Who I Am With You (Imagination #10) - Staci Stallings Page 0,205

out to the student center, praying Clara would be there, and she could fix at least one thing in this mess.

When she got to the student center, she found Clara coming out the back door and heading to her car. Before Taylor could talk herself out of it, she jumped out, slammed the door, and ran over. “Clara! Hey!”

The glance up told Taylor two things. One, Clara had seen her, and two, she had no intention of acknowledging that she had.

“Clara!” Taylor called again. “Wait! Please. Wait just a minute.”

On the driver’s side, Clara stopped just as Taylor got to the other side. The anger was clear on her sweet friend’s face. “What?”

Taylor stumbled, scrambling for words. “I’m sorry. Can we talk?”

“I’m about to run some errands.”

“I could go with you.” Desperation took over then. “Please, Clara. Please?”

A moment and Clara sighed. “Fine.”

Chapter 28

Going on barely two hours of sleep, Greg was imminently glad he was still just training. If he’d had to do this for real, he was sure he would have been fired on the spot.

“Be sure to chart that,” Izzy said. Thank God for Izzy too. She had been patient with him as he learned the computer system. The codes were beyond him on a good day. Today was not a good day. “You’ll get it. Don’t worry. I promise.”

But he wasn’t so sure about that.

Taylor figured she should start with her most recent transgression and work her way back. “Look, I’m sorry about last night.”

Driving, Clara barely glanced her direction.

“That was wrong of me,” Taylor said. “I guess I was afraid you were mad about what happened before.”

“What happened before?”

Did she really have to say it? “You know, with Ryan at the restaurant that night.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, about that,” Taylor said as they pulled up at the drive-through of the bank behind another car. “Look, I know how that must have looked. But I promise you, I wasn’t coming on to Ryan.”

Clara sat motionless and completely silent.

“I wasn’t. I think I was just nervous.”

“About what?”

“About being there with everyone,” Taylor said. “I just feel so uncomfortable around them sometimes, like if I don’t say something cute and funny, I don’t know… I’m trying to figure all of this out. Greg thinks I’m doing it on purpose, but I’m really not. I don’t feel like I am anyway.”

They pulled forward, and without further conversation with Taylor, Clara put her paperwork in the little air shuttle and hit send. She had a pleasant conversation with the woman inside the bank. It sounded like nothing had ever been wrong in her whole life, and like it certainly wasn’t now.

“Have a nice day,” the woman finally said.

“Thank you. You too.” Clara waited for the shuttle to return, took her things out, and set them next to Taylor without ever glancing over. She drove out, made three turns around the back of the bank, and joined traffic.

It was like being a ghost along for the ride.

“I really am sorry,” Taylor said softly. “I never meant to hurt you or Ryan.”

“Ryan’s fine,” Clara said. “He said I’m making too much of it.”

Taylor wanted to agree, but that didn’t seem advisable so she kept quiet.

“I just… I guess it’s just hard when you’re me and not you,” Clara said.

“Not…? What does that mean? I don’t understand.”

“Sure you do. Everybody loves you,” Clara said. “Everybody gravitates to you like a magnet, to all of you really. I just feel like…”

“You’re invisible?” Taylor asked, and she swallowed the word. It was the same one Greg had used.

“Yeah. I guess so. Like that. I mean, that night at the restaurant, you didn’t even talk to me at all. It was like you were locked tight on Ryan.”

“Not because I didn’t want to talk to you,” Taylor said. “I thought we were all talking.”

“No. You were talking.” Clara pulled into the post office. “I have to get stamps.”

“Oh. Okay.” Taylor wasn’t sure what that meant, but when Clara parked, Taylor got out too and awkwardly followed her inside. Unfortunately there was a large Out of Order sign on the kiosk, so they went to the line for the service desks.

Leaning there, Taylor thought about what Clara had said. She was talking. Only her. And the more she thought about it, the more she realized Clara was right. The conversation was all about her laptop, how she didn’t know what she was doing with computers, what would Ryan recommend, did he think going to somewhere in town was good, and