Page 50 of Zeppelin
Although, the Dickens that I’ve been reading isn’t half bad.
And isn’t that just pure fuckery in itself.
I don’t feel ungrounded and uprooted just because Jack isn’t on this ride with me. It’s more than having my other half missing. It’s painful because thisisjust another first of many things that I’ll do without him. It dredges up all thelastswe had without ever knowing it. It’s not just that life is never going to look the same or be okay again.
It’s that I’m pretty much torn in two. I could have talked to Ginny before I left, but she didn’t reach out. I could have called or texted her. It wasn’t that I was worried about being the first to break. I just didn’t know what to say. I half wanted to apologize to her, and I’m still half gutted. Illogically. It doesn’t make any sense to be mad at her when she never made any promises and we had an understanding trending in the other direction. It’s me who got confused. It’s me who had to pull away to stop myself from wanting more.
It wasn’t herfault, but the way she joked about not getting attached is still salt in a wound that shouldn’t exist. My head knows what I have to do to fix this and get the fuck back in line, but my heart and fucking soul are torn in a completely different direction.
How could I allow myself to get close to a woman who was only going to pull away? I thought I could enjoy the sweetness while it lasted and deal with the bitter torture when it inevitably came.
Imagine my surprise when I wigged the fuck out on the inside and couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t keep getting close, giving her my body and taking hers, pleasuring hers, coming right alongside her, holding her and being held, opening myself up in ways I didn’t even realize I could and didn’t even know was happening until it was right in the thick of the minute. I couldn’t sleep beside her, wanting her, growing into the one thing she so clearly will never want.
Attachment.
She’s not my family.
These men around me? They’re my family.
Including the annoying motherfucker who I’m currently trying to ignore.
Carver, AKA Dominic, AKA Ginny’s almost brother-in-law, doesn’t take the hint. He’s made it his mission to stick close to me for the entire six days we’ve been on the road so far. Maine is no joke. Crossing the country isn’t for the faint of heart.
It’s another hard hitting blow that lands in a soft spot I thought was long healed.
Me and Jack? We only joined the club because we had plans on doing our own big road trip. Not just across one country, but many. We wanted to see Latin America. Maybe even go down there and start a new life. Instead, we ended up not so far from home, living a different life completely. We never went down south.
We never will.
It makes me feel itchy and restless in my skin. Prickly.
I have no one to talk about it with.
The one person I can imagine texting or calling in a private moment, probably doesn’t want to hear from me, seeing as I pretty much threw her out of my room.
And now Carver knows that there’s some shit going on between us. He’s not watching me like I need to be warned away from Ginny or studied to decide if I’m good enough to be around. He’s protective of her and that’s fair enough. I like that for her. It’s more that he wants to try and be closer to me as though she asked him to keep an eye out for me and be there because I need someone right now even if I can’t admit to it.
That’s absurd, because I know she’d never do that.
Would she?
Just because she doesn’t want to be in a damn conventional relationship—the R word from hell that I never thought I wanted either—doesn’t mean that she doesn’t care.
I think.
Damn, when the fuck did I even startthinking? Not just regular shit, but all the deep shit? It sucks. I wish I could undo it. I wish it would stop. Self-awareness or whatever the shit it is, really sucks.
“Zeppelin?”
It took a while, but the guys have stopped calling me Decay. There might be the occasional slip up, but everyone understood why I wanted to get rid of that name.
“Carver?” I parrot back sarcastically.
“Just wanted to make sure you’re doing okay.”
“You want to make sure or you’re asking for a friend?” On the outside, I’m a sarcastic fucker, but on the inside, I’m one of those soft, squishy marshmallows that we’re not toasting.
