A request for protective Travis.
"It's just noise, Trav. Isn't that what we always say?"
It's funny to have reached the point where she's unbothered. Yes, she's still human, yes, certain things, particularly about her body or moral character, can hurt, but over the past few years, she steadfastly refused to let it burrow deeply into her skin. At thirty-five, she loves herself. Finally. She isn't a scared little girl who wants to continually shield herself from the worthless opinions of people who don't know her, don't know her heart or intentions.
And she doesn't have a partner who she feels will up and bolt at the first sign of media scrutiny. She's with a self-confident, strong man who can shake off hate and show her that he's not going anywhere. His actions and his words are louder and more powerful than anything else, and she's not living in fear.
As a couple, they had decided to ignore any backlash. It seemed the best possible way of dealing with it, not giving anyone the satisfaction of thinking they were rattled. Opinions, outside of their own, didn't matter. They'd been in firm agreement from the beginning that no one else had any privilege in their relationship but them.
Travis is an expert at barricading them both from the bullshit. He lets anything that's unimportant roll off his back, and in turn, that translates to how she chooses to handle things. Very few instances can put a dent in the bubble, and in nearly two years together, they'd been through the ringer. Some men might have folded, but not him. He always told her that the magnification and the nonsense just made him appreciate what they had more. How real it was.
But the truth is, at the heart of the matter, he never wants her to be hurt. If there was a choice, Travis would take any kind of heat for the two of them, shift attention onto himself. It was a vast difference, Taylor recognizes, from standing back and allowing her to handle it all on her own. It wasn't that he doubted her ability to; it was more the fact that she knew she didn't have to.
There are times, though, when she sees it get to him. She sees it in how his jaw tightens, how his fingernails dig into the flesh of his palm, the tension that settles into the creases of his forehead.
The moments where he feels helpless, like he should be doing something more, even if it isn't a situation where his intervention would change anything. They're both self-aware enough to know, after years of being in the public eye, that it would probably do more harm than good.
She's witnessed it; the stupid rhetoric from sports commentators, shit the press has said about her, AI images and the threat of stalkers, things said in passing that he knows for a fact hurt her. Things he couldn't fix, couldn't change, couldn't speak out about without possibly making things worse.
Instead, he'd learned to adapt. To hold her that much closer, to quietly combat the negativity by singing her praises every chance he got, to appreciate what they had more so than before.
The shit storm that preceded the Super Bowl had left them collectively exhausted. The loss hit hard, and if it were only that, if the fallout were solitary, she thinks it would've been easier to handle.
Everything seemed to pile up and what was left was the need to get away from all the bullshit. Not yet, not until exit interviews and meetings and the formalities, and Taylor can tell it's making him itchy, picks up on the eagerness to leave it behind for a few months and redirect his focus.
He's been tense all evening, quiet during dinner, and as they curl up on the couch with a movie that neither of them is watching, she skims her nails lightly over his forearm, listening as he talks.
What she loves most about him, if she were pressed to choose, is his ability to communicate. She doesn't have to guess what's on his mind...she asks, and he tells her. They talk about shit. They have little disagreements, and they apologize and learn from them. No tip toeing, no silent treatment, no second-guessing.
