Act Your Age

by Eve Dangerfield

  “But…that can’t be right.” Veronica shook her head so fast her hair looked like a blonde cloud.

  Ty took Veronica’s hand. “Babe, I love you more than anything and we should have talked about this before now, but if you really want to be a mum, I don’t know if what we have can work.”

  The panic Ty had seen on her face when he told her he didn’t want kids was a sun shower compared to the monsoon that came after that. They’d talked for five hours, and by the end, Veronica promised she didn’t want kids, either. They were loud and smelly and would make her pee when she laughed. She’d only been asking out of curiosity. A part of Ty had known she wasn’t telling the truth, but then she’d opened her dressing gown and told him to kiss her and he’d fallen for the oldest trick in the book: distraction by way of tits.

  In the following weeks, Ty could feel the issue pulsing under the surface of their relationship, like the yellowish pus inside a pimple. It came to a head in the cab ride home from her friend Deidre’s birthday party. Veronica, drunk and on painkillers, had cried so loudly people in other cars kept turning around to look at them.

  “Why won’t you let me be a mum?” she wailed. “Everyone thinks we’d have the most beautiful babies.”

  “It doesn’t matter what everyone thinks,” Ty said through gritted teeth. “Please, can we talk about this at home?”

  “You’re a heartless bastard! You’re unnatural! Passing along your genes is the point of nature!”

  “So’s dying of cancer but that didn’t stop us from inventing chemo.”

  The cabbie had let out a small snort of laughter. It didn’t help.

  “Oh, you’re so smart, aren’t you, Tyler?” Veronica screamed. “So fucking clever. Well, you know what? Maybe you can decide not to have kids, but I can’t be a woman and not have a baby!”

  That had hit a personal nerve. One that made him forget his vow of five seconds ago, that he would be calm in the face of her anger.

  “What about Georgie?” he bellowed. “You know she can’t have kids. Does that mean she’s not a woman? That she and Dave should just kill themselves because their lives are pointless?”

  He shouldn’t have brought up Georgie; his girlfriend had hated his best friend from the moment they met. Dropping her name in an argument was tantamount to glugging gasoline all over an open fire.

  “Oh, perfect Georgie,” Veronica screamed with predictable fury. “Of course you’d bring up perfect, perfect Georgie.”

  “Don’t start that again. She’s my friend, and she’s—”

  “Irrelevant! I’m not infertile, you’re not infertile, we have a choice and do you know what I think? I think if you really loved me you’d want to have babies with me.” Veronica slapped her palm against the cab window. “Let me out! I want to go back to the party!”

  Though every single cell in his body longed to let her go, Ty convinced his drunk girlfriend to stay in the taxi. They drove home in a thundercloud of angry silence and as soon as the car hit their driveway, Veronica sprinted into the house.

  Ty pulled out his wallet and the driver, a middle-aged Indian man, had turned to look at him.

  “I was you once,” he said. “Now I have four children. I love them, but believe me when I say, go and get a vasectomy.”

  That night, Ty slept on the couch. The next day he’d gotten as far as calling a doctor’s office when Veronica came out of their bedroom wearing his old rugby jumper and a look of deepest remorse.

  “I love you,” she’d told him. “I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone. I’m not going to give you up for some baby that’ll just wreck my vagina. You’re enough, Ty. You’re more than enough.”

  And so they’d gotten engaged.

  Six months later, when the date had been set, and the venue booked, Veronica started acting strange. She got edgy whenever he mentioned the wedding, worked late a lot and saw friends for coffee dates that lasted hours. Ty was apprehensive, but told himself she needed space. Maybe he felt guilty over the baby issue. Maybe he just didn’t want to know what he already suspected to be true. It was Georgie who blew Veronica’s secret wide open. She spent a week tailing her and discovered the ‘friend’ Veronica was having coffee with was Colin Boyd, another PR jockey at her firm. Turned out they weren’t so much having coffee as they were getting a hotel room in the middle of the day.

  “It’s not physical,” Veronica had sobbed when Ty confronted her. “Colin just understands my situation.”

  As it turned out, Colin Boyd, with his bovine face and chemically whitened teeth, wanted babies, too. Ty got his diamond back and within eight weeks, Veronica had another one. A better one. She was married nine months later in a beachside wedding just like the one they’d been planning. Their mutual friends all swore to him it was terrible.

  “The oysters were off,” Henry said. “And Colin’s teeth looked like someone was shining a black light over a cum-stain. Good luck to them, I say. They deserve each other.”

  And perhaps they did. Once his initial betrayal burned away, Ty could admit he and Veronica were far from the perfect couple. She was good at PR, his ex-fiancée, and the outside had always looked more heartwarming than it ever felt. Still, Ty longed for the first few months of their relationship, not just because of the travel or the sex but because he’d been different back then, when he thought he’d met the woman he could love for the rest of his life. He missed that comfortable delusion and the man who had believed it. That man felt like a brother who’d moved overseas for work and never, ever called.

  It had been hard, leaving the MFB but the death of his engagement had bled the last of his hope out of him. For six months he ate, drank and fucked more than he had when he was nineteen, until even debauchery felt monochrome. When that happened life itself, became boring, a copy of a copy of a copy. The only new thing was his ever-increasing contempt for a perky civil engineer who wore floral headbands and baked blueberry cheesecake muffins.

  Before Bendigo, his attraction to Middleton had been a somewhat safe bet. She was cute, but she didn’t seem real to him. She was too preppy and one-dimensional and perfect. After Bendigo, it was harder to resist, but it felt good, like ignoring office birthday cake when you were trying to lose weight. It left him feeling righteous and smug, and people were starting to notice.

  “You’re seeing someone, aren’t you?” Georgie had asked him over dumplings, pure hope sparkling in her eyes.

  “My right hand,” Ty told her. “My left when that gets old.”

  Georgie wrinkled her nose. “Overshare.”

  “You asked. And you shouldn’t ask. You know I’m done with all that shit. I’m a bachelor for life now, like Batman.”

  “More like the Unabomber.”

  “Whatever. Point is, I’m single.”

  Georgie sighed. “Tyler, lie all you want. We both know you’re a lame romantic at heart. If you’re really not seeing anyone, please let me set you up with Millie.”

  Ty rolled his eyes. “Goddammit, no!”

  “But she’s an entonologist!” Georgie pleaded. “And she teaches Pilates in her spare time!”

  She raised and lowered her eyebrows as though teaching Pilates was the single most erotic thing a woman could do. Ty poked her with his chopsticks. “No.”

  She prodded him back, leaving two small soy-sauce stains that looked like a colon. “Fine. Close the door on love if you must, but at least get some action. When you don’t get laid you go all sad around the eyes.”

  She had a point. Not about his sad eyes, but about getting laid. As he’d sat drinking at his desk after work Ty decided it was high time he flew to Sydney to fuck the schoolteacher he met in a bar last year. He’d gotten as far as checking the flights and wondering if she’d wear a big pink jumper and let him call her ‘Middleton’ when the original—well not the original, but a Middleton—was standing in front of him, in clear defiance of his order to leave him alone. Her reason for being there was obv
ious and in that moment Ty’s resistance had crumbled. Why go to Sydney when what he wanted more than anything was standing right in front of him.

  Fuck it, he’d thought. Let me rub that sweetness all over me. See if I can’t make it seep in.

  But no sooner had he given in than she’d handed him a note like girls used to in Secondary School and vanished. Ty still hadn’t opened it. He was scared of what he’d find written inside and half convinced it would be ‘Do you like me y/n?’ A note. He offered to give her the sex they’d spent years craving and she’d given him a note.

  As he finished the last of his whiskey, Ty found himself logging into Facebook. There was no need to search for the picture he wanted to see; with five hundred likes and ninety-two comments, it was right at the top of his feed. Most of Veronica’s friends were in PR and, understandably, very into social media.

  Ty held his phone close to his face, drinking in the image of Veronica and her baby. It had been Photoshopped, that was the first thing he noticed. His ex’s skin was silky smooth, the tiny scar between her eyebrows nowhere to be found. The kid looked like every other Caucasian newborn Ty had ever seen, a reddish meatball with eyes. He squinted harder, confused by the fact that he felt nothing. He was looking at the woman he’d hoped to marry, and she was holding the son she’d had with another man, a son she’d pushed out of the body he’d once loved so thoroughly, and he felt…nothing. No pain, no sense that he should have been the one taking that picture, tilting the camera slightly to the right so Veronica’s cheekbones would look better.

  It’s over. I didn’t stop her from getting what she wanted, he thought. Maybe now I can get what I want.

  He stood up and went to the bathroom for a piss. When he returned the first thing he saw was Middleton’s note lying in the centre of his desk. He picked it up and opened it. To his relief the message was neither gushing, nor full of Fatal Attraction-style threats. She’d written that she wanted him and if he wanted her, too, he should look at her Kinkworld profile.

  Ty had no idea what the hell Kinkworld was. It sounded like a porn website. Dimly, his alcohol-soaked brain wondered if Middleton was moonlighting as a pornstar. He scowled, then realised he was being ridiculous. The woman could barely look at him. There was no chance she was getting paid to screw on camera.

  Occam’s Razor, Henderson. What’s the logical conclusion here?

  The logical conclusion was that she wanted to show him something embarrassing or sensitive. Maybe Kinkworld was a porn site, and she wanted to show him a video she liked. That would be a trip. Ty pulled his laptop out of his backpack and turned on his mobile phone hotspot. He’d had to fire employees for not restricting their porn habits to their goddamn phones where they belonged, he wasn’t going down the same way.

  His first glimpse of Kinkworld was a little disappointing. It wasn’t a porn site but some kind of medieval-looking Facebook done up in black and purple. There was no search box where he could type in Middleton’s pseudonym, only a banner that encouraged him to create an account so ‘kinky people from all walks of life can get to know you and “get to KNOW you,” wink-wink.’

  Ty hesitated. He hated social media and only sheer force of necessity had forced him to get a Facebook account. But it looked like the only way to gain access to whatever Middleton wanted to show him was to create a profile. He decided to make one, reassuring himself that if he had to ‘friend’ her or answer any questionnaires or give over his credit card, he’d just quit his job and never speak to her again.

  Creating an account only took a couple of seconds. He threw in a fake name, Brian Merchant, confirmed his email address and phone number, and he was there. Banners of naked women suspended in ropes greeted him and—joy of all joys—a search box appeared in the right-hand corner. He typed in @LolaJones.

  Instantly the screen displayed a tiny thumbnail picture of a woman’s torso. Fat purple letters asked, is this who you were looking for?

  “Here’s fucking hoping,” Ty muttered.

  He clicked on the picture and the screen redirected. What came up resembled a profile page on LinkedIn, only full of information that if publically known would ensure you never got hired again. The thumbnail picture was bigger now; a woman in a high-waisted skirt patterned with daisies, her long brown hair arranged so it covered her breasts.

  Middleton. Ty would have known it even if she’d not directed him here. She had a tiny beauty mark on her collarbone he recognised. He felt a hot pang of jealousy that she’d put a picture of it on the internet for anonymous perverts to ogle, then remembered he was one of those perverts and decided to get down to business. He skimmed her description as quickly as his drunk eyes would allow. It announced @LolaJones was straight, interested in casual and long term relationships and was twenty-five-years-old. Ty knew that already, but seeing the numbers was always a sock in the guts. He paused, trying to remember what he was doing when he was twenty-five. Living in a cockroach-infested share house in London, training to be a chef during the day, running wild through the city until dawn. Middleton was twenty-five and was trying to have sex with him.

  “You knew that already,” Ty reminded himself. “Keep going.”

  He scrolled down and began to read the short bio below the description.

  Hi, I’m Lola,

  “Middleton,” Ty muttered. “Your name is Middleton, Middleton.”

  I guess you could say I’m a girly girl.

  “I do say that. Frequently.”

  I like romance and kisses, cupcakes and books where men carry women in the rain. You name something twee, and I probably own or like it. That being said, I’m also a young professional with a lot of socialist, tree hugging and feminist opinions and if you can’t reconcile those two things, please don’t contact me.

  Ty blinked, surprised by her choice of language. He’d never heard Middleton refer to herself as a socialist or a feminist. Outwardly she looked like a woman who played into the helpless ‘I can’t see a spider without screaming’ stereotype of femininity.

  I’m interested in meeting new people, especially if they’re sexy, sane and interested in spanking me. Check out the list of kinks at the bottom for more…

  Abandoning the bio, Ty scrolled to the bottom. Middleton’s kink list was extensive.

  Spanking, lingerie, bondage, handcuffs, high heels (wearing), anal sex (curious about) and—

  Ty’s heart pounded against his rib cage.

  —daddy-daughter role-play.

  He blew out a breath and stared up at the ceiling of his office. Just reading those words made his blood pump faster. He wanted to message her on this bizarre sex-Facebook and tell her to meet him in the nearest motel. Tell her he was game for it all, every last kink and he could help her fuck her way through every fantasy she’d ever had. But that wasn’t how he should play this. He’d already tried to seduce her tonight, and she ran. She was willing, but she wanted him to know more. Ty scrolled back up and kept reading her bio.

  You might have noticed I didn’t put baby girl, submissive, masochist or spanko next to my role. Not to sound like a whiny millennial, but that’s because I don’t like those terms. My fantasies aren’t just about pain, submitting or spanking and they’re not about pretending to be a literal child. What I like is complicated, I think it will depend a lot on the man I’m with because so much of what I want involves giving way to what someone else wants.

  “That,” Ty said. “Can be arranged, Middleton.”

  When I imagine daddy-daughter play, I imagine entering a state of mind in which I’m entirely innocent and the man I’m with corrupts and disciplines me. To me, this is power play, not a desire to experience incest or genuine trauma. I’m NOT into the extreme aspects of age-play or daddy-daughter kink (infantilization, pacifiers, baby-talk, or nappies). I consider myself more of a submissive with a twist. So if you’re looking for a chick to roll around in a crib, drink juice boxes and watch Peppa Pig, I ain’t your girl. If you want
to pretend I’m in need of tender loving care…or punishment, let’s talk.

  Lola.

  Ps. If all your pictures are of inanimate objects/cartoons I’m going to assume you’re a married weirdo.

  Pps. No one wants to have a terrible threesome with you and your girlfriend. Hire a pro and quit hassling single chicks. Life is hard enough for us already.

  Ty found himself grinning at his laptop. He could hear Middleton’s voice in this profile but it was so sharp and no-nonsense it was as though a tougher sister had taken the keyboard on her behalf. He understood then, what she wanted to show him. She wanted him to understand that she was ready and willing to be everything he wanted in a play partner. To know he wasn’t actually corrupting her because she was already aware of, and exploring, her fantasies.

  That rattled him, the idea that she’d discussed doing this with other men. Then he remembered the way she’d responded in his hotel bed, how she’d told him he was the first man she’d ever called daddy. She was still green. Maybe it made him a pig, but he was glad about that. He wanted to be her first, show her how good it could be.

  And, what, prep her for the next man?

  “Don’t think about that,” Ty muttered to himself. He re-read her profile. Everything she’d written resonated with him—especially the plea to not misinterpret what she wanted as a desire to live out trauma. She was far more eloquent than he’d ever been about the subject. Though she clearly wasn’t totally comfortable with her desires, her profile didn’t hint at any of the shame he’d carried around since puberty. Maybe it was easier for the masochists, Ty thought. Wanting pain and humiliation couldn’t be fun but wanting to cause harm was downright fucking terrifying. It made you turn yourself inside out, looking for evidence that you were a scumbag, a sinner, a murderer-in-waiting.

  It was that thought that stopped him from hitting the ‘message’ button. He scrolled upward to the banner he’d glanced at when he first logged in. Big purple letters said the website had eight million members.