Caught Up In A Moment [Kaylor]

Chapter Seventeen - Nothin' Good Starts In A Getaway Car

"What are you thinking about?" Taylor asked, speaking up for the first time in half an hour other than to sing.

Karlie shook her imagination away and chuckled. "Horses."

"Horses?" Taylor asked with an amused smile. She turned to look at Karlie. "Why?"

"I don't know, I was just wondering if you had any."

"Ah, well, we do!" Taylor turned to look back at the road, dropping one hand off the steering wheel to rest it on her lap. "We have five. Two of them are mine, one of them is my brother's, and the other two are my parents'."

Karlie perked up. "Really? Why do you have two?"

"I don't know," Taylor said with a laugh. "I just asked for another one once because I thought she was really pretty and my parents were on board. Besides, we have an extra for guests now, so it worked out."

"What are their names?"

"I have a bay horse called Sparkle and a palomino called Pal." Taylor rolled her eyes as Karlie snorted. "Look, I was a kid when I named them! I clearly wasn't feeling very creative when I got Pal."

"Which one did you get first?" Karlie asked, intrigued as to which horse was so beautiful that Taylor just needed to have it.

"Pal, actually," Taylor said with a laugh. "Sparkle was this rambunctious little filly when I saw her at a sale yard. My dad was looking for some kind of new trailer for his truck, but I saw her and I wanted her. Pal is the calm one. He's a little older now, almost seventeen. I got him when I was eight or nine as a birthday present when he was just three. Then when I was thirteen, I got Sparkle. She's only ten."

Karlie tried to imagine a little Taylor with her horses and smiled. "That's cute. I can't wait to meet them!"

"Austin's horse is the prettiest, though," Taylor told her. "She's this beautiful leopard Appaloosa. Domino, because what else would you call a spotted horse?"

"I dunno," Karlie supplied, "Oreo?"

"Nah." Taylor shook her head. "Oreo would be good for a black and white Paint horse or a Pinto or something like that."

"You know a lot about horses," Karlie pointed out, genuinely impressed. She didn't know Taylor liked horses so much. And while Karlie was always amazed by them, it was only a surface-level kind of knowledge. She could probably name three different breeds and colour variations.

"I love horses," Taylor said with a grin. "Not as much as I like cats but—Oh! You get to meet Meredith!"

Ah, Meredith. Taylor's cat she always talked about. Karlie had been looking forward to meeting the allegedly aloof and people-hating Meredith. Or well, maybe just Taylor-hating since the blonde always whined about how the cat would let anyone else pick her up and snuggle but Taylor herself. "I hope she's nice to me."

"I hope she's not," Taylor teased. "I need to know that she doesn't just hate me specifically."

Karlie laughed but stayed quiet, opting instead to focus back on the road ahead of her. They'd at some point reached a more rural side road, though the freeway was still visible through the trees. According to the GPS, they only had about a half-hour left in their drive, which tracked since they'd escaped any sort of city or even a resemblance of one and had been driving alongside trees and fields for the other half of the last hour. The nerves had come back almost tenfold, and Karlie couldn't even begin to imagine how Taylor herself was feeling. She must have been nervous, too, considering she was the one who was coming out at some point over the long weekend. Karlie was just along for the ride.