'tis the damn season - a tayvis short story.

// four.

"You made me lose our fucking baby!" Taylor yelled, causing everyone to exchange glanced. Blake looked over at Abigail, who looked like she was ready to launch from her seat and attack Travis. 

"What? Taylor? What do you mean you lost a baby?" Travis's eyes glanced over at Jason, whose face was filled with shock and concern. His eyes went back to Taylor, who was standing before him, blinking absently. Before he could say another word to her or ask another question, she ran for the door and vanished out of it. "Taylor!"

"Abi, no," Kylie grabbed Abigail as she tried to follow behind Taylor. "You know just as well as I do that she needs Trav right now. She has probably needed Trav this whole time they've been apart. They need to talk this out."

"She needs me!" Abigail tried to fight as Kylie held her back. Travis just glanced at Abigail, ignoring her insistence. He walked over to the door, grabbed a coat from the coat rack, and walked out of the door, pushing past the two people that were carrying their bags on their way in.

"What was that all about?" Cara asked as she walked in. She looked around the room, noticing all of the shocked looks on the faces in the room. "What happened in here? Why the red-headed one crying?"

"Babe, I don't think now is the time," Selena told her girlfriend of three years. 

***

Travis grabbed a coat from the coat rack and proceeded to walk outside and into the wooded area around the cabin. "Taylor, where are you?" he called but got no answer. She was a runner, and there was no telling how far she had gone in the short amount of time it took for him to regain his composure and follow behind her. "Tay? Come on, this isn't funny," he called out. He finally found her sitting near a small stream on a log, her knees pulled close to her chest. Her head rested on her knees as the sound of the flowing stream filled the night air. Travis let out a sigh and sat down next to her, draping the coat over her shoulders. It was near freezing, and she was out here with only a pair of jeans and a cutesy sweater that Travis was sure wanted very warm. "Tay, talk to me."

"I don't have anything else to say, Travis," she whispered as she sniffled.

"The sniffling tells me otherwise." Despite it having been five years since they last spoke, since they had last seen each other, he still knew her like the back of his hand. She was his everything, still to this day, and there was nothing he could do to dim just how much he cared, how much he still cared.

"Well, I don't want to talk about it," she told him, her head still turned opposite of where he sat.

"But you mentioned it. So now you have to tell me. I know why you ran away, but why didn't you tell me this? That we were having a baby? Why did you keep that from me?" The silence between them lasted a long while. Taylor looked out at the stream they were sitting near, fixating on the water as it passed by. 

"I was going to tell you that night," she whispered. The memory of the night came rushing back. Walking into their apartment. Hearing the shower going. Hearing his phone continuously going off made her pick it up. Seeing several text from a name she didn't recognize. She opened his phone and read through a few messages. It didn't take her long to put together what was happening. She threw his phone on the bed and started packing. She packed as much as she could in a suitcase and left out of the door. She called her boss and accepted the job offer she was going to originally turn down. That offer led her to where she lives now, Los Angeles. "Within the week of me moving, I lost the baby. I was alone, and I hated you for it. I was 8 weeks, so I wasn't showing yet, so I was just going to pretend it never happened. Abi was the only person to ever know, until now."

"I'm sorry, Tay." He told her, not truly knowing what to say after her confession. He was sorry. He was sorry that his fragile ego got in the way of the best thing he had in his life. He was sorry for not opening up to her when his feelings were hurt and his pride was bruised. He was sorry for not being there for her in what was most likely the most difficult time in her life. They had always talked about children. What they would look like. Who they would be like. What they would name them. And here they were, parents to an angel baby, and he was only finding out five years after the lost. "I'm sorry for everything. I should have been a man and told you how I was feeling at the time. I just didn't want you to think I was being selfish. I knew you had so much going for you and I knew you were close to getting the step up that you really wanted. I didn't want to ruin your chances of getting it by saying I felt neglected because of your job."

"I turned down the offer for you," she turned her head to look at him. Tears streamed down her face as she spoke the words. "When Jackie told me I would have to move to LA for the job, I told her I couldn't do it. I already knew about the baby, and I didn't want to uproot you from your job because you were doing so well, and you were close to moving up. I thought that when I moved up, it would be for the branch I already worked for in New York. But when I found everything out, I called her and accepted it. I didn't want to leave you." When he looked over at her, she noticed his eyes glistening, tears threatening to escape but holding on. "Even though I wasn't being the best girlfriend at the time, I loved you, Travis. I still have really deep feelings for you, and I'm sorry that I wasn't showing you towards the end. I was so caught up in work that I overlooked that I was hurting you and pushing you away. I'm sorry."

"You know," Travis said, leaning back on his hands. "Maybe my mom was right. Maybe we were too young to be navigating both a serious relationship and serious jobs." This was something he had never told her. His mom suggested they take a break while they figured out their corporate jobs. It seemed like she didn't want them to be together in his eyes. He had ignored her, and refused to tell Taylor what had been said. He kept it to himself. But as the years without her passed, he thought about his mother's words more frequently. "We were, what? Twenty-six? We were still immature, trying to act as if we weren't, with way too much on our plates to maintain it all. When she said it in the beginning, I thought she was being a protective mom. I thought she was saying we had been together so long that we needed to be with other people to see what life was like without each other. But looking back now, I think I understand. We needed to focus on one thing, and that one thing probably shouldn't have been each other."

"Maybe." Her eyes focused on the stream again, her eyes darting from side to side, watching leaved float along. "But, Kylie and Jason did it."

"They aren't us, Tay. Our first mistake was probably trying to compare our relationship to theirs. They aren't like us." Travis had watched his brother and his childhood best friend's relationship bloom and grow for so many years. He admired what they had, but in all of the admiration, he noticed that they were able to let things go that he and Taylor would have fought about for days. They were different. Their standards and expectations for each other were different. They weren't like them. They were who they were, and he and Taylor were who they were. Different. "I've watched them get into the same argument that we had once, and they resolved it and moved on in 45 minutes, we fought for three days."

"Are you saying that we were doomed from the start?" Something inside of her was kind of hoping they had another chance at being with each other, another chance at getting it right. 

"I'm just saying, we're different. Everything that works for them won't work for us," he replied. The silence between them reappeared and they gazed out into the water flowing before them.