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She knew something was different this morning when she woke up. Maybe, that was the first clue already. The fact that she was waking up, really waking up and not just giving up on falling asleep at about five or six a.m. Not that she felt like she had slept enough, let alone something even close to being rested, how could she, when her dreams were once again so vivid she really felt like she had just run through the desserts of the wild-western-town she spent the majority of her dreams in at the moment? But it was the first morning in ages she woke up without a heavy feeling on her chest that put her under the impression that she could barely breathe. She heard little scratches on the bedroom floor and just seconds after that, Meredith jumped up on the bed but instead of tiptoeing her way over to her, she stood right at the edge and just looked at her, the head slightly tilted.
„Morning girly…“, Taylor greeted the cat, her so far unused voice still slightly raspy, „Come here…“, she said, rubbing her fingers and making soft hissing-sounds to get her cat’s interest. But Meredith stayed where she was, looking at her unimpressed.
„It’s fine, girl. There’s nobody here to tell you it’s not your place.“
The words tasted bitter and she put a whole lot of effort into tricking herself into thinking that this was just the result of the fact that she hadn’t brushed her teeth yet. But it wasn’t. Meredith stood where she was.
„Will you come over now you horrible creature and give me something to cuddle already? I really need it…“
She whispered the last sentence more than saying it, a fruitless attempt to keep herself from hearing the words. Petting the cats for comfort had become a ritual, of sorts, a part of a greater scheme the only goal being to get her through the day at the moment. A scheme her cats were as complicit in as her mum and Selena and Blake and - Blake! She remembered that her friend had just asked her about a recommendation for a restaurant in Nashville right before she must have fallen asleep. Given in to the exhaustion that built up in her for days but never let to a relief of sorts. Not until now. She grabbed for her phone without looking, touched around the mattress and got herself an unamused sound and a paw-clap from Meredith who had snuggled herself up next to her.
„Sorry, dear, I just…have you seen my-“
It was right in this moment when her fingers touched the plastic frame of the case wrapped around her phone. She pulled it up an mindlessly scrolled through the pile of messages displayed without unlocking the device. Her mum. Selena. Keleigh. And one that stood out in-between them. Because unlike her friends that were saved by surname only and sometimes an emoji on her phone, he wasn’t. Bob Dylan. The name hadn’t popped up in her message-notifications for a few days and now he did with a text obviously sent at about 4:20 this morning. Again. Like he would have had a hunch. She opened the message. „Thinking of you…“, the text read. Attached was a Youtube-link. „The Blue Nile - Downtown Lights“. She opened it and laughed at the sheer length of it. 6:31. Well. Those were quite a lot of thoughts to think at this ungodly hour. She pressed play and closed her eyes.
The soft synthi-sounds filled the room at once and the chime in the beginning made her close her eyes immediately. This was an invitation to dream and dreaming was what she would do. So she let the slow beat of the drums become her footsteps along a night-covered street, where it was dark and lonely but comfortable nonetheless. Because she knew that she was walking towards a goal. The street lay in nightly silence and the far glimmer of city-lights was the only distant light in existence. But she wasn’t afraid, while she kept moving.
„In love we’re all the same, we’re walking down an empty street, and with nobody call your name, empty streets, empty nights, downtown lights.“
She sank back into the cushion, let her body drown in the soft fabric of it all. Took several consciously deep breaths, finally allowing herself to let the feeling in that had been lingering there since she woke up. Relief. For the fist time in days. Relief, because this ending in particular was so much more than that. Could be so much more than that if she only took the right steps now. If she only listened carefully enough.
„If it’s him you want, why don’t you just do it? Why don’t you just say it, out loud, right now?“
Joe had sent those words to her wit the intention to hurt. They were meant to be a daggers that caused her to bleed out internally. Little did he know that she caught them before they could reach her hart. Caught them and put them in her pocket, where they stayed for the past few days. And now she would take them out again and see what they looked like. Felt like. Tasted like. Because she needed to know.
„How do I know you feel it? How do I know you feel it? How do I know it’s true? The downtown lights.“
Yeah, that was the question, wasn’t it?, she thought. Was it the way her heart started to beat fast at the thought of his name? At the way she could assume now that he thought about her in the middle of the night? About their last conversation? Was it the thoughts thad had crept on her yesterday evening, faint memories of how his hands felt on her body? Of what his skin tasted like under her lips?
The so far slow rhythm swell into a crescendo while her mind drifted away to the music, making her walk the nightly street way faster than she did before, pacing up to the speed of the music. She was running by now, along empty bars with their neon-lights that only lit up part of the way, the cars with the foreign number-plates and the solemn people crying in corners. Ran along because none of it mattered. Because she could see him. At the end of the street she could see him. She picked up speed, ran like her life depended on it, really. But the song ended before she could reach him. And so all that was left for her to do was to lay here, short on breath and wondering about the would haves, could haves, should haves once again. Or wasn’t there? Her fingers double tapped the message before she thought about it twice. She stared at it in shock for a second. Then she locked the phone and threw it so far away that it was out of her reach. Meredith jumped at the sudden movement and meowed at her reproachfully.
„Sorry, I just…I think I did something stupid. Why didn’t you stop me?! Wouldn’t that be your job or something?“, she asked while still scratching her cat between the ears. She just looked at her without any reaction whatsoever.
„Yeah. Thought so. You’re utterly useless, you know that? If Blake was here now, she would have taken my phone away and-“
She interrupted herself mid-sentence. Or, to be more precise, she was interrupted mid-sentence. Interrupted by the sound of a message arriving. The speed in which she sat up and grabbed for her phone was embarrassing. Embarrassing and nothing else.
„Glad to know you’re alive.“
No emoji. No GIF. Just the next plain text message. And still, she could imagine him typing out the words with a smug smile around the corners of his lips. Because she knew that was how he would have said it. A smug smile and a shimmer of pride in his eyes from getting what he wanted. She could imagine every wrinkle around the corners of his lips, the way he would look up at her form slightly beneath, even the exact tone he would say those words in. So dry that it was teasing, in a dark tone that spoke of honesty and mockery alike like only he could. Like he had done so often in these long summer-nights that led to them being here now. Obviously. Oh if only she had known.
„If I said I came over in about thirty minutes, how’d you react?“
She stared at the bubble of text immediately after she sent it. Stared at it without seeing it, really. Her heart racing in her chest, her throat dry. This could absolutely be the worst thing she did in a while. And it could be the best thing she did in a while. The three points that showed up right beneath her message would most probably decide about that once they vanished. The fact that they appeared mere seconds after she sent the message were a statement in itself though. The „typing“-symbol was there for what seemed like an eternity to her, stopping and vanishing every once in a while. And then there it was. A grey bubble popping up in the conversation-history. A grey bubble that carried one word. And one word only.
„C’mere.“
And she was on her feet in no time.
The rain was drumming against the car’s windows, roof and front in an undefinable rhythm. Not that she would not try to figure out which one it was, since this always had been something very calming for her since childhood, but she couldn’t. No comfort then, this was. Maybe she didn’t deserve it. Maybe this was her reminder that the smile around her lips was as inappropriate as the way her heart was beating in anticipation. That the number of times she had looked at herself in the mirror now was way too high given the way she knew all too well what she looked like. Her hair messy, her clothes wrinkled and her eyebrows undone. A hot mess. But the mess that he wanted. Hopefully. Her driver didn’t even use his navigation system to get her to where she told him she wanted to be now. To where she needed to be now. He knew. This had been her route way too many times this past summer, fresh out the studio and into the bunker. Her reflection smiled back at her from the mirror. A bright smile. A happy smile. One she hadn’t seen on her face in ages, it seemed. The driver parked the car on the path walk in front of the entrance of a fence. It was a routine. And it was about to become so much more than this. She thanked him and told him he wouldn’t have to wait. She knew she was not going to need him anytime soon. She just knew. The sound of the car’s door falling shut behind her felt like the clicking of a lock. She was out of the slammer for good. She was free now. And she knew exactly what she wanted to do with this new-gained freedom.
He didn’t even ask who it was when she rang the doorbell. He just opened the door, standing there, a cigarette slipped between his lips, bare chest and sweatpants sitting slightly loose on his hips. He was a sight even though you could tell that he didn’t get significantly more sleep than she did, recently. It was visible from the shadows under his eyes and the way his lips were chapped. Nonetheless the urge to kiss them rose the moment she saw him.
„There she is“, he said, his voice hoarse as if he was still in denial wether these words really described what was happening before his eyes.
The gaze that roamed her body now almost felt like a hug, so full of admiration it took her breath away. Nobody had ever looked at her the way he did. Nobody would ever look at her the way he did, she was absolutely convinced of that. Still, she couldn’t move, somehow afraid she might break the moment if she did.
„You called, I came.“
He chuckled an opened his mouth, saying: „Well technically“ as if he was going to explain to her how things unfolded from his perspective. But he closed it after the words left his mouth, the smug smile she had imagined earlier forming around his lips. Then he nodded slowly.
„I called you came.“
And with that she took the decisive step forward, literally stepping over his threshold. HIs hands were on her body in no time. Caressing the small of her neck, messing up her hair, his lips met hers with a longing built up for months now. A longing that none of their previous meetings had been quite able to fulfill. They became one so quickly that it was almost non-imaginable to her how they had ever not been. How she had ever managed to be without him, when nothing had ever felt as good as him touching her, holding her, making her heart race and the first soft moans leave her lips. When nothing had ever felt as good as he did.
„Should we talk?“, she asked when he pulled away from her for the blink of an eye so that he was able to pull her t-shirt over her head.
„Oh we definitely should…“, he said, while his lips found home against her neck, „But this is not the time for it.“
And when he unclasped her bra, all of her contradictions in that department faded into nothing.
They came back though, eventually. At some point when they were lying next to each other in his bed and he had just lit his first cigarette. She watched him do it, one hand carefully racking through his curls. She knew she would never not be impressed by the fact how he could already be inhaling tar when she was still busy catching her breath. Obviously, her workout-routine she had adopted pre-tour wasn’t as successful as she told herself.
„So…the past three days…what was going on? Give me a recap.“
A recap. Like this was some kind of soap-opera. And maybe it was. Still, she sighed.
„It was the past three weeks, to be honest. The whole thing it…it blew up in my face. Kinda. No, not kinda, it totally did, actually.“
She paused and kept running her fingers through his hair. He didn’t say anything, but when he took the next drag of his cigarette and had blown the smoke out, he put a kiss to her temple. She loved when he did that. She always saw it as if he was honoring the thoughts running through her head. And right now it gave her the courage to speak.
„Joe put a gun to my head. He said I’d have to make a call.“
Matty chuckled. „Between the two of us? Oh I’m-“
„Between him and the tour. He said he thought about it and he was not going to go through with it if I didn’t make major changes to the schedule. And I thought about it. For days. I was really thinking things through, how I could maybe scale the whole thing down a little bit. I wrote whole concepts in my head about which cities could be cut out, how I could probably stretch the whole thing out over two years in the US only instead of just one so that there would be more time in-between. And then halfway through it I…I somehow realized that this was not what I wanted to do. The Eras-tour isn’t a tour of compromises, you, of all people, know that, don’t you, Matty? It’s all in or all out. I can’t make it half-heartedly. And in some of those nights where I was trying exactly that I realized that I didn’t want to.“
His dark eyes met hers in an instant. „As you should. It is your right to put your art first and you should have people around you who support you in that.“
A dry laugh left her lips. Dry and disbelieving.
„It sounds so easy when you say it…“, she whispered, wiping her eyes with the hand that was not intertwined with his by now.
„What did he say though?“
She took a deep breath and bit her lip while the memories of the exact same scene came back to her.
„Then this is where it ends, Tay. Obviously. And I’m sorry it does. I’m so sorry. But this is your choice, apparently. And your choice alone. And you choose to not choose us.“
She couldn’t bring her tongue to repeat these exact words, no matter how many times she cleared her throat in an attempt to get ready for it. She couldn’t say it. But there was something else for her to say.
„He asked for his ring back.“
Her voice didn’t sound like it was her own, but her heart stayed remarkably calm the whole time. Her hand kept wracking through Matty’s hair. Maybe that wasn’t that surprising after all, she thought, hadn’t he proven to be her rock in these past months? Her source of sanity, the cure for her ruined self-esteem, the bandaid over her heart that suffered so many blows in recent months. Way too many.
He didn’t reply. Instead he lifted her left hand up and put a kiss to her ring finger. And as if he could feel her heart beating faster again at the gesture, he said:
„I’ll get you a new one tomorrow.“
She chuckled, half-helplessly.
„You don’t have to-“
„Yes, Tay, I do have to. Because it is what makes you happy, apparently. And if this is what makes you happy, I’ll do it. Because you deserve to be happy, Tay. And I really hope you haven’t forgotten about that during your time in the slammer.“
The way he looked at her made her heart stop. So affectionate. So full of love. So him.
„What if I did?“, she asked, her voice way too hoarse, way too unsure.
„Well…“, he said, kissing said spot on her finger once again, „Then I see that as an assignment to myself to remind you of that. If you do give me permission, that is.“
She couldn’t help but laugh. And this time it felt like the weight from the last days finally left her chest. That she was able to breathe again. Fresh air, filled with cigarette smoke.
„I do…“, she said absolutely convinced of her words, „I absolutely do.“