Does Billy Love Daisy in "Daisy Jones & The Six"? Here's What Happens in the Book

The tumultuous relationship between Daisy Jones and Billy Dunne is at the center of "Daisy Jones & The Six," both the Taylor Jenkins Reid novel and the Amazon Prime Video adaptation. With two very different approaches to music and a lot more in common than they care to acknowledge, the two musicians clash from the beginning but also understand each other on a deep level, which seems to frustrate Billy in particular. Is he in love with Daisy, or is it something else?

From the beginning, it certainly seems like there's a spark between Billy and Daisy. They clash musically, philosophically, and personally in a way that anyone familiar with variations on the enemies-to-lovers trope will clock as masking some underlying attraction. By the midpoint of the TV show, we're starting to see that both of them realize the attraction, but neither will do more than just nudge at it. During an extended sequence in the fifth episode, for instance, Billy and Daisy isolate themselves to try to write a new song and wind up sharing a few confessions, a few flirtatious gestures, and a slightly-too-long hug . . . which Billy immediately follows by rushing home and getting in bed with his wife, Camila, almost as if to prove to himself that he's only attracted to Camila, not Daisy.

It's in the following episode, though, that the lingering tension between them comes to a head — and it's a significant departure from their relationship in the book. In the TV version, Billy grows frustrated with a recording session where Daisy can't nail the emotion of the song, leading the two of them to argue in the parking lot about the recording session, and about the attraction between them. When Daisy challenges him to say there's nothing between them, he instead shocks both of them by kissing her. In the book, the kiss doesn't happen; Daisy leans in during a songwriting session, but Billy panics and flees instead of kissing her.

In the book, there's not a clear answer as to whether Billy and Daisy were in love in the '70s, but it's pretty heavily implied that the feelings between them went way beyond platonic, and way beyond something as simple as "will they or won't they." It's telling that, in the final pages of the book, we read a letter that Camila leaves behind when she's dying of a terminal illness, decades after the main storyline. She tells her daughter to give Billy some time . . . and then to tell him that he should call Daisy.

The question of whether they're attracted to each other is a resounding "yes," but the question of whether it's love is one of the big questions of the whole story. It's also a big part of what inspired Reid to write the book. In an essay she wrote for Hello Sunshine, she described how a Fleetwood Mac performance, and the visible, complicated emotions between Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, sparked the idea that became "Daisy Jones":