I Should've Known

Chapter Five - Stay.

Chapter Five: Stay.

Somehow, Ed had found a successful way on calming Taylor down. They found themselves seated on Taylor’s couch, the two of them settled at both ends of the couch, staring quietly at the sleeping Meredith. Ed was nibbling on some chips while Taylor had her arms wrapped around herself as if she was cold, her legs tucked protectively towards her chest.

They were just like that for about half an hour when the redhead got finally irritated of the ear-piercing silence between them. For him, it felt queer finding Taylor in her ‘aloof state’, and he wanted to see again her happy and funny side which seemed to slowly fade away after Taylor and Harry had broken up weeks ago. It was as if Taylor was trying to pretend that nothing was wrong, even though her problems were the size of an elephant sitting in the same room as them. Obviously, she was trying to her very best to ignore its whole existence.

“Are we just going to be stuck in silence forever?” the redhead asked the blonde, clicking his tongue in annoyance. He turned his head to her direction, but she wasn’t looking at him. She was staring at her pet cat, sleeping on her dresser. “Look, I just want you to be happy, Taylor.”

“You don’t understand me, Ed,” Taylor told him quietly.

“Then let me understand what the bloody hell is really going on here,” he insisted in a rather loud voice.

“I told you already, I’m going to be fine,” she replied, her eyebrows furrowed together. “I just need some time to think things through and I’ll be over him.”

“Time doesn’t always heal things, Taylor. You have to do something. Waiting doesn’t always help,” Ed told her, putting the bowl of chips on the coffee table in front of him.

She rolled her eyes and glared at the redhead. “Ed Sheeran, do you want us to fight once again? I’m tired, alright? And you have absolutelyno right to tell me things like that because you don’t understand me.”

“Life isn’t about you all the time. Life isn’t just revolving around you, Taylor Swift,” he retorted, glaring back at her. “You have no idea what I’ve been through in the past. You don’t know what it feels like to break up with someone you really love just because of distance, of all these popularity bullshit, and of the blasted media.” The redhead clenched his fists tightly, remembering vividly the memories of his past.

In a whisper, he gnarled out, “I wish I hadn’t wanted to become famous. I wish I hadn’t wanted to get the attention of the people—if only I knew that my privacy would be taken away from me.”

There was something in his angry and distracted cerulean eyes that Taylor understood because she had felt it in the past—sadness and incompletion.

A blonde girl with tear-stained cheeks and blank eyes had flashed in her mind, recalling her own reflection on the mirror when she had cried countlesslyabout the guys that she had dated in the past. Taylor could still remember that she got mad at herself for not being the type of girl that those guys wanted her to be, when she felt jealous whenever she sees a happy couple, when she feels terrified of being alone and single forever.

Rejection. Anguish. She’d felt worse, she thought. But after seeing Ed almost break down in front of her, she was sure that she was quite luckier than him. It was obvious that he had been in worse instances.

She shushed him gently, placing a hand on his arm to comfort him. The redhead turned his head towards her, and once again, their eyes met. Hers were full of understanding; his was filled with hurt and longing. Somehow, Taylor had managed to calm Ed down quite a bit, and her dressing room was then stuck in a deafening silence.