AN: Many apologies for being, probably, the slowest writer ever. I can't promise that the updates will ever come quickly, but it's not my intention to let it got for a year again. Thanks so much to those of you that continue to follow this story, review it, and/or message me! It's so appreciated.

I should note that while I think the root of their love as teenagers was pure, by Jax and Tara's own admission their relationship when they were young was pretty unhealthy and codependent. So I want to make it clear that there are some things in this chapter that I don't think are particularly healthy or even romantic (unless you like your romance tinged with tragedy and bad decisions which, hey, is exactly the kind I like in my fiction!), but that I think are true to their characters, especially as teenagers going through pretty huge life-altering events. Please don't think I'm promoting codependency as some sort of romantic ideal!

Those of us who are lost and low
I know how you feel
I know it's not right but it's real
—Don't Ask Me Why, Laura Marling

Tara likes when she wakes up before Jax.

Tara likes days like this one, when her father is working a double shift at the mill and Jax can stay the night, when she's up before the sun sparks. She likes looking at Jax in the pale blue light of morning. She likes the look of his dark circles with his lashes fluttering against them and the hollow of his neck, the way the hair on his arms stands up pale and bright against the tan of his skin. She likes his shadows and light.

"I love you," she says in the quiet. It's a whisper from the back of her throat; it feels like the words barely leave her mouth, but they beat in her heart.

Tara doesn't think he hears her—that he understands her—but he stirs anyway in his patch of light and stretches like a cat. Jax blinks his bleary eyes at her and a smile pulls at the corners of his mouth. He throws his arm around her and pulls her closer so her face is buried in his neck.

Most of all, what Tara likes is that this is his first instinct upon waking: to love her.

"Good morning," whispers Tara, and it is.

When Tara's college letters come, she opens them, reads them, and puts them away. At night she stares from her bed at the dresser where she's hidden them neatly from sight in a drawer, too scared to take them out again.

Acceptances, all of them.

She'd only applied to four schools—UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, Stanford, and Smith—and they all want her. Smith was more of a romantic notion, a dream another girl might have had, but deep down Tara already knows it's nothing. She loves Sylvia Plath and maybe she aches for the same awakening but—she's Californian, born-and-bred, and it's the first time it's occurred to her that that's something that matters. California is the only home she's reluctant to leave.

Anyway, it's nice to be wanted, but she's not sure what it is she's looking for.

And she hasn't told Jax, which is the most frightening prospect of all. She'd thought that the choosing would be the hardest, declaring her intentions: Jax was the only thing she had ever wanted. She doesn't know how to want things. No one has ever given her anything to keep. It's hard enough to say this is where I'm going; how can she manage please stay with me?

Tara imagines them, sometimes, in Berkeley or in San Diego. Jax would—well, she doesn't know what Jax would do, but she likes to think that he would work as a mechanic and attend community college at the start. He's so smart, and she thinks—privately—that he would thrive if not burdened by the legacy of SAMCRO. He's a prince in Charming, but what is that worth? Outside the scant square miles of their town, it's worth nothing.

So she daydreams of their apartment, a shitty one-bedroom student setup with plastic blinds and beige carpet and a cramped little kitchen. She likes the humbleness of that dream. And Tara likes to imagine a coffee table cluttered with her science textbooks, a bookcase with novels they've both flipped through until the pages are worn down with the singular prints of their thumbs and their souls; she likes to imagine Jax behind her in the kitchen, kissing her over her shoulder and singing along tunelessly to Tom Petty on the radio while they make dinner.

This is the thing, the whole of it: wherever she ends up, her heart can't fathom a life without Jax in it. Even when he's not in her dreams, the signs of him are: she sees a mechanic's shirt draped over a chair and black greased handprints on the towels and a collection of Emma Goldman's essays open on the table. Jax is a part of her the way her hands are. He is essential like her blood is. Sometimes Tara thinks she was born knowing how to love him. And she knows that's why she hasn't told him—why she's hidden the letters away like secret, shameful things—because when she thinks of leaving and her blood pumps and races through her veins it isn't with the surety of knowing he will follow her.

It's because she thinks he won't.

She's studying for an English test when the phone rings. Tara's always the one to answer the phone—tonight her father is parked in front of the TV watching baseball, but he's not drinking, so she doesn't really mind.

"Knowles residence," she says absently, the kitchen phone wedged between her shoulder and ear.

"Jax needs you."

Tara cuts her eyes sideways to stare at the phone. "Opie?" she says. "What's going on?"

"He didn't want me to tell you," Opie says. "It's not my shit to tell, but—"

"Tell me," Tara says sharply. Her heart is beating in her throat. Whatever has Opie calling her at her house, concerned about Jax—it can't be good. She knows that for the both of them, it has always been Jax who is the anchor, who holds them together. She thinks sometimes that Jax is untouchable. Death and grief and violence have cast their shadow on him but in her eyes he remains solidly a son of light. There is something blessed about Jax, as strange as it is to think, something that makes certain the bad shit doesn't touch him. Dead father, dead brother, a legacy of violence—he has a spirit that's irrepressible. The thought that something has hurt him now—that, she can't bear.

"Some club shit went down, Tar," he says, and her heart clenches at that, the familiarity in the nickname and the vulnerability in his voice. Whatever is going on with Jax is going on with Opie, too.

"Are you okay?"

He pauses, and she wonders what he's thinking on the other end. "I'm fine," he says eventually, and she knows he's not.

"Where is he?"

"He told me he was going to clear his head. I don't know where he went."

"Okay," Tara says. He might not know, but Tara thinks she has an idea. "Okay, I'm leaving. And Opie—" she says suddenly, urgently, because even though she's never said it to him before it feels right, it feels like something has changed and he is not the sweet, gentle boy she's known for years and she is suddenly terrified of him changing when she has been so selfish and only ever worried about Jax falling into the violence that haunts their families—she says: "Opie, I love you."

He is quiet, and then he says, "Love you, too," and she feels all right enough to let him go.

Tara hangs up and pulls the keys to the Cutlass off their peg on her way to the living room. They jingle anxiously in her hand while she stands in front of her father, her knee bouncing a nervous rhythm.

"What's up, kid?" he says, half-paying attention to her.

"Can I take the car?" Tara adds, "It's an emergency."

Her dad mutes the TV and gives her a look of concern. It's unfamiliar on his face. "Are you okay? Do you need me to take you somewhere?"

"I'm fine. But,"—she pauses—"Jax needs my help."

Her father doesn't know much about Jax except that he's dating his daughter and she was arrested in his company, which is enough to make her father dislike him (with fairly good reason, Tara has to admit). And maybe it's the hard set of her voice or the years' worth of guilt catching up to him—maybe it's just a father's intuition. Whatever it is, she has never loved her father more than when she hears him say, "Be safe. You call me if you need to."

Tara darts forward and gives him a quick kiss on his stubbled cheek, and on her way out the door she promises herself that she won't forget this kindness of his. It's small, but it means something. And besides—in the scope of life, everything is small. Even pain. Even kindness.

It takes her a minute to adjust to the dark at the abandoned lumberyard. Out here, out where people have razed the old trees to the ground and left it deserted when the earth had no more to give them, there is no artificial light, and only the moon shines its half light down on them. She grabs the flashlight from the Cutlass's trunk before she goes and beams it into the dark, but she doesn't see Jax or his bike.

But Tara knows the area, and she knows Jax, and so she's not surprised when she finally comes across the old barn Jax had long ago taken to her in the first months of their relationship and finds him.

He's curled up in on himself in the doorway, head between his knees. His cut's off, but he's wrapped in a sweatshirt that looks too big on him. He looks childlike, and her heart breaks.

"Jax," she says gently. He doesn't move. She sits beside him on the stoop and pulls him toward her; he doesn't fight it, but falls against her. Tara feels his face against her neck and it's wet, but she doesn't know if with sweat or tears. "Jax, baby, what's wrong?"

"Do you love me, Tara?"

She frowns, though he can't see. "You know I do."

"How much?"

Tara cuts her eyes down at him. "Why are you asking me that?"

He ignores this: "How much do you love me?"

How much does she love him? How do you quantify something like love? How do you quantify this love? It's selfish and it's stupid but in her heart of hearts Tara wholly believes that no one has ever loved anyone like she loves Jax. She knows she's barely an adult and she has so much more of her life in front of her, and that millions of lives have been lived before she started hers—and of course people have loved, of course there have been big world-changing loves, but Jax is everything to her. She thinks of him constantly, all the time; her heart feels like a house that a tree has grown in and spread its roots to every corner. They have grown into and around each other and there's not a space in her soul that Jax hasn't taken residence in.

"I love you so much," Tara says, "that I don't think I could remember how not to."

"I killed someone."

Her gasp is loud in the dead of night; she hates herself for it but she shrinks back from him. He leans forward, elbows on his knees, still staring at the ground. "What?"

"A Mayan," he says. "Shit's been bloody with them all year. They tried to run us down at a meeting with the Niners…"

"Oh my God," she whispers. "Jax—are you okay—"

"I'm fine," he says. "I mean, I'm not hurt."

"What happened?"

"I don't know." His voice is flat, almost dreamy, and it scares her. "I was getting back on my bike and one of them was right in front of me—I don't even know what I was doing. I just went for my gun."

"Jax—" she says, but stops, not knowing what to say. Her brain is firing millions of neurons a second and she can't make sense of her own thoughts. She is staring at him and everything she's ever learned is telling her to brand him murderer and run, run as far as she can, but she knows it's hopeless. Nothing will ever change the way she sees Jax. Tara will always love him, love all the broken pieces, and terrifyingly enough they're not the kind of pieces she wants to put back together—she loves him for his unassuming intelligence and sly wit as much as she does for his wild heart, the violent parts of him that spark up like a caged animal, the anger simmering beneath the surface. And this—this is the logical endgame of that—there has always been a part of her that knows that he is dangerous. And that his hands that she now knows have killed are the same hands that tangle reverently in her hair: well, there is a part of Tara that loves him all the more for it, for the gentleness he graces her with.

He turns away from her, something bigger than distress evident on his face at her silence, and Tara lurches forward, taking his face between her hands. He doesn't look at her.

"I love you," she says, and his eyes cut up at her quickly. "Nothing could change that, Jackson. Look at me. You're the—you're everything to me. Okay? Everything. That's not going to change."

"I love you," he says, and he is crying now, vulnerable like she's rarely seen him. "Tara—"

"Shh," she says gently, and pulls him against her. "I know."

His mouth is on her neck, seeking comfort first, and then covering her in quick kisses. Tara feels heat rush to her skin, prickling it, and she revels in the slow, drowsy feeling of being loved—of being needed.

They take each other in the dark, but there is no fumbling. They know each other's bodies as well as they know their own. Tara knows the exact changes in his movements, the precise hitching of his breath, exactly what to do to spur him on, and she does. When he comes he clutches her tighter to him and his fingers dig bruises into her shoulder, but she doesn't mind; she likes the memento.

The night is quiet and punctuated only by the chirps of nature and their own ragged breathing and though Tara is aware of the itchiness of the wild grass on her back she finds she doesn't much care about it. She is too busy looking at him in the darkness, looking at him studiously not looking at her. Jax is a million miles away from her. He's gone to a place she doesn't understand, one she can't reach—there is something bigger than his patch between them now. There is a man's blood on Jax's hands. She hasn't stopped thinking about it since the moment he told her, and she knows he hasn't either.

She hadn't been lying when she said she loved him despite this. It was the truth, as shameful as it was; more shameful was the part of her that found it easy to be the one to offer him solace.

Tara fixes her eyes on him in the dark and her heart hurts with the love she has for Jax. And for the first time since she sent her applications away in the mail, for the first time since Jax started to prospect and she was arrested and she started to think Charming was the last town she'd ever want to live in, or worse, die in—

For the first time, Tara starts to think she might stay.