Who I Am With You (Imagination #10) - Staci Stallings Page 0,177

her, “are you sure?”

“Yeah.” And, in fact, she was already headed out. “Thanks for lunch. I’ll talk to you guys later.”

Having no idea what the right thing to do was, Greg thanked them as well and quickly followed Taylor through the house and out to the car. She got in, and he did too. However, he didn’t start the car immediately.

“Tay?” he asked, looking at her. “Are you sure about this?”

“Can we just go?” she asked, her voice breaking into a thousand tiny pieces. “I just want to go. Please.”

“Yeah,” Greg said as he reached for the ignition. “Yeah, we can go.”

With everything in her, Taylor wished she hadn’t brought Greg. As they drove out, she could feel every glance he shot her way. Now he was angry and worried. Humiliation crawled through her, kicking up tears and anger as it went. She knew her dad would be unreasonable about it, but she hadn’t expected it to be that bad.

“So what now?” Greg asked when they had gotten almost to the Interstate.

“I don’t know,” she said, fighting the tears although one slipped out anyway. She swiped at it, willing herself not to lose it. Not now. Not with Greg sitting right there. Taking a deep breath to push it all down, she closed her eyes and shook her head, shaky beyond belief.

“You don’t know, maybe they’ll come around,” he said gently.

But she did know. That was the problem.

“Can we not talk about it?” she asked, hating how broken and fragile her voice sounded. Why did her dad still have this effect on her? He always had. That’s why she had learned to deal with bad things without getting him involved if at all possible, him knowing about bad things made even worse things happen.

“Okay,” Greg said. “What do you want to talk about?”

Taylor’s mind spun through all of her stuff and landed squarely on his. She sniffed hard. “Have you been studying for that radiology test thing?”

Of everything in the entire world, that was the last thing Greg wanted to talk about. “No. Not really. No time, you know?”

Next to him, Taylor nodded. “Well, there’s no time like the present.”

Panic lit through him as she turned to retrieve the backpack from the backseat.

“What? What are you… doing?” he asked as she struggled to get the thing to the front.

She sniffed one more time and the tears were gone as she opened the thing at her feet. “Helping you because one of us should get what we want.”

They had studied for the test the rest of the way back. It took 30 minutes for him to start finding the information in his brain again and another 30 before he felt like he was making any progress. When they got back to the house, Taylor asked what time they would be leaving for chapel, and Greg couldn’t help but notice how normal she seemed.

“I’ll leave about 4:45,” he said.

“Okay. You mind if I tag along?”

“Fine by me.”

“Cool.” With that, she headed to his room, and she’d just disappeared there when Wes came through the front door.

“Oh, hey, you’re back,” Wes said.

Man, it would have been nice to bounce some of this off of his friend. But there were lines, and this was one he didn’t dare cross. “Yep. We’re back.”

Taylor made sure to look extra-good for chapel. The last thing she wanted to do was show up looking like her world was crumbling around her. They already knew too much—the apartment, the dorm room, Chris… If they knew about this…

“You guys are singing?” she asked when she made it to the living room and found both Greg and Wes there.

Wes looked at Greg who didn’t answer. “Yeah.”

“Cool,” she said with an extra-wide smile. “Well, I’m ready when you are.”

Though he had thought not talking to Wes was bad, playing let’s pretend nothing happened with Taylor was even worse. On the way to the student center, she babbled on and on about how much she was looking forward to spring because winter was just annoying. She asked what he was thinking about for Spring Break, and Greg hardly had the brain cells to make a logical reply. It was something about probably having to work and not really having any plans.

She just shrugged. “I need to talk to Sophie, see if anybody at Alpha Chi’s doing anything. Padre Island was fun that time. Maybe they’ll be doing that again.”

“The truth,” Pastor Dave said as Greg sat in the front bench with Wes, Nelson,