in my wildest dreams - a taylor swift fanfiction

58 - teenage love taught you there's good in goodbye

TAYLOR

The last few days in Tokyo were very hectic and I had a lot on my mind, but as soon as I had a moment to myself, I kept going back to Skye's situation with Josh. There's no telling what I would have done if he had been in the room with us when Mom revealed everything she knew about what had happened. As it was, we were in completely different parts of the world, and I had a few days to calm down, to process everything and think about it rationally.

My initial instinct was to do everything in my power to protect her, and in order to do so, I had to keep Josh away from her.

I knew, of course, that this was more wishful thinking than anything else and that it most likely wouldn't work in my favor. I remembered back when I was a teenager and dating people my parents didn't approve of. At the time, I was young and inexperienced; I thought it was us against the world, that no one understood what we had, and that their disapproval only made our love stronger.

I now understood from experience that forbidding Skye from seeing Josh would most likely just make her want to see him even more. History proved time and time again that forcing two people to stay apart only motivates them to keep fighting to be together, or even worse, to alienate themselves from everyone else.

With all this in mind, I knew I needed to be smart about it, and even as I was on the plane back home, I kept going back and forth in my head about how to go about it. On the one hand, I wanted Skye to be happy, on the other, I wanted to shield her from getting even more hurt than she inevitably would.

I could make her leave him which in turn would make me the enemy, or I could choose not to intervene and instead be there for her, to love and comfort her, and help her through the breakup when the relationship finally ended. Was I willing to risk not being allowed to comfort her when she really needed me? Who else would she go to? Mom? Joe?

There was only one thing that I had managed to make up my mind about so far — I would have to keep all of this from Joe, at least for the time being. He's normally not a violent person at all, but he would kill Josh if he found out; not that I would blame him, but Skye no doubt would.

We were six hours into the flight and still had nine to go. Mom was asleep next to me, but I had been staring out of the little window for the better part of our flight so far, deep in thought.

Apart from the fight itself, there was something else that kept gnawing at me — the fact that Skye had decided to keep it from me, and that I'd had to hear it from Mom instead a couple of days after it had happened. It actually really stung that she didn't tell me about it because I'd been working on gaining her trust for almost two years at this point. There was only one reasonable explanation that I could think of that didn't have anything to do with her not trusting me.

Ever since we met, almost two years ago now, she's had this thing where she doesn't want to make other people upset or worried on her behalf. She undoubtedly knew that I would worry about her if she told me about the fight, but even though I loved her for it, she needed to realize that as her mom, it was my job and my responsibility to protect her, not the other way around.

I had sent for someone to pick her up at Maeve's and had tried to time it so that she'd arrive shortly after me. That's why I was so surprised to find her walking out of the kitchen before I'd even had time to close the front door. I was even more surprised by her purple curls that fell over her shoulders, and I just looked at her hair for a moment without saying anything.

"Hi Mom," she greeted me happily and came over to hug me. When she backed away, she seemed to notice where my focus was at because she grabbed the ends of her hair between her fingers and looked at it. "Oh, now—before you say anything—it isn't permanent and it'll wash out in a week."