STATS.
name: rhys leslie o’connor gender & pronouns: cis man / he + him orientation: biromantic bisexual age: thirty-five date of birth: 2 may, 1987 zodiac: ☼ taurus ☽ cancer ↑ capricorn occupation: senior ranch hand at larimer county rodeo positive traits: hardworking, loyal, compassionate, responsible negative traits: standoffish, emotionally unavailable, stubborn, anxious
BIO
Life might not have dealt Rhys O’Connor the most advantageous of hands, but the practical and resourceful ranch hand has spent the last thirty-five years seizing every opportunity and making the most of the cards he’s been dealt. Born an ill-timed accident and a bastard to Patrick O’Connor, a man with a colorful history of international crime, Rhys was raised in an inviting but dilapidated house on the southside by his mother, Darlene Murphy. Darlene, or Dolly, as she was known to most, was a dancer at one of the seedier clubs in downtown Lockwood Springs when she was younger; she’d met Patrick after he requested a private dance from her in one of the back rooms, and between the bottle service and bills stuffed in unmentionable places, Dolly quickly gave into the whims of lust for a man with deep pockets, a thick accent, and a dangerous demeanor.
Nine months after a night she could barely remember, Dolly was in the maternity ward of Rocky Mountain Medical Center, and Rhys Leslie O’Connor was born. ( She’d given him the surname of his sperm donor — one detail she’d made sure to commit to memory — in a long and inevitably unsuccessful attempt to secure child support from the man she was certain could afford it. Unsurprisingly, Dolly never saw another dime from Patrick O’Connor. )
Clear as it was from a young age that they were not very well off, Rhys never doubted that his mother did everything she could to provide for the two of them. To this day, he still acknowledges that he’ll never understand the sacrifices she had to make as a single parent trying to raise an unplanned child on a single, inconsistent income. But Dolly was nothing if not savvy; she took advantage of every state benefit and assistance program she could find, stocked their fridge on food stamps and food banks, and made sure that neither she nor her son ever went without. Once she could, Dolly returned to the club, relying on the kindness of neighbors and friends to keep an ear out for Rhys when she worked overnights.
It wasn’t always easy, and it sure as hell wasn’t always stable, but they always managed to get by. Once he was old enough to know how to operate a phone in case of an emergency, Rhys was spending most nights by himself, locking up the doors and tucking himself into bed, and she’d always be there in the morning when he woke up, ready to make him breakfast and give him a hug and send him off to school. They had a routine, and though he never felt unloved in spite of hours spent alone, it taught him how to be independent in his own right, self-sufficient. Rhys has always known how to look out for himself. And for Dolly, too.
Rhys watched his mother bring home countless men over the years of various backgrounds and occupations, some only for a night or two and others for periods of months at a time. No matter how long they stuck around, Rhys always held his mother’s boyfriends at arm’s length, even when Dolly herself was convinced she’d found the one. He was distrustful, wary of them, if for no other reason than worry for her. To her credit, she did her damnedest to hide it from him, but there was nothing Rhys hated more than seeing his mother cry. For several years, nothing serious came out of any of her romantic pursuits, but when Rhys was eight years old, she met a man named Billy Ray who swept her off her feet and, a little less than a year later, he had a younger half-sibling.
Rhys paid very little mind to the man who gave them Bluebell, even as he seemed to stick around for his daughter while Dolly went to cosmetology school and found a new career in a southside salon; cynical — and rightfully so, he thinks — Rhys didn’t trust it would last, so he focused all of his attention instead on how he could help his mother and his new baby sibling. By the time he was a teen, he was working at the Silvas’ ranch whenever he could, waking up before dawn and spending hours out on their fields before and after school; the Silvas became like a second family to Rhys, and Sofia like a sister. After he saved up enough money to buy a car, every cent of his paychecks that wasn’t spent filling up the tank so he could get back and forth to work and school went straight into his mother’s hand. A few months after he turned sixteen, Rhys dropped out of school to work on the ranch full-time, and he continued to work as a ranch hand for the Silvas for five more years until he got a job at the Larimer County Rodeo when he was twenty-one.
When he was twenty-six, Rhys had enough money saved up to finally move out of his mother’s house and put a down-payment on a place of his own less than a block away. After giving several years to the rodeo, he could’ve afforded to leave the southside, but he still sent his mother money every week to help with the rent and utilities for his childhood home. He’s spent the several years since fixing up and renovating the place, slowly making progress in turning it into a place that might be suitable for a family one day. In the meantime, he’s got plenty of family in the form of his mother and his half-sibling, Finn and Angel — a half-brother and sister from his father’s side — and cousins Elliot and Hunter, found brothers in the Andersons and, of course, the Silvas, too. For having spent so much time on his own at the start, he’s rich in company now, and grateful for every moment of it.
At thirty-five, Rhys is a senior hand at the rodeo, and while he loves what he does, he knows he can’t keep up with a life of manual labor forever. He’s currently in night classes to get his GED, and after that, he’s looking at community college courses and maybe, just maybe, a degree in business so that one day he can make a profit out of his beekeeping hobby.
WANTED CONNECTIONS + MORE TBA.
