We can close our eyes
And cry out to the darkness
That there is still this light in us
There is this fight to find right where we belong
This ribcage, it is a staircase
Climb, climb it to my iris
You can live there
You know who I am
You know who I am
—"Regarding Ascending the Stairs", Lady Lamb the Beekeeper
Her junior year, Tara is arrested three times.
The first time comes on her seventeenth birthday, when Jax takes her out to a field on the outskirts of his neighborhood. Donna and Opie come along and they sit in the bed of Opie's pickup, smoking weed and swigging from a bottle of tequila pilfered from Opie's dad's stash. Out there the stars are so bright and so numbered that Tara sees for what feels like the first time how big the world is. What else were those stars illuminating tonight? She wants to be there, everywhere: she wants to look at the stars in a hundred different cities and feel how far she's flown from home.
Jax and Opie surprise her when they tell the girls to stay put and run out to the center of the field. Tara sees a flicker of flame in the black night and then they are running back while fireworks burst up in the air, silver and blue and gold sparks falling like comets' trails. Tara is showered in light and she listens to Donna's delighted laughter and the proud whooping of the boys and she feels, somehow, so happy that it hurts.
It's the first time she is acutely aware of how little time she has left here; it's the first time she realizes that if she leaves—when she leaves—she can't take this with her.
"I love you," she whispers into Jax's ear. His hand is hot around her waist and she leans into him to shield herself from the late November chill.
"Happy birthday," he says back.
Donna and Opie beg off soon after—Donna is sweet but Tara senses that having let herself sober up enough to drive, she's tiring of being around her three drunken friends. She pushes Opie into the passenger seat, hugs Tara tight and wishes her a sincere happy birthday. Opie is too wasted to say much to her, which makes her laugh.
Tara doesn't trust Jax to drive them anywhere so they take the tequila and go off walking. Charming is small enough that it doesn't take long for them to reach main street, even stumbling as they are. It's late enough that the shops are closed but there's still some activity in the twenty-four hour diner and the two small bars. She drags Jax to a bench and he sits there with her stretched out on the length of it, her head in his lap, his fingers knotting in her hair, watching the slow trickle of small town late night life.
But they still have the tequila and so when a man passes by and calls dismissively for them to get a room, Jax is drunk enough to make a scene.
"Fuck off," he says, lumbering to his feet.
"Isn't it your bed time, kid?"
It's the wrong thing to say: Jax may be eighteen, he may be only a prospect, but he's a Son—he's the heir apparent—and he's not used to being treated like a child. He doesn't like it, either. Even in the dim light of the street lamp Tara can see the way his jaw goes tense and his eyes light up in that terrifying way of his. Jax has the most frightening fury she's ever known because it boils underneath his skin, underneath his charm; she's seen the way he smiles in a fight through a mouth of blood.
(What scares her is the way his anger mirrors her own, the way she feels the same rage curling in her blood, a flint that strikes the iron of her veins to fire. In some ways they are the same.)
She jumps up behind him and pulls him back, whispering in his ear to soothe him. "Blow me, shithead," Jax calls at the stranger. He turns around and gives Jax a little shove. Tara's had enough to drink that the momentum sends her stumbling backwards; her back hits the bench and she falls dizzily over, dread already pooling in her stomach.
She looks up and sees that Jax has the man backed up against a storefront and he's pointing wildly at Tara and at the patch on his cut. "You know what this means, bro? It means you don't touch me or my old lady," he says, loud enough for her to hear. Maybe he can't see the prospect patch, maybe he doesn't know what it means, but the man is sufficiently scared by Jax's invocation of the Sons of Anarchy that when Jax releases him with a bracing pat on the cheek he leaves quietly. Jax stares after him, breathing hard through his nose. Tara stands in front of him and when he looks down at her everything about him has changed—his smile is real and his eyes honest.
"My hero," she says, shaking off the fear.
"I love you," he replies.
Tara smiles and takes the edges of his cut in her hands and pulls him closer to her. She is so wrapped up in kissing her boyfriend—her beautiful, mercurial, drunken boyfriend—that it takes several taps to her shoulder and a polite cough to break her free from him.
"Excuse me, officer," Jax drawls. She turns around and sees the officer standing in front of her; Jax wraps his arms around her waist and pulls her flush against his warm body. "I'm trying to wish my girl a happy birthday."
She thinks she recognizes the policeman; she's seen him around the clubhouse before. Unser—his name comes to her.
"Saw that little altercation you had, Jackson," Unser says. "Now, I know you're not dumb enough to be drunk in public and making threats."
"Nah, we ain't drunk," Jax says to him like they're friends.
"Not what it looked like to me." Unser gives her a look that she thinks is somewhere between pity and disappointment. She stares back at him, defiant. Let him judge her. From Jax's ambivalence toward law enforcement she knows that SAMCRO must have the police in their pocket; a corrupt cop's judgment means nothing to her. (This is what she tells herself to drown out her racing, frantic panic.) Unser says, "Now, listen, Jackson, I want you to do this for me and then I'll let you go—"
They fail the sobriety tests, and then the breathalyzers, and Unser arrests them for public intoxication.
Unser has them wait it out in the drunk tank for a few hours and then lets them off with a warning. Jax's stepdad picks them up from the station.
Clay Morrow is—she can only think of him as big. Big shoulders, big face, big energy. He is everything the president of SAMCRO should be, intimidation covered by a congenial humor. He jokes around with Unser while he unlocks their cell.
They climb into his SUV. Tara is silent; Jax is laughing.
"Your mother ain't gonna be happy about this," says Clay, giving Jax a hard look in the rear view mirror.
"Aw, come on." Jax wraps an arm around Tara's shoulders. "He was saying shit to Tara." This is not precisely true, but Tara isn't about to contradict him. Clay looks back at them for a moment longer before the mask cracks and he gives them a big, lionlike smile.
"We can keep it a secret, then," he says, "if you were defending your old lady's honor."
"Thanks for taking care of it with Unser," Jax says, and it's only then that it occurs to Tara that it may not have been Unser's choice, in the strictest sense, to let them off easy.
It's the first time Tara comes under SAMCRO's protection. She can't decide how to feel about it.
The second time she's arrested, it is not at all her fault, and she's furious with Jax for days.
It's March and it's cold and miserable so one weekend he takes her to the cabin his family owns up north. It's quiet and cozy and he brings two bottles of wine. It's the cheap stuff, but she appreciates his commitment to setting the mood.
The first night they're laying on the floor in front of the fire, their heads next to each other, their legs extended in opposite directions. Tara feels warm from the fire and the wine and her love for Jax. She feels like this all the time, it seems, like her blood jumps more when he's around or when she thinks of him and the excitability of her nerves warms her from the heart out.
"How are your GED classes?" she asks him with her eyes closed.
"Fine. Good," he amends. "How's school?"
"It's all right. I've been thinking about college."
There's a pause and then Jax says, carefully, like the thought hasn't occurred to him before, "You want to go to college?"
"I don't know. It's something to think about. I'm good at school and—" Tara stops herself, unsure of how to put the words together. She sighs and says, "I've just been thinking… God, I don't even know what I want to do. I want to be able to do anything. I want to have a better life than my parents."
She feels Jax move and when she opens her eyes he's rolled over, propped up on his elbows. "Well, babe," he says, and he punctuates his words with kisses, "you're looking at the future owner of Teller-Morrow Automotive Repair."
"Half owner," she corrects him, laughing.
"Aw, Clay's old ass will be dead in a decade." He winks at her. "I'll make loads of cash doing repos and selling parts under the table."
"Noble," she says. Jax raises his eyebrows at her; his expression says, Obviously.
"And I'll be able to give you anything you want."
The sentiment is sweet and honest and she pulls him down to give him a proper kiss in thanks. But she can't help but think that it's becoming more and more evident that there's nothing Jax can give her in all of Charming that will satisfy her hungry brain and the feeling in her heart she can't put a name to, the feeling that captures her like an electric current and tells her to run.
"I got you something."
She stops packing the duffel they'd brought and turns to look at Jax, who is hovering uncharacteristically nervously behind her.
"You did?"
"Yeah." He reaches out and takes her hand, drops something in it and closes her fingers over her palm like he can't stand to look at whatever he's given her. When she opens her hand there's a little pile of silver in the middle of her palm. Tara pinches the chain between her fingers and holds it up in the light so she can see it: a necklace with a solitary round diamond dangling from it. It's simple and understated and absolutely, completely perfect.
"It's nothin' fancy—"
"I love it," she interrupts quietly. She looks up and Jax's face is radiant in the sunlight, boyish and proud. "It's beautiful. Thank you."
He gives her a kiss and says, "Let me put it on," and as he moves behind her and pushes her hair gently to the side, she feels her heart break to think that she doubts this boy could make her as happy as she aches to be.
It turns out, of course, that the necklace was stolen.
She's sitting in the diner with Jax the day after they get back, after he picks her up from school. She's still feeling buoyed by love and affection for him when an officer she doesn't recognize slides into the booth next to her.
"Uh, hi," Tara says, alarmed. Jax is looking at the officer with steely eyes. "Can I help you?"
"You sure can," he says. "You Tara Knowles?"
"Why?"
As if he didn't hear her, he says, "Mind telling me where you got that necklace, Tara?"
"It was a gift." She levels a look at Jax.
"Lay off her, man," he says, but the officer continues.
"See, the funny thing is," he says, leaning forward across the table like he's having this conversation with Jax, "a necklace described remarkably similar to the one you're wearing was reported missing from the pawn shop a few days ago with a few other items. Now, we picked up Lowell Harland yesterday—for possession of meth, but imagine our surprise when we found some of the missing jewelry in his car. You got a receipt for the necklace, Mr. Teller?"
"You chargin' me?" Jax says, defiant.
"As a matter of fact," says the officer, "yeah, I guess I am. Receipt of stolen property, both of you." He slaps his palms on the table when he gets up and gestures for both of them to stand.
"That's bullshit—" Jax starts, but Tara interrupts him.
"Just don't," she says quietly.
The officer does them the courtesy of forgoing cuffs, but climbing into the police car in front of the whispering diners is bad enough.
"Don't worry about it, babe. It won't stick," Jax says as she slides in beside him. He pauses, and then: "Man, fuck Lowell."
"Don't talk to me," she says. Beside her, Jax jerks in surprise, but he doesn't say anything else to her the whole ride to the station.
Jax is right, of course: he really didn't know that the necklace was stolen and Lowell confirms it as soon as his high wears off. They're released quickly and Chief Unser gives her a ride back to her house. She doesn't talk to Jax.
It's stupid, she knows: it's not his fault. He was just trying to be good to her. I'll give you anything you want. But he doesn't see—it's different for the two of them. It doesn't matter if Jax gets arrested; the men of SAMCRO bounce in and out of jail cells as quick as it takes for charges to fall through. It's practically a rite of passage. Even Opie had spent a night locked up, and Opie's the gentlest person she knows. No one looks at the charming bikers any different.
But Tara—she's supposed to be the smart one. She's the daughter of the town drunk and she has so much to prove, and she doesn't understand how Jax doesn't care about their futures when it matters so much to her.
After a few days she finally swallows her pride and waits outside TM for Jax to start his shift. Gemma isn't there, so Tara sits at one of the tables outside nursing a soda that a passing crow eater was kind enough to bring out to her. When Jax finally shows up (fifteen minutes late—he must know that Gemma isn't around) he regards her coolly before he sits on the bench next to her.
"I'm sorry," she says without preamble. "I shouldn't be mad at you."
"Are you mad?" he asks. "Right now?"
Tara considers this, and says, "Yes. But not at you, I don't think."
Jax ducks his eyes. He looks contrite. "I'm sorry," he says. "I didn't mean to get you in trouble. I just wanted to do something nice." He sounds vulnerable then, the way he rarely sounds, and that conveys an apology more than words alone could. With Jax, reading his emotions is everything. He doesn't wear the bad stuff—the bloody, private, deep-down stuff—on his sleeve.
"It was nice," she says. "And it wasn't your fault. I just had to—I have to take a minute. To think about…all of this."
"About us?" Jax says.
"No," she says quickly. "Just about me." Tara takes a deep breath, twists her hands around in her lap. She thinks of her life now: "I don't think I'm very happy with who I am anymore, Jackson."
"Hey," he says, and takes her chin in hand to make her look at him, his furrowed brow and soft eyes. "You're a good person, Tara."
"Maybe," she says, "but I keep doing stupid things, and I just—I don't know where I fit in. Not with you, or Charming, or my family. There all these—these pieces, and I don't know how to fit them all together. I don't know how to choose. I don't know how to be all the different people I need to be."
Jax is quiet for a minute, and then. "All I know," he says. "is we're meant to be together, Tara. I swear I've never been so sure of anything in my life. Anything I can do to convince you of that, I will. I promise I will. I want—" he stops, like the words are caught in his throat—"I want you to be my family. I want to be yours. Jesus, Tara. I'm so in love with you."
Tara feels the tears caught in her eyelashes; she feels them suspended there for one precarious second before she blinks and they tumble to her skin. She feels it in her heart, too, that same movement, the push over a precipice.
"I love you, too," she says, and puts her hands gently over his, kissing his fingers. And she knows her decision is made for her. All the other shit can come after. She has Jax. For now, that's enough.
After this, life seems to get better.
Her relationship with her father improves. Tara thinks that it will never be okay, but she's been through enough shit in her life that she knows you make concessions. Her father isn't all she has anymore—she has Jax, and Donna and Opie, she even has Gemma—and it's easier to forgive her father when it's on her own terms and not because he's all she has. He stops hitting her, even when he drinks: he's altogether more morose. He talks about her leaving, sometimes; he tells her she's got her mother's brains and she should do something with them and then, sometimes, she catches him crying.
Tara is surprised to find that she has no anger left for him, only pity, and it's one of the many ways she feels more like a mother than a daughter. She hasn't had the chance for so many years now to be a child, but she's here now, and she is who she is, and that's the end of it.
She spends more time with Gemma, too, and is surprised by the kindness she finds there. It's laced with layers of ice, to be sure, but the more Tara comes to accept the club—the less she asks about it, the more family dinners she shows up to help with and stays at even when the boys come in an hour late—the more Gemma seems to thaw toward her. Sometimes she's downright motherly.
Tara sucks this up, even knowing it's double-edged, even knowing that Gemma's love comes with conditions: it is love nonetheless, and when Gemma gives it you feel the power of it, like it's a gift bestowed on you. She wields affection like a weapon and Tara knows this but—but sometimes, it's enough.
The rest of the year passes like this, a blur, and she falls more and more love with Jackson until one spring day he shows up at her house with an envelope and a grin.
"What's this?" she says when he hands it to her.
"Read it," he says, so she does: she opens it up and when she sees what's inside, she smiles as wide as he does.
Jax finished his GED.
"I didn't know you were so close!" she exclaims, and gives him a soft punch to the shoulder. "You should have told me."
"I've seen how you study," says Jax. "You woulda locked me up in your room with books for a week if you knew."
"Maybe. Maybe the rewards would have been really, really good."
Jax steps into the doorway, puts his hands around her waist and walks her back until her back is against the wall. "Any chance that reward's still on the table?" he asks her, jerking his chin back like he does when he knows he's going to get what he wants.
"I could be convinced," she says, and Jax kicks the door closed behind them.
There's a party at TM that night—of course there is—and Jax and Opie are both the objects of celebration. Opie got his GED, too (she wonders if Jax and Opie can do anything separately—there's so much love there, the kind you don't normally see between teenage boys, but SAMCRO has a way of making brotherhood mythic) and she kisses him on the cheek in congratulations before Donna drags her off to do shots.
The night is perfect, really, and if she's at all surprised by how comfortable she feels in this world now, she doesn't let herself dwell on it.
And then, in a quiet moment, Clay sits Jax and Opie down and makes them take off their cuts. Tara knows then what's happening; Jax and Opie know it and they look like boys, like children, filled with wonder at a world they've been allowed into. They saw off their prospect patches and Clay gives them both their new patches. Redwood Originals. Fully patched.
They cheer and clap and Tara does the same because she doesn't know what to do. Jax comes up to her, his cheeks bright and his eyes maybe glassy with emotion, and she says, "I'm so proud of you."
It's the right thing to say: he pulls her into a backbreaking hug and beside her Gemma is approving.
It's still maybe only nine o'clock when Jax tells her he has an idea and before long she is in the tattoo parlor with him and a few of his brothers, watching the muscles of his back clench as the man drills the tattoo gun into his skin. It seems like it hardly takes any time and she thinks how strange it is, that in a few hours Jax has slipped from one life to the next, that Tara's life has changed along with his.
A few days later she finds herself in the tattoo parlor.
It is a spur of the moment thing, and they are emboldened by alcohol and love and youth, and Jax is holding her hand while the artist inks a crow into the small of her back.
(In the days after Jax is patched in Tara feels herself floundering; she feels more connected to Jax than ever but there's a part of her that's so afraid of him moving further into the club. Not just the violence of it—although that pricks at the back of her mind more often than not—but what it means for him to be so dedicated. She has to be strong. She has to be as strong as him.
So on a lazy Saturday, her brain foggy and thick with whiskey, she says, "Do you want me to get the crow?"
Jax stops working on his bike, fully drops the wrench and turns to stare at her like he's never seen her before. "What?" he says.
"I know that the women of the club do it," she says. "And you're patched in now, so I thought—"
"Yeah." He doesn't even let her get the words out. "Yeah, I want you to do it. If you want to."
She loves the look on his face, half in love with her, half turned on. If she knows Jax at all, he's thinking with his dick right now. But she laughs, because she's in love with him too, and there's something about committing herself to him this way—yeah, it does something to her too.)
"How does it look?" she says when it's done, peering over her shoulder even though she can't see it. The look on Jax's face is confirmation enough, though.
"Fucking hot," he says earnestly.
He pays and they head up at the clubhouse, where he shows her off, and she feels a little strange about it—good-strange, maybe; there are so many thoughts in her head she can't make sense of them.
"Let me see," says Gemma, and she pulls up Tara's shirt to give it a hard look. Tara meets her eyes; there's love there, and acceptance. Maybe she's proven herself. "Looks good, sweetie."
The party gets shut down by the cops. Noise complaint. Tara wouldn't care, but Unser gives her a look and tells her to get home. She hates him and his condescension, and she is still a little drunk, so she spits back, "I don't need you to tell me what to do."
Unser turns around and says, "Excuse me?"
"Don't treat me like I should know better," she says. "Don't try to look out for me. I don't even know you."
Unser pauses, and then he says, "You know, Tara, I met your mom once or twice down at the station." She knows what he's implying, the words that are left unsaid but carried underneath like an anchor dragging his well-meaning act down: I knew your mom from when your dad kicked the shit out of her. How could he throw that in her face? "She was real sweet. Kind. She would have been real sad to see you act this way."
The words are out before she can stop them: "Fuck you," she says, and starts forward. Jax throws himself in between her and Unser but there is rage in her; she sees red and feels herself choking on the indignity of this. She's found her place here with Jax—she's found something that soothes the whirring of her anxious mind—and the suggestion that her mother would be disappointed in her makes her nauseated.
"Leave her alone, man." Jax sounds angry; he knows what her family is—was—like. He knows the suggestion there. He knows what his family is like, too, and it's not perfect but she knows that as cocky as Jax is Unser's suggestion that his family—Jax himself—aren't good enough for Tara makes him as angry as it makes her.
"You don't want to do that, Jackson," says Unser, but Jax doesn't move. He's staring the cop down coolly. "You can end this peacefully or you can stay the night in jail. Your call."
Tara looks Unser in the eyes. "Thanks for the advice," she says levelly. "You're as good an influence as you are a cop."
Unser pops them both for disorderly conduct.
The cop who processes them is kind enough to put them in the same cell; they spend the night there quietly, but there is no anger between them like there was before. There's understanding in that space now, a quiet acceptance that they're in this together. Thick as thieves.
Gemma gets them in the morning, bright and early. They've already dropped the bullshit charge—it was just an old man's attempt at a lesson. She doesn't seem mad; she gives Tara a long hug and Tara thinks maybe she understands that Tara was sticking up for her, too. When they drop her off Jax gives her a quiet kiss on the forehead and lets his hand linger in the small of her back where he's marked her and whispers I love you, be safe.
When Tara walks in her father is awake, sitting on the couch, a nearly empty handle of vodka in front of him. He looks up when she walks in, and she sees his red eyes. She stops short like a deer in headlights.
"You were in jail?" he says, and it's like saying the words breaks him. He starts crying: messy crying, the gasping, gulping kind. Drunk crying.
"It was a misunderstanding," she says softly. He doesn't seem mad and she doesn't know what to do with that.
He is mumbling something into his hands, and it's only when she takes a cautious seat on the couch next to him that she can understand what he's saying: "God, what would your mother think?"
Tara stares at him, open-mouthed. He backhands the bottle across the table and it hits the wall with a dull thump and rolls down the floor. There are other empty bottles here, ones she hasn't had the time to clean up yet, and he stands up and kicks them. Her father is strong, tall and broad shouldered and powerful—even the alcohol hasn't taken that from him—but he looks weak to her now, weak and defeated and sad.
"What would your mother think of me?" he says.
Tara doesn't know what to say. She can only stare at him and she has no consolation to give to him and she feels only the tattoo burning her back like a brand, like a wound.