Page 17 of Wait For Me

That held true until the day I went to tell him that I’d decided to go live in Idaho with him after all. That day, I learned another hard lesson in life. There were certain questions people should be asked in the beginning of a relationship, and moving forward, I would never forget that lesson again. When I showed up to tell Zane the good news, I learned that he had a wife and two kids back home.

We all had a few things to accept that day. Finding out about his family came in the form of meeting his wife, Zara, who showed up to spend the weekend with him before he was scheduled to fly back home. She learned that her husband had been having an affair with a girl who wasn’t long out of high school. He learned that secrets never stayed secret.

There are some educational experiences I wished I never had to endure. After that, I went home to my hotel room and cried for three straight days until the manager came to tell me that I needed to pay the full price to stay there since I stopped showing up to work.

Life sucked.

Dreams were reformed.

Tears were shed.

The most important thing was that I wasn’t nursing a broken heart that time. The tears were about dealing with another round of lies and betrayal from someone I respected. Love had never even been an emotion that was in play when I was with Zane. We were friends who fucked and nothing more.

Thankfully, Zane had been very wrong about one thing he taught me. When I checked my crypto currency to see if I could pull the money back out that I put in, so that I could make it home and pay my hotel bill, I was shocked to see just how wrong Zane had been. Even if it had been a total fluke, there was cause to celebrate.

My $3,000 life savings – emergency money to get back home – had gone into purchasing a crazy amount of crypto currency since I purchased it when it was just $0.004627 per coin. Since then, it had turned into eight million dollars somehow. Without a thought, I sold ninety percent of it off and kept only 10 percent of it invested. That was still $800,000 invested. I didn’t even know what to think about that. I set aside over half of the money that I pulled out for taxes, just to be sure. That left me with a little over three million dollars. I wasn’t sure what the hell to do with myself.

One thing I didn’t plan on doing was telling anyone about my sudden windfall. It was nice to know I was financially independent now, considering I wasn’t done with my road trip and hadn’t found my home yet. As it turned out, I cashed out at exactly the right time, what would be the peak of the currency’s run. While the $800,000 I left in the exchange slowly dwindled to half of that, I couldn’t complain because the rest of it was mine and even $400,000 was a far cry from my original $3,000 investment. I wished I could see Zane one more time so I could tell him to suck it!

Then again, he knew what I had invested, and he watched the financial news. He would know. Success incurred by following your own gut, even against the advice of others, was the ultimate revenge.

It took a few weeks to straighten out my finances after my major windfall. Once everything was cleared up, and my Beauty got a fresh tune-up, we were back on the road, looking for a new home.

5

Bagger

“So, I’m just supposed to send daily updates to Mack?”

Mike was a newer prospect for the club trying to earn his patch by taking my place on “Star Watch”. I had just rolled into Loveland, Colorado behind her about five days earlier when my mom called. She wasn’t doing well and needed me back home. I was fucking torn in two about it. On the one hand, my mother had always been there for me, and I needed to return that. There was a gnawing feeling in my gut that if I left, I’d lose sight of Star forever. Obviously, I wouldn’t have eyes on her, but there was this feeling that I may never see her again if I stopped following her myself. So, I turned and stared Mike in the eye as I gave him direct orders he was to obey. I didn’t care what Mack and Tripp had to say to him.

“You report to them once a week with a basic update letting them know she’s alive and well, or if anything significant happens where her life is in danger, obviously you tell them immediately. Otherwise, I get the daily, detailed updates.”

“I don’t think that’s how this is supposed to go,” he attempted to argue.

“Listen, I’m just going back to help my mom out while she’s sick. When she’s back on her feet, I’ll be right back on Star Watch duty, and you’ll be heading home. It’s important for me to stay in the loop so I know what’s up when I get back.”

“Yeah, okay. That makes sense. How’d you land the princess detail anyway?”

“I fucked up my marriage proposal to her and sent her running in the first place,” I admitted.

“Well, fuck! I’d heard rumors that you were once a member and busted back to prospect. That’s why?”

“That’s why. Word of advice, don’t fuck around with a club princess.”

Mike laughed. “Well, that’s a fuckin’ no-brainer.”

Yeah. If only I’d had some semblance of a brain months ago. I traded info with Mike and went for one more look at my girl. She was cleaning one of the rooms in the hotel where she had been staying since showing up in Loveland. I took my phone out and got a picture of her. It wasn’t as good as some of the others I’d taken, but it would have to do until I could get back to her.

I admired the hell out of the fact that Star hadn’t called home and begged for money when she started running low. She wanted to be her own person and took responsibility for what that meant. She was a fighter. That was a part of her I never saw before she left home. I understood now that I never got to see that from her because there was never a reason for her to show it then. She had a whole clubhouse full of bikers at her back.

I glanced over my shoulder one more time and watched as she shuffled the cleaning cart down to the next room. That unsettled feeling in my gut was still telling me not to go. I couldn’t let my mom down though, so I hopped on my Harley and headed back toward Georgia. It was going to take two days of hard riding, if I was lucky, maybe three to get back home.

Just before I set out on my last leg of the trip, I received my first update. It was a series of pictures of my girl and immediately, I regretted my decision to leave when I did. She was all dressed up to go out to a party, from the looks of the crowded house full of people she stood in front of. Mike hadn’t been with the club before she left, so he was able to get a lot closer to her than I had been.

Part of me wanted to turn right the fuck back around. I couldn’t let my mom down though. Instead, I stared at the picture before moving on to the next. Once, I flipped through to the last picture, my blood started to boil. Star was sitting next to some older man, he had to be in his mid-late thirties, on the porch of a house having a drink and a laugh. Her head was thrown back, smile wide, and her neck so damn alluring. It was obvious by the man’s stare, that he thought so too.

Bagger: What the fuck? I leave and she’s drinking with an old man at his house? You didn’t think that was a bad situation?

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