Chapter Text
June 1997.
Daisy stood in front of the stove, collecting her soft hair in her hands and twisting it into a lazy, unsecured bun, just for a brief reprieve from the heat. Billy was watching her, couldn’t help himself at the sight of the now-exposed skin on her neck. He set his knife down on the cutting board and stepped around the kitchen island to stand behind her, hands sliding across her stomach, lips landing in the nape of her neck.
“Oh, hi,” she hummed, only a little bit surprised to find him on her.
“Hi,” he murmured into her skin. He lifted his head just slightly to rest on her shoulder, musing, “This smells so good.”
“I’m a really good cook, Billy,” she answered, “You know this.”
He gave her shoulder a quick peck as she spoke and then replied, smiling, “Somehow I never imagined this about you, all that time.”
Daisy laughed softly, “Well how many really great dinners do I have to make you before you believe it?”
“Mm, I’m not sure I’ll ever believe it,” he was playing coy. Billy shifted so he was next to her, hands sliding but never leaving her abdomen. He gave her a sly smile, “I think I might need you to keep cooking me dinner forever.” He delivered it like he was breaking bad news to her, as if she didn’t absolutely delight in getting to care for him like this, as if these honey-dipped moments weren’t her dream come true. As if she didn’t know they were his, too.
Daisy grinned at him. Her hair was already starting to fall from its haphazard bun, messy, like he loved. “I can make that happen,” she teased, “But you really have to be a better sous chef, and to stop groping your boss.”
Billy’s mouth fell open in mock-offense, “I wasn’t groping, I was hugging you.”
He sounded so pouty she almost regretted her joke, except she kind of loved him like this. “Oh, c’mere,” she looped her arms around his neck, urging him closer and pulling a sweet kiss from his lips. Offhandedly, she realized with a quiet giggle, “Sorry, whatever was on my hands is on your shirt now.”
“‘s fine,” he mumbled, more interested in coaxing another kiss.
“Alright,” Daisy whispered, smitten, “You can grope the head chef all you want.” Her words were merely permissive, but her tone was asking, longing for his hands to find more of her.
“No, no,” Billy taunted back, “I have work to do. I gotta earn my keep.” He squeezed her hips and kissed her cheek before he slipped away, moving back to his spot on the island and resuming his Daisy-ordered veggie chopping.
Daisy laughed, having been beaten at her own game. She’d get him back later. She’d get him, because she had all of him, and they had all of time.
Though really, having this specific part of him – touchy and silly and freely loving in the kitchen before dinner – was what she savored most. Nearly three months in, evenings like these had become routine, almost unremarkable in their simplicity and security, except that Daisy still felt her heart fluttering every time he did something like come over to kiss her while she cooked. It was all just so easy.
They spent some days writing together, others with him producing for other bands and her taking meetings for her foundation, almost always returning to each other as the sun started to fall west. Some nights they’d go out to eat, traced by the eyes of strangers and dusted by whispers of “That’s Daisy and Billy!”, “I heard they’re together now”, “Oh my god they’re holding hands!”
(One night, when Daisy finally admitted that she kind of liked the chatter, Billy had grinned at her and told her he did, too. More specifically, he had told her, he thought it was hot.)
But most nights they’d stay in, and on the best nights, Daisy would cook. They would talk about their days over dinner, so duly domestic but so earnestly fulfilling. And after they ate, they’d tangle together on the couch, sometimes strumming budding songs and other times just talking, until their bodies took each other or sleep took them both. Lately, their days were full of an unfinished tune, one they’d just been calling New Song. Billy had talked about maybe bringing it to one of the bands he was working with.
“Did you meet with Abbott today?” Daisy wondered.
“He’s in New York,” Billy answered, as he sliced another carrot and added with a wry laugh, “Which nobody told me.”
Daisy chuckled back, “Well that makes it difficult, doesn’t it?”
“These kids, Dais,” he was shaking his head.
“Oh, baby,” she replied over her shoulder, “I’m sure we were far more difficult to work with in our twenties.”
“Us?” Billy echoed, playful suspicion in his voice, “No way.”
Daisy giggled, rolling her eyes. He couldn’t see her face, but he could tell anyway.
“I’m gonna go out to New York on Friday, I guess, to meet with all of ‘em,” Billy told her, “And then I’ll be back home Sunday.”
Daisy spun around, leaning gently against the counter behind her, and he watched the gears turn in her head. Predicting her unspoken thought process, he went on, “I know Stella comes back Sunday, though, so maybe you just wanna come over to write on Monday once she’s at school?”
Of course, their whole routine, the dinner and the talking and the strumming on the couch until sleep lulled them away, only applied on weeks when Stella was at her dad’s. They had a schedule, a 50/50 split, and these days Tommy was pretty good about keeping it. Though in the past twelve weeks, Billy had already seen Daisy rearrange a handful of nights or weekends to accommodate Stella staying with Daisy longer or coming back to her sooner.
Tommy was transient by nature and by profession, and, since Daisy, never with the same woman for longer than a few months. He loved Stella, and Stella loved him, and it mostly worked because he had a nanny, Carla, who Stella absolutely adored. But, still, it was common for Tommy to unexpectedly decide he was going out of town, or out for the night, or doing something else that he evidently found more important or compelling than fatherhood. And recently, a new wrinkle: nine-year-old Stella had started to sometimes tell Daisy she didn’t want to go to her dad’s.
Daisy had no idea how best to handle that, how to balance wanting her daughter to have a relationship with her dad and wanting to respect her agency. She worried constantly about Stella having too volatile a childhood. If she thought too hard about it, she could berate herself for once believing Tommy would be a man she’d build a stable home with. Instead, she was seeing flashes of her own youth in the way Tommy swept new women in and out of Stella’s life and seemed to think of spending time with his daughter as a backup plan for a boring day.
There had been better times and worse times. The second summer after the divorce, Stella was supposed to spend a month in France with Tommy, but he had hired a new nanny and disinvited Carla because the woman he was seeing didn’t like her. When he refused to change plans, Daisy had one week to totally reconfigure her 22-show arena tour to accommodate her six-year-old coming along. Years later, Stella still gleefully recalled memories from that tour, and Daisy felt pretty damn proud of that. But the stress, the guilt, the frustration of not being able to shield Stella from turbulence and rejection could still eat Daisy alive. She’d cried countless tears to countless friends, read countless books by countless experts, spent countless nights tucking Stella into bed and countless hours staring up in the dark, wondering how she could rectify all this.
Ultimately, Daisy had landed on this: she would always, always be here, preserving her home as a warm safe haven with an ever-open door for her daughter. Whatever was going on with her father, as with the rest of her life, Stella would always have the sturdiness of her mom’s world to rest on and return to. A world where she would never ever question that she was the top priority and where she would never have to ask to be seen or fight to be taken care of.
And so, although Daisy had done a bit of casual dating in the five years since her divorce, no man had ever crossed into Stella’s world.
Daisy knew Billy understood all this, knew he had so similarly given so much of himself to keep Julia’s life so secure. She knew he supported her parenting, and she was so grateful to never feel even a sliver of resentment or hurt from him when she’d have to say no to something because of Stella. She felt a strikingly comforting sense of unity, now, hearing him remember the schedule and easily acclimate to it.
For Billy, it was barely even a thought. Of course her daughter was paramount, and of course that only made him love Daisy more.
Daisy stepped forward, resting an elbow on the island and her chin on her hand, sighing softly as she took the sight of Billy in.
Billy raised his eyebrows in response, still dutifully doing his chopping. Then as she kept staring, he laughed, almost shyly, and asked, “What?”
“I can come over Monday, yes,” Daisy started softly. The man standing in front of her was, in a million ways, the same man she had met in 1975. Same rough curly hair, same enthralling introspection, same dry sense of humor, same mystical and undeniable connection. But he was different in a million ways, too. Temper a bit milder, hands a bit tougher, smiled a lot more easily and considered a lot more openly. No longer scared of himself. She knew who she was dealing with now, and she knew it was someone who would never flee or send her fleeing.
“Okay,” he replied expectantly, stretching out his last syllable to mirror Daisy’s leading tone.
The first few times they had tried to be in each other’s lives, they were bound to fail. Too much working against them, too much they each had to sort out before they could give themselves to one another. But then, each time they came back, they were closer and closer to making it last. The love was there, the understanding was there, the willingness to commit was there. It had just been timing, conspiratorially bad timing, keeping them from succeeding, for at least a decade there.
And now, time had finally relented.
He was in this, for good, and she knew it. She was in it, too.
And so she gently smiled and asked, “Billy, do you wanna meet my daughter?"