Catrina's reason

by Catrina "Cat" Masterson Wed Aug 31, 2011 3:57 am

Catrina had been having some rather vivid dreams as of late. Most of them had involved her two best friends. Oh she had friends spread sporadically around Rhy’Din, but these two particular friends happened to live within the town nearest her Pindragon Ranch. So that seemed to afford them special privileges. That might also be why she was missing them so badly while she was at the Inn with her sisters.

Now Kyle, he was a constable for the township that was nearest the ranch. He would come out to the ranch after work an average of once a week, or once every other week. They would sit around and watch movies and he would vent about work or whatever. He was married, and his wife wasn’t the ‘tell me about your week at work honey’ type of woman. Besides, Cat had known Kyle for years before he had ever even met his wife. They went way back.

The other man was Jacob. Jacob had been friends with Kyle for a very long time. They had always hung out together for as long as Cat had known Jacob. Jacob had liked her back when she was dating Nick, another friend of Kyle and Jacob’s. Or at least he had been at the time. But now Jacob was practically married too. He was living with a woman, had been for a long time. She never asked when it had happened, but then again, she lost touch with them when she had moved away with Nick for a year. It took a while for her to be able to get back in touch with them both.

Since Cat had gotten back in touch with them, things had been running hot and cold with Jacob. Sometimes he was hers, other times (more often than not) he was not hers. Some days it didn’t bother her, but other days (again, more often than not) she hated that she was near the bottom of his list of priorities. Kyle did his best to try to make her have more days where it didn’t bother her. The time they spent together watching movies had started to become a comfort to her. Because at least when Kyle was there, she wasn’t lonely.

Not that there was ever a time when Cat was truly alone. Four of the ranch hands lived in the main house with her, and one of them had a child. But there was a difference between being alone, and being lonely. And even worse, there was a big difference between being lonely, and lonely for way too long. Catrina was headed on a downhill path towards lonely for way too long. Which made her wish Jacob would come to his senses and leave the woman he lived with to be with her. Hell, at this point, she would settle for his simply coming to her for more than five or ten minutes here and there and nothing progressing past kisses.

One night, before she left to go see Tasha, she got a text message from Kyle’s phone. It said ‘Leave my man alone.’ It was spelled wrong, but she stared at it with wonder. It was followed by a few more messages, one asking her of a preference concerning the male anatomy, the other asking if she wished to engage in adult activities. Of course, that isn’t how the questions were phrased. She started to type a response back then stopped herself. This couldn’t have been Kyle asking her these things. The messages continued, back and forth for an hour and a half. She had thought for sure that Kyle’s wife had found his phone and had thought they were having an affair.

She had never been properly introduced to either Kyle’s wife or Jacob’s live in. She had seen who she thought might have been the woman that Jacob lived with. She knew their names. She had seen the daughters of both women, both daughters from previous relationships. Jacob’s woman had a son too; at least Cat was pretty sure she did. Kyle and Jacob didn’t have children of their own. Kyle’s step-daughter even had a child of her own already. This, of course, gave Cat fodder with which to pick on him, a Grandfather in his thirties.

Catrina had gone to sleep thinking that Kyle’s wife had thought they were having an affair and that Kyle was in trouble. She was worried of her old friend. He didn’t deserve trouble for a crime he was innocent of. She left a message for Jacob before she went to sleep. And when she awoke the next morning she sent him a text message as well. And like a good boyfriend, though not the technical term for their relationship just the convenient one, he called her as she had asked him to.

The conversation began with ‘you might want to check on your boy, I think he got himself in some trouble last night.’ She went into detail about how she was getting these texts and how some of them sounded like they were coming from him, but most of them didn’t. Jacob found this terribly amusing. He told her that the texts were from Kyle. When she asked him how he knew, he told her about how the two of them had been messing with her. They had found it amusing. They made her the butt of their joke for the night, and they thought it was funny.

Catrina found it anything but funny. In fact, she was furious with them. She was used to others making her the butt of their jokes. Those she lived with had their strings of inside jokes and most of the time she felt as if they were making fun of her for one thing or another. Why was it that she never fired them and sent them on their way? It took a special kind of person to deal with Pindragons. She couldn’t afford to rid herself of some of her best handlers. And besides, they were sly about it. She never could really prove that they were making fun of her.

But those who lived in her house were not the issue at the moment. The issue was two men who she cared very deeply for. Two of her best friends in the entire world were the issue. Though in different ways, she could surely say that she loved them both. How could they do that to her? How could they, of all people, forget that she was human, and female?
Forget that she had feelings and emotions? The call with Jacob had ended with both of them saying that they loved each other, as it almost always did, but that didn’t change how upset she was.

When she got off the phone she got out of bed and got dressed. She went about her morning chores and her evening ones too. But all day it had plagued her every thought. It had bothered her so badly that by the afternoon she had been in tears. Of course she was behind closed doors and sobbed in silence lest someone hear her and call her out about it. She knew she would make them grovel; make them beg her for mercy, somehow anyway. She just didn’t know how. And she knew she would need time to think about it.

Maybe they would realize their mistakes on their own? Maybe they would figure out how badly they had upset her thanks to what she had said to Jacob on the phone? And maybe Jesus Christ was going to be reborn on Rhy’Din instead of Earth and would take over as the Supreme Being? The chances of the last happening were higher than the chances of two men admitting they were wrong. They were men, they needed women to point out their mistakes to them and tell them how to fix them.

As Cat stood in the shower that night, she was still thinking about what they had done. As long as she was at home, she was going to keep thinking about it. She needed to get away for a while. Clear her mind of these sorrows. Besides, if she left for a while, it would give them time to think too. And maybe, just maybe, they would figure out what they’d done wrong. Or maybe she would find someone who wanted to make her their number one priority. Or at least make her second only to their family and work.

It wasn’t that she wanted a relationship with someone else. She wanted a relationship with Jacob. Well, more of a relationship. But she didn’t think that was going to happen any time soon. And she was getting tired of waiting. The text messages had just made her even more tired of waiting. The text messages had made her tired of a lot of things when it came to Jacob. That fact only told her that she really did need to get away for a while.

So instead of putting on her t-shirt and crawling into bed, she packed a bag and got dressed in traveling clothes. She took her stuff outside. She went and got her purple Pindragon Penelope and they left. She rode all night and into the next day. But she finally reached her destination. She was at the Starry Myst Inn, where he little sister was staying. And then she wondered how long it would take the boys to figure out she was gone.

That’s where she was now. She was at the Starry Myst Inn, settling into bed for the night. She had been here a few days, and so far, the boys hadn’t seemed to miss her much. She hadn’t heard a word from them in the entire time she had been here. The lack of contact from them might be the reason for the vivid dreams she was having. She was already missing them something fierce. In the past few years she hadn’t been away from them for very long. This was the farthest she’s been from them for the longest amount of time in probably four or five years.