Inside the house, she locked the door, and walked into the kitchen. She paused for a moment to listen to the roar of the Harley disappearing into the early evening. She felt the long night reaching for her and she opened another bottle of wine. She rinsed a dirty wine glass out and poured a liberal serving. With the glass in one hand and the bottle in the other, she walked through the empty dining room, into the empty front room, and pulled up the dusty shades over the window, peering out past the front yard. She had grown up on this tidy street, her untidy life a shameful secret behind the windows and door. She let the late day sun attempt to warm the cold room, slanting through the dust motes.

The interior painting was finished, a neutral cream Kelly-Moore had sold her as Dappled Sunlight and even after all the walls, trim, and ceiling were wearing two coats the house was still a dismal and frigid hell. Too many monsters and memories crouching in the corners. Drunken fathers and dead mothers. Gunshot ex-lovers and an empty uterus. Her solitary life. Love simply injured you. It was something that would hurt you, abandon you, shove you, slap you, puke on you, rape you, in the worst of cases make a murderer of you, and a liar and a runaway in the best.

The rooms were all barren. She turned and let her gaze sweep across the emptiness. She never went into the master bedroom. The carpet guys hadn't spoken English but she had avoided them studiously for the hours it took to cover the damning floor of that room. Now she leaned an ear against the door, listening for her parents fighting, her mother sobbing, her father weeping drunkenly. She closed her eyes and was a small child again, curled against the bottom of the door, sleeping as close as she could possibly get to them. At nine she simply stood outside, hands limp at her sides, her mother gone and her father locked away inside. Then as a surly teenager, tiptoeing past her father's snoring.

She wasn't going to cry for the dead, but she did whisper an apology and a small Irish prayer her mother had taught her. Listening harder, she was assaulted by Kohn's mewling anger. She curled her lips back from her teeth, her stomach threatening to empty itself. She downed half the wine and pressed her face back again to the door. Josh had represented everything Jax had not. Clean-cut, upright, the law. It had been a shock to her entire system when she discovered his moral compass was spinning wildly inside his broken psyche. She had grown to hate him in life but now pitied him in his death. Another apology and a prayer, for her own soul, went out into the universe.

She turned and walked down the hallway, past the room her mother had called a guest room although they never had a single guest. Past the room that had been hers until she fled. She couldn't bear to return to it. The four walls and ceiling acted as a memory vault she could not escape if she entered, nineteen years of memories that would not be vanquished. That door stayed shut, too. The ghost of the living lurked behind it; the fumbling beginnings of her relationship with Jax.

Through the front room again, and towards the back of the house to the small room she had made her own. It had been designated craft room, office, and then finally storage throughout the years but she had reclaimed it. She had painted it a deep warm grey and furnished it minimally. An outrageously expensive queen bed dressed in silk and Egyptian cotton. A large art photograph, deep muted reds and blacks, of a close-up of open heart surgery was hung on the wall in place of a headboard. A mirrored bureau and a mirrored bedside table.

She sat on the edge of the bed, kicked off her boots, and set the wine bottle and glass on the bedside table. She stood and stripped off all her clothes and lay back down, imagining if the afternoon had gone in a carnal direction. Her skin was still tingling from the long motorcycle ride. Her bones still aching. All her desire in the center of her body, a hand grenade waiting for the pin to be pulled. She closed her eyes and all she could see was Chibs' with the pin between his teeth.

He had called her on her stuff. And he was right, what was going on with all the apologizing. She was sorry for so many things, in the past and in the future. She was pathetic and he had basically told her so. Unless you're looking for a way out, you're here. Be here. But, and she drained the glass with this thought, she was looking for a way out. Running away. Physically and emotionally. Always leaving. She never entered a room without knowing where the door was, and if not the door, a window. She interacted with people from behind a riot shield, angry and frightened. After thirty years, these things had reduced her and in the eight months since she had run from Jax she had grown less angry and more sad, less accusatory and more apologetic.

Jax had been her only true love so far. Kohn had proven to her that she was an abysmal reader of character and terrible at choosing things for herself. But she was over Jax now and Kohn was gone forever. Chibs offered something entirely different yet he looked so much like all the things she had already tried and failed at with Jackson. The bad boy, the outlaw, masculine to a dangerous fault. Hadn't she already traveled that road and her life had become a car wreck. Ending things with Jackson had been far more traumatizing than anything she had gone through with Kohn, even his slumped and bleeding body had been less terrible than the look on Jax's face in his grandfather's house. And what kind of person did that make her? She screwed her eyes shut now.

She fell back on the bed, lifted her fists to her face, tapping hard at her forehead, wanting to be unconscious. But suddenly, on her back, she was flushed with a body memory of Filip. The weight of him, the strength, the desire he had flooded her with by simply pressing his thigh into the juncture of hers. His mouth, his lips, his tongue. She turned onto her side, pulling her knees up to her chest, and she unloosed her imagination, let it become an overwhelming longing, a need for another human being, for this man in particular. More than the physical consummation, the desire to lick every inch of his flesh, the suck-breath need to have him take her, she was overcome with the kindness in his dark eyes, a certain tilt to his head, his hand holding hers, and the gentle low cadence of his voice saying her name.

She had certainly been aware of him, before. When she was trying so hard to tangle her life back up with Jax's knotted life. He was impossible to not notice. But the overwhelming heat she was feeling now, the undeniable attraction was new. Or she just had not allowed herself to go there, had honoured the tacit agreement of covetousness, of other men's possessions. She knew herself well enough to know that her feelings for Chibs had nothing to do with Jackson Teller or SAMCRO. The familiarity she had with the MC lifestyle certainly made the idea of the outlaw Scot plausible, but she knew that was as far as any possible re-involvement went. She did not want to tease, trump or call out Jax. She wanted nothing to do with him anymore, or his mother, or Clay or SAMCRO. Chibs could be any modern Viking in any city, the desire she was feeling for him was solely between the two of them.


She woke to the cell ringing. It was in her jeans pocket on the floor. Her heart thumped with his name on the screen.

"Filip," she answered it.

"You," he said.

A comfortable silence. She listened as he lit a smoke.

"Is Tom there?" she asked.

"Aye, he is. C'mere, ya bastard." He laughed. "He won't let me touch 'im. He's like you."

She scowled but felt an infusion of warmth that he was so bold. "I've been thinking of you."

"Aye?"

"Tomorrow night," she stated this simply. For reasons she would not be able to give voice to, she knew they shared a wavelength.

"Tha' right?" He sounded as though he were smiling.

"Aye," she said dramatically.

"You sound like a pirate."

They laughed.


She listened to the bike pull up into her driveway. Finishing touches in the hall bathroom with the window facing the street. He knocked and she heard him let himself in and knew she would catch hell for that. He called her name.

"Back here," she answered. "Just another minute. Beer in the fridge."

She found him standing on the edge of the living room, looking around at the empty dark space, drinking from a bottle of imported beer.

She wrapped her arms around him from behind and he murmured appreciatively. He turned and caught her in a hug, then kissed her. He stepped back, looking at her appreciatively.

"Nice," he grinned. "You look outrageous. Beautiful."

"Thank you." She took the beer from him and drank.

"Why is your front door unlocked?"

She popped her eyes at him. "For you."

He nodded, skeptical. He waved a hand at the house. "What's going on here then?"

She walked back into the kitchen, her bag was on the table, he followed. "I don't know. What?"

"Tara. It's empty. It's a house not a home."

"That's what it is," she nodded. "And that's what it's always been. Are you ready?"

He took the beer from her and finished it, tossing the empty effortlessly into the garbage bin.

"Let's go."


Catfish Charlie's was a bar and restaurant in a ramshackle building jutting over the river. The gravel parking lot was half full with pickup trucks and older model cars. He parked the Cutlass, then reached for her, pulling her nearly into his lap as he kissed her deeply.

Outside he shrugged out of his cut and placed it on the backseat. She gave him a quizzical look.

"Charlie's is no patches. It's good. Neutral ground if you're needing such a thing."

He locked the door, pocketed the keys, and she took his hand. Inside, he pulled her through the bar and out onto the deck. She watched as he nodded to the bartender, and acknowledged the appreciative stares she was getting from men on bar stools and at the pool table. Outside, they sat at a small table. He ordered beer and steaks and chips. They talked and smoked. She was emotionally relaxed, mentally engaged, and physically on fire. She knew without question she would be taking him home. She leaned across the table and whispered, "I want you so bad it's making my teeth hurt."

He kissed her. "You got no idea, Tara."

During dinner, he finally asked her about Jax. "What happened there?"

She closed her eyes briefly. She had known this stagnant water would have to be bridged. She looked at him. "They blamed me for Abel's kidnapping." She reached for the pack of cigarettes on the table, but her hand was shaking and she grabbed for her glass of beer.

"They who?" He was watching her through narrowed cautious eyes.

"Jax. Gemma. Clay."

She watched him scowl. "They think you shoulda taken a knife to the gut like Half-Sack?"

She shrugged. "I guess they do."

"It wasn't your fault. You know that, right?"

"Sometimes I do. Sometimes, I don't know." She shook her head. "I'm glad he's home. And that's as much as I ever want to think about it. I had a hard time at first."

"It's not right they put that on you." He shook his head, looking out over the black water. "Jackie. He's just beginning to come into his power. He hasn't lost much in his life. I know - his Da and his brother, but I'm talking as a man. You got to survive some awful shite to get to a place where you begin to understand things. He's not quite there yet. This fuckin life will take him there, though. Gemma, she should know better. She can be a right bitch."

Tara nodded.

"Sorry I asked."

She finished her beer and he yelled something over his shoulder back into the bar. The bartender brought two beers to their table.

"You seem like a regular."

"Naw. Semi-regular like. I do come here. When I need to mellow out, forget things for a time, not wear the cut." He was watching her, then burst out laughing. "Alone."

She turned her dark gaze on him, smiled, caught out. "What makes you think I care about who you come here with?"

"You wear everything on your face, luv. You're an easy study."


She was pleasantly intoxicated. At the house, he keyed off the car and tapped the keys on his thigh. She leaned herself against his shoulder.

"Yes, yes," she whispered.

It was her turn to take his hand and lead him through the front door, through the darkened house and into her room. She lit two candles on the bureau and the shadows climbed into the corners of the room. Slowly she began to undress, keeping her gaze fast on his. He leaned back against the wall and watched her. Her clothes pooled at her feet and his expression had changed. He came for her fast, the male animal. Her breath caught in her throat, her heart stuttering around the fact of him, the force of him, her need for him.