TNT Short Fics

One single thread

Author's Note: I honestly debated posting this because I am feeling super hesitant about writing about the last couple of weeks. That is why the last part of this story is couched in the vaguest of vague terms. And this is probably all I'll ever write about this time. But I've also just been thinking about how much Taylor gives of herself to others and this came out. ***Not judging anyone who chooses to write about these events more concretely, it's more a personal preference for me.

It starts with a threadbare Bearcats t-shirt Travis has had since freshman year of college.

He'd dropped it over Tay's head the third time she came to Kansas City after a night they spent doing anything but sleeping. She'd looked sexy and adorable and like something out of his dreams as she flipped pancakes in it, and he vowed to do anything in his power to keep her by his side just like this for the rest of his life. When they sat down to eat, she'd poked a finger through a hole in the shirt's collar and raised an eyebrow at him.

He shrugged, "It's broken in. It's my favorite shirt."

"Wow, I feel honored to wear your favorite shirt," she'd replied.

"Yeah well, you might just be my favorite too," he smirked, popping a blueberry in his mouth.

When he'd left later that morning for practice, she'd kissed him at the door. She was heading back to New York and he wouldn't see her again until next weekend.

"I love you in my shirt," he'd murmured against her lips.

"Yeah?"

"Mmhmm, I just love you in general," he shared, feeling bold saying it for the first time.

Her eyes had lit up and she'd thrown her arms around him, "I love you too."

It wasn't until a few days later when he grabbed the shirt to wear to bed that he found the careful hand-sewn stitches to the collar, mending it back, good as new.

Since then he's seen her fix a dancer's broken shoulder strap on the fly in Argentina. Found two more shirts with mended seams. She's sewn a button back to his dress shirt after an incident in the car between two Oscars parties where they'd got a bit handsy in the backseat. And she stitched the city and year in small gold lettering into the back collar of the jersey he wore in the Super Bowl when it was returned to him after the game.

Today she's been hunched over a sewing machine all morning, meticulously stitching a straight line as she crafts a blanket for Paul's baby, pouring her love for her friend into every precise stitch and the sweet sloping embroidery of the baby's name to the corner.

"That's pretty," he comments, looking up from the script he's been studying as she works.

She smooths a hand across the silky fabric at the edges and nods. "Every baby should have a baby blanket. I'm not the best at it but, I dunno, I just like doing it."

"I love that. You put your heart into it."

She worries her bottom lip, a sign she's working out exactly what to say: "Sometimes I feel like presents are a bit of a touchy subject with friends and family. Either it's too much or too little because of who I am. I don't know if that makes sense."

He nods because maybe not the same scale but he's experienced that a time or two himself—the unspoken assumptions.

"People like Paul. People who actually know me...they don't have any expectations. So I want to give them what I really want to give them. And yeah, the kid is getting a college fund from me too cause I grew up with Paul, he's my brother. But this, this is how I can put how much I truly care into a gift."