the stars in your eyes | t.s. one shots

fire

Thump.

"What was that?" Gracie asks, brushing her bangs out of her eyes as she looks up from the piano, her gaze meeting Taylor's, who only laughs.

"You've never had cats, have you?"

"No..."

"They just sort of... jump around and make noises in the other room," Taylor says. "It was probably just Benji jumping off of a table or Olivia pushing him around or something. Don't worry about it."

Gracie nods. That sounds reasonable, so she believes her friend. "Alright." She turns back to the piano. "I think... we've gotta repeat the chorus one more time, but give it something special to make it more of an outro?"

Taylor thinks for a minute. "If you sing, I can do sort of like, an echo-ey, background vocal sort of thing? And I'm sure Aaron can change up the instrumentals a little bit to isolate this chorus a little bit more." She pauses. "The song has been building up the whole time. I know usually an outro would settle down a little bit from the climax, but what if we just keep building up? I feel like that matches the song, thematically. You're just begging for these answers that you're never going to get, and it's like, you get increasingly more desperate. That's the why behind singing the chorus again. It's like a final plea, a fleeting moment of insanity and desolation, before you suddenly crash down and accept your fate."

Gracie's face lights up. "Oh my god. Yes, yes, yes!" She looks down at her fingers, resting on the white keys of Taylor's piano. "You're such a genius. Oh my god." She adds more pressure as she starts to play the chords beneath her voice, raw and crackly from the night that they've had, full of laughter and alcohol. Taylor starts to improvise some backing vocals as Gracie sings the melody, and once it's done, the brunette hits the final chord.

"Gracie!" Taylor squeals. "Oh my god, oh my god. We have to send this to Aaron. You have to put this on your album." She clasps her hands together excitedly. "I'll record it with you, if you'll have me."

Her eyes widen. "Taylor, are you serious?" A smile spreads across Gracie's face. "Absolutely, what the fuck? Is this real life?"

Taylor lets out a laugh, lightly punching Gracie's arm. "Aaron isn't awake right now, or I hope he isn't, but I'll text him right now. I'm scheduled for some time up at Long Pond next week, and I'll see if you can tag along."

Just as Gracie is about to make some remark about how this has to be a prank, how there's no way this is real and that they just wrote a song in the middle of the night while drunk and that she's going to actually get to release it, she starts to hear a beeping. Gracie furrows her eyebrows. "Taylor, is that a smoke alarm?"

"Shit, yeah," she says. "It's probably out of batteries. Fuck, we're going to have to find which one it is because that'll get annoying real fast."

"I don't think they beep that crazy when it's a battery thing," Gracie remarks. The beeps are loud and close together. There's no mistaking it- that alarm is going off. Something's smoking. Suddenly, her eyes widen as she feels a pang in her stomach. "Did you put out the candle in the kitchen?"

Taylor's face goes completely white. "Shit." Her bare feet hit the wooden floorboards and run down the hallway, with Gracie trailing close behind. Sure enough, the candle has absolutely gone up in flames. It also seems to be across the counter from where they'd left it. "One of the cats has been here..." Taylor mutters. "The crash from earlier, oh my god. Oh my god, what do I do?"

"Do you have a fire extinguisher?" Gracie asks, feeling her heart race as she looks at the older girl. "We can't put it out with water."

"Yeah, yeah, good idea," Taylor nods, opening up one of the kitchen cabinets and pulling out the red device. She walks back over to Gracie, holding the tool. As she's walking over, Gracie can't help but laugh. She'd never though she'd see Taylor Swift holding a fire extinguisher, but drastic times call for drastic measures. In a manic moment, she pulls out her phone and starts to film. "What do I do about this?"