Getaway Car

Never Imagined

"Travis! Where is your head?" Coach Reid shouted from the sidelines.

Travis' head was not on the field. It was waffling between the butterflies of getting to be close to Taylor, and dread of knowing it was all for show. He'd heard Matty Healy was in New York, and Taylor was in New York. Would they meet up? Travis was allowed to see other people as long as they didn't get photographed together, was Taylor doing the same thing? And he didn't think he was allowed to have an opinion even if she did, but he couldn't get it out of his thoughts.

His birthday had been incredible. You can never go wrong with steak, but getting stuck was the highlight of the night. He wished he could have paid those firefighters to leave them stuck a little longer. Now he couldn't stop from smiling every time he saw a photo of her in the news, so he was smiling a lot. She felt magnetic; this icon that he got to know. And then he'd remember how sad she'd looked. She may be an icon to the world, but she was also a woman living under a microscope. How could he remove that microscope for her? At least for a moment.

But she was in New York and he was in Minneapolis. Specifically, he was in the middle of a game against the Minnesota Vikings and struggling to stay focused. Travis needed to get Taylor out of his head.

-

Taylor needed to get Travis out of her head. She was trying to record some new songs she'd written on tour, but it felt like nothing was working. She kept thinking back to Travis' birthday and his goofy smile while doing her choreography and God, that mustache. She felt like so much had changed over the last few weeks that she didn't even know the Taylor that had written these lyrics just a month ago.

Her frequent collaborator Jack Antonoff was in the studio with her. "What's up? Like what's up really?" he asked.

Taylor walked over to a velvet couch and fell into it, "I don't know, Jack. I wish I knew. Everything's feeling so flat today."

"This isn't about Matty, is it?" Jack joined her on the couch.

"No. Yes? I don't know. He texted me but I haven't responded."

"Travis, then? I thought that was fake, and mostly to draw attention away from Matty."

"It is fake," Taylor started. "And it's making Matty super jealous, which is a bonus."

"So back to my original question. What's up?"

"Travis is fun. I feel like a different person when I'm around him, lighter even. But I don't know if that version of me is real, or if I just feel that way because I know it's fake. There's no pressure. Even when the press is dissecting every video frame of us together, and fans are already planning our wedding, he handles it. I'm not afraid of scaring him off, because there's nothing to scare him away from," Taylor dropped her head back, tired.

"Heavy stuff."

"Yeah."

"Do you want to try writing a song about getting trapped in an elevator?" Jack grinned, picked up a guitar and played the first notes of Aerosmith's "Love in an Elevator."

"Oh, shut up."