Lemonade

                                    

                                          
a/n: short little piece that came to me while I listened to 'Pray You Catch Me' and 'Hold Up' and 'Don't Hurt Yourself' by Beyonce. 
                          
been meaning to get back to these oneshots for a while now :) give me some suggestions(!!!!) i already have a few more in progress
                          
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Taylor knows that if she takes the side road home, around the busy main street, that she can make it home earlier than Harry would be expecting her to. If she is as quiet as she's been practicing, she could probably make it to her hiding spot behind a door panel outside Harry's home office.
                          
Then she could listen.
                          
She doesn't know when this began, the eavesdropping – the trying to find out something definite, but it must have been at around the same time he put up all the walls he had around him and began staying out later and later and making excuses as to why he was strolling into their bedroom at almost midnight every night with a stupid smile on his face.
                          
If that hadn't been enough of a red flag for Taylor, his shirts always smell like women's perfume that wasn't hers.
                          
Taylor had even gone out to lunch with his sister Gemma to catch a whiff of her scent to see if he was just hanging out with his sister instead of his wife every night, but it wasn't Gemma's or even Anne's.
                          
All of this didn't mean he was cheating, but the way the spark in his eyes seems to die out as he looks at her, and the way it reignites sometimes when he got a phone call from someone Taylor "didn't know" or "just and old friend" seems to say everything about what was going on.
                          
She even stealthily scrolls through his Recently Called list on his iPhone while he's in the shower, but all that's there are work calls and calls to Niall and Anne and herself, so she carefully puts his phone back into the exact position she found it in.
                          
It's all of this and a whole bunch of other, tiny little things that had Taylor convinced that her husband was cheating on her, but there was a hope, somewhere deep inside of her that wants all her suspicions to be wrong, and for Harry to just be working extra hard on his new movie. A part of her wants it to all be some paranoid theory she's cooked up that isn't real.
                          
Their whole relationship hadn't been feeling right for the past few months – something was terribly off and Taylor knew it wasn't because of her. They hadn't been intimate in weeks and when they had, it wasn't the same as it usually was. Back before Harry disappeared into himself, when they had sex, there was a lot of laughing and teasing and just general playing around, but recently, it had all been very intense and serious.
                          
Harry had always had those moments when he seemed forty years older than he actually was, but now he was like that all the time. When he wasn't out at work or God-knows-where, he usually shut himself in his office, being very serious and quiet and this was very unsettling for Taylor, to suddenly have her husband disappear like that.
                          
One of the reasons she had gone back to him, and the reason she had married a younger man was because Harry was fun and spontaneous and loved playing games, but she wasn't sure if she liked the game he was playing now.
                          
It wasn't as if their marriage had been all rainbows and kittens and good times – after about a year of being married, Harry was diagnosed with cancer, and that had taken a lot out of the both of them – he had to be in hospital half of the week, and so he stopped working for a while, and she was worried sick about him and couldn't focus on work either and so she stood by him as he had chemotherapy and radiation treatment, and all while he was pale and sick.
                          
Now, Taylor is more than angry that she had literally been by his side during the lowest point in his life and here he is, coming home with another woman's lipstick on the collar of his shirts. Who the fuck does he think she is?
                          
She had all but given up her career to be with him and support him – a career that meant a lot to her, and a very successful one at that. More than on one occasion, she had half a mind to ruin his perfect boybander-turned-actor-who-overcame-cancer image and serve him divorce papers but she couldn't.
                          
Even though his feelings for her are questionable right now, she still loves him dearly and wants to make their relationship work – even if she's angry and hurt by his behaviour. She still wants to prove all the skeptics wrong. She still wants them to last.
                          
Taylor slowly swings the huge wooden front door of their house open and slides inside, hoping he hadn't heard her engine coming up the drive. The house seems empty and too-big – and she knows it was way too big – but they had both bought it after they'd gotten married and thought they'd be filling it with kids very soon. The truth was, they were almost three years down the line and didn't have so much as a pet together.
                          
They wanted children as soon as they had gotten married, but Harry was shooting a movie in the middle of nowhere for about six months after the wedding and she had toured for almost nine. After that, Harry had gotten diagnosed and baby-making was possibly the last thing on their minds for a year after that. When Harry was cancer-free, both of them dove straight into catching up where they had left off at work, and although their relationship was great then, for some reason, Taylor had just never gotten pregnant.
                          
She pads around downstairs and passes the door to his office, to press her ear against the cool wall next to it, which is the best to hear his conversations. It's all very symbolic of the walls he's built between his world and hers. She knows what she must look like – crazy, neglected wife eavesdropping on her husband's conversations – but she doesn't care. There isn't anyone around to judge her, anyway.
                          
She slows down her breathing so that she can hear what he was saying, just as she's  been practicing, and slowly, the sound vibrations from inside the room begin to filter into her ear. He's playing some soft classical music in the background, and for a while she doesn't hear much, but then his ringtone blares through the room and she hears his deep rumble of a voice answering, "Hey."
                          
She strains to hear a lot of the muffled words he was saying, the thumping of her heart getting louder as she fears she would get the confirmation that she's been dreading. All this time she's prayed she'd catch him whispering to whoever she was, thinking that would bring her closure and give her strength to... what? Leave him? Confront him? She doesn't know.
                          
Half the time, she's prayed he'd catch her listening, so he knew that she still cares about their marriage and that she suspects something of her distant husband. That he'd realise just how much pain and damage he's causing.
                          
"I'll be right there," she hears, and gasps audibly but just as she did, his footsteps neared the door she was centimetres from. Darting further down the hall and into the kitchen, she grabs a cookie from a plate on the counter and busies herself with that, as he emerges from the door, oblivious to the fact that she had been spying on him a couple of seconds ago.
                          
He looks visibly surprised to see her home so early, but quickly regains his composure and presses a kiss on her cheek.
                          
"I didn't know you were home yet," he says, more to himself than to her. She carries on working at the pumpkin spice cookie in her hand, not saying anything of importance, just mumbling something about wrapping up early.
                          
Harry grabs one of her cookies off the plate and his car keys with the other hand, "I'm going out for some drinks with um, Jeff," he says, looking everywhere in the room but at her.
                          
Taylor could hear the dishonesty in his voice and cringes inwardly at it. When had she stopped being enough for him? To the world, they were the golden couple – they were perfect and good looking and made millions with minimal effort. She wishes their relationship was as great as the tabloids painted it. Nothing hurt like watching the smile on his face disappear over the years of their marriage.
                          
She wonders if Harry realises she was aware of it all.
                          
"Don't wait up," he says, even if he knows she always does. He silently slips out of the front door and his sports car's engine sounds down the driveway.
                          
Taylor takes off her ring.