Who I Am With You (Imagination #10) - Staci Stallings Page 0,254

it. It was all so confusing. I wanted to be something, and I didn’t even know what that was. Popular? Liked? Accepted? Something like that. But I always felt like I didn’t quite fit in.”

“You?” he asked in shock. “You. Taylor Grayson? Miss Everyone-Wants-to-be-fabulous-like-her Taylor Grayson? You felt like you didn’t fit in?”

“I was never fabulous. I was just trying really hard.”

“You were never fabulous?” he asked sarcastically as they pulled into her parking lot. “Yeah, right.”

“I wasn’t. Not like other people. Not like you guys were.”

“You guys?” he asked as he parked, and his voice went up three notches. “Hold up. Let me get this straight, you think Wes, Nels, and me had anything on you in the fabulous department?”

“Oh, come on,” Taylor said in annoyance. “You guys were gods at that school.”

“Gods? Wow. Yeah, not…” He shook his head. The car was still on, and he didn’t move to do anything about it.

“Are you serious? All my friends were constantly asking about one of you.”

He shook his head.

“I’m serious,” she said.

“Well, you could’ve let us in on that information.”

Taylor scrunched her face. “I wasn’t going to let those girls just throw themselves at you.”

“You could’ve let a few of them throw themselves at me.”

She laughed. “Oh, yeah, like… what’s her name? The one you took to prom senior year?”

“Ansley?”

“Yeah. Ansley. Good ol’ Ansley. I remember her coming to talk to me about it, asking about if you’d ever noticed her, if you’d ever said anything, if I could talk to you about it, put in a good word for her...”

“She talked to you… about me?”

“They all did. I was like the one that kept the gates closed on the flood,” Taylor said. “You guys would’ve been mobbed if I’d have let it happen.”

“And that would’ve been a bad thing?”

Taylor ducked. “Well, some of it wouldn’t have been good. You know how it was back then. Everybody had one goal in mind, and I knew how you guys were. You weren’t into all that stuff. Least I didn’t think you were.”

“No,” Greg admitted. “Though it might’ve been nice to have had the option once in a while.”

However, Taylor shook her head and didn’t even laugh, though she knew he was joking. “Yeah, you think that, but… I thought I was looking out for you, making sure only the best girls got through.”

“And you thought that was Ansley?”

“Come on, she had a trust fund and more money than the rest of us put together.”

“She was also stuck up, annoying, and tedious,” he said, counting the attributes on his fingers. “I knew five minutes after I picked her up that was going to be a bust.”

“Well, I guess we were all going on our own agendas,” Taylor said. “I thought I was doing you a favor, but maybe I was just standing in the way of something that wasn’t ever mine to protect.”

As much as Greg wanted to fault her for it, he knew what she meant. He just hadn’t been as successful at it as she had. Not knowing how she might react, he put his hand down between them in offering to hers. He watched as she looked down at it and carefully, slowly laid her hand in his.

He let his gaze go across to her. “No more secrets?”

Her gaze came to his, filling with the hope of what might be. “No more secrets.”

Looking at him like that, Taylor had the fleeting thought that now she knew what love looked like. She also knew he would never take another leap across the abyss that had always separated them. That would be hers and hers alone to take. “Thank you for never giving up on me.”

He nodded slowly. “Never.”

“I need some time.”

“I know.”

“But I don’t want to lose you.”

“Not possible.”

“Are you sure about that?” she asked, knowing it would be her that messed this up, never him. “You know how I can be.”

However, his eyes simply held her gently, knowingly, lovingly. “Just be you. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

Just be you.

What a concept.

She wasn’t even sure she knew how to do that. It was like starting all back over with a blank canvas and all the colors in the world at her fingertips. This time there would be no masks, no secrets. Just life lived in vibrant, dazzling color.

“You sure about that?” she asked as excitement surged in her heart. “I’m a little high maintenance.”

He grinned. “Eh, I like a good challenge.”

“And I don’t always get everything right.”

“Yeah, well, join