Being different wasn't a realization that Colton made until he was almost a teenager. His mother's gloved hands were clutching his forearm, even though he stood at the same height as her, and she glared daggers at the photographers propped up across the street from their Central Park penthouse. "They're always after your father," she hissed and hurried him inside. In the elevator, he wondered why exactly every outing for any reason ended in the door of their building being the most awkward point of the entire trip.

Children always idolize their parents; Colton idolized his father an enormous amount more than he did his mother, but not because she was lacking in the department of parenting. Simply because he rarely saw his father, but he saw his work on the theater and he heard about it in conversation and he heard his mother talking to her socialite friends on the phone about it. To Colton, his father must have been so busy directing and producing movies that everyone loved, he had very little time to dote on a son.

By the time Colton was a teenager, his mother was taking him to auditions as soon as his private tutors had escaped the clutches of their luxurious home. "You're a natural at pretending, Colton, come along," she would tell him as she made all the right calls to people or had his father step in to help guide. Behind private tutors came the coaches, the speech therapist to help tweak his ability to mimic any accent. A stylist came along, hand picked by his mother, to help market him as a trendy young man.

Colton thought he was a trendy young man, honestly, and the resentment that he felt toward his mother began to grow from a normal level for a teenage child into something more intense. The more she had him fussed over, the more he hated it. The more she pushed him to audition, he rebelled against it. The more she pushed, the harder he pushed back. Until one day she threw her hands up in the air. "If you don't want the life you were born into, fine. Other people would kill for it." Great, Colton thought to himself, maybe now he could just fucking go to college like a normal kid.

That's what he did and he graduated a psychology major with a minor in theater. He studied, he met people, he fell in and out of love, he pledged a fraternity, he lived like a completely normal young man after living a life where being completely normal was the exact opposite of what he was raised to be. It was a time that he relished. Colton felt like he could attempt acting now that college, something he had spent years pining after, was over. It had to be on his terms, it had to be the way he wanted to do it. His mother, unsurprisingly, hated the things he adutioned for, hated that he wouldn't let her help, that Colton didn't want a momager.

Turns out that Colton's gut was spot on in this situation. He took the hits of rejection after failed auditions, he took the sting of a casting director telling him that he simply wasn't good enough, and he watched as people he saw in auditions were given good news. His father refused to play a part in it; "Colton has to do it on his own now, he had his chance." Things turned around when he got a small bit on a television show, then a few supporting roles, and over night -- or so it felt -- Colton was someone that people referred to as critically acclaimed.

His career flourished before him and soon his father was beaming at him, proudly, his son had done it on his own. As much on his own as he could with the last name attached, at least.