Unattainable (Undeniable, #3)
Madeline Sheehan
PROLOGUE
Take one fresh and tender kiss
Add one stolen night of bliss
One girl, one boy
Some grief, some joy
Memories are made of this…
— Dean Martin
I’ll always remember the first time I laid eyes on him; the bane of my entire existence. I was eight years old and he was eleven—tall, blond, with deep brown eyes, and when he smiled…dimples.
Most importantly, he’d been sweet to me. He paid attention to me when no one else did.
“Hey,” he said, bending down beside me, smiling. I smiled back. He was the first kid I’d seen since my mom had started bringing me to the club. He looked older than me, but only a few years or so, and he was so cute. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Tegen Louise Matthews,” I said, offering him the teacup I’d just snatched from the lap of my stuffed teddy bear. “You can join us,” I told him, gesturing to my circle of stuffed animals.
“A tea party with Tegen Louise Matthews,” he said, his smile growing even wider. “I’d love to.” He settled down beside me and crossed his legs into a pretzel. “You got a nickname, Tegen?” he asked. “Or are you just plain Tegen?”
“Just plain Tegen,” I said, lifting up my teapot and pouring him a generous amount of invisible tea. When I finished pouring my own cup, I lifted it to my lips.
“Wait,” he said. “You forgot to cheers.”
I wrinkled up my nose. “Cheers?”
“Yeah, with your teacup. My little sister always makes me ‘cheers’ before tea. Like this.” Lightly he clicked his plastic cup with mine. “Cheers,” he said, glancing down at his cup then looking back to me. “…Teacup,” he finished, grinning.
“What?”
“Teacup,” he repeated. “That’s what I’ll call you. I mean, what other nickname can you give a girl named Tegen who likes to have tea parties with teacups?” He frowned. “Unless you don’t like it?”
My eyes went wide. “No!” I cried excitedly. “I’ve never had a nickname before and I love it!”
“Then it’s settled,” he said, holding out his free hand. “Nice to meet you, Teacup. My name is Cage.”
Despite his young age, he was the lone male figure that actively participated in my life on a regular basis from that point forward.
But eight-year-old feelings eventually turned into twelve-year-old feelings, and twelve-year-old feelings turned into fourteen-year-old feelings.
The older I grew, the more I grew to love him until I no longer looked to him as the one stable figurehead in my life, but instead loved him with an intensity that at times bordered on madness.
Love, they say, has the potential to kill a person if they aren’t careful.
I wasn’t careful. I let that love blossom uncontrollably until it was in full bloom, exploding from within me, with nowhere to go.
It wasn’t the same for him. The older he grew, the more he changed.
Gone was the sweet, caring boy he’d been, and his place…
He became the cockiest, most self-centered, self-serving, egotistical, narcissistic, and depraved motherf*cker I’d ever met in my entire life.
Which, when I think back on it, is probably why I fell even more in love with him.
Girls are stupid like that. Falling in love with what they can never have—the untouchable, the seemingly larger than life, the unattainable.
However, I wasn’t alone in my stupidity.
Nearly every female that crossed Cage’s path fell immediately into a big bucket of f*cking stupid. Young, old, and everything in between, it didn’t matter. The minute they saw his smile, heard his smooth-as-whiskey drawl, watched the fluid way he moved, they went instantly stupid.
As more time passed, my feelings, unreciprocated and with nowhere to go, began to fester and rot until I couldn’t take it anymore and took matters into my own hands.
And did something really, really stupid.
I bit down on my lip as my body burned, trying to adjust to his harsh entrance.
“Fuck, you’re tight,” Cage mumbled drunkenly, pulling nearly all the way out of me. As hard as I fought it, his movements hurt and a whimper escaped me.
My body, despite the horror I was feeling, was slowly adjusting. Wet warmth flowed through me, and when he slid back inside, this time there was no pain, only a slight discomfort.
“Fuuuuuuck,” he groaned, grinding his hips, a movement that made my stomach flip with a brand new feeling. A good one. One that had me forgetting what was really happening between Cage and me; fooling me into thinking this was going to go the way I’d planned. That I was going to give Cage my virginity, something that was going to make him realize that I was the girl for him. That no one would ever love him more than I would.
His hand slid into my hair, tightly gripping a handful, while his other hand clamped down on my hip. His face dropped into the crook of my neck and I turned my head, seeking him, needing to see him, needing to confirm that my feelings were reciprocated, but his grip on my hair tightened, holding me in place.
Then his hips pulled back.
I gasped as he slammed back inside of me. Our bodies slapped together, my breath returned and…