Your Daisy

Part 2

When Taylor was a kid, she'd always imagined her part of the wedding: big, poofy white dress, the kind that would make her look like a princess. It would be a big party, family and friends all around. She'd never gotten to the person at the end of the aisle. First, she hadn't cared, but once she'd realized it was always going to be a woman, she tried to shut that part of her brain off.

Clearly, it hadn't worked, considering she was now married to a woman.

And Tree was still waiting for a response.

"I'm going to put you on speakerphone. I think Karlie should hear this."

The other girl looks up again, her eyebrows arched even higher than usual. "Hi, Tree."

"Hello Karlie," she responds. "I hear congratulations are in order. You and Taylor are legally married."

It would be all too easy to say that Karlie doesn't react at all, but Taylor has spent a lot of time studying her. The side of her mouth twitches ever so slightly, and there's a momentary furrow in her brow. Once Taylor sees those tells, it's easy to read the stress in the lines of Karlie's body. "Okay. And what are we doing?"

And so Tree repeats herself, "I think it is for the best that the two of you stay married, at least publicly, for now."

Karlie swallows something back. Taylor knows her face probably says everything she's thinking, her dismay and confusion and the way that she'd wanted to come out on her own terms, not during a drunken evening she can't even remember.

"Okay," she says then, and Taylor's heart thrums in her chest.

Which is dumb, because this is just another PR relationship. No matter what she and Karlie may have been thinking last night, the important thing is what they're thinking now, sober. And Taylor definitely isn't thinking about Karlie's pink lips and the way she's worrying the lower one gently with her teeth.

"What are people saying?" Karlie is staring intently at the phone, as if it'll just magically pull up a Buzzfeed article about how Taylor Swift and Karlie Kloss totally just proved Kaylor is real and we can't over how adorable it is, guys.

Right. Taylor has to focus. Drunk her (and Karlie) probably put both of their careers in jeopardy last night, and she'd really prefer not to be accused of queerbaiting until she ends up hiding away from the world until it forgets her.

"A lot," is Tree's answer. "We can compile some of the most prominent tweets, Instagram and Tumblr posts, and articles if you'd like to see them, but I recommend you stay off social media yourselves until you get here. Taylor's plane will be ready to leave for Rhode Island in two hours."

"So we just do nothing?" Karlie asked.

Tree sighed. "For now. We're all headed to Rhode Island for now because that seems to be our best bet to avoid paparazzi. They're swarming both LA and New York at the moment. Once you get here we'll start staging photos, so hold off on anything too elaborate with your makeup and hair."

"Okay," Taylor says, and then, "also, sorry."

"Apology accepted. But I'll be expecting a week of drinking mimosas on the beach by myself once we get this figured out. See you in Rhode Island, Taylor, Karlie."

And then she hangs up. Which leaves them alone again.

Karlie puts her head in her hands. "No offense," she says, "but I very, very deeply regret whatever happened last night."

"Yeah," Taylor says, because there's not really anything to do but agree. "We royally fucked up."

"I'm going to," Karlie gestures at her room. "If we only have a couple hours, I should pack. And brush my teeth."

"Agreed." Taylor's mouth tastes like something died in there. And not something clean and hygienic either. A possum, probably. "I'll order room service and have it ready for when you're done."

"You're an angel." Karlie flashes her a grin. "If nothing else, being married to Taylor Swift is probably going to be like having the most conscientious roommate ever."

"That's me," Taylor says, and if her voice sounds a little bit hollow, that's no one's business but her own. "Most conscientious roommate award goes to T Swift."

Karlie slips out the door, but not before winking at her. "See you in a bit."

Unless she's gone to freak out, Karlie seems to be handling this shockingly well. But Karlie's kind of like that. She doesn't have the strength of anxiety Taylor does. And Taylor is excellent at worrying. So she does that in between showering and throwing on a pair of skinny black jeans that she thinks might actually belong to Karlie and a white shirt.

It's after all of that when Taylor finally thinks to look at her camera roll.

Here's the thing: she records everything in pictures. She used to keep a diary, when she was young and teetering on the edge of the kind of fame that leads to people selling the secrets you wrote in cursive and hid with the flimsiest of locks. So now she trusts her IPhone password and the cloud and never takes any nudes, everything else is documented by a thousand photos. She never wants to forget the way this feels, the way every moment of her 1989 in 2014 felt, the way Karlie's hand in hers feels. And if everything has to come in coded words and photos then she'll work with the Polaroids and photos she's got.

It's a long way of saying that she's got 200 photos of the night before and it doesn't even seem that excessive for her.

Most of them are blurry shots of body parts immediately identifiable as Karlie's, and maybe Taylor should feel a bit bad that she's so intimately familiar with her best friend's body from all of the time she's spent staring, pining, but she doesn't. But there are a few damning ones: her and Karlie kissing, the angle awkward as they try to fit both of them into the shot. A small bottle of Patrón, two shot glasses between it. A wedding ring and a ring pop on their hands.

She's glad that's not the one her drunk self chose to post. Even off her face, she isn't willing to completely blow up her life.

Except she has.

Her phone buzzes again. Tree, confirming their flight. She takes a deep breath: she can do this. She has no choice but to do this. It's easier to focus on the next thing, because she's only about two seconds from checking her Twitter mentions and that's sure to be a disaster.

She checks her Twitter mentions.

It's pretty vile. It isn't just people calling her names, saying they hope she dies, and messages of betrayal re her never mentioning the whole being in love with Karlie Kloss thing (at that she wonders: do they even listen? because it's been patently obvious in her music and her eyes for who knows how long, and it's a miracle Karlie herself has ever noticed). To be fair, there is a lot of that. But there's support, too. People are posting gifs and photos of every time she and Karlie have ever been in the room, saying how gorgeous they are together, and asking for the story of how they got together. They're treating it like any other relationship.

And if that doesn't bring tears to her eyes, well, what would?