Chapter 9
A song was stuck in Kate’s head. She first heard it on Spotify the day Ty told her to take a day off work; directly afterward it moved into her brain and refused to go away. It was a dizzy little pop number called Electric Love. Everywhere she went, she hummed it under her breath, whispering lyrics about lightning and explosive lust. She woke up with it and went to sleep with it and she didn’t even care. According to her phone, she’d listened to it seventy-seven times.
Why she liked the song was obvious, as obvious as the loose bottles of Pepperwood Ale she kept buying and drinking with her dinner, but as uncool as both of those things made her, Kate didn’t care. She sang her song, she drank her beer, and she was dizzyingly, stupidly happy. For the first time in her life, she had a secret about a man—or at least one that didn’t make her hate herself.
She and Ty had hooked up twice since their first night together. The second time had been more of the same role play; Ty found her in the kitchen ‘doing her homework’ (finishing some reports. Why not incorporate your excellent work ethic into your sex life, particularly when you were screwing your boss?) and placed a big bottle of lube on top of her notebook. “I need to relax before your mother gets home,” he told her. “Take everything off except your panties and meet me in the lounge.”
Naked except for her underwear, Kate had sidled into the lounge room nervous as the schoolgirl she was pretending to be. Ty had been reclining in one of her leather armchairs, his thick cock jutting from his jeans like a rudder. He’d helped her slick his shaft with the jelly, then closed his palm around hers, ‘showing her’ how to give him a hand job. It had been obscene the way her breasts jiggled as she worked, the feel of him thick and slippery in her hand, his look of sneering contempt as he told her to hurry up because her mother would be home soon.
“Are you almost done?” she begged.
“Shut up, or you’ll suck the lube off, and I promise you won’t like the taste.”
When he was close he didn’t make her suck or sit on him, instead he ordered her to arch her back and came all over her breasts. Kate had never eroticized that act before, she’d always thought of it as a gross by-product of porn. The reality, at least with Ty, was different. When he coated her skin it felt like she’d been marked in a tangible and incredibly erotic way and when he pulled a hand-towel from his backpack to wipe her up she almost told him no, she wanted it to last. But that would have been truly gross and not because of porn. She let him clean her, and once it was done, he shoved his hands in her underwear.
“You better come fast, little girl,” he crooned as he rubbed her clit. “If you don’t come, Daddy’s going to climb into your bed tonight and fuck you ‘till you do.”
She got off in about thirty seconds.
Kate’s fantasies of playing daddy-daughter had always tended toward the intimate. Her imaginary lovers were stern but affectionate, framing their sexual requests as attempts to correct her behaviour or as ‘normal’ things that weren’t sexual at all. Ty’s interpretation of a daddy figure as a scumbag willing to blackmail his way into sexual favours wasn’t her wheelhouse, but as soon as he introduced the idea it became all she could think about. She could barely keep her hands off herself. At work, she avoided him just so she didn’t get distracted and do something mortifying and/or sack-worthy.
A week ago she’d been forced to endure a two-hour staff meeting with Ty. She spent the whole time doing pelvic floor exercises and a fterward, she’d had to lock herself in a cubicle and touch herself just so she could concentrate. To be fair to her that had been the day after her third hookup when the purple and red bruises were just starting to blossom on her ass.
Every time Kate thought about that night, her body temperature skyrocketed. Ty had texted her a few hours before he was due to arrive at her place.
You’re getting spanked tonight. How hard do you want it?
She hadn’t even needed to think about it.
Hard enough that it leaves bruises.
She’d been making ginger biscuits when Ty burst into her kitchen, six plus feet of hard angry male. He’d picked her up, pushed her against her pantry door and accused her of taking money out of his wallet. Kate had denied it, but her voice quivered so much it sounded as though she was guilty.
“You’re a liar,” Ty snarled, carrying her to the marble counter and yanking up her skirt. “You know what happens to little girls who lie to their Daddies?”
“No, please, stop.”
Ty picked up the wooden spoon she’d been using and held the handle in front of her. “Bite down,” he said and when she did he honest-to-god tore off her underwear. Just tore it off like it was wrapping paper.
“Are you going to tell the truth or am I going to have to punish you?” he snarled.
It was difficult to insist you were telling the truth through a wooden spoon but Kate tried. When she did, Ty proceeded to lay sheer raging hell on her ass. This wasn’t playful ‘you’ve been a naughty girl’ swats, this was his huge hand cracking down on her flesh with enough force to split wood. It was like lightning in reverse, first the noise and then the electric zap of pain. Kate had wanted it to stop, but every strike brought her closer to some undefinable edge she wanted to cross, couldn’t cross, needed to cross.
She had frightened herself with the pleas that had come out of her mouth, guttural appeals for mercy throttled by the wooden spoon, but Ty hadn’t hesitated. Somehow he’d known exactly where she wanted to go and when she burst into tears the sensation was every bit as euphoric as it had been when they first had sex. He’d given her three more slaps that barely even registered then took the spoon from between her teeth. “Did you take money from my wallet, Katie?”
“Yes,” she sobbed, tears rolling down her chin. “Yes.”
“What did you spend it on?”
“Lip gloss.”
He smoothed a hand over her smarting behind. “Will you do it again?”
A tear rolled down her face and plopped onto the counter. “No, Daddy.”
“Good. Now you’ll go put on that lip gloss and you’ll pay me back with your mouth. You’ll do it a dollar at a time until you don’t owe me anything, understood?”
Kate nodded, so light and floaty it was like she was on drugs. She’d always thought subspace was a thing kinksters invented to make their sex sound better than other people’s, but this was different. She hadn’t orgasmed, but she’d gone somewhere she’d needed to go deep inside. A peaceful, perfect place.
Thankfully, Ty hadn’t made her blow him right away, a task that would have been near impossible in her limp state. He’d carried her to her couch and spread her pliant legs wide. The orgasm she’d had as he thrust inside her was as bright as a summer cloud. Now that she knew she could do it, now that she didn’t have to be afraid, it was easy. It was like magic.
Afterward, they ate ginger biscuits and watched another documentary she’d recorded on polar bears. She’d wanted to hug him when the announcer talked about their dwindling numbers and maybe Ty had sensed it because he’d wrapped her very tightly in her peach blanket and given her a gruff kiss on the forehead.
She’d thought, Tell me this is as amazing for you as it is for me. Tell me you think I’m beautiful.
He’d said, “That was great, Middleton. I’ll see you soon. Stay warm.”
The next day, true to all clichés, Kate could barely sit down. She could see why this had been a punishment back when people genuinely thought pain taught kids not to steal and lie. When she checked her ass in the bathroom mirror at work, she was amazed to find it covered in indigo bruises. She’d snapped a picture for her own benefit and decided it was too beautiful not to share. Ty’s response came an hour later.
Purple suits you, Middleton. You should wear it more often.
It was the middle of a particularly bitter Melbourne winter, but Kate felt like she’d stumbled into spring. Every morning she woke up with excitement bubbling in her middle and remembered she was sleeping with Tyler Henderson. She laughed at stupid jokes, stopped to smell flowers and ordered things she’d never heard of for dinner. Everything felt new and exciting and silly again. Electric Love was in the air and even as she skated around the Northcote multi-purpose stadium at derby practice, she couldn’t stop herself from singing the words. At least, she couldn’t until Casey Hindley threw an elbow into her side. “Are you singing while you skate?”
“Erm…no?”
“I shouldn’t have framed that as a question. I heard you singing while you skate; why are you so weirdly happy?”
Kate smiled weakly. Casey was one of the most popular girls on the team. As a practicing Wiccan, she was perpetually adorned in flowing skirts, flower crowns and protective crystals. She held big parties on the solstice that, through a combination of shyness and Catholic guilt, Kate had never attended. It was a well-known Barbie Troll fact that if you had a secret Casey wanted to know, she hounded you like a bulldog until she had every detail. “I’m not happy. I mean, I am but not for any reason. And no more than usual.”
Casey narrowed her large indigo-blue eyes. “Are you on drugs?”
Kind of. “No, why?”
“Because it’s fucking freezing in here. My feet and tits and hands are numb, and you’re grinning like we’re on holiday in the Bahamas.”
“I’m not!”
“You really are, the question is why?”
Tambara Oluo pulled up alongside them, her dark skin gleaming with sweat. “She’s getting dicked, obviously. What kind of witch are you, Case?”
“Wicca has nothing to do with mind reading!” Casey snapped. She turned to Kate. “Are you getting dicked?”
“No! Things are just going well at work, and I like the cold weather—”
“And you’re getting reamed in the pussy,” Tam agreed. “Who’s the guy? Or are you finally letting Rapunzel have her way with you?”
Rapunzel, whose metal studded corset made her look even more like a Viking berserker than usual, skidded up to join them. The waist-length braid for which she’d gotten her name wrapped itself around Casey’s neck like a gold rope.
“Fucking hell!”
“Soz about that Case,” Rapunzel said, untangling her hair from her teammate’s oesophagus. “What are you lot talking about?”
“Macca’s getting laid,” Tam said, before Kate could respond. “We were wondering if you were doing the honours.”
“I wish.” Rapunzel winked at Kate. “Fight him for you?”
“I’m not seeing anyone!”
“You’re clearly lying.” Rapunzel slung an arm over Kate’s shoulders. “My advice? Tell Casey about it now. Remember when Hellsy wouldn’t show us her new tattoo?”
“I remember Casey skating around behind her, threatening to pull up her skirt?”
Rapunzel laughed. “Exactly. Just confess, mate. Tell her who the guy is.”
“But there is no guy.”
“Oh, so it’s a girl? Even better. You, me, and her, this Friday? I give great third.”
Kate usually shied away from Rapunzel’s indiscriminate guerilla style-flirting, scared she was being mocked. Today, her good mood was a buffer, reminding her that Rapunzel meant well and said stuff like this to everyone. She ducked out from under her arm. “Thanks, but I’m happy doing things in pairs right now.”
“Illuminati confirmed!” Casey poked a quartz-adorned finger into Kate’s side. “Speak up, Mac. Who is this guy? You’ve been single for longer than I have, I demand to know who you’re fucking!”
“No one, I swear.”
Tam slid her arm through Kate’s and rolled her away from the group like a gentleman suitor taking a maiden for a walk. “Come on Mac, you can tell me. Is it someone naughty?”
Kate thought about Ty pressing her face into her couch as he hammered into her from behind, snarling about what a dirty little girl she was. “I…”
“It is!” Tam announced.
“Knew it,” Rapunzel said, adjusted her corset. “She’s got that look lesbos get when they’re banging a man. I’d say you’re fucking a married guy but something tells me you’re too pure to fuck a married guy.”
“I am. At least, I hope so.” She’d wasted a lot of time wondering how she’d behave toward Ty if his fiancée hadn’t left him, and had mentally declared the topic off-limits.
Tam squeezed her shoulders. “I’ve never known you to do anything naughty before, Macca. I thought you were a virgin.”
“No, I just kind of look like one.”
Her teammates laughed and Kate felt a pleasurable squirm of happiness. Tam, Casey and Rapunzel were the ringleaders of the Barbie Trolls, and it was kind of flattering they’d taken an interest in her, even if it was because she was screwing someone.
Rapunzel framed Kate’s face in her hands. “I don’t think you look like a virgin. I think you look like a nun.”
“Rapunzel!” Tam scolded.
“A cute nun!”
“Can we please stop off-roading here?” Casey demanded. “Mac, where’d you meet this male? Tinder? Bumble? OkCupid? Christian Mingle?”
“IRL?” Rapunzel suggested. “She looks like the kind of girl who’d get approached IRL in like a park or something.”
Tam shook out her ombre hair. “No, not a park, the State Library. They were both reaching for the same copy of The Life of Pi, and they did the adorable ‘you have it, no you have it’ thing.”
Kate couldn’t help but laugh. “You’re all wrong.”
“So tell us who he is and we’ll be right.”
At this point, Kate did want to tell them about Ty, if only to stop the guessing, but she couldn’t. He was her boss, and she didn’t think it was smart to tell her derby term she was sexing her boss.
“Did you hear they’re remaking Tomb Raider?” she said. “Thoughts? Comments?”
Her teammates soundly ignored her and continued to list situations where Kate could have met her lover—café, hostage situation, when she applied to be a nun, and he’s a hot priest, and that’s why it’s a secret.
Shrilly Temple—real name Gilly—came rolling up to join them. “What’s happening here?”
“Macca’s shagging someone she shouldn’t be,” Rapunzel said.
Gilly raised a pierced brow at Kate. “I thought you were asexual?”
“Or a nun,” Rapunzel agreed. “Turns out, she’s not. Although, now I’m starting to get really turned on about the idea of fucking a nun.”
Everyone laughed. As the gossip session continued and the guesses grew more bizarre, she decided, in a warm rush of happiness, to just go ahead and tell them. None of them knew Ty, and if she was honest, she was dying to brag just a little. “It’s a guy I work with. It’s not a big deal, but you guys can’t say anything, okay?”
There was a moment of silence. After all the elaborate speculations, Kate guessed ‘a guy I work with’ was pretty dull.
“I called it,” Rapunzel said and cutting through any and all protests to the contrary she added; “How is that naughty? I fuck people I work with all the time.”
Tam wrinkled her brow. “You drive for Uber Eats?”
“And?”
“And fucking people in your car is not the same thing.”
“It is, but shut up. Macca, what’s this guy like?”
Kate licked her lip, determined not to rant on about Ty’s beauty and infinite impressive qualities the way she had with Maria. “He’s handsome and blond and a little older than me.”
That got her a chorus of intrigued oohs.
“How old?” Casey demanded.
“Erm, in his forties.”
More intrigued oohs.
Gilly gripped her arm. “Does he have dad-bod?”
“That depends on…what that is?”
“When an older hot guy puffs out a bit because he’s really into Big Macs. Kind of like Chris Pratt in Parks and Rec.”
Kate did a visual comparison of Andy Dwyer and Ty. “Oh. No, he’s a Guardians of The Galaxy Chris Pratt. He used to be a metro firefighter and he has abs.”
The loudest chorus of intrigued oohs yet.
Tam clapped her hands. “Naww, that’s amazing Mac. I was hoping you’d meet someone. I was thinking about trying to set you up with my brother.”
Kate stared at her. “Seriously? That’s so sweet.”
Rapunzel elbowed Tam out of the way. “You’re only saying that because you haven’t met her brother; he’s an accountant for Westpac and he’s boring as shit. If you were going to suck the dick of someone it should be my brother. He paints street murals.”
“Oh, wow—”
“With spray paint,” Tam said. “It’s basically just organised vandalism. Meanwhile, my brother just bought a house in Thornbury and—”
“I want to hear more about this firefighter,” Casey interrupted. “Mac, if you want me to do a romance star chart for you both, I will. All I need is the year, month, day and minute you were both born.”
Kate blinked. “Wow, um, thank you. But there is no way I can find out the exact minute Ty was born without him thinking I’m a freak.”
“Fair enough, when are you seeing him again?”
“Tonight.” Kate’s insides squirmed pleasurably at the thought of what she and Ty had planned for the evening.
“Ooh, la, la. Where are you guys going?” Tam asked. “Movies? Dinner? Or are you still in the ‘stay home and fuck each other constantly’ stage of the relationship?”
“Girls!” Maria’s voice was sharp as she strode toward them. “You’re supposed to be warming down, not standing around gossiping!”
“But mama bear, we need to gossip,” Casey said tugging her arm. “Macca’s got a hot firefighter boyfriend.”
Maria turned to look at Kate. “Does she now?”
Kate felt all her excitement drain out of her feet into the cold floorboards. “He’s not, erm, we’re not actually together.”
“I see.” Maria’s eyes were cold.
Aside from a couple of texts, she and Maria hadn’t discussed the Ty situation since that day in the coffee shop. Maria had invited her over for dinner a couple of times, but Kate had declined. She had been busy with work, Ty, and training but she was also enjoying keeping her sex life to herself. Maria, she knew, would want to analyse everything down to the bones and remind her Ty didn’t really care about her. Kate didn’t want that. She understood heartbreak was probably waiting down the line, but what she and Ty were exploring right now was so incredible, so electric, she wanted time to enjoy it on her own. That appeared to be backfiring.
Maria opened her mouth and Kate braced herself for her disapproval, when a shrill blast cut through the air. They all turned to see Rapunzel swinging a silver sports whistle through the air. “That was quite loud wasn’t it?”
“Yes! Where’d you get that fucking whistle from?” Gilly shrieked
“Found it. Want me to run a warm- down drill, Maria?”
As everyone started swearing at Rapunzel for scaring them, Kate breathed a sigh of relief. She would warm down, then slip away while Maria was busy with the other girls. She had another date with Ty tonight and she didn’t want—
A warm hand closed over her arm and Kate found herself face-to-face with an extra irritated Maria. “You told your teammates about Tyler Henderson?” she asked.
So much for her big escape. “No, well, kind of,” Kate said. “I told them I was seeing someone from work.”
Maria’s lips thinned. “Are you seeing someone from work? I was under the impression you were having casual daddy-daughter sex with a forty-five-year-old man who happens to be your boss.”
“Maria!” Kate glanced around to see if anyone had heard, but mercifully everyone was still bitching out Rapunzel for blowing the whistle. “I didn’t mean to tell them about Ty. They guessed I was seeing someone and I panicked.”
Maria’s fierce expression softened slightly. “I understand you wanting to bond with them, Katie, but telling more people about Tyler is only going to raise your expectations even higher than they already are.”
Kate looked down at her pink and black skates. “I know, but I just—”
“We still haven’t discussed how this situation has progressed,” Maria said. “Are you free after practice? You should come to my place for dinner.”
Her heart sinking, Kate opened her mouth to say ‘yes, I’m free’ when, over Maria’s shoulder, she saw Casey and Tam trying to steal Rapunzel’s whistle while Gilly filmed them on her phone. All four of them were laughing. They looked so happy, so careless and unlikely to lecture her for sleeping with a gorgeous older man. So Kate did something bad. She smiled at Maria and said, “I’d love to have dinner, but the girls just invited me out for drinks.”
It wasn’t technically a lie. The team usually went to Rumba Bar after training on Thursdays, she’d just never gone along.
Maria glanced over at the girls’ play-fight and frowned. “Are you sure that’s a good idea? They’ll only grill you about Tyler.”
And you won’t? Kate shoved the angsty thought aside. “I joined the team to learn how to be friends with women. It’s been three years; I think I might be ready to go out for drinks.”
Maria didn’t smile. “Very well. Come and help me pull out the mats for stretching, please.”
She was pissed, but Kate didn’t have enough emotional space to feel bad, she needed to confront one of her greatest personal fears. She skated over to the girls whose play fight appeared to be wrapping up out of sheer exhaustion.
“Macca!” Tam said, draping her arm across Kate’s shoulder. She smelled incredible, like vanilla and spice. “Did you see me kick this big bitch in the shins?”
“No, but you smell amazing.” The moment the dorky compliment left her mouth, Kate was mortified, but Tam grinned.
“Thanks, it’s a body butter my mum makes. Hey, want to come out for drinks tonight?”
Kate couldn’t believe it was that easy. “Um, okay?”
“Excellent! Do you like espresso martinis?”
“I’ve never had one.”
“So you are a virgin.” Rapunzel shoved Kate in her side. “And tonight we’ll collectively pop your cherry.”
Tam gave her a look of disgust. “Don’t worry about her. We muzzle her outside the stadium.”
Rapunzel smacked her friend on the ass. “You wish. How fucking kinky are you, anyway?”
“Very,” Tam shouted back. “You know that.”
Rumba Bar courted the derby crowd; they gave players half-price drinks and let them wear their skates on the battered hardwood floors. Kate figured the short shorts and counter-culture vibe was good for business; the place was packed. She crammed herself into a booth between Tam and Rapunzel and despite her plan to eat something before drinking, was sipping an espresso martini in five seconds flat. Turned out they were just cold vodka coffees, but she liked the taste. Despite Maria’s prediction that she would be grilled about Ty, the girls didn’t even mention him. They started teasing one another about their derby names instead.
“I get that you wanted a witch theme,” Rapunzel said to Casey. “But Hermione Maim-Her? That doesn’t even make sense.”
“You can fucking talk! Your name is just ‘Rapunzel.’ That’s not a play on words, that’s just what we call you.”
“You try thinking of a play on words about Rapunzel then.”
“My derby name is perfect.” Tam raised her martini glass as though toasting herself.
Rapunzel scoffed. “You stole it. There are about fifty thousand Foxxy Balboas in America. Face it, the only person on the team who has a cool original name is Mac.”
Kate almost spat out her vodka coffee. “Seriously?”
“Hell yeah. Princess Bleach, how’d you come up with that?”
Kate felt her smile stiffen like day-old bread. “I’m, um, the youngest kid in my family. Everyone used to call me Princess.”
The rest of the girls at the table gave her big ‘nawww’ smiles, telling her she’d sounded convincingly cheerful. Kate wondered what they’d say if she told them the term had never been one of endearment.
Her dad was one of those Catholics who took the lords name in vain, plucked two dollar coins out of shopping center fountains, never went to church and invoked his religion whenever the subject of birth control was raised. Child after child he told her mother she’d soon be too old to get pregnant and he didn’t need to offend the big man in the sky by getting a vasectomy. Her dad didn’t know shit. At the age of forty-seven Brenda McGrath fell pregnant with her ninth kid.
Kate was five years younger than her nearest sister, Claudia. All her older siblings thought they were done enduring screaming, shitting babies. They welcomed her as one would welcome a sex offender into a community swimming pool, which was to say, not at all. Once, when he was drunk, her brother Josh had told her they planned to smother her. “We picked out a blanket and everything, but then mum found out and stopped us.”
Kate grew up fully aware no one wanted her to be born. That would have been bad enough, but she’d cried a lot, slept poorly and struggled to make friends. That was the undiagnosed ADHD, but her family didn’t know that. They thought she was a brat. Her parents were exhausted by then, completely over the whole child-rearing lark. All they wanted was for her to shut up and stay out of their way. Because she couldn’t, because she made things hard, Kate became the little princess. As in, “Suck it up, Princess. Stop crying, Princess. Hurry up, Princess. Mummmm, Princess locked herself in the bathroom again.”
Kate wasn’t sure why she’d chosen Princess as her derby name. Maybe she was trying to reclaim it, maybe the word had been drilled so deep, it was the first thing she’d considered labelling herself when she was asked to choose a name. The only thing she knew was that ‘Princess Bleach’ was a better derby name than her other childhood monikers; ‘Runty,’ ‘Spaz-basket’ and ‘Dipshit Magee.’
Mercifully the conversation steered away from derby names and toward who was the most fuckable ‘90s rock star. Kate sipped her vodka coffee and had just put forward Gavin Rossdale (unfortunate band, gorgeous face) when Casey squealed, “Maria! I didn’t know you were coming!”
Kate’s stomach dropped. Sure enough their coach was squeezing herself into the booth beside Gilly. “I felt like unwinding so I called my babysitter,” she said. “What are we all drinking?”
Another round of espresso martinis was ordered, and the conversation picked up again, this time with Maria at the helm. Soon the whole team was laughing at her stories and discussing sex and BDSM and politics. Kate couldn’t think of a single thing to say. She felt irrelevant and completely out of place. She was probably being paranoid but it also felt like Maria was shutting her out of the conversation. When she hit the bottom of her second martini, she excused herself to go to the bathroom and decided she’d leave. It had been silly of her to come to Rumba for drinks, as though she could just make friends with all these cool, uninhibited women. She exited the bathroom stall and walked straight into Maria’s velvet-covered boobs. “Sugar!”
Maria barely seemed to notice, her dark eyes were wild. “Katie, are you upset with me?”
Kate didn’t know what to say. The obvious answer was ‘yes,’ but she didn’t know if she should say it. Maria looked so upset and really, what had she done? Ask after her, invite her to dinner and then come to the same social gathering Kate had been at. How was that a crime? “No, I’m not.”
“Thank the lord,” Maria beamed at her. “Come back to the table and hang out with the rest of the team.”
“That’s okay. I’m probably going to head home.”
“Why? I only just got here!”
Kate walked over to the graffitied rack of sinks and turned taps until she found one that worked. “I’m sorry,” she said to the Maria in the cracked mirror. “I’m, um, seeing Ty tonight.”
Mirror-Maria’s smile faded. She walked closer, bringing with her the plum of her perfume and the faint acrylic scent of her freshly varnished nails. “You know it’s a vulnerable position you’re putting yourself in. Even pretending to be violated can take an emotional toll.”
“I know,” Kate said. “But it’s been amazing. I have zero complaints.”
A small huffing noise. “How is he at aftercare?”
Truthfully, Kate didn’t know. In all the BDSM books Maria made her read, aftercare was listed as cuddles and kisses, emotional reassurance, and skin-to-skin contact. Kate wasn’t sure if watching documentaries and having a few drinks counted, nor did that weird thing where Ty wrapped her really tightly in a blanket, but she couldn’t tell Maria that.
“He’s great at aftercare,” she said with a chirpiness that sounded weak even to her own ears.
Mirror-Maria looked unimpressed. “Very convincing.”
Kate sighed. “Okay, I get that I’ve never done this before and I don’t have anything to compare it to, but the sex is great and w e’re having a lot of fun.”
“You’re using condoms?”
Kate felt like Maria was hunting for something to get annoyed about. “Yes.”
“What about for oral?”
“No. He offered, but I hate the way they taste.”
“Is he going down on you?”
Kate winced. That was another danger zone. Ty had never put his mouth near or around her pussy and never expressed any interest in doing so. “Yeah, he uh, loves doing it.”
“Really?”
“Oh my gosh, what’s with the Spanish Inquisition, Maria?” Kate walked over to the hand towels and tore off a sheet with more force than was required.
“I’m sorry,” she said, not sounding it. “I just don’t trust this man.”
Kate dried her hands and threw the towel in the overflowing bin. “I get that, but you don’t need to worry. I think Ty and I are becoming friends.”
Maria scoffed. “Friends? Like you were friends with all the boys at your school? Like you were friends with Mr Peterson?”
It took a few seconds for the insult of what she was saying to sink in, but once it did, Kate felt something she hadn’t felt in a long, long time. A thin red vein of anger wrapping itself around her like a jellyfish tentacle.
“No,” she said. “Not like that.”
She turned and walked toward the door. Maria dashed in front of her and blocked her exit. “Katie, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”
“You shouldn’t have,” Kate agreed, but the look of agonized contrition on Maria’s face bled some of the heat out of her anger. “I get why you don’t trust Ty, but you need to understand this isn’t like what I did at school or…afterward. This is different. I know what I’m doing now.”
Maria took her still-damp hand and squeezed it. “Just give me some time, Katie. Be patient. You mean so much to me, I don’t want to see this man hurt you.”
Kate made herself smile. She was good at that. “I know.”
They shared a slightly uncomfortable hug and Kate went back to the booth to retrieve her sports bag. The other girls were tipsy, and Kate knew her leaving wasn’t going to affect them in the slightest. Feeling depleted and headachy from the espresso martinis, she slipped out of Rumba and into the frosty night. She checked her phone and found a text from Ty.
I’ll be at your place in fifteen minutes. I had better see those skates tonight, Middleton.
She smiled at her screen, relieved to feel something as uncomplicated as lust. Then, as though her brain was determined to ruin it, something occurred to her. The guys at work had given her another princess nickname—Middleton—and no one called her Middleton more than Ty. Aside from when they were role playing, that was all he called her. As she stood on the cold street, Kate wondered why that was. It could have been a quirk, but something about it felt a little strange, the same way him never going down on her, or taking off his clothes when they were having sex was strange. Her own words to Maria echoed in her head. I think Ty and I are becoming friends. She shoved her phone back into her pocket, feeling stupid.