Unbeautifully

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Life goes on.

If there is nothing else in this world you can count on, you can count on that.

Life will go on.

With or without you.

Before you, after you, all around you, life has always done just that.

Gone on.

After Ripper left, life went on. The world didn’t stop turning, the sun didn’t forget its nightly duty to set in the west and rise again each morning in the east. The seasons still came and went. Everything, everyone, continued on.

Even me.

When my father and Eva came home from their honeymoon, it was back to business as usual only my father was home a lot more. Things settled.

And life just kept going.

Danny D. got married.

Cage had a girlfriend, a waitress from town, for an entire week.

Kami got pregnant and nine months later gave birth to her and Cox’s second son, Diesel. Tegen graduated from high school. Not even twenty-four hours after her graduation ceremony, she was on a plane San Francisco bound where she’d gotten a full scholarship to San Francisco State University and an internship at a small newspaper. She didn’t come back for Christmas, or spring break, or the following summer.

Bucket was arrested, carted off to jail out of state on assault charges.

Then Dorothy got pregnant.

Jase didn’t leave his wife. Other than Dorothy, no one was surprised.

Hawk left. Went nomad like Ripper, and never came back.

Anger, one of two prospects, eighteen years old, and half Native American, was patched in. From what I knew of him, like Dirty he too had been aptly nicknamed. Mostly, I tried to avoid him and his temper tantrums.

And through it all, Ripper would periodically appear. He’d show up out of the blue, stay for a day or two, and then just as randomly, he’d disappear again.

We never spoke. We barely looked at each other. But there were times when not looking was as unbearable as holding my breath for too long and so I’d give in and I’d look. And every time I did, he was looking back at me.

The pain that followed those brief glances was indescribable. And always took weeks to heal from.

And still…life went on.

Eventually two years had passed, during which I continued on with school, and made a concerted effort at spending more time with my family, or alone with ZZ, and less time at the club.

And then, three weeks after I turned twenty-one, during one of the many Horsemen summer barbeques, life came crashing to a stop.