#ft. ck.

“Excuse me! Excuse me, miss!”

A wrinkle of a creamy brow, and the mystery girl turns, one hand on her car door as she had been preparing to leave. He makes a bit of a sight, scuffed up button down with a kerchief around his neck, cowboy hat being murdered as he crumples it in his hands, dirty blonde hair with a slight cowlick and a smudge of dirt on his cheek. He's handsome, sure, but not traditionally so, and it's not the smile lines by his eyes that makes her keep pausing. It's the slow draw of a crooked smile, and the words he lets drop his country boy accent as casual as you please. “I'm sorry for stopping you, but…” he shakes his head, and the wattage in that smile slides up just a tick. “I couldn't let the prettiest thing I'd ever laid my eyes on just up ‘n walk away.”

Months of courtship and a pearl and diamond engagement ring later, and twenty year old former secretary from Virginia has become a wife. Not only a wife, but Olivia Kingston, steadily adjusting to a new world wherein walking out the front door of her home normally greeted her with sweaty men and plentiful horses. Fast forward four years, and she's cradling a baby given to her by the man who'd stopped her, a boy who carried his same name. Crystalline blues blink up at her, downy blond hair on his small head, and Olivia coos at the person who already held her whole heart, rocking him in the same chair his grandmother had rocked his father. “I'm going to love you always, sweet boy.” She whispers to him, thinking there could be nothing more beautiful than he, this child she had made and would try to fill his life with joy. “You can always, always count on me.”

Cut to now, Cass and his mother taking a walk on one of the trails in the woods that framed his house on three sides. There was no snow today, but a cold rain had fallen the night before, the thin layers of ice crunching underneath their boots. Olivia, Hudson's leash in her gloved hands, having been talking to her son for ten minutes or so so far, discussing the plans she has for a new menu once the seasons change once more. That's one area of the business Cass tends to stay out of, leaving it to his very competent and qualified head chef and his only a bit less skilled in the kitchen Momma, especially after her strawberry lemonade recipe was a smash hit and helped put the as then fledgling B & B on the map. Today, however, Cass isn't much interested in what successes they've had in the past adding a specific amount of cinnamon to their French toast recipe. What he wants to do is ask his mother is something he's wanted to know since the time his father grilled him mercilessly at the table because he'd started on his chores late after going to football tryouts. What he'd wanted to know since he'd stopped depending on his mom having his back when it was against his father. It was an uncomfortable conversation to have with a loved one, especially so close on the heels of the catastrophic one he’d had with Amy barely three days before, but it was one he’d already been avoiding for years.

Pushing the past the feelings of dread that wrapped their uncomfortable fingers around his throat every time he'd imagined this semi confrontation, Cass clears his throat, hands stuffed deep in the pockets of the vest atop his fleece lined jean jacket. “Momma, I need to talk to you about something.”

The furrow in Olivia's brow that her son inherited makes an appearance at what he says, pulling a wayward strand of strawberry blonde hair behind her ear. Smile lines crinkle as she frowns, touching his arm. “Cassidy, honey, what's wrong.”

“What's wrong,” her son begins, subtly moving his arm, forcing his steps to keep going and not lose his nerve. “Is Dad. And how I need to distance myself from him. And why...why you weren't there for me. Then. Now.” Cass's hands curl into themselves, hidden by the puffy fabric of the vest he wore, and he isn't sure his lips are cold because of the temperature or because of the words he's trying to push out of them.

“What do you mean? There's nothing you can't ask me for Cassidy; you're my son. I would do anything -”

“Yeah. Anything. Anything but protect me from Dad.”

Olivia falls silent for a moment, Hudson's overly loud sniffing as he inspects a place to pee stopping their progress, causing them to halt. “I know your Dad is hard on you. But he really does love you and want the best.”

“Does he, Momma?” The thirty two year old man's voice is rusty and short, hard on his throat. “Does he though? Did he want what was best for me when he made sure Greer and Bailey knew how much they were loved and cared for and couldn’t do anything wrong? And if I looked in the wrong direction when he was talking to me, I’d get a lecture that lasted for hours and made me feel like a piece of shit. No fourteen year old should feel like a piece of shit, Momma.”

On some level, Olivia had known that the relationship between her husband and her son wasn’t exactly the best. For the few years, maybe there had been the kind of relationship she always dreamed of for them, but when the girls rolled around she noticed a difference. Showering attention on the other two, C.K. treating Cass more seriously and differently. When he got older, and C.K.’s attention shifted to the next generation leading the ranch, Olivia had mostly left it up to the two of them. Bonding time, she thought. Sure, she noticed over the years that Cass hated being alone with C.K. Spent as much time out of the house as he could if he wasn’t working, thin lips and blue eyes that forcibly cleared of pain when they locked on her own. Their moments had been private, private and devastating in a way she wasn’t aware of. Devastating in a way that she was only hearing now.

“In the beginning, it wasn’t too bad. He’d praise me for getting a full day of work done, for making the football team. And then it seemed to be few and between, the kind words. The spaces between them were killed with nasty ones that made me feel like the lowest of the low. I couldn’t do anything to please him, Momma. Couldn’t then, absolutely can’t now. Not when I committed the gross sin of leaving. I wasn’t going to come back, Momma. Not at all. Not when he was what I was coming back to.”

“Cassidy, sweetie - “

“Actually, can you wait until I’m done?” Cass interrupts, shooting blue eyes sidelong to her. He might not be walking to a noose but every moment spent talking about this seemed to tighten around his neck, a suffocating hand of years of hurt and frustration bubbling up and anxious to escape. This isn’t a safe space the same way that Ashley’s office is, and Cass isn’t sure how to operate in it. To reveal the dark truths hiding in his Momma’s house, but then again - hadn’t she been the one to turn a blind eye? Hadn’t she been only a passive ally? It was only after the accident that she started helping him keep distance between he and his father, that dark spectre that had tainted so many things in Cass’s life. Including, it seemed, his relationship with his mother.

“On my sixteenth birthday, he gave me shit for not showing up to work that night. My friends threw me a surprise party at one of their houses, and I thought he’d be fine. He liked that I was popular, after all. A good face for the family.” The bearded man laughs, but it’s not the full and golden one he usually lets out. This one is scratchy and raw from past pains and incredulity of the sheer lack of humanity C.K. had shown him for much of his life. Something Cass would never, ever do to a loved one, much less a kid. Another pang, a reminder of the fight he was struggling through with Amy, and the thirty two year old fights the urge to grab at his heart. It wasn’t going to ease the hurt. “When I got home, you made me a cake. He didn’t sing me Happy Birthday with you and Greer and Bailey - and when everyone else went to sleep, he came to my room and told me how ashamed he was to have a son who rang in such an ‘important’ age with irresponsibility.”

They’ve given up on walking at this point. Hudson, let off the leash, eats snow and bounds around about them until the stress radiating from his owner reaches the point that even the dog feels it and tries to make his owner feel better. Stories spill from Cass, ugly ones with poisonous words and memories that still whip his spirit. The lectures of the way he wasn’t, couldn’t ever measure up. References to him in front of others designed to tear him down piece by piece. At every turn, Cass was a disappointment. A blight to his father and his name. How no matter how long he worked at the ranch, he was still the traitor who’d left the business behind. How C.K. refused to acknowledge any good that Cass did, anything that went wrong automatically was his fault. How scared he would be when bringing home a C, how many nights he stayed up wondering if his father was right. The incidents that he only recognized now, mostly on the other side of it, as anxiety attacks when C.K. was on the warpath. As he continued to talk, Olivia’s hands slowly seem to rise, covering her mouth. Horror is reflected back at him from his mother, horror and a deep seated sense of inadequacy; for all that C.K. had been a bad parent with all the bells and whistles, even if Olivia couldn’t quite believe all of it, she had failed in her protection of him. “I’m sorry.” Is all she manages to get out, whispered at intervals, soft with regret.

“Momma, he’s literally told me the only things he has to be proud of are Greer, Bailey, and the ranch. When Amy came over for dinner, he couldn’t stop talking about how I’d tricked her into being there. How I had to be holding something over her, or she wouldn’t be there. Because who would want to date his failure of a son, huh Momma?” Winter still has its grips on the landscape, inhabiting the seat sized rocks they’d managed to find on the trails, seeping through Cass’s jeans and yet not the cause of the shake in the broad mans voice. Cass was 220 lbs, almost 80% completely muscle, and six three, carrying an imposing figure that few wanted to mess with. Talking about his father, he seemed frailer, weaker, genuine belief in what had been drilled into his head for over thirty years almost making him try and fit into the descriptive terms C.K. assigned to him so many times. “All I’ve ever heard from Dad for years has been that I’m weak. Stupid. Useless. Incapable of doing easy things the right way, and always a step away from disaster. He’s always right. I’m always wrong. I’m not an iota of the man he is, to hear him say it. And do you know what’s the worst thing? It’s that I know I’m not. At the very least. I don’t use my words to hurt people. To make them feel like horse shit on someones shoe is probably of more use than you. But he’s poisoned me, Momma, and I hate it. He’s targeted me so many times that sometimes, my thoughts turn to aiming at others the same way. I just had a fight with Amy - and no, I don’t want to talk about it - and I said horrible things to her. I knew what to say, how it was going to hurt, where she was vulnerable. I don’t want to know where my girlfriend is vulnerable, Momma. If I do, I should only learn so I can figure out how to protect it. Not use it against her.”

A touch, Olivia’s hand on his knee, and Cass looks up at her with eyes that he’d deny to his grave were stinging, shaking his head, not done. “When he discovered that the other ranch hands actually liked me, that working wasn’t as bad with them, he made it a point to give me solitary assignments if I’d pissed him off. He reminds me every moment that the ranch is not mine, that it was his name first that goes on it and all its successes are his, all its failures are mine. If I lost a football game, he’d give me the silent treatment for a week. He’d only talk when at the dinner table, because you and the girls were there. He made jokes about erectile dysfunction when my friends were over. I learned how to stop bringing people that weren’t my forewarned girlfriends over the house so my dad would stop trying to sabotage my friendships. Do you know how long it took me to realize that other kids dads weren’t like that? Too long. I doubted everything. Dad made me believe I was just being overly sensitive, that he was just trying to push me to accomplish more. To reach my full potential. I should’ve known I’d never be enough. I won’t ever be, not for him.” A harsh truth, but one that Cass had come far enough to be able to say. Even if in his core, the root of him, longs for one sign of his father being proud of everything. Despite of everything. Because of everything. Hope, that hardest bastard to kill. His eyes give up the ghost, let tears slip down ruddy cheeks and disappear into a full beard, sparkes of shine in the gold. Hudson’s head is heavy in his lap, big brown eyes concerned whilst Cass’s shaking hands stroke his dogs forehead, gaze dropped as it had been for most of his unloading. Olivia, having long since started crying, just keeps rubbing his leg and nodding her head.

“For years I thought I was selfish for wanting his love, when he only seemed to have enough for my sisters and not for me. This ranch - this damned ranch, this thing that I love, this place that I call home and work and that I pour my existence into to make it work, the B & B that was my brainchild and my greatest pride - it’s a miracle that I’ve gotten to this place. Crazy that I feel about it the way I do. Because for years, I know it’s meant more to my father than my own life. I’m so angry about it, Momma. I’m angry, and I’m hurt, and I hate being around him, and you have to let me cut him off. You have to.” Olivia’s arm curls around his shoulders, shushes falling from lips that kissed him on the forehead more times that he could count, and Cass holds on, even as he chokes out the last words,  a show of stark vulnerability he could only show with his mom. “You didn’t protect me then. But dammit, Momma. You’ve gotta do it now. You’ve got to…”

In that bar on that Saturday night, one would be hard pressed to find a man in there with an opinion of himself lower than the oldest Kingston’s was that night. No one there knew him, knew that the chaotic mess of his insides was a shaky tower that was precariously close to finally tumbling over. What they knew, what anyone who saw him knew, was that this was not a man to be messed with. To do so would be to court bodily harm. Cass sat in the farther corner he could, the only resident of a dimly lit booth with a couple of empty beer bottles on the table next to him. Black shirt, dark jeans, and a navy baseball cap pushed down to cover angry and lost blue eyes. The brim could not cover the slightly purpling areas under his eyes, the skin that under his natural glorious tan that was wan and closer to pale than it had ever been. You can only abuse your body for so long until the affects start to make themselves known, and as in denial about it as Cass was, everyone who saw him knew it. The story his shaggy hair and shaggier beard told was more telling than the one it didn’t. Running on perhaps five hours of sleep from the past three days, eyes strained from hours staring at a computer screen, knuckles from busted from sleepless nights beating the shit of his punching bag so often he had to purchase a new one. The day before he’d received an email from a prospective investor in the B & B who’d pulled out in deference to another offer they’d received - an offer from a restaurant in town whose owner CK was family friends with. How had later that night Cass received a phone call from a father whose critical words judged him for not making the ranch a good enough prospect? How could his fathers sabotage him, and then judge him for his failures to overcome that sabotage in the same day? Cass didn’t know. Couldn’t know. But it filled his heart with feelings of inadequacy and defeat that he’d recently given into.

A brush of a touch against his shoulder and Cass’s sharp blues shoot up, catching the sight of a woman with waist length black hair and a slim curvy figure, the dips in her body an invitation any man would eagerly accept. This one, however, felt a squeeze in his heart at her inviting smile, a betrayal of emotions when his dark side longed to answer her welcoming grin. That betrayal is what spun into fervor the fury he had at himself and his traitorous emotions, a heart that didn’t give a shit about the emotional turmoil he’d just gone through and was still pretty invested in Amy. Amelia Taylor, that brunette tornado who’d stepped with him into the eye of the storm for a while, a time short, too short, severed by the anniversary of a man she’d loved, lost, and still felt a twisted responsibility to. While on one hand, the bleeding half of his soul that believe in an eye for an eye gloried at the verbal assault he’d given her the last time they’d been together, poisoned darts that spread into each others souls, the other hand held the half of his soul mortified at his actions, at what he’d said. For someone trying to distance himself from his father, you sure are acting a lot like him, came the accusatory whisper from that being within, voicing a fear Cass would rather ignore. You still care about her. Still want her. What are you going to do about that?

What was he going to do about that? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. She’d made it clear her heart held no more room, and Cass deserved more than to be a second class citizen to a ghost. Or did he? Unlike the spectre that haunted Amy, Cass’s was alive and well, a malevolent presence in the shape of his father that spit words that he could call to mind at any moment. Worthless. Pathetic. A shitty excuse for a son. Suddenly, the desperate need to quiet that voice, hell any of the voices inside his head, fills him, and alcohol isn’t enough. He pushes out of the booth, stands. Makes a beeline for the woman who’d propositioned him with words he hadn’t fully heard. “You want me?” Cass demands, low and hard when he finds her just around the corners from the bathroom, surprise and then pleasure flooding her pupils. Her teeth find her lower lip as she nods, hands coming up to rest on his shoulders, and the blonde man has to shove the memories of the last women he’d held who had a tendency to bite her lips to the back of his mind. “Good.” The utterance is followed by a surge forward of his head, a rough meeting of his lips to hers in a move he’d never done before. Cass doesn’t do this. He doesn’t kiss strangers in bars, he doesn’t use them as a desperate attempt to drown his inner demons, and he certainly doesn’t do it before asking their name. Whether or not he doesn’t do it, the fact cannot be denied that he’s doing it right now - feeding hurt and anger into a bracing kiss that the woman he doesn’t now eagerly returns. While the mechanics are sound and the motions are familiar, Cass feels dirty. Downright filthy about the fact that no matter how strong the denial was that he wrapped his heart around, she wasn’t Amy. And he didn’t want this. The tall blonde jerks away in as broken a manner as he’d first surged forward, one big, shaky hand wiping at the back of his mouth. “I’m sorry.” He whispers to her, a regretful, apologetic sound that responds to her hurt eyes and pouting lips even as he slaps a twenty on the table and continues to back away.

The disgust at himself and his actions doesn’t leave his abused body even as he calls a car to get him home, the soul deep exhaustion in his body begging, pleading to get some rest as he places scuffed converse wearing feet back on the ranch grounds. Mind hazy from way too many late nights, overstressed limbs and brain, and a beer bottle too many, Cass follows his feet to where they take him, in this case the stables. Jazz, the black and white mustang filly already asleep, flicks an ear up at his footsteps and gives a quiet whicker that reaches Cass (and always will, if everyone was being honest. He’d raised the horse from birth, after all - she worshiped him and he adored her) even through his fog. “Hi beautiful,” he murmurs as he clumsily unlocks the door to her stall, big body folding down next to her. Jazz shakes her mane and lifts her head so it’s even with his in his seated position, brown eyes gazing at the blonde as he strokes her neck and mane, their foreheads pressed against each other. If all had gone well, this would have been how Cass ended his night. The morning sun and Jazz’s nudging would have awakened him the next day, plagued with a hangover and a heavy soul, and it wouldn’t have been the night he’d finally fallen off that cliff. His phone vibrates, an unnatural sound in the calm and nature of the barn, and he fishes it out of his pocket, slides the answer call button in a motion that goes a little too far off the edge of the screen. Cass presses it against his face, doesn’t look at the name. “H’llo?”

“Are you drunk?” CK, the man, the myth, the devil, accuses from the other end of the line. A flinch, physical and in his soul, manifests itself immediately in his son, a stilling of his palm on his favorite horses neck.

“Dad this - I’m off the clock. It’s a weekend.”

“The job never quits, son. Although I’m not surprised - every time I talk to you you seem to always be able to let me down, somehow. If you’re drunk, then so be it. Alcoholic or not, you need to hear this. If you don’t step up your game, actually start pretending to be a man and running this ranch the way it deserves, I’m taking it away from you.”

Cass didn’t just stop then, he jerked - paled, somehow even more, a wave of distress coming from him so strong that Jazz snorted in alarm. No - no - he couldn’t. He wouldn’t. It was his now. Mine. A building and business he’d poured his heart and soul into, his future. His birthright. “Dad,” the blonde tries, fails, attempts with another name. “Sir, don’t. I can handle this. I have been handling this, look at - look at the profit margins since I’ve been in charge, it’s increasing every year, the profile in the magazine -”

“I don’t give a damn about any of that. This place is in my name. As long as I have breath in my body, it’s my duty to take care of it. And if I have to remove you from it to do that, then I will. Don’t push me, boy. Because I will not hesitate. Do you hear me? No hesitation. None. I’d rather train someone else than allow you to keep tarnishing Kingston’s good name. So pull your shit together. Or you won’t have any.” A noise, an abrupt hanging up, and Cass is left alone in the stall with a worried horse and a very low sense of self preservation. His heart was beating so loud he could suddenly hear it, feel it stretch to the reaches of his body in a frenetic pace he couldn’t keep up with. The foundations shattered; bedrock crumbled; strings severed; and suddenly all he could do was think of getting away. He tacks up Jazz in a fugue state he won’t be able to remember days, weeks, years from now, walks her out of the barn and swings into the saddle with an ease someone of his mindset was only able to do with decades of practice. The filly, while a bit troubled by the frenetic emotions radiating from her so loved human and rider, was always down for a run, and could sense that Cass was too. Her hoofbeats were quick, nearly prancing with eagerness as he leaned down to open the gate to their largest, wildest field, one that only ended in the thick woods bordering their property. It was ideal for pretending there were no limits to the freedom it presented and a favorite of the blonde man and his horse, a location so familiar to Jazz that the moment Cass pulled it shut behind him she started moving. A lurch, a grasp of the reins and a hunkering down to be as close to her neck as possible, he placed his trust in his horse and prayed for the sounds of her gallops to drown out the demons in his head and heart.

For a moment, all was well. For a moment, it was two animals joined in one in the elegant motion, nearly flying over the ground as Jazz tried as hard as she could to almost fly. For a moment, the joy of the activity almost put him, if only momentarily, back together; before it all fell apart.

A fox, unexpected and caught mid flight home, appears in the horses view as a sudden red coated enemy, a thing of surprise that causes her to stop in her tracks so suddenly Cass can’t keep up. Loss of sleep, slight inebriation, and general exhaustion all work against the big man in teaming up of bad luck and he goes flying through the air, the last moment of consciousness he held before his head collided with a rock and it all went black.

The next occurrences Cassidy Kay Kingston III was not mentally present for as he lay there, blood dripping down his face from the rock he’d collided with, Jazz pressing worried muzzles into his form and whickering. A forgotten text, sent to his friend Mason before it had all gone to hell and he’d arrived at the bar hours before, is the only reason someone knows to look for him - he isn’t discovered until a few hours too many after the incident occurs, his friend having seen the filly in distress and following her to where he lay. Consciousness only comes to him in bits and spurts, a flash of Mason’s worry stricken face, of someone leading a rearing Jazz away, of an ambulance. Of the murmurs of the hospital, Mason calling his sister, seeing Holden’s worried face. 

Severe concussion, bruised and cracked ribs, head injury, sprained arm, extreme exhaustion, and sleep deprivation. Cassidy Kay Kingston III had finally, finally, fallen over his tipping point - for better, or for worse.

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