The whole point of age play was that Ashley was good at it, and the whole problem was that she looked it.

She had been a Blonde since she was twelve and people had been talking down to her because of it ever since. So when he suggested age play, she didn’t argue. She put her hair into two pigtails, dug the plaid skirt out of the back of the closet where the tenth-grade version of her had left it, and practiced her voice at the bathroom mirror until it stopped sounding put on.

“Neighbour’s Teen,” he said when he opened the door. “Come to borrow sugar.”

“Uh huh.” She stood on the step with her knees together, Blonde and small in the doorway, doing the thing with her eyes that she knew worked. “Mom sent me.”

“Does your mom know you’re out this late?”

“Mm-mm.” She shook her head and the pigtails swung. It was ridiculous. It was also, immediately, the most fun she’d had in a month. Age play was supposed to feel like a costume and instead it felt like a door coming open.

He let her in and kept talking to her like she was fifteen. Was she eating enough. Was that skirt hers or her sister’s. She answered all of it in that soft little voice and let him fuss, and every time he called her a good girl her stomach flipped over.

Then he asked her to sit on the floor.

Ashley sat. The plaid skirt rode up and she didn’t fix it. He looked at her knees and she let him — Blonde head tipped back against the arm of the chair, playing the Teen who hasn’t worked out what she’s doing yet. When he finally leaned down and kissed her, she made a small, surprised sound, half of it real, and he said, “Ssh. Neighbours.”

Age play with a man who actually committed to it was a different animal than she’d expected. He narrated everything — where her hands went, what a Blonde Teen like her was supposed to do with them — and by the end she had stopped acting entirely, pink in the face and shaking, still in the plaid skirt, one pigtail up and one down on the floor.

“Was that too much?” he asked afterwards, and she laughed into his shoulder.

“Ask me again tomorrow and I’ll tell you no.”

She wrote it down later the way she writes everything down, over at thesincenter.com/ashley/ — Blonde, Teen, and a plaid skirt that still fits.