AUTHORS NOTE: Holy hell, you guys. Thank you so much for following, favoriting, and all your comments! Only one chapter, and already so much love. You guys are seriously the best! I hope you keep reading - so much more to come! I'll try to update at least every few days.

TRIGGER WARNING! Mentions of suicide and alcoholism.

1999; Jax

It's my twenty first birthday. I'm so drunk I can barely see straight, can barely think hard enough to put one foot in front of the other. So I don't try, I just lay motionless on the tile in my bathroom, deciding whether or not I will let myself throw up for the third time. It's three a.m, or maybe four a.m, or maybe five because everyone is passed out cold on the floors of my newly purchased house. Some are naked, some are clothed, but they are all affiliated with the Sons, a common ground that is now mine. I've fucked a fair amount of crow eaters tonight, threw up on one, passed out during another, and called several of them the name that I can't let myself think of sober. They didn't care; I am a Son. I am my father's legacy. I am a Man of Mayhem.

I am lost.

I crawl towards my bedroom. It's empty – I made it clear that it was off limits at the beginning of the party, an escape clause when necessary. When I make it inside, I so pathetically crawl across the carpet and I reach for the phone. I don't think twice; I'm not really thinking at all. The only thing I have is instinct, and the instinct is this; I need her.

I dial the number I weaseled out of Donna so long ago, even though I couldn't bring myself to use it, I just memorized it instead, a branding on the back of my brain. In case I needed it, I told myself. In case something should happen, I justified. When really I just wanted whatever shred of her permitted, and all that's left is a number. A fucking number.

She answers on the third ring.

"Hello?" Her voice is everything I want, everything I need, everything that splits me open and rubs me so fucking raw that I have to hold my chest with my free hand, forcing the pieces to stay together. I'm going to lose it. I'm going to lose it.

I can't say anything. I open my mouth, and nothing comes out. What am I supposed to say? What is even left? Silence.

"Jax?... Jax..."

She knows its me.

It breaks me like a damn has been destroyed, streaming out in crashing waves. All I feel is the impact of the pain, slamming into me over and over again, reliving it all. The silk of her tawny hair between my calloused fingers, the touch of her ivory skin rubbing against mine, the bell of her laugh, the warmth of her smile, the length of her eyelashes resting against her cheeks as she slept in my arms, in my goddamned arms. I don't realize I'm crying until I taste the salt on my tongue, see the wetness dripping down onto my t-shirt. I haven't cried since I was eighteen years old, when our irrevocable decisions were made and there was no going back, no ifs or buts or someday.

I let her go.

When she waited at a bus station in vein. When the pain was too much for me to bear that I felt nothing, in shock and numb and barely breathing. When I spent too many days not sleeping or eating and feeling as if I could press a gun to my temple and pull the trigger without a second thought.

I need you, god damnit, I should say. Why did you leave me? I want to beg.

Why didn't I follow you?

Neither of us say anything. I let myself uncharacteristically cry into the phone, curled into a pitiful, drunken ball on my forsaken floor. After awhile, I hear her soft sobs, too, reciprocating mine. And we cry together. I don't know how long it lasts, because I fall asleep like that, cradling my phone to my cheek like I used to cradle her.

When I wake up in the morning, the line is dead.

1994; Tara

"Hello?" I answer the phone, setting aside my mug of tea. I'm thumbing through my biology textbook, preparing ahead for the coming week. School will be starting soon, and my nerves are buzzing, the lot of my courses advanced placement.

"Tara, it's me," David's voice says on the other line. "Please don't hang up."

I sigh, thinking for a second that I will hang up, but I know I can't keep running. "What do you want, David?"

"Just to talk." He pauses, taking a breath like he's prepared a monologue for this moment. "Look, I'm really, really sorry. I didn't mean to be such a jerk at the carnival, Teller just sets me on edge, it had nothing to do with you, and –"

"It's fine, David." I cut him off, not wanting to talk about Jax with him. Opie's party was a few days ago, and my mind has been so polluted with Jax that one more thought could turn my entire head into toxic waste. I can't get swept up by him, and I can't let myself go any further than how far I've already gone. I don't belong in that life, and I certainly don't belong with him – not that it's an option, anyway. I've seen the way he is with girls, and I refuse to be another notch in his belt. The party was a one time thing, a bought of my curiosity. I saw him. We spoke. I waited for Heather, and then I went home. That's all.

"Really? You forgive me?"

"Yes," I lie, heaving another sigh. "All forgiven."

I hear a breath of relief on his end, and I almost feel bad for being so angry and unforgiving with him. "Good. Great. Thank you," He says in a chipper tone. "Do you want to hang out? A bunch of us were going to go to the lake."

"I can't," I respond, turning the page of my textbook. "I'm studying."

"Seriously, Tara? School hasn't even started yet. Come on, come have fun with us."

"Some other time." I say, placing my index finger over the sentence I left off with. "I've got to go."

He sounds deflated when he says, "Okay. Some other time, then."

I say bye and hang up, picking back up my mug. I study a bit manically the rest of the afternoon, either trying to relentlessly push myself ahead or fill my brain with something other than Jax Teller, I can't be sure. But I study the first four chapters, memorizing definitions and taking the chapter quizzes at the end, shoving so much information in my head that I don't have even an inch to have a stray thought. I stay there at the desk in my bedroom until I hear my dad stumble out of his bedroom.

He is drunk, so I don't want to be home. Though he's a perpetual drunk and there's a ceaseless curse of alcoholism commandeering our lives, there's a difference between drunk and drunk, a difference that I take careful warning to. When he reaches that end of the spectrum, I hide away or disappear, depending on where he channels his rage. He's mentioned my dead mother too many times for me to feel safe just hiding away in my bedroom, and so I choose to disappear. I take my copy of Jane Eyre and slip out of my bedroom window, the sky pink with twilight.

I walk around Charming for a little bit, the afternoon warm, crisp, and mellow on the streets – not many are out around this time, probably sitting at a dinner table with a family. A luxury I don't have. I feel the usual pain underneath my ribcage when I think about family; a sore spot festering on the wound of my heart. I was really only a little girl when she passed, young enough to forget the small details now – like the exact number of laugh lines she had, where her hair fell on her shoulders, how many freckles there were on her hands. I lose more and more as I get older, and the only way I ever feel better about it, about losing her, is to be with her.

I curl around the sidewalk and move towards the Charming cemetery.

Jax

Me, Opie, Donna, Wendy, and a handful of others are headed down to Santa Cruz when I see her.

Tara, walking alone, clutching what looks like a novel to her small chest and headed towards the cemetery. I don't really have a plan when I promptly turn my bike south, motioning for Opie and the gang to pull over and wait.

"Hang on a sec!" I yell over the sound of my Harley, watching as they all pull theirs to the curb. I'm not shocked that they listen to me without question or hesitation; it's my dead father who was the king of Charming, my soon-to-be step father who is his successor, and my name slabbed onto the Sons of Anarchy legacy, one week until I can call myself a Prospect. Opie and I will be the youngest to ever be allotted, and something about it makes me feel on edge. It's like I'm pissing my youth away, too soon to grasp a real understanding of it, but I am reassured every time I'm in that clubhouse. They are my family, my life. This is what I'm supposed to do; this is who I am.

I pull up next to Tara on my bike, and she looks over at me from the pavement with a surprised expression, creasing the smooth planes of her immaculate skin. As soon as I return that look with a smile, it's like she puts up a facade and masks her face into total blankness. She looks away from me, stares straight ahead, and keeps walking; I keep following her on my bike, touching the ground with my feet on both ends. She's purposely putting out the vibe that she doesn't give a damn, and it pinches some part of me that I'm not sure existed before now. I want her to want to see me, and instead I feel like a wrinkle in her ironed out plan.

"Hey." I try to coax, unable to keep my eyes off of her.

"Hi." She deadpans, refusing to look back at me. I don't get it – I thought... Hell, I don't know what I thought, but this is the last thing that I expect from her.

"Where are you going?"

Tara finally glances over at me again, and then, as if on cue, over her shoulder. I follow her gaze to my friends, parked in a group and watching us intensely. Wendy is scowling.

"Where are you going?" She deflects, raising an eyebrow at me. At least she stops walking now, so I can park my bike and meet her on the sidewalk. I stand in front of her purposely, as if to say, stop walking away from me.

"Santa Cruz," I say and then, like an asshole, "Now it's your turn to answer me."

To my surprise, Tara cracks a small smile at this. I realize that I am constantly surprised by her, endlessly fascinated and never even the slightest inattentive. She sucks me in effortlessly, captivates me without even trying to, and that in itself is inexpressible for me. Because I've never felt that way before. I've never not been bored.

"I'm visiting my mother." Tara finally tells me, a little bit of sadness in her voice.

"Does she live close, or –"

"Yeah," Tara says, gesturing to the opening of the cemetery. "She lives here."

I nod a little at that, unfazed. I'm a friend to death. "Seems your mom, my dad, and little brother share a home."

I assume she's taken aback, because we stare at one another now. Her hazel eyes are wide and searching, meeting mine with a question that seems to hang in the air, suspended between us. Are we not so different after all?

"Jax!" I hear Opie yell at me over the distance. "Let's go, man."

I hold up my hand in a lazy way, asking him to give me a minute in one gesture.

"I have to go." I say, and then when I realize I really don't want to walk away from her right now, I add genuinely, "Do you want to come with me?"

Tara purses her lips, her expression tense and pensive. I can tell my question is tugging at her in the same unexpected way that her initial iciness tugged at me; unwarranted, enticing, and so insurmountable. And I can't understand it and I can't put a name to it. All I know for certain is that I have this odd sensation that I want to stop time, stop everything and everyone else outside of this moment, and just talk to her. Understand her, and let her understand me. Tell her about that hole inside of my chest, the one I know matches hers in size and shape and all the sores surrounding it. Because I may be the criminal, the rebel, the outlaw, and she may be the princess, and we may be from entirely different, parallel worlds that are never meant to overlap, but even if she isn't a choice, now or ever, I would still choose her.

I barely know her. Barely understand this uncanny, new found attraction. And I still would.

Finally, she says, "I can't."

I try not to look disappointed, but it's pretty damned hard. In that split second when our eyes met before, I was sure she would say yes.

I'll never get used to not being right about her.

"Yeah. Yeah, alright, darlin'," I respond, faltering, walking back to my bike. I kick it to life, buckling my helmet back on my head.

She calls out to me. "Jax."

I don't look back at her when I say, "Maybe some other lifetime." And I ride away from her.

We blaze down the roads, down the highways, and disappear out of Charming.

I think about her the entire time.

I'm roaring drunk on the beach, lit up by the blistering bonfire and the blanket of stars in the navy sky. We'll sleep here tonight, the reckless teens who believe they have a sense of the world in the backs of their pockets, living on the dregs of their innocence before reality smacks them. I'm floaty but also raw in the sense that I'm unable to exist outside of my head tonight. I've been thinking too much about my damning path, my smoke clotted lungs, and the fullness of Tara's bottom lip and how it looks when she smiles at me, like she can see all the gory parts that I keep hidden. I can't stifle the overwhelming ache in me – the one that begs just to be near her and let her explore all the bits of me that fascinate and entice her. I know she wonders about me like I wonder about her – I know she does. She had to feel it that night at Opie's, and she had to feel it hours ago, when I matched her dead mother with my own losses. When I looked at her with all the world's we could live in beneath my eyes.

And then I remember where I am, and who I'm with, and who I'm always going to be.

We aren't cut from the same cloth, Tara and I, and my destiny is too crooked and dark to bring her along.

Wendy lays beside me in the sand now, her hands searching for mine. I don't reciprocate, and I flinch when she finds my skin, trying to suck me into her.

I don't want her. It resonates with me, loud as ever, because any other night I would let my body tangle with hers in such a sinful way that God would turn a blind eye. Because I don't care. Because I know she wants me. Because I know she slept her way to here, in my reluctant arms. I'm her prize for climbing the ladder of all my friends.

And she'll never be rewarded.

"Jax..." There's a beg in her voice, and it makes me grimace. Her full, voluptuous body is pressed into mine with needy intentions, and I just want it to end. I want to will it away without smashing her feelings like a pumpkin on the pavement.

I don't even consider. "No." I say, and gently push her away from me. "Not tonight, Wendy."

She rolls away with a heavy sigh, like she expected it all along. After a long beat of dead silence, she says, "She'll never want you, Jax."

"What?" My voice is more fierce than I mean for it to be, but I know where this is going. And who the fuck does Wendy think she is, addressing it now?

"Tara. She's not like us. She's not like you," Wendy keeps going. "You're never going to have her."

I want to get angry. I want to scream. I want to force Wendy to back the hell away from me, and realize her place; I am not a force to be reckoned with, or diabolically diagnosed. But the anger and disdain melts away with the existence of reality – with what I already know.

She's right.

I don't say anything.

When I was twelve years old, I held my brother's, Thomas's, hand while he laid comatose in the hospital. We were born with the same genetic defect, my mother explained. Our hearts "just weren't right", was her easy way of putting it. The "family flaw". Thomas slipped into a coma and died soon thereafter, bringing about the brief disappearance of my father, who wrote short and distant letters stamped from Belfast.

Stay strong, Jackson. I love you.

After Tommy passed, I used to hold my arm over my chest at night, succumbing to the waves of incomprehensibly impenetrable anxiety attacks, and willing my body to stay together. I thought if I didn't, if I didn't stay strong, my heart would split and my body would fall apart. Because it wasn't right – I wasn't right. Something wasn't right inside of me, and it felt like it could just snap at any second, like it snapped for Tommy. As I grew older, it became the justification for everything. For my rebelliousness, for my evilness, for my rage, for my need to destroy or die. I was born wrong. My heart was broken and twisted and if I didn't keep the pieces together, it would crumble like the bits of a dried out cookie.

I was born wrong.

Tara will never be like me. And she will never be mine.