where: in front of the big house, the kingston ranch b & b property, around eight o’clock
who: kinsey & gage (and unfortunately hayes)
tagging: @arcadianiisms
Kinsey’s thighs were sore. They were sore, and kind of tender, and it was no one’s fault but her own but honestly sometimes it was necessary and there was nothing that could quite give her the high that that activity did.
The activity, of course, being horse riding.
Cass, her dad, had forced her to take the evening off. As much as I love having my right hand man at my side, sometimes the Ranch B & B can take care of itself, Kin-kin, he’d told her in his deep voice, all laughing eyes and rugged face, and it had pained her to dip out early but it was also a pleasant change of pace. It was their off season, after all, and that meant that there weren’t guests clogging up the riding trails or the fields sectioned off specifically for free range riding. It was her girl Guinevere, a present that sixteen year old her had received from her parents as a mere yearling, that she’d taken out, a mustang mix with a caramel colored mane and dark coat. She’d done a few rounds of dressage with one of Kinsey’s closest friends, but mainly was Kinsey’s girl now, and she loved to run. Loved to run so much that the faded light never concerned her when she let them both run free on an evening that she needed to let some steam off.
After cooling her down, and taking off her tack and giving her to a ranch hand to hose off, Kinsey took a shower at the Big House instead of her own place, not really caring to make the hike or drive on legs as wobbly as hers. After kissing her mother on the cheek and telling her that she would be around for dinner, she was tamping down the front stoop, on her way to feed Guinevere a few thank you apples (her favorite treat), when a voice stopped her.
Fuck. Fuckity fuck fuck, because Kinsey hasn’t seen Hayes in nearly a fucking month and she was enjoying that. Enjoying the time without him. And maybe it wasn’t fair, that she took hours to message him back when he texted her from his college an hour away, and that he had been a good boyfriend for the two years that they’d been together, but her heart wasn’t with him anymore. “Hayes! What a surprise.” She wills her voice to sound normal as she slides her arms around his waist and ducks his mouth kiss, aiming for her cheek, but her heart remains stuck in the soles of her cowboy boots.
(It was anyone’s guess who it belonged to, of course, but he was no longer the man she thought about when there was a flush spreading across her cheeks and there was private time in the future.)
THAT man was coming at her from the other side of the Big House, the lights of the main barn at his back, filtering through his curls like a golden halo and making Kinsey’s eyes damn near swoon then and there...with Hayes’s hand in her back pocket. Oh my God. Someone strike her down right now. Weakly, she waves, and hopes that her smile is a lot more comfortable than Hayes’s presence next to her feels. “Heyyy, Gage.” (Where’s that bolt of lighting?)
