Page 3 of Not Your Shoe Size

She didn’t want to get married.

To anyone.

Not even Tyler Henderson, the most exciting, attractive, wonderful man in the universe.

But how did you say that without phrasing it as a rejection? Like you didn’t love your partner less than people who got married?

Kate’s phone buzzed like killer bees. She picked it up to see Tambara and Rapunzel telling Casey to back off. Casey had already said sorry for being ‘a big nosy bitch’ and offered to buy her a coffee on Saturday. Kate felt a warm pang behind her ribs. It was nice to be defended and apologised to. It was also good that she didn’t have to explain why getting engaged made her feel like she had a chicken egg in her throat.

No problem, she wrote.I have to go, I’m almost at my tram stop.See you dudes Saturday.

She slid her phone into her handbag and stood. As she did, she saw the German tourists laughing together. The feeling hooked her again, that restless longing.I want something,I want…

But she couldn’t phrase it. Instead she imagined the dandelion stalk being tugged out of its base. Drifting along to float into grassy fields unknown.

Chapter 2

When Kate reached her Aunt Rhonda’s apartment—the habit of calling it Aunt Rhonda’s was unbreakable—she threw her bag on the couch and headed for the shower. She stayed under the water for a long time, increasing the heat until her skin was tender and the stall thick with steam. She wanted to be raw, to flay off her melancholy afternoon. If she melted away her skin, she could become someone else, not Kate McGrath, engineer, girlfriend, friend, and derby teammate. Something less. Something small and sweet and manageable.

Steaming and pink, Kate stepped out of the shower and towelled herself dry. When she wiped the misty mirror, she saw a rosy-cheeked adolescent. It wasn’t flattery. She didn’t look twenty-nine. She didn’t looktwenty-three. Last month she’d worn her high school rugby jumper to the shops and the assistant asked if she was looking forward to graduation. She resembled a teenager more than most of the teenagers she saw out clubbing on Saturday nights. Those girls knew how to flaunt themselves in a way Kate was still working on.

But it doesn’t matter.I’m cute the way I am.

That thought would have once rung hollow, but tonight Kate smiled at her reflection and liked the smile she got back. At least until a wave of moodiness swept her.

“No,” she told herself, stern as a schoolteacher. “Not now. Now is for sexiness.”

She turned from the mirror and opened her toiletry bag. The temptation to apply make up in these situations was ever-present, but she knew from experience that foundation and mascara would be smeared all over the pillows if Ty’s role-play led to manhandling or crying—which it always did. She satisfied herself with dabbing water jelly moisturiser onto her still-flushed skin and opened the cabinet and grabbed her box of Ritalin. She swallowed the capsule with a mouthful of tap water. It used to bother her, having the tablets where Ty could see them. When he first moved in, she hid them in the couch cushions and in disused mixing bowls, forgetting her own stashing places so she had to keep getting refills. Eventually, when he found five Ritalin blisters beneath the SodaStream, Ty got angry.

“I know you take Ritalin,” he’d said, holding up the pills like a cop brandishing his MDMA bust. “Why don’t you keep your pills in the medicine cabinet instead of hiding them all over the fucking house?”

Embarrassed and a little relieved the Ritalin wasn’t missing, Kate struggled to reply.

“Well?”

“I don’t know…that’s like admitting I’m not normal.”

“To who?”

‘To you’ she’d tried to say, but the truth burst from her without permission. Like it had been waiting for the question. “My family.”

Ty didn’t miss a beat. “Fuck your family! They’re a pack of useless cunts! Acting like you’re pretending to have ADHD when they believe in chemtrails and flat earth and fuck knows what other bullshit. They can all get fucked.”

Two years later the memory still made Kate laugh. Ty’s blanket contempt—and swearing—had shifted something she’d spent years trying to budge. She couldn’t feel embarrassed about taking medication without hearing Ty’s voice.“Fuck your family! They’re a pack of useless cunts!”

That’s love, she thought, finger-combing her hair.The way he made something so hard so easy. But I could never explain how that feels to anyone else and have it make sense.

She imagined herself standing at an altar, wearing a long, lacy gown like her nicknamesake Kate Middleton, turning to Ty in a tuxedo and saying ‘I love you because you called my family cunts so hard it made me lose all respect for them.’

She snorted. No one but Rapunzel would appreciate that sentiment, and maybe not even Rapunzel, considering her current mood. Meanwhile, just the idea of wearing a wedding dress made her arms itch. She scratched her wrists as she strode to the spare bedroom.

The room was dim enough to make early evening feel like midnight—you could barely make out the Mallrat and Shawn Mendes posters on the wall. Kate opened her costume cupboard and pulled out a puffy white lace babydoll trimmed with pink ribbons. She tugged it over her head and pulled on the equally puffy panties. You couldn’t wear them under clothes without looking like you rocked adult diapers, but they were girlishly sweet on their own.

She twirled, feeling the material swish around her thighs. This was perfect. Now that all her simple tasks were completed, she had no nothing to do but wait. She climbed onto the small pink bed and pulled the sheets up to her chin. The cool cotton made her shiver. She closed her eyes and lay still. Minutes passed, but she didn’t feel bored or impatient. This was ritualised anticipation, the deliberate stringing out of arousal.

She knew wherever Ty was, he was playing the same game. Maybe he was at work, completing unnecessary tasks, or, more likely, having a drink at a bar, vibrating with pent up energy, planning what was coming next. He liked to drink whiskey knowing she was lying in wait for him, horny and impatient. They both had a kink for waiting. Of all of her and Ty’s kinks, it was the most innocent. The others had grown darker as their relationship continued. When they had first started dating, Kate had been worried their insane sexual chemistry would burn itself out. Instead, their growing trust let them push each other further into what Ty called ‘the red zone.’ Their daddy/little girl role-play had never been more intense or realistic.

Sometimes Kate felt dirty about it, but mostly she felt fine. It helped that the concept of calling your sex partner ‘daddy’ had blown up in a major way. It was bananas. One minute her kink was niche and taboo and largely associated with incest and Freudian issues, the next minute, #daddyvibes was trending on Twitter and hot guys all over the internet were being called daddy. Soon DDLG porn was flowing into Pornhub like someone had turned on a tap in kinky heaven. Even Tambara, who avoided social media, kept sending Kate links to‘Hollywood’s top zaddies, daddies, and dads—AND HOW TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE!’

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