His breath hitting her neck. His gentle encouragement as she tried to make sense of the geometry. This moment with him, and how she was trying to pin it to her heart. The thousands of days they had spent together, and how she hoped to have thousands more. 

She took the shot. The cue ball moved slightly, but didn't hit the green ball she was aiming for.

"Ohh, too bad, Stevie," J.C. said. "Can I take my turn now, without interference?"

"Of course," Stevie said. She reached for Lindsey's hand seemingly at the same time Lindsey reached for hers. They clasped together, like an agreement. "Lindsey and I were just going to--"

"Step outside for a minute," Lindsey finished, and started leading her toward the door. 

Here we go again, Christine mouthed to her.

"Shut up," Stevie whispered, with a smile. 

***

It was different this time. 

It was different when Lindsey politely, and with a ten-dollar bill, asked the limo driver to take a walk. It was different when they scrambled into the car while he kissed her mouth, her neck, her shoulder. It was different when he pushed up the skirt of her dress and traced around her underwear with his sure fingers. It was different when she kicked her shoes off and unhooked Lindsey's belt. It was different when they wound up on the floor of the limo rather than the seat, him caressing her legs and her moaning softly.

It was different, maybe, because they were both thinking the same thing. 

Are we testing time? Are we testing it enough?

They were wrapped around each other on the floor, still half-dressed, when Lindsey nudged Stevie's cheek. "You know," he said, "when we came out here, I didn't know what exactly was going to happen. I mean, I had another plan."

"What do you mean?" Stevie freed some of her hair from Lindsey's beard and threw it all behind her shoulders. 

"I mean... I guess you didn't notice what's next door to the pool hall."

Stevie looked up. The sign on the building next to the pool hall was in neon. She was a little too nearsighted to read it without squinting. 

RHINESTONE WEDDING CHAPEL, she finally deduced.

Oh.

Oh.

She looked at Lindsey, wide-eyed. "You planned this?"

"The plan came to me within a split second," Lindsey said. "I saw the wedding chapel next to the pool hall, and that's when I asked us to stop, because I thought, well, what if we changed everything?"

"You haven't asked me yet," Stevie said.

They were sort of dressed on the floor of a limo, and their faces were lit by streetlights and neon. They were still high from J.C.'s pot. They were full of a pent-up energy that hundreds of cycles of the same day couldn't possibly shake. Stevie knew this.

And yet, when Lindsey asked the question, the question, there was something so fragile about the moment. 

His breath shallow. His eyes shining. "Stephanie Nicks, will you marry me? Here in Nashville?"

Still. The knowledge of how she would answer was grounded deep in herself, and no mistakes of time would take it away. 

"Yes, Lindsey, I will." She kissed him. "But the chapel isn't open right now, is it?"

"No, we'll have to come back tomorrow. In the morning, first thing," he said. "Is that okay with you?"

"Absolutely," she said.

She moved to unbutton his shirt, and they were kissing, and Lindsey caressed her breasts through her dress. He wriggled out of his jeans and boxers, and she pulled up her dress and took off her underwear. Lindsey was smiling sweetly in a way that Stevie knew he couldn't turn off. "Tomorrow," he whispered to her.

"Yes, tomorrow," Stevie said, and she was sure her smile matched his. 

Lindsey was weird and overly analytical and a terrible perfectionist and obsessed with everything. And he was beautiful. And he was Stevie's favorite person. And now he was all hers. 

She moved on top of him, straddling him, bracing herself with one hand against the body of the car. He positioned himself to enter her, and then she slid easily onto his cock. She rode him hard, delighting in his length and the way he fit inside her. The darkness of the limo was cut through with dusty light, and outside, other cars and people rushed by, unaware of the tiny universe that two people had created here. Stevie thought of the last time she'd fucked Lindsey, that night in the hotel room, a time this Lindsey didn't remember, not really, but she hoped that some strain of that time still existed between the two of them. I fucking love you, Stevie, he'd said over and over that night, as though the repetition made it truer. 

She felt the urge of a climax gathering between her legs, and when she couldn't handle it any longer, she breathed out, "Linds, I'm coming, I'm coming, I'm..." as her orgasm surged through her, shimmering up and down her body. And Lindsey was saying, "God, you're beautiful, Stevie, god..." and she watched his face, drenched in streetlight and moonlight, as he came. And she loved him. And it was different this time.

They stood outside the darkened wedding chapel after they'd turned the limo back over to the driver. Stevie took Lindsey's hands and she looked up at the buzzing neon sign. "Well, it's not what I pictured, but neither was this, you know, situation."

Lindsey laughed. "I know exactly what you mean."

"I was just thinking, as I was getting dressed back there, that it's wild we wound up in the same loop."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean," Stevie said, taking a step back toward the pool hall, "that you've looped before, and I've been looping for a while now, and yet, this is the first time we're in this timeline, together. You know?"

Lindsey had that look of overwhelm again. "You mean it might not keep happening like this?"

"I have no idea!" Stevie unlatched her hands from Lindsey's and threw them up in a dramatic shrug. "Maybe you're right that changing everything will prompt something to change. Right?" She looked helplessly up at the sky, as if it could give her some kind of answer. But the night seemed even quieter now than before. "But I was struck with the idea that we might lose each other in time. And I just... I don't know."

"Don't make me panic, baby."

Stevie smiled. Oh, the things he let slip when he was a little bit terrified. Just Stevie, she could say to him, but he wouldn't remember those other loops when she'd sung him "Celebrate Me Home" and worried about the ever-looming presence of Carol Ann. "Look, okay. We can have, like, a meeting place. Or a code word. Something to let us know that we're the same you and me from right now. How about that?"

"I like that." Lindsey took in a deep breath, let it out, and took Stevie's hand again. He nodded up at the neon sign buzzing above them. "Let's make the code word 'rhinestone.'"

May 21, 1977 - again

"Linds," Stevie whispered. 

"Hrm."

"Is it still you? Rhinestone."

Lindsey rolled over in bed. "Yes, sweet girl." He touched his fingers to her lips and her nose. "I'm here."

They had been up so late last night, here in Lindsey's room. Stevie had braced for Carol Ann to still be here, to be met with a shoe in the face, but she'd fled, though not without trashing the hotel room. Still, Stevie and Lindsey had collapsed here in the bed, and they'd talked about their plan to keep the wedding mostly a secret for now. But there was a tentative gleeful joy that this might do it, this might be the day that stuck. Because everything would have changed. 

She dimly remembered pleasuring him with her mouth somewhere around 4 in the morning. Then she'd rolled over on her back and was going to request the same from Lindsey, but she'd fallen asleep before she could. That was okay -- they were going to have a million more chances. 

"Ughh," Lindsey mumbled. "Does that clock really say 10:30?"

"10:30!" Stevie leaped out of bed in her underwear and went to open the curtains and the shade. Light poured in. Yet another Saturday morning in Nashville. 

"Let's get going." Lindsey grabbed another button-down shirt from one of the many piles Carol had left on the floor. 

"We're really doing this," Stevie said, half to herself and half to Lindsey. She picked up the white silk dress from the end of the bed and held it to her chest, feeling a rush of sentimentality for something that hadn't happened yet. But this, she knew, had to be her wedding dress. 

***

The flowers were a bouquet Lindsey picked up at a gas station on the way over. Their witness was a very surprised Dwayne, the bodyguard. The rings were two of the flower stems that Stevie had hurriedly tied together. Stevie had pinned back some of her hair while Lindsey was paying the clerk at the front for their quickest wedding package. 

And before she knew it, they were standing at the tiny altar in the tiny chapel, her face inches from Lindsey's, while they spoke their vows to each other. Stevie's voice came out small and shaky, and she wished she'd had time to write her own vows. But she knew what her heart was saying in this moment: that it was a such a risk, an intellectual exercise, to love Lindsey Buckingham. That it was difficult, that she might love him too much, too thickly. But she knew that it would be worth it to love him across the years and decades and for the rest of her life. It would be worth it to love him.

"You may now kiss the bride," the officiant said.

And Lindsey did.

***

With Dwayne still gaping at them in the limo, they had to rush back to the hotel to get ready for the show. "Dwayne, remember, you're sworn to secrecy until we tell you otherwise!" Stevie chided him, and then Lindsey touched her hand with all the gravity of what could happen in the next few hours. Maybe they really would get a chance to tell everyone about their wedding. 

Stevie spent a few precious minutes in her new husband's arms at the hotel before gathering up what she needed for the show and racing downstairs again. Her arms and legs and heart buzzed with anticipation, something the others in the band and entourage definitely noticed but didn't comment on. Probably they noticed the absence of Carol Ann and simply assumed that Lindsey and Stevie were sleeping together again. If only it was that simple, Stevie thought, but then stopped herself. Maybe this really was everything. Maybe this was how she truly did get back together with Lindsey for good. Maybe this strange carousel through time was meant to teach her about the value of their relationship. Maybe.

At the venue, she held on to Lindsey's arm, whispering, occasionally, "Rhinestone, rhinestone," and he smiled and whispered back, "Still me, Mrs. Buckingham."

Stevie giggled. She couldn't help it.

"I'm going to find that black dress and scarf I like," she said. "But I'll be back, I swear." And she ran off to her dressing room.

From the dressing room, she called Robin. She couldn't resist absolutely shrieking the news to her and promising she'd tell her more later. Robin, too, was a screaming mess through the call, and she promised to return to the tour soon to see the happy new couple. Then Stevie dove through the clothing in her trunk to locate the usual black dress and scarf and boots, and she put them on.

When she jogged out of the room in the boots to find Lindsey, she could, of course, find everyone else but him. There was Kenny, mildly flabbergasted at the amount of cocaine left in his dressing room. There was Chris, who usually helped with her hair, looking concerned at Stevie's flushed face but never demanding an explanation. There was Mick, striding down the hallway, checking on everyone, offering Stevie a beer. 

And there, at the end of the hall, near the doorway that led to the stage, standing like a blonde barricade, was Carol Ann.

Stevie could swear the whole place fell silent. A flare of pain ignited in her forehead. 

"No," Stevie whispered.

"What's going on?" Carol asked, an edge to her voice.

"Have you seen Lindsey?" Stevie stopped and leaned against the wall, listening to her heart pound.

"Just in there."

It was the room they were in right before going on stage, and there was Lindsey, prepping for soundcheck by smoking a joint. 

"Rhinestone," Stevie tried, her voice small.

"Oh hey, what's that, Stevie?" Lindsey turned around. 

She knew immediately it wasn't him, that they had crossed timelines, or uncrossed timelines, or whatever confusing other thing had happened. "Rhinestone," she said again, just to be sure.

"You a Glen Campbell fan now?" Lindsey said with a laugh.

Stevie turned and ran.

***

The thing was, Stevie got her time again. She got to walk onstage with him. She got "Say You Love Me" and "Monday Morning." She got the swirl of music and sweat and cathartic fucking terror and joy that was the beginning of a sold-out Fleetwood Mac concert. She got Chris smiling warmly at her from the keyboards. She got a welcoming bump of powder from one of J.C.'s always well-placed bottlecaps. She got John nodding at her from his little hiding spot by Mick's drum set. 

And then she got her cue.

It was her song. It was "Dreams." And she hadn't performed it in months.

Lindsey-from-another-timeline looked pointedly at her as he played the familiar chords. The crowd yelled as she came toward the mic. This was it, this was the song on the charts right now, this was the song that Mick and Richard and J.C. swore had a great shot at being their first number-one single. 

And she was getting extra time. Sure as the beat of her heart and the intense pain in her head and Lindsey's fingers on the guitar. She had, somehow, taken back some time.

But she'd lost Lindsey. Again.

She opened her mouth to sing, but the space where the words should have been was overtaken by the searing pain in her head.

Stevie blacked out. 

Chapter Text

"Have you seen Lindsey?" 

Mick had barged into Stevie's dressing room without knocking. Stevie, fortunately, was out of her stage outfit and back in her travel clothes, and having a cup of tea with Karen before the band was supposed to head out. Mick wore such a look of distress on his face that Stevie couldn't really be annoyed with him. 

"Not since we came offstage," Stevie replied. This was fine with her; she needed a break from the man after everything that had happened today. 

"Well, he was supposed to talk with Brett after the show, and he just never turned back up. Marty hasn't seen him. And his dressing room was empty."

"Did you text him?" Stevie asked. "He's always got his phone."

"I did, but no answer." Mick scratched at his beard. "I figured you were the most likely to know what was going on in his headspace."

"Mm, no idea," Stevie said, though she was interrupted by the arrival of Brett, who reported that one of the band's SUVs was gone. 

Mick, Brett, and Karen were all looking at Stevie. 

"Look, I'm not an oracle on all things Lindsey." Stevie stood up, put down her teacup, and glanced around at the group, at the lumbering wooden wardrobe in the corner of the room, at her reflection in the mirror, and then back to the wardrobe.

"Actually," she said, "yeah. I do know where he is."

The SUV dropped a small Lindsey Rescue Party headed by Stevie, Karen, and Mick back at the Sheraton Hotel. Stevie and Mick huddled with the bodyguard while Karen spoke with the manager to explain the situation and make sure they could get into the hotel room that Lindsey had stayed in. Stevie was aware that Mick was looking down at her with curiosity. 

"Don't know what goes through that man's head sometimes," Mick said, his voice low and tired. "Well, most of the time. Did he forget something, or...?"

"Must have forgotten something important," Stevie assured him. "Probably some of his recording equipment. He doesn't trust anyone else with that." She noticed Karen coming back with the key card for Lindsey's room. Karen, always so reliable. "Look, Mick, if you want to wait here, I'll go up to the top floor. I'm sure he'll be there."

***

Stevie tented her fingers the same way Lindsey did when he was nervous. It seemed like the thing to do when anxiously missing someone, co-opt all their little gestures. Karen watched her from the other corner of the elevator, but neither of them said anything. At their floor, Stevie hopped out first, and she checked in the gold-bordered mirror on the wall that she was still herself. Yes. Stevie from 2009, still buzzing from the show, still itching to leave Tennessee, still wracked with worry about Lindsey. Why had he rushed back here? That was the question both she and Karen were asking as they walked down the hallway, Karen with that look about her that said she knew there was more going on than Stevie had disclosed. Karen had a way of acting like she was all-seeing and all-knowing, and sometimes it was a good way to describe her. But this time? Surely Karen didn't have the first clue.

Stevie gently placed Karen's hands in her own, and took the keycard from her. "Please, just wait for me. I'm sure this won't take long."

She opened the hotel room door and let it shut heavily behind her.

"Lindsey?" she said.

But it was just what she'd feared. The door to the closet, to the void, was wide open, and Lindsey wasn't there. 

On the bed nearest the closet lay his iPhone. She picked it up and clumsily slid it open. Besides texts from Mick, Brett, and Marty, there was a string of messages from she who called herself Mrs. Buckingham:

Kristen: Hey babe how was the show?!!!!

Kristen: Me and the kids want to say goodnight to u so give us a call when u can!!!!

Kristen: Hey babe u there

Kristen: ????????????

Stevie pecked out a message to Kristen: Slightly delayed. But all is well. She tossed the phone back on the bed. 

Not two feet away, the void was disturbingly still. Stevie felt like she herself was swirling every time she glanced over to consider its stillness. Its blackness. Its clear determination to be the most nothing that nothing ever was. 

"Lindsey!" she called, though she knew it was pointless. "LINDSEY!" Even louder, even more pointless. 

The thing about seeing and recognizing nothing, Stevie realized, is that one had to be something in order to recognize the nothing. 

Still, the idea of hurling herself straight into the nothing seemed insane, at best. 

But did she have a choice?

She did not.

Stevie wasn't sure if she was falling. There wasn't any sensation of movement. However, there wasn't anything above or beneath her, either.

And still, she could touch her hair and her face and the silky material of her black shirt. She hadn't become a part of the nothing.

At least, not entirely.

What was most real to her in this space, this space of no shape and no light, were her memories. They flew at her fast and insistently, like cars passing on a highway. There she was, learning to ride a horse with the help of her grandfather. There she was again, traveling somewhere in the southwest with her family, that cozy feeling of being in the backseat with her parents in the front, that childhood feeling where everything in the world was settled and safe. 

Then she was jolted into adulthood. Being in her early twenties and cleaning someone else's shower. Walking into that Mexican place with Lindsey to meet the rest of the band and realizing with every step that her life was about to change. Leaning on Christine's soft shoulder and whining to her about some press interview they had to do. 

She missed everyone all of a sudden. She wanted everyone she'd ever loved back, surrounding her. 

Stevie closed her eyes, as if that would make things any darker. 

But when she opened her eyes, she was lying on a patch of grass. Unnatural, too-manicured Los Angeles grass.

And Lindsey's house was towering in front of her.

But wait, no. This wasn't Lindsey's present-day house, the one he shared with Kristen and the kids. This was his house from the 80s and 90s, but it stood sturdy and real, as though Stevie had stepped into the busy highway of memory and been struck by this time in her past, a time when she and Lindsey were so much more disconnected from each other. 

She scrambled to her feet and walked toward the house. The front door flung itself open for her, and she walked in. 

Lindsey was there, the same man she'd slept with that very day, in a hotel room beyond time. Lindsey with the gray-brown hair and the t-shirt that didn't have any business fitting as well as it did. That Lindsey.

He was sitting in the front room, playing an acoustic guitar, but he looked up when Stevie came in, and his mouth crinkled into a smile. "You made it."

She was still dazed. "Yes." She collapsed onto the couch beside him—well, beside him, but leaving a crucial bit of distance. "I don't understand."

"I don't either." Though Lindsey went on playing, Stevie noticed that his face was streaked with sweat. 

Stevie brushed a stray piece of grass out of her bangs and smoothed her hair. She gazed around the room. There were magazines on the coffee table—Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone. Framed magazine covers and albums on the walls. Fleetwood Mac albums and Lindsey's first two solo albums. Stevie leaned forward and looked at the dates on the magazines. December 1984, January 1985.

Well, at least she had gotten away from 1977.

She was about to try to explain whatever she could about the mechanisms of time, but then, footsteps approached from another room.

A blonde woman appeared in the doorway, and Stevie steeled herself to be cordial to the illustrious Mrs. Buckingham. But on second look, it wasn't Kristen in the doorway.

"Hello," the woman said. "Lindsey said you might be showing up."

Stevie said a flustered but mostly polite hello while squinting at the woman. She had wavy blonde hair with her bangs fluffed in a telltale way. She wore a floral dress and Doc Martens boots. She very much had not been transported from 2009. "I'm Anne," she said. "Heche. Nice to meet you."

Stevie stood up from the couch and shook Anne's hand. She foggily recalled that Lindsey and Anne had dated sometime in the 90s. 

"Oh, but not actually Anne Heche," Lindsey said, while still picking his way through a song. "She explained to me that she's just an Anne Heche-shaped manifestation of my thoughts."

"Is that right?" Stevie asked.

"Hope that's not disappointing," Anne said.

"Oh no, not disappointed," Stevie said. "Just overwhelmed."

***

She rushed out of the room and found herself in the kitchen, where she leaned against the counter and took a few deep breaths. She was here, Lindsey was here, and not-Anne Heche was here. But where was here, exactly? She ran her hands over the counters and the fridge to be sure they were real. She took a glass out of the cabinet and filled it with water from the tap and drank it. Okay, yes, real. 

But the memories were creeping back in. And they were strange and cloudy, as though they had happened to someone else. She recalled a time on tour—Rumours tour, it had to be—when she was getting high with Christine, and they were laughing and watching TV, and Stevie marveled in the sweetness and uniqueness of their friendship. This memory became sharper the more Stevie concentrated on it, but it was also as though it was brand new. 

"Stevie."

She looked up, startled. Lindsey had abandoned the guitar and come to find her. He stood on the other side of the kitchen island, his arms crossed against his chest. "Are you okay?" he asked.

"Why are we in your old house?" Stevie pushed her bangs out of her face. "And why, Lindsey, did you go back to the hotel after the show? And jump in the closet? And did you think that I was going to jump in after you? Well, here I am." 

Lindsey took a deep breath. "I went back to the hotel," he said evenly, "because I couldn't get over that if there was a void in my closet only, it must have been there for a reason. Just like your room took us somewhere else"—he conspicuously looked away from her while recalling this part of their day—"I felt like I had to abide whatever my room was telling me to do. Like I couldn't just go on to New Orleans without trying to figure out why. I like to believe there's a sense of logic to things, you know."

"Hm," Stevie said. Off in the distance, not-Anne Heche clomped around in her Doc Martens. Yes, Stevie thought, so much logic in this place. 

"Anyway." Lindsey was looking down at his boots. "I didn't know if you would follow me. Maybe I hoped so. Maybe I—I don't know." 

"You wanted me to," Stevie found herself saying. "It's just like the other night when you told me you wanted to quit the tour. Of course you wanted me to say, oh, Lindsey, no, no, you can't quit."

"That's not what—"

"You use me for things like that, over and over," Stevie snapped. "You use me to help you find your better self. And where does that get us? Stuck in a void together, apparently."

Lindsey opened his mouth and then closed it again. He tapped a rhythm out on the doorframe of a house that no longer existed, seeming to carefully consider his next words. Finally, he looked at Stevie. "Let's walk around the house."

"Do you guys need anything?" came Anne's voice from another room. "Maybe I could make snacks for us?"

"No!" Stevie and Lindsey said at once.

She found herself following him—even when she seemed to be in step with him, it was still his boots that were clearly taking the lead. And it infuriated her that she was doing this. Stevie was sure she'd had this revelation before, probably even shared it with Sharon or Lori or Mary, this idea that she or Lindsey was always leading the other. When she did find herself in those vanishing moments when they felt really, truly together, she always tried to hold on to them. In her head, she kept an inventory of them, the most recent being their roll in the bed together that afternoon in the hotel room beyond time and space. 

And now, they seemed to be beyond time and space yet again, but the dynamic here was much more familiar. 

Clunk, clunk. The sound of Lindsey's boots. Followed by the whisper of her black flats. 

"Don't have much to say about what I told you back there, do you?" she said. "About the things you use me for."

"Why are you needling at me, Stevie?" he said without turning around. He seemed to have a destination in mind.

"Because we've done over fifty shows on this tour now," Stevie said, "and I think you can't deny that things have gotten somewhat weirder in the past day or so, and I've got a few things to get off my chest."

"Well, maybe I have a few things to say, as well," Lindsey said. He flung open the door to the room at the end of the hall. Ah. Stevie certainly recalled this one. 

"You have to admit, the rain room was particularly ingenious." Lindsey walked in and marveled at the windowed ceiling, at the calculated oddity of the tree growing up through the middle of the room. It was sparsely furnished on purpose, Stevie figured. Everything Lindsey did was extremely on purpose. 

"Some of us are fine without bringing the outdoors indoors," Stevie countered.

Lindsey smiled tightly and shook his head, seeming both charmed and exasperated by her. "I feel like I did such good work here. Not just in this room, but in this house. There was a real creative synergy that I don't think I've ever quite gotten back."

"I get it." Stevie walked along the perimeter of the room, running her hand across the stone wall. "I felt that, from the music you made here. But I also felt that, you know, from the music we've made together."

"Yeah." Lindsey cleared his throat. He was standing in the middle of the room. "I know."

"When I was younger," Stevie said, "I always pictured us writing music together forever. I pictured us being together forever. And somehow, I can still picture that. Maybe it looks different. Maybe it's defined differently. But I can still picture that."

She thought that her voice had gotten smaller and smaller as she'd said that. At any rate, the room seemed cavernous all of a sudden. Cold and huge and uncertain. But Lindsey—Lindsey, standing there still in his t-shirt and jeans and boots from the show, standing there in the center of the room, his hair graying but his expression boyish, hesitant, thoughtful. 

He shook his head at her again. "Stevie."

And then. Five strides across the room in those clunky boots. Five strides straight to her.

And his mouth was on hers, and she had her back to the stone wall, and everything was warm and cold at once. He breathed her name into her as he moved his lips against hers, and she put her hands on his sides and wondered at the breadth of him as she felt her tongue on his, his hands in her hair, the familiar satisfaction of their bodies crashing together. 

But it was always a satisfaction underscored by an ache. Stevie knew Lindsey felt it, too. It was as well-played as one of the classics they were performing on this tour. Perhaps a note differed here and there, but the rhythm and the chords were always the same.

Lindsey drew away from her. 

"What did you have to tell me?" Stevie asked.

"What?" He wiped at his forehead.

"A minute ago, you said you had some things to tell me." Stevie felt the coldness of the stone wall again. "I was just curious. Seems like we have the opportunity to talk—"

"You guys? Are you there?" Not-Anne's voice rang out from somewhere across the house.

Lindsey's eyebrows went up. "Yeah, what's going on?" he called back.

"Ah, something's happened?" 

"Do you need our help?"

"Yes," Anne said. "But I don't know where I am."

Stevie met Lindsey's eyes. "Well, you know this house better than anyone," she said.

The problem was that Anne had walked into the pantry to grab some snacks, but then found herself in a dimension beyond the pantry. Stevie didn't understand how any of this was happening, but neither did she understand a single thing that had occurred since the band had landed in Nashville, so she walked beside Lindsey through the house's winding hallways, calling for Anne and seeing if they could help her. 

"Can you see us? What do you see?" Lindsey asked.

"I see nothing." Anne's voice echoed throughout the sprawling house. "It's like the darkest place I've ever been."

"Like the void," Stevie said.

"Huh?" Lindsey asked. 

"It wasn't dark for you?" 

"No." Lindsey stopped in front of the door to the recording studio. "It led me straight here."

Stevie shook her head. "Anne? Can you hear me?"

"Yes, Stevie!" Anne said.

"Women know the darkness much better than men do," Stevie said. 

"But she's a manifestation of my thoughts," Lindsey cut in, "so I don't know how any of that works."

"Oh, god." Stevie sat on the floor of the hallway. "Anne, just close your eyes, okay?"

"Yes, they're closed," Anne said.

"Now let your mind wander," Stevie said. "Just let any memories come to you that want to come to you, okay?" 

Now Lindsey was sitting on the floor next to her, and he moved his hand to touch hers, just barely. Finger to finger. "I'll try to do that, too," he said, his voice low. "Maybe that'll help."

"Tell me what you remember," Stevie whispered.

"I remember sitting in the recording studio right over there." Lindsey rubbed his finger against hers. "I was, god, so drunk and so stoned, and I was trying to work on stuff for the solo album that became Tango in the Night. It was so late at night. Late enough that every thought I had seemed heavy and meaningful. I had my feet up on the mixing board. And I was thinking about you. I was thinking about... why you weren't there. I didn't know where you were and it hurt me that I didn't even know where to look for you anymore. And then the hook for 'Big Love' started to come together."

"You know where I am," Stevie said. Her whole body was humming with Lindsey's one touch. "You knew where I was."

"I didn't. I feel like we wasted so much time back then." He put his head back against the wall. "I think... I think I was waiting for you."

"You were with someone else," Stevie said.

"I know, I know, but..." Lindsey shifted around on the floor. Off somewhere in the house, there was a clunk. "That situation could have changed. I would have changed that, for you." He took in a ragged breath. “But now, you know… I can’t. I wouldn’t break up my family.”

Stevie chose to ignore his last statement for now, and to think back on the 80s. Would he have really gotten back together with her then? She wasn’t sure. Though of course, her own memories of the mid-80s were rather fuzzy, and in particular, when trying to recall those Tango writing and recording sessions, there was little more than noise and pain. 

"Oh! I made it!" came Anne's voice. 

Lindsey shook and opened his eyes. Stevie hopped up from the floor and Lindsey eventually followed. "That's great, Anne!" Stevie said. "Where are you?"

"Somehow I wound up in the bedroom closet!" Anne rushed out from a different hallway and joined Stevie and Lindsey in front of the recording studio. "Well, that'll teach me to go looking for actual food in a place like this."

"This place is fucked up," Stevie said.

"Hey, come on, it's my house," Lindsey said.

"No, I agree, Lindsey." Anne looked shaken. "It's fucked up. We need to leave it."

I was waiting for you. Stevie knew she would hear that echo in her head for the rest of the tour, and maybe the rest of her life. As always, one was leading, one was following, and maybe they were never sure which was doing which. 

"Is that what you wanted to tell me?" Stevie asked. She and Lindsey were back in the house's front room with the album covers and magazines, though Stevie noticed that the magazines were different than they were before. There was a Time magazine about Bill Clinton winning the election. Stevie turned it over and found an ad for Kool cigarettes. Her old brand. "That you missed me? That you couldn't find me?"

"Something like that." Lindsey had his hands rather insistently in his pockets, like he was trying to keep them away from her. They were both waiting for Anne, who had rushed off with a promise to figure out how to get them out of the house and back where they needed to be.

"It's just... what does it mean when we sleep together?" Lindsey said, all in one quick breath. "Like we did today, like we did in Milwaukee, like—"

"Like we're going to do again." Stevie quickly shot him a knowing smile. "What does it mean? It probably means something different in each moment. And maybe it means that we can't save everything that we were before, but..." She looked down at her black flats, then out the window, and then at Lindsey, who stood there uncomfortably, his guilt palpable. "But maybe it means there's something worth saving."

He took a few steps toward her. She could see the pores on his face, the worry in his blue eyes, the gray in his hair. He flinched when she took his hand. "Maybe we're never going to know what this means. Maybe because there isn't anyone else like us."

Lindsey's lips settled into a slow, wrinkled smile. Stevie loved how well she knew it, loved how she knew she would see it again and again. And then he was leaning toward her, only to be interrupted by the sound of Anne's Doc Martens coming toward the front of the house. She appeared in the doorway, nearly out of breath. 

"I've figured it out," Anne said. "Lindsey, do you love this house?"

"Yes, of course," Lindsey said.

Anne handed him a lighter. "Then burn it down."

Stevie, Lindsey, and not-Anne Heche stood at the end of the driveway of Lindsey's old house, which may not have been real, though the heat and the flames and the smoke certainly seemed real to Stevie, standing there, a finger hooked through Lindsey's hand. Was this really the way out of the void and back to Nashville so that they could make it to New Orleans? It was one of those moments that had too many questions to try to set them up in a way to give them answers. Sometimes, Stevie figured, there was nothing to do but to let the moment wash over a person. She hoped New Orleans and the rest of the tour were in the future, but she couldn't be sure.

The only sureness at this moment was the one small place where she and Lindsey met. The fact of his hand, of his body, of his heart. The fact that no matter how much they had lost each other in the past, there was still something between them. 

Something worth saving. 

Chapter Text

Karen had made the arrangements. She and Stevie would head to Sheryl's house on the other side of Nashville at 6 PM. As Karen assured Stevie, Lindsey "had been contacted." Karen had talked to Lindsey's rep who talked to him and everything had apparently been set. The few steps of removal in communication between her and Lindsey made Stevie a little nervous. Of course, after she'd confessed this to Karen, the response, predictably, was, "Well, were you going to get in touch with him yourself?" 

Stevie wasn't.

She didn't know why.

As she and Karen rode out to Sheryl's house, Stevie considered why this was. In the past few years, the connection between them had gone from cool to cold to frozen. Occasionally she tried not to think about him at all. That was hard, knowing he was having some of his worst years, and with every passing day, week, month, it began to feel less and less possible to slide in and show her sympathy. But after some time, she had asked Karen to show her anything in the press about Lindsey, any interviews he had done, any new projects he was working on. 

And now, having gone to the void in space and time, having walked through his old houses, touched his floors and his fridge and his piano—there was still a hint of warmth there. Stevie was too nervous to think of a better metaphor at the moment than that of a tiny flame that had never gone out. 

Then, a few weeks ago, she and Karen had been talking about the band, and the topic of Lindsey had slipped in there as he often did, and something prompted Karen to say, "You know, Stevie, I'm pretty sure he's separated."

Stevie had raised her eyebrows.

She trusted Karen's intel. Karen always had her sources. Stevie didn't bother to ask for more information—she simply gave Karen a down-but-not-up conspiratorial nod and went back to whatever she'd been doing. 

But throughout that week, the words he's separated, he's separated rang through her head. 

Now she and Karen were on the outskirts of Nashville, and she was thinking about how much of a blur it was when he was fired from the band. It had been like a death, in a way, how Stevie didn't fully know how it had happened and never entirely believed it, either. She had given Mick her opinion about the near-future of the band, and then a few days later it was done, Lindsey was gone. Yet, every day on the tour, the strange, surreal tour of 2018 and 2019, a part of her expected him to be there. She would come out of her dressing room and wonder why she wasn't seeing him wandering the backstage of yet another arena, his faced fixed in concentration. Onstage, she'd look to her left and startle herself every time when seeing Mike and Neil instead of him. On planes, in cars, at interviews, she had to remind herself again and again that the pilot or the driver or the interviewer didn't need to wait for him. He wasn't late, he simply wasn't coming.

If Christine hadn't been on the tour, she didn't know how she would have survived. Not that the two women talked too directly about the absence of Lindsey—maybe Chris could tell she wasn't ready for that—but the knowing looks, the sighs, the quiet acknowledgment of the various rituals that had been destroyed. All of it was important. 

All of it was gone.

Sometimes, Stevie told herself, you walk through a door, and everything changes. 

"Stevie! Oh my god, look at you!" Sheryl was hugging her tight in the front room of her home. Stevie put her arms around her dear friend and took in the mood of being in Sheryl's house. Even though it was massive, there was an undeniably pleasant and lived-in feeling that hung in the air. Coming here was like hearing a favorite old song for the first time in many years. 

The two women headed through the living areas and into the huge kitchen. "Did I promise to cook? I hope not," Sheryl said. "Though I wouldn't entirely be lying. I made the guacamole, but the rest was catered, okay?" Sheryl gestured over the spread of salads and wraps and a cheese plate on the kitchen island. 

Stevie tried to nod. "It all looks amazing."

"Stevie."

"Hm?"

"You're so dazed."

Stevie put her hands on the countertop as if to steady herself, but what came to her was the realization that she was steady, solid, and very much here, grounded in this day. She glanced out the picture window, where Sheryl's stables were in view. Karen had rushed off when they'd arrived to see Sheryl's horses, correctly sensing that Stevie wanted some time alone with Sheryl. But what could she really say in this moment with her friend? Same as with Karen, the words to describe her adventures with space and time simply wouldn't come. 

"It's been difficult lately," was all Stevie could say.

Sheryl tilted her head in sympathy. "Touring in 2023 seems like a real bitch. It's just not the same as before, huh?"

"I'm always going to love it," Stevie said, "but it's definitely not the same."

Sheryl motioned to one of the tall chairs at the kitchen island. Stevie sat, and Sheryl took the seat across from Stevie. They looked like they were negotiating a deal. "Okay, elephant-in-the-fucking-room time." Sheryl slapped her hands down on the counter. "Lindsey's coming. Are you going to be able to talk to him, or am I going to have to start up a party game for our little group here?"

Stevie smiled. "The words will start coming, I'm sure."

"Mm, I don't know. I think Charades might be a good one for this crowd. Me and Lindsey versus you and Karen. Think about it."

"We can probably avoid that."

"Oh, or Cranium! The boys always loved that one. Have you ever played Cranium?"

Stevie took a tiny piece of cheddar from the cheese plate. "Sheryl. I say this with all my love, that I don't know what in the utter fuck you are talking about." She finished her cheese and looked her friend in the eyes. "I remember you told me that Lindsey had some sort of business in Nashville. Do you know what it was? Why he was here?"

"Is here," Sheryl said. "I don't think you've accepted yet that he's actually coming here. And no, I don't know. Hey, that'll be the first topic of conversation when he arrives."

Stevie nearly took another piece of cheese, but opted to pour herself a glass of lemon water from a pitcher that Sheryl had prepared. "It's just," she said, "I think Nashville is cursed or something."

"Cursed?" Sheryl said. "You realize I live here."

"Okay, well, not for you, dear. Clearly, you're doing fine. Just for me. And maybe for Lindsey, I'm not sure."

Stevie checked her watch.

She and Sheryl had moved the food and drinks to the table on Sheryl's back deck. It was a lovely evening, the sky turning to light blue before the sunset, and crickets chorusing from the expansive lawn. "Nashville's cursed, huh?" Sheryl said with a teasing smile. "Well, that's one curse I'll happily accept."

Stevie drank from her water glass and startled when a noise came from inside the house. She looked to her left, expecting to see him. Hoping, she realized, to see him. Jeans and a leather jacket, surely. Gray hair. A wrinkled smile and those eyes she knew so well.

But it was just Karen.

"I had two of the horses eating right out of my hand!" she said to Sheryl. And they started digging into the cheese plate and engaging in horse talk, neither of which Stevie could stomach right now. She stared off over Sheryl's property. She thought of being with not-Don Henley and word-associating in Lindsey's unreal house and realizing how to escape from the time void. Bringing those strange and secret thoughts here, now, to what purported to be her real life, felt dangerous in a way. 

Being here, though, and waiting for Lindsey—there was something just as unreal about it as what had happened in the void.

She closed her eyes and let the sound of Sheryl and Karen's voices fade out. She thought about him, about the ways they had loved and hated each other, about the thousand tiny knots they had tied to try to stay connected, about the fraying and the wanting and above all, just the time. The sheer length of it. The strangeness of the way it stretched and contracted, like how she could spend a whole week thinking about just one day they had spent together in the 70s. The way some of those years in the 80s felt like a held breath. 

A memory prickled at her. Gazing at Lindsey in a tiny chapel in Nashville. Her tiny, racing heart asking if this was the right thing to do and then immediately being given the answer. Yes. Yes yes yes yes. Her lips on his lips, his strong arms wrapping around her as if to confirm that this was right, even if everything else was off-balance, this still was right. 

Stevie opened her eyes with a start.

Within a moment, she knew two things. One, that this memory had absolutely happened in one of the other Nashville timelines that she'd shaken up.

And two, that whenever Lindsey showed up, she would be able to take one look at him and understand exactly how she felt about him. 

The problem was, he was already an hour late. 

She pushed her chair out and walked off the porch and back into Sheryl's kitchen.

"I know, I know." Sheryl appeared behind her a minute later. "Look, if he's not able to come tonight, maybe he's still in town for a few days. Maybe we can arrange another thing."

Stevie shook her head. "I've got the shows."

"Maybe he'll come to the show!"

"I don't believe he's done that in a long, long time."

"Things can change," Sheryl said. "They always do."

"Sheryl." Stevie leaned back against the fridge, and as she did, her head was full of moments and memories again. They flew at her from across her life, from timeline after timeline, enough to break and mend her heart over and over. And he was there, always, in all of them. They were in hotels and planes and cars and each other's beds. She felt pangs of love and swipes of hate. 

Maybe she didn't need to see him again. Maybe she already knew. 

"Lindsey and I eloped once," Stevie blurted out. "Decades ago."

"What?" Sheryl spilled out of the glass of wine she'd just poured. "I'm sorry, how long have we been friends, Stevie?"

"Nobody knows about it," Stevie said. "I mean, maybe Lindsey doesn't even remember."

"Well, whenever he pops in," Sheryl said, "maybe you could ask him about it. Although I'd recommend starting out with a more traditional greeting." Sheryl shook her head. "Stevie Nicks, I swear. So, what, did you get it annulled or something?"

"Hard to explain," Stevie said. "Very, very hard to explain."

Sheryl swigged her wine. "You and Lindsey," she said. "It was never the right time, was it? It's like he had his trajectory, and you had yours, and they could never meet in the right place."

"They met," Stevie countered. "They met for quite a while in the 70s. And they met, you know, perhaps a number of times, over the years."

There was a clunk. Toward the front of the house. When Sheryl eyed her, Stevie knew that it wasn't just she who'd heard it.

Stevie took a deep breath. "Let me go see if that's... someone."

She padded across the house in her tired black flats, and then she opened the heavy front door to find no one. Not a car out front, not a familiar figure climbing the front steps or standing expectantly on the porch.

Maybe it had all been too much to hope for.

Stevie glanced down. At the edge of the porch, something fluttered. She reached over to pick up a paperback book. Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell.

A piece of white paper was stuck as a bookmark, halfway through. She opened to the bookmark, and saw that it was scrawled with her own handwriting:

Dear Stevie,

There are so many ways to live inside your life.

Love, Stevie (2009)

She instinctively rushed down the stairs of the porch and into the yard, now only dimly lit by the setting sun. "Hello?" Stevie called out. But there was no response, no rustle in the distance, just Nashville sweeping over her once again. 

"I'm not explaining this to you," she told Karen in the car back to the hotel, perhaps in the firmest voice she'd heard from herself in a long time. "I'm not even going to try. I just can't."

Tomorrow she would try to figure out how she got the note. Tomorrow she would decide how and when and if she would try to contact Lindsey. But for now, she let a smile flicker across her face as she clutched the book.  It was only for herself.

Chapter Text

1. Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), 2008

Lindsey was always on the lookout for ghosts.

It continued to vex him that the only ghost who'd ever appeared to him was not that of his parents or his brother, but rather an astronomer with whom he had only a passing familiarity. Of course, since that strange time backstage in Nashville, he'd tried to read the collected works of Carl Sagan, and had, over four years, made some progress. Still, he lived each day with the possibility that a new and different ghost was around every corner. Maybe the next time he took the kids down to the beach, he'd find himself with two minutes to chat with Dennis Wilson. Maybe one of the coyotes he always heard in L.A. was actually the transplanted spirit of Warren Zevon.

But if there were ghosts here in the Delta Sky Club, they certainly weren't making themselves known. 

Lindsey picked a few nuts he disliked out of the ceramic bowl of snack mix he and Kristen had been served upon sitting down. 

"That's what you get when you fly commercial," Kristen singsonged. 

"I don't see the sense in chartering a plane when we're just going to visit your parents." As soon as this was out of Lindsey's mouth, he knew it was the exact wrong thing to have said. Kristen's eyes widened, and her eternally smooth forehead suddenly took on a crease. He mumbled an apology that he was sure she didn't believe. And then he got up to walk around. 

Across the room, the nanny, Linda, was sitting with the kids and watching them color and draw. Lindsey caught Linda's eye and nodded at her, as if to say, yes, carry on, everything's fine. Because it was, wasn't it? This was family life, the constant push and pull, give and take. In his more pessimistic moments, he had considered whether his never finding a way to be with Stevie meant that he was stung by the universe's punishment of being legally committed to someone who desired Tusk-tour-level extravagance every day of her life. 

But.

No.

He couldn't let himself think that way. A glance back at the kids. Punishment? Never.

Lindsey pushed through the door of the Sky Club and found himself in the rush of people going to their gates. He slipped on a pair of sunglasses and tried to join the flow, imagining that he was just a normal guy going on a business trip somewhere that normal people went. Chicago, maybe. St. Louis. Seattle. The names of cities glowed at him from the various gates, seemingly tempting him to sit with the throngs of passengers reading magazines or using their laptops and Blackberries. He imagined each gate's door as a portal to a new place, a new life. 

"Excuse me?" came a voice beside him. "Are you...?"

He slipped away before he had to answer.

Lindsey usually liked meeting fans but today wasn't the day. He pressed on down the concourse, even though he had no destination in mind. With each step, he tried to remind himself of a single truth in his life. 

One. That Kristen couldn't help but be obsessed with money. 

Two. Because a person has no control over what consumes them. He certainly didn't. 

Three. That there would be tours. Soon. A short tour for his solo release, and then one of those marathons with the band. 

Four. That tours had their own rules. 

Five, and onward. That those rules could bring about anything, from new music to new ghosts to new closeness with a particular person. 

He realized he was coming to the end of the concourse. The last door in front of him wasn't to a destination, but rather just to the emergency exit. 

"Mr. Buck!" came a voice behind him. He knew it. The nanny, Linda.

He turned around. She had Stella with her. "Mr. Buck!" she said again. "You know the flight doesn't board for another half-hour, don't you?"

"Oh, right." Lindsey looked around, trying to seem mildly bewildered. Maybe he actually was. "Yeah. I was just taking a walk."

Stella smiled up at him and took his hand. Together, they returned in the direction from which they'd come.

2. Pittsburgh International Airport (PIT), 2009

The Mac was back.

The machine of it all. He was walking between Marty and Mick through the airport after deplaning from the tour jet, and he had that familiar feeling of being a small part of something big. There were a thousand things that needed to have happened before he could take the stage in Pittsburgh the next night with his guitars. Negotiations and bookings and promotion and coordination and transportation and rehearsal. There were a thousand decisions he himself had made about this tour -- the songs he'd advocated for on the setlist, the different ways he might bend and twist a classic (and the extent to which he could without fans getting angry), the clothes he would wear and the ways he would interact with the audience and the way he was just going to be, in general. How was he casting himself this time? Was he emerging on the stage each night as a cynical rock veteran, or as a guy with old songs to play but new ones to give? 

Marty and Mick were talking around him, about money.

You guys, he almost said. Can we not wrench open the books yet? We haven't even played the first show. 

But maybe that wasn't the guy he was going to be. The argumentative one. The one least concerned with strategy and shrewdness. 

He kept his mouth shut. He wasn't sure, either way.

Stevie walked in front of him with Karen and the girls. Her long blonde hair flowed down her back, and she had a certain bounce to her step that hadn't been there during rehearsals. Stevie, as usual, knew who she was. Her tour self was a finely crafted image, honed over the decades with different dresses and capes and stories. Her tour self was her, but pared down and then amplified, Stevie Nicks translated into another language and then back again. The woman that emerged from that re-translation was ethereal and funny and tactical and beautiful, all at once. It was something to behold, every time.

"Stevie."

Oh, that was him, addressing her. He didn't know what he was going to say. He just wanted to be a part of the way she was.

Stevie slowed and let the girls and Karen get a few steps ahead. 

"I was thinking," he started.

"You?" Stevie deadpanned.

He smiled. "I know. Well, ah, I was thinking about some of the harmonies on 'Sara,' the way we've been doing them in rehearsals. I had a few tweaks I wanted to run by you." He had no idea what these tweaks were going to be. 

"Sure, of course." She was looking up at him expectantly. He loved that look--it meant there was more to come between them. 

"Well," he said, lowering his voice, "how about later?"

"Sure," she said again. But this was different, and she knew. 

She remained in step with him, and Lindsey settled back into a part of himself as though he was slipping on a comfortable jacket. This was touring. The ability to soften the edges of the real world. The moments with Stevie, spoken and unspoken, that let him pretend it was 1974 all over again. The touches and smiles and nudges and nights. 

But it was also this. The cold feeling of regret that sometimes came over him at the worst possible times. Now? Yes, it crept through again, insidious as the awful light jazz playing in the airport concourse. That knowledge that he could never truly have her, not in this year that had the nerve to not be 1974. The idea, even, that he shouldn't be here at all, that he should have retired and made himself a 24/7 family man, because wasn't that, on some level, what he'd always wanted?

Ah.

This was his tour self.

Conflicted and tired, electric and skeptical, elated and morose. He'd be watching her on stage, he'd be waiting for later. And sometimes later wouldn't come. Sometimes they'd just have to exist in the now, the unrelenting messiness of the present.

This was who he was.

3. New York City (JFK) en route to Paris (CDG), 2010

"Please come and join our family unit!"

That was Will, playing some make-believe scenario with the girls, who were delighted that their older brother would join them and add some complications to their game. Usually, Lindsey noted, this was the sort of thing that would embarrass Will, but the gate before a late-evening flight to another continent was a pretty anonymous place to be. 

"I don't want to join your family unit!" Stella insisted. "I want to get out. I want to go Elsewhere."

"Elsewhere? That's a lie," Will retorted. "You know you'll be released if you try to go Elsewhere."

"No!" said Leelee, seeming genuinely upset at the situation. "Don't get released, Stella! Do not!"

Lindsey leaned over to Kristen. "Uh, do you know what they're playing?"

"The Giver," Kristen whispered. "It's from a book that Linda read them last week. The girls were pretty shaken by it, but they seem to be feeling better about it now."

It was a long layover and after a while he pulled Will from the game and took him down the concourse for some hot tea. Lindsey asked his son if he was excited for the trip, and Will, naturally, said yes. It was their first big family vacation after the end of the tour; it was the trip that was meant to glue them all back together. 

"So you've all been doing well?" Lindsey asked when they were seated at a small table inside a coffee shop. 

"No, Dad, we're all doing awful and we lied to you the whole time you were gone." Will was already reaching expert levels of pre-teen sarcasm.

"Good to know." Lindsey chuckled.

"How are you doing, Dad?" Will asked.

He thought for half a second about telling him even a small part of it, that maybe the unreality of the airport at night would be a small buffer for the strangeness of the story he could recount to his son. But there was no part of it that he could extricate from being with Stevie. All of it -- the hotel room beyond time and space, the visit to his old house, the suddenly appearing memories -- were wrapped up in his history, and his present, with Stevie.

Well, he was using present loosely. She had floated away again, and was starting to work on a new album with Dave Stewart. Sometimes he wanted to call her and ask, did all of that just happen? But they both needed space from it, probably.

"I'm... well, I'm sixty." The sentence felt strange coming out of his mouth. "And there's no handbook for how to keep doing my job at my age. So I'm just stumbling along and trying to figure it out."

Will nodded like he understood. Maybe he was an old soul, as Stevie liked to say. 

***

The truth about how he was doing is that somewhere along the way, his heart had started the quiet process of continuously breaking. The soft buzz of heartbreak was like the ringing in his ears, in that sometimes it could be ignored and sometimes it called attention to itself. 

With Will back at the gate with his mother and sisters, and with an hour to go before their nighttime flight to Paris, Lindsey wandered into one of those little airport bookstores that featured mostly thrillers and business books among the neck pillows and earplugs. He went to a farther corner of the store where paperbacks and hardbacks were squeezed into a narrow shelf, and a particular spine caught his eye. And The Heart Says Whatever, by Emily Gould. He picked up the book, and bought it.

When Kristen eyed the book as they were boarding, Lindsey couldn't be sure if she remembered the lyric, or if she was just wondering why he was reading an essay collection with flowers on the cover. I'm trying to read more, he imagined his part of the conversation going. He really was, though. He had finally picked up another copy of Cloud Atlas to replace the one that had gotten lost on tour, and he'd finished it, though he hadn't yet been able to process the experience. Anyway, Kristen wasn't asking about the book. Kristen was making sure they got the right seats.

As they settled in first class, Kristen popped an Ativan and tapped the book cover with a red fingernail. "Babe," she said, "are you really going to try to read? Come on, just sleep."

He knew he wouldn't, though.

He stared at the cover during takeoff, repeating the lyrics to the song in his head. I am just one small part of forever, she'd sung.

Small, ha.

The longer they were apart, the more outsized her legend grew.

The more he wished they could meet again, in a place beyond time and space and reality. 

And every day, the heart broke, just a little bit. 

Chapter Text

There were still a lot of things for Stevie to figure out.

First, whether it was even vaguely on Lindsey's mind that he'd threatened to quit the tour.

Second, whether it meant anything to him, beyond this one moment, that he was touching her hand right now.

Third, why Lindsey's old house was literally in flames in front of them, while there was no effect from the smoke at all. Not a stinging eye or itching nose. Above them, the sky still displayed a deep California blue, as though nothing out of the ordinary was happening. She and Lindsey stood in the street, waiting. Wondering. 

Fourth, whether not-Anne Heche actually had a way for them out of this void, or if she was tricking them to get them stuck here. 

And then Lindsey's finger rubbed against hers—his fucking ring finger, dammit—and she considered that the worse fate would be for just Lindsey to get out, leaving her to stay here making awkward small talk with Anne for all of eternity. 

That absolutely could not happen.

"Anne," Stevie said through gritted teeth. "We don't seem to be going back to our normal dimension of space and time."

"Just wait, just wait," Anne said, a little too breathlessly for Stevie's comfort. 

Lindsey gripped Stevie's finger harder, and Stevie held his hand in response. He was warmth, he was comfort, he was home. "I don't like watching this," Lindsey whispered to her. "Though I'm infinitely curious what's going to happen when the house is gone. I'm thinking probably another of my old houses is going to pop up in its place."

"Very possible," Stevie said. Then she heard herself blurt out, "Linds. Don't quit the tour. I mean, if we can get back to the tour, you need to come with us for the rest of it. We can't do it without you."

"I'm not quitting." He took his hand from Stevie's and raked it through his short hair. Both he and Stevie watched as Anne paced around, appearing to need to look at the house fire from a different angle. "If we make it back, I'll be there with you. I promise. We'll carry on just like we have been."

Carry on. That was one way to put it. Lindsey was always one to consider his words carefully, so Stevie tried to wrap herself around his phrasing. For them to carry on like they had been... that meant for them to fuck from city to city, never changing. He was her home, but she was quite sure she wasn't his. That's how they carried on, with her throwing her whole self at him, and him compartmentalized. 

A few yards away, Anne kicked the brick-encased mailbox with one of her Doc Martens. "This should work," she muttered. "This is supposed to work."

Stevie glanced at Lindsey. "If we make it back," she said pointedly.

Lindsey shook his head, his expression unreadable. "Uh huh."

“We should see each other during the tour break.” The words tumbled out of Stevie’s mouth. “You could come over, or we could get a hotel, you know. We’ve been through so much together. We need to process this.”

"I really can't think about that right now, Stevie." Lindsey gestured around—to the burning house, to their inexplicable environment, and, if only slightly, to her. She remembered how he'd looked when she'd first found him in the void, sitting on the couch and strumming a guitar. So calm and cool, a musician in his natural habitat. 

Then she'd arrived and messed everything up.

He began ambling down the street, and Stevie tentatively fell in step beside him. Lindsey, to his credit, didn't try to shoo her off. 

"If you walk away," Anne said, "you're not going to get very far." This wasn't spoken as a threat, but just a matter of fact. It didn't seem to faze Lindsey, who continued to walk. 

Stevie usually enjoyed their silences. They’d known each other for so much of their lives that spoken communication wasn’t always required. But sometimes she was too aware of the time and pain and wanting that lived in those spaces of silence.

They were walking down the street, and Lindsey seemed to be taking in the other houses, remembering them from decades gone by. They encountered no cars, no people, no birds, nothing.

Stevie was tired of the lack of a nice southern California breeze. The air was completely still.

“You know you left your phone at the hotel,” Stevie said, keeping her voice quiet, as though trying not to disturb this strange world.

“It seemed like the safest place for it,” Lindsey said.

“Someone was texting you,” Stevie said. “I just, you know, happened to see it.”

“Hm.” He looked at her knowingly. Then he tapped against the bottom right side of his leather jacket. “Look what I did bring, though.” From the inside pocket of his jacket, he produced the paperback book he’d been reading on the plane. Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell.

“You’re never going to finish that,” Stevie teased.

“Hey now,” Lindsey said, “I don’t see you trying to read contemporary fiction. And besides, it’s just a dense book.”

A rumbling from behind. And then, a breeze, even if it was artificial. Anne pulled up beside them in a red BMW convertible.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Anne said, “but we’re going to have to do a little more manipulation to get you two out of here.”

"If you'd kept walking, Lindsey, you would have wound up back at your house," Anne called over the noise of the car. She was speeding down the residential streets, the top down, and Stevie and Lindsey in the backseat. Stevie wasn't even sure how they'd joined hands this time, whether it was she who'd grabbed Lindsey's hand, or if Lindsey had helped her into the backseat and just hadn't let go. She wanted to lean into him more, to wrap herself up in that stupid leather jacket. 

"How's that even work, Anne? And where are we going in this car? Is this a Back to the Future-type thing?" Lindsey's voice had a sharpness to it.

"Nothing's working here," Anne replied. "That's the problem. I think timelines are crossing." Anne suddenly halted the car in the middle of the road. "Stevie."

"What?" Stevie dug her fingers into Lindsey's palm.

"Your timelines," Anne said. "They're the problem."

"What did I do?" Stevie tried to smooth her hair. She hated riding in convertibles. "I was touring, and things started getting strange in Nashville, but Lindsey was the one who wound up here—"

"Nashville," Anne interjected. "You broke something to do with the timeline in Nashville."

"What? How?"

"Not in this timeline," Anne said. "In 2023."

Anne put her foot to the gas again and the car sped off. Stevie caught Lindsey looking at her. 2023. What would that year be like? Who would they be in that time?

"That's a made-up-sounding year," Stevie tried to joke.

"Nevertheless," Anne said over the engine, "I think I'm going to have to send you there."

Stevie was about to protest this, and then Anne turned on a street that she hadn't thought about in ages. N. Orange Grove. Seeing the street sign was a jolt to her heart. This was the street she and Lindsey had lived on when they'd first moved to Los Angeles.

Lindsey knew it too. He turned to her, and he held onto her hand a little tighter. The street was beautiful, dotted with small houses and garden apartments and so many trees. It looked just like the early 70s, and Stevie didn't want to know if they were traveling through time again. She didn't want to know. She just wanted to be here with Lindsey, the way they used to be, so hopeful and buzzing with energy and never imagining they were running out of time. Lindsey, so beautiful and determined. Oh, and so stoned. Always. 

She smiled at him, this clear-eyed Lindsey who was going to turn sixty soon. And she'd told herself that she hadn't thought of this place but, no, she had. Every time she'd contemplated the what-ifs, the meandering lines from the 70s to now, the melodies of their lives and the harmonies that lurked beneath, she'd grounded her thoughts here on this street. In the building that their convertible was pulling up to.

"Oh wow," Lindsey breathed.

"I know," Stevie said. "Uh, Anne, we're staying here, right?"

"Maybe Lindsey is," Anne said. "But, like I said, you're going to need to go to the future."

The chairs and couches in the living room were worn-in and smelled strongly of smoke. There were beer bottles and ashtrays strewn about. A Los Angeles Times from 1972 on the floor. Everything was just as it had been back then. As Stevie moved from the old green couch to the floral easy chair, she thought that if she could fall asleep here, surely she'd wake up as herself from the early 70s.

Across the room, though, Lindsey was noisily arguing with Anne. "You're not supposed to get into a situation where you could meet yourself from a different time!" Lindsey said. "That's basically the first rule of time travel."

"We don't really have a choice," Anne said. "She doesn't necessarily have to talk to herself. But she needs to get in touch in some way. That connection hopefully will repair the timeline." Anne crossed her arms and Stevie was no longer sure that Anne was simply a manifestation of Lindsey's thoughts. She seemed to be her own entity, a creature from beyond time. There was both a wildness and a sureness in her eyes that Stevie wasn't sure she liked.

But Stevie didn't know what to do besides trust her.

"I'll do it." She hopped up from the chair. "I'll write myself a note. Do you think that'll work?"

"I can't promise anything, but it's a good idea," Anne said.

"Who are you?" Stevie stood in front of Anne. "What do you know about me in 2023?"

Anne shook her head. "I can't tell you much. I'm sending you to Nashville, in 2023, where you've arrived for a tour date. Okay?"

Stevie walked into the kitchen and took a seat at the tiny, crooked-legged table. Everything seemed so much smaller than it had back then, when the world itself had been large and terrifying in its ability to give and to take. She found a pad of paper and a pen, and she considered what to write. 

"Hey."

Stevie looked up. It was Lindsey.

"Take this." He produced the paperback book from his jacket pocket. "You can put your note in it. I bet 2023 you will remember."

"Remember how you had it with you since the start of the tour and never finished it."

Lindsey put up his hands in a shrug and smiled. "Exactly."

He leaned against the doorframe, and he looked around the kitchen, and tears appeared at the corners of his eyes. "This place, huh?"

"It was everything." Stevie looked down at the blank paper. "It was me, and you, and Richard, and just trying to be who we are."

"I'm sorry I always made you cook." Lindsey sniffed. "You know, I still can't cook."

"If I handed you a box of Hamburger Helper, I think you'd be smart enough to figure it out."

"I immediately become clumsy when I get in a kitchen," Lindsey said. "You never see that side of me."

"Well." Stevie looked up. "Sometimes I wish I did."

Stevie had written a note to herself and tucked it inside Lindsey's book. "Anne? I'm ready," she called out.

"Oh, good." Anne was by the front door, peering into the coat closet. "I don't think you'll have much time."

Lindsey posed the question that Stevie had been trying not to ask. "There's a way back from the future," he said. "Right? She'll know the way back? We need her to come back."

Stevie turned and smiled at him. "You know I'll come back."

"Exactly!" Anne seemed flustered. "Stevie, you have good instincts. I think you'll know. I think... maybe... when you make contact with yourself... I think it could happen on its own. Automatically."

"Fuck," Stevie whispered as Anne led her to the bedroom closet. It was as she'd feared—the closet wasn't a repository for her long skirts and dresses from 1972. It was another void. 

Her heart pounded. 

Lindsey was right behind Anne. He looked into Stevie's eyes, pursed his lips together as though kissing her softly. And Stevie knew she'd see him again. Because she had to.

"Okay, Stevie?" Anne said. Sweat dripped from beneath her choppy bangs.

Stevie clutched the book and glared at Anne. "Who are you?" she asked again.

"I'm the beginning and end of everything," Anne said simply.

And then Stevie was gone.

A moment later, she found herself in darkness—but not the deep-nothing darkness of the void. She was outside, on an expansive lawn, at night. Her black tunic and leggings were instantly too warm. But that was okay. She knew she had landed in a real place, a real Nashville, a place with trees that moved in the breeze, a place with humanity. 

There was, about two hundred feet away, a huge house.

She moved toward it, her shoes and feet dampening from the dew on the grass. She became aware that she was still clutching the book, and a wave of relief came over her. Everything was going to plan. 

If she was here, Stevie reasoned, then her future self must be nearby.

She didn't have a plan, though, beyond tense hope, as to what she'd do if she ran into herself.

She kept going.

A tour stop, in Nashville, in 2023, she repeated to herself as she walked. So far, 2023 could easily pass for 2009 or just about any other year. She approached the house, a sprawling ranch with gentle orange lights that seemed to be guiding her to the front porch.

She didn't, however, think she could knock on the front door. 

There were cars out front that she didn't recognize. There was a glimpse of a beautifully decorated interior, sleek and cozy all at once. And somewhere in the distance, there were voices. Stevie suspected she knew where she was. 

She made herself as small and unassuming as possible, and crept along the perimeter of the house. The voices came clearer.

She knew it—Sheryl! That lovely, lithe voice of hers, bright and reassuring. And then, in response, Karen. She'd know her voice anywhere. 

And then she heard a familiar gravelly laugh. Her own.

Stevie felt her blood freeze. She couldn't risk taking even one step closer. She began slowly returning to the front of the house, all the while wishing that she could sit with Sheryl and Karen in 2023 and ask them questions.

Do you know why I broke the timelines? Do you know why I started glitching in time? Why I wound up in the hotel room at the end of the universe? Do you know what it all meant? Do you know if Lindsey and I are okay now? Do you know, do you know, do you?

She wasn't meant to know right now.

She was only meant to get in contact with herself.

Stevie figured she would toss the book on the porch and then try to wait as long as she could to be sure that her 2023 self picked it up. (2023! She finally took a moment to do the math and figure out how old she was. And still touring! Anne hadn't specified whether it was her solo show or with the band, so she could only speculate.) She made her way back, her shoes soft and quiet in the wet grass. 

As she reached the front of the house, though, she wasn't alone.

A dark figure approached the front porch from the opposite direction, crunching through the loose stone walkway. As the figure got closer, Stevie realized it was a silhouette she knew very well.

Lindsey.

From 2023. 

His hair was grayer and more wiry, and he wore it strangely, a little too long and spiky. But that was okay. He was still Lindsey. He had the same leather jacket and jeans as always, those same long legs, that same kind and wondering face that could crinkle into a smirk or a smile. 

And.

She had been looking at him too long.

"Stevie?" came his voice. 

Every muscle tensed. Her eyes fluttered closed and then open again. He was just a few yards from her.

"Stop," she whispered. "You shouldn't talk to me. You shouldn't even be seeing me."

"Stevie, what do you—" He was coming closer. 

"STOP!" she yelled. She could see him fully now, his wrinkles, his blue eyes, his concern. His surprise upon recognizing that she wasn't the Stevie he'd expected. "You'll fuck up the timelines, Lindsey! We can't risk that!"

Lindsey took in a quick breath. His face looked haunted. And then he turned and rushed off from the way he'd come.

She watched his car drive away. And Stevie, her hands and arms shaking, flung the book toward the porch. 

She wasn't sure how she got back.

Back, in this case, was to the place far less real than future Nashville. Stevie emerged, sweaty and shaking, from the bedroom closet, and when she shut the door behind her, there were suddenly clothes there. Her 1970s clothes, though she couldn't risk taking even a moment to look at them.

"Lindsey? Anne?" she called out from the bedroom. "Did I fix it? Or are things worse than ever?"

"Uh, I'm not really sure." It was Lindsey's voice, from the kitchen. Stevie wound her way there, and found Lindsey sitting at the kitchen table, looking fine and normal. Maybe better than ever. He smiled and shook his head at her with relief. "I knew you could do it," he said, but his voice wobbled.

Stevie wiped at her face and a smear of her gray-black eye makeup came off on her hand. She knew most of her makeup had been sweated or smeared off at this point, and she was sure she looked small and haunted and every bit of her sixty-one years. 

But Lindsey knew what she needed. He got up from the table, and he embraced her, and there she was with her face buried in that jacket, in that t-shirt, in that chest, in that shoulder. Again. Just like earlier that day and the night before. Just like she would be again. He smelled like old sweat, but she didn't care. It was him, it was all him. He pressed his lips to the top of her head, and then brushed them against her forehead. 

And then Stevie put her hands on the back of Lindsey's neck and guided him down to her. He kissed her, seemingly instinctively, his lips slow, trusting, tired. Stevie parted her lips and moved against him, and she was warm all over. 

She knew there was truly no sense in trying to stay in the void forever.

And yet. Here, they could just be themselves. Here, they could remember that beautiful, bursting potential of being in their 20s. Here, there was no tour, no contract, no Kristen.

It was a ridiculous thought, Stevie knew, her fingers grazing over Lindsey's hair, her lips on his, her heart warm and safe. But, still, the thought was hers.

"Hello?" came a voice.

They broke apart.

"Is that... Anne?" Stevie took her hands off Lindsey's neck.

"I meant to tell you," Lindsey said, "while you were gone, Anne went into the coat closet and didn't come back out."

Stevie took in this information as she crept out of the kitchen to follow the voice.

It was as Stevie had suspected—it wasn't Anne at all.

"I heard you'd been trying to call me." Her voice was sunny. "Well, here I am!"

Robin.

Her long-dead best friend. 

Stevie had nearly forgotten how Robin looked—how she moved, how she folded her arms, how her hair hung. This suddenly-appeared version of Robin was straight out of the late 70s, before she got sick. Stick-straight blonde hair and a long blue sundress. Her smile, as always, was infectious.

Stevie had no idea what to do. She heard herself say Robin's name, maybe a couple of times, as though making sure she was there. And then Stevie rushed toward her and held out her arms.

Robin put out a hand. "You can't hug a ghost, silly girl."

Dazed, Stevie took a seat on the sunken green couch. Robin sat across from her on the floral easy chair. And then Lindsey came in, having heard the commotion, and took the place beside Stevie on the couch. 

"You can see her, right?" Stevie asked quietly.

Lindsey nodded and squeezed Stevie's knee. 

"Well, well, Lindsey Buckingham, how completely unsurprised I am to see you here," Robin said, smiling warmly. "How long has this whole thing been on-again, off-again?"

"Ah, well, I'm actually married, Robin."

Robin started laughing. "You're a delightful liar."

Stevie could feel Lindsey's embarrassment. Plus, she noted, he hadn't stopped holding on to her knee. Lindsey laughed uncomfortably and looked down at his boots. "Okay, Robin. I feel like... I feel like we shouldn't be here. Like none of us should be here at all. Did you bump into Anne?"

"Who?"

"Never mind."

"But, yes, you're right," Robin said, "I probably shouldn't be here at all. It's not great for someone in my state to come to an in-between place like this."

Stevie arms and hands and fingers shook. It was Robin, sitting in front of her, talking and moving and seemingly breathing like a human. "I miss you," Stevie stammered out. "Robin, I miss you so much." She felt like she was in a dream, one of those strange, watery ones where a person wants to do more than they actually can. She wanted to tell Robin everything about her family and the world. But the words wouldn't come.

"Oh, sweet girl, I miss you too," Robin said. "You must have been trying to call me for a reason. Can you tell me?"

"I just wanted to hear your voice." It was simple, but it was also the truest thing Stevie could think of.

Just then, there was a strange noise surrounding the house. Stevie thought that one of their ancient kitchen appliances must have turned on. But, no, the sound was from outside. It was wind. It was rain.

"That doesn't seem right," Lindsey said. 

"Oh lord." Robin put a hand to her face. "You guys need to get out of here. We all do, but you two more than me."

"We've been trying!" Stevie said. "But I think I broke something in the future."

"If it was truly all broken, I wouldn't have been able to come and see you." Robin smiled. "Maybe things just aren't quite back in place yet."

A huge crack of thunder sounded over the tiny apartment.

"Shit!" screamed Robin. Stevie and Lindsey jumped up from the couch. Robin rushed in circles around the living room (Stevie thought she looked quite human and therefore huggable, but she didn't dare try). Eventually her small hand pointed to a rickety table by the front door. "Lindsey. Are those the keys to that car out there?"

"The convertible that's getting soaked? Yeah, pretty sure."

"Take them. Drive. Go as fast as you can, as far as you can. Go to the absolute limit. Okay? You'll break out of this place."

Stevie watched Robin's small face behind the window get further and further away as Lindsey pulled the convertible out of the driveway and onto the street. She waved, but she wasn't sure if Robin could see. Her heart clenched in her chest at the blurry sight of sweet thirty-year-old Robin, a ghost of some capacity, and a reminder to Stevie that she truly could never go back. Lindsey had put the roof up on the BMW convertible, but the rain pounded on the car, leaking in around the windows. 

"Fucking hell," Lindsey muttered, putting the car into gear and gradually going faster. "What are we doing?"

"I came here for you." Stevie's voice came out gruffly.

"What?"

"You heard me. You're the one who got us into this mess. I came here after you, to help you."

"Well." Lindsey gunned the engine and turned off North Orange Grove. "Maybe if you hadn't been here... maybe if there hadn't been all this shit with time, it would have been a lot easier for me to get back."

"You don't know that."

"I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm very realistic about time, Stevie." His voice went up, and at the same time the rain started to pelt at them sideways.

"What do you mean by that?" Stevie said.

"I mean that I knew what I wanted!" he called over the rain. "And I knew that to get it, I needed to move forward!"

Lindsey careened the car around a corner, hydroplaning through a pool of rainwater as he did. Stevie hung on to the leather handle on the passenger side door, gripping it until her knuckles turned red. 

The speedometer ticked upward. Lindsey had found a straight road and was flooring the gas. Stevie didn't think she had ever gone so fast in a car before. She watched his face, mired in panic and focus. The cool, calm Lindsey from the old apartment was gone.

"Moving forward," Stevie continued, "always meant some compromise about us. It meant leaving the band, it meant leaving—"

"You?" Lindsey wiped sweat off his cheek. 

"Yes!" Stevie shouted over the noise of the car, of the rain. "Because you knew, because you've always known, that there's something between us. That there will forever be something between us."

"You were never ready to commit!" 

"I've come to the end of the time for you!" Stevie yelled. "Isn't that enough?"

Lindsey fumed as he drove faster, faster, faster still. The rain tore on, and another clap of thunder sounded near them. They were zooming down Santa Monica Boulevard, Stevie realized, and yet with the weather and the speed, she couldn't pick out a single landmark. Was it still 1972 here? Was it 1983 again, or 1994? The years were a circle. Time was everywhere at once. The whole of the forty-plus years she had known Lindsey Buckingham seemed to all be sitting there in the car with them, waiting for them to understand reality. 

"It's enough!" Lindsey shouted back. "It's also... just not possible!"

"What isn't?"

"Any of this!"

Stevie could sense they were heading west, which meant eventually they'd run into the end of this street. The street would connect with Ocean Avenue. They'd be at the Pacific.

"I'm not leaving my wife," he said. The rain let up slightly. "Do you understand? I'm not leaving her."

He swerved around another corner. 

Stevie watched sweat drip down the side of his face. She clutched the door handle tighter. They must have been going 70 or 80 miles per hour down this empty road. 

"Never?" Stevie heard herself ask, her voice sounding like it was trapped under something heavy.

"No." Lindsey's face was tight. "Never. This is who we are."

"Lindsey, are you sure."

"Yes!" He smacked his hand against the steering wheel. "This is who we are!"

Lindsey floored the gas again, and he missed how the road curved, and he barely hung on to the car. The engine sputtered in anger. The rain restarted its downpour. And Lindsey looked at her, straight into her face, and both their eyes were wet, and for the first time in a long time, Stevie knew that, in this moment, she was Lindsey's home. 

She was also very aware that they were nowhere.

And then the thunder clapped again, and blackness descended. 

The next thing Stevie knew, she was picking herself off the floor of Lindsey's hotel room.

A thin sheen of sweat lay on here face and body.

The rain was gone, replaced by the thin hum of climate-controlled air. 

"Linds," she murmured.

"I'm here," Lindsey whispered.

He was sitting slumped over on the bed, where he'd finally taken off his leather jacket. He was texting his wife. Click click click. Stevie was able to see the message from her vantage point on the floor. 

I'm here, it said. Love you, babe. Good night. 

She remembered from the future that Lindsey would get old. She knew that she would, too. Stevie remembered those ten minutes of being in the future, and that while she'd been scared, there'd also been a feeling of reassurance, of a strange sort of home. It was a fact on which she could hang years of her life: in 2023, she and Lindsey would be in the same place.

But right now, the future felt like the past, and she hoped that what she had done in the past to help herself in the future was actually going to work.

Stevie's head hurt.

Of course, being on a plane didn't help. The band and entourage had all rushed to the airport to be sure their flight schedule wasn't too thrown off, and now they were somewhere between Nashville and New Orleans, the plane quiet and dark, the tour back in motion. Karen was sitting across from Stevie, snoring politely.

Stevie knew who else was still awake.

She got up from her seat and walked a few rows over to him, where he sat with his iPhone out and his headphones on. Stevie was able to get a glance at the screen. He was playing a Thin Lizzy song, but he paused it when her shadow crossed in front of him.

"Stevie," he whispered.

"Can I sit?"

"Of course."

"Are you getting them? The memories?"

He took his headphones off. "Yeah."

Stevie ran her hands through her hair, as though that would help with the incoming memories. Strange scraps from the 70s, about being in Nashville again and again. Looping through time and trying to figure out how and why. 

"I think," she said, "the timeline's not quite fixed yet."

Lindsey nodded. "We'll get there. We made it here, together. I'm so fucking glad we're out of Nashville."

"Oh god." Stevie couldn't help but laugh. "Me too."

He took her hand, wove himself around her with his long fingers. He leaned in to her, and Stevie felt that familiar warmth, and they ducked their heads just below the seatbacks and she let him kiss her. Just once, on the forehead, but she understood. They were in time and space together, hurtling toward some unknown forever, the two of them on a tether between history and the future. 

"I won't let you go," he said.

"Never?" Stevie asked.

"Never," Lindsey said.

This, Stevie reminded herself, was who they were. 

Chapter Text

May 21, 1977

When Stevie came to, she was backstage at the Nashville Municipal Auditorium, on the sunken green couch in the prep room that she'd come to know so well. J.C. and Mick were hunkering over her, J.C. blowing his cigarette smoke directly into her face. 

Stevie coughed. “What time is it?” she insisted.

“Glad you’re alive, Stevie.” Mick put a hand on her shoulder. “Uhh, it’s nine-fifteen. We’ve got a medical team on the way, okay?”

“What? No!” Stevie attempted to sit up. “We’ve got to finish the show!”

These words were coming to her out of instinct, out of a bone-deep need to be here, now, making music and being situated in time. Her vision refocused, her breaths got deeper, and she was finally able to see Lindsey and Chris and John pacing around the same room.

“Stevie, we’ve already called it off.” A hint of acid hung in Christine’s usual warm voice. 

“How many songs did we get through?”

“Who fucking cares,” John mumbled. 

With a long sigh of what Stevie hoped was relief, Lindsey sat on the other end of the couch. “We were into the third song of the set,” he said. “Your song. I know you want to give the fans a good show, Stevie. We all do. But we need to be sure you’re able to get through it.” He leaned over, almost to where he could put his chin on her platform boots. It looked uncomfortable. “We’ll come back. You know we will.”

Stevie’s breath caught in her throat. We’ll come back. Yes, well, she had been through here countless times already. The thought of somehow being done with Nashville until the whole band looped back through here for a different tour date, a different month—it was enough to practically make her levitate back to the stage.

“Don’t make any sudden moves, Stevie,” Mick said. “We can’t have you running around with a concussion.”

Did her head hurt? Did it matter? She touched the top of her head and felt a place where a bruise might form. It didn’t seem to be worse than that, but if she was actually going to stay in time this time, then she supposed that Mick had a point.

Lindsey was looking steadily at her, and she looked right back. He cracked a small smile, and his cheeks were flushed, and she knew he’d been worried about her. God, the way they all had just watched her fall over on stage while singing "Dreams"—her own face ran pink with embarrassment. 

"Lie back down, Stevie. Please," Lindsey said. "I need you to be okay."

Stevie lay back on the couch again, and she became aware that everyone was watching her, and that a cloud of commotion still hummed in the distance where the fans were leaving the auditorium, and then a minute later there were two EMTs taking her vitals and asking her questions.

She felt Lindsey's hand take hers—really, just her fingers—for a moment, and she recalled that Lindsey was also looping through time, that there were various Lindseys in various times right now, and something about this was endlessly calming. It calmed her as she realized she needed to tell him (again) about her time loop. It calmed her as she wondered if he was the key to getting time straightened out again. And it calmed her as the scene in front of her began to fade away, yet again.

May 20, 1977 - again

Stevie sat up in bed. Ran her hands down the silky floral dress she had never intended to know so well. Felt for a tender spot on her head, and of course, there wasn't one.

Still, her prevailing thoughts were of the fuck fuck fuck variety, because so many things about the last loop had seemed so promising. Well, devastating, but also promising.

She forced herself out of the hotel bed and took in a deep breath.

The afternoon and the loop were fresh. She could try again. She could do anything she wanted. 

And, ah, the familiar call from out in the hallway: "Come out, come out, wherever you are!"

Stevie poked her head out of the door. "I'm just going to order something to the room," she said to Mick, maybe a little too pointedly, but who cared. She went toward the phone—she really was hungry—but then she had a thought. An urge greater than hunger, to do anything to get herself out of this loop.

When she heard the commotion of others in the hall, she went back out. Lindsey, Kenny, and Carol Ann were all heading toward the elevator. "Wait!" she said. "Kenny. I need to talk to you."

Lindsey was the first to turn around, and he regarded Stevie quizzically. Then Kenny turned around, scratching his beard. "But I was looking forward to the Hawaiian barbecue," he said.

"It's not Hawaiian, trust me," Stevie replied. 

"How would you know?" Carol Ann snapped.

"Oh Carol," Stevie said. "I forgot you were here."

It was true, Stevie really had. But every time Carol faced her, as she was doing now, it reminded Stevie of how much space she took up in Carol's head. Carol was wearing a white top and a long floral skirt that wasn't too unlike Stevie's dress. Carol's hair was naturally blonde and straight, and right now it had the look of having been in a minor fight with a curling iron. She was gripping Lindsey's forearm, so tightly that Stevie thought she could see the strain in Carol's hands and face. Stevie didn't know if or how she could use any of this to her advantage, except to affirm that the Lindsey standing here right now was not the time-looping Lindsey, not the Lindsey she had briefly married. This Lindsey was tinged with hostility toward her, which at this point Stevie had learned to be okay with. 

Carol Ann patted Lindsey's arm and said. "Come on, baby, I'm hungry."

"Yeah, me too." Lindsey regarded both Carol and Stevie with an odd sort of curiosity, as though he wasn't sure how he had come to be in this position. 

"Kenny?" Stevie said.

"Yeah, I'll hang back here for a minute," Kenny said. "You two go on, Carol Ann and Lindsey."

Stevie ordered the club sandwich from room service that she had gotten at least ten times. Kenny had a burger, and they split a bottle of white wine. Stevie asked Kenny about how his solo record had come to be, and confided how she dreamed of making a solo album, and then, when she was sure Kenny was comfortably tipsy, hit him with the time loop confession yet again.

"Oh no, oh no." Kenny put down his wine glass. "Not you too. But also, wow, you too, Stevie. I thought I was the only one."

"Lindsey, too," Stevie said, the name nearly getting caught in the back of her throat. She took another gulp of wine. "I mean, I think he's still looping. We only crossed once."

"Crossing timelines while looping is probably pretty rare," Kenny said. "I mean, what do I know, I'm just a guy who got stuck once. But it feels like... it feels like that's one of those things that statistically just doesn't happen."

"I don't know." Stevie hopped up from where she'd been sitting on the corner of the bed in her hotel room. "I don't know anymore. I've tried so many things to get out of this loop, I've talked to you so many times, Kenny, and no matter what I do, I just wind up deeper into this. Now I'm getting strange headaches and passing out onstage, and now Lindsey's stuck in this whole thing, too. It feels like I'm destined to stay here forever." She walked by the window and ran her hands across the drapes she knew so well. "Stuck in Nashville. You know my birthday's in just a few days? But I guess I'm always going to be twenty-eight years old."

"Stevie, you can't talk like that. It's not hopeless," Kenny said. "Nothing ever is. I don't know what to tell you. I guess I haven't given very good advice to you before, or you wouldn't be here again. Maybe you just have to let go a little."

"Let go."

"Yeah. Stop holding on so tight to having to get unstuck."

Stevie let out a long sigh. She didn't feel like capitulating. She handed the second bottle of white wine to Kenny to open with the corkscrew and then poured herself a rather generous glass. "I'll try." She stood by the window, sipping from the glass. 

The limo seemed to roar under Stevie's feet, as though she was trying to tame a lion along these Nashville streets. But she was driving a car. Or attempting to. 

She hadn't driven in years, not since she'd accidentally wrecked Keith's car five years ago. That had been a stick shift. This was an automatic, so how hard could it be? But the limo felt like it was as long as a bus, and it was powered by some sort of high-tech engine that meant a tiny tap of the gas made it nearly burn rubber.

"Shit!" She was turning wildly onto Third Avenue, and it was just blind luck that this wasn't a one-way street. Three cars behind her honked in unison as she cut them all off with the giant back end of the limo. 

"Sorry!" She opened the window to yell into the noisy air. "So sorry! So, so sorry!"

Stevie wasn't even sure where she was going. The moment of taking the limo had been one of pure instinct, of seeing the band's cars pull back into the hotel and flying downstairs to meet them, then asking Dwayne to distract one of the drivers outside the car for just a minute. Dwayne had done as instructed, and Stevie had been able to slide in and start the car before anyone knew what was happening. 

She kept waiting for the other limo or for a police cruiser to turn up behind her, but so far there was nothing. 

She was on her own. 

She careened down Third Avenue, past office buildings and bars and restaurants and pedestrians. It was late evening and downtown was starting to wake up for the night. While checking to make sure her dress wasn't getting caught on any of the machinery (this was what had caused part of the previous mishap with Keith's car), she made an unplanned lane change. But since she didn't have a destination in mind, that was fine.

It was all fine.

She had to let go.

Stevie thought about being in Lindsey's car as they'd driven down from the bay to Los Angeles for the first time, the feeling that only one direction existed for them and they had found their way there. California state route 1, its curves and views, taking them to their destiny. Lindsey's hand had crept onto her thigh as he drove, and she'd shiver at his touch, knowing that he knew exactly what he was doing. They'd stop at the rest stops and make out, his hands feeling around under her dress, tempting her with the promise of what was to come later. Everything about that time had been so perfect, so brimming with possibility. 

They really had had it all. 

And now it was unclear where they even were. 

Third Street dead-ended at an intersection, so Stevie had no choice but to make a turn. A wide, messy turn onto the street that paralleled the river. Stevie found her way into the right lane, and then she heard it. 

She knew at once that the police siren was for her.

Nevertheless, Stevie hit the gas.

She drove a block, another block, and another, with the lights of Nashville all around her and the river glistening beside her, and the cop car's blue lights making everything just a little bit more beautiful. She would stop eventually, sure, but for now, it didn't matter. She was letting it all go.

"MA'AM!" A gruff voice crackled on the cop's speaker behind her. "YOU MUST STOP THE CAR."

Stevie kept going.

"YOU ARE AN IMPAIRED DRIVER. DO NOT KEEP GOING."

And then, a second voice. One much lighter and kinder. 

"Stevie!" It was Lindsey on the speaker now. Lindsey had ridden along in the cop's car. "You've got to pull over! Please!"

And Stevie tried to. But her foot mixed up on the gas and the brake as she tried to pull off to the right, and so, with a boost of power that was meant to be a hard stop, she launched herself and the limo straight into the Cumberland River.

May 20, 1977 - again

Her heart shook as she woke up.

The comfortable mattress, the floral dress, the light streaming through the room in that particular May 20th kind of way.

She was back.

She had died and she was back.

"Holy hell," Stevie whispered to herself. 

She braced for the usual yell from outside her door, Mick's call for dinner. 

RRRING!

Wait. 

The phone on the nightstand beside her bed rang with insistency. Stevie watched it vibrate with sound. RRRING RRRING!

The phone, as a rule, did not ring at this time of the day on May 20.

Stevie carefully picked it up. "Hello?"

"Miss Nicks?"

"Yes."

"This is the front desk. You have a message down here. Would you like someone to deliver it to your room?"

"No." Stevie sat straight up in bed. "No, I'd better come down there myself."

She grabbed her pocketbook and slipped on the woven sandals she wore to dinner on the days that she went to dinner. And then she rushed out the door, locked it, and took the first elevator down to the lobby. She recognized the usual desk clerk, who saw her coming, and perhaps concerned for her safety, waved her over. 

"Miss Nicks, we found this on the desk here, addressed to you," the clerk said. He was a tall man with a southern accent. "It must have come from a courier."

"I wasn't expecting anything, but thank you," Stevie said. The envelope had nothing on it but her name in ink. She ripped it open.

Dear Stevie,

Lindsey is the key to getting unstuck. You'll have to find him and balance your timelines. I know you can do this. I believe in you.

Love,

Stevie (2023)

The paper trembled in Stevie's hands, and the world felt so small, and so large, all at once. 

Chapter Text

May 20, 1977 - still 

Stevie dropped the note. And when she bent down to pick it up from the floor, she very nearly stayed there. 

"Miss?" came the voice of the desk clerk. She appreciated him not saying her name out loud. "Do you need some assistance?"

"No," Stevie whispered. 

Nashville buzzed around her in its familiar way, but she was an island unto herself. A perpetual 28-year-old with a note from herself, from the future. Any small voice inside her that asked her not to believe the note was quickly silenced. It was safer at this point to believe it than not. 

Lindsey is the key to getting unstuck.

Lindsey is the key to getting unstuck.

She repeated this to herself as she walked away, a mantra from herself, to herself.  

The problem with Lindsey was that the current version of him did not understand the urgency of the situation. 

Stevie intercepted the rest of the band and entourage as they were getting into the limos to head to the barbecue restaurant. Carol Ann and Lindsey were seemingly joined at the hip, their arms around each other's waists, and Carol's long blonde hair tangled up in Lindsey's brown curls. 

"Oh, Stevie, heyyy!" Lindsey slurred. "You coming to dinner with us? Mick wasn't sure where you were. There's a Hawaiian barbecue—"

"It's just Tennessee barbecue," Stevie snapped. "Try the pulled pork."

Carol looked at her oddly.

Stevie decided to get right to the point. She put her face perhaps too close to Lindsey's and said, "Look, I just need to know. Are you trapped in time?"

"What?" Lindsey laughed uncomfortably, though sincerely. "Stevie, your philosophical questions are interesting, but they're also getting in the way of our dinner."

She searched his face. Those steel blue eyes. She'd know if he was lying. 

Stevie pulled away from him and shook her head. "Okay. Well, I'll see you next time around." And, still clutching the note tightly in one fist, she turned to go back to the elevators.

"Wait, aren't you coming to dinner?" Lindsey called.

She didn't answer.

May 20, 1977 - again

"Okay, so, if I'm understanding all this... you've been looping through this day for a while now." Kenny took a swig of the Tennessee whiskey Stevie had ordered to the room. "You are basically invincible, but you're also stuck here indefinitely. And Lindsey also started looping somehow, but you can't find the version of Lindsey that's looping."

"Yes?" Stevie stared down into her paper cup of whiskey. She had forgotten to ask for actual glasses. "Yes." She took a sip. It was perfectly smooth. 

"Holy shit." Kenny shook his head. "You must be so tired of explaining this to me."

"I haven't tried to explain the Lindsey aspect of it to you before," Stevie said, "so thanks for listening. And honestly, I'm kind of perplexed by it myself—oh my god, did you hear that?"

"What?"

"My accent, Kenny! I have a fucking Tennessee accent now! When I said 'perplexed,' those are not the vowels I would have used back in California!"

"Perrr-playyyksed," Kenny attempted to drawl.

"Yes!" Stevie shouted. "I'm a southern girl now, Kenny. You're going to be shocked at how polite I am."

"Oh, I'm sure." Kenny grabbed the whiskey bottle and refilled Stevie's paper cup, then his own. "You'll get less and less polite the farther we get into this bottle. Now tell me what you're planning to do about this Lindsey problem."

"Lindsey's not a problem," Stevie said instinctively. "I mean... the problem is us. The problem is time." She emptied the cup before realizing she'd done it. Her tongue burned a little. "I have to find Lindsey in his loop, or I'll never get unstuck, and maybe he won't either." She had been pacing from one end of the hotel room to another, but at this point, she sat down on the edge of the bed. Was she in her room, or Kenny's? She looked around, found very little mess or luggage, and realized it was Kenny's room. "Maybe I can, like, set a trap for him."

"A Lindsey trap?" Kenny finished his whiskey as well and sat beside her. "What would that entail? Some new guitars?"

Stevie laughed. "Maybe. A jam session with Brian Wilson. A truckload of the best pot that's ever been grown. Oh, and me."

Kenny scratched at his beard. "How are you going to pull all this off, Stevie?"

She shook her head. "Just gotta keep trying, I guess." She held up the bottle. "More?"

"I better not."

Stevie took in a breath, leaned toward Kenny, and kissed him. Just to see. Just to test herself. 

"Whoa there," Kenny whispered into her mouth.

"What?" Kenny's beard was scratchy against her face.

"I just..." He laughed, embarrassed. "When I said we should do a duet someday, this isn't what I—"

"Okay." Stevie's face burned. She stood up, grabbed the whiskey bottle and her paper cup, and headed toward the door. "It's fine. I can do this on my own."

May 20, 1977 - again

"Stevie, you sound drunk," Lindsey said.

"Yeah!" Carol Ann said.

"Oh, fuck, Stevie, there's no reason to storm off," Lindsey called from the limo. "Why'd you ask me to come down here and go to a pool hall with you if you were just going to turn around and leave?"

"Fuck you both!" Stevie yelled. 

May 20, 1977 - again

Stevie had now dragged one of the bodyguards with her to the pool hall for six May 20ths in a row. Sometimes she could convince another of her bandmates to join, as well, though never Lindsey. On the sixth night, Christine came with her, and she marveled at Stevie's pool skills.

"Quite a mean shot!" Chris said from the other corner of the table, watching the striped ball hit the pocket. "Who taught you?"

Stevie grinned. In actuality, she'd gotten one of the grizzled old regulars, a portly guy who insisted his name was Junior, to help her improve her shot and show her how to look more strategically at the table.

"I learned through careful observation," she told Chris. 

She and Chris walked outside and Stevie stared up at the glaring neon sign for the Rhinestone Wedding Chapel. "Look at that," Stevie enthused. "Can't you imagine getting remarried in a place like that, Chris?"

"Not on your life," Chris replied. 

Stevie closed her eyes and saw the afterglow of the sign on her eyelids. She breathed deep as if in prayer. She would find him again. She would, she would.

May 20, 1977 - again

It was strange when things in the loop happened differently. It was a welcome change to the routine, and it was a little bit of hope. When she got a few extra minutes with the band at the show on May 21. When the note from her future self arrived, or sometimes didn't arrive. And even when she got a call from the other man she mostly forgot she was dating.

"Don?" Stevie checked the clock when she heard his voice. If she recalled—and she barely did—the last time he had called, officially, had been in the afternoon of May 20, before she fell asleep at the hotel and the time loop had started. For him to be calling again at 9:35 PM was an aberration. 

"Stevie! I know I called earlier, but I thought I'd tell you we had a change in the band's schedule."

"Oh... really?"

"Yeah, we're coming east sooner than we thought."

"Hm, great!" Stevie said. She was sitting on her bed, debating whether to order that bottle of Tennessee whiskey again. Hearing from Don made it an easier decision to just order it. 

"We should plan something. I mean, you should," Don went on. "We could have some sort of party with the bands. And then you and me... I was thinking we should do a joint press conference, or try to get a big interview with Rolling Stone or something."

"Yeah, maybe." And maybe in some other realm of time and space, she would have appreciated Don's shrewdness, his ability to see her as a girlfriend and as a publicity strategy. But not today. 

"I knew you'd like the idea," Don said.

"Look, well, call me when you know more about when our paths will cross." Stevie was thankful for the time loop, for once. "I'm going to get a cocktail."

May 20, 1977 - again

She tried to calculate how many times she had been through May 20 and 21, 1977. It was at least a hundred. Sometimes numbers and dates and sunsets and sunrises lost all meaning. Sometimes, they took on more meaning than they should. Sometimes she barely felt like herself, but rather a jumble of memory and heart and fear with no place to softly land. Sometimes she felt like she was too much herself, that she was perceived too acutely by the world.

But right now?

Right now, the disaster that was time and space wasn't fazing her.

Right now, she was correctly herself in every possible way.

Right now, it was sometime late at night on May 20, for the hundredth time, and she was in her hotel room in Nashville tangled up with Lindsey.

She had her hands on his ass as she pulled him deeper into her, and he had one of his hands meandering through her hair while he braced himself on the bed with the other. The only light on was the one in the bathroom, and so he was dim outlines, and he was the familiar feel of his body and his length, and he was the familiar sound of his groans as he tried to hold back his climax. 

"God, Stevie, you feel amazing," he said, his fingers dancing from her hair to her face.

"Give me that." She stuck out her tongue until he put his index finger on her lips for her to lick and suck. 

Lindsey laughed and pulled his finger away. "You can't do that. I'll come right away, baby."

She didn't tell him, but she herself nearly could have come at the sound of that word. Baby. Stevie let it linger in her head, and between her legs. There were years of history in that one little word. There was so much history between them, and sometimes Stevie felt like she was the only one carrying it. 

"Baby," she repeated.

Lindsey smiled. He lay both his hands on her shoulders, and he leaned down and kissed her, first gently, then harder, their mouths crashing together. For the moment, she believed absolutely everything about him. She believed in his hands and his tongue and his cock. She believed that he still loved her, that he would do anything for her, and she believed that somehow she'd be able to carry all five hundred feelings she had about him.

"Could you turn on the light?"

She was surprised to hear herself ask this so insistently.

"Sure." Lindsey reached over to the nightstand and flipped the switch on the lamp. And then he was leaning back down again, kissing her neck while she touched his face and hair. 

"Why isn't it always like this?" Stevie whispered.

"Like what?" 

"You know. Easy."

Lindsey rested his head on her shoulder. "When was the last time anything about this life was easy?" he asked. "It was never going to be easy, baby."

"Back when we lived together," Stevie said. "Back when it all made sense."

Lindsey shook his head. They'd had this conversation before, long before she'd gotten stuck in a time loop in Nashville, and to have it again would feel far more circular than she could stand at the moment. And clearly Lindsey didn't want to have it, either. They were, in a way, having the conversation just by being together, just by staring at each other. The lines they'd say and the feelings they'd have were already there.

He'd stopped moving inside her. They were lying there, still.

"What do you know about time?" Stevie whispered.

"What do you mean?" Lindsey said. 

"Like, your perception of it."

"Uhh." Lindsey drew himself out of her and rolled onto the other side of the bed. He studied her, more curious than annoyed. "Time. Okay. Well, it mostly goes forward, but sometimes it feels like it slows down, almost to the point of stopping. And sometimes you want it to slow down, but it won't. Like you're in a moment you know you're going to miss later, and you want to hold on to it."

Stevie nodded. She went to reach for the blanket to pull it up over herself, then realized she didn't care. 

She watched Lindsey's face, those kind eyes as they searched her. He didn't understand why she'd asked such a question. He didn't understand her growing desperation and the depth of her trap. 

Stevie leaned forward and touched his forearms, his shoulders, his neck. When she was younger, when they were still officially together, she liked to try to guess how many times she had kissed him up to that point, and how many times they had fucked. She had sat in their little apartment in Los Angeles and wondered how many kisses and fucks they still had yet to share, and she'd hoped it was so many that she wouldn't even be able to count. 

Stevie had loved their little life, as messy and desperate as it had been.

It couldn't all end here, she insisted to herself as she pulled Lindsey closer. They simply had too much of a history of it to all end like this, in a single, meaningless circle. 

"Don't cry, Steph," Lindsey whispered as he lay his body over hers again. "I'm here."

May 20, 1977 - again

He wasn't, though.

Stevie had gotten off (rather deliciously, she might add) and Lindsey had gotten off, and then he'd gone back to his hotel room and then it was the next day and they had prepared for the show, and Stevie found herself getting absolutely no extra time. Rather, she wound up fading out of the day as early as she ever had, right before she and Lindsey followed J.C. to the stage. 

And now she was back—back at the hotel, back in bed, back in her white floral dress, back on May 20.

She had made no progress. 

"Fuck!" She got out of the stupid bed, flung back the blankets, grabbed the first thing she could use as a projectile—in this case, a woven leather sandal—and flung it at the wall. "Fuck this day!" She went and got the shoe and threw it back at the wall. It made a satisfying mark on the wallpaper. "Fuck it! Fuck everything!" When she tossed the shoe again, it bounced off the wall and came to rest on the dresser. Stevie let it sit there as she crumpled to the floor. 

It wasn't supposed to be like this.

"Fuuuuuck!" She pounded on the stupid hotel carpet with her fists. The lack of sound from this pummeling was disconcerting. She wanted a racket. She wanted drama. 

"Uh, Stevie?"

It was Mick's voice, from the other side of the door.

Stevie went to the door and opened it. She knew her face was flushed, and that tears of frustration were on her cheeks. "Yes, Mick?"

Mick's mouth slanted in concern. "We're going to dinner, if you want to join."

"I know," Stevie said, "and I don't."

She shut the door. But she sat on the carpet between the door and the bathroom and listened as the rest of the band and entourage made their way toward the elevator. She opened the door again, just a tiny crack, so she could watch Lindsey and Carol Ann's backs as they walked away. Lindsey had his arm around Carol Ann's shoulders. They looked easy and casual, pleasant and normal. Once again, she suspected she was not in the presence of the Lindsey who was looping through time.

She missed him. She missed everyone. She missed who she used to be.

***

Stevie made some phone calls. Hearing her own voice was a way to come back to herself. She called Robin to see if she would come back to the tour soon ("I'll put you on the payroll!" Stevie said. "You can be my speech therapist!"). She called her parents and tried to remember anything that had come before Nashville, and found herself recounting things that may or may not have happened at their last tour stop in Oklahoma City. 

After she hung up, she thought of Don's strange call that had started sometimes coming at 9:35. Was she going to wait and see if it happened again tonight? No. She was going to take control, not that time seemed to care what she did. Before she could think too hard about it all, she had looked up Don's home number and dialed. 

"Do you want to fly out here and party?" she said. "It's not like I'm doing anything else."

***

Don brought Joe Walsh and Randy Meisner and a couple of security guards with him, and by 11 PM the party was in full swing. "The party" in this case was all of them in Stevie's hotel room, along with Mick and J.C. and a few groupies the guys from Eagles had picked up on the way to the hotel. J.C. had ordered food, Mick had brought some top-shelf liquor, Don was hanging all over Stevie as though they were actually in love, and everybody was high. 

It was terrible. 

Stevie took a long drink of champagne and figured that maybe this was how things were supposed to be. Riches and excess forever, but with the wrong boyfriend in the wrong place. 

"You having a good time, Stevie?" Don asked, grabbing the champagne bottle to get himself a refill. 

"Oh, of course," Stevie said.

"Maybe we could stay out here for a few days," Don said. "I'm sure our team could get some publicity going, some parties. What do you think?"

"We're moving on!" The words felt bitter coming out of Stevie's mouth. "We're going to... ah... Florida?" At one point, she had known what their next tour stop was going to be, but she'd discarded the information since it no longer mattered. 

Don sort of nodded. He had already stopped listening and was now paying attention to what Joe and Randy were doing, which was trying to figure out who else they knew in the area who might come to the party. The door to the hotel room was propped open and several others arrived. J.C. seemed to have an endless supply of powder for everyone. Stevie stopped by for an extra line on her way out the door. She padded down the hallway (she was barefoot, she realized. Oh right, her sandal was still where she'd thrown it earlier) and knocked on the door to Lindsey and Carol Ann's room.

She could swear she heard music inside. But no one came to the door.

Stevie took walk down the hall and back, and then back again. She knew this feeling too well, the way she could turn into a ball of heat-seeking energy. When it was good, it was so, so good, and when it wasn't good, well, it took her uselessly up and down hotel hallways. She knocked on Lindsey's door again. Nothing. She knocked on Kenny's door. Also nothing. Her heart raced and her limbs buzzed as though she was on stage. But right now she was a firework with no way to explode. 

"Chris?" She knocked on her bandmate's door. "You wanna come to a party?"

Christine opened the door and gave Stevie a watery smile. Her makeup was off, and she was wearing one of her silk robes over a t-shirt and pants. 

"It's a hot party," Stevie said.

"It seems like a bunch of noise," Chris replied. 

"Oh, I need someone there besides Don's band and some groupies," Stevie whined. "Please."

"God. Let me grab my drink."

Chris reappeared with a full glass of wine and followed Stevie out of the room. Stevie couldn't help but gaze down the hallway once more toward Lindsey's room. But the door stayed cold and silent.

Lindsey is the key.

Lindsey is the key.

That meant she was the lock. And clearly she was going to be stuck forever.

Back in the hotel room, she burned with anger at everyone, at her situation, at Nashville, at the whole world. She found her shoe that she'd tossed earlier and picked it up and hurled it back at the wall. Though this time, it didn't hit the wall, but rather one of the nondescript pieces of stock art on the wall. This one, a watercolor picture of a bridge over a river. The shoe and the painting both tumbled down the wall and hit the carpet.

The whole party turned to see where the clunk had come from.

Stevie thought to apologize, but the expected sorry never materialized. Rather, she said, "Yeah, that was me."

Don held up his drink in appreciation. "Look at you, Stevie. That's the spirit."

Stevie had heard that it was a signature move of the Eagles' members to destroy hotel rooms from coast to coast and around the world, but Stevie had never witnessed it. Now, though, as Joe Walsh wobbled over to the bedside table, unplugged the lamp, and started swinging it around his head as though it was a porcelain lasso, Stevie had to wonder what she had started. Joe took great joy in scaring the partygoers by nearly flinging the lamp into their heads, then walking out into the hallway and letting it fly. It crashed into a thousand pieces against the wall.

J.C.'s face was just one big billboard of cringe, and yet he had already lost control of the situation. The groupies, none of whom looked older than about twenty-two, had ripped the blankets off the bed and were wearing them as dramatically long capes or using them as makeshift parachutes. Randy Meisner tipped over the bedside table and stood on top of it. 

Stevie marched up to Don. "What in the actual fuck is happening here?'

"Oh, don't worry, Stevie, we'll pay for it all," Don said.

"I... I like this room." Stevie didn't expect to be near tears over the loss of her blankets and lamp.

Don stared at her. "You told me earlier that you're leaving soon."

"I don't know if I am." Her voice was barely above a whisper; she was sure Don couldn't hear her. "I don't know."

The stock artwork, the lamp, the nightstand, the blankets—they were stripping the place down. Christine caught Stevie's eye from across the room, looked at her disgustedly, and left. Mick and J.C., high and unprepared, looked bewildered by the chaos.

And that was before Joe Walsh brought out the chainsaw.

Stevie heard it before she saw it, but when she saw it, it was loud and menacing. Don had told her about Joe using it on tour ("It helps him make requests of the hotel staff") but the idea of him traveling with a chainsaw was more bizarre than anything Stevie could imagine. 

But here it was. The groupies screamed, and Randy and Don egged Joe on. He was knocking over the small wooden desk where Stevie had sat a few times to read poetry. Stevie rushed out of the room before she could watch him churn the desk into bits.

The hallway wasn't much quieter but at least she was alone now. Her heart and head still pulsed with the artificial energy of the cocaine and the real energy of her panic. She leaned against the wall as the chainsaw buzzed through the furniture she had come to think of as hers. Her body started to buckle with fatigue, or with the weight of the swirling forever-present.

"Stevie?"

She could barely hear the voice, but it was sweet, it was home, it was everything.

"Stevie? Are you okay?"

She looked up. Lindsey was coming down the hallway.

"Where have you been?" she managed to say.

"Carol and I were out having drinks. What's going on?"

Stevie gestured to the open door of her nearly destroyed hotel room.

"What the fuck, Stevie? Why are they here?"

"I'm stuck and I didn't know what else to do."

"Wait." He was sitting in front of her on the hallway carpet now. He wore jeans and a button-down shirt, just like always, and he carried with him a whiff of pot smoke, just like usual. "Did you say you're stuck?"

"Yes."

Lindsey took in a breath. "Did we... I know this might sound weird, but did we get married, Stevie?"

Stevie gasped. "At the Rhinestone Wedding Chapel."

"Yeah. Rhinestone." Lindsey raked his hands through his hair. "Do you know how many timelines I've been through, trying to find you?"

"Do I know how many timelines?" Stevie yelled over the chainsaw. "Of course I do! And I promise you I've been through just as many, if not far more!"

Just then, the chainsaw stopped, though the partygoers' screaming continued. A wooden leg that was once part of the desk came flying out of the doorway and landed between Stevie and Lindsey. 

"Fucking hell." Lindsey stood up and moved a few feet away. "Why'd you mess with the timeline, Stevie?"

"Me? I was just trying to get back to you! It said you were the key to getting unstuck."

"What said that?" 

"A note." Stevie closed her eyes. "A note from my future self."

"Damn. I got one of those, too."

"A note from your future self?" 

"No, from yours."

Stevie opened her eyes and managed to crack a smile. "Wow, future me is really smart and daring."

"But all of this—" Lindsey gestured at the doorway, at the sawed-off desk leg, at the party. "All of this is just screwing things up even more. Him. That fucker."

Stevie sighed. "You don't know that. All I had to do was get back to you, I think. The note didn't say how, or who could or could not be there at the time."

"Bombs away!" came a shout from inside the hotel room. Stevie took a glance at Lindsey and ran back inside. Joe had put down the chainsaw at last, but he and Don had jimmied open the window and were sending things flying out of it. A bedsheet. Her dresses. 

Her dresses!

The guys had gotten into her trunk of clothing and were letting her dresses and skirts fly free over the streets of Nashville. 

"Oh my God, stop! I need those!" Stevie yelled. But she knew she had little power over a group of coked-up guys being the center of attention and having the time of their lives. And maybe her clothes didn't really matter, not when she was waking up every day in this same white dress. 

But. Lindsey. The one she'd been waiting for. 

She turned back around and lunged out of the hotel room. "Lindsey!"

But he was already gone. 

Chapter Text

May 21, 1977 - still

Stevie was there when the hotel management came up to their floor to investigate the source of all the noise.

She was there when Don, Joe, J.C., and Mick all agreed on an amount to pay the hotel in cash to make sure that no one heard about the incident. 

And she was there when Don tried to apologize to her. Though it wouldn't have mattered much if she'd been there or not. His apology was a hollow thing that could have just as easily been directed at the torn blankets and broken lamp. 

"Just go home," Stevie said to him. She was sitting on the stripped bed, with her gaze fixed on the rummaged-through trunk of her clothes. 

"No, let me at least get us a decent place to sleep for the night," Don said. 

"I can stay here," Stevie said. "It doesn't matter."

"I hate to think of you sleeping here—"

"Well, then, you and your pals shouldn't have destroyed it, huh?" Stevie shouted. She performatively picked up a few of her dresses that hadn't been thrown out the window and then went back to the bed and lay them over her. "Look at that. A perfect blanket, don't you think?"

As soon as Don left, Stevie threw the dresses off of her and went looking for Lindsey. She rushed down the hallway in bare feet, calling out his name, knocking on his room door, even going so far as to call for Carol Ann. But there was no one.

She went back to her room and put up her hair and covered her face as much as possible with a tragically unattractive hat that someone had left on her floor. Then she took the elevator downstairs to the lobby and went looking around. For Lindsey. For Mick. For J.C. or Kenny or John or anyone.

Of course, when she'd yelled out for Carol, she hadn't been in a situation of actively wanting to see her. But that's who came striding up to her near the doors of the hotel lobby.

"Stevie Nicks, you asshole," Carol said. She was wearing what looked to be a nightgown over jeans, and a pair of sneakers with holes in the toes. Her eyes were bloodshot. "Because of you, we're moving hotels in the middle of the night just so that we can get some fucking sleep before the show. Thanks a lot."

Stevie knew that Carol wouldn't have had the courage to talk like that at any other time of the day. Stevie was going to point out that it was not, in fact, Carol's show, and that Carol did very little at the shows besides sit backstage and smoke. However, Stevie calmed herself for the necessity of the moment, and said, "Is Lindsey with you?"

"Of course."

This stung more than it should. "Can you tell me which hotel you're going to?"

"Why, so you can fuck everything up again? No, you can stay here with the mess you made," Carol huffed. "Lindsey and I are going to get some rest."

Carol turned around and rushed outside to the limo. The door was already open for her, and she hopped in, and the car sped off. 

Stevie was left there, in front of the hotel, feeling like she should try to run after the car but knowing she would fail. And anyway, it didn't matter. It was all over. The Lindsey from the timeline she'd been looking for had found her, and of course she'd gone and fucked everything up. Maybe it was good that she was going to be stuck in this time loop for eternity—at least that way, she could continue to fuck things up in entirely predictable ways, rather than descending into the future with all of her faults still dangerously intact. 

Since she had nothing more to do, Stevie went and grabbed a so-so pair of sandals and her handbag from the detritus of her hotel room, adjusted the terrible hat again, and went back downstairs. She was about to leave again, on foot, through the big glass doors, when she heard a call from the concierge desk. 

"Miss? Do you know where you're going at this time of the night?"

Stevie checked her watch. It was 2 AM.

The concierge hailed her a cab. Stevie forgot to tip the man, but she promised herself to come back and do so. It sounded nice in the moment, a promise for the future. She clambered into the cab and told the driver, "Hey, could you just drive me around downtown for a few hours?"

The driver turned around and looked at her. "You on drugs or something?"

"Not officially."

The driver shook his head. "All right. If you've got the fare, I can do it." And they sped off.

Stevie didn't know what she was looking for, but she also knew she couldn't sit still. She let the cabbie wind his way through the streets of Nashville, cruising down Broadway as it was still hopping for the night, and then fading into the quieter, darker streets where people had been asleep for hours in hotels and apartments. "Which are the best hotels around here?" Stevie asked the cabbie, though it felt like something she should know by now.

"Well," the driver said in a deep Tennessee accent, "there's the Hermitage. That one's big when celebrities and political folks come through here. There's Spence Manor... that's where Elvis Presley stays when he's in town. They built it with him in mind."

"Hm." Stevie was mildly annoyed at the Fleetwood Mac entourage for not booking them in one of the more notorious hotels. "Can you drive me by both of those?"

As he drove, Stevie couldn't help but think about starting over. If she was going to be here, day after day, in Nashville in May, then maybe each day she could escape to a new hotel and try on a new persona. At this Hermitage place, she could be a politician's wife. ("Oh, perhaps you've never heard of my husband," she imagined herself telling the concierge. "He was... just elected!") At Spence Manor, she could be the shrewd assistant to a music executive, here to help scout new talent. And then occasionally, she could go to a plain old hotel, where she could pretend to be a salesgirl, a secretary, a mom of two kids, or a diner waitress just passing through town. 

"Word is that the pool at this place is actually shaped like a guitar," the driver said, passing by Spence Manor. 

"I'd love to see that," Stevie said.

"You need to stop here?"

"No, just slow down."

What, or who, was she expecting to see? It wasn't like Lindsey was just going to be standing around outside whatever hotel he and Carol had landed at. A few very drunk passersby were the only ones on the sidewalk. And Stevie knew her own head was swimming from the drugs and from the long night. 

She slumped down into the vinyl seat of the taxi. Who was she to think she could reinvent herself, not just once but every time she went through the time loop? It was a ridiculous notion coming from her worn-out brain. She was the personification of "wherever you go, there you are." She was two parts of the same contradiction. She was a rockstar and a ballerina, a clear-eyed songwriter and a girl always reaching for the next bender. She was a mess of yearning and joy and frustration and poetry, all wrapped up and waiting for the right stars to wish on. 

Stevie looked up out of the taxicab window.

Strangely, she couldn't see the moon tonight. Couldn't she always see the moon on Friday night?

"Excuse me, is it cloudy?" she asked the cabbie. 

"Oh yes, miss," he replied. "Looks like we're starting to get some rain."

"Rain? No, that's impossible," Stevie said as drops started to appear on the windows. "It doesn't rain on Friday."

But tonight, it did. 

Stevie was mesmerized by the patterns of water splashing against the taxi windows. The giant drops hitting the windshield and then being swished away by the wipers. On the side windows, the drops that stretched themselves out like little rivers. And the sheen of tiny water dots on the side and back windows that glowed with color from the streetlights and stoplights. It was beautiful. She hadn't seen rain in ages.

She stared so long at the watery webs that she didn't notice how long the cabbie had been driving around in silence. When she looked up, she clocked that they were approaching a familiar street. That neon sign down the block was one she knew too well.

"I might want to stop down the street here," she said.

The cabbie startled a little. "You might want to? Or you actually want to this time?"

"Actually." Stevie felt her voice solidify. "Yes, let me out in front of that pool hall. But wait here. Is that okay?"

The cabbie nodded as he glided the car to a stop in front of the familiar old pool hall. Stevie got out and stood under a streetlight, letting the rain fall all over her.

She could have gone into the pool hall and maybe her pal Junior would've been there and she could have introduced herself to him for the eighth time. She could have gone in and gotten a towel and a drink, at least. But instead she walked the few steps down the sidewalk where the neon sign for the Rhinestone Wedding Chapel still glowed brightly, making the puddles beneath it appear tinted pink.

Stevie threw off the awful hat from the party. She put her arms up over her head, and she spun around a few times, and when she finished her head was spinning a little bit less, and also, he was there.

He was a few feet in front of her, bathed in the glow from the sign.

"Lindsey, is it still you?" Stevie asked tentatively. "You came here because..."

Lindsey squinted through the rain as he nodded up at the wedding chapel sign. "Because I remember us being there."

"Remember when I was your wife for, what, twelve hours?"

Lindsey gave a sweet smile for the first time all day. "Yeah. Something like that. A few hours and then I was gone again. I tried to find you."

"I tried to find you!" Stevie said. "Where have you been, you jerk?"

"Here," he said. "Always, always here."

"I have too," Stevie said. "But it hasn't felt like you. Like us."

"Hasn't really felt like us since 1976," Lindsey retorted. 

Stevie shook her head. Her hair was dripping wet now. "There were so many reasons for breaking up with you, but at the moment I can't remember what they were."

"I don't think I ever understood," Lindsey said. "Not for a minute."

The rain had picked up. Lindsey's hair was soaked now, too, and his curls were growing heavy and dripping down onto his loose white button-down. He was wearing jeans and sandals, and somehow this was the most himself he had ever looked. 

Over his shoulder, Stevie saw a flash of lightning. The thunder followed a few seconds after, and Stevie instinctively leaned toward Lindsey. 

"Hey there." Lindsey caught her and pulled her close. His wet shirt was cold against her cheek, but his chest and neck were somehow warm as she buried herself into him. 

"I'm sorry," she whispered. "About Don and his stupid band. I'm sorry for never knowing the right thing to do at the right time. I feel like that's what cursed me to be here."

"Stevie, come on." Lindsey's voice was quiet. "The right thing at the right time? You chose to join us in Fritz, you decided to go to L.A., you wrote all those songs. No one on the planet could look at your life and accuse you of having bad timing."

"It's us, though," Stevie said, as another clap of thunder sounded across Nashville. "With you, I feel like I'm always a few minutes off. Like I hurried when I shouldn't have. Like I'm always just barely missing you."

"Hey!" The cabbie honked his horn and was leaning out the window. "Miss! Do y'all need to get out of this storm? Or can you just pay the fare and let me go?"

"Just give me a minute, and then I'll pay you!" Stevie called back. "See, look at that," she said to Lindsey. "Absolutely awful timing."

"No." He stroked her soaking back with a few fingers. He knew exactly where to put pressure. He always knew. "Think of how we met. Either of us could have been too early or too late that day, but..."

"It's true. We wouldn't be here if not for that day."

A crack of thunder rang out again.

"Linds," Stevie said, "all I know is I was supposed to find you. What should we do now?"

There were raindrops all over Lindsey's eyebrows and facial hair now, and he scrunched his face either due to discomfort or confusion. Had he also gotten a note? Stevie wondered. She couldn't think too long about how, apparently, her self from 2023 had been here, and she definitely couldn't add thoughts of a future Lindsey to that mix. The idea of the years going up that high seemed unnatural. 

Wait, was she scared of the future?

"I couldn't sleep, and I came down here," Lindsey said. "I'm not sure what else we should do."

Was she scared of jumping back into the unforgiving machine that was the Rumours tour? Or scared of having to follow up Rumours with another huge album? Was she scared of her dreams to do a solo record—scared that she was nearly ready to take the idea out of her dreams and into real life? 

Stevie wrung out her hair. And just as she did, Lindsey stopped rubbing her back and leaned forward to take all of her into his arms. They were both soaked, and cold, but in between them grew a spark of warmth. Lindsey smelled like rain and trees and smoke and nighttime. Stevie hoped, as Lindsey put his face to her hair, that nothing about her reminded him of anything that had happened earlier that night. 

Was she scared of this? 

No, no, she couldn't be.

And yet, something within her, within all the warmth, shivered with fear.

"Do you think we could’ve made it?" Lindsey asked softly.

"That question's too big for me," Stevie said. "It’s like asking about the direction of the universe."

"Well, if you ever come up with the answer, let me know." Lindsey's voice was a low growl. She knew it well. And with him here, what was there to be afraid of?

Something.

The inevitability of time. The way she had thrown herself so completely into that relationship and hadn't known how to get out. The way she'd lost herself, but she'd lost him, as well. 

Stevie said, "Maybe there's a timeline where I won't always be missing you."

Just then, everything around them lit up like a stage. This was followed by a deafening crack of thunder. Stevie shrieked. Before either of them could react, another flash of lightning hit near them, above them, striking the sign of the Rhinestone Wedding Chapel and sending it down, down, down, in a fit of neon pink and purple sparks. The electricity placing them in the spotlight as they clung to each other. 

May 20, 1977 - again

Sunlight burst in through the drapes. 

The blankets were back on the bed.

Her clothes were folded in their trunk.

Everything was clean again.

Stevie put her hands on her hair, her dress. She was dry and cool. The air conditioner hummed in the corner of the hotel room. Stevie sat up and stretched. The day felt thin and delicate. Like lemonade, like wrapping paper, like freshly washed hair. 

She waited for Mick's usual yell from the hallway.

She waited.

And waited.

Finally, she slipped on her woven sandals and poked her head outside the hotel room. For a moment, there was no one. Then, Mick slipped out of his room and noticed her.

"Are you going to dinner?" Stevie didn't mean to sound so insistent.

"Yeah, Stevie, some of us were going to get some burgers, or—"

"Not barbecue?"

"Why?" He put his giant hands on his hips. "You in the mood for some saucy meat?"

"Oh god," Stevie said. "Maybe I was, but not anymore."

"Were you, by chance, looking for Mr. Buckingham?"

"Not at this moment, why?"

"Well, he went to go pick up a guitar," Mick said. "He's going to be gone for a while tonight. He thought you might have wondered."

Stevie ordered a turkey sandwich from room service instead of going to dinner. She turned on The Tonight Show and watched Johnny Carson interview Peter Falk and Carl Sagan again. She smoked a joint with Christine and kept herself from her usual habit of babbling on about this or that. She just let the silence feel comfortable, and she watched the smoke curl around them. She didn't try to confess anything about time. 

"Stevie, you okay?" Chris said as she bid her goodbye.

"I'm pretty sure, yeah," Stevie replied. 

Her breaths had felt shallow and panicky all evening, and finally she was more relaxed. She hadn't seen Lindsey all day, and if he'd stopped by her hotel room door at his usual time, she hadn't been there. 

She missed him. But something about this day, this loop, kept telling her to tiptoe through it. 

And so she would. It was late, but she took the elevator up to the revolving restaurant at the top of the hotel, just so she could go to the big windows. Just to make sure she could see it.

Yes. Tonight, it was there. The moon. The night looked clear and lovely. She could even see a few stars. 

If she was going to be stuck here forever, at least she had this. 

May 21, 1977

When Saturday dawned, she felt lucky that she'd made it this far—the day of the show. In the early afternoon, Stevie threw on a tank top and long skirt and rushed down to where the limos waited to take the band and entourage to the venue. 

"Well, well, someone's early," came a familiar voice from inside the limo. Lindsey. He was the first band member to be there. 

"Hi." Stevie pushed her hair behind her ear as she got into the car. "You alone?"

"For now," Lindsey replied. "Carol's on her way, eventually." The guys liked to joke about the women always being the later ones to arrive, but the truth was the guys' pharmaceutical needs often made them just as late as the women. 

Lindsey, as usual, had a joint in his hand. He offered Stevie a smoke, and she took it. Through the smoke, she stared at Lindsey, waiting to see if that look of critical recognition, that intersection of time, happened again.

Stevie took a long exhale. "Rhinestone," she said at the end of it.

"Huh?" Lindsey said.

"Nothing, it's fine," Stevie said.

And it was. Maybe there's a timeline for us, Stevie reminded herself as she headed into Nashville Municipal Auditorium yet again, as she had Chris help style her hair, as she went to soundcheck, as she put on the black dress, scarf, and necklaces she'd worn loop after loop, and as she listened to Kenny's set begin and end. 

Then it was their turn. Her turn.

Stevie's heart pounded as she lined up with the band at the place where they'd enter the stage. Lindsey appeared next to her, the flowy sleeves of his shirt brushing against her arm. Stevie looked over and smiled. "Well, here we are again." And, knowing full well that Carol was creeping just a few steps behind them, she went ahead and squeezed his hand and his arm a little longer than she should have.

"Promise me something," she said, her voice low.

Lindsey raised his eyebrows.

"Promise me that if anything weird happens on stage tonight, you'll be there for me."

"What do you think is going to—"

"Shh, I don't have time to get into that. Just please promise me." She was still clutching his arm.

"Okay, sure, I promise." Lindsey put a hand on Stevie's shoulder.

Then, J.C.'s voice rang out from the stage. "Ladies and gentlemen, would you please give a warm welcome to... Fleetwood Mac!" 

***

The show was a noisy, glorious carnival. Stevie remembered that "Dreams" was actually charting, and so she sang it with the conviction that it could go to number one. She did "Rhiannon" with her heart in her throat, and her dress hurricaning around her in furious twirls. Her and Lindsey's "Never Going Back Again" was a plaintive wail, a diary entry put to music. Lindsey's solo in "I'm So Afraid" rattled the rafters of the auditorium. And all the while, he was glancing over at her, connecting with her, sending a message to her through song. I'm here, I'm here. And Stevie met his eyes every time and messaged back, I know, I know.

So many things could happen, Stevie told herself. She remembered the headaches, the blackouts, the times she simply faded away, back to the beginning of the loop. But this time, the colors were vivid, the audience was a warm, shrieking, sighing mass of everything she loved about the world, and the music was perfect. 

Stevie stayed in the show moment by moment. Lindsey's acoustic solo in "Landslide." Each shout and purr in "Gold Dust Woman," scored to Mick's steady, thumping beats. Each note of their impressive wall of sound in "The Chain." And finally, Christine's last pure, beautiful note in "Songbird."

And then it was done.

The band came off the stage in a swirl of adrenaline. Stevie, though, was in a daze. The show was done. She had made it all the way through the encore. And she was still here.

She came to a stop in the backstage hallway.

She tapped her platform boot against the concrete floor. She glanced in the stained mirror on the wall. The calendar would say she was still 28 years old, but she felt older. Her eye makeup hung in black rings below her eyes. Her hair was tousled and her scarf weighed down with sweat. It's okay to go into the future, she told herself. You're going to be okay.

She piled into the limo with the band, and Mick insisted they all go out, but when the car approached Broadway, Stevie couldn't bring herself to follow the rest of the band into one of the bars. "Just go on ahead," Stevie told them. "I need a little while to sit here."

When everyone was gone, when it was only her and the driver, silent, Stevie promptly fell asleep.

And when she woke up an hour later, it was May 22. 

Chapter Text

You see a pathway ending with a doorway
As she slips towards the doorway
He's been waiting there all day
All these years

- Stevie Nicks, Gold and Braid

Stevie was getting hit with memories again.

She'd promised that she would give herself until tomorrow to figure out what to do about her various time and space conundrums, but the universe was being more insistent than she would like. 

Memories, new ones. A thousand memories of a thousand Stephanies, all of them weary and wanting, trapped and free. At Sheryl's house tonight, she had started to get strains of things that had happened to her in the 70s, things that she had never remembered before, but this, now, was an absolute avalanche. The time loop, those days and days of May 1977, fell into her head with the mental equivalent of a resounding thump. 

"Oh my god. Karen." Stevie's voice sounded as though she was trapped under something heavy.

"Stevie?" Karen's head snapped up. "What's wrong?"

Stevie put her head in her hands. "I can't even begin to tell you."

"You might want to try," Karen said. "If we need to cancel one of the shows, I need to know right away.”

“I keep telling you, I’m fine to do the shows.” Stevie said this with her hands still pressed to her head. 

“You passed out on the plane,” Karen reminded her. “We brought a doctor in. And now you look like you’re having the worst migraine ever.”

"It's not a migraine," Stevie said hoarsely. "It's probably some other neurological bullshit. You know who knows a lot about this? Kenny Loggins. If you could lend me your phone when we get back to the hotel, I think I'd like to FaceTime him."

Stevie had cooked up a mostly-true story about how Kenny had also gone through a painful withdrawal from Klonopin some years ago, and how he could be relied on to help her with any weird symptoms that might still pop up. But Karen, sensing Stevie's desperation, turned the phone over to Stevie without a fuss. 

"Sorry that Lindsey didn't show up tonight." Karen sounded overly businesslike as she showed Stevie how to make a FaceTime call. "Did you want me to try to get in touch with his manager again?"

Stevie looked at her blearily. "I don't need you to do anything. I'll work it out."

Karen worked her magic to get Kenny’s current number through his manager, and then Stevie sat on the sofa in her hotel room with Karen’s phone. When Kenny’s face came up on screen, she was hit with a feeling of coming home.

“Stevie! It’s been too long. It’s great to talk to you.”

“You too, Kenny. You’re looking well. You’re on tour?”

“Yeah, I’m in South Carolina right now,” Kenny said. 

“Oh! I was in North Carolina recently, and now I’m in Nashville. Hey, do you have a way to get here? It’s not that far, right?”

“I mean, it’s far enough,” Kenny said. “Tennessee’s a pretty long state. Stevie, what’s going on?”

“You don’t remember this,” Stevie said, “but in 1977, here in Nashville, I told you on about thirty different instances about how I couldn’t get out of the same day.”

There was a silence. Kenny's eyes narrowed. “And did I tell you about—?”

“You did,” Stevie said. “But not on the last day. You know, the official day. The one you remember now.”

Kenny nodded. He still wore a patchy gray beard and mustache, but he looked good. Distinguished, but not too serious. "I don't think of it that much anymore." His voice was low and quiet. "Sometimes I could almost convince myself I dreamed it all. But then I step back and say, no, that happened. I really did loop through time for quite a while, back in 1975." He let out a long breath. "Even though I don't think of it consciously, I know it's always there, probably affecting me in ways I don't even realize."

"Do you know why it happened?" Stevie asked.

"I'd like to say that it was because I was mentally or emotionally stuck," Kenny said. "You know, something that teaches me a lesson and makes sense. But I don't know. When I first saw Groundhog Day in the 90s, I was like, hey, why didn't I think to learn French or ice sculpting? I feel like I wasted a lot of time. Maybe that's what I learned—how to waste time. Or maybe it was just random."

"Huh." Stevie paced around the hotel room with Karen's phone. "I don't think it's random, Kenny. Like you said, that experience is always there. We're shaped by everything that's happened to us, even if it's a bizarre thing we can't talk about."

"Oh, I told my wife," Kenny said. "Both of them, actually. And, well, I'm not married anymore."

Before she brought the phone back to Karen, she went through all the contacts and made sure she had the contact information for all of Lindsey's management. Just in case. 

She sat in her hotel room and paged through the book that had turned up on Sheryl's porch. She remembered it now: it had been Lindsey's book, back in 2009, when the two of them had grouchily fucked around the world during the Unleashed tour. But there were new memories clinging to the ones she already had about that time. 

2009. Nashville. When she'd been unable to stay put in one year, when she'd crossed back and forth between 2009 and 1977.

And then when she'd found herself and Lindsey trapped at the end of time itself.

The book's title was Cloud Atlas, and it had a note from herself to herself in it. "There are so many ways to live inside your life." Stevie repeated the single line of the note, as if it would eventually create a map for her to follow. 

"There are so many ways to live inside your life."

The direction, of course, was already there. She knew it—she knew exactly who she needed to talk to. But she couldn't bring herself to truly make the connection yet.

Instead, she picked up her flip phone and made a call. 

"Sheryl," she said, "I can't do this."

"I'm not sure what you're trying to do," Sheryl replied, "but I have no doubt you can do whatever it is."

"I'm fixing spacetime," Stevie said.

"Hmm, well, that's a new career avenue for you."

"We all may be completely fucked if I can't do this, Sheryl."

"I don't know what to tell you, Stevie," Sheryl said. "Except that, you know, you've always been my fucking hero. I've always looked up to you. You've done the impossible again and again. So I'm going to believe that you can do it this time, too."

Fine.

There was only one more thing to do, one more call to make. And it wasn't even one she could make directly, since she didn't have his number anymore.

She called Lindsey's management, left a voice message asking them to have Lindsey please call her in the morning. 

And then she tried to lie down and rest. 

But her phone rang hours sooner than she ever expected it would. It was just before midnight here in the Central time zone, and her phone was lighting up with an unknown California number. 

"Hello?"

"Let's meet up. I'm still in Nashville." It was him. His voice in her ear. His breath. His number that had connected to her number. "Things are getting really weird."

"Okay," Stevie said, her voice full of exhale and hope. "Tell me when and where."

"I think," Lindsey said, "we need to go back to the top of that Sheraton hotel. The place where we fell into the void."

The void. That meant Lindsey had gotten the memories too. That they were coming from the same set of experiences—if not the same feelings—made things a lot easier. Stevie felt a hum of true excitement, the first she'd felt all evening. "Yes," she said. "I'll meet you there in fifteen minutes."

It would have been easier to ask Lindsey to pick her up. But, god, she had been in the music business for fifty years, so didn't that mean that she could do anything? Sheryl thought so. Stevie slipped a black jacket over her clothes and a black Covid mask over her face, and headed out. 

The late-night concierge at the hotel gave her a strange look but called a cab for her. Stevie smiled under her mask as she strode out of the sleek hotel and into the cab. This was giving her flashbacks to one of the memories she'd just gotten that evening—Nashville in 1977, rushing around the city in the middle of the night, trying to find Lindsey, trying to fix the universe. If she'd done it once, she could do it again.

The cab got her quickly from one hotel to the other. Stevie gasped when she saw the Sheraton Grand Nashville; seeing it again was like returning to another life. That old 1970s design with the former revolving restaurant on the top. People really had been trying hard to imagine the future back when this place had been built. These days it felt like everyone was too busy being nostalgic for the past to imagine much in the way of a future. 

Of course, as Lindsey had once said in 2009, maybe time wasn't linear at all. Maybe there was no difference between the past and the future, and maybe everything that had ever happened or ever would happen was happening now. 

Stevie made her way into the hotel. As if on cue, Lindsey called her cell phone and told her, "Room 4110. It's at the top. I'm not sure if it's the room we had before, but it's close."

"I'm on my way," she said, shuffling toward the elevator and pressing the button for the floor just below the no-longer-revolving restaurant.

When the elevator opened, he was right there.

Stevie found herself taking in a long breath. Lindsey Buckingham. Here. Waiting for her.

Tall and slender, his hair a fierce gray-white, having given up the last specks of its old brown. There were new age lines around his mouth and neck. He wore one of his tired navy blue t-shirts under a gray jacket.

All of it was so very Lindsey.

Stevie tried to smile at him, and she and Lindsey seemed to note at the same time that she was wearing a face mask.

"You still have those," he said, pointing at her face.

"Post-Covid respiratory complications are very real," Stevie said. "You of all people should know."

"Trust me, I do." Lindsey shrugged and led her to the door of Room 4110.

She took the mask off as soon as they were inside, and then she immediately made her way over to the closet. "Is there—?" 

"It was the first thing I checked," Lindsey said. "If you open it, you'll just find a regular closet."

"Huh." Stevie opened the door just in case a void had appeared in the last few minutes. It had not. 

She shut the door and turned around, leaning against it, letting her body take in the full weight of this endless day. And... oh. There was a certain feeling she knew, a tug at her heart like an old wound opening. It was the feeling of Lindsey's gaze on her.

What could she do? He was sitting on the edge of the bed, his eyes intense. She looked right back.

"What," Stevie finally said, "are you doing in Nashville?"

"Meeting with a producer, thinking about some things I could do for a solo record." The only time Lindsey's gaze slipped from her was when he said this. "And Stella had an equestrian event nearby. So I popped in on that for a few hours."

"Busy, busy," Stevie said.

"Not as much as you."

"It's not... I mean, it's the same show every night. You know. The classics." 

Lindsey nodded, and Stevie knew he knew what she'd meant. "Are you writing?" He looked at her pointedly.

"Occasionally."

"Stevie."

It was the first time she'd heard him say her name in years. "Say that again."

"What? Stevie?"

She smiled.

"Stevie." Lindsey crossed his arms across his old t-shirt. "I wish you'd write again."

"I'm trying." Stevie pushed her hair out of her face and gestured around. "It's just... life. I haven't had the words to express what I've wanted to say lately. Tom's death, Chris's death. Being so fucking old and watching the world start to pass by in new ways. I don't know how to explain it to people." She sighed. "And now this? Are you going to try to explain whatever the hell it is that's happened to us, Lindsey?"

"Say that again." Lindsey's lips settled into a smile.

"Lindsey."

"Come here, have a seat," he said. And so Stevie did, perching tentatively on the bed beside him. Lindsey had uncrossed his arms, and her black jacket was just an inch away from brushing against his gray one. 

"What are we doing here," Stevie said, "if there's no void in the closet?"

Lindsey let out a long breath as he surveyed the hotel room. "I'm not sure. But it felt like we had to come here, you know? This was the place where it all happened."

"You got the memories too," Stevie said. "I was so relieved to hear that."

"Memories, yeah." Lindsey looked at her again. "I didn't think I needed any more memories. But these are special, I think. Or at least really, really weird."

Stevie played at the bedspread with her right hand. She tried to remember what this place had looked like years ago, but she couldn't. The room today was generic white and gray with a few pops of color, just like so many other hotels. "I guess you could nicely ask the hotel manager if you could get a different room on this floor." Lindsey shuffled next to her, rearranging how he sat while still managing not to touch her. "Hey, do you remember how you got out of that ridiculous time loop?"

Lindsey sucked in a breath. "Fuck. I'm having a hard time processing that. And no, I don't remember the end."

Stevie was thinking maybe this was a good moment for her to delicately place a hand on his jacketed arm. Or to touch those new lines in his face. It unexpectedly bothered her that there was something about his body that she didn't know well yet. 

But just as she was moving her arm, there was a flicker, and the lights in the room went out.

"Oh shit," Lindsey whispered.

"Fuck," Stevie said. "This happened before. This happened before, right?" 

"Yeah. Yeah, something like it did." And now Lindsey was the one gripping her arm. "And I think it indirectly got us to where we are now."

"Do you have your phone?" Stevie asked. 

She heard Lindsey fumbling for it. "It's dead."

"Well. Stand up, then. Hold on to me," Stevie said, and indeed, Lindsey kept his hand tight around her forearm as they stumbled through the dark. Stevie remembered what had happened the last time they'd gotten stuck in one of these blackout-time-glitches at this very hotel, and she was glad Lindsey wasn't able to see her blush. They had come so far since 2009, and yet had resolved nothing. They were still just them, the push and the pull, the fucking and the silent treatments. The subject of time, in the context of Lindsey Buckingham, had become so warped that she couldn't even remember what year they had truly started dating. 

Stevie found the hotel room door in the dark and fumbled it open.

Outside, the hallway was as lit up as ever, but the gray, businesslike 2020s decor was gone, replaced with the original 1970s earth tones. Lindsey dropped her arm and looked at her. 

"You know this?" Stevie said.

"All too well," Lindsey replied. 

Stevie sighed. They were back.

Lindsey's revelation that life "goes in cycles" was something that had occurred to him on a drug-fueled night in the 70s, and it amused Stevie that it had become a philosophical point he touched on in interviews for decades to come. She had teased him about it over the years, for instance if they were in a car and happened upon a roundabout. That had been funny. This was much less so.

This was Lindsey's sense of cycles writ large.

"How many times do you think you looped?" Stevie stepped carefully into the hallway.

"God. Somewhere between thirty and forever?" Lindsey said. "I think I may still be looping somewhere. Stevie, maybe this was a mistake to come back here. I loathe this hotel."

"I know," Stevie said. "But we have unfinished business with it. Or it has unfinished business with us, I'm not sure." 

Lindsey wiped at his sweaty forehead and then put his hands in the pockets of his jeans. He seemed disinclined to do much of anything. Maybe he just wanted to let time wash over them, no matter the result. 

Stevie pushed her long, tired curls out of her face. "Are we okay?"

"You mean, in this time-travel mess we're caught in, or—"

"I mean," Stevie said, "you and me. We haven't even really talked in so long."

"Well, you tell me, Stevie." There was an edge to Lindsey's voice. "Pretty sure you were the one to cut off contact. And while I'll admit it feels natural to be around you again, there's a part of me that feels like I need to tread carefully."

"It does feel natural again," was all Stevie could think to say.

The air was heavy between them. "Stay here for a minute," Stevie said. (What did "a minute" mean anymore? she wondered.) "I'll be back."

She sensed that they had been brought back here for a reason. That they were together for a reason. 

That they were in a hallway lined with doors for a reason.

Lindsey watched her as she placed a shaky hand on the door across from their room. And opened it.

Immediately, she was sucked into the room, which was as pitch dark as the other room had been. The door slammed behind her. Stevie found the wall and braced against it.

Stevie.

The voice could have come from anywhere—the ceilings, the walls. 

Stevie, you're there, aren't you?

It was a woman's voice. Stevie took a minute to decide not to be afraid. "Yes, it's me," she called back. "Can we get a light in here, at least?"

I'm sorry, I can't. Please listen.

"I'm listening," Stevie said.

Lindsey is the key. You need to tell yourself that, okay?

"Tell myself," said Stevie. "Do you mean now, or do you mean myself in 1977?"

Isn't it all the same? came the voice.

"It's not the same to me," Stevie said. "I'm different now than I was back then. It's been almost fifty years. I've lived a hundred lifetimes."

You and Lindsey are the keys, the voice replied. I think you understand. 

She really didn't understand. But the door to the room swung open again, and Stevie found Lindsey waiting exactly where she'd left him, and she commanded him to wait for one more minute as she raced downstairs to deliver herself a message in 1977.

When she came back upstairs in the glass elevator, she realized she had a thousand questions for Lindsey that needed to be answered. What happened in every one of your loops? What was I like? Did you also ever wind up giving too much information to Kenny Loggins? Did you ever try to get out of town? Did you ever die?

The elevator doors opened to the top floor, and Lindsey was no longer there.

Chapter Text

Stevie was exhausted.

Not even being unstuck in time could take away the pains in her calves and her lower back, nor make her hair and clothes feel less heavy. She was, in fact, about to turn 75 years old.

And yet, for every small part of her that wished to be back in her hotel bed, there was another part of her that knew she was exactly where she needed to be. 

She took a few steps from the elevator to the first room door on the hallway. Stevie grabbed the knob, turned, and pushed on the door.

Instantly, it flung open.

Stevie tentatively walked inside and was swept up in the scent of California, of coffee, of nighttime. She stood on a concrete floor, with a few buzzing fluorescent lights above her. A gasp escaped as she took in the scene that materialized in front of her. 

Just a few feet away, two sweet kids were lovingly arguing and making music.

"I was going to add a few bars of a solo here, Stevie, what do you think?" Lindsey's voice was so high and boyish. 

"Okay! I think I could use a little break before singing the bridge." That was her. Her tiny little early-twenties voice! She was sitting on the floor, legs crossed, hair messy. She was wearing a long hippie dress and sandals. 

Lindsey shyly leaned over and... patted her shoulder. God, he'd had absolutely no moves back then, but he'd been so cute about it. 

Stevie sensed that the two lovebirds couldn't actually see her, but she watched them, curiously and tearfully, from just a few yards away. They practiced part of a song, they shared a joint, and then Stevie lay her head on Lindsey's shoulder and said she was tired. 

And just behind Stevie from the present, the hotel room door burst open, and she realized she was meant to exit.

Out in the hallway, there was still no sign of Lindsey. Stevie trudged to the neighboring door and pushed on it until it opened. 

She walked inside.

This time, she was jarred to find a much later scene. She and Lindsey were there, again, and it was at her house during the In Your Dreams sessions. Those had been good times, good days, the kind that were gone too soon. But in this room, the days had never left. In her living room, Lindsey came to sit next to her on the couch, snuggled up close to her, let her hair fall down onto his shoulder. Stevie from the present day couldn't quite see the whole scenario, but it looked like Lindsey had an arm wrapped tightly around her waist. God, they looked married, Stevie couldn't help but observe from her perch several yards away. They exuded deep comfort and intimacy, a couple who knew everything about each other's bodies and minds. 

Stevie missed him.

"Lindsey," she whispered from near the door.

Lindsey from 2010 didn't turn around. 

Somehow, from the doorway, Stevie in 2023 could feel the warmth of her past self's body, the way that she and Lindsey needed each other in such a primal, unquestioning sense of the word. The way that reaching for each other would suddenly block out the rest of the world—business and politics and friends and lovers and children. The way they had needed each other in that way then, and now.  

"Lindsey," Stevie whispered again, "you were right. Everything, all of time... it's all happening at once."

Lindsey in 2010 kissed the top of Stevie's forehead, letting his lips linger there, and Stevie in 2023 blushed, knowing she didn't want to intrude on this scene any longer.

The hallway was empty again.

She called out his name, to no response. 

And then she stood her aching legs and feet in place, wondering if she simply waited, he'd emerge from one of the hotel rooms, too. Maybe he was also getting knocked around in time. 

Stevie sat on the floor, and uselessly consulted her blank watch. It wasn't even counting her steps anymore. She closed her eyes and tried to wait for him, and for time.

The thing was, she realized, she loved him.

She loved him. And she needed him back. 

Fuck.

This was far worse than the feeling of being unstuck in time. This was an undoing of her soul, a parade of tiny snips at the heart, a voice in her head telling her that maybe she'd been wrong about too many things for too many years. Stevie put her head on her knees and let the last few years rewind themselves in her mind, the scenes racing past with the awkward staccato of an old VHS tape. Before these years of touring and the pandemic, there was Lindsey's firing from the band, and how the bloodrush in her body when Mick gave her the news was the same as the rush of many a heated moment between her and Lindsey in the past. Strange how there were so few types of bodily reactions for so many, many feelings.

She remembered, too, the news of Lindsey's heart surgery and the ten thousand stupid notes she'd drafted to him before finally settling on one that sounded impersonal and curt. But what else could she do? She'd known he was fucking pissed at her; a note of elaborate and flowery feelings would have been misplaced. And his wife would have read it. 

Still, the note, when sent, built a stone wall between them.

Stevie gazed around the hallway, expecting to hear a door slam anytime, expecting to see him and his wrinkles and jeans and jacket sauntering back toward her. Where was he?

There really was only one option.

She would have to check the rest of the doors.

Time was a concert in 1982 when Lindsey held her, sobbing, in the days after Robin's death. Time was a trembling moment with the band when they were preparing to record Rumours and Lindsey was looking at her with pleading eyes, unsure if the two of them would be okay ever again. Time was a beautiful morning in Sydney in 2004, with days and nights nonchalantly mixed up, and her and Lindsey spending a few extra luxurious hours in bed, enjoying each other. 

Time was her own mother asking when she and Lindsey were going to get married. When, she said. Because Barbara Nicks had always understood the urgency of time.

Time was a long kiss before the beginning of their set. Time was him sneaking over to her condo somewhere in the blur of the 2000s. Time was his thigh on hers, his lips on her neck, her fingers brushing through the hair on his chest. 

Time was every glance.

Every kiss.

Every moment of them.

That's what Stevie was seeing behind the hotel room doors.

And yet, there was still no sign of present-day Lindsey.

Well, she remembered enough about the hotel to know that there was one more place to go. 

Stevie found the door to the fire stairs and took them, slowly, up one more floor. This was the very top of the hotel, the part that once housed the only revolving restaurant in Nashville.

But since this was 1977—or some strange and unholy version of 1977—the restaurant was, of course, still there. And the lights around the bar were on, as though waiting for her. 

Stevie tentatively walked to the bar and took a seat. "Hello?" Ugh, she was so hoarse. She would somehow need to recover her voice before the shows.

"Ah! You finally made it!" came a woman's voice from somewhere behind the bar. Stevie knew that voice so well. It had always been there, comforting her across the decades, as Fleetwood Mac bounced around the world. 

"Chris?" Stevie whispered.

Christine McVie appeared in front of her at the bar, ready with some cocktail napkins and a glass of water. Stevie could hardly stay on her barstool. Christine appeared as she had in the late 90s, with her hair short and uneven, very chic for that time. She wore a dark blue top on which Stevie noticed a small gold lapel pin that said, ask me about time!

Chris smiled warmly at her. "What can I get you, my dear?"

Stevie bristled a little at the label. "I, uhh—just a glass of white wine. Whatever you have, I'm not picky."

"No, no, I wasn't either," Christine said with a wink. "Don't worry, by the way, I've got that all under control now. So aren't you going to ask me, Stevie?"

"What you're doing here?" 

"No!" She tapped the pin.

"Oh! Okay, then. What about time, Christine?"

"Wait, let me get your wine first!" Chris rushed to an unseen part of the bar and then reemerged with a glass of white wine. "There you are. Okay, the thing about time is that it's up to you."

"Oh God," Stevie said. "Chris, are you a ghost, or are you a manifestation of my thoughts?"

Christine leaned on the bar. "Neither. I'm your generally loyal bandmate and friend."

"You're fucking with me." Stevie took a sip of her wine. "Has Lindsey been through here?"

"He ran through a little while ago, yes," Christine said, and Stevie sat up straight. At this, Christine smirked at her. "Yes, I knew once I told you that, you'd be off like a shot."

"I'll finish my wine." Stevie lifted the glass and smiled. 

"He was looking for you." Chris wiped down the bar. "I suspect you could have guessed that, but he was. No two people have continually missed each other in the way you two have."

"Well, I—"

"Oh, no need to be embarrassed, Stevie. I always knew what was going on."

Stevie had a sip of wine. After a moment, she said, "I bet he found the way to the void. Have you been to the void, Chris?"

Christine smiled tightly at her. "I've been to some strange places, but I don't think I've been to the void."

"We're revolving." Stevie noticed the gentle movement of the otherwise empty restaurant. The motion reminded her of the ocean on a good day, soft and predictable. "Chris, time is not up to me. It just passes and, apparently, breaks down, whether I like it or not."

Christine leaned on the bar. "Have you ever had a day, Stevie, that felt like a thousand years?"

"Yes," Stevie replied. "May 20, 1977."

"Not quite like that. But think about it."

"I will." Stevie finished the wine. "Chris, we were friends, right? I was nice to you, wasn't I? I tried to be." Stevie realized that the questions were unfair as soon as they were out of her mouth. They put the onus on Christine—ghost, manifestation, or none of the above—to give Stevie a comforting reply. 

Christine gave the bar another wipe with her towel. "I've missed you, Stevie. Do you feel, in this moment, that we're friends?"

"I think so."

"Well, then." Christine smiled. "I just want to tell you, your skin looks amazing. Anyway, you'd better go find your man."

"Can I find you here again?" Stevie struggled down from the barstool. 

"I wouldn't know how to get back here, would you?"

And just then, the bar went dark, and the revolving stopped. 

Stevie remembered the feeling of falling, the initial desperation giving way to serenity. The way she was alone with her thoughts, with herself. The most alone she'd ever been.

All she had done was step away from the bar after the darkness had taken hold. But she had stepped into absolute nothingness.

And when the darkness pulled back, Stevie found herself facedown on familiar ground. California ground. The sun warmed her back as she got to her feet, straightening her black dress as she did. 

She looked up to find that she was in Brentwood, in front of Lindsey's current house. 

Stevie thought she was going to have to decide whether to knock or ring the doorbell or just walk inside or, well, just walk away. All of these felt like plausible options. But the front door opened before Stevie could make a decision. Lindsey, still in his jacket and his boots, was right there.

"We keep losing and finding each other," was Lindsey's greeting.

"That's one way to put it," Stevie said, and she couldn't help smiling. "Is this place real, or—?"

Lindsey stepped aside to let her into the house. "Well, that's a complicated question. Does this look just like how I left my house the other day when I flew to Nashville? Yeah, I think so. Are we back in California? Well, not exactly."

"It's the void again." Stevie walked past Lindsey and into the front hallway. It really was a beautiful house, full of sleek lines and earth tones and a lot of light. It almost felt real.

"Okay, yes, it is," Lindsey said. "But I haven't seen Anne Heche around anywhere."

"Oh, Linds, that's grim."

"I'm sorry." He walked behind her, his boots slapping on the hardwoods. "It's how I deal with things like that."

"Do you think we're going to run into anybody else?"

"I doubt it."

Stevie turned to face him as they arrived in a living room. "Wait, who do you live with right now?"

Lindsey shrugged. "You're looking at my number-one roommate, traveling companion, jack of all trades, et cetera."

"Oh, is that right?"

"I mean, Leelee comes by a lot. Sometimes she'll stay for a week or so.  But, yeah. Kristen and I have been separated for a while now."

"Karen told me."

"Well, she always knows, doesn't she?"

"We're in a void," Stevie said. "There's no need to be so sardonic."

Lindsey started laughing, there in the not-California sunlight, in the living room that both was and wasn't his. Lindsey, with his gray hair and wrinkles and the t-shirt Stevie could swear she'd seen him wear ten years ago. That was Lindsey. Even amongst all the shifts of time, those expected and not, he was still completely himself. That slightly crazy-sounding laugh, those long fingers raking through his hair. The electricity of him, the excitement dipped in anxiety that was his daily way of life. 

"Oh god, Linds," Stevie found herself saying.

"Yeah?" He stopped laughing and looked at her seriously, those clear blue eyes focusing on nothing but her.

Stevie instinctively touched her hair, moved some of the curls around. "I think we're here because only you and I can fix time together."

She had been on the verge of realizing it before.

Maybe she had realized it at the same time she realized she loved him.

Maybe she realized it earlier than that, but hid it from herself because she knew just how wonderful and terrible it would be, fixing time together.

Just like the last time they'd been here in the void, there were no cars on the road outside, no breeze in the trees, no birds and no other people. 

But there was something different about the air here this time.

Because they were both here. 

Stevie knew Lindsey felt it, the pulsating of energy and time in his otherworldly living room, the history between them racing around in circles. "Did you go to the different hotel rooms before you went to the restaurant?" Stevie asked. "Did you see what was in there?"

"Well, see, I went to two. The first one showed me, ah, a time with the two of us in the late 90s." A blush climbed up Lindsey's cheeks. "I went out, didn't see you, and then went up to the restaurant. That's how I wound up here. What can I say, I figured you would be here soon. At least, I hoped so."

"Did you see Christine?"

Lindsey looked at her strangely. 

"I'll tell you about it sometime," Stevie said, and her heart pinged at the idea of their having prolonged contact. That there would be a sometime, a next time. It was nice. "Well, you were right, though. About what you said years and years ago. About all of time happening at once."

Lindsey cracked a smile. "I wasn't trying to be right, exactly. I was just being theoretical."

"Lindsey, come on. You're always trying to be right."

"Well, so are you." He laughed when he said this, and so Stevie did too, and then Lindsey reached over and touched her arm. "Come on, let's sit down."

He led her into a second living room, this one with a worn-in gray sectional sofa. Lindsey sat down with his legs outstretched, and Stevie sat next to him. Their legs instantly intertwined. 

"Stevie," he whispered. And then he was touching her on her fingers, the back of her hand, the long sleeve of her black dress. 

She clasped his hand in hers, and then she leaned over and brushed her lips against his.

A small sound escaped his mouth, a tiny oh to bring everything together. 

And then he was pressing his lips to hers, wet and thirsty for her, the energy between them warm and bright. Stevie put her hands on his chest, on his stupid leather jacket, enjoying the comfort of it, and the newness all at once. It had been years since she'd kissed him, and yet it was like coming home. The feel of their tongues meeting, the undeniable taste of him. 

She finally touched the new wrinkles on his cheeks and his neck. There. Something about them had felt incomplete, and it was because his body had changed and she hadn't yet been able to map it with her hands.

And her lips. She drew her mouth down to kiss the fold on his neck. "Okay," she whispered, both to Lindsey and to herself.

"I missed you," Lindsey said. "God damn, have I missed you."

"I've missed you too," Stevie said. "It's been very quiet around my house. I swear every year has felt like 2020."

"You don't deserve that."

"I don't know, maybe I do."

"No," he said. "You deserve to know how much you're loved."

Stevie's chest lightened, and she felt a wash of joy all over her body. "Take this off," she said, already trying to push aside his leather jacket. "You must be far too warm in that thing."

"Yes, dear," he said, and they both smiled. 

Lindsey took off the jacket, and then loosened his belt. Stevie felt her breath catch at the sight of the bulge in his jeans. She felt terribly young and terribly old at the same time. Was she ready for this—again? Ready to let Lindsey Buckingham back into her life in more ways than one? Ready for all the complexity and history that that entailed?

She ran her hands across the heaviness in his jeans, and Lindsey startled at the touch. 

She was ready.

Mostly.

Stevie pulled a white throw blanket off the back of the couch and lay it over her as she struggled out of her shoes and black dress and leggings. Then she lay next to Lindsey under the blanket. 

"Oh, are we feeling shy?" he said, running a hand through her hair. 

Stevie shrugged.

"Don't worry, me too," Lindsey whispered, and Stevie could tell he was smiling. She watched as he tossed off his t-shirt and jeans, and then slid slowly out of his plain blue boxers. He held his cock, showing her how hard he was for her. 

"Shy, huh?" Stevie took the big head of his cock between two of her fingers and ran it back and forth, watching his face react as she did. After a moment, Lindsey put a hand on hers to signal her to stop. Then he turned his long body against hers, so they were facing flush on the couch, and he pressed against her as he kissed her long and slow on her mouth and neck, and ran his hands up and down her body, finally coming to rest gently on her back. 

"Can I?" he whispered, tugging at the back of her bra. 

"Of course," Stevie said back. 

He helped her out of her bra, and then she pushed down her underwear and took those off too. Lindsey sensed her nervousness and brought the white blanket around them both. She loved the feeling of her breasts against his chest, their bodies together, touching each other at too many points to count. 

"Please, Lindsey," Stevie said, the words getting caught in her breath. "Please, let's be with each other again."

Lindsey smiled crookedly and kissed her small shoulder. "You mean," he said, "would you like me to fuck you?"

She nodded her head against his chest.

Stevie knew it would be different. They were older, they had spent years apart, and they were in a fucking void. And yet. And yet. When he entered her, it was almost as though no time had passed. When he rubbed a finger against her wet clit, it took her to a place beyond time. 

She felt their hearts beating together, heavy and sure, and she knew everything was right.

Lindsey went slow at first, and then he picked up the speed of his thrusts, sweat forming on his brow as he clung to Stevie. He was beautiful, he was tired, he was all that she wanted. She felt a quiet urge building inside of her, strumming itself up from her middle, to her thighs, to the place where he had connected himself to her. 

She felt as if she were watching herself, her breaths going ragged, her fingers running through his chest hair, her lips parted and hair wild. And then Lindsey whispered to her, "Let yourself go," and she did, yes, she did. 

A minute later she felt him hit his climax, crying out, and then he lay down, sweaty and satisfied, on her chest. 

They were there under the blanket for a long time, both of them seeming to fill themselves with the idea of being with each other. Everywhere around them remained silent and still.

"You know what I've been thinking about?" Lindsey finally said. "You know what I was thinking about in Nashville?"

"No, tell me," Stevie said.

"I was thinking that maybe we should go all the way back to the beginning."

"You mean... finally do the remaster?"

"Yeah."

Stevie sat up and instinctively pulled the blanket around her. "Maybe it really is the time."

"Maybe it's been the time. You know how many bootlegs are out there? We need to reclaim that for ourselves." He laughed. "And maybe do a final told-you-so to our old friends at Polydor."

"I think everyone there is dead."

Lindsey sat up, too. "Hm. Well, maybe they can hear us here, wherever we are. Hey Polydor execs, you motherfuckers! Look what we became!"

"Two sweaty old people fucking on a couch?"

"Two sweaty old rockstars fucking on a couch," Lindsey said. "You know they'd be jealous, and you know I'm right."

Stevie threw a pillow at him.

They lay back down under the blanket, and Stevie watched Lindsey fall asleep. Stevie lay there, looking up at the ceiling, hearing the nothing all around them, feeling the very realness of Lindsey's skin on hers. 

It was time, she knew it. It was time for the remaster of Buckingham Nicks. It was time for them to forgive each other and just live. 

Stevie drifted off to sleep.

And when she woke up, she was back in Nashville. In the bed she'd been in before she left for the Sheraton. And her phone was ringing.

"It's show day!" Karen's voice was too loud for whatever time it was right now. "Just making sure you're feeling ready for it."

"Erm, sure," Stevie grunted into the phone. "Remind me what time is soundcheck?"

The other side of the bed moved. It moved. 

And it let out a snort.

Stevie leaped out of bed as Karen was still talking about the soundcheck or getting lunch or whatever. She was back in her black dress and leggings. And Lindsey... Lindsey was there, asleep, looking as peaceful as he had under the white blanket. And fortunately, some of his clothes had reappeared, his blue t-shirt and jeans. Stevie hoped that his leather jacket hadn't been lost to time.

But the main thing was, Lindsey was here. 

"Thanks, Karen, see you soon!" Stevie's voice trembled into the phone before she quickly hung up. 

She flopped back into bed and nudged Lindsey. "We're in Nashville," she said into his ear. "We're back!"

"Huh?" Lindsey turned over and opened his eyes. 

"Listen! There are cars and people outside. We're not in the void anymore."

Lindsey was looking around. "And I'm here." He ran a hand down Stevie's arm. "And so are you." He stood up and rubbed his eyes, noticing that he was wearing clothes again. He made a few circles around Stevie's hotel suite, finally coming to stop in front of the window. "Stevie, come here."

She shuffled over to stand at the window with Lindsey, and he touched her waist, lightly, with a few of his fingers. 

"I want to be out in the world with you, Stevie," he told her. "The real world, not our strange spaces beyond time. But actually, if I ever had a chance to go back there with you, I'd take that too. I'd like to be anywhere with you. And I want people to see us together again, and wonder."

Stevie felt dizzy at his words. They were in Nashville, seemingly with time back together, and with Lindsey's heart officially unattached from his soon-to-be-ex-wife. The sun streamed in to her hotel room—their hotel room, at least in this moment—like a message of possibility. Stevie stood in the pillar of light it made and looked at Lindsey and, for the first time in a while, wondered about the future. Who knew that there was still so much room in her life for surprises?

"I'd like that," Stevie said. "I want the magazines or the people on Instagram or whomever to write stories about us. I want them to call us old and talk about Rumours for the millionth time and talk about our history." 

"Again," said Lindsey.

"Again and again and again," Stevie agreed. "And I'm fine with it. Because I love you, Lindsey."

He startled as though he thought he'd never hear those words. "I love you too, Stevie." The words came choked out, resting on a cloud of tears. He swiped at his eyes. 

"Oh, Linds." She leaned in to him, let him wrap himself around her. Everything felt new and fragile—him and her and time and the whole world. But she was sturdy in the fact that she loved him, and the idea that they could find their way together. 

"Are you ready?" she asked him. "To be us again?"

"Never been more ready," Lindsey replied.