Unattainable (2 page)

“
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.

As for me, it was hard. There was a lot
of explaining on my part, rehashing year after year in hopes she’d
remember something past my toddler years. A lot of tears were shed,
but eventually she came to accept the fact that she forgot two
decades of her life, and that I wasn’t her baby anymore but a
full-grown woman.

As for Christopher, she loved him
instantly. Because she didn’t remember him, he was presented to her
as a newborn. The familiar red hair, green eyes, and pale skin
hadn’t hurt much either.

Which was great, super. Wonderful,
even. But she didn’t remember me and I couldn’t accept
it.

I felt alone. Orphaned in a
way.

So I blamed Jase and Hawk, as well as
the entirety of the Hell’s Horsemen Motorcycle Club and their
affinity for drama, for all of it.

My mother, as confused as she was,
tried to break all ties as well, but Hawk being Christopher’s
father made it hard for her. Several women associated with the
club, women my mother had been close to, also refused to let her
go. They continued to show up for visits and call her periodically
despite her protests.

They also pressured her into spending
time with Jase, or Hawk, in hopes that it would help trigger a
memory.

So yeah, I timed my visits alongside
Hawk’s trips home. He stayed on the road mostly, but when he would
return, he wanted to see his son ASAP and it was my job to ensure
that happened without him intruding on my mother.

“
I’ll call the airlines
today,” I told her. “I should be able to take a few days off
work.”

“
Thank you, baby,” she
whispered tearfully and I felt my eyes prick in
response.

“
See you soon,” I said
hurriedly, needing to get off the phone before we both ended up in
tears. As much progress as she’d made, it was still hard for her to
think of me as an adult and seeing her cry, hearing her cry…well,
it was hard for me.

She was my mother. The only parent I
had, the only person in my life that had ever loved me. I would do
anything for her, including make myself miserable.

Hanging up, I halfheartedly threw my
cell phone across the room and it landed pathetically in a basket
of dirty laundry.

“
Fuck,” I muttered.
“Fuck.”

“
Speaking of fuck,” the
man beside me said. “And seein’ as you’re already
naked…”

I glanced over at him.

ZZ.

Yet another biker in the Hell’s
Horsemen Club. Sort of. He didn’t associate with anyone in the club
other than Deuce West, the president, and he hadn’t set foot back
in Miles City since Danny, Deuce’s prissy-ass little bitch of a
daughter, had cheated on him with another Horseman, Ripper, and
broken his heart around the same time my mother had been
shot.

Deuce’s offspring were good at
that…breaking hearts.

All the West kids looked the same no
matter who their mothers were. Cage, Danny, and Ivy were all blond
with identical dimpled smiles. The girls had been blessed with
wide, doe-eyed baby blues and full lips, and Cage…ugh.
UGH.

He was beautiful. And an
asshole.

Like father, like son.

As for Deuce, I wouldn’t be surprised
if every blonde-haired, blue-eyed, and dimpled beauty queen across
all fifty states belonged to him.

My body and my looks would always be a
sore spot for me. I was ridiculously skinny, and not in the
graceful supermodel way, but instead awkward, all elbows and knees
like a newborn foal. I had tiny breasts and no hips, my collarbone
stuck out, and so did my hipbones.

I was still pale-skinned, red-haired,
and freckled.

And I would always be—no matter how
many times I looked in the mirror and saw someone not quite as
unattractive as before—that stupid and ugly little girl that no one
had wanted.

But whatever, I’d accepted the fact
that I’d never be beautiful a long time ago.

After my mother’s injury, I returned to
San Francisco just in time to start my sophomore year. Two months
into fall semester, ZZ showed up looking for a place to crash in
his downtime. Other than the Horsemen, he didn’t have anyone else.
His father had been one of Deuce’s lifers but had died when ZZ was
twelve. Deuce had become his surrogate father and ZZ had taken the
path his own father had, into the life. When he was twenty, his
mother had passed away, her body ravaged by cancer. Not wanting to
return to Miles City and subsequently see Danny or Ripper, he’d
tracked me down instead with Deuce’s help.