spencer, house of kinkaid

「 mr. spencer kinkaid 」

Full Name: Spencer James Kinkaid

Nickname/s: Spence, Skid, Spencekaid, Evie’s Dad

Gender: CIS Male

Date of Birth: May 11, 1988

Age: Thirty two

Ethnicity: White

Place of Birth: Tupelo, Mississippi

Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual

@tupeloextras​ || [tw: alcohol use, alcoholism, poor parenting choices]

No matter the validity of Spencer’s excuses regarding the lack of haste taken to come see her she still maintained a mildly playful pout, ceasing only to press another spoonful of sugary goodness into her mouth before resuming her mope. Maverick was the master of a proper sulk. Her life was essentially a singular stretch of ceaseless sullen melancholy with brief intermediate breaks where work or loved ones occupied her. Spencer always made it more bearable and she’d missed him something fierce while he’d been gone. Nashville was only a few hours away but at times it felt as if he was on the other side of the planet. Her only lifeline the few hours captured during the week when they caught each other up via phone. Most of the time it was enough to soothe her weary spirit but not always. So naturally she was entitled to a tiny tantrum. “Sounds like a crock pot o’ bullshit to me” she jested, frowning when her spoon hit the bottom of the carton. Of course she wasn’t seriously angry with him, there wasn’t anything he could do that wasn’t easily forgivable. In fact she might have given him more passes than necessary but that was because he truly could do little wrong in her eyes. In was in her nature to believe anyone was redeemable, especially the ones she cared about most. “It’s okay, I understand. I guess we aren’t as close as I thought” she further teased, hiding a smirk. “I mean it ain’t like you’ve seen me naked or anythin’” 

Maverick swung her legs up, draping them across his lap as she listened to his conundrum, unsure of the best way to speak her peace. “I sympathize with ya Spence, truly I do. But you hav’ to acknowledge that ain’t the only reason” her tone was gentle but she’d never be anything but truthful with the man. She was on his side but that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to play devil’s advocate to help him understand their point of view. “I’m not saying your past should define ya, people are capable of growth. What’s fair for Evie is you showin’ some consistency”. She nudged him slightly with the heel of her foot hoping he wouldn’t be irritated by her honesty. “You made some mistakes and you’ve gotta accept that. Take some time to wallow in. Enjoy it, embrace it, discard …and pro-ceed. I’m sure Ivy will loosen up with time” 

Spencer knew that, out of all the stupid shit he’d done in his entire life, this wasn’t going to be the thing that broke his friendship with Maverick. He had done far worse, and honestly, she’d stood by him from the moment she heard about him going into rehab, which only proved his point even more. “I’ll make it up to you, I promise,” he replied before smirking at the mention of having seen her naked. “Well, now, you know it’s been a while since then,” he pointed out, looking the blonde over quickly in hopes of not being caught. “Can’t say I really remember it all that well.” A bold-faced lie, if he’d ever heard one. He remembered it with full detail, and it’d been the straw that broke the camel’s back for him. Sleeping with Maverick and having her walk away had sent Spencer over the edge, piling it right on top of his broken heart over Ivy had simply been too much. From there, it’d only made sense that he got drunk more than he stayed sober, and that was the beginning of his unraveling. Not that he blamed Maverick, he blamed himself. Regardless, he couldn’t help but smile as he remembered every clear detail about their first time together now that she’d brought it up.

“i ain’t talkin’ to you any type of way. i’m just tryin’ to help you realize you can’t just jump back into your daughter’s life.” but it was onvious that his brother wasn’t going to listen to him, which wasn’t all that surprising because spencer pretty much never listened to him. “she’s already wonderin’ that. easin’ into it ain’t gonna hurt nothin’ but you know what? do what you want, spencer. it’s not like i know what i’m talkin’ about anyways.”

“No, Evie knows. She knows that I’ve been busy with work, I tell her every time I see her.” He was entirely too defensive for it to be true, but Spencer couldn’t fathom the idea of his daugther thinking anything less than the world about him. “You’re eright, you don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. I’m goin’ to let Ivy know and then we’ll see what happens. I’m not goin’ down without a fight on this, though. Evie’s my daughter, I’m not goin’ to stand by and let everyone keep me from seein’ her just ‘cause you’re all so caught up in the past.” 

gracie set the treats down on the counter top, spreading everything out. “so we’ve got the oatmeal chocolate chip, the croissants, the chocolate croissants, mom’s special zucchini loaf she knows you love, and…” looking at the chocolate banana bread, she hesitated before snapping out of it and smiling, “some chocolate banana bread, on the house.” she had made that for travis, but that was a story she didn’t want to get into. especially in front of his momma.  hearing someone come in, her eyes landed on spencer, travis’ brother.

“spencer, hey. it’s been awhile.” at his compliment, she chucked and smiled.  “vacation will do that, trick people into think you look good. it’s really just a tan.” she laughed, looking at his mother. “momma wants to come over, and I’ve got you in to books for friday. do you want me to bring her over and i can do both of you here?” they spoke for a moment, making plans bright and early friday morning and lasting basically the entire day.  when she left, gracie looked back to spencer.  “how have you been, with the recovery and all?” she didn’t want to overstep too much, but after all, gracie was helping with said recovery.

Spencer was grateful that she waited until his mother left the room to talk shop about his so-called recovery. It was easy enough to pretend it didn’t exist when his mom and dad were around, and as long as nobody brought it up, he didn’t have to pretend to miss their disappointed glances in his direction. “Oh, you know,” he said with a nonchalant shrug, fingers tapping lightly against the glass in his hand. “Bored out of my mind and tryin’ not to think about the fact that I can’t drink. I didn’t even go to the Monster Mash party, I spent the evening with my daughter doin’ fun dad stuff. How are you doin’, Gracie?” 

It was all her fault. 

Everything that transpired prior to her hopping in Biscuit and taking the three hour drive to Nashville was entirely and irrevocably her fault. Maverick knew that. But that didn’t make the sting of betrayal any less severe. It coiled around her tightly, making it difficult to breathe without searing pain rattling her bones. It robbed the simplicity of every mundane task and made it impossible to overcome. Even stepping off her front porch felt tremendously strenuous. And so she ran. She ran to the only person capable of providing a temporary salve for the pieces of her broken heart. The first person she rang when the finality of her relationship with Noah – the only man she’d ever loved – became apparent. Just like Maverick would have done if he was down the street and not several states away. Spencer had always been her safety blanket. Going to him when life proved too difficult to bear was instinctive and this wasn’t just some minor dlimena. 

The distance felt like it stretched for an eternity until she pulled into the driveway and just like the she felt some semblance of grounding. Like she wasn’t just a glass figurine vulnerable to the next tumultuous gust and threatening to shatter into the finest dust. If everything in her life could be whisked away like some forgotten dream she could at least be comforted with the absolute knowledge that the two of them were realer than the blood in her veins and the beating of her heart. Maverick was allowed a single night to wallow in self deprecation, and lord dit he grief surged with every expelled breath, always reaching higher peaks. Only moderately soothed by her long intakes of his scent as she laid in his embrace. When the dawn broke she barely had time to dwell on her break up because Spencer seemed determined to fill every spare second and Maverick was immensely grateful for his efforts. 

Her head was spinning and at this point it was undetermined if it was all the tequila she’d been drinking or her vigorous movements on the dance floor. Either way, she was coasting on a different plane. A pocket of space where the only occupants were two old friends and a pair of tapping cowboy boots. Maverick didn’t seem to consciously process they weren’t still cutting a rug until she was deposited gentle atop his lap. In one fluid movement she draped her arms around his neck, teeth gleaming in a grin. “You seem to have forgotten who won Little Miss Tupelo with her two step in the ninth grade” was her rebuttal, lifting her chin as if the plastic crown awarded to her after the competition still rested on her head. “I ain’t wear that god awful dress for nothin’”. Spencer should have remembered how much she complained during the entire event, especially the state of her sore cheeks cheesing so hard. Her mother always fancied her a little debutante. 

“I feel like I do anymore dancin’ you’re gonna have to carry me outta here, my heels are on fire”. Though what they’d been doing felt a little more intimate than a simple two step. Maverick hadn’t though much of it, they’d always been the intimate sort. A lingering touch here and there didn’t mean much of anything. It was simply comfortability between two people who’d known each other all their lives. “I believe you’ve done your due diligence for the day” Maverick pressed a chaste kiss to Spencer’s cheek before letting her head loll onto his shoulder. “Thank you” 

The fact that Mav was hurting ripped through Spencer the moment he’d heard her voice on his phone. It was exactly why he’d told her to come up, spending the three hours she was driving anxiously cleaning his apartment with every bit of nervous energy he could muster. He wasn’t sure if he was making the right choice in any of this, and he was a pretty miserable friend in the scheme of things, but he knew having her here would give him the best possible chance. One night spent in the sadness and then the rest of their time together was going to be packed with stuff to do. He had taken a couple days off work and was going to get her through the weekend before he had to worry about the eight hours of the day he’d spend away from her. Worst case, she could use them to lay around feeling sorry for herself and then he’d come home and fix it all right back up. For now, he was all hers, all the time. 

Spencer fell back against the chair he’d found, one of the only open ones in the entire place, as his head fall back in laughter. His arms wrapped around Maverick’s waist as he pulled her down into his lap. They’d always been the best of friends, so physically, this wasn’t all that strange. Since he’d broken up with Ivy, he’d been able to get away with things like this without feeling guilty, and he took every chance he could to do just that.

Reaching up to brush Maverick’s hair back over her shoulder, Spencer paused as he tried to catch his breath. “I knew you could dance, Ricky, I just didn’t know you could dance like that.” He rested his elbow on the table beside him, chest rising and falling a little slower than a moment before. “Okay, super star, you’re in charge tonight. More alcohol? More dancing? Sleep? Make the call, I’m along for the ride.”

She never expected to see anyone in this town that she had crossed paths with in Nashville. She came here because her cousin lived there, but that was the only familiar face she expected here. When she glanced up from the pumpkin, she recognized Spencer right away. “Spencer!” She grinned, happy to see him. She cradled the one pumpkin her arms, using her knee to push it up further into her arms. “It’s a long story, really. I moved here about six months ago. I transferred my residency. My uh my parents died in a car accident and I didn’t want to stay in Nashville anymore. So, I came here.”

“The one and only,” he replied with a tilt of his head and a shrug. Spencer was glad to see Lily, oddly enough, grateful for a little bit of the place he’d learned to call home for the past decade somehow finding its way into the place he’d grown up. It was strange how life did that, but he was grateful as hell for it. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that about your parents, but I’m selfishly real glad you chose Tupelo. How’s it been treatin’ you so far?” 

Sydney didn’t typically mind grocery shopping but there were times when the woman straight out dreaded it. It never seemed to fail when she would run into someone who used to babysit her when her siblings were busy and get roped into a twenty-minute too long conversation about how much she has grown up. She got it. She was thirty-one years old, she grew up. What more did they want from her than for her to awkwardly laugh along at all the stories she didn’t remember. When Sydney heard her full name roll off her lips as she perused the meat section, she fought back a sigh. This was it. However, her gaze lifted to find that it wasn’t a little old woman beckoning her like she automatically assumed. “Holy shit,” she breathed, a short laugh in the form of a puff of air crossed her lips all the same. 

The last time she saw Spencer Kincaid? When he was getting dressed and leaving her hotel room after a few go arounds between the sheets. That had been almost three years ago if she could remember correctly. And then, that was it. She hadn’t heard from him or seen him since. It seemed only something karma would do to put them in the middle of a grocery store in Tupelo and make them run into one another. “Of all places,” she gave a small laugh, nodding her head. As if running into him in Texas hadn’t been strange at all. “I thought Ivy mentioned you were back around.” 

He wasn’t really sure he’d expected Ivy’s name to roll off her tongue quite so quickly. That was the elephant in the room, really, the fact that his ex-girlfriend and the mother of his child worked with Sydney at Ivy’s family’s funeral home. He’d managed to get drunk enough to forget about Ivy when they’d slept with each other back in Nashville, but there wasn’t enough alcohol in the world to push her away right now. “Yeah,” he said with a slow nod, reaching up to ran his hand through his hair. “I’m back in town for good.” They’d never really talked about what had happened between them, and while he’d really chalked it up to too much alcohol and a little familiarity in a big, unfamiliar city, Spencer had to admit that didn’t make it any easier to stand here before her right now. The worst part of all of it was how badly he found himself wondering if they could avoid talking about it by falling back into bed together, with or without the alcohol. Preferably with, of course. “You look good, Syd,” he offered up, wondering just how one should address an ex-fling in this situation. 

travis was honestly surprised his brother thought he could jump right back into being a dad when he’d been away for so long. “spencer, you really gotta think about this. you hurt her. you hurt your daughter. she has no idea why you stopped makin’ an effort to see her. you gotta ease into it or you might make her pull away.” but hell, what did travis know? he didn’t have a kid of his own and he wouldn’t be surprised if his brother threw that in his face. “you need to take baby steps.”

“You’re talkin’ to me like I’m some kind of moron, Trav, and it’s not really givin’ me a ‘brotherly love’ kind of vibe,” Travis said, instantly regretting the words when they left his mouth. “I don’t want to take baby steps. If I’m stuck livin’ here then I want to make the most of it, y’know? I want to be around for Evie, really do right by her so I can make up for all the weekends I was busy with work and couldn’t bring her out to Nashville. I can’t do that if I’m just sittin’ around twiddlin’ my thumbs waitin’ to see her. If I’m this close, she’ll wonder why I’m not tryin’ to spend more time with her.”

Cash had no intentions on stepping within ten feet of a bar, it may sound like he’s over reacting but he wanted to be far from temptation. The man wasn’t an alcoholic but drinking lead to him using and he couldn’t risk that, not even a sip. He couldn’t afford to be a screw up, he was scared of the outcome if he ever did. That’s why he wouldn’t be seen at the Monster Mash that night, he encouraged Lottie to go have fun. Cash knew the blonde was a little weary of living him alone with Forest which he didn’t blame her for no matter how bad it had hurt him. 

There was a whole night he had planned out for them, the first stop was at one of the local parks to spend their afternoon before getting dinner. He thought they would be the only ones there but when seeing a little girl join Forest on the playground meant he wasn’t the only one skipping out on the festivities. 

When seeing who he assumed was the father, he gave a smile and a small nod himself. Cash chuckled softly, shaking his head. “No, it’s really not my type of scene as of late. Plus, I just got to town earlier this week and that seems a little too fresh for social interaction with the whole town.”

“No?” The man didn’t have to say much for Spencer to have a general idea of why it wasn’t his scene. Things like that were said a lot by addicts who were referring to the very thing they were avoiding. It had only taken him a couple of times of trying to explain why he couldn’t go out for drinks before ‘it’s not really my scene anymore’ slipped out, the easiest of answers he could find. “Me either, I guess. At least not anymore.” There was a twinge of sadness in his voice, realization hitting him once again at just how pathetic he felt having to live this life of sobriety without even wanting it for himself. Some days, he really just wanted a fucking drink because of it all.

“Well, welcome to Tupelo, Mississippi,” he said with a laugh, spreading his arms out on either side in some grand gesture meant to seem welcoming. “It ain’t the greatest place on earth, but it sure doesn’t suck all the time.” He knew his outlook on Tupelo was different from most, having spent the last 15 years calling other places home. Deep town, though, Spence had always liked Tupelo. “What brings you to our little corner of the world?” 

☞ t u p e l o   t a s k   # 2 : p l a y l i s t

[ [ a e s t h e t i c s ] ]

a flashy red sports car, the smell of cigars at a poker game in the back room of somebody’s apartment, a silver flask tucked into the glove box, the sound of a cash register printing the receipt for a gift she didn’t need, never being able to say no to ‘daddy, please?’, forgetting where you came from, christmas dinners over a table you don’t sit at nearly enough, floor to ceiling glass windows overlooking the city

[ [ p l a y l i s t ] ]

[ "Habits and Hearts” - Jordan Rager ] It shouldn’t be so easy to turn to pieces this thing inside my chest and so hard to put the whiskey down when that’s what numbs the pain. I guess habits and hearts don’t break the same.

[ "Better” - Maggie Rose ] There's a bottle on the shelf, talkin' to me, sayin', "Come over here, you can have a drink. We can make it through this lonely night together.” But that's a road I don't wanna go back down and I hate myself for what I'm thinkin' now. “Hey, it's just one night, it's not like it's forever.” I just want to feel better.

[ "Drinkin’ Problem” - Midland ] People say I’ve got a drinkin’ problem, that ain’t no reason to stop. People sayin’ that Iv’e hit rock bottom just ‘cause I’m living on the rocks. It’s a broken-hearted-thinkin’ problem, so pull another bottle off the wall. People say I’ve got a drinkin’ problem, but I got no problem drinkin’ at all.

[ “Runaway Train” - Cam ] There's no slowing down now, I'm a runaway train. My pistons are pounding, brakes are screaming your name, and when there's nothing but wreckage and flames and your misery is all that remains, I’ll feel human again.

[ "Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old)” - Garth Brooks ] All my cards are on the table with no ace left in the hole. I'm much too young to feel this damn old.

Joe recognized that he was making an utter fool of himself, but there was actually very little he could do about it at this point. As long as the man didn’t accuse him of being on drugs or something then it would be okay. Granted, Joe was probably making himself look like he was on drugs. “Oh, then don’t worry about it, it was kind of a strange shot in the dark to ask a stranger anyway, I guess…I just kind of got distracted? Sorry, I’m making myself sound like an idiot.” Clearly, the man was older than him, by a potential significant amount, but Joe was a complete mess regardless. 

“I don’t know, I can see it bein’ a pretty good bet,” Spencer said with a shrug of his shoulders. “You just happened to ask the new guy in town, I guess. Distracted by what?” Spencer looked around like maybe he was missing something, but he really couldn’t tell anything was out of sorts. He raised an eyebrow at the stranger before laughing softly. “Are you okay, man?”