Act Your Age

by Eve Dangerfield

  When she told Mr Peterson, his brow had furrowed into angry lines. The next afternoon he’d handed her a rose cut from his garden, its stem wrapped in shiny tinfoil and a tiny card that read Congratulations, Katie! What a fantastic achievement! Love Kane, Jennifer, and Deirdre Peterson.

  That night, Kate had locked herself in the bathroom and erased the names of Mr Peterson’s wife and daughter with liquid paper. They didn’t give a damn about her, Mr Peterson did. Mr Peterson was the only one who did.

  Kate wasn’t sure why she had the kinks she had. She’d done enough research to know it wasn’t as simple as the vending machine theory of ‘insert daddy drama, out rolls a can of kinkiness.’ It was clear to anyone with half a brain that the abuse-for-kink model held no water. Girls had fathers who abandoned them, loved them, beat them, raped them or were as ambivalent as Kate’s dad was and they turned out to be Dommes, subs, bottoms, switches, lesbians, bisexuals or as straight and vanilla as they came. It wasn’t that simple.

  Still, Kate had to acknowledge that she’d had a painful childhood and that during her formative years, when she was love-starved and desperate for affection, she’d fallen for a much older man she wished was her father and her boyfriend.

  Before her thoughts about Mr Peterson were explicitly sexual or even romantic, Kate had known she loved him. She’d loved his voice, his hair, the way he said her name. She’d loved his kindness and his sense of humor. When she’d discovered her body in her cramped single bed, Deidre’s dad had been in the forefront of her fantasies. Those flickering girlish daydreams hadn’t even been about sex. They’d featured things like Mr Peterson laying her down in a big soft bed and saying things like “I love you, Katie. You’re the most precious thing in the world to me.”

  It was embarrassing, really.

  She never knew if Mr Peterson was aware of her crush on him. The summer she turned sixteen, the state government funded a legitimate school bus service and Rape on Wheels was decommissioned. Kate had cried in her bed for a week, writing long, rambling poems about the love of her life being snatched away from her. The poems themselves had been histrionic, the ‘broken wheel’ and ‘final journey’ metaphors terrible, but the pain behind them was as acute as when Aunt Rhonda had died. She’d lost her only ally.

  When her grief finally bottomed out, Kate realised she had another serious problem on her hands—no friends. It wasn’t exactly a new problem, she spent most lunchtimes reading in the library by herself, but without Mr Peterson’s van rides to look forward to it seemed urgent she find some mates. Kate set about pooling her resources and found she had two valuable friend-making assets—boobs.

  Boys had never held much appeal for her while Mr Peterson was around, being gorgeous and talking to her about The Wheel of Time series, but now they took on a new shine. They were nicer to her than girls and impressed both by her rack and her job at Doughnut King (she had access to a lot of free, barely-stale, doughnuts).

  Unfortunately, the boys she tried to hang around with weren’t so keen on being friends—they kept trying to hold her hand and go in for unwelcome kisses at the movies. Telling them she only wanted to be friends irritated them and kissing them back was insanely uncomfortable. After a few months of trial and error, Kate stumbled on a winning boys-for-friends formula—acting totally freaking clueless. If she pretended she didn’t know what a guy’s intentions were, if she giggled and said things like, ‘Which of the girls in our class do you have a crush on? Is it Rylie? Is it Stephanie?’ boys got confused and stopped trying to kiss her and suggested they go into empty paddocks and shoot a potato gun instead.

  When she perfected the art of acting clueless Kate discovered another amazing plot twist—the more she played dumb and refused to become anyone’s girlfriend, the more boys liked her. Most of them were horrible to the girls they actually hooked up with, but they invited her over to dinner with their parents, taught her to play HALO and beer pong and talked to her about all the stuff they couldn’t tell their guy mates. It was like black magic.

  Being one of the boys got her through the rest of high school, but Kate always knew it wasn’t quite the way it was meant to be. The guys she hung around with weren’t really her friends. They were more like “friends.” There were always strings attached to hanging out with them—laughing at jokes that stung, listening to talk that offended, staying a virgin because they didn’t like it when she showed romantic interest in anyone, despite having no romantic interest in her. She was always ‘other’, the exception to the rule, but part of the rule all the same. Female friendship continued to evade her. Later, she learned girls picked up on ADHD markers better than boys. They sensed the strangeness hiding beneath her lip-gloss-and-ponytail attempts to be like them and backed away as though she was infectious.

  Kate wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD until she was almost eighteen. Her psychology teacher told her she should be getting much better marks and when Kate showed her all the extra homework she did—the practise essays and questionnaires—Mrs Winsor had frowned and recommended she see a doctor. Kate paid for the psychiatrists visit herself, and sure enough, she had severe ADHD. Severe enough that she’d be on Ritalin for the rest of her life. Severe enough that someone should have noticed when she was a kid, but they hadn’t. No one had.

  Kate thought about that as her Uber sped her toward Aunt Rhonda’s apartment, how she’d grown up feeling so twitchy and weird. How she’d chipped away big chunks of her personality so she could have friends that weren’t really her friends. How her first fantasies were about a friendly dad being nice to her.

  The only person who knew everything about her past was Maria and her mentor seemed to have assigned her a permanent chair in the hall of victimhood. Yes, it was a pretty sad story, Kate thought as the streetlights flashed past, but not one she wanted hanging around her neck like a dead albatross for the rest of her life. She was grown up now, she had her own apartment and Ritalin and a job. Why couldn’t she just evolve from the placid half-girl she’d been into something new and bold and brave?

  Because you don’t have the guts.

  The inner voice, cruel as it was, had a point. The habits she’d picked up as a kid ran deep; she apologised even if she knew it wasn’t her fault, saw her family every Christmas even though it broke her heart, and never attended a derby event without Maria, despite skating for the team for three years. Maybe her desire to play daughter wasn’t about any pseudo-sexual Mr Peterson Freud stuff. Maybe it was as simple as wanting to be the center point of someone else’s desires so she didn’t have to take any risks.

  “God, I’m depressing,” she mumbled.

  “What was that?” Her Uber driver, a thickset guy with forearms so hairy Kate had first thought him covered in tattoos, turned to look at her from the front seat. “You say something?”

  “Um, no sorry. That was nothing.”

  The driver smiled, it wasn’t a nice smile. “Didn’t sound like nothing. You having a bad night?”

  A nudge of fear in her belly. “I’m totally fine.”

  “Don’t give me that, sexy, talk to me. Are you having boy problems, or is it high school drama?”

  The skin on the back of Kate’s neck prickled. This guy thought she was in high school and he was calling her sexy and asking her about boys. It reminded her of her role play with Ty except that had been a game and this was real life. Saying the word ‘roses’ to this man would do approximately nothing. She pulled her jacket tight around her neck, wondering what to do next.

  “Girly.” The driver’s voice sliced through the air like a box-cutter. “I asked you a question.”

  Kate opened her mouth to apologise again, when another hot tendril of anger she’d felt with Maria wrapped itself around her middle. Who was this guy to talk like this? To assume she was a sad teenager travelling on her own at night and try to use that to freaking flirt with her? She held up her phone. “Sorry, I’m texting my dad. He’s a detective and he’s super angry I’m Ub
ering by myself. I think he’s going to come out and meet me once we’re at my place. I hope he doesn’t take my phone away!”

  If it wasn’t so sad, the way the driver’s face contorted with horror might have been funny. “Sure,” he said. “A detective, right. Right, right. Want me to take the next left?”

  “Yes, please.”

  It sucked that the world could be this way, and she’d hardly given the driver a piece of her mind, but as he flicked on the radio and started humming the worst imitation of innocence Kate had ever seen, she had to admit she was a bit proud of herself.

  Chapter 11

  The elevator ding was unnaturally loud. Or maybe it felt that way because she was headed toward Aunt Rhonda’s apartment in the knowledge that she was going to have filthy, filthy sex. There were two other apartments on her floor. One was occupied by a middle-aged Russian couple, the other belonged to an ancient ex-showgirl gleefully outliving her relatives. They were all nice enough, but they’d skin her alive if they saw her going down the hallway in roller skates. She skated up the hall as quietly as she could. She didn’t really need to worry, all the apartments on her floor were soundproofed. Sometimes Mr Petkovic opened his door and marching band music blasted out at a hundred decibels, only to vanish the instant it closed again. Kate had taken comfort in that whenever she screamed for Daddy to fuck her harder. She reached her door and eased her keys out of her sports bag. Ty, she knew, was already in her apartment. She’d given him a key of his own, slipped it into his pigeonhole at work like a criminal. That knowledge would probably make Maria’s head explode, but it was safer than leaving her door unlocked and it made scenes like the one they had planned tonight so much more realistic.

  Kate slid her key into her door as quietly as possible. The lock turned easily and she tugged her front door open. The unmistakable groans and slapping sounds of sex greeted her.

  “Yeah?” she heard a man say. “Yeah, you like that, you dirty b—”

  Kate slammed the door shut.

  “What the heck?”

  Her brain was buzzing with information and all she could think of was Ty bringing another girl to her apartment and having sex with her in full view of her Aunt Rhonda’s carnival glass animals. Then she realised that was utterly insane. Since Ty had given her every indication of being sane, there had to be another reason. She re-opened the door, just a crack, and glanced around. A second later she realised Ty wasn’t hosting an orgy, he was playing porn through her TV. The voices had the slightly tinny quality of a recorded video and the American accents were obvious even through the moaning. Relief and mortification surged through her in equal measure and she closed her door, needing a moment to collect herself.

  Where had he gotten the porn from? Netflix didn’t have a secret porn side-channel, was he streaming it on his phone? Had he brought a DVD? Kate knew most people watched porn but the thought of Ty striding into an adult store in one of his nice suits and walking out with a bag of DVDs called things like Anal Sluts III: The Re-Sluttening just didn’t seem right. But maybe that was the point. From their first encounter, Ty had made it clear he liked playing the immoral sleazebag, an unusual choice from a man everyone praised for being so upstanding and honourable. Maybe it was a release pretending to be the man no one wanted him to be, just like it was a release for her to wallow in helplessness deliberately instead of incidentally.

  Her hand hovered over the doorknob. She wanted to go inside and experience what Ty had in store for her, and yet something held her back.

  “What do you want?” she asked herself

  The answer came with embarrassing clarity: Ty on top of her in bed, his naked body warm and reassuringly heavy. He’d thrust inside her with slow, careful rolls of his hips, one big hand cupping her cheek. “Does that feel good, baby? I’m not hurting you, am I?”

  “No, Daddy,” she’d whisper. “It feels nice.”

  “Good. I want to make you feel nice.” He pressed his mouth to her ear, his hair falling like a silk curtain against her skin. “I love you, Katie, I always will.”

  As Ty had already noticed, Kate rarely swore. Her mother had been a big fan of the washing-your-mouth-out-with-soap trick, and say what you will about child abuse—it worked. Saying the F-word to Ty that night had given her guilt pangs that lasted days, but in that moment Kate couldn’t help herself.

  “Fucking hell,” she muttered. “Fucking, fucking, fucking hell.”

  That fantasy was pathetic. It was a big bowl of sad with tragic sprinkles on top. To think such soppy crap about Mr Peterson when she was fourteen was one thing, to feel that way about Ty, the earthbound Adonis she was actually sleeping with, was beyond embarrassing. Kate seized the doorknob and yanked her door open. She’d take porn and perversion over that saccharine, painfully female fantasy any day of the week.

  The porn was even louder on the other side of the door. She skated into the living room and saw Ty sitting on her couch with a beer in his hand. On the TV an obscenely muscled man was getting a blowjob from two blondes. He was being very ungrateful about it, working a rough fist in each woman’s hair and snarling, “Suck harder you little sluts.”

  The crassness was so overwhelming, Kate had to look away. Ty was so good at getting her into this headspace of erotic uncertainty, making her feel so much younger and more naïve than she was. It was even stronger tonight, with him relaxing in her home as if he owned the place. She shifted in her roller skates, the heavy boots hindering her in a way that felt like bondage.

  “That you, Katie?” Ty didn’t turn around, but from his voice Kate could imagine his expression, a smirk of pure masculine pleasure. His sex doll was home and he was about to get laid.

  “Erm, yeah, hi,” she stammered.

  She could never call him Daddy when they started playing like this, and it didn’t seem right to call him Ty. This wasn’t Ty. This was another, meaner man—her brutish stepfather if not the daddy borne of her Mr Peterson fantasies.

  “You’re late,” he said, because that was what they’d planned.

  “Sorry, I had derby practice.”

  He made a meal of slowly checking his wristwatch. “That finished at eight. Where have you been since?”

  Kate put her sports bag down on the floor. The clunk, without her roller skates inside it, was much lighter than usual. “Out with my friends.”

  “And you didn’t think to let me or your mother know?”

  The menace underlying his tone made her shiver. How did he do it? How did he make her feel guilty for offending her imaginary mum, while he sat watching porn on TV with his boots up on Aunt Rhonda’s antique coffee table?

  “I’m waiting?”

  “I forgot to text,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  Seconds ticked past with agonising slowness. The girls on the screen moaned and the man swore but Ty said nothing. Kate’s nerves began to flutter, her hands and feet and pussy buzzing with useless energy. Sorry was never good enough, but how would her stepfather make her pay? They never discussed the ins and outs of a scene in their Kinkworld correspondences. Kate had a hand in the destination, could veto or suggest certain things, but Ty sat behind the wheel and drove them where he wanted to go. She liked that, didn’t she?

  Ty sat up, drained his beer, and put the empty on the coffee table. “Come here, Katie.”

  “Why?”

  Tension crackled in the air between them.

  “Because,” Ty said very quietly. “I want my cock sucked and seeing as you’re late, I think it’s the least you can do.”

  She swallowed. The male pornstar was now taking one of the girls from behind as the other stroked her hands over his chest. “Okay, but can you please turn that stuff off first? It’s gross.”

  He stretched his arms over his head, making his shoulders flex beneath one of the cotton t-shirts he always favoured when he came to her house. “After all our fun together, Little Miss Good Girl still thinks sex is gross, huh?”

/>   “I don’t think sex is gross. I think you’re gross. Why are you watching this stuff while my mum’s out?”

  He turned to look at her then, and as always Kate was struck by how handsome he was. Not an unusual or brooding kind of handsome, just handsome. Bright blue eyes, thick blonde hair, a stern brow and a square jaw. She’d never seen pictures of him as twenty-something, but she already knew he was more attractive now. The faint lines around his eyes and forehead lent him the ruggedness of a cinematic cowboy. In looks, he was the perfect all-Australian man, yet such a strange perversion had brought them together. Kate thought of Ty’s ex-fiancée. Had she known about this? Had she stood where Kate was standing only with a diamond ring and the knowledge that he loved her? What would having Tyler Henderson’s love even feel like?

  “I do a lot of things while your mother’s out, something you know very well,” Ty said scanning her body. His eyes lingered on her tight derby tee. “Is that what you wear to practice?”

  Kate tugged at the hem of her short-shorts. “Yes.”

  “Interesting. So you went out with your little friends after practise, did you? Where to, a playground?”

  “A bar.”

  Ty’s upper lip curled into a sneer. “Maybe I’m corrupting you after all. Did you drink?”

  “Yes.” Kate tried to sound as smug as teenagers always did when they consumed alcohol, as though it wasn’t an incredibly mundane adult activity.

  “How’d you get drinks? You flirt with the bartender ?”

  “No, my best friend Casey bought them for me, she has an ID.”

  She was also twenty-six and far from her best friend, but Kate figured that didn’t matter so much in role play.

  “Casey, huh? She a dirty little girl like you?”

  “No,” she said quickly.

  Ty’s sneer grew more pronounced. “I don’t believe you. Maybe you should invite her over some time so I can find out for myself.”