Who I Am With You (Imagination #10) - Staci Stallings Page 0,155

huh?”

Next to him, Paige looked at him, and Taylor saw the anger.

“You don’t really…” Taylor started, but Greg took a half-step in front of her.

“I don’t think it’ll take very long,” he said. “With enough people, we can probably do it in one trip.”

Lauren sighed dramatically, her arms crossed. She looked at them and then at Wes before halfway rolling her eyes. “Might as well get this done.”

Since she hadn’t gotten anything boxed or ready, when Taylor got to her former room, she had no idea what to expect. At least the police tape was now gone. However, what she found inside was just shy of a gut punch. Hannah’s side had already been cleared out. There wasn’t a single stitch of her former roommate’s mess anywhere. Only hers remained. And what a disaster it was.

Now she wished she had agreed to do this earlier with just Greg. Letting the others see was crushing in a way she really hadn’t realized it would be. The second she turned on the light, she knew two things. It was awful, and there was no going back now.

“Whoa,” Lauren said when she came in behind Greg. “Wow.”

Taylor tried not to notice the reactions of each of them, but that was nearly impossible. How could she not feel their judgment and condemnation? It was in every syllable they uttered.

Trying not to think about any of it, she went first to her desk, the contents of which were in a disheveled cascade that went from the top shelf all the way to the floor. Her books seemed okay, the notebooks and lab books, not so much.

Bending down, she picked them up one-by-one and stacked them on the desk like a robot because one hint of emotion would bring her own wall crumbling down. She crawled on her hands and knees almost to the bed to retrieve the last of them as Greg picked up her laptop next to the bed on the other side.

“Well, that’s wrecked,” Nelson said as Greg held it up.

“Do you want us just to roll all of this up, and we’ll take it to the house and wash it?” Paige asked, her hands on her hips as she surveyed the bedding.

“Uh, yeah. Sure,” Taylor said as she swept up the last of the notebooks and stood. Holding down the tears was getting harder by the second.

“The clothes in the closet go?” Wes asked.

“Yeah, just take it all,” Taylor said as she stood to put the notebook on the desk. “I’ll figure it out later.”

Like an army of wordless ants, everyone grabbed what they could carry and headed out. Never, never would she have pictured it like this when she’d first moved in. Why did everything always have to fall apart for her? This was humiliating.

“Hey,” Greg said when he glanced over at her. He went past Ryan on his way to Taylor. “Hey. Hey.” Carefully, he put his arms around her, and that’s what finally broke the dam of pent-up frustration and anger with herself and the whole horrible mess. Why her? Why was it always her that these things happened to?

As the hot tears leaked from her eyes, Taylor latched onto his arm and his waist, and she held on as waves of humiliated tears rushed over her. The rip tide of them nearly took her knees out from under her, and had it not been for Greg’s solid presence holding her up, she would’ve ended up on the bed or the ground, one of the two.

“Shhh,” he whispered softly as stroked her hair and back. “I know. I know. It’s a lot. I get it, but it’s going to be okay. Trust me. It is. This is over now. You’re moving on to better things. Trust me, you are.”

Something about his words or the way he was holding her pieced the tattered rags of her courage back together. A moment more and she pulled back, sniffing and swiping at the tears.

“You okay?” he asked, focused solely on her as the others quietly dismantled what was left of her life in this room.

She didn’t have words, so she just nodded never lifting her head.

“You sure?” he asked, without removing his arms from her shoulders as he leveled his gaze at her.

A breath and she nodded again, knowing she had to be okay whether she was or not. She dragged in a hard breath. No one needed her to be a drama queen now. “Yeah. I’m okay.”

The whole thing took less