Chapter 15
The next day Kate got up, took Ritalin, and went to work. She signed off on three projects, ate something with chicken in it, came home and went to sleep. The next day, she did the same things except she ate something with lamb in it. The day after that was a Saturday, so she went for a five-kilometre run, cleaned Aunty Rhonda’s apartment, organised her wardrobe according to the KonMari method, and caught up on all of her emails.
By Sunday, she was standing at her bathroom sink, Ritalin between her fingers, wondering for the first time since she was eighteen, if she should drop it down the sink. She wanted to let all the sharp edges dull, let the clear radio transmission return to static. She wouldn’t be able to function as well, but surely she wouldn’t feel this acute, painful emptiness. She let the pill slip towards the end of her fingers, then caught sight of herself in the mirror.
No, the sober brown of her eyes told her. If you do this you’ll let Ty be responsible for wreaking your head and breaking your heart.
She took her pill.
That night she tried to touch herself. After an incredibly frustrating fifty minutes, she discovered she couldn’t come. She tried every toy and technique in her arsenal—except the severance package dildo—and nothing worked. For a moment she considered the glass wand, then she got up, dressed herself and went for another run .
Now that Ty had left, her lack of a social life was even more apparent. She accepted an invitation to Sunday night dinner at Maria’s out of sheer desperation. Maria insisted on hearing the full story, and though it felt like pulling a string of razor blades out of her stomach, Kate told her. It didn’t sound that dramatic out loud; she and Ty had been having casual sex, and now it was over in the way casual things were over.
“How did you know it was over if he never said it?” Maria asked.
“I just knew.”
The naked relief on Maria’s face was irritating, but Kate could understand it. She had known this was coming, was probably relieved the ending hadn’t been messier. Kate had been the one in denial.
Five days after Ty’s departure, she deleted all his texts. She was so sick of reading them over and over, searching for meaning in messages like ‘be at your place in thirty minutes, take off your panties.’
She went into Kinkworld to delete their correspondence and found a direct message from someone called ‘@BadBastard1995.’ The subject line was ‘You’re a slut,’ and the content read, ‘No man will ever love you.’
It was just mean-spirited trolling, but reading the words was a slap in the face, especially since she was spending so much time dwelling on the fact that no man, specifically Tyler Henderson, loved her. She screen-shotted the message, reported the account to moderators and deleted it. She wanted to cry but the sadness wouldn’t come; instead she found herself furious. How dare someone send her that message? How dare Maria smile when she told her the man she’d fallen for had left? How dare Ty give her a stupid dildo and then leave without explicitly stating he was leaving?
“Fuck this,” she whispered. “Fuck all of this.”
She stormed to her bedroom and pulled on the cherry nightie she’d bought for Tyler. She then went to the bathroom, put on as much makeup as she would wear to a wedding and snapped a few pictures of herself in the mirror in various sexy poses.
She knew it was narcissistic and borderline irresponsible, but she didn’t stop. She was alone in every sense of the word and she wanted to do something reckless, rip off her skin and expose what lay beneath. She chose the best picture, applied a flattering filter, then posted it to her Kinkworld profile. She thought about making the caption ‘suck a big fat penis, Tyler Henderson and also BadBastard1995,’ but wrote ‘new nightie, what do you think?’ instead.
The response was instantaneous. Her phone pinged with notifications about likes and ‘Phwoar!’ comments and she started getting messages from guys wanting to meet up and couples seeking a unicorn (they never read her goddamn profile properly). She read through everything, wanting to feel flattered, and instead feeling emptier than ever. Sycophancy from strangers, it turned out, was no cure for heartache. It was barely even a Band-Aid.
Kate looked across the room at Aunt Rhonda’s painting of Grecian goddesses. They were cavorting under a mountain spring, not a single problem between them. What would Aunt Rhonda have said if she was there?
Nothing, Kate realised. She’d have gone to the nearest ATM, withdrawn a bunch of cash, and told her to pack her bags because she was driving her to the airport for an adventure. Kate considered finally doing it, just packing a bag and going overseas the way Aunt Rhonda had always wanted her to. Then she remembered her job and the apartment and how she was so, so afraid of getting on a plane by herself.
“Sorry, Aunty,” she said to the painting. “You were a lot braver than me.”
***
Ty got up and swam laps in the hotel pool. He drank coffee and ate bacon and eggs. He attended meetings. In the afternoons, he drove out to work sites and inspected the progress of the eco-motels GGS were building. He ignored Middleton’s name whenever it cropped up on the on the blueprints, the same way he ignored the workmen who muttered he was a Melbournian asshole who didn’t know shit. He could have told the guys he was a born and bred Queenslander, but what was the point? At night, he drank alone at the hotel bar. There was a Women in Business conference on and he received many offers of nightcaps from pencil skirted executives whose husbands were far, far away. He turned them down. Even if he’d wanted to be complicit in their deception he couldn’t muster the energy. He hadn’t gotten hard once since leaving Middleton’s apartment. It was as though someone had flicked the switch on his sex drive to ‘off.’
“Are you alright?” Johnno asked him via Skype. “You look a bit rough.”
“I’m fine. How’re the troops?”
Johnno rattled off what the boys were up to, but didn’t mention the only person Ty wanted to hear about. What was Katie May McGrath working on, what was she doing? Did she miss him? Was he the biggest prick in the world for hoping she missed him?
On the first weekend of his trip, Ty drove his rented Audi four hours out of the city to visit his family. The Gold Coast, with its web of skyscrapers and fried chicken chain stores, looked different from how he remembered it as a kid, but the roads that led to his hometown was so familiar it hurt—the sun bleached general stores and potholes and fields of bananas and pineapples. As he wound down the window and inhaled the scent of baking asphalt, Ty felt with perfect clarity how it had been to be eighteen-years-old, driving for the sake of driving, dreaming about the life that lay ahead.
As the kilometres passed, a doomed little fantasy entered his mind. Katie May McGrath, born twenty years earlier, attending university at the same time as him. She was Georgie’s friend and why wouldn’t she be? Georgie had collected shy girls trying to break into male dominated industries the way other people collected stamps.
They’d meet at one of Georgie’s punch parties. Katie would look exactly the same as she did now, but he would be the man he was back then—shaggy gold curls, unlined forehead, some glimmer of hope in his eyes. He’d be a virgin, just like her and still a little gun-shy around women. When their eyes met he’d make himself a promise—he wouldn’t leave until he talked to her.
It might have taken a few hours, but eventually he’d muster up the courage to introduce himself. They’d talk about school and home and living in Melbourne. They’d get drunk on Georgie’s near-poisonous white-wine punch and kiss in some quiet corner of the house. Ty would ask her out and she’d blush and say yes and write down her number. They’d go out for cheap Chinese and walk through Fitzroy gardens, because that was the most romantic date a broke eighteen-year-old could think of. Then they’d go on more dates, to the movies, to the beach. He’d have brought her flowers a lot because he assumed that’s what men did for women they were falling in love with.
He’d be scared of rushing her, but unable to keep his hands off her, either. Within a few weeks they’d have started getting each other off in his dorm room until finally he made love to her under his Pearl Jam poster. From the start, it would be clear she liked him being rough. Once they grew comfortable with each other, they’d have started pushing the boundaries.
“I want to call you…”
“I like it when…”
He’d have flexed his dominant muscles against her. He’d have been clumsy, but she wouldn’t have cared. Her calling him ‘Daddy’ would have always had a theatrical, laughable quality because they were the same age, the same age, the same age.
A deep and treacherous pothole startled Ty back into the present. He swore and pulled over. The underside of the rental was okay, his morale not so much.
When he arrived at his old house his mum and dad rushed out to the car to see him. His brothers and their wives hung back, smiling stiffly. They resented the fuss his parents made whenever he came home, marveling at every little detail of his life in Melbourne. They sat down to a long, uncomfortable meal and by the time Pavlova was served, the familiar barbs were offered alongside them—when was he going to bring a girl home? Was he sure he didn’t want kids? Did he ever get lonely living by himself?
When Rhys’ wife, Minnie, brought up Veronica’s new baby, Ty said he needed the bathroom and went and stood on the veranda by himself. He stared up at the crescent moon and thought about Middleton. What would his family say if he ever brought her home to dinner? Where was she tonight? Curled up on her couch watching TV or out at a bar auditioning his replacement?
“How’s it going, Tyso?”
He turned to see his oldest brother Rhys holding out a can of XXXX. “Sorry ‘bout Minnie. She’s a bit drunk.”
Ty took the beer and cracked it open. “S’fine.”
“She’s worried about you. We all were after the job and Veronica, she and Minnie got along so well y’know?”
Ty wished he didn’t know. “Yeah.”
“You’re not…I mean, you’re not seeing anyone, are you?” Rhys asked with palpable desperation. “That would go a long way toward everyone worrying less.”
Ty took a long swallow from his beer. He was a successful businessman with his own house and plenty of money and friends and yet in the eyes of his family he was suffering a fate worse than cancer—being single. He sighed. “I had a thing going with a girl from work, but that’s over now.”
“Shit…” Rhys said, sounding surprised. “Was it serious? What happened?”
“She’s twenty-five.”
There was a short pause.
“Twenty-five?”
Rhys’ tone was neutral, but Ty could hear the envy throbbing beneath it. Inwardly, he groaned. He shouldn’t have told him about this. He wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t give good advice, he’d just mark it down as another way in which his younger brother had one-upped him, the list starting from the moment Ty made the first string senior rugby team before he did. “Forget it,” he told Rhys.
“I can’t just forget it, are you really rooting a twenty-five-year-old?”
“I was, now it’s over.”
“Fucking hell.” His brother shifted on the veranda as though grinding out an invisible cigarette. “You know, it’s probably for the best. You’re almost forty-six. You can’t be running around with a girl half your age, you’re not DiCaprio.”
“I know I’m not.”
Rhys shook his head. “Twenty-five…with that generation she might as well be seventeen. You don’t need that in your life.”
“Well, I don’t have that in my life. Look, can we drop this?”
“I get it. You’re by yourself, you’re getting older and fucking a girl that young was an ego boost—”
“It wasn’t like that!”
His brother raised his hands. “Okay, look, have you heard from Veronica lately?”
“No.”
It was a lie. She was still calling him. Every few days, her name flashed up on his phone along with another teary voicemail begging him to call her back. He didn’t, but he didn’t block her number, either. He wasn’t entirely sure why.
“You need to find another woman like her,” Rhys said. “She was a diamond, pretty, smart, put up with all your moody shit. If you’d just…but it’s too late now, eh?”
Ty didn’t answer. He’d learned long ago that his family wouldn’t—couldn’t—understand why he refused to give Veronica a baby.
“Mate.” Rhys glanced cautiously at the porch door. “Mate, no bloke wants kids. You just have ‘em and get used to ‘em. It’s part of getting older.”
Rhys always talked like that, as though social expectations were carved in stone and you got no say in any of it. Marry the girl you’re dating when you’re twenty-eight, have as many kids as she decides she wants, buy a four-bedroom house in the suburbs and pay it off until you’re sixty-nine and a half.
“Are you listening to me?” Rhys pressed. “There’s still enough time to do things properly. You can still meet someone else and have a family.”
Ty thought about dinner, his nieces and nephews running around the table screaming, Robbie downing about nine glasses of wine and sighing whenever his wife spoke. Rhys’ personal anecdotes about how Minnie nagged him and that their kids were always in his way. His brothers had both gained weight since Ty saw them last, both looked about ten years older than they were, and that was the life they wanted for him? Ty crushed his empty can of Four X against his palm and wondered if he still had the number for the vasectomy place.
***
If Kate wasn’t so desperate for company, she wouldn’t have gone to Lorena’s baby shower, but seeing as she was desperate for company and the former Barbie Troll had promised copious amounts of champagne, she was there at eleven on the dot.
She’d expected the party to be sweet but boring. As it turned out she’d severely underestimated Lorena’s ability to party with an almost fully-formed baby inside her. Five hours into the shower, Kate was drunk—really, really drunk—and she and the rest of the Barbie Trolls (minus Maria who was at a family barbecue) were drawing on Lorena’s swollen stomach like it was the cast on a broken arm, ignoring the dire warnings of her Italian aunts who swore it would poison the baby in utero.
Kate had just finished her picture of a lion cub (Lorena’s derby name was Lion Maiden) when the older women in the room steered the conversation toward kids—namely grilling the baby-less about their plans to become baby-full. Kate was on the verge of running to the toilet and hiding for an hour when Rapunzel saved the day.
“Why the fuck would I?” she said to Lorena’s great aunt when she asked if she wanted to have kids. “I’m a dyke. I love vaginas. I’m all about vaginas. Why would I want to shove a watermelon sized shit-factory out of one? Especially my vagina, the nicest, most relevant vagina of all?”
The look of horror on the old woman’s face, Lorena’s screech of laughter, and the fact that Rapunzel followed her pronouncement with a casual ‘too much?’—Kate couldn’t help herself, she burst into hysterical champagne giggles and had to leave the room.
When she finally calmed down she went into the kitchen and found Rapunzel sitting on the counter, nursing a cup of tea. “Not doing so hot at this party, am I?”
“Well, you did say the word ‘vagina,’ like, fifty times. But you also almost made me break a rib from laughing. And you saved me from being grilled.”
Rapunzel raised a pale brow. “You don’t want kids, either, huh?”
“I don’t know,” Kate said honestly. “I get why people have kids, but I get why people don’t. I don’t have the most normal role models. My Aunt Rhonda had no kids, and she was the happiest, nicest person I knew and my mum has nine kids and she, like, hates us. Swings and roundabouts you know?”
“Sure,” Rapunzel said with a smile. “You’ve got eight brothers and sisters?”
“Yeah. For the record, we are Catholic.”
Rapunzel laughed. “How’s your man, by the way? Treating you well?”
For a moment Kate was confused, then she remembered that she’d told the derby girls about Ty because she was a stupid, foolhardy fool. “He um…it’s over. It’s no big deal though, it was never meant to be serious.”
To her surprise, Rapunzel leapt off the counter and pulled her into a bone-crushing hug. “I’m sorry, Peach. You wanna talk about it?”
“If I start, I might cry,” she said, her eyes already burning. “Thanks though.”
“Anytime. Wanna go out on the balcony and smoke weed?”
“Erm, no thanks.”
“Well, come keep me company. I need a lookout in case any more of Lorena’s aunts show up and judge my lifestyle.”
Kate laughed.
They stood outside in the cold for half an hour, talking without the slightest awkward pause. When Kate got so cold her fingers went numb, she ordered an Uber. To her surprise, Rapunzel insisted they swap numbers so Kate could text her when she was safely home. When she did, Rapunzel replied with ‘Glad to hear it. It was good to see you, Peach. You should come out with us more often.’
Kate smiled. She was still miserable about Ty, but unless she was mistaken she and the hardest girl on her derby team were kind of becoming friends and that was pretty cool. She only wished it had happened a few months ago. Rapunzel seemed like someone who’d know exactly how to talk you out of embarking on a doomed fling with your boss that left you questioning the very foundations of your life.
***
Ty’s flight back to Melbourne was delayed, first by two hours, then five. He sat in the executive bar getting progressively drunker and more introspective. Airports always did that to him, it was something about the floaty timelessness of a place dictated by non-stop arrivals and departures.
His delay was inconvenient, but as he sat on his cushy bar stool, being served by a friendly, non-judgmental bartender, he had to admit that no one was expecting him. He would have to be delayed by another twenty hours before it mattered that he was getting drunk in the airport instead of at home.
He pulled out his notepad with the vague idea of doing some writing and instead found himself sketching big disjointed words: golden boy, bachelor, pervert, alcoholic and Middleton. He circled the last word, then crossed it out. Then he drew it again in wide bubble letters. Middleton.
“You’re almost forty-six,” Rhys had said. “You can’t be running around with a girl half your age, you’re not DiCaprio.”
He wasn’t. But he wasn’t like Rhys, either, not married or mortgaged to the hilt. He’d chosen his life for himself and already endured all the slights that came along with it. Family dinners were already painful, would it really be so bad if he and Middleton made a proper go of things? If his brothers and their wives had to accept that, in addition to being a childless weirdo, he was the kind of tacky middle-aged asshole who had a twenty-something girlfriend? Did it matter?
Not really, he decided. It mattered that he’d left her, ending things without a word, though. It mattered what she was doing now. Ty drained his pint and decided to investigate. He pulled out his laptop, and logged into Kinkworld. His pulse spiked when he saw messages in his inbox, but they turned out to be from some dickhead called ‘@BadBastard1995’ who felt the need to tell him he was a pervert. He deleted the messages and typed Middleton’s pseudonym into the search box.
She had a new profile picture. She was posing in front of her bathroom mirror in the cherry patterned nightdress she’d worn when they were last together. Unlike her other photos, you could see her face, all wide brown eyes and pink lips. She’d angled herself so that her legs looked a mile long, her body flawless. She looked young and beautiful and so sexy she was almost a stranger.
“Why would she do this?” Ty muttered. From the way that nightie had smelled when he’d been fucking her, it was new. Why would she take something she bought especially for him and show it to every goddamn perv on this website?
Because she’s in the market for a Daddy, asshole. Don’t act like you’re surprised.
“You okay man?” The bartended asked.
“Fine,” Ty lied. “Makers on the rocks, thanks.”
As he waited for his drink he scrolled through the comments listed below Middleton’s picture. Again, most of them were moronic, but one by a man called RedRight was irritatingly eloquent. “Very pretty but you look like you need a hug, gorgeous girl. Dinner this Friday? (I just DM’d you.)”
Ty googled the term and was unimpressed to learn that it meant ‘direct message.’ Had Middleton responded? He clicked on RedRight’s profile and learned the guy was a twenty-nine-year-old property developer. He was irritatingly good looking, heavily muscled, and well-hung, something Ty learned against his will when he accidentally clicked on a video of RedRight doing a woman in the ass. He’d never back-clicked out of something so fast in his life.
Surely Middleton wouldn’t be interested in dating someone who put their homemade porn on the internet? Surely? The question did nothing to help Ty’s growing unease. He went back to Middleton’s profile and looked at her posing in her cherry night dress. She looked gorgeous, but as RedRight had pointed out, there was something sad about the look in her eyes. It wasn’t too much of a stretch to imagine why. Yet Ty knew better than he’d ever known it before that she’d find someone else, eventually. Maybe not a handsome buttfucker with sex tapes plastered all over the internet, but someone. She was too precious for another man like him not to want to keep her.
Ty closed his laptop and considered the glass of Makers the bartender had left at his elbow. Another drink would have gone down like water, but it wasn’t going to help him make the decision he knew he needed to make. He gave the drink to the bored looking guy next to him, paid his tab and wandered over to the food court. He ordered a custard tart and ate it, savouring the sweetness he normally detested. He’d always made his own choices, regardless of what other people thought. Maybe it was time to man up and make another one.