Madeline Sheehan - Unbeautifully

ZZ must have already asked him. There was no way my father would have appreciated this being sprung on him. My father was the sort of man who had to mentally prepare himself for things like his daughter being proposed to.

Which meant…my father was A-OK with me marrying ZZ.

In fact, looking around at all the happy faces, everyone was A-OK with me marrying ZZ.

More than okay. Elated, really.

Everyone except one.

I zeroed in on Ripper, whose sun-kissed skin had gone an interesting shade of green.

Our gazes locked.

And for a moment…I thought I saw the man I loved.

• • •

Ripper stared at Danny. Stared at ZZ kneeling on the grass in front of her, asking her to marry him.

He was going to flip his shit.

These assholes all around him didn’t realize it, but they were about to get sprayed with blood, bone, and brain when his head decided to explode, which was in about five motherfucking seconds.

Five…

Four…

Three…

Two…

One…

Fuck him.

Married.

ZZ was asking Danny to marry him.

Ah, fuck. What was happening to him? Everything inside of him suddenly felt all fucked-up and wrong. His heart started beating faster and his skin began to tingle irritably. The air around him grew thick, stuffy, making it hard to breathe. He felt lightheaded, his nose stung, and his stomach clenched painfully.

Before he began shredding his own body to pieces, just to make all these damn uncomfortable and unwanted feelings go away, he grabbed Anabeth and yanked her up against him. She responded immediately and curled seductively around his body.

Feeling like ten times an asshole, he kept his gaze on Danny as he groped Anabeth’s ass.

Danny’s beautiful blue eyes filled with pain and her gaze dropped back to ZZ.

He stopped breathing. She was going to say yes.

Say something , his brain screamed. STOP HER!

FUCKING STOP HER!

But he didn’t.

He never did.

Because he was a useless pussy, who would never fucking deserve her.

So he just stood there like an asshole, manhandling her friend, and watching in horrified fascination as her lips parted and—

FUCK THIS SHIT.

Fuck the club and the code, and fuck brotherhood.

He would give it all up for her. For his woman. Because she sure as shit was his, and he’d go to hell and back ten times over before he lost her forever.

He shoved Anabeth aside, his right foot moved, and…

“DANNY!” he bellowed. “ BABY !”

Three years earlier…

Prom night. The culmination of thirteen years of school was ending with prom night.

All my preparing and primping, driving four towns over with Kami just to find the perfect pink dress and matching shoes, two hours at the salon getting my hair, nails, and makeup done and…

It all seemed so…anticlimactic.

But maybe that’s because I was on the outside looking in.

Because I could no longer relate to the laughing, dancing, happy people inside the gymnasium.

Whereas everything inside this building, my high school, had once seemed so important, my grades, my friends, homecoming, dance committees, cheerleading, and prom…had once been my entire world, they weren’t anymore. Hadn’t been since…

“ He made me watch him rape her!” my father roared. “Do you fuckin’ get that? I was chained to a fuckin’ radiator, watchin’ my woman gettin’ slammed by a fuckin’ psychopath, and I couldn’t do shit about it!”

I squeezed my eyes shut, gritting my teeth through the ugly memory.

“ How’d they take him down?” Tap asked.

“ They didn’t,” the FBI agent said. “The woman did. Nearly severed his head clean off with a dagger. She came walking out of the room holding it, half naked and covered in blood.”

“ She’s okay, Prez,” Mick said. “She’s alive.”

“ She’s alive,” my father replied. “But I can tell you right fuckin’ now, she sure as shit ain’t okay.”

My father had been right; his woman wasn’t okay. Eva had seemed okay at first, she was quieter, she cried a lot, then they’d left for New York to bury Frankie. After that, she stopped talking altogether, stopped eating, showering. She spent most of her time in bed, catatonic, staring at nothing. My father wasn’t any better. Most days, he would sit on the floor next to the bed, his head in his hands, not talking, not doing much of anything aside from occasionally pacing the room, during which he did a lot of redecorating the walls with his fists.

Cage and I tried to keep the house running on our own, for Ivy’s sake. Not yet two years old, she didn’t understand what was happening, why Mommy wouldn’t get out of bed, why Daddy wasn’t playing with her.

And it only got worse.

Cage couldn’t do everything all of the time. My brother had jobs to do, runs to make, and there were times when he had to be at the club, if only to make sure things were running smoothly in our father’s absence. I was forced to drop out of all my extracurricular activities; my gymnastics instructor, after weeks of missing practice, took me off the roster. By spring, I’d missed so much school that my grades were suffering, which led to me getting kicked off the cheerleading team. I was lucky to be graduating, and ended up resenting my innocent little sister because of it.

I hadn’t even had the advantage of leaning on my real mother. When I was eight, she’d left us, moved to Forsyth, a forty-minute drive from Miles City, but where Cage and I were concerned, she might as well have been in another country. She worked ten-hour shifts waitressing at a diner, after which she spent her nights drinking with whatever skeezy boyfriend she had at the time. She called infrequently and rarely kept dates to see us.

And now…

Eva was out of bed. She was eating, showering, once again taking care of herself and her daughter.

My father was back on his bike, back at the club, doing what needed to be done.

But things weren’t the same. When they were home together or at the club, their relationship seemed strained. They never did anything together anymore, they rarely spoke to each other unless it concerned Ivy, and eventually my father reverted to his old behavior. Not coming home for days at a time, and even when he did, he was still sleeping almost every night at the club. And Eva, she didn’t seem to care what he did. She spent most of her time with Kami and Devin, and her trips home to her family in New York City became more and more frequent.

Cage had easily reverted to his old idiotic self—joking, drinking, and womanizing. He was always either at the club or out on a run. And me…

Because of my grades, Montana State University was no longer an option for me, not until I completed two years at Miles Community College. Which outright sucked.

My two closest friends, Anabeth and Ellie, were going to MSU. The three of us had planned for years to go off to college together, to room together since we always did everything together. Until my family fell apart and I’d been forced to take on responsibilities that took me away from my life.

A life I didn’t have anymore.

I scanned the gymnasium, decorated to the theme of A Midsummer Night’s Dream . The floor was littered with giant, multicolored, papier-mâché trees covered in tinsel; silver stars and moons hung from a ceiling covered corner to corner with pastel-colored balloons. It was beautiful; it was everything I’d wanted it to be when I’d still been on the planning committee. And instead of enjoying it, I was standing in the hallway watching my date bump and grind the school slut to Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby’s Got Back.”