[Fic: RPF] City Lights
Title City Lights
Pairing: John Mayer/Taylor Swift
Rating/Word Count: R/1938
Disclaimer/Warning: I do not own Taylor Swift or John Mayer, and none of the portrayed events should be taken as fact. They are fiction and never actually happened. No matter how much I wish they did. Other disclaimers are at my journal. This is a RPF story, meaning about real people in a romantic relationship context. If that bothers you, this is not the story for you. Rating for non-explicit sexual content.
Summary: Miley and Taylor work with Demi to pull off a surprise concert for Selena's seventeenth birthday while also trying to push Demi and Selena toward each other.
A/N: So this one requires a bit of explanation. It all started when I read Let's All Pack Up and Move This Year by empressearwig featuring these two as a background pairing, which caused a suspicion of mine to further take root. A few weeks later I had a conversation about one of John's concerts with perfectlystill, which meandered to the above mentioned story, then to John and Taylor together. By the end of it, I was inspired, and out of that, came this. The title comes from lyrics from Taylor Swift's "Mine" and from John Mayer's "Neon," though neither really has much to do at all with this story. I must also say a far less adequate than deserved thank you to leobrat for giving me an introduction to this fandom, so to speak, encouraging me to post this, and welcoming me into the fold. perfectlystill, this is for you. Sorry this is being posted late, I ended up having to get a new car, and apparently that takes time.
She wakes up just before dawn, straight out of a dream. A lyric is haunting her mind, and she knows that it won’t leave until she gets it out of her system. Taylor disentangles slowly and quietly from the arm wrapped around her torso, shivering as her feet hit the hardwood floor and the chilly morning air hits her bare body. She grabs blindly at the clothes hastily shed the night before, wincing slightly at the soreness in her thighs and pelvis, but smirks to herself as she catches a glimpse of the reason behind it all. John makes a murmuring sort of snore while reaching for the spot she just vacated before finding Taylor’s pillow and curling into it. Once she’s found a pair of sweats and one of John’s undershirts, she picks up the closest guitar she can find and grabs the notebook she always keeps in her nightstand drawer.
After jotting down the one particularly haunting lyric, she catches herself staring across the room at the large window and the sun rising over the remnants of a beautiful Nashville night. It’s November and Nashville is already decorated for Christmas, displays that slowly fade away beneath the barely visible sun currently making its way over the city lights. A sleepy smile stretches across her face and she wonders how she got here. How the loft she bought nearly two years ago has now become not just a home, but an inner sanctum for her and John to be sixteen and crazy all over again, writing songs and making love and seamlessly creating their own little world together.
She’d first heard his music her freshman year of high school when Abigail had been obsessed with “Your Body is a Wonderland” while dating The Douchebag, no doubt constructing endless fantasies of her and Douche in her mind. The song had made Taylor blush madly due to all the various implications, and she’d known then that it was the song of an all-or-nothing lover that made his girl the luckiest in the world, if only for a while. Taylor had never imagined in her wildest whim of a dream that she’d later be the one he spent all afternoon discovering.
She remembers the nervousness, the fear, and the excitement of that first night with him a little over a year ago. Most of her other friends had already given it away, but her deeply analytical mind combined with her proven tendency to run away from love resulted in her staying a virgin until nineteen. She’d seen what happened with Abigail when they were fifteen, and it remained Taylor’s deepest fear: to give everything she had to someone only for him to change his mind.
Being with John complicated things even more so. His playboy reputation, their significant age difference, and the numerous glamorous women that came before all made her retreat behind the camouflaged walls she’d carefully built over the years. Once she managed to get over all those things, her main fear was change. She knew intuitively that sex, the purest manifestation of love and need, would change them, change her, and she wasn’t sure if she was ready for that yet. For her unwillingness to admit it and his hatred of self-diagnosis, they both knew she had some mild abandonment issues. Sex was just that for him, sex, because it had been a part of who he was for so long now, but she needed that commitment, his stability when her world would forever shift on its axis. Sure enough, it opened her up further, freed her in a way neither of them ever anticipated, but would never ever regret.
Miley devilishly commented that it’d be fitting that John Mayer would finally be the one to bed Taylor Swift. Selena worried over Taylor’s heart and casually mentioned that she was much too young to be godmother to any dark-eyed blonde babies. Abigail, Kellie, and Katy all warned that it’d be more painful than pleasurable the first time, but that it was so worth it.
In the span of two hours, she was thrown over the edge of desire four times. She blacked out after the third and cried herself to sleep in John’s arms after the fourth, unable to process the sudden wild rush of love, passion, and emotion flowing through her body, mind, and heart. Taylor woke up late the next morning to the smell of omelets and coffee, the sound of gentle melodies made by rough and calloused hands, and the feel of being wrapped completely in John’s love and warmth. Being with Taylor had taught John to give her space and time, so he fed her breakfast and held her until she gathered her thoughts and strength. Now, though, nights like that are a constant, and she loves them almost more than he does.
“Morning beautiful,” John murmurs sleepily, lips finding her bare shoulder as he sits up behind her. She’d gotten so caught up in her memories and writing and watching the sunrise that she never heard the rustling of the sheets; Taylor looks down and to her surprise, the page before her held completed lyrics to a new song with a melody still slightly out of reach. John’s lips bring her back into the moment as they trail a path up behind her ear, his morning stubble drawing out happy humming giggles as it grazes her ticklish throat.
“Morning,” Taylor whispers, turning her face to meet his lips. It’s a slow, languid kiss that deepens almost instantly, and soon the guitar and pencil in her hand end up forgotten on the floor just before she ends up flat on her back in their rumpled sheets. Suddenly John stops all movement once he’s straddling her and holding her arms above her head. Taylor’s eyes flutter open searching his, seeing love and lust and a good bit of amusement in them, too.
“Did you grab that guitar on purpose?” He asks, a slight smirk tugging at his lips. Taylor stares at him in confusion before turning her face to look at the long discarded guitar.
“No, I didn’t,” she laughs. “It was dark and I didn’t wanna wake you, so I just grabbed the closest one. Sorry?”
“You should be,” John teases, sliding off the bed to pick up his old blonde acoustic. “I just find it amusing that out of all of her guitars, I always seem to catch my girl with one of mine.”
“What can I say, I get a little more inspired when I play yours. Though I think that might have more to do with the owner than the guitar itself,” Taylor laughs, sitting up and readjusting the shirt she’s wearing before taking the guitar he’s now holding out to her. It slides easily into her arms as if it belonged there, and John slides in behind her in much the same way with a glass of water and a handful of pills.
“Medicine,” John reminds her, and she groans before plucking her birth control pill from his hand. He pops his Xanax and runs his fingers through her hair while she starts playing with different rhythms and arrangements. John loves what he calls her sex hair: wild curls frizzy from sweat, sex and sleep. He jokes at least twice a week that she needs to make it her new public look. His eyes catch the notes in front of her and he whispers in her ear, “mind if I have a look?”
She nods and slides over the lyrics for John to read (while she avoids his eyes and tries to calm the flush that’s taken over her face), and soon they’re sharing the guitar and creating a melody and harmony for an acoustic ballad tentatively called “City Lights.” Taylor decides that this is her new favorite way to write a song: half naked in John’s lap sharing the same guitar, close enough to steal quick kisses between lyrics and riffs, curled up in the same twisted blankets that held them as they thoroughly loved each other the night before.
When Taylor reaches a stopping point for the song, she turns in John’s arms to capture him in a breathtaking kiss, tracing her fingers across the tattoos on his chest, arms, and shoulders. It’s an unspoken invitation that John readily accepts, using his hands to pin her hips to the bed and hooking on her sweats to drag them down. Once they’re thrown off somewhere across the room, his eyes meet hers nearly black with want after noticing she hadn’t bothered with underwear. She looks up at him with heavy eyes from under those impossibly long eyelashes and bites her lip shyly under his gaze, causing John to just groan and shake his head.
He’d been afraid that in taking Taylor’s virginity many months before, he would shatter the innocence about her that he’d always loved. The thought terrified John because he knew he'd never be strong enough to put either of them back together again. Instead, John ended up with some strange mix of woman and girl. Now, she’s an adorably insatiable lover who does things in bed that not even women twice her age had ever mastered, combined with the young woman who carried herself with the grace and charm she’d always possessed. Even still, he knew Taylor would never fully realize just how much she turned him on.
“John?” Her questioning tone snaps him back to the present, Taylor naked from the waist down beneath him wearing only one of his shirts. Her blue eyes meet his, dark and swirling like an ocean in a hurricane. He merely smiles down at her before bending to kiss all the way up those long legs, lingering on all her childhood scars and most sensitive places. She’s writhing and clutching his hair desperately in her hands by the time he finally reaches where she needs him most.
An hour later, Taylor’s asleep again and he can’t help but stare. John wonders what he ever did to deserve this amazing treasure of a woman, so much like him yet different enough to be a literal breath of fresh air from the very moment she walked into his life. His eyes catch a glance at the old sculpted iron clock on the opposite wall, and he reluctantly pulls away from Taylor’s embrace, watching as she curls into herself and the blankets. He grabs some clothes and throws them on, moving about quietly to keep from disturbing her. The kitchen is calling, insistent on him making them breakfast in bed for two, but before John leaves their room, he glances at the cigar box on his nightstand. The one with the false bottom, the one currently housing the glittering two carat diamond ring he bought last week. As much as he wants to take it out to admire it for the thirteenth time, he really doesn’t want to risk it until he’s ready to ask her the right way.
John turns back to Taylor, leaning over to brush back her curls and place a gentle lingering kiss on her forehead, then her left ring finger, where he envisions the ring sitting not too long from now. He’s waited all these years, so just a few more weeks can’t hurt. Until then, he’s perfectly content to combine all his perfect loves: holding Taylor in his arms while finding that right sound to describe what it’s like to fall in love under the city lights.
Pairing: John Mayer/Taylor Swift
Rating/Word Count: R/1938
Disclaimer/Warning: I do not own Taylor Swift or John Mayer, and none of the portrayed events should be taken as fact. They are fiction and never actually happened. No matter how much I wish they did. Other disclaimers are at my journal. This is a RPF story, meaning about real people in a romantic relationship context. If that bothers you, this is not the story for you. Rating for non-explicit sexual content.
Summary: Miley and Taylor work with Demi to pull off a surprise concert for Selena's seventeenth birthday while also trying to push Demi and Selena toward each other.
A/N: So this one requires a bit of explanation. It all started when I read Let's All Pack Up and Move This Year by empressearwig featuring these two as a background pairing, which caused a suspicion of mine to further take root. A few weeks later I had a conversation about one of John's concerts with perfectlystill, which meandered to the above mentioned story, then to John and Taylor together. By the end of it, I was inspired, and out of that, came this. The title comes from lyrics from Taylor Swift's "Mine" and from John Mayer's "Neon," though neither really has much to do at all with this story. I must also say a far less adequate than deserved thank you to leobrat for giving me an introduction to this fandom, so to speak, encouraging me to post this, and welcoming me into the fold. perfectlystill, this is for you. Sorry this is being posted late, I ended up having to get a new car, and apparently that takes time.
She wakes up just before dawn, straight out of a dream. A lyric is haunting her mind, and she knows that it won’t leave until she gets it out of her system. Taylor disentangles slowly and quietly from the arm wrapped around her torso, shivering as her feet hit the hardwood floor and the chilly morning air hits her bare body. She grabs blindly at the clothes hastily shed the night before, wincing slightly at the soreness in her thighs and pelvis, but smirks to herself as she catches a glimpse of the reason behind it all. John makes a murmuring sort of snore while reaching for the spot she just vacated before finding Taylor’s pillow and curling into it. Once she’s found a pair of sweats and one of John’s undershirts, she picks up the closest guitar she can find and grabs the notebook she always keeps in her nightstand drawer.
After jotting down the one particularly haunting lyric, she catches herself staring across the room at the large window and the sun rising over the remnants of a beautiful Nashville night. It’s November and Nashville is already decorated for Christmas, displays that slowly fade away beneath the barely visible sun currently making its way over the city lights. A sleepy smile stretches across her face and she wonders how she got here. How the loft she bought nearly two years ago has now become not just a home, but an inner sanctum for her and John to be sixteen and crazy all over again, writing songs and making love and seamlessly creating their own little world together.
She’d first heard his music her freshman year of high school when Abigail had been obsessed with “Your Body is a Wonderland” while dating The Douchebag, no doubt constructing endless fantasies of her and Douche in her mind. The song had made Taylor blush madly due to all the various implications, and she’d known then that it was the song of an all-or-nothing lover that made his girl the luckiest in the world, if only for a while. Taylor had never imagined in her wildest whim of a dream that she’d later be the one he spent all afternoon discovering.
She remembers the nervousness, the fear, and the excitement of that first night with him a little over a year ago. Most of her other friends had already given it away, but her deeply analytical mind combined with her proven tendency to run away from love resulted in her staying a virgin until nineteen. She’d seen what happened with Abigail when they were fifteen, and it remained Taylor’s deepest fear: to give everything she had to someone only for him to change his mind.
Being with John complicated things even more so. His playboy reputation, their significant age difference, and the numerous glamorous women that came before all made her retreat behind the camouflaged walls she’d carefully built over the years. Once she managed to get over all those things, her main fear was change. She knew intuitively that sex, the purest manifestation of love and need, would change them, change her, and she wasn’t sure if she was ready for that yet. For her unwillingness to admit it and his hatred of self-diagnosis, they both knew she had some mild abandonment issues. Sex was just that for him, sex, because it had been a part of who he was for so long now, but she needed that commitment, his stability when her world would forever shift on its axis. Sure enough, it opened her up further, freed her in a way neither of them ever anticipated, but would never ever regret.
Miley devilishly commented that it’d be fitting that John Mayer would finally be the one to bed Taylor Swift. Selena worried over Taylor’s heart and casually mentioned that she was much too young to be godmother to any dark-eyed blonde babies. Abigail, Kellie, and Katy all warned that it’d be more painful than pleasurable the first time, but that it was so worth it.
In the span of two hours, she was thrown over the edge of desire four times. She blacked out after the third and cried herself to sleep in John’s arms after the fourth, unable to process the sudden wild rush of love, passion, and emotion flowing through her body, mind, and heart. Taylor woke up late the next morning to the smell of omelets and coffee, the sound of gentle melodies made by rough and calloused hands, and the feel of being wrapped completely in John’s love and warmth. Being with Taylor had taught John to give her space and time, so he fed her breakfast and held her until she gathered her thoughts and strength. Now, though, nights like that are a constant, and she loves them almost more than he does.
“Morning beautiful,” John murmurs sleepily, lips finding her bare shoulder as he sits up behind her. She’d gotten so caught up in her memories and writing and watching the sunrise that she never heard the rustling of the sheets; Taylor looks down and to her surprise, the page before her held completed lyrics to a new song with a melody still slightly out of reach. John’s lips bring her back into the moment as they trail a path up behind her ear, his morning stubble drawing out happy humming giggles as it grazes her ticklish throat.
“Morning,” Taylor whispers, turning her face to meet his lips. It’s a slow, languid kiss that deepens almost instantly, and soon the guitar and pencil in her hand end up forgotten on the floor just before she ends up flat on her back in their rumpled sheets. Suddenly John stops all movement once he’s straddling her and holding her arms above her head. Taylor’s eyes flutter open searching his, seeing love and lust and a good bit of amusement in them, too.
“Did you grab that guitar on purpose?” He asks, a slight smirk tugging at his lips. Taylor stares at him in confusion before turning her face to look at the long discarded guitar.
“No, I didn’t,” she laughs. “It was dark and I didn’t wanna wake you, so I just grabbed the closest one. Sorry?”
“You should be,” John teases, sliding off the bed to pick up his old blonde acoustic. “I just find it amusing that out of all of her guitars, I always seem to catch my girl with one of mine.”
“What can I say, I get a little more inspired when I play yours. Though I think that might have more to do with the owner than the guitar itself,” Taylor laughs, sitting up and readjusting the shirt she’s wearing before taking the guitar he’s now holding out to her. It slides easily into her arms as if it belonged there, and John slides in behind her in much the same way with a glass of water and a handful of pills.
“Medicine,” John reminds her, and she groans before plucking her birth control pill from his hand. He pops his Xanax and runs his fingers through her hair while she starts playing with different rhythms and arrangements. John loves what he calls her sex hair: wild curls frizzy from sweat, sex and sleep. He jokes at least twice a week that she needs to make it her new public look. His eyes catch the notes in front of her and he whispers in her ear, “mind if I have a look?”
She nods and slides over the lyrics for John to read (while she avoids his eyes and tries to calm the flush that’s taken over her face), and soon they’re sharing the guitar and creating a melody and harmony for an acoustic ballad tentatively called “City Lights.” Taylor decides that this is her new favorite way to write a song: half naked in John’s lap sharing the same guitar, close enough to steal quick kisses between lyrics and riffs, curled up in the same twisted blankets that held them as they thoroughly loved each other the night before.
When Taylor reaches a stopping point for the song, she turns in John’s arms to capture him in a breathtaking kiss, tracing her fingers across the tattoos on his chest, arms, and shoulders. It’s an unspoken invitation that John readily accepts, using his hands to pin her hips to the bed and hooking on her sweats to drag them down. Once they’re thrown off somewhere across the room, his eyes meet hers nearly black with want after noticing she hadn’t bothered with underwear. She looks up at him with heavy eyes from under those impossibly long eyelashes and bites her lip shyly under his gaze, causing John to just groan and shake his head.
He’d been afraid that in taking Taylor’s virginity many months before, he would shatter the innocence about her that he’d always loved. The thought terrified John because he knew he'd never be strong enough to put either of them back together again. Instead, John ended up with some strange mix of woman and girl. Now, she’s an adorably insatiable lover who does things in bed that not even women twice her age had ever mastered, combined with the young woman who carried herself with the grace and charm she’d always possessed. Even still, he knew Taylor would never fully realize just how much she turned him on.
“John?” Her questioning tone snaps him back to the present, Taylor naked from the waist down beneath him wearing only one of his shirts. Her blue eyes meet his, dark and swirling like an ocean in a hurricane. He merely smiles down at her before bending to kiss all the way up those long legs, lingering on all her childhood scars and most sensitive places. She’s writhing and clutching his hair desperately in her hands by the time he finally reaches where she needs him most.
An hour later, Taylor’s asleep again and he can’t help but stare. John wonders what he ever did to deserve this amazing treasure of a woman, so much like him yet different enough to be a literal breath of fresh air from the very moment she walked into his life. His eyes catch a glance at the old sculpted iron clock on the opposite wall, and he reluctantly pulls away from Taylor’s embrace, watching as she curls into herself and the blankets. He grabs some clothes and throws them on, moving about quietly to keep from disturbing her. The kitchen is calling, insistent on him making them breakfast in bed for two, but before John leaves their room, he glances at the cigar box on his nightstand. The one with the false bottom, the one currently housing the glittering two carat diamond ring he bought last week. As much as he wants to take it out to admire it for the thirteenth time, he really doesn’t want to risk it until he’s ready to ask her the right way.
John turns back to Taylor, leaning over to brush back her curls and place a gentle lingering kiss on her forehead, then her left ring finger, where he envisions the ring sitting not too long from now. He’s waited all these years, so just a few more weeks can’t hurt. Until then, he’s perfectly content to combine all his perfect loves: holding Taylor in his arms while finding that right sound to describe what it’s like to fall in love under the city lights.