Madeline Sheehan - Unattainable

And then, almost as soon as it had begun, it was over. Cage was groaning, having pulled out of me and I felt him finishing, felt the moisture on my belly as his body jerked above me.

It took all of a minute for him to roll off me, to turn on his side, to breathe in deeply and breathe out heavily.

And then he was snoring.

“Cage?” I whispered.

I lay there unmoving for several heart-pounding minutes, not knowing what to do until what he’d left on my stomach had begun drying, making the tiny hairs on my body feel stiff and pulled.

Rolling out of bed, wincing as I did, sore, feeling my pulse pounding between my legs, I walked stiffly to the bathroom and shut the door behind me. Swallowing hard, I glanced down at myself.

Gross.

Not only was I covered from breast to pelvis in half-dried semen, but my own blood was smeared across my inner thighs.

It was then I realized he’d never kissed me.

Which, in the end, killed the girl I’d once been. It left me broken, stuck, unable to move forward. And no matter how many years had passed, I was unable to let go.

When it came to Cage West, my mistakes were plenty and my regrets were numerous. If my past were a person, I would grab the throat of that motherfucker, drag her ass down Re-do Street, and once I’d beaten the ever-loving shit out of her, I’d stand over her beaten-down, broken body and say:

“You stupid bitch. You ignorant, stupid bitch. Love isn’t a fucking answer. It hurts more than it doesn’t, it’s harder than it is easy, it takes work, guts, and perseverance.”

Most importantly—what I would stress the very most—is that love doesn’t solve a goddamn thing. Love doesn’t erase a broken heart, and it sure as fuck doesn’t change people.

But no matter how old, how flimsy, how frayed the rope of love is, it does keep you tethered to the people you love.

And I was forever tied to Cage.

Would I change it if I could? Hell fucking yes, I would.

But we don’t get to pick our families or choose who we fall in love with. And we all have our crosses to bear: our stories, our loves, and our losses.

And this is mine.

Well, ours actually.

“Either you answer that fuckin’ thing or I’m throwin’ it out the window, Tegen.”

Blinking sleepily, I focused on the angry face mere inches from mine, wondering what the fuck he was talking about.

“Piss off,” I muttered, turning my face into my pillow. “It’s not morning yet.”

This time when my phone started both ringing and vibrating from its place on my nightstand, I heard it loud and clear.

“Tegen! That’s the fourth call in a fuckin’ row!”

“Shit!” I yelled into my pillow. “Stop bitching and just answer it!”

“I can’t!” he yelled back. “It’s your fuckin’ mom!”

The phone stopped ringing and I heard him let out an angry sigh.

Almost instantly, it started ringing again.

“TEGEN, ANS—”

Cursing, I jumped up, grabbed my pillow and swung it up in the air, then slapped it down over his face.

“Shut. Up,” I hissed, already reaching for my phone.

Pressing Answer, I lifted the phone to my ear. “Hello,” I snapped.

“Tegen?”

“Mom.” I sighed, instantly feeling bad. “Is everything okay? It’s not even light out.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s just…I wanted to catch you before you made plans for the long weekend. I thought maybe you could come home for a few days.”

Reaching up, I rubbed the heel of my palm over my eyes and sighed.

“Hawk’s coming home, isn’t he?”

James “Hawk” Young, lifer in the Hell’s Horsemen Motorcycle Club, was the father of my half brother, Christopher Kelley. Christopher was four years old and nearly two decades younger than me. Despite his dark red hair, green eyes, and freckles—traits our very Irish mother had given us both—he looked just like his extremely good-looking dad. Right down to his brooding eyes and the hard line of his mouth.

“He is,” she said softly. “And I’m just not ready. I just…I have enough to deal with, with Jase. Please come home, Tegen.”

Herein lay the problem. Despite how good-looking Hawk was, my mother wanted nothing to do with him. She couldn’t bear even the brief encounter to hand over Christopher for a few days. One might think that my traveling all the way from San Francisco, California, to Miles City, Montana, just to hand my half brother over to his father and comfort my mother in his absence, was a little extreme…it actually wasn’t. Not after what my mother had gone through.

When she was nearly nine months pregnant with Christopher, my mother had been shot in the head by her boyfriend’s wife. Not Hawk’s wife; Hawk wasn’t married. But Jason “Jase” Brady, also a member of the Hell’s Horsemen, was.

Actually, my mother had still been married to my father when she’d met Jase.

My mom, Dorothy Kelley, had gotten pregnant at fifteen, given birth at sixteen, and was forced by my grandparents to marry my father. My father, a truck driver, was rarely home and when he was, was more interested in television and beer than my mother and me. When I was four, my mother met Jase.

She fell in love with Jase almost instantly, unconcerned at first that he was married with three small children, because she thought he’d eventually leave his wife.

It didn’t happen. But my mother stuck it out. She worked at the Hell’s Horsemen clubhouse, cleaning up after the boys, cooking for them and doing their laundry, enabling her to carry on her affair with Jase as discreetly as possible.

Eventually my mother left my father, who’d subsequently hopped in his truck, left Miles City, and never returned. She cut ties with my grandparents and Jase moved both my mother and me into an apartment in town, a nice four-unit condo where we had a front door, a driveway, and a backyard, and everything continued much the same as before.

I hated it. I hated watching her throw her entire life away for a man who would never truly be hers, a man who would always go home at night to his wife and children and leave my mother alone, usually crying for him. Knowing that no matter how much she loved Jase, if he never left his wife she would always be considered a club whore, nothing more, and yet she still stayed.

That’s how I grew up.

The fatherless kid of a club whore, I watched my mother cater to a man who, in my opinion, didn’t really love her, watched her work her ass off for a club full of criminal bikers who lied, cheated, and more than likely killed their way through life.

And that was it. I had no one else, no other family to turn to.

I left Miles City, desperate to get away from the club life and all it entailed, the day after my high school graduation. With a full scholarship to San Francisco University and an internship already in place at a small newspaper, I had no plans to ever return.

After leaving, I’d been more than ready to get rid of “the look” that had defined me all my life, that look consisting of braces, glasses, secondhand clothing two sizes too big for me, and wiry red curls that took a day and a half just to tame in any sort of way.

One of my first friends in college, Grace, a true hippie raised on a commune in Northern California, had taken me under her wing and “crazied me up a bit,” as she liked to call it. So now I was free of both glasses and braces, my crazy hair had no choice but to remain in dreadlocks, and my body was a work of fucking art. Every single one of my tattoos I loved—colorful, large, and intricate, taking up both my arms, my back, chest, stomach, and both thighs. And my piercings…eh, I was fickle. Aside from getting my ear holes stretched a little more every so often, I’d alternate which ones I wore because I liked to change it up a bit every now and then.

In San Francisco, nobody gave me a second glance. And I loved it. There was no reason to ever return to Montana.

Except, that wasn’t in the cards for me. No matter how hard I tried to cut all ties with Miles City and its merry band of chrome and leather criminals, they just wouldn’t let me go.

After my mother was shot, Jase’s wife was tried, convicted, and shipped off to prison. My mother survived, obviously, but the damage had been devastating. Her memory had suffered, and at first she didn’t remember anyone or anything. Then, slowly, her memory began to return.

She remembered her childhood, her parents, and old friends; she even remembered my father and eventually me.

Then the progression came to a screeching halt. Her last memory of me was as a toddler.

My entire childhood, my teenage years, her meeting Jase and leaving my father, the many years of service she’d devoted to the Hell’s Horsemen Motorcycle Club…all of it was gone. Forever, it seemed.

Where did Hawk fit into any of this?

Well, as it turned out, my mother, in the midst of her already fucked-up love triangle, turned to Hawk for the comfort she couldn’t find with Jase.

No one had known.

After my mother had been shot, Hawk appeared at the hospital in a fury. He beat the crap out of Jase, during which he spilled the beans about him and my mother, crudely bringing to light Christopher’s true paternity.

And now…

My mother still didn’t remember either of them. To her, Jase was just some pathetic, broken man who refused to leave her alone, and the husband of the crazy woman who’d shot her. And Hawk was the father of the child she didn’t remember conceiving or carrying.