Page 44 of Zeppelin
Because if I let myself lean into that, I’m betraying Jack.
The club’s got a ride coming up in three days. A long haul to the East Coast, out through mountains and plains, the kind of ride that burns through fuel and time and whatever bullshit you’re carrying in your chest.
Part of me is dreading it. Being on the road without Jack beside me feels wrong, like a song missing its harmony. We used to ride like two halves of the same machine. Engines synced. Tires chewing the same asphalt. It was us against the world.
Now it’ll just be me, and the silence inside my head will be deafening.
But maybe that’s what I need?
The road doesn’t lie. The road doesn’t talk back. It doesn’t care about grief or love or all the shit I’m too cowardly to say. It just takes whatever you throw at it and gives you space to bleed it out.
I don’t know if I’ll come back with answers, but maybe I’ll come back with less noise in my head.
I lie back on my bed, staring at the ceiling as if it holds all the solutions. The sheets are damp from the shower and from her body, and I can still see her stretched out here, her head thrown back, her mouth parted. I can still hear the way she said my name when she was close.
It should be enough.
It should be more than enough.
But it isn’t.
Because I don’t just want her body. I want her mornings and her nights, her laughter and her bad moods, her smart mouth and her soft silences. I want the baby she’s carrying to know me. I want to stand in her kitchen and fix her broken porch and hold her when the sickness gets too bad.
I want a life.
And that terrifies me more than death.
When I come back, I’ll figure out how to face her. Maybe I’ll apologize. Maybe I’ll tell her the truth—that I’m already too far gone to play casual.
Or maybe I’ll bury it all deeper and keep playing the asshole until she forgets about me.
God, even thinking that makes my chest ache.
For now, all I’ve got is the road ahead. The open sky, the roar of engines, and the faint hope that somewhere between here and there, I’ll find a way to live with this impossible truth.
That I’m already hers.
And it’s gonna wreck me.
Chapter 12
Ginny
Ipull up in front of Dom and Bronte’s small house just before ten.
As soon as she opens the door and steps out, shadows outlining her soft brown eyes, arms wrapped around a soft fuzzy sweater and a billowing floral dress, I guess that someone from the club called here as soon as I left.
We have a thousand things to talk about and catch up on, but all she does is open her arms and let me step into them. Bronte’s a few inches taller than me, but at the moment, it feels like at least a foot. Her arms are strong and somehow wiser and older, like our mother’s. Maybe it’s just my brain and my chest, all my hormones, and my heart worked into a state, but I have to turn my face so that the tears I can’t hold back don’t start leaking all over her neck. I let them dribble onto her sweater instead.
She makes a noise in her throat, and I know that’s the only lecture that I’m going to get from her tonight.
Bronte told me not to get involved with someone from the club.
She specifically warned me to stay away from Jack.
At the same time, she knew that I wouldn’t, so she decided she was going to let me live my life as an adult instead of “mother henning” me to death.
She has never, and will never, tell me that she told me this would end in disaster.
