Author's Note: Thank you so much to everyone who has reviewed or placed this story on their favorites and/or alerts lists. Your kindness has been overwhelming and has provided lots of motivation. I hope you enjoy this new chapter, which was fueled entirely by pie and red wine.

Guilty as charged, you were on my mind
Try as I might, I can't seem to lie
I can love you back if you like
I can hold you back if you like

And so I go back home to be by myself
I try everything I've ever read
Desperate, I still can't get you out of my head

Because you're on my mind
All the time

—"Guilty as Charged", Tegan and Sara

At every stop light Jax takes the opportunity to tease her. But the engine is still loud and he's sitting in front of her so his words don't quite reach her (although the woman in the SUV to their right seems to think Jax is heckling her), but she gets the gist from the bits and pieces she does pick up. "—Bruising my goddamn ribs", for instance, might indicate some amusement with the death grip she has around his waist. By the time they've parked in the library's lot and she moves to stand up Tara half-thinks her legs might just collapse right under her.

"Didn't take you for such a pussy," Jax crows.

"Keep it up, Teller," she tells him mildly and thrusts the helmet past his waiting arm and straight into his chest. "Doesn't bother me. Just remember who holds the key to your academic future here."

Inside, they manage to secure one of the two quiet study rooms in the small library. Tara's stacking her own books on the table when she notices Jax isn't doing the same. Rather, he's reclining on a chair balanced on two legs, all slouched indifference with his hands crossed behind his head. It's only now that she realizes he hadn't had any books or even a bag when they left school.

"Your textbook…" she prompts.

Jax feigns regret. She can tell he's faking it because from what she's seen Jax is incapable of being serious. But there's this way he jokes around that makes it impossible to be annoyed with him—he punctuates every smart comment with a wink or a smirk that seems meant to indicate he's fully aware of how obnoxiously charming he is. Maybe the word she's looking for is self-aware. At first Tara thinks he's too young for that, but then she remembers the heaviness of his expression in class. She remembers how old he looked. "Must have left it at school."

Tara rolls her eyes, but it's really more for show; she's not that bothered. It's not her ass on the line here anyway. "Who told you I would be a good tutor, anyway?" she asks, adding: "I want to know so I can kill them."

"My best friend is dating this girl in your class…Donna Lerner?" Tara nods in recognition. She isn't close to Donna but knows enough to like her; she barely clears five feet but last year had knocked a boy out cold for insinuating that her family was white trash. "Yeah, she said you helped her out with finals last year."

"I should start charging," she says drily. They're silent for a moment—comfortably so—and then her eyes catch on something. "You've got a tattoo?" Her fingers unconsciously stray to his arm and trace the outlines of the ink there. A gravestone, crows perched on top of it. He pushes his sleeve up, regarding it like she does, like it's the first time he's seen it. New eyes. "Your parents don't care?" Tara can't imagine what her father would do if she came home with a tattoo. The drunken verbal abuse was a given—what exactly he'd say was always a fun surprise.

"Well—it's for my old man. He died last year. So my mom likes it." His voice is indifferent but there's tension at the corners of his eyes. Tara had thought he looked old before; that was nothing. He has an expression on his face that she recognizes because she's seen it before. She's seen it in the mirror, hundreds of times, and she's memorized the feeling of her features twisting unwillingly into it when she senses pity on a stranger's lips.

"Yeah, I heard about that," she says, feeling stupid. John Teller's death had been bloody, the ensuing funeral legendary. The deep rumble of bikes had permeated Charming for a week straight as every living member of the Sons of Anarchy had descended upon the town. How could she have forgotten? But she doesn't say sorry. She hates when people tell her sorry. "I think my dad would kill me if I got one, even for my mom." Her tone is light; that's how she knows how to deal with this. Make it a joke and no one knows how true it is. The fading bruises beneath her sleeves, where her father had grabbed her and held her in front of him to make her listen while he screamed, are a testament to his violence.

"Your mom…" Jax trails off, but the question is implied.

"Yeah." He nods and looks at her thoughtfully. But he doesn't say anything. He doesn't say sorry.

Tara thinks they might understand each other.

They don't do much actual studying, but Tara does her best to explain how Mr. Hill grades (homework counts for practically nothing, so he can get away with not doing it—Jax looks inordinately pleased with this). An hour goes by in the space of a second, and when she slides onto his bike behind him, this time she is not afraid.

About three blocks from her house, she nudges his shoulder. The bike shudders to a stop in the empty lane. The purr of the engine is quieter now—still loud but she can hear the faint chirping of birds, a lawnmower running somewhere nearby. The air smells like honeysuckle and hot charcoal. It's the setting of a thousand other California afternoons, but it feels different. Significant. Suddenly she's aware of so many things she never has been before, and not just the ephemeral perfection of the collision of sight and sound and smell…but of feeling, too. Like it's not just the trees and flowers that are blooming but something in her.

"What's up?" Jax says over his shoulder.

"Let me off here." He cuts the engine and stares at her as she takes his helmet off for the second time that day.

"Thought you said you lived on Cardinal?"

"I do." She flashes a smile that's too big at him. "Overprotective dad." Drunk dad, she does not say. Jax doesn't seem bothered. She thinks it's likely Jax has lots of experience with avoiding overprotective fathers—she's heard the stories from the mouths of dozens of girls giggling over classroom aisles between bells. "Thanks for the lift."

"Not a problem, darlin'." Jax drops a wink at her and fastens his helmet's strap underneath his chin. She lets him go forward before she starts walking the three blocks to her house. By the time she gets to the end of the street he's long since disappeared. Tara is left alone with those feelings of change and newness and something being stirred to life, but now that the heat of Jax's body beside her is nothing more than a memory she's half-convinced it never happened at all.

For the next four weeks, she is, in theory, scheduled to meet with Jax three days a week.

By the third week she cannot imagine a life where a weekday goes by without her seeing him.

He is there, all the time, even when he's not. Slipping in quietly behind her in the lunch line and pinching her waist and grinning innocently when she whips around (although she knows for a fact he has history during her lunch period). Showing up to sixth period and telling Ms. Arrington, with his most imploring voice, that the principal needed to see Tara, then spiriting her away early from school to parks on the outer limits of Charming that she hadn't even known existed. It's on these excursions that she meets Opie Winston, Jax's best friend, and is able to get to know Donna more. She likes the both of them. And although she has never felt the ache of a lack of real companionship before, these afternoons make her aware that it was a void she had never known needed filling.

And when she's not with Jax, she's thinking of him. Not, she tells herself, in any sort of weird obsessive way. But she is so relentlessly analytical about everything else in her life; it's only natural that she's the same way about Jax, who she's still not sure if she likes or likes. Every touch, every comment, every look: Her brain spins it all, whirling it all around and around in some effort to make sense of what she feels and what he feels and twist it into something that she can know concretely. Tara likes facts. She likes plans.

She doesn't like this wondering.

But—all of that aside—there is still something to be said about the way she feels when she lays in bed at night and stares at the ceiling, too giddy and breathless to sleep, her wakefulness buoyed purely by thoughts of blond hair and rough hands.

When four weeks are over, she feels that she has known Jax a lifetime.

At the end of the week, she meets Jax in the school library after first period. Tara is working on research for the science fair; Jax is skipping. When he joins her at the table she looks at him expectantly.

"Where is it?" she demands.

"Where's what?" Jax says innocently. She raises her eyebrows. Interim report cards had been handed out that morning. Jax needed at least a B in geometry to get off of academic probation. He pulls a piece of paper, already impossibly rumpled, from his back pocket. "This?"

She snatches it from him, unfolds it, and skims her eyes over his grades. A row of Cs and Ds. And, standing out like beacons, two As.

Geometry. And English.

Joy and pride bubble up in her chest. And she can't help herself—she launches herself at him and pulls him into a hug. She feels him laugh against her shoulder and reach his arms around to embrace her too. When she pulls back, she feels the heat of a blush on her cheeks. "Congratulations," she says sincerely.

"Yeah, you too," Jax says. "Must be a miracle worker, turnin' me around like that."

"Must be," she agrees. And then, because she can't help but wonder: "English?"

For what she thinks is the first time since she's known him, Jax looks genuinely uncomfortable. This is not the Jax who can make jokes at his own expense about his dismal academic track record. Intelligence, it seems, makes him vulnerable. Tara wonders how he's grown up that it's something he wants to hide.

His eyes on the table, Jax says, "Yeah, well. I like to read."

In years' time, when she looks back and charts the course of their relationship, Tara will pinpoint this moment, the first time she saw the hidden parts of a boy that foreshadowed the man he would become, as the second she fell irreversibly in love with Jax.

And although she can't put a name to her burgeoning feelings—not yet—Tara is aware again that something has changed. This time it's not in her; it's between the two of them.

At least, that is what she thinks.

Jax is officially off the hook with Mr. Hill, but he hadn't said anything to Tara about stopping their tutoring. She assumes, maybe somewhat presumptuously, that although he may be off academic probation he'd still like her help. Or at least her company.

They normally meet at her locker after school, but she decides the next Monday to go meet him instead of waiting. His locker is right around the corner from her seventh period class, so she's able to get there quickly. This affords her the privilege of seeing Jax coming down the hall long before he spots her with his arm around a girl, dropping kisses into her hair, his hand playing at the nip of her waist. He touches the girl and Tara feels the phantom touch of his hand on her own body. Her heart aches but not just with pain—logically, she knows that it's only been a month. A month of nothing at that, and that's what hurts: how could she have let her brain spin something out of nothing? She's supposed to be smart.

She does her best to lean idly against the locker, straightening up when he approaches, smiling at him and taking in his look of surprise. She digs around in her messenger bag and retrieves a folder stuffed with paper. "All my old notes," she explains. She had been using them to teach Jax the most efficient way to study, although she half suspects he just studies from her own notes instead of endeavoring to learn how to take his own. "Since you're off probation now and don't need me…thought these might still be useful."

Jax is still staring at her, a peculiar look in his eyes, but she resolves not to think too much about it. She's done reading into things that aren't there. "Thanks," he says slowly. Tara smiles at him—that same too-big smile, eyes just wide enough to fake earnest enthusiasm.

"See you around," she says, and walks away.

It is the first time Tara walks out on the possibility of something because it hurts too much to try.

It is not the last.