By Chance: Day 11

Word Count: 66,049

Summary of Events:

After the group left for the day, Steele attended the debrief meeting, lingering afterwards to ask Alida about the girl who'd attested her father to be a bull rider, and had been very hostile toward him throughout the day. Alida told Steele that her name was Peyton and she was, in fact the daughter of a bull rider, but because she'd been born when her parents were in high school, her parents weren't together, and her father also seemed more interested in his sons with his new girlfriend than he was in her. The following morning, while Steele prepared his breakfast, his mind began to wander…

Excerpt of the Day:

Still having to wait, Steele’s mind wandered back to Peyton. He’d ended up spending much of the evening thinking about her once he’d been driven home by Stan after his dinner with Grandma Clare, who didn’t like driving in the dark — not that Steele blamed her, at her age, her eyes weren’t the greatest, even if she didn’t need glasses.

The more he thought about Peyton, the more bad he felt that he’d even thought so negatively about her owing to her behaviour toward him. Even if he couldn’t altogether explain why she’d acted the way she had toward him, he could sympathise with her.

To say the very least, he’d not received a lot of love from his father — in fact, the few memories he had of his father were overwhelmingly negative ones — and even if he had received the opposite from his mother, there was a part of him, even still, that yearned for the tiniest modicum of love from his father.

Considering the way things had ended up, Steele had his doubts he’d ever see his father again, though, so unless his father left some sort of affectionate note in his will, Steele wasn’t likely to get it, but there was also a part of him that would internally lambaste him for thinking such foolish thoughts as that love from his father would ever be something good to have.

During his teenage years Steele had craved it more than now, although Steele wasn’t sure whether it was because he’d acquired at least two surrogate father-figures — Alder and Strahan — and a surrogate grandfather in Grandpa Clare, or because he agreed with the part of himself that didn’t think love from his father was something he really should be wanting, or if it was a combination of the two.

He turned off the burner, but didn’t lift the lid or move the pan, as the eggs were still doing their best popcorn impression, which sounded a touch juicier than popcorn sounded.

Even though Peyton’s father undoubtedly wasn’t the same kind of man as his father, he still had probably been less of a factor in her life than he ought to have been — if Steele’s experiences with Strahan were any indication of how things were supposed to work, which Steele felt they had to be considering that Strahan and Astrid’s kids were only too glad to see their parents on a regular basis, and Steele wasn’t the only kid they’d fostered who still came around to visit either, even if many of the others actually lived further afield, and so didn’t come by quite as often.

As a result, Steele suspected that Peyton had a similar craving to what he had, but probably more at the level he’d had when he was a teenager, but why she would’ve been hostile toward him, instead of maybe hoping that he would be able to help her get the love she wanted from her father, he wasn’t sure about.