She was exhausted. And when they lay down together she reveled in how boneless she felt, how weightless. He pulled her to him and she lifted the sheet up over their bodies. She closed her eyes and listened to sleep call her. In his arms she let herself drift into oblivion.

Hours later she woke to his voice. He was in the hallway, speaking into his mobile. His words clipped and short, his tone tense. She felt the familiar fear settle into her guts, amazed at how it stung just as sharply with another man, another year, another relationship. It made no sense that she was willing to put herself through it again. She burrowed deeper beneath the bedding, curling into herself, wondering if it was, indeed, possible. If they could make it possible or if, as he had alluded, it simply was impossible.

She listened to him moving through the house, and then he was back in the bedroom, finishing dressing. Turning onto her back, she kicked the linens off her body.

"You're awake," he said.

She looked over at him. He was avoiding her eyes, her naked body.

"What is it?" she asked, wincing at the pitch of her own voice.

"Aye, you know what it is." He had his boots and socks in his hand and sat on the edge of the bed. "You planning on proper furniture in your new place?"

"In my cardboard box under the bridge? Sure."

"I don't even know what to say to that. My head ain't in the right place, girl."

"I'm sorry." They both knew she was talking about the fact that he had to leave.

"Me too. Fucken mule, pit bull, dancing bear. It's getting real old real fast."

She went up on her knees and wrapped her arms around him from behind. "You are coming back?"

He was silent, finishing with the boots. Elbows digging trenches into his thighs, head in his hands.

"I hate that I can't answer that. I hate it. Aye, I'm coming back, Tara. But I cannae tell you when."

She nodded against his back. "I know. It's okay. I'll be here. I mean, I have to work all week, but I won't split again, go back to the ER."

"You need the telly, or something like."

"Maybe. You want me to make you some coffee?"

"No time, luv."

He turned and scooped her up, pulling her across his lap, kissing her thoroughly. "I'll call you if I can. I will come back the minute I'm able to."


Margaret had accepted the invitation for the interview on her behalf. The paperwork was on her desk when she returned from lunch. Another post-it with an exuberant smiley face, and a link to JetBlue. She couldn't help but allow the small swell of affection towards her boss rise and roll inside her. They never spoke of her bad year, never referenced the physical turn it had taken. Her knuckles instinctively went to her mouth, biting softly into the skin stretched taut over the bone. She thought of it now, the horror of it, the shame of it. Funny how both Jax and Chibs had been such an integral part of her violent outburst. The pull she had on Jackson the push that she had made for Filip. Now with it all behind her, she dismissed the men and focused on the women, the pseudo-mothers. Gemma had so perfectly played the role of the bad mother, the devouring mother, and Margaret had and continued to be the good mother, the nurturing mother. Tara decided to consider her abhorrent behavior as simply the acting out of adolescence.

She shuffled through the sheaf of faxes. Interview questions, preparation, directions, hotel reservation, paperwork still needed, and even a timecard allotting her three days, two nights paid time. She sat down, opened her laptop and sent Margaret an upbeat email telling her she was on it.


He woke her just past midnight. She had given him her spare key. The light in the hallway was on and he was undressing in the shadows. She got up and lit a candle, turned off the hallway light and watched him hungrily.

He allowed her to make a slow feast of his body. Loving him with ravenous deliberation. She had to close her eyes, savor him. Feeling at the angles of his limbs, his spine, his ribcage, along the curving length of collarbone. Memorizing the limits of his skin, as though she was blind and he the full extent of her world.

Afterwards, he lay on his side, a lazy hand tracing her profile, her brow bone.

"I think I've had more sex in the past ten days than I've had in ten years."

"More good sex," she answered.

"I talked to Jax."

She reached up for his hand, bringing it down between her breasts, trapped between her palms.

"I didn't tell him."

"You didn't?"

"He said," he paused.

She could feel her heart rise up into the empty space between his words.

"He said, aye, that he had to make you leave. That it was the only way he could protect you."

"Protect me from what?"

"Oh, Tara girl."

"From what, Fil? His mother? From himself?"

"All that and more, probably. I think he's right."

Her heart began to trip hammer against her ribs. It hurt. "What?"

"I think he did the right thing by you."

"Screw that noise."

"He said it killed him. Killed something inside of him."

"Don't feel sorry for him."

"No?"

"No. Don't you see? He killed it." She was surprising herself with insight, the words making things clear so long after the fact. "He was willing to kill it because he loves SAMCRO, the club, above all things. More than anything else he ever had or has or could have. How does that work?"

"It works the same way tha' a soldier loves his country. A priest loves the church. How a fighter loves the hurt."

"That's a kind of illness."

"Then it's one we all got. All of us are infected with it."

"Don't say that. Please, don't say that." She swallowed hard. "It's a choice."

"Aye, it is," he agreed. "Tara?"

She heard the shift in his voice, felt the expansion of his presence into her bed, her life. She reached for him, he came into her arms, his face pressed to hers.

His mouth was against her ear. "I love you."


His mobile went off with the sunrise. For a perplexing moment, she pulled herself out of a dream in which the neighbor had a rooster that crowed with the sound of a cellular phone. The window was grey with early morning light.

He was cursing in his strongest Scottish accent and she smiled listening to him. Finally he had the cell and was disappearing into the hallway to take the call. She didn't envy whoever was on the other end. He sounded brutish. Hacking, coughing, barking into the phone.

Suddenly she remembered his proclamation of love. It was a coin tossed into the still deep well of herself, tumbling through the dark waters. The wish of it echoing in the chambers of her heart.

He threw himself into the bed, rubbing his eyes awake with the heel of one hand. "We should quit smoking. Do you even smoke? What are you smoking for? You're a heart surgeon for chrissakes."

"Was that the Surgeon General?"

He laughed. "Don't I wish. My mouth tastes like a feckin ashtray and I feel like I'm gonna cough up a lung."

"Smoking is bad for you," she agreed, kissing him. "You taste like whiskey more than ash."

"We should give that up, too."

"Wouldn't that be breaking some kind of Scottish law?"

"There's that." He rolled onto his side, hand under his head, looking at her. "You wanta get out of here? Ride over to the coast. Sleep on the beach?"

"Really?"

"Really really. I gotta get clear for a few days."

"You have to?" she asked, worried.

"Naw, not like that. I gotta get clear for my own self."

She knew she had to be in Washington at the end of the week. "Do you trust me?"

"To the ends of the earth." His look turned slightly suspicious.

"I have to fly out of state. For an interview. It's a good job." She rolled her eyes. "I mean, it's a great job. Things careers are built on."

"Okay," his voice had become hesitant.

"Come away with me. Two nights. Everything's paid for. The interview is on Friday. We would have Thursday night and Friday night and most of Saturday. Fly back that evening."

He pursed his lips, gaze shifting to the window, the morning light growing strong. He combed absently through his goatee with his fingers, licking the long mustache hairs along the sharp edges of his upper lip.

"Alright."


She was in her office, coffee steaming on the edge of her desk, paperwork and patient records spread in organized chaos across the top. She was body sore, in all the best places, and she smiled to herself thinking about how much sex she had been having in the last two weeks. She had never considered herself insatiable or needy and far from a sex kitten. Before Chibs. It was as though he had breathed hot on the thick carapace she had wrapped herself in, breaking her loose, drying her wings, encouraging the transformational metamorphosis that had always been a possibility for her. She felt more herself than she had since the cerebral days of medical school. More completely herself now. He accepted everything, trusted her completely, and that trust represented safety to her. She had not known that she was in longing for a physicality. A total immersion with another body that she had almost always denied herself. Control was the thing that held her together but now she saw that it had isolated her in a small space. And through the doorway of their flesh and bones, she had found a vast place that only the two of them could enter.

An unapologetic knock at the partially opened door pulled her from her increasingly heated thoughts of Chibs. She looked up and Jax was walking into the room.

The swagger, the smirk, the achingly familiar shy ducking of the head. It was like a full-body blow. She stood at once, hands covering her belly.

"Tara," he said. Her name a kind of secret shared.

She would not say his name. "Hello," she said instead, cautious.

She watched him process the fact of the desk between them, and he casually threw his long lean self into the chair on the other side. She looked at this comfortable behavior, breathed deep, and sat back down in her own chair.

"You look great." He sounded genuinely relieved, admiring.

"Thank you." The initial panic upon seeing him was rapidly fading. She realized that he had come in peace. "I feel great."

Nodding, appraising her, his hot gaze, the perfect bone structure in his face.

"You," she motioned at her own hair, "cut your hair."

He drew a quick, heavily-ringed hand over his shaved head. "Yeah." He looked at the window over her shoulder, shrugging. "Did a bit of time."

She couldn't decide if the shave made him look harder or just more the lost boy. She sighed. "Sheriff Unser told me about Abel. I'm so relieved. Happy for all of you."

His face registered a slight shock and she realized that he had not thought of his child, the kidnapping, or her in the same moment for a long time. "Uh, yeah. Of course. It's all good."

"What are you doing here?"

His face was closing slightly. He sat up straighter. "Not trying to start anything. Tara. I was thinking of you. I wanted to see how you're doing."

"You were thinking of me? Out of the blue? And you wanted to see how I'm doing? It's been almost a year."

"That long?"

"I wasn't doing well for months, thanks for asking, I guess. I'm good now."

He looked suitably abashed.

"I'm sorry about how all that went down."

"I believe you." She took a deep breath. "I was sorry, too, for a long time. But I'm not sorry now. That it's over, I mean. I am sorry that I pushed myself back into your life. I shouldn't have done that. I guess we both needed to know that this," she indicated both of them with a wave of her hand, "isn't good for either one of us."

"Yeah," he sounded doubtful.

An uncomfortable silence settled between them.

"I'm surprised, honestly, that you're still here. I went by your Dad's place. Saw the sign. You are leaving, huh?"

She nodded. Suddenly fearful and protective of her new life. Chibs. "You went by my house? Please don't do that again. Don't go there. Don't come here."

He stood and she recognized the quiet anger, the slow seethe.

She was standing too, sweat beading in the well of her spine. As though a precious shell had just been washed onto the shore of her life, she realized that he was the one from whom she had been running for years, not her life. She smiled at the discovery, at the realization.

He was watching her. "You seem different. Somehow. You've changed."

"I have. But not different. Not really."

"I miss you, Tara."

This made her inexplicably sad. She moved towards him and opened her arms. He hesitated and she was alright with that, too. When he came, he came hard and fierce but she held him until he softened in her embrace.

"I know, Jax. But you've been missing me since the day we met."


She finished the coffee. She stared at the paperwork. She looked back up to the doorway through which Jackson Teller had walked. She reached for her phone.

I LOVE YOU

Seconds later, it rang.