Unattainable (9 page)

“
Yeah?”

“
Got a
problem.”

“
What?”

His voice shaking, Dirty did his best
to explain everything that had transpired since last night and then
he waited for Deuce to respond.

“
Ellie?” Deuce asked. “As
in Danny’s Ellie?”

“
Yeah.”

“
You sure it was
Mooresville?”

“
She is,” Dirty said. “I
didn’t get a good look at him.”

“
Fuck,” Deuce growled. “I
don’t need this shit. We got a huge deal about to go down and I
need that fucker in place, and I’m thinkin’ he ain’t gonna be in
place if he’s too busy worryin’ ’bout Ellie rattin’ him
out.”

That was not what Dirty wanted to
hear.

“
She can’t stay here,
Prez,” he whispered. “You gotta get her outta my place.”

Deuce went silent.

“
Brother,” Deuce said
after several moments. “Did you do somethin’ I need to know
about?”

“
No,” he gritted out. “But
I need her the fuck outta here.”

“
Gimme fifteen,” Deuce
said quickly. “And I’ll be there.”

Trembling, Dirty let his phone fall to
the linoleum with a loud clatter and then his head dropped and he
pressed his forehead against the wall. Fifteen minutes. He could
keep his shit together for fifteen minutes.

ZZ: Where the fuck are you?

Rolling my eyes, I typed ZZ back a
short text.

Me: Fuck you.

My phone buzzed again.

ZZ: Can’t. You ain’t here.

Me: I’ll be home later.

ZZ: Where the fuck are you?

Me: Since when do you care?

ZZ: Answer me.

“
Fucker,” I hissed under
my breath.

Narrowing my eyes, I glared down at my
phone. What the fuck was wrong with him?

Angry, I punched in exactly two
letters.

Me: No.

“
Teg?”

My head shot up and I found Hayley, her
husband Joe, and our mutual friends, Tara and her boyfriend Tim,
and two of Joe’s douche canoe friends, Doug and—Scott? Skip?
something with an
S
—all staring at me.

And Hayley looked seriously
annoyed.

“
What?” I asked, feeling
pretty annoyed myself.

She gestured toward Scott or Skip. “I
was just telling Steve how much you appreciate motorcycles and it
just so happens that he has one.”

Whoopee. Like I fucking
cared.

“
Oh yeah?” I said,
glancing at Steve. “What kind of ride?”

The douche canoe grinned at me,
revealing two perfectly straight and glaringly white rows of
teeth.

“
A BMW,” he said.
“R12—”

“
A sports bike?” I
interrupted, wrinkling up my nose. “How super gay for
you.”

The table went quiet as everyone
glanced uncomfortably at one another. Rolling my eyes, I stabbed a
piece of tofu on my plate and shoved it in my mouth.

When I’d finished chewing and still no
one had yet to speak, I glanced around the table. “What?” I asked.
“Sport bikes are for pussies. True fucking story.”

Hayley let out a long-suffering sigh
and Joe shook his head. Whatever. I shrugged again and went back to
eating.

Exactly one extraordinarily painful
half an hour later, I was finally on my way out the door, racing
through the night with Hayley hot on my heels.

“
What is wrong with you?”
she demanded. “Are you trying to stay single forever?”

I picked up my speed, suddenly pissed
off that both my work and my apartment were within walking distance
of Hayley’s home.

“
Tegen!” she shouted,
breathing hard behind me. “I just want to see you
happy!”

“
I’m perfectly fucking
happy!” I shouted over my shoulder. “In fact, the only thing I’m
not happy about is you constantly trying to marry me off to Joe’s
douchey friends!”

“
You are not happy!” she
shouted back. “You are so far from happy!”

Oh, hell no. How dare she?

I came skidding to a stop and spun
around. Upon seeing my murderous expression, Hayley
froze.

“
Stop it,” I hissed. “You
don’t get to judge me, you don’t even know the half of it, so you
do not get to fucking judge me!”

“
I don’t need to know any
of it to know that ZZ is the problem! You’re like frozen or
something, Teg! What’s the plan here? Are you going to marry him?
Or are you just going to have meaningless sex forever? When are you
going to really start living?”

I stared at her, fighting back the
tears burning behind my eyes. I wasn’t frozen. I fucking wasn’t. I
had a life here. I did. I fucking did.

“
Fuck you,” I
whispered.

Hayley’s expression shifted from hard
to kind. “Oh, Tegen, honey. Please, I just want you to be
happy.”

Happy.

Who was I kidding? Even after all these
years, I wasn’t ready to let go. Because if I were, if I really and
truly were ready, I wouldn’t still be daydreaming about being on
the back of a certain asshole’s bike. I wouldn’t be staring
forlornly at passing motorcycles. And I wouldn’t be fucking a man
who did nothing but remind me of a life I supposedly wanted to
forget. Everything I’d left behind.

But most of all, because he reminded me
of…

Shit.

Which meant it was probably time to
start being honest with myself, meaning I would finally have to
admit what my therapist had been trying to get me to concede for
years now.

That ZZ wasn’t just a fill-in, he was a
fill-in for something, for someone very specific.

Goddammit, I was still sitting on
Cage’s bed the morning after he’d taken my virginity, my heart
aching, looking up at him as he looked down at me and said, “It
ain’t like that for me, baby.”

Even after all these years.

I left Hayley in the middle of the
street staring sadly after me. When I got home, I found ZZ lounging
on the couch in his boxers, his cell phone held to his ear with his
shoulder, a bottle of Jack in one hand and a cigarette in the
other.

I dropped my backpack by the door,
kicked off my sandals, and began undressing. By the time I reached
him, I was naked.

As I straddled his lap, he stubbed out
his cigarette in a nearby ashtray and let the bottle fall to the
floor. Cupping both my breasts, he squeezed them hard and twisted
the soft flesh in his hands until I winced in pain.

“
How many?” he asked the
person on the other end of his phone call.

“
Fuck that, Prez,” he
continued. “I can handle it.”

“
Fuck me,” I pleaded in a
whisper, lowering my face to his, grinding my hips over his,
feeling him grow hard as I did.

His grip on my breasts tightened and
his dark eyes bored into mine, but he did nothing.

Aggravated, I pushed up and off him and
dropped to my knees between his legs. Freeing him from his boxers,
I took him into my mouth. ZZ threaded his fingers through my hair,
digging into my scalp, grabbing fistfuls and pulling as hard as he
could.

Yes. I needed this. Pain to make the
pain go away.

“
Prez,” ZZ said, sounding
strained. “I don’t care how many years he’s been running shit
through the Cali territories. If you send that motherfucker out
here, I will put a fuckin’ bullet in him.”

Still working him with my mouth, I
glanced up at him. He had to be talking about Ripper. Ripper had a
house in Los Angeles.

“
You think I give a
motherfuck about him bein’ your son-in-law?” ZZ hissed. “I ain’t
workin’ with him. Not fuckin’ now, not fuckin’ ever.”

I took more of him, worked him harder,
lightly grazing him with my teeth, all the while watching
him.

“
Yeah, I fuckin’ got this
shit,” he said hoarsely, looking down at me through hooded eyes.
“Listen, Prez. I gotta go.”

Releasing my hair, he grabbed his phone
and tossed it aside.

The next thing I knew his hips punched
up, sending his dick down the back of my throat. Gagging and
cursing, I pushed backward only to have him grab my upper arms and
haul me up and onto his lap again.

“
How was your date?” he
sneered, smelling strongly of liquor.

“
It wasn’t a date,” I shot
back. “I was at Hayley’s.”

“
Yeah?” he said, and
laughed. “You expect me to believe she wasn’t tryin’ to hook your
ass up with one of those dick-suckin’ friends of hers? Those
fuckers who got pussies where their assholes should be?”

He kissed me before I could respond, a
brutal kiss, all teeth, biting and sucking on my lips, popping
blood vessels, and splitting skin. I closed my eyes, reveling in
the pain. I wanted it rough tonight, to make me forget for a few
minutes what the span of years could not.

I needed to focus on something,
anything but the nagging memories.

I kissed him harder, this time plunging
my tongue into his mouth, and a throaty, pleased growl erupted from
the back of his throat. “We fuckin’ dirty tonight, baby?” he
asked.

“
Yes,” I mumbled against
his mouth.

“
Good,” he grunted,
shoving me off him and face first onto the couch. Behind me, he
pulled down his boxers and then he pushed against my
backside.

“
Break’s over,” he
muttered.

“
Make it hurt,” I
whispered into the couch, letting my tears fall freely now that he
couldn’t see me.

“
Not a fuckin’ problem,”
he whispered back.

Cage pulled up to his father’s house, a
log cabin that could no more be considered a cabin than a New York
City penthouse could be considered an apartment. He cut his engine
and glanced up at the home that, for the most part, he’d grown up
in, and let out a long-suffering sigh.

Because neither he nor Danny lived at
home anymore, weekly dinners were a thing now, mandatory by way of
Eva, who was insistent that they all spend some quality time
together.

For the most part Cage appreciated her
efforts, loved her for trying so hard, but dinner at the West home
almost always ended in catastrophe, usually because of his
stubborn-as-fuck father always giving him shit. He couldn’t do
anything right in his old man’s eyes. Nothing. As far as his father
was concerned, he was a useless asshole who couldn’t keep it in his
pants.

Forget that it was him who, when his
old man was off doing whatever the fuck he felt like and their
mother was off drinking herself to death, Cage was taking care of
Danny. Then later, after he brought Eva home with a difficult
pregnancy, he’d left Cage to pick up his slack. And even later,
when his old man couldn’t seem to hack it yet again, Cage had been
taking care of Ivy too.

Yeah, Deuce liked to conveniently
forget all that. It always came back to sex.

And, what the fuck ever, his old man
was a hypocrite. Just because, now, the asshole wasn’t sticking his
dick in everything that showed his old ass any interest didn’t mean
it had always been that way. Before Eva, Christ, even during Eva,
Deuce had been fucking bitches left and right.

Cage never understood that. When you
had a woman like Eva, hot as fuck and willing to do anything his
old man wanted, loved the bastard even, why the fuck would you
stray from that?

If he had a good woman, an old lady
dedicated to him and the club, someone with a clean past who didn’t
spread her legs for every motherfucker out there, he’d never touch
another woman.

Shaking his head, Cage swung his leg
over his bike and started for the porch.

The door was unlocked, so he kicked his
boots off in the foyer and headed left through the living room. In
the family room, he found his youngest sister, Ivy; his
three-year-old niece, Danny and Ripper’s daughter, Harley; Cox and
Kami’s kids, Devin and Diesel; and to his surprise, Christopher,
Dorothy’s four-year-old son, all seated around the flat screen TV.
With the exception of Christopher and Harley, they all had
controllers in their hands, their eyes glued to the violent video
game on the screen in front of them.

He nudged his little sister’s leg with
his foot. “Yo, princess,” he said.

Ivy glanced up and her perfect little
face split into a huge grin. “CAGE!”

The next thing he knew she was in his
arms, her legs wrapped around his waist, her arms around his neck,
squeezing the holy shit out of him.

“
Jesus, you’re gettin’
heavy. How old are you now, twenty-fuckin’-five?”

Ivy laughed. “Nine, stupid! I’m only
nine!”

“
Yeah, yeah.” He grinned,
gave her a kiss on the cheek, and set her down. “Makin’ me feel
old, little sister.”

“
Cage, when are we gonna
work on bikes again?”

He grinned down at his little tomboy of
a sister. “Soon, baby,” he said. “Soon.”