Page 22 of Zeppelin (Satan’s Angels MC #9)

Ginny

C ooking is my love language. And what the actual fuck is that? Love .

If I was brutally honest in my definition of it, I’d say it’s the fairytale that people get sold on young so a whole bunch of other people can make a lot of money on them all throughout their life.

We’re told that the love of another person will complete something that we’re born missing.

We’re told to go to the ends of the earth to seek it.

It’s the one concept that so many people have so much trouble defining, yet there seems to be an overabundance of literature and art in every form to contradict that notion.

Love is something different to every single person.

My parents would say that it’s a feeling and a fact.

It’s hard work, selflessness, communication, patience, grace, forgiveness, growth, and a lot of self-improvement.

They’ve both told me that if you want to make it work with a person and you want it to last for a lifetime, then you need to be able to change many times and fall in love over and over again as that person changes too.

I had the notion of wanting to get married and have a family one day, but the problem was that I never got closer to inserting myself into the traditional ways of getting there.

I’m okay with myself. I don’t need anyone to complete me.

I never needed another half. I couldn’t find a way to fall blindly.

I never had those feelings. Does that make me incapable of love?

Did it mean that I never found the right person?

Those are heady questions for an early morning, especially one like this.

They’re heady questions when I’m still a bit of a mess, though my stomach has settled down.

It seems that once my body purges itself, it realizes that it’s responsible for making another human and it needs to calm down and get with the program of letting me provide nutrients without trying to kill me in the process.

I flip the eggs over and turn the bacon before it burns. I use the flipper to turn the toast too. The wood stove is a learning curve, mostly with timing since there’s not much in the way of heat adjustment.

I can leave this, can’t I? What we did last night.

The tenderness that Zeppelin showed me this morning, caring for me with an innate selflessness and instinct that you just can’t teach.

Love language is just a saying. I can be practiced platonically, or for people I care about, like my family and friends.

Even in the most literal sense, good sex and tenderness doesn’t amount to deep romantic attachment. Not if it’s not given time to flourish.

I’m about to ask Zeppelin if he likes his eggs over medium or scrambled, but his deep voice in an almost reluctant tone, cuts me off. “We lived in Canada, so the risk of tornadoes was pretty low, but we got some wicked storms now and then. You know where Alberta is?”

I don’t turn around. I’m afraid that if I do, and we make eye contact, he’ll need to run from it, or I will, and that will be the end of this. I plate the eggs and toast and nod.

“We lived in a trailer park in an old singlewide trailer from the seventies. No basement. The plow winds could flatten the place. One day, that’s exactly what happened.

My mom wasn’t home. No fucking surprise there.

She almost never was. Did Jack tell you about that?

” His throat sounds scratchy, like he’s coming down with a cold.

It’s his way of showing emotion. Most people would say that he’s not capable of processing much past his bike, motors, grease, and tools, but most people don’t dig deep enough or take the time to take a second look.

“He… not really.”

I shove the bacon around in the pan for a few more seconds before I scoop it out onto a plate with paper towel to dab the grease off.

“There’s not much to tell. We were a typical trailer trash family.

No dad in the picture. Our mom wasn’t really a junkie.

She did sometimes have a job, but she liked getting strung out.

Always had some dumb fuck of a boyfriend around.

Sometimes, she’d disappear for days. She did make an attempt, when we were young, to get clean.

A few people from the trailer court, old people, would drop in and check that we were okay.

Sometimes we’d go over to their place. She made an effort to get us to school and make sure we went, but after we were ten, it all just went to shit,” he pauses.

I give him the space and keep my focus on the eggs.

He continues, “She got back into drinking and drugs because she got back into the dumb fucks who liked to give it to her. We were old enough to get our own asses to school. The main motivating factor wasn’t education.

The place had a breakfast program, so we were guaranteed one meal for sure.

We had a few friends who’d share their lunches with us.

Even early on, we were real good at sports, so people liked us.

We fit in. Honestly though, we didn’t give a shit if we were liked or not, and I think that’s why people did. We were our own world, me and Jack.”

I wait until he pauses again before I bring his plate to the table. Four eggs. A mound of bacon. Three pieces of toast. Hopefully that’s enough. I have an egg on my plate, and a slice of toast that I’m going to force myself to eat because I need the calories. Hopefully it sticks.

I sit across from him, focusing on my plate since I’m still not sure where to look.

Already, I can sort of tell where this is going.

It makes me hurt for a child who wasn’t loved properly and who never got the protection he deserved.

It’s even worse knowing that the one person in his life who ever showed him affection is gone forever.

It makes me want to go back in time and find him as a boy and hug him hard.

I want to hug him right now. Is there an emptiness inside of him that won’t ever close up?

“There was a storm one night. We’d just turned twelve.

We lived in this shit singlewide, and it was basically a tin can.

No cellar. Our mom wasn’t home. We were old enough by then that people didn’t have to come check up on us anymore.

She hadn’t been home in days. She was off on some bender.

The place just blew in. Collapsed, that’s how strong those winds were.

Big hail, thunder, the sky was sulfur yellow.

Jack said we had better get in the tub. We dragged a mattress in there over us.

He was right about that. We got banged up, but we were okay. ”

I get up slowly, so he can tell that I’m not trying to cut him off and I’m still listening. I fill up the kettle and set it on the stove to boil. I used to love coffee in the morning. It’s not a problem giving it up. At the moment, the thought of drinking even a sip makes me want to retch.

“After the storm,” I ask him, running my finger over a groove in the old farmhouse tabletop.

I have a love for old furniture. I chose what spoke to me, not because I thought it would fit with the house’s vibe.

I appreciate that it’s not just books that can tell a story.

“What happened? Someone must have known something wasn’t right. Or where did you go?”

The coffee is strong and black, and still very hot. The steam curdles off the top of the mug as soon as Zeppelin pours.

“Social services got involved. It was a shit show. Our mom somehow convinced them that she had her life together. She moved us in with her boyfriend at the time, into this dumpy little house on the other side of town. It was disgusting, but the people coming and going were worse. That was our life for a few years. A body can only take so much and our mom’s finally gave out.

When our mom overdosed, at least Caesar—that’s what her asshole boyfriend called himself—paid for the cheapest burial.

We knew it was coming. We were sad, but she’d ceased to really be a mom or anything like it to us a long time before that. We were almost fifteen then.”

I nibble away at the cold piece of toast, listening intently to every word he’s saying.

I know that when people have truly done that for me in the past, it makes me feel heard and seen .

Bronte and my mom can both make a person feel like they’re the only one who exists in the world for that moment.

I want to be that for Zeppelin. I want to know that there is one person in the world he can still come to.

It’s important to me.

I don’t tell him that I’m sorry. It’s so trite. I want to hold him. I want to give him space. I don’t know what I want to do. Like his losing his brother, there’s nothing in the world I can do to change that, and there’s precious little I can do to make it seem better.

“We’d been talking about leaving for a long time.

” He takes a minute to eat, head bowed. “We finally did it. Just got on a bus with some money we’d saved from doing odd jobs around town and left.

We went to Edmonton, found work—the kind of job where no one asks your name or age, we slept rough, crashed on floors, and finally got a shitty apartment.

All our money went into saving up for some bikes.

There was this guy who used to come to my mom’s boyfriend’s house.

He rode a Harley. It was just an old thing, but to us, it stood for something.

Freedom. He was just another fuckup who came there to get high and drunk, but that didn’t matter. We were in awe of that bike.”