Total pages in book: 22
Estimated words: 20430 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 102(@200wpm)___ 82(@250wpm)___ 68(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 20430 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 102(@200wpm)___ 82(@250wpm)___ 68(@300wpm)
6
CASSIDY
After a great dinner, we saddled up – literally, in this case – and head back to Cash’s farmhouse.
I’m barely containing my excitement at this point. Every kiss we’ve shared has made me want him more and more, and really, I’m just struggling with how to properly express myself about all of it. Should I just be as forward as him? Should I tell him that I’ve never been with a man before?
Would that endear him to me? Or maybe it would be off-putting. Cash is old enough to maybe realize what he wants out of a woman is experience.
I hope not. I may be a virgin, but I know what I want to do. I want to ride a real cowboy.
I follow him into his home, which is detached from the farmhouse. His place seems a bit spartan. But what decoration he does have seems important. Framed photos on the walls. Some of Jennings, and a lot of people who look like them. An older version of Cash stoically looking into the camera like he really doesn’t want to be photographed. With a bit of gray in his beard, I determine that must be Cash’s father.
Cash is busy shuffling about and preparing something in the kitchen, but I continue to look over the photos. It’s a very masculine assortment. A lot of hunting and fishing, all the men on horses. Not a woman in sight.
Until I get to one photo.
There’s a gaunt-looking woman with the rest of them, her arms wrapped around the youngest, a child who looks like he belongs in kindergarten. I squint, and realize that it might be Jennings. What a cute kid he was.
Continuing down the line, the woman shows up more and more. When there’s only three or four kids in the photos, she’s looking a lot healthier. But even where she’s sickly, she seems happy.
“Did you want something to drink? Coffee, perhaps? Something harder? Or coffee AND something harder?” Cash calls out from the kitchen.
I connect the dots. This is his mother. Cash’s mother, Jennings’ mother. I note that the old man seems a lot happier when she’s around too. I keep coming back to the photo where she looks so sickly, and the expression on Daddy Rowdy’s face.
Concern. Worry.
“Did you hear me, Cassie?” Cash pokes his head back into the living room and catches me looking at his photos.
“Cash, what happened to your mother?”
He sighs. “I brought you back to have some fun, Cassie. Do you really want to talk about depressing things?”
“Well, I want to know more about you, Cash. What kind of man you are. Where you came from.”
Overwhelmed, he comes to the couch and sits down hard on it. “I’m young enough to remember my mother. When she passed, I was a teenager.”
I go to his side, a hand on his shoulder for a change, massaging it as he speaks.
“She was such a bubbly woman. Always singing, always friendly, always out to help people. I try to take up a lot of what she did. Except the singing, anyway. She sang like an angel and I don’t think I can compare.”
“Maybe you should give it a try.”
“I’m not underselling her, Cassie. My dad always told the story of how she was talented enough to really shine and become a megastar if she wanted. But she didn’t want that. She wanted him. She wanted a family. It made my dad feel guilty, but she told him every day she had no regrets. Something he has repeated to us every day since she passed.”
“She really loved him, huh?”
“She loved all of us. With all of her heart. She’d never let us forget, and I remember days before she died she said her only regret was that she couldn’t keep loving us on Earth, but she’d love us as much as she could from up above.”
“Cash, she sounds like a wonderful woman. What happened?”
“Cancer. It took her from us when she wasn’t much older than forty. She fought it tooth and nail. Lost all of her hair. That pic on the shelf? She’s wearing a wig. She said it was all worth it if she got to spend more time with us. All the pain, all the weakness, she kept going as long as she could, but the doctors could only do so much.”
I can’t imagine his pain. My parents aren’t perfect by any stretch, but I’m fortunate enough to still have them.
“I was devastated. The moodiest fucking teenager you could imagine. I damn near got expelled from high school with all the fights I started. But my brothers and father? They kept me sane. Now, my father, he’s the one that really suffered.”
“It’s never easy to be a single parent. Especially to five boys and while running this ranch.”
“He loved her. Extremely passionately, she was the light in his world. He’s never been the same in the fifteen years since. He puts on a smiling face, but I think he only keeps pushing forward for us, and if my mother knew he gave up? She’d whip his ass to Hell and back in the afterlife.”