say hello wave goodbye

6: the sexiest thing is trust (1997)

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Lindsey slapped his hand against the steering wheel in frustration. He'd been stopped at this intersection for 20 minutes and at this rate, he'd make it to Stevie's house quicker on foot.

Stevie. Everything had been fine the last time he saw her- better than fine, even. They had been making plans for the evening and she said she'd wait for him while he went to talk to one of the techs. When he came back, she was gone.

"She said to tell you that she wasn't feeling well and was going home," Mick said, pausing his conversation with Chris when Lindsey had asked if they'd seen her.

"What? Fifteen minutes ago she was fine. Are you sure?"

Mick shrugged. "I don't know, mate, guess it just came up."

He took off for the parking lot without another word, hoping to spot Karen's SUV, when John drove by.

"Looking for Stevie?" he asked, a slightly pitying expression on his face. "I saw her and Karen drive outta here a moment ago."

"Did she seem sick?"

"Sorry, couldn't tell ya," he said, minding his own business as usual. The man was the English equivalent of Fort Knox, for better or worse.

Lindsey hurried toward his car and sped off in the direction of Stevie's house, all the while wondering what the hell was going on. It wouldn't have been unusual for the old Stevie to have a change of heart for whatever reason and flee the scene without warning, but she was different now. Or so he thought.

Some things had stayed the same, and he had been delighted by all the little reminders that the girl he fell in love with so many years ago was still very much alive and well. She wrote to him while she was away, letters and postcards penned in that familiar cursive and decorated with doodles of flowers and stars and fairies in the margins like the ones she used to draw on her notebooks when she should have been studying.

(One letter from Florida had a panda peeking out of a flower patch at the bottom corner of the page, so small that he almost missed it at first, and he knew it must be her way of telling him that she'd seen the stuffed panda in his studio. He had found it years ago in an old box in the back of a closet and was never sure how it got there in the first place. Stevie had kept it with her from when he first gave it to her until the end of the Tusk tour, even after he blew up at her for carrying it around and Christine slapped him for the second time in less than six months.

Jesus, what a dick he was.

So he found the panda in his closet and left it there for years, not coming back for it until a few months after the conversation he'd had at Stevie's house last year. He wasn't as strong as she was. He wasn't ready to talk about his daughter, their daughter, and he doubted that he ever would be. But he was finally in a place where he could acknowledge that she had existed, if only to himself, and maybe he could have that tangible reminder with him and be okay with it, or at least not want to kick the shit out of everything else in the room every time he looked at it.

He's glad she noticed it was there, but he's even more glad that she didn't say anything about it.)

When he wasn't waiting for the mail to come like some anxious bride hoping for a letter from her husband who's away at sea, he was waiting for nighttime and hoping she'd answer the phone when he called. At first he let a few days go by in between calls, not wanting to seem overeager, but it wasn't long before it became a daily thing. One time he happened to call when she had the whole family over, and her parents insisted on each having a turn to talk to him before they'd give the phone back to Stevie. He loves Jess and Barbara like they were his own relatives and he was glad to hear from them for the first time in years- save for the birthday and Christmas cards that came without fail- but it was mildly uncomfortable just because he didn't know what exactly Stevie had told them about their current relationship.