Chapter 1

Three weeks had passed. I’d cleaned my apartment, being a bachelor, it took that long, and gave notice that I was quitting the lease to get married. I was living with Kendi full time and enjoying it immensely.

We had settled into our normal routine of showering ourselves awake and then remaining naked as we did our daily stuff around the condo. Kendi worked on her projects and I sat at the same table and did my administrative stuff for the swim team. We cooked together, we worked out together, I began losing weight and inches (I was proud to reacquaint myself with the penis that I’d not seen in a while). I must have lost almost 20 pounds thanks to Kendi’s loving care.

We also decided that since the decision was made, it made no sense to delay our wedding and Kendi decided that it would be a small affair.

“Kendi, it’s your wedding. I thought that all first-time brides wanted a huge wedding with thousands of guests.”

“And thousands of dollars in dresses and flowers and all that. No thank you. I just want to have a quiet ceremony on a Friday evening, change my last name and then go home and do a ton of consummating.”

And that was pretty much the whole of planning for our wedding, other than deciding that we’d invite everyone on the team to meet Kendi on Saturday afternoon at a reception.

The next Monday that rolled around, I asked Brody if he would like to do a karaoke wedding reception, that would have kids and adults in attendance.

“You’re really going to do it?”

He sounded amazed.

“Yeah. I feel like I’m living in a fairy tale. I mean shit like this never really happens, right?”

“Mick, I have never heard of anything like this, and I have a lot of friends who do severe drugs!”

“I understand, and I’m waiting to wake up.”

Brody suddenly looked past me.

“Oh my God!”

Brody’s mouth gaped open when he finished the phrase.

‘She’ walked in the door and every eye in the place turned towards her.

Kendall Jackson, I call her Kendi, was 23 years old and I was a lot older. She was an engineer and I was a swimming coach. She used to live next door to me when she was 8 and I saved her from being raped by her father after he was done beating her mother and raping her older sister.

After DFS had taken her and her sister and placed them in separate foster homes, her mother died from a drug over dose and her sister committed suicide after her foster father raped her. Kendi was adopted by her foster family, a really fantastic couple. She took their last name, and when she finished college with a degree in civil engineering, she fell in with a few classmates and started a company with each of them living in separate cities and doing all their work online. As soon as the company was settled in, Kendi set out on her true-life mission; to find the man who saved her life.

It took her a few of years, but she finally found me in Boise, Idaho, and in the process of finding me and finding all about me, she fell in love with the man who saved her. Her reset goal became to get herself into my life and save me from the minimal, unhappy existence I was calling my life. It started off with her walking into the Bar where I sang karaoke on Monday nights and gently kidnapping me to spend my vacation week living with her.

The weeks adventures featured me turning down $100,000 from her father to give her up to him, a convicted, and just released from prison, child molester. He wanted to finish the rape of her that he didn’t get to start when she was 8. Getting into a fight at the farmers market with two of his henchmen, who were on a mission to kidnap her, so he could rape her. I’d had a gun pulled on me, twice. Once by one of the gorillas and then by her father. The second incident caused me to hit her father on the side of his head with a pool ball so hard, that it crushed a portion of his skull and fracture my hand. The injury to his head, later on, caused him to bleed inside his skull and die from a stroke.

Outside of that, Kendi seduced me with her logic and caring. Over the course of four weeks, I fell in love with the girl and asked her to marry me. Oh! Did I mention that her dirt bag father had won the fucking lottery the first month he was out of prison?

He was worth about $30 million and while lying unconscious in the hospital, Kendi showed the hospital administration proof that she was his daughter and established herself as his next of kin. Her initial motivation was to have his life support turned off if it came to it, but she later decided that she couldn’t have done that.

After all of the madness was over and her father was dead, and his bodyguards were handed over for trial, Kendi and I moved in together and I asked her to marry me after we made love for the first time, AND before I found out about her being the heir to his millions.

I told you all of that, so I could tell you all of this.

Kendi walked in the door of the Bar-Bar on that Monday night and walked straight towards me and Brody. She was wearing a black satin t-shirt and black mini-shorts. Her 4-inch heels accentuated her legs and the front of her t-shirt was bouncing around like all t-shirts do when a buxom female doesn’t wear a bra and has a bounce to her step that keeps her nipples happily rubbing on the fabric of her shirt.

“Oh my God!”

Brody’s mouth gaped open when he finished the phrase.

“Hi lover! Hi Brody!”

Her voice was even more bouncy that her breasts.

“Mick, dressing like that should be illegal.” Brody poked me in the shoulder.

“Or immoral!”

“Mick! I dressed like this just for you.”

“Not Brody or the rest of the Bar?”

“No, just for the man I love more than anything. Everyone else gets to be considered collateral damage.”

“If I was rich, I’d think that you are trying to give me a heart attack to get to my money.”

“No, lover. Besides I have the money.”

“Did you hear something from the lawyers?” I asked as I pulled out two bar stools for us and gave her a kiss when she sat next to me.

“My lawyer says that as far as they can tell, my father had no other heirs AND did not have a will. He never had one drawn up after he won the lottery. My father took his money in one lump sum. That throws it into the hands of the probate courts. He is going to see what the problems might be between California and Idaho.”

“Well, it is a good thing that we don’t need the money. At some point we need to sit down and plan how we are going to meld our lives. I mean we both probably have savings, insurance and credit cards.”

“I don’t have credit cards.”

“Wow! Really? Neither do I.”

‘She’ did that smile and turned her head slightly.

“Why? When I was looking for you, you seemed to use credit cards all the time.”

“Yup, and it got me into a lot of debt. I ran into a radio show a few years back that opened my eyes.”

“Let me guess. Dave Ramsey?”

“Yup! Since then I paid off the cards and I have no debts. I pay for everything I want to buy with cash. If I can’t afford it, I save up or I skip the purchase.”

“But you rent.”

“Yeah, that is the one thing that I can’t see. With the chance that I could have to pack up and move to a new team at any time it never seemed like a good investment. Since it is only me, I rent a small place and keep the costs down.”

“I have not seen your place yet. Are we going to go there sometime and baptize your bed?”

There was the ‘She’ I loved.

“I have a single full bed. It is wide enough for me. Everything I own is old or used except for my computers and TV. I just got the TV last Christmas.”

“A small bed, huh. I guess I’ll have to sleep on top of you.”

“Kendi, you always sleep on top of me.”

“Isn’t life wonderful?”

“It is.”

We kissed.

“Jeez, guys! Get a room.”

“Brody? Don’t be a dick!”

Is flipping off a friend while he kisses his 23-yr. old fiancé being a dick?

“Mick, there is another thing that we might want to consider.”

Kendi brought my attention back to her.

“What is that?”

“My lawyer is suggesting a...”

“A prenup.”

“Yeah, how did you know?”

“It is what I’d have suggested if I was a lawyer looking out for my client’s best interests.”

“It seems to me like it would mean starting off our lives together by not trusting each other.”

At that moment, Brody began reciting the karaoke rules ending with his ultimate rule, Don’t Be A Dick.

“Kendi, I have no problem signing a pre-nup. I’d advise you to put in there that we revisit it every 5 years so the courts can’t over rule it for being old or out of date if it ever has to be used.”

“But Lover, I’m not going to cheat on you.”

“You never know, I might find some sexy 70-year-old in a few years and want to play with her.”

“Mick! That is not even funny.”

For the first time in the weeks I had known her, Kendi’s nipples disappeared.

“Sorry. Look. Truth?”

“Truth.”

“You’re 23 almost 24. In a few years you might find a younger version of me and need to go with him. A prenup will set out a way to do that. If one of us cheats or if one of us just grows apart from the other we need a plan. Our ages are a pretty big gap.”

The woman who saved my life and started my heart pumping again sat there and looked very sad. I saw the tears begin to well up and I pulled her to my chest.

“Kendi, in a few years you might meet my son and think that he is all that and a can of beer.”

“I’ve seen your son. He is nice, but 36 months in Afghanistan have hurt him, badly.”

“Is he hurting worse than I was?”

“Yes.”

“Then maybe he needs you more.”

“But I don’t need him. Mick O’Dell, I swear, if you say anything like that again I’m going to kick you right in the nuts.”