Page 10 of Not Your Shoe Size

Kate rubbed her lips. “It’s not the idea of a wedding. I like weddings. I had fun at Tambara’s and Gilly’s and all the rest of them. It’s not about the event, I just don’t want to…”

“What?”

“Be a wife,” she blurted. “I’m so not a wife, Ty. God, even sayingwife…” She rolled the word around her mouth like a floury mint. “Wife, wife, wife, wife…”

Ty knew what she was thinking even if she was too polite to say it.Yuck.

“Mah wahyfe,” Kate concluded in a Borat impression. “I don’t get it. I keep waiting to get it and I never do. So, I’ve concluded I won’t. I know that’s hard to hear now, but could you maybe be cool with it in the future?”

He couldn’t imagine such a thing, but even as he debated his next pro-marriage argument, Ty knew he was fighting an uphill battle. He saw in Kate a version of his own ambivalence about children—he didn’t hate them; he mostly liked them, he just couldn’t see why peoplewanted them. Yet he couldn’t stop himself. “Okay, fuck the wedding, fuck the ring and the ceremony. Fuck all the details. I just want to marry you. I want to propose, marry you, and walk around with a ring on my finger, telling everyone I meet ‘I’m married to Kate McGrath.”

Kate raised her eyebrows. “Why does that matter?”

“So, people know you’re mine.”

“People already know I’m yours! Whenever we walk together you have a hand on my ass.”

“It’s not the same. It’s the spectacle of the thing.”

Kate’s brows rose. “Spectacle? You’re not going to do one of those flash mob proposals, are you?”

Ty scowled. “No.”

“I guess that would be a bit 2012.” Kate tapped the side of her bowl with her chopsticks. “Why do youwantto get married? We already live together and we’re happy. Why do we have to get engaged?”

He’d asked himself the same thing multiple times since the botched Percy’s proposal. He wasn’t sure about the answer. It wasn’t like he’d grown up thinking marriage was the secret to domestic bliss. His mum and dad’s relationship was tepid, bordering on hostile, and his brothers were embroiled in an endless rotisserie of petty marital squabbles.

“I’m not sure.”

He’d no sooner said it than an unpleasant thought slid into his mind like an earwig.

His fiftieth birthday was just two months away. But that didn’t matter. It wasn’t relevant.

“Ty?”

He blinked. “Look, I don’t know why I want to get married; I just do. I think about it all the time.”

Kate looked thoughtful. “Maybe that’s the difference between us. I don’t. I’ve never fantasised about being a bride. Probably because my sisters were already becoming brides.”

“That checks out. Your sisters are a scary bunch of—”

“Hang on.” Kate put a hand to her cheek. A cheek that had turned suddenly and shockingly pink. “Ididfantasise about getting married. I completely forgot until now. Holy shit that’s so weird.”

Ty felt a jolt of electric panic. “What? When? Who?”

Kate stared, unseeing, into the middle distance. “Mr. Peterson.”

“Who the fuck is that?”

Kate didn’t reply. She stared at nothing, apparently lost for words.

Ty took a deep steadying breath. “Who’s Mr. Peterson? Some guy off TV?”

He strongly suspected he wasn’t, but Ty wasn’t ready to give up hope.

A strange look crossed Kate’s face, as though she was debating what to say and what to hold back. “I don’t know how to put this…”

Ty gritted his teeth. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”And if you have no vested interest in keeping me sane.

---