Only then did I put my own bedding on, all the while telling myself that it was just temporary, but that I wanted to feel the comforts of home while I stayed.
The rest of the room followed. I put on some elbow-length gloves and scrubbed every square inch of the bathroom until the bleach fumes gave me a headache.
After that, I wiped down the outside and inside of the desk, nightstands, dresser, and desk chair. And, finally, I scrubbed the walls with a flat mop.
It left the floor.
It had fresh vacuum lines, but I’d been tempted as hell to rent a carpet shampooer to ease my mind. Ultimately, though, I decided that I had a ‘shoes all the time’ policy instead. So I had slippers that went on my feet the second my heels came off. No bare feet touching the rug.
And it was… doable.
Not ideal, but doable.
Was the part of me that was accustomed to a sprawling walk-in shower and deep soaking tub sobbing a bit over the tub/shower combo in a heinous mustard-yellow color with atrocious water pressure? Yep. Did I hate that I went from penthouse views of Shady Valley and the Death Valley mountains for… the gas station and prison? Also yes. Was it inconvenient to no longer have a kitchen or laundry in my unit? Oh, absolutely. Especially since I’d really been picking up cooking as a hobby. But I had to do what I had to do. And what I had to do was sneak in a microwave and mini fridge and buy mostly pre-made foods from the grocery store to eat.
Everything was an adjustment.
But it had been almost the full month already and my worst fears had not come true. I had no bed bug bites. There were no creepy men at my door. And, perhaps most important, no one in town had found me out. That was mostly because once I snuck in, I didn’t leave my room again until I absolutely had to.
Things were especially risky once I learned that the new prospect for the MC—Hail, I think his name was—was staying at the motel too.
Luckily, he seemed to spend most of his waking (and sleeping) hours at the club. Likely under a pile of women.
No one else in town, outside of the criminal empires, seemed to know who I was. I hadn’t ever really been the most social of people. And that was working in my favor while staying at the motel. If I did occasionally pass by someone in the hallway, it was never someone who would look at me twice. Hell, most of the people staying here were doing so for nefarious reasons. They no more wanted to out me than they wanted me to out them.
It was all… tolerable.
Temporarily.
The problem was, things weren’t turning out to be as short-term as I’d planned when I’d first packed my car full of mostly just my living essentials: clothes, bedding, electronics, and cleaning supplies.
I expected that once I set my mind to sorting this whole mess out, I would have it all figured out in two weeks, tops. That had simply been my experience in life. If I knuckled down and worked hard, I could get results. Not easily. But I was relentless, which had always led to results in the past.
This whole situation was simply a little out of my wheelhouse. There’d been a learning curve to a lot of it. And I still felt out of my depth all these weeks later.
I was going to need to resign myself to at least another month, possibly longer, depending on if I needed to do more travel.
But, I reminded myself, each week I stayed here, I was saving myself money. Some very much needed money.
So long as my secret didn’t get out, I had no concerns.
Complaints? Yes. But not concerns.
“Ugh, again?” I grumbled as I made my mad dash back to my room from the creepy-ass laundry facilities. Which was basically two washers and dryers next to each other in a dimly-lit oversized closet.
I was lucky Jack let me use them at all. They were meant only for the bedding. And it saved me a lot of time and money since I would need to go out of Shady Valley to hit a laundromat if he didn’t let me.
On the wall directly behind my bed, a man was showing a woman a very mediocre time—judging by the jackrabbit hammering of the bed against the wall and her loud, almost comically fake, moans.
I didn’t know if it was a couple having an affair (for her sake, I hoped not) or the favorite room for a local sex worker, but I was getting sick of all the body-smacking, wall-banging, moaning, groaning, dirty-talking racket.
I grabbed my speaker and cranked up my music as I set to folding and hanging my clothes, reminding myself to be thankful that I had a roof over my head, clean clothes, food in the fridge, and air conditioning that certainly did as well as it could considering it was older than I was.
It could be worse.
I could be living in my car.
Or in a tent in this damn heat.
