Chapter 21
For three days, Ty carried Middleton’s front door key. He wasn’t sure what he was trying to accomplish, only that every morning he slipped it into his pocket alongside his phone and wallet. He pulled it out from time to time, rubbed a thumb along the steel, and wondered why this hurt more than having his engagement ring returned.
He had no idea. He was waist deep in post-breakup numbness and it was hard to see anything from that particular forest, especially the fucking trees. Since receiving the letter, he’d spent two nights at work in a row—a personal record. He had no idea why he preferred work to home, seeing as Middleton had never been to his place, and GGS was riddled with memories of her. Another tree he couldn’t see from the forest.
Georgie had offered him her frequent flier points so he could go to Prague and try to win Middleton over but, Ty had refused. “There’s no coming back from this.”
“You’re probably right,” she’d said. “You really fucked yourself this time.”
The call he’d been expecting came four days after Middleton’s letter. He was in a meeting but the woman left a voicemail.
“Hi Tyler, this is Katie’s friend, Maria. If you could return Katie’s key and anything else you might have of hers to my place in the next couple of days, that would be great. I live at 42 Copper Street, Carlton. You can come over before ten or after four. Okay, bye.”
Her tone was sunny, but Ty could hear the dislike ticking beneath it. He remembered Maria from the derby final, a tall Latina woman built along the lines of Salma Hayek. She’d glared at him at the after-party, no doubt wondering what an old bastard like him was doing with her young friend. Well, she didn’t have to worry about him haunting Middleton’s derby games anymore.
He replayed the message, snorting a little at the line, “If you could return Katie’s key and anything else you might have of hers.”
What else did she think he had? He’d lost Middleton’s trust, admiration, and body in The Breton Club. The only thing he had left was the key, a little slip of metal that had once granted him refuge from the outside world and now served as a reminder of what a useless fuck-up he was.
All morning, he considered not giving the key back to Maria, pretending he’d lost it or given it to Middleton before she left for Europe, but that was insane. Holding onto the key was only going to make Middleton change her locks, not her mind.
That afternoon, he left work early and rode to Carlton. Maria lived in the kind of three-storey townhouse that once belonged to an Italian family of eight and would now fetch millions on the open market. He wondered what she did for a living and decided not to ask; he’d knock on the door, drop off the key, and get out. He opened the brown waist-high gate that always framed such houses and a brown kelpie bounced its way across the front yard, its face alight with doggy excitement. Instinctively, Ty dropped to one knee and started petting its ears. He’d always loved dogs.
“Caramel!—oh it’s you, Tyler.”
Ty looked up to see Maria standing in her doorway, a fat baby on her hip. “Hey, I’m just here to drop off Midde—Kate’s key?”
“Of course.” Maria gestured to her house. “Come in.”
It wasn’t a question so Ty couldn’t think of a polite way to say ‘no thanks.’ The interior of the townhouse was full of plastic kid shit and big beautiful murals made up of what looked like shells.
“I’ll get us coffee in a second, Tyler,” Maria said, bustling up behind him. “Just let me put Emmy down.”
She vanished, and in the absence of anything else to do, Ty bent down and scratched the dog’s velvet ears. It had followed him inside, yipping happily and making Ty feel a fuck of a lot calmer.
Maria reappeared in front of him, sans baby. “Do you have a dog?” she said, hustling Caramel onto a nearby mat.
“Not since I was a kid.”
“You should get one.” There was no trace of suggestion in her voice; it was like when his sisters-in-law told him to find a new girlfriend—an order, plain and simple.
“I work late hours and I travel a lot. It wouldn’t be fair to the dog.”
Maria looked unimpressed. “Right. Follow me, Tyler.”
She had a rich, accented voice, one he might ordinarily have found attractive, except she kept saying his name like it was a brand of toilet cleaner. ‘Tyler works wonders on those stubborn hard-to-face stains. Try Tyler now and we guarantee you’ll be amazed at the results!’
Ty began to suspect this meeting had very little to do with returning Middleton’s key, but he had no idea what to do with the knowledge except follow Maria into her azure coloured kitchen. She gestured toward the bench. “Tea or coffee?”
“Coffee, thanks.”
His host—or was it captor?—turned on an expensive-looking espresso machine and Ty sat on a blue cushioned stool. He glanced at Maria’s fridge and noticed among all the pictures of the baby and a dark-haired boy, there was one of Middleton. She was wearing a pink sundress and smiling shyly, as though she didn’t think the picture was a good idea, but loved the person holding the camera too much to say no. Pain rippled through his chest, deep and dull as if someone had pressed a butter knife into it . He looked away.
“How’s your day been?” Maria asked.
Ty shook his head, trying to get Middleton out of his brain. “Good thanks, yours?”
“Fine,” Maria said, pulling a carton of milk from the fridge. “I work from home, so it’s mostly just kids and numbers all day. What about you?”
“About the same. Only without the kids and numbers.”
“I see.”
Silence fell. Ty wished Caramel was there so he’d have something to do with his hands.
“Here you go,” Maria said placing a bright blue mug of coffee in front of him. Ty took a sip, barely tasting anything. “Thanks.”
“Not a problem.”
Maria came around the counter and sat beside him. Ty would have preferred she stayed on the other side. He knew what was coming next, and if she was going to take him to task, it would be better if they remained on separate sides of the counter, like true adversaries.
“So,” Maria said, blowing on her coffee. “I want to apologise to you.”
That was not what Ty was expecting. “Pardon?”
“I. Want. To. Apologise. To. You. Tyler. Henderson,” Maria enounced as though her accent might be the problem.
“I don’t understand,” Ty said. “I mean, I get what you’re saying, but we don’t know each other, why are you apologising to me?”
Maria frowned into her coffee. “Hasn’t Katie ever talked to you about me?”
“Not…not really, no.”
“I see.” She sucked her lips into her mouth, obviously hurt.
“We didn’t really talk about each other’s friends,” Ty said, feeling the need to make amends, perhaps because she’d given him a coffee.
“It’s fine,” Maria said briskly. “I wanted to apologise to you because I was very against you two being together. I spent a lot of time telling Katie you were a selfish arsehole and I know it sounds egotistical, but I feel I contributed to how things ended between you.”
“Right…” Ty, unsure of how to respond, drank some of his coffee.
“I wasn’t a friend when she needed me,” Maria continued, as though he’d asked to hear more. “I distrusted you for my own selfish reasons and for that, I owe you an apology.”
“Right.”
“Is that all you can say?”
Ty thought about it. “No.”
Maria tossed her curtain of dark hair over one shoulder. “You are such a man.”
The statement reminded Ty of Georgie. “So I’ve been told.”
At a loss for what else to do, he drank more coffee, knowing the sooner he finished, the sooner he could leave. Why hadn’t he dropped the key in the mailbox when he had the chance?
Maria let out a fluttering sigh. “I’m sorry. Ever since Katie left for Prague, a lot has happened. I’ve been forced to…to come to terms with certain things.”
He stopped himself from saying ‘right’ by the skin of his teeth. “Sure.”
Maria rolled her eyes. “Did you get a letter from her? Written on yellow paper?”
Ty frowned. “Yeah.”
“I got one also. I think they were written at the same time. I think a few of my team members got together and helped her do it. None of them are very impressed with either of us right now.”
Ty recalled the boisterous derby after-party. The thought of all those funny, good-natured girls hating his guts wasn’t as painful as seeing the picture of Middleton, but it wasn’t pleasant, either. He’d liked them. “Why aren’t they impressed with you?”
Maria traced a fingertip over the rim of her blue mug. “I…I have feelings for Katie. Feelings that made it hard for me to see her with you.”
Ty raised an eyebrow. If this woman helped convince Middleton to run away and revenge-fuck a bunch of floppy-haired Europeans, he had a major axe to grind with her. But it wasn’t such a major axe he couldn’t appreciate the idea of her spanking the shit out of Middleton’s backside. “What, uh, kind of feelings?”
A smile touched the corners of Maria’s lips. “Not the kind you’re picturing.”
Bugger. Ty took another deep swallow of coffee. He was almost three quarters done.
“Don’t you want to know what I mean?” Maria enquired.
“I can appreciate you wanting to talk to someone who you think is in the same boat as you, but I don’t know what to say.”
“I don’t want you to say anything, I want you to listen.”
“But, you haven’t—”
“I’m a sexual dominant,” she said, sharp as a dagger through a cheesecake. “I like control, and I like causing pain. When Katie first joined the Barbie Trolls, what she was struck me at once. I imagine it struck you, too?”
Ty remembered Middleton asking for directions in the GGS kitchen, how he’d wanted to pull her across his lap and lay hell on her behind. “Yeah. I noticed.”
“It’s fairly obvious, but you met a different Katie. The girl who joined my team was painfully shy, very uncomfortable with what she was. I decided to take her under my wing.”
Again, Ty pictured Maria spanking Middleton. His expression must have shown it because Maria gave a little laugh and said, “Men.”
“Sorry. It’s an occupational hazard. So you and Middleton were friends?”
“Yes, and I mean it when I say it wasn’t sexual; we talked, I learned about her past, and she learned about mine. But there was something not quite right about it all, she used to look at me…” Maria shot him an apologetic glance. “She used to look at me like I was a goddess, as though she couldn’t believe I was real. That’s an intense feeling, especially for someone like us.”
Ty didn’t like that she’d said ‘us’ but he knew what she meant. He remembered the adoring look in Middleton’s eyes when he made her come all too well. “So you fell for her?”
“Yes,” Maria said quietly. “It was a strange attraction, maternal and sisterly and authoritative. I didn’t want to sleep with her exactly, I just wanted her close, wanted her to keep looking at me the way she did when we first met and I…I used my nature against hers to do it.”
“What do you—”
“I gave her orders,” Maria said. “I bossed her around and kept her from becoming close to her teammates. I told myself I was protecting her, but it was selfish.”
“Did Middleton know what you were doing?”
Maria drew her full lips into her mouth then released them. “I thought not, but her letter made it clear she noticed a change in me. She started to feel obligated to me in ways she shouldn’t have. By the time you two became lovers it wasn’t fun for her to be around me anymore.”
Maria tapped at the rim of her coffee mug and Ty noticed the thick gold band sitting on her ring finger. “How did your husband feel about your relationship with Middleton?”
“Oh, Brendan’s a wonderful man,” she said dismissively. “He could understand where I was coming from. He met Katie and he liked her. He was glad I was trying to help her come out of her shell.”
Ty took that to mean ‘he thought there might be a threesome in it for him, if he kept his mouth shut.’ He picked up his mug and drained the last of his coffee into his mouth. “I should go. Thanks for—”
“Do you know much about Katie’s childhood?”
“No. I should—”
“I won’t go into it too much,” she said a little louder than before. “But I will say the way Katie behaves toward men, the asexual la-di-dah, glitter and cupcakes stuff, is a defence mechanism. As we got closer, talked more about BDSM, she told me she wanted to meet someone. I didn’t like the idea, but I knew I had to help her. She’d tried to find a daddy on her own before and…” Maria raised a dark brow. “Do you know about the selling…?”
“The selling her underwear thing?” Ty scowled. “Yes, I know about that.”
Over the past week the thought that countless men owned pairs of Middleton’s used panties when he didn’t had caused him quite a bit of angst .
“So, you know Katie doesn’t have the best judgement when it comes to getting what she wants from men. Before she started at your company, I helped her set up a Kinkworld account and took her to some play parties. It soon became apparent she wasn’t interested in men pretending to dominate her. She wanted the real thing, which ruled out almost everyone.”
“Why?” Ty said, keeping his question short so he wouldn’t be interrupted.
Maria gave him a put-upon smile. “True Doms, alpha males, are four-carat diamonds. They’re exceedingly rare, and no matter what they say, most women want one. They’re born, not made, and they’re snapped up quickly. The ones who stay single are highly unlikely to join websites like Kinkworld or fetish clubs.”
“Why?” Ty repeated, feeling like a parrot.
Maria waved an impatient hand in the air. “Because it requires a kind of campy showmanship that rubs alpha males the wrong way and because there’s usually no shortage of women willing to sleep with them, it’s unnecessary. So, Katie spent her whole adolescence and early adulthood pining after something she had a minuscule chance of finding. I was just starting to persuade her to lower her standards when she met you.”
Ty felt his face grow hot. “You’re saying, what? I’m an alpha male?”
Maria gave him a withering look. “Please don’t act like you don’t know what you are. It’s very irritating.”
Ty brought his mug to his lips, tried to drink air and brought it back down again. His cheeks felt like they were on fire. Why the fuck hadn’t he put the key in the goddamn mailbox?
“From the way Katie talked about you, I knew you must have been what she was looking for,” Maria said quietly, as though to herself. “Still, I never thought anything would come of it. You were older, and I had no way of knowing the attraction was mutual. Then Bendigo happened.”
Jesus, she knew about that? Ty cleared his throat. “I know it sounds sleazy, but I didn’t mean—”
“I know you didn’t mean to sleep with her that night.” Maria’s voice was sharp once more. “But seeing as the two of you did wind up in bed and seeing as you’re sitting in my kitchen, looking like shit and trying not to stare at my picture of Katie, I’m going to go out on a limb and say the attraction was very mutual and the two of you sleeping together was only a matter of time.”
“That’s not—”
“Why were you even in the pub watching Katie kiss that other boy?” Maria demanded. “She told me you were the only staff member there, why were you watching her? Why carry her back to your room instead of buzzing reception and asking them to unlock her door? Why let her seduce you? Why—”
“I don’t know why!” Anger that had been percolating inside Ty for days burst out in a great rush. “I don’t know what you think talking about this will accomplish. Middleton’s gone and it’s over for me and it’s over for you. We fucked up and we have to live with that. Now, are we done here?”
Maria shot him a look as though they were at an office party and he kept drunkenly demanding everyone do the Macarena. “You know, Katie called me from Prague yesterday?”
The news felt like a fist to the temple. “Good for you.”
“Don’t you want to know what she said about you? How much she misses you and hopes you’re doing okay?”
Ty stood, pulled out Middleton’s key and laid it on the kitchen counter. “This is why I came here. You’ve got her key, now I’m going to go.”
Maria touched the key with the tip of her finger. “If that’s what you want, Tyler, but I think you’ll regret it.”
The fact that she kept saying his full name—the way Veronica used to—did nothing to soothe his temper. “What do you want from me? Why the fuck did you invite me here?”
Maria glared at him. “Because I want my friend to be happy and I know this is a sensitive topic for you, but there’s no reason to swear.”
Ty thought of the baby and instantly felt lower than dirt. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be a pri—a jerk.”
“That’s fine,” Maria said primly. “But I think it’s time we got down to brass tacks. Did you ever read the blogs Katie posted on her Kinkworld profile?”
Ty scratched his head.
Maria muttered something that sounded a lot like ‘ignorant idiot man’ in Spanish. “Of course you didn’t. Well, go look at them.”
“Why?”
“You’ll learn a few things about how she feels about you and perhaps it will inspire you to pull your head out of your alpha male asshole long enough to see what you’re ruining.”
Ty stared at her, her silky brown hair and disdainful eyes, and decided she had no idea what the fuck she was talking about. “I’m gonna go. Thanks for the coffee.”
“You’re welcome.”
He was halfway through the kitchen door when he turned. “You never said why you saw me as a threat.”
“No, I didn’t.” Maria had produced a phone from somewhere and was playing a bubble exploding game. “Would you like me to tell you?”
“No. We both know it’s my age.”
She gave a sharp, carrying laugh. “If you think that’s the issue, you’re even stupider than your hair colour suggests.”
Ty scowled. “You said we were going to get down to brass tacks. I’m too old to be her goddamn boyfriend, and you know it.”
“Mmm.” Maria tapped away at her screen. “Weren’t you leaving?”
Ty turned back to the door, then faced her again. “I don’t know what Middleton told you about me, my scars or the firefighting or some other shit, but she doesn’t know half of what’s wrong with me.”
“Have you killed someone?”
“What? No!”
“Then why—”
“I drink too much. I sleep on the couch at my office all the time. My fiancée left me for another man, and now she keeps calling and saying she wants us to be friends. I’ve got two decades of baggage on Middleton, I can’t even hold her without feeling like I’m going to go out of my head or cry or something…” Ty pinched the bridge of his nose. “Look, what I’m saying to you is my life’s messed up. You had the right idea when you tried to warn her off me. I’m not someone you’d want anywhere near a girl like Middleton.”
“Mmm,” Maria said again. “Is it easier for you to call her that than by her name?”
“No.”
“I think you’re lying,” she said, exploding a row of purple bubbles. “I think it’s much easier, just like it’s easier for you to tell yourself you’re too damaged to have the kind of relationship Katie wants from you.”
He wanted to leave, wanted to stay, wanted to shout, but most of all, he wanted this infuriating woman to understand where he was coming from. “She wants too much.”
Maria put down her phone “Is that really it? Or does she give too much and you’re secretly convinced you don’t deserve it?”
Ty decided to play his trump card. “I don’t want kids. Never have. You think a girl like Middleton would be okay with that?”
Maria gave an unsatisfactory shrug. “I don’t know, have you ever talked to her about it? Have you ever talked to her about anything that made you feel even the slightest bit vulnerable?”
Ty said nothing.
“You know, I trained as an art therapist. Part of art therapy is manifesting your thoughts and feelings in the physical world. Your fears are much less scary when they’re on a canvas. Your goals feel much more attainable.”
“What does that—”
“Katie told me you’re writing a novel,” she said, interrupting him for the umpteenth time. “Here’s some homework for you, Alpha Male—go home and write about your relationship with Katie, write about how you wish it could be.”
“Oh yeah? What’s that gonna do? Make it come true like The Secret or some shit?”
Maria laughed. “You turn cruel when you’re vulnerable, a very masculine tendency, but not one that’s going to serve you very well going forward, Alpha Male. If it serves you at all now.”
“Stop calling me that,” Ty said through gritted teeth.
“Fine.” Maria picked up her phone. “But I’m not Katie, I don’t give a damn about your feelings. All I’m offering you is a chance to change the very sad road you’re walking down. If you’ve got half a brain, you’ll go home and write about how you wish it could be with Katie. You’ll make it real, at least to yourself.”
“I don’t want to make it real .”
Cartoonish music began playing from Maria’s phone as she resumed zapping bubbles. “What we want and what we need are two different things. Katie might think you’re a god, but I can see right through you. You won the genetic lottery, had everything handed to you on a platter. Everyone’s jealous of you. They don’t understand being that way brings its own problems.”
“Like what?” Ty asked in spite of himself.
“Like not understanding that things don’t always go your way.”
“I understand that!”
“Do you? Because from where I’m sitting it looks like you’ve painted yourself into a misery corner. One woman broke your heart and you think you can’t trust anyone with it again. You’re not twenty-five, so you don’t think you deserve someone as young and beautiful as Katie.”
The words, as she said them, cracked something open inside him. He stared at Maria, this stranger who seemed to know everything about him and heat welled behind his nose.
How, he thought. How do you know?
“I’m like you in a lot of ways,” Maria said, over the sound of the cartoon music. “I was born beautiful and confident, I always got everything I wanted. It was a shock to me when things went wrong, when I started getting old. I didn’t understand it, I fought it. I still fight it. I loved Katie because she saw me the way I wanted to see myself. I know she makes you feel the same way, but she never loved me like she loves you. She doesn’t need you to be perfect, she just needs you to be there.”
Ty rubbed a hand over his eyes. “It’s so goddamn hard.”
“I understand, but you have to come to terms with the fact that you can’t be a firefighter again, or go back in time and pick a fiancée who doesn’t leave you, or be the same age as Katie. You have to accept that and move on.”
Silence permeated the kitchen. Ty heard a wattlebird twittering by the window, the game music and beneath it the faint sounds of a TV playing upstairs. Homely noises. Pleasant noises .
Ty opened his mouth to say something when a small boy in rumpled Toy Story pyjamas came padding up the hall behind him. He raced around Ty’s legs and into the kitchen.
“Mummy?” he said in that warbling voice all kids seemed to have. “Mummy?”
Maria’s face opened up like a sunbeam. She put down her phone and threw her arms wide. “Hello, my beautiful love! You’re awake! Come over here!”
The boy rushed toward her and Maria took him in her arms. The boy’s face as he nestled into her was radiant. Ty glanced at Middleton’s picture again, thinking of all the times he’d ignored the soft look in her eyes that said she wanted him to hold her. How he’d thought he was doing her a favour, when really it had been his own fear that stopped him.
“Who’s that, mummy?” the boy asked in his jangling voice.
Maria kissed his cheeks, making him giggle. “That’s Katie’s friend, Tyler. Say hello to him.”
Ty expected the kid to ignore her, the way his nieces and nephews did when their parents made such requests. Instead, the boy turned and waved a chubby arm at him. “Hello, Tyler. Hello.”
Ty felt something inside him unhinge and for a moment he was positive he was going to cry.
“Hello, mate,” he managed to say.
Maria stood, hoisting her son onto her hip. “Tyler has to go, my love, say goodbye.”
“Goodbye, Ty,” the boy said, giggling at the rhyme.
Maria strode toward him and to his surprise, kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you for coming to see me, and good luck.”
“Right.”
She laughed. “I hope I see you again in better circumstances, Alpha Male, now go home and do your homework.”