Is It Chill That You're In My Head?

March 2019

"So you know how you asked Hayley to babysit when we're out on this weekend?" Justin turns to his wife as they're tidying up after putting the kids to sleep.

"Yeah?" She looks at him suspiciously, taking note of the mischievous glint in his eyes.

"I invited Taylor too." He grins.

"Justin York! You sneaky man." She giggles as she puts the remaining kids toys into the tidybox.

"You and me both know they need a push in the right direction."

"I see, so you're going to claim it's for the greater good." She teases.

"Well we both know my brother's too busy sulking to actually fix this himself." He jokes, "besides, when we last saw Hayley she wasn't doing any better, so we'd be fixing 2 people's happiness for the price of one."

"When you put it like that..." She smirks, "but they can never find out about this though, Hayley would practically murder you."

"My lips are sealed if yours are." He shrugs.

"Deal." She hugs him before picking up the tv remote from the coffee table so they can find a movie to watch.

-----------

To say that Hayley had been handling things well would be the biggest lie of the century. She had been talking to her therapist about it and trying to work through some of the issues that may have caused the relationship to break down, and she saw someone on Pinterest say that journalling would help but since she was so used to writing song lyrics to process things then all she had was a few pages of song fragments messily scribbled down into a notebook with pages which were more tear stained than she'd like to admit.

The fact was that no matter how much work she did on herself, she still missed Taylor. She missed him in any capacity, she missed the way he would hug her tightly from behind when she least expected it, she missed the way he would pull her impossibly close when he kissed her, and the way he would softly run his fingers up and down her back when she was having a bad day. But the past few months had been almost completely no contact, so she missed him as a friend too, and even though she was still deeply in love with him then as more time passed without seeing him she had gotten to the point where she'd have him back in her life in any way he wanted her.

Agreeing to babysit for Justin and Jana tonight was mostly about helping them obviously, but also part of her hoped it might help her to get out of the house for a bit, plus she hadn't been to visit Nora and Ella for a while and she felt kind of guilty because knew they missed her, and so she shouldn't allow her breakup with their uncle to get in the way.

"Hi." She said, hugging Jana and laughing as Nora ran up to hug her leg. But that's when she spotted him.

Stood slightly further into the house, chatting with Justin, was the man she had been avoiding.

"What's he-? Is Taylor going with you or something? I thought you guys were going on a date night." She whispers nervously.

"No, he's babysitting." Jana replies. "Guess we accidentally got two babysitters, I had a really bad night with Ella the other day so my tired brain probably wasn't working properly." She lies.

"Oh ok, sorry I'll just go. Enjoy your evening." Hayley tells her awkwardly.

"No." Nora grabs her wrist, her little hand making Hayley turn back to face her. "I want you to stay."

"Guess that's que for me to leave then." Taylor says uncomfortably, as he starts walking towards the door.

"Nooo." Nora says conflicted at the choice, she thinks for a moment.