Madeline Sheehan - Unattainable

Because I’d just had an orgasm just by kissing. And then another just because the motherfucker had told me to.

“Fuck you,” I said, half moaning into his mouth as I ground my backside into his groin. “Fuck…you.”

Cursing, Cage pulled quickly out of me and wet warmth shot up over my back as he groaned through his own release. Breathing hard, he rolled onto his back, bringing me with him, settling me on my side into the crook of his arm. I slid my arm over his rippled stomach and curled my left leg over top of his, then laid my cheek down upon his tattooed chest.

“Fuck you, too,” he rasped and kissed the top of my head. “You mouthy little shit.”

I snorted, my lips curving into a smile, and I found myself holding Cage tighter.

“You’re stayin’ all weekend, right?” he asked as he reached to his right, fumbling around with the contents of his nightstand.

My smile fell away as reality began to permeate my lust-addled brain. Why the fuck was he asking me that?

“Teacup?” I heard the flick of a lighter followed by the scent of freshly lit green.

“What?” I whispered, refusing to look at him.

“I asked how long you’re stayin’, babe.”

“I’m not sure.” Which was a lie. I was due to leave on Monday, but I could stay longer if I wanted. I had vacation time at work and if I…

FUCK.

No. No way was I going down this road again, no way was I going to get trapped inside feelings that could never amount to anything but more self-loathing. So I kept my eyes shut and tried to remember every female I’d ever seen Cage slutting it up with. Groping them, kissing them. I forced myself to relive that awful night so many years ago at the clubhouse.

I had to get out of here. Away from Cage. And then I had to get very drunk, very, very drunk and forget this ever happened, because if I didn’t, if I allowed what just happened to sink too deep within me…

Teacup. I would be Teacup again.

So I told myself that, in no uncertain terms, Cage West was a whore, that this was what he did, and that if he hadn’t changed his MO not once in his entire lifetime, he never would.

“’Cause I’m thinkin’,” he wheezed, blowing out a mouthful of smoke, “that if you’re stayin’ for the whole weekend, we could keep this shit goin’ ’til you head out.”

Sex. That’s all he was about. It’s all he would ever be about. If I spent the entire weekend with him having sex, more sex meant more feelings were going to slip out, and more feelings meant I’d end up doing something really fucking stupid.

Like telling him I loved him…again.

Which would mean I had indeed turned into my mother even after all the promises I’d made myself to never be some dirty biker’s second choice. Or third. Or his whore.

Suddenly I wasn’t just mad at myself, I was mad at him and my mother and my father and my grandparents and Jase and the whole lot of stupid bikers that had set this all in motion, all over again. And then I wasn’t just mad, I was fucking livid and suddenly wanted to cry and scream and rip my hair out for being such a stupid girl! Again!

“Tegen?”

“Hmm?”

“Fuckin’ really, woman? I’ve only been askin’ how long you’re fuckin’ stayin’ for the last ten minutes.”

“I’m tired,” I lied, rolling away from him as I faked a yawn. Grabbing the blankets, I pulled them up over my shoulder. “Let’s talk in the morning.”

Muttering nonsense about women and decision-making, Cage rolled over, reached under the blankets, and gathered me in his arms. His large hands slid over my bare body, one stopping on my breast and the other between my legs.

“I had fun tonight,” he whispered as his lips found my neck. A shiver tore through me even as I grimaced.

He had fun.

Was I supposed to take that as a compliment? When didn’t Cage have fun? Fun was one of his two middle names, the other being “slut.”

“Lips,” he growled, nipping his way across my face. Unwittingly, I turned my head and met him, countering every stroke of his perfect tongue with one of my own. We kissed for a while, touched, but Cage was spent and even though I’d never admit to it out loud, I was too, not to mention a little sore.

Eventually exhausted, we fell away from each other.

It took all of fifteen minutes before Cage was sound asleep. Then I was up, dressed, and calling my mother from his cell phone.

• • •

The next afternoon, upon arriving at the clubhouse, Cage headed straight for his father’s office holding the small envelope of photos he’d taken from Eva’s room in New York. Things had gotten so out of control so quickly last night, he’d forgotten to pass them along. Finding the office door already partially open, Cage walked in and found Deuce seated behind his desk, looking over a pile of printed pages that looked to him like laundry lists. As in the dirty money the club laundered through their legitimately owned businesses.

“Tell me you didn’t fuck the hippie,” Deuce said, not bothering to look up.

Cage grimaced.

Yeah, he’d fucked the hippie. And then the hippie had taken off and never came back.

So she hadn’t wanted to spend the weekend with him. She hadn’t even wanted to spend the night with him. Which was fine. Whatever. So what if he’d never had a bitch just up and leave in the middle of the night before, not even a club whore. But hey, there was a first time for everything. Which was…fine.

He’d hit her up later today for a re-run.

“You fucked her, didn’t you?” Deuce growled, finally looking at him. “Even after I told you to leave her the fuck alone?”

They stared at each other and Cage felt like he was looking in a mirror thirty years in the future. A cranky, pissed off, judgmental bastard of a mirror.

Cage opened his mouth and Deuce’s hand lifted, then crashed back down on the desk.

“You got any idea how fucked-up D is? She barely sees her daughter as it is and what do you do? YOU GO AND FUCK HER!

“It was real fuckin’ simple,” he continued. “I told you to leave the girl alone, but stickin’ your shit in anything that’s walkin’ by you is more important than followin’ orders, isn’t it?”

Cage didn’t respond. He’d heard this speech enough times that he knew it by heart. He also knew that interrupting his father would only make the man angrier.

“You’re pushin’ thirty fuckin’ years old and still ain’t listenin’,” he continued, looking at Cage with unmasked disgust. “You’re never goin’ to amount to jack-fuckin’-shit, are you?”

It wasn’t a question. It was an answer. He knew it, his old man knew it, and Blue, who was in the front room asleep at the bar, knew it too.

“Here,” Cage muttered, pulling the pictures from his cut as he walked toward his father. He tossed the envelope on the desk.

Deuce’s gaze dropped. “What the fuck is that?”

Cage shrugged. “Found it at the Demons MC, in Eva’s old room.”

Deuce glanced down and picked up the envelope. As he looked over the first photo in the stack, Eva seated next to Blue at the bar, Cage watched his father’s expression shift from indifferent to downright sappy.

“Where the fuck did you find these?”

“Hidden,” Cage said, knowing better than to bring up anything to do with Frankie, or Frankie with Eva, to his father. Shit might be happy-go-lucky between them now, but it wasn’t always that way and Frankie had been the reason.

“Behind a photo,” he finished.

“Fuck,” Deuce muttered, slowly going through the stack, his eyes growing more and more unfocused with every picture. “Look at her…just fuckin’…look at her.”

“She still looks pretty damn good,” Cage said and Deuce’s eyes shot to him and narrowed.

“That’s not what I was talkin’ about,” he growled. “I was talkin’ about how fuckin’ stupid I was. I had that.” Deuce held up the photo he was looking at.

Eva, grinning, wearing a baggy cropped tee and saggy jeans, sandwiched in between Kami and Dorothy, was giving Dorothy rabbit ears while her other hand made the sign of the devil over Kami’s shoulder.

“I had that,” Deuce repeated. “And I fucked it all up.”

Cage didn’t say anything, unable to believe his father was done fucking up, and Deuce went back to looking through the pictures.

Jumping to his feet, his father glared at him. “Did you look at all these?”

Father and son stared at each other.

“Little fuckin’ asshole,” Deuce growled. “Get the fuck out.”

“I’ll be around if you need me,” he said tonelessly, already turning on his boot heel.

“Don’t hold your breath,” he heard Deuce mutter.

He wasn’t going to.

When it came to his old man, he’d stopped holding his breath a long fucking time ago.

“Stupid,” I muttered as I yanked a frying pan out from underneath a stack of pots and pans, wincing as the following loud clatter echoed throughout the kitchen. My mom didn’t get a lot of sleep; when she did sleep she dreamt of the memories she couldn’t quite access and usually woke up in a cold sweat, shaking and crying. Between that and Christopher, she needed her rest.

After placing the pan on top of the stove, I headed for the refrigerator.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” I said under my breath as I surveyed the chilled contents. A carton of eggs, a package of cheese, a loaf of bread, and a tub of butter later I was sitting down with a cheese omelet and a side of toast, not eating.

I felt too sick to eat.

I was a first-class fucking idiot. And not just because I’d fucked Cage. Again. I mean, yeah, that was seriously idiotic, but worse, I’d fucked him not once, but three times, and not once did we use a condom. Not once did I even remember to use a condom. Why oh why did I always lose my head around that man?

Goddammit, I probably had AIDS now or at the least some sort of wonky biker venereal disease. Or even worse, I was going to end up like motherfucking Danny and pregnant with a little biker baby that, knowing my luck, would be a boy who’d look just like his father, become a biker just like his father, and break a million hearts…just like his father.

It was official. I was my mother’s daughter. I could bed the man but never wed him. I could suck his cock, make him dinner, do his laundry, and have his children, but I could never actually have him.

Jesus, I’d actually prefer to have explosive diarrhea while wearing a miniskirt, performing a jig onstage in front of half a million people.

My one saving grace was that I had absolutely no reason to see Cage for the rest of the weekend. I closed my eyes and let out an irritated sigh. Why did I absolutely hate the sound of that?

My eyes flew open and I stared down at my omelet. “FUCK!” I yelled. “You look really yummy and I don’t even want to eat you!”

“Tegen?”

Glancing up from my breakfast, I found my mother hovering near the kitchen entrance, dressed in only a knee-length black robe and fuzzy slippers.

“Shit,” I said, immediately pushing my chair back and getting to my feet. “I’m sorry, Mom.”

She gave me a small smile. “Is it okay to come in? Or am I going to get an omelet to the face?”

My shoulders sagged. My mother had never been a shy woman and she’d never skirted around sensitive subjects. Unless it had something to do with her relationship with Jase, she’d never had a problem speaking her mind. I took after her in that way, although I was infinitely more vulgar than she would ever be.

Other than that, we were polar opposites. Our hair wasn’t even the same shade of red.

Even at forty-one she was still beautiful; at forty I was pretty sure I was going to look like skin sagging off a stick. But not my mother. She was several inches shorter than I was, petite but not without curves, her breasts were full and her stomach flat.

Her deep red hair hung halfway down her back in soft waves, her pretty green eyes still sparkled with a youthful vitality, and her skin, although freckled, was a shimmering sort of pale, not the sickly sort. Like me.

“I’m sorry I woke you,” I said quietly.

“No, baby, I was already up and about to get in the shower when I heard you yell. Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” I said quickly. “I’m fine.”

She took a step inside the kitchen and folded her arms under her breasts. “Tegen, I may not remember everything, but I still know when my own daughter is lying to me. I already knew something was up when it was Eva and Kami bringing me back my car last night. And then I get a phone call from you from Cage’s phone telling me you’re at Cage’s house and you need to get picked up. Not only that, I am well aware of what a woman looks like after she’s had sex, which is exactly how you looked when I picked you up from Cage’s house. Now, you have one of two choices; you can tell me what’s wrong or you can keep lying to your mother.”