Well. It hasn't even been that long since I last updated! I'm pretty proud of myself on that front. On the other front – the actual quality of this chapter – not so much. But it is a necessary evil! And…well…for those of you who have been begging for Ringo to come back, here he is. Although probably not in the form you want him to be. Pay attention less to what is said, and more to what is not said. And that is all I shall say about that. Happy reading!

I wandered up over the stairwell, still lost in thought. I couldn't shake the image of John's turned back, his shaking hands. And I couldn't shake his words, either; I should know when I meet the love of my life. I should feel it somewhere deep, deep in my bones.

The reason I was in the past had nothing to do with my love life, but – just like last time – it was becoming that. Unfortunately. As though there wasn't enough stressful things going on in my life. Speaking of stress –

As I walked down the hall toward the boys' rooms, who did I bump right into?

With all her clothes on, I didn't recognize the girl right away. I usually credited myself for having a good memory when it came to faces, though, and when I saw hers I knew that she was from somewhere. But how would I recognize a girl from the 60s? It wasn't like I made regular appearances there. The only people I really knew were fairly recognizable by over half the world's population.

But then I saw it; in the turn of her hips as she sauntered down the hallway, in the way she shook back her hair and looked vaguely pleased with herself.

"Hello," she said politely as she passed, which I had to admit I didn't expect.

I maintained eye contact with her as she moved past me, daring her to remember who I was. I saw the recognition flitter across her features before I let out a small, "Hi."

"You're American," she noted, stopping in her tracks. Her brows were furrowed and, just like me, she was trying to figure it out. Only I was one ahead of her.

"You're wearing a lot of clothes."

It was amusing how the repercussions of my words echoed across her features a few times before she finally settled on an emotion; embarrassed, then shocked, then pissed, then confused for a little while, before she was decidedly gleeful.

That's right: gleeful.

"Oh!" she said brightly. "You're the girl who knows John Lennon!"

"Yes," I replied, not even sure what I was still doing here in the middle of the hallway. "You're the girl who wanted to."

She let out a high, tinkling laugh. For the first time, I really looked at her face. She was stunning, simply put, and suddenly I didn't feel so confident. It had been a really long time since I was in high school and such environments where I associated extremely pretty girls with being huge bitches. I sort of forgot in the moment that it wasn't always the case. To me, the face and the laugh fell short of the sluttiness and ultimate bitch label I had already put on her.

"Right, right," she said, whereas I would have said something along the lines of 'fuck off'. "Well, you might have won that round and scared me away, but I sure got my vengeance." And then – Lord Jesus, of all things – she winked at me.

I was starting to feel a bit uncomfortable.

I was also very confused. She couldn't have met that she slept with John, since he was at breakfast with me. So it could only mean…

Slowly, I turned my head to look at the door. Then I looked back at her. Then back at the door. Speaking to the great wood plank I let out a small, "Oh."

"Mhm," she chirped, repositioning her bag of her shoulder, "better than I thought, too. But, anyway you have it, it's love with a Beatle."

The way she said "love" made me visably cringe. Not because of the awkwardness of it (okay, yes, slightly because of the awkwardness…call me immature) but because it was one of my friends behind that door. And I didn't know which it was.

They'd had plenty of sex when I was around, and probably had ten times more when I wasn't. It was a known fact. So why did I feel so utterly creeped out?

It might have had to do with the fact that before I even opened the door, I knew who it was going to be. Hadn't I been in almost this exact same situation before? Hadn't I learned my lesson?

Apparently not, because after I dismissed the girl with a polite laugh and a nod of my head, I brought my fist up to rap at the door. When a muffled answer came my way, I eased it open.

He was standing near the bureau, his back to me. All he had on was a pair of tighty whities and one thick, woolen sock. The room was dark and stank of alcohol and cigarettes and stale perfume. The scent chocked me, though even as I gagged I knew I had no right to. This was his life now. This was what I had chosen as much as he.

"Hey," I said, my voice strained from the want not to say it. What I wanted to do was go in and sit down on the bed and have him say it to me. Have him act like I was still a person, not some horrible monster that ruined his life. I wanted him to treat me like he used to.

He turned around slowly. There was a lipstick print on the base of his neck, and another one slightly off-center on his chest. His eyes were hazy, unfocused, and even without him speaking I could tell he was drunk; he was holding another drink in his hand, and I wondered if he had even gone to sleep last night.

"Hi," Ringo said shortly.

Just like I wanted to, I moved into the room and sat down on the bed. He watched me all the way. I tried not to think about what had occupied these sheets not too long ago, and I tried not to remember that harsh words he had spoken to me also not too long ago. I looked up at him expectantly.

Heaving a big sigh, he came and sat next to me. For a few minutes, we just stayed like that. Both of us stared down at our legs, splayed out in front of ourselves in a rather defeated way. We both could feel it, I'm sure. We both knew. The amount of resignation between us surmounted higher than the amount of determination we had ever felt.

"I don't know," I started slowly, breaking the silence, "what I'm even doing here. In your room, I mean, not the 60s. But I do know that I miss you."

Ringo didn't say anything, but his drooping, bloodshot eyes continued to study his bare legs.

"I miss you," I repeated. "Why can't that be enough to tell me anything?"

He crinkled his nose, but still remained silent. He looked deep in thought, and fairly disgusted with what he was thinking. It was probably about me. He hated me. I needed to accept that; but it was so hard to think about someone you love – or once loved – hating you. It was supposed to be the opposite.

Shouldn't I hate him? Shouldn't I hate him for making me feel guilty for making the right choice? It wasn't like he gave me a whole lot of time to make the decision, but any way you had it he rejected me. He laughed in my face and I told myself he was an asshole even though we both knew what he was; he was human. He was defending himself. I didn't give him a whole lot of time to make the decision, either.

"I'm confused," I admitted to him. "And it's all fucking John's fault."

I remembered then how easily the conversation used to flow between the two of us; whether it was out loud or in our heads, we could carry on for hours. We got each other. And looking at Ringo now… I didn't understand him. Not for a second. This wasn't who he was supposed to be, this wasn't the way he was supposed to turn out.

I didn't want to be the cause of his alcoholism.

I wished things were different. I wished I hadn't made the mistake of falling for him – for anybody, for that matter, in a different time period from that which I lived. I was eighteen years old then. Eighteen. Still in high school and still naïve enough to think I could be in love with the only boyfriend I'd ever had.

"It's not all fucking John's fault," I amended, taking Ringo's silence as accusatory. "It's a lot of my fault. I want to be loved, Ringo." The words came out of my mouth before I could even think them, but I knew they were true. I'd been denying it all along, but there they were. "My grandpa – Doctor Ryan – he told me he sent me back here for a reason. To meet you all, to get the greatest friends in the entire planet. To fall in love and learn a lesson. Well, I learned it. I thought I learned it. But I never really did anything about it, did I?"

Ringo heaved in a great breath then. He picked up his hands, put them to his face, and bent his neck. I stared at him. But no matter how hard I willed it to, my heart didn't break for him.

"I want to be loved," I repeated, "and I've been trying to be loved for a very long time. Why can't I? What's the matter with me?"

He suddenly brought his hands down with a very hard slap. There were tears in his blue, bulbous eyes, but there was also anger. A feistiness which I had only ever read about. "You bitch!" he said, and the words seared.

"What? I – "

"What are you talking about?" he demanded. He stood up very suddenly, the weight shift from the bed making it groan. Standing before me in his underwear, with his hair completely amuck and his face ruddy from the night, I got the first good look at Ringo since I'd arrived back. And if I needed any confirmation about what I concluded before, I certainly had it.

"I love you!" he declared, pounding his fist into his palm. "Me! I do! And probably that boy who gave you that ring – he loves you to! It's you – it's you who is the bitch who plays us all along. Me, him, Chuck… Countless others, probably, too! I wanted to give you a second chance, but why? So you could do it again?" He shook his head, and it was with pure venom that he spat his next words. "No. No, I won't let you."

Now it was my turn to become indignant. He was wrong – he'd had this speech ready for me for years, probably, and now here I was. But I had a speech for him, too.

"Will you pull yourself out of your God damn FUCKING PIT OF DESPAIR?" My voice rose several octaves before I could stop it, and he looked at me gravely. I had his full attention now. "You do not love me, Ringo. Maybe you could have. Maybe we could have fallen in love with each other. But I was eighteen years old when I came here, and I was hardly a month older when I left. You don't know me, and I don't even really know you.

"I thought I did. Oh, yes. But now, coming back here, I'm realizing that I never really did. I thought 'That Ringo, that's not my Ringo. He's changed.' But people don't really change, Rings. They just progress, and as they grow older and experience more layers are added to themselves. I know that the boy I knew is standing right in front of me. I can hear it in your laugh, and I can see it in those eyes. Those God damn blue eyes that I thought I would love forever.

"John told me that I would know. When I fell in love with someone, I would know. Just like he knew about Maggie Mae, and still knows today. I'm not a bitch." I shook my head, tired, resigned. I didn't want to be having this conversation any more. "I'm not a bitch, I'm just telling you the truth. And I'm sorry it hurts you, but you have absolutely no idea how much it hurts me, too. I don't want a second chance at…at whatever we had going on. I want a second chance at knowing you. Because I really feel like I don't anymore."

He gaped at me. Never before had he seemed so small, so inconsequential yet so huge a part of my life. Ringo was one of my layers – I, too, was a different person from before. But love isn't just about one of the layers. It's about all of them. It's about the sum of them. And it's impossible to understand without first knowing your story.

"A.J.," he finally said, so softly that I almost couldn't hear him. I stood up, crossed the room to where he was standing, and planted my feet in front of his. "A.J. I'm sorry. I'm…I'm just…" He inhaled deeply again. "I'm a mess. I'm a mess and I don't even understand why, really."

There it was. There was the person I thought I knew. Just that small piece of himself made my heart pang, and I felt that insatiable need to reach out for him, to have him back as mine. I could if I really wanted to. I could take him as the person he used to be.

But it would be wrong, especially because he had evolved. Like it or not, this was the person he had become. And I didn't love it when he drank, or when he became so dark and angry. But that was part of him now, and if I really loved him I had to love all of him.

I pulled him into my arms, and I felt his head rest on the crook of my shoulder. He wouldn't cry, I knew, but he would once I left. Men.

Still, though, I held him. For what seemed like hours, we stood there in the center of his room. Then, finally, he picked up his head and pulled away from me.

"That was closure," he said.

I nodded. "That was closure."

He stood quietly for a moment, looking again deep in thought. "A.J.," he finally said, "why are you here?"

"In this room, or in this time?"

He smiled, and I couldn't help but smile back at him. It was only an echo of the once uncontrollable laughter that would spill from our lips when we as much as looked at each other, but it was still something. We were working on it.

"In this time. I thought it was for me, but if that were the case you would have closed your eyes and disappeared minutes ago. Right?"

"I think what I need is the ending to a story," I said, and once I said it I knew it to be true. "And I think this conversation proves that the story isn't mine."

…

A few hours later, I slipped back into the room I had been sharing with Paul and George, the two Beatles that at the present I was most comfortable with. George was absent, but Paul was sitting on his bed. He had his guitar on his lap, and a notebook placed in front of him. The page was blank.

He looked up as I entered. "Hi," he chirped, his smile radiant as always.

I went and sat on George's bed carefully, feeling strangely buoyant. Like a huge weight had lifted off my chest. "Hi," I replied. "Working on a song?"

He shrugged. "I'm meant to be."

"But?"

"But," he said, his smile fading slightly, "songs never seem to come to me when I expect them to."

A wave of tiredness hit me then. Even though I didn't know where George was, or whether he would be returning, I wanted to seep down into his bed and sleep there forever. The lights in the room were dim and the window was cracked just a fraction, so that cool air spilled in and mixed with the scent of cigarette smoke. It was oddly comforting, and it brought be back to the days of my little "bedroom" in the middle of the house that the boys rented back when they were just getting started.

Paul smiled at my sleepy eyes, which probably matched his natural ones at that point. He stood up and gestured to his bed. "Go ahead, I was thinking about going out anyways."

"You sure?" I rasped.

"Oh, yeah."

Gratefully, I forced myself to my feet and threw myself across the room. I landed in a pile dead center of his bed. I would have been content to sleep right there in that position, had he not made a clucking noise at me and crossed his arms over his chest.

"Paul," I said as he smoothed the covers by my feet and rested his guitar against the wall there. "Do you remember the first night I met you? When I fell asleep and you carried me all the way back to your house?"

He laughed. "You think I could forget that? That was the longest walk of my life!"

I smiled sleepily, blinking up at him through bleary eyes and not really knowing what I was saying anymore. "Thanks for that. You're my favorite Beatle."

"And you, my dear A.J., are my favorite twenty-first century girl."

"Aw, Paul. You're just saying that."

"Maybe. But you're one of them, at least."

I smiled into his pillow. "Hey – why did you think you'd be able to write a song tonight, anyways?"

I don't even know if my words were coherent, and the thought was only teetering on the edge of my mind. It wasn't important, anyways, and when I didn't hear the sound of his voice respond immediately I could feel myself start to drift away. I was in that sort of half-dream state where nothing really seems like reality but you're quite confident that you're not asleep and dreaming yet.

Paul stood there for a good few minutes, it turned out, before he finally answered my question. "Because my muse is back," was his reply, though I never heard it. I did, however, feel the slight pressure of his lips on my forehead, and hear the light creak as the door opened to suck him into the hallway.

I rolled over, smiling to myself. All around me was the sweet, spicy smell of spearmint. I vaguely remembered that it was my favorite smell in the world.

Disclaimer: I don't actually know that Paul McCartney smells like spearmint. But, as it is my favorite scent in the world and I associate it with any person that I love, I thought it fitting for him. Oops, did I say the L-word? ;^) Geroge knows something youuuu don't know! Does winky-face George look slightly maniacal to anyone else? Like maybe he's plotting against me? I can't be sure. Leave me a review letting me know. ALSO please just review in general telling me what you thought about the chapter and where you think the story is going to go. There's not much left – probably only a few chapters – so get ready for the drammmaaaa and the surprise ending! It's a twist, lemme tell ya.

One last thing – if you want to know what I'm up to, what I'm currently reading, what I'm currently writing, or just my general musings on life, you should follow my blog on Blogspot, Paperback Writer. The link to that is in my profile. Thanks guys! Hope you enjoyed this update and the swiftness of it!