Games Boys Play: A Dark High School Romance (Troubled Playthings Book 2)

by Tiffany Sala

  I felt my shoulder jerking back in its socket. Steven had me by the wrist again.

  “What is wrong with you?” I tried to yank myself free and couldn’t budge him. “Would you just let me go already and leave me alone?”

  Steven scoffed. “Now you care about leaving other people alone when your presence isn’t wanted.”

  “So what are you going to do then, keep me here just to be an asshole?”

  He shrugged with his free arm.

  I had never felt so much rage towards a person I hardly knew. I yanked on my arm once, then again harder. It sent stabbing pain through my shoulder, and I didn’t care.

  On my third attempt, I managed to pull my hand free, and then I swung it forward as a fist.

  Steven caught my fist in one outstretched hand and hardly moved backwards a bit. The shock flung me backwards to the ground, but I didn’t stay there long. I was up and flying at him again, and when he rebuffed me casually like it amused him how easy it was, I came back so fast I took him by surprise and slapped his face.

  He grabbed me hard around the waist, his fingers digging in. It was my turn to be surprised. He shook me once, then just held me still, bright blue eyes searing into mine with an intensity I felt wriggling down my spine.

  “Don’t think I’m going to let you get away with putting your hands on me just because you’re a woman,” he told me, his voice low and somehow shockingly intimate.

  “Don’t you think I’m going to let you get away with pushing me around just because you’re so much bigger than me and have friends in high places.”

  For a moment his lips moved without any words coming out. “Do you mean fucking Lucas?”

  “I mean the whole lot of you. You swan around here like you own the place and you basically do, you wouldn’t have the faintest idea what it’s like for the rest of us.”

  “You fucking stupid bitch,” said Steven, but just as I was about to hit him again, someone took hold of my shoulders from behind and pulled me out of range. I was so riled up I was going to fight them off to get back to him, but then I realised it was Ms. Miller… and that I was probably in a lot of trouble.

  I’d been expecting Ms. Miller to go off at me once I explained what had happened. To anyone outside of the situation it had to look like I was being unreasonable towards a guy who had actually stepped in and helped me.

  But she just told me the minimum I expected—that launching into a fight with a classmate was completely beneath me, and then she said, “How do you want to deal with this?”

  Right then, I knew: there was more to this situation than I was aware of. Ms. Miller knew things.

  “I just want what I’ve always wanted,” I told her. “I want him to stay away from me, and I want him to do it sincerely, not trying to psych me out or whatever he’s been playing at today.”

  She didn’t ask me to clarify that statement, which was another warning sign. She rose from her chair. “I’m going to go out and speak with Steven, and then I’d like to bring him in here so the three of us can thrash this out.”

  It was the most unfortunate terminology I could imagine, and from the look on her face Ms. Miller realised it right away. “Well, any objections?” When I shook my head, she got out of there fast.

  She was in such a hurry she clearly hadn’t fully thought through the implications of leaving me alone in her office, because after the door clicked behind her, there I was with a bulging file with Steven Dillon printed on it now sitting just inches away from my fingertips. My folder, much smaller, peeked out from underneath it. On the one pre-Steven occasion I’d been alone with Ms. Miller, when she’d gleefully set up my folder, she explained to me that she had been strongly encouraged to take up digital record-keeping but was too worried about the possibility of her students’ files being subject to a security breach. Her method of security didn’t seem to be working out very well for her.

  Maybe she hadn’t been worried, because I was not the sort of girl who poked her nose into things that were clearly not meant for her.

  But I wasn’t exactly the sort of girl who harassed her friends when they didn’t want her around, or got into physical altercations with people twice her size, so I thought maybe she hadn’t spent quite enough time thinking that one through either.

  I still wouldn’t have even thought about touching that file, if not for my sudden realisation Ms. Miller was hiding something. If I was going to trust her to sort this situation out between Steven and myself, I needed to know everything she did.

  I felt like the instant I put my hand on that folder, there had to be a reaction. An alarm, a camera flash. Ms. Miller would rush back in.

  When I touched it and there was nothing, I felt bolder. I took the folder in two hands and tilted it so it fell open, flicking through the neatly handwritten pages. I remembered Ms. Miller had taken some notes during our meeting, but there was no way she could have kept up a conversation and written this much at the same time. I had no desire to look at what she’d said about me in my folder, but I bet if I looked I’d see much more text than she’d written while face-to-face with me.

  And I definitely didn’t need to see any of it after just a quick look through Steven’s. Ms. Miller had written what looked like whole essays about her thoughts on Steven. I skipped through belligerent and issues surrounding claustrophobia and likely sexual dysfunction, none of which was any of my business. Actually I wasn’t sure what I might be looking for, and I was starting to think maybe I was violating Steven’s privacy for no reason other than tasteless curiosity… and then a phrase stopped me.

  Restraining order.

  I read over the full sentence. Restraining order from J— M— heavily on his mind. Probably the only thing stopping him from being more aggressive with me.

  Who was J— M—? Someone who had a restraining order out against Steven, clearly. It didn’t match the initials of anyone I could immediately think of who had anything to do with Steven’s group, not that I knew Steven that much better than he knew me. I was assuming the initials were even the actual initials of a person of course, when it would make some sense for Ms. Miller to have used a code name to hide the individual’s identity from casual eyes.

  I thought I could assume some things, though. J— M— was probably female, and Steven had definitely done something to hurt or frighten her. That was the requirement for a restraining order, wasn’t it?

  A memory struck me: Callie, some weeks ago, asking if I knew anything about a girl she was trying to find out about. Obviously someone who had something to do with Lucas. I remembered the surname because it had sounded really pretentious to me: Montgomery. What was the first name? Jane or something? Was it possible that the girl Callie had been trying to find out about was the same girl whose full name Ms. Miller was wary of mentioning?

  Well, I couldn’t exactly ask Callie about it now. And wasn’t I looking just as crazy as she’d looked to me then, obsessively researching some guy I should really be running like hell away from? My situation was a little different because honestly, Callie had always wanted Lucas, even before she’d been able to understand that, but that just seemed to make what I was doing more questionable.

  I had to knock it off before I really got myself in trouble. I put the folder back exactly as it had been before, and rearranged myself into a more innocent position. Not a moment too soon either, because I could hear approaching footsteps.

  Chapter Five: Steven

  I was pretty done with Ms. Miller and her meddling and would have just not waited for her to come and ‘deal with me’, but it wasn’t like I wanted to go to my next class either. So I sat myself down on the bench outside her building, and let her waste my time until she stepped out and sat next to me.

  “Steven. What was all of that? You know better than to think you can get away with that, surely.”

  “I don’t know what that was,” I said. “You tell me. She seems to have it in for me now no matter what I do.”

  “I’
ve had a quick chat with her, and that is not how she sees the situation at all,” said Ms. Miller.

  I got up and started walking, and of course she followed me. Nobody could ever leave me alone when I wanted them to.

  “That’s it then, isn’t it? You’re going to believe what she says, because she’s the female. Anything I have to say doesn’t even matter.”

  Ms. Miller rolled her eyes like I had no reason to say something like that… which sort of proved my point. “That’s not it at all. I can’t tell you how sympathetic I am to you because of what you’ve been through… but at the same time—and this is actually something I’d say to the both of you—when you act like this, you are making your own bed. The consequences you face are consequences you should expect.”

  “Well it’s not—”

  “Fair,” Ms. Miller interrupted, “no, it’s not. I would be doing you a tremendous disservice if I only advised you on the way life should work for you. You know you will never be able to go through life the way your friend Lucas does. If he had done what you have done, it’s very likely he would be able to talk his way out of it. But the same will probably never be true for you, and it’s too late for you to go on denying that.”

  Something about her mentioning Lucas hit me hard. Maybe because of that Tamara bringing up Lucas too before, acting like the two of us were the same, which just showed how much she knew. Ms. Miller might be fucking busting my balls half the time, but she got it.

  I stopped walking, and dropped my shoulders a bit. Once I was still I sort of wanted to just run, get the hell out of there so I didn’t have to deal with any of this, but I wasn’t as stupid as I’d been at sixteen. I knew this was the fucking big leagues now and if I tried to just ignore what was happening, someone else would make the big decisions that would either save my life or destroy it.

  A much bigger bitch than either Ms. Miller or Tamara had taught me how that went.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked.

  “I need you to come and talk with her in my office,” Ms. Miller said. “I don’t think she wants to be unreasonable. This could be the best opportunity you have to sort this out before it becomes a big problem for you.”

  “Fine.” I turned to get the jump on her walking back to the building. If I was going to have to suck some little bitch’s dick, I was going to do it on my terms, be the first to step into that room.

  Tamara looked really spooked when I entered the office. That surprised me, because she’d always seemed fierce as hell every other time we’d been facing off. Now it was like she was convinced she was in trouble no matter what she did. I wondered what Ms. Miller had said to her out of my hearing.

  I had to admit, having her stare me down while her pretty lips quivered was doing things to me. Struggling with her, having her hit me in her ineffective little way, had done something too.

  It wasn’t like I’d sworn off women these days. I still had certain needs. I always liked to mess around with the girls Lucas had around, to keep him on his toes and because with most of them there was zero chance I could ever start anything with them with Lucas on the scene. Zero risk.

  A girl like Tamara, I knew I could make her love being with me even as she hated it. But I also knew already that she was trouble—the sort of trouble that would fuck me over again before I knew what was happening.

  But right now, that was not turning me off the idea of starting something with her as much as it would have normally. Because she was really feeling something for me right now, something she was clearly trying to restrain without success.

  It said a lot about how fucked-up I was, but I loved the idea of fighting her. Goading her to be rough with me. I could take it, so long as it was out in the open the way she was being when I riled her up.

  She went all rigid when I sat down next to her. I could hear her breath fluttering in her throat, smell her. I restrained myself from leaning over to inhale. That would throw Ms. Miller right off my team for sure.

  Ms. Miller settled herself behind her desk and picked up that stupid file she insisted on keeping on me. “As I’m sure you’re both very aware, there are only three months left in this school year. Three months until you can go your separate ways entirely, never even think about one another again if that’s what you want. So what do we have to do to get the both of you safely there?”

  Well, I might be damn happy to forget I’d ever seen Tamara Hills in three months’ time… but against every bit of counselling I’d been given since I made my big mistake, I wanted to make sure she would never be able to forget me.

  “The real problem here is Tamara misses her friend,” I spoke up. “So maybe instead of butting up against her, I need to be helping to bring them back together.”

  Tamara’s surprise quickly settled into a squint of suspicion.

  “You aren’t ready to just give up on Callie yet, are you?” I said, because I could see Ms. Miller was gearing up to put something in. “You know that’s the only reason I’m asking here, right? I’m not trying to pressure you into spending time with me or anything, I just think it’d be better if you didn’t feel like you had to avoid my group entirely.”

  I wasn’t pressuring her… right? Something about this whole scene felt wrong… but even though she looked deeply uncomfortable, Tamara nodded.

  It was fine. She was going to be happy with everything that was happening once this was through. And this was just what I had to do. I couldn’t afford to have another girl who didn’t want to be anywhere near me. People were going to start talking eventually.

  But if I intended to cut Ms. Miller out of the deal, I was going to need to lay some of the groundwork in this very room.

  I reached over and put my hand on the arm of Tamara’s chair, just under her elbow. My nails might have brushed her skin. She jerked her head around to stare, but she didn’t flinch. As I’d hoped, she wasn’t willing to spook in front of an audience.

  I kept my eyes down, too. “I came on too strong the other day, and that’s what’s set you against me. I can see that. But let’s set all of that aside and work together. I don’t fucking care if you join our group, none of the other guys will care, and Callie is too wrapped up in Lucas to worry whether you’re there or not.”

  She grimaced. “Hanging out with Ashleigh and her type? I don’t think so.”

  I’d avoided mentioning Ashleigh on purpose, and I guess I hadn’t gotten away with it. Honestly, I didn’t know why the fuck that girl lurked around our group still. I’d never gotten the idea she liked us that much. Tamara being suspicious of her was a mark in her favour, as far as I was concerned.

  “You don’t even have to talk to her. Trust me, Callie doesn’t. She’s got some sense.”

  “How do you feel about that, Tamara?” Ms. Miller asked, because she could see as well as I could that Tamara was still very nervous. What she couldn’t feel, because she was all the way across her desk, was the heat rising off her skin in response to my nearby hand. She was trying to hold off some reaction to me, and though she was a bit afraid of me she’d never once acted like her fear was getting the better of her… so there was only one other explanation I could come up with.

  “Honestly,” she said, keeping the tension in her voice very well under control. I only picked it up because I was close enough to sense the tiny movements in her body. “I think I just want to be left alone. I’m sorry I went off at you for trying to help me with Tyrell today, I just think I would have been able to handle it with less drama if you hadn’t stepped in.”

  She wasn’t going to make it easy for me, but that was okay. I was pretty sure I could convince her once we didn’t have an audience or especially Ms. Miller lurking around trying to get everyone to talk about their feelings.

  I leaned back in my seat, withdrawing casually from her personal space. “Fine. And I’ll try not to do anything that would make you feel like I’m creeping on you, because you seem sensitive to that.” I knew exactly what I was promising there, t
oo. What I had in mind would be a lot less subtle.

  Tamara had gone all stiff and scowling. I really liked that fighty attitude to her—I liked it so much I needed both my arms suddenly to disguise just how much. “It’s not like I just felt like you were doing something wrong, you were definitely crossing a line somehow and everyone else saw it. I’m not going to be allowed to forget about it for the rest of the year.”

  Well, I wasn’t going to let the likes of Tyrell fuck with Tamara any more. I didn’t have the charm Lucas had, but Ty and I played footy together, and I had ways of letting him know that shit was not going to fly. Once I hit him a few times during training, he would knock it off. Ty wasn’t a bad guy, he was just a dick.

  “I’m going to think over my actions more carefully from now on,” I told her, like a fucking choirboy. “Because I know they can have an impact beyond just what happens to me.”

  Yeah, I knew how to get women off my back when I needed to.

  Ms. Miller looked tentatively pleased, and for her part Tamara nodded. Good girl. “I appreciate it. I just want to forget all of this happened really.”

  Oh, she would definitely be able to forget all of this once I was through with her.

  Chapter Six: Tamara

  I’d been so freaked out when Steven was there next to me. I felt like he would be able to see what I’d done, and once he knew there was no chance he was going to be nice to me.

  What I’d actually learned was messing with me too, of course. I already knew Steven was aggressive, violent. But so abusive someone had needed to turn to a legal method of protecting herself from him? That was scary… and now I was in his sights. And Ms. Miller was… protecting him, somehow? Keeping his secrets, at least, which I supposed was required of her as part of her job, but still seemed pretty fucked-up to me. I didn’t even know if I could take it as her not seeing any genuine danger ahead for me.