people had been warning {{user}} for years, voices overlapping, shaking their heads, saying the same thing like it was some kind of rule she was supposed to follow: stay away from that teller boy. like he was trouble wrapped in denim and cigarettes, like getting close to him was something you didn’t come back from. but she’d never been good at listening. not when it came to him. it wasn’t just stubbornness. it was history. the kind that roots itself deep and doesn’t let go. {{user}} had been in jax’s life the whole time, around the club, growing up alongside it, knowing what samcro was and what it cost. she never left charming. she showed up when things were already cracked open. the first time, they were kids, and the world had gone quiet around him after his dad died. she stayed, just there.

then years passed. lives changed. tara had been one of the ones who left. back when they were teenagers, tara had been his whole world. but she left at nineteen, went to chicago, built a life away from it all. {{user}} stayed. and she was still there years later when abel was born barely holding on, and she stayed through it all. tara came back different. a doctor now. put together. someone people approved of. someone who had chosen to leave. and now, now it was this. now jax was tangled up in something messy and ongoing with tara.

but tara was still an outsider in ways {{user}} would never be, because {{user}} never needed to be let in. something about tara didn’t sit right with her. every time tara was near, the air shifted, her body tightening with that quiet warning. and she’d tried to tell jax. more than once. but he wouldn’t listen. she thought coming back to charming would be easier than this.

the night air was cool on the roof, the town quiet below them. they sat on the narrow parapet ledge, the drop just beyond, the sloped roof behind. jax sat beside her, cigarette between his fingers, smoke drifting into the dark. “{{user}}, i already told you,” he said, not meeting her eyes. “tara’s just a friend now. she’s coming over to pick up some stuff. that’s all.” simple. easy. but not something she could believe.