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

by Tiffany Sala

  Chapter Nine: Tamara

  I was already shaking when I finally emerged from my hiding place near the toilet block, confident I would find Steven easily now the school was clearing.

  Ryan had given me a whole lot of attitude the night before when I told him I didn’t need him to pick me up the next day. “Since when do you not need a ride somewhere? You’re not going to take the bus, are you?”

  “I’ve got a friend dropping me off later,” I said, which I hoped was true.

  Mum was over to see what was going on by then, and that had me twitching. I’d had my student ID and school reports on hand to mostly cover my ID requirements, but we only had one Medicare card between the three of us. I guess Ryan and I should have been split off onto our own cards by now, but we’d never gotten it done. Fortunately, Mum was much more careless with that than the birth certificates. I’d found it buried at the bottom of a pile of papers on the kitchen table and was just hoping she wouldn’t need it for anything else before I was back the next evening.

  “Are you going out with Callie?” she asked. I nodded quickly, because Callie was about the only good alibi I had. “And Lucas?”

  I shrugged.

  “Maybe Ryan should go out with you,” Mum suggested, which already had Ryan straining and grimacing.

  “I think I’m old enough to go out with a few friends by myself, right?”

  That was when Mum looked like she wanted to shrug, but of course she knew she couldn’t stop me. I hated that she would even think about it for a moment, though. I knew she just wanted to protect me, but at times like this it just felt counterproductive.

  In the present, Steven was suddenly in front of me. I hadn’t seen him coming, and that definitely scared me. I felt like I needed a bit of time to get my expression in order for facing him. I didn’t become all silly and giggly in front of hot guys like Aileen, but the thing was, among hot guys there were certain classes. And ‘hot guys who kiss like that’ were definitely in a class of their own.

  I thought I should probably be a bit scared about getting in a car with him, but I just wasn’t. I was a little scared about the process of getting my birth certificate, of being able to see what was on it… not this.

  Actually, I was a little disappointed when Steven just touched my arm and pointed me towards the rear of the school, where there was a small amount of parking that didn’t generally get a lot of use.

  I seemed to remember a lot of the sporting guys would park back there so they could make a quick and discreet enough change into their training gear (the typical advice was not to look if you didn’t have to) so that made me wonder. “You didn’t have to go to your sport thing today, did you?”

  Steven snickered. “Sport thing. Yeah, I have training, but I’m skipping it. Game’s not until tomorrow so I don’t need to be around today.”

  “But won’t your, um, team want you to train extra hard for—”

  Steven stopped walking. “It’s not fucking important, Tamara. It’s not like it’s going to be a career for me or anything. Are you going to ruin this whole thing by going on about sport?”

  “Sorry.” I kept my eyes on his, even though the anger I saw in him was actually a bit scary. “I don’t know what’s important to you yet. I just assumed the sport might be something you actually wanted to do, something I was taking you away from.” I shivered. I would have told him I’d always thought from his antics at lunch that he was really good at footy, the sort of player a coach might expect more of, but I didn’t know how he’d take that either. “I don’t want to be a nuisance to you.”

  “A hot girl has agreed to come out with me, and she thinks I might want to ditch her to kick a ball around.” Steven shook his head, then he broke out into a surprisingly sincere laugh. “You are hilarious. You get all fired up in a fight, and then the hint of a compliment and you go all fluttery and cute.”

  If he’d seen fluttery in me before, well I was really feeling it now. Suddenly, I wished we really were going out with Callie and Lucas. I’d sort of hoped she would call me to demand answers about what was going on with me and Steven, but I guess we weren’t quite at that point yet. Either that or she was too occupied with Lucas to give me much more thought. Probably she was too occupied with Lucas. I didn’t think either of them would really want me and Steven tagging along with them too much. Probably that was the reason Steven was looking to spend time with me, flattering a girl he could have a little temporary thing with and not have to worry about the long-term when he’d be back in with his friend.

  I had to keep my head in the right place over this all by myself, without help from Callie or anyone else. I couldn’t forget I was dealing with a guy who had hurt someone else in his life. Exactly the sort of guy who might be very charming to get to know at first—well, not that very charming described Steven at all on whole. I was yet to see any evidence he had redeemed himself after his past experiences.

  His car was pretty clean for an eighteen-year-old’s, although he did sweep one burger wrapper off the front passenger seat before I got in.

  “The paperwork first,” he said. “Then I’d like to take you up the mountain.”

  Hobart was in the shade of a big mountain it was popular to climb, but I’d never been up there. I’d never really thought about going up there. “What… what is there to do up there?” I asked, then wished I hadn’t, because the look on his face was of the oh you cute innocent little creature variety. There didn’t need to be anything up there but the two of us and a car, right?

  “Not much,” said Steven. “There’s some tracks up there, I like to run those sometimes.”

  I looked down at my own legs, which were living proof that what counted as ‘hot’ for a guy was beyond the ability of mere females to understand. “Do you want me to come running with you?”

  Steven was grinning again as he pulled out of his parking spot. “I don’t expect it. You can, if you want? But you’re not really dressed for it so maybe we’ll just walk this time.”

  I thought a few kids still hanging around the school or starting their walk home were peering in the windows of Steven’s car as we passed them, maybe trying to work out who the girl sitting next to him was. But he’d done a pretty sly job of keeping anyone from seeing the two of us close together. The rumours would spread in time, of course, but our friends were dating already, and Callie and Lucas made a much more interesting couple. Much more plausible, too. At least the two of them had history.

  Something seemed to change in Steven once he was able to speed up a little out of the neighbourhood of Burgundy College. It was a very subtle relaxation. “What happened with your job, anyway?”

  That was not the question I had been expecting. “Nothing, really. I mean I didn’t get fired or anything. It just got a bit exhausting to have to do school and then work and then come home. Mum never liked it either, she whinged about my working all the time.”

  “Huh.” Steven was already pulling into the carpark at the place where I needed to go apply for my birth certificate. “I would have thought you’d need to be working. You and I, we’re not exactly like bloody Lucas where we can afford to just bum around and then step straight into the perfect career.”

  I felt a little rubbed up the wrong way that he seemed to be telling me I should be working. But there was nothing particularly judgemental in his voice. He seemed more interested in pointing out the connections between us.

  “Yeah well, there’s a reason I have no money now. But I think my mum was right, it was getting too stressful for me.”

  “Fair enough.” Steven’s car seemed to stop with a sharper jolt than I was used to. My heart was going wild, and it had nothing to do with being alone with Steven in his car—well, that was a part of it. But mostly, I just couldn’t believe what I was about to do. I couldn’t even imagine how Mum would react if she found out I’d been getting this information behind her back. After everything she’d been through, all she’d done to protect me from terrible for
ces that could have ruined my life, how could I do something like this to her?

  I grabbed Steven’s arm as he was about to open his door. “Steven, wait. I’m sorry. I can’t do this.”

  There was a flash of annoyance on his face, and then it softened. “Because of your mum?”

  I nodded. At least he got it. “I can’t betray her like this. I should never have even thought of it in the first place.”

  Steven gently moved himself out of my grasp and then took both my hands in one of his, folding the other on top of them. “That is why you need to do this, Tamara. You have questions, and there’s no good way to get them out of her. If you do things this way, at least she’ll never have to be involved. You’ll both be able to get what you need without hurting one another more.”

  “But is this something I even have a right to?” I asked. “It was her life; I don’t remember this guy. Am I just claiming a story that belongs to my mother to make myself feel more special, or something?”

  Steven seemed to be really thinking about what I’d asked, which touched me a lot. I would never have seen him as having this much depth. Honestly if you’d asked me for one word to describe him before this past week, ‘meathead’ would have likely been the top contender. He was proving today especially that you never really knew what was inside another person.

  I didn’t realise just how much I was hanging on his reply until I felt my whole body sag when he finally spoke. “No, this belongs to you too. You need it, you deserve it. Everyone’s entitled to have the truth about what really happened in a situation involving them. It just sucks when getting the truth means other people might get hurt. So… what we’re doing here is getting you your truth, without hurting anybody else.”

  He was like that the whole time I was in the office, nudging me a little whenever I acted awkward, pointing out what I needed to hand over when I got flustered.

  The lady on the other side of the counter seemed sympathetic, at least. “It can be very emotional to get to see these documents,” she said. Well, that gave me hope I wasn’t the only person who’d come in all but blubbering like an idiot.

  I nearly went off properly at the last hurdle: her informing me that I would receive my certificate in the mail in a certain number of days.

  Steven hauled me off before I could get fully into making a scene. “It’s really not a big deal. If you don’t want anyone to see, you’ve got a couple of weeks to get into the habit of being the one to bring in the mail.”

  “Well, Mum is terrible at that anyway and I don’t think I ever remember Ryan doing it, so…” I was distracted by the fact that he’d put his arm over my shoulder to lead me out. “I just hate having to wait at this point, you know?”

  Steven shot me this funny sideways smirk. “Yeah, waiting always sucks.”

  It felt very much like something was not being said there… and it also felt like I probably shouldn’t press any further. Steven took his arm off me as we reached his car, and we got in and he drove me up to the mountain, as promised.

  I started shivering a little once I was out of the car. It was beautiful up there—the whole of Hobart was revealed to us down below—but it was definitely colder. “I guess you have to run once you’re up here.”

  “Have to do something to get your blood going for sure,” Steven agreed. He took my hand and led me off down a path marked as a walking track, but when he abruptly yanked me off the path about a minute in, dragging me behind a tangle of saplings and thick prickly bush that formed a screen from anyone else who might pass by… well, I realised he might not have necessarily been thinking about exercise.

  “I am fucking fuming at the thought of having to wait even one more minute to fuck you,” he murmured, his hands suddenly all over me. I was scared, because my first reaction to those words wasn’t fear. “But I’m going to wait. As long as I have to. I didn’t bring you up here to force you into it.”

  His hands were already up the front of my shirt, crossing the bare skin of my stomach. “But I don’t think you’re going to want to wait too long, are you?” He pushed my shirt up so it was bunched under my chin, and nuzzled the side of my neck as he squeezed my breasts. I had a sudden, vivid memory of putting on some awful bra that morning, but in the next second the bra was coming down too, and I didn’t think Steven was leaning back to stare at my underwear.

  There I was, exposed to him like the city below us. I looked Steven right in his eyes which were not looking in my eyes, and I felt that awful truth right up against my skin this time: how good it might feel for a woman to stick with a dangerous man longer than was safe, if he looked at her like that even some of the time when she felt most vulnerable.

  He pushed my skirt up, his fingers finding their way into my underwear to explore; I turned my head up and whimpered as he pinched my nipple hard. What with the cold up there, I felt every bit of it.

  He nuzzled his face between my breasts, then pulled back. His eyes still wouldn’t meet mine. “We’d better get out of here before everything I’ve just said goes out the fucking window.”

  He didn’t seem willing—or able, probably—to help me put my clothes back together, but I managed to take care of myself with only a little awkwardness. He held his hand out to me as soon as I was finished, so he was clearly paying attention. “Well, let’s go.”

  Maybe I was supposed to feel dirty after that, but the main thought in my mind was that I wanted more. As soon as possible. I’d never had anything like this in my life before and now a little taste had me starving.

  And if there was something wrong with me because of that—if I was a whore or stupid or a stupid whore—I would be perfectly happy to wear that.

  Chapter Ten: Tamara

  At least worrying about when Steven would make his move kept me from worrying about my birth certificate that was probably winging its way ever closer to me.

  I wasn’t worrying about the fact of it, that was the really concerning thing. I was obsessed with the details. How would we manage to find somewhere we wouldn’t be interrupted? Would he enjoy himself with me, when I didn’t really know what I was doing? I wasn’t keen on the idea of giving myself to someone who wasn’t going to appreciate it.

  Maybe all of this just meant that what my biological father had done to me all those years ago had damaged me. Here I was, so willing to jump into bed (maybe not even a bed) with a guy just because his touch felt pretty good. But I couldn’t bring myself to worry too much about that either.

  I’d started hesitantly talking to Callie again, though it was incredibly awkward compared to how it had been before. Back then, we’d been on the same level, each clueless about a lot of things in the world but trying hard. Now, I felt like Callie was out there succeeding at everything, and I was such a mixed bag. Didn’t work any more. Wasn’t sure what was going on with this guy I was messing around with.

  I’d hoped Callie would ask about Steven, so I could maybe ask her if things had been the same with her. But either she still didn’t feel like talking to me about my personal life, or she was just too distracted by her own. I felt pretty confident in continuing to go with ‘too distracted’ as an explanation.

  What Callie did ask me—something that would never have happened before the past few weeks happened—was if I would come to a party with her.

  “I’m surprised you’d think I would want to go to a party with the other people at our school,” I said. “I’m surprised you would want to go to a party with the other people at our school.”

  Callie shrugged. “I don’t really. Well, Carlene is pretty all right these days, I know you don’t think much of her still but she’s been great to me when I needed someone to just accept me. Lucas is the one who wants to go, obviously, and it’d be fine if I could just spend time with him, but he’s bound to run off and boof it up with his idiot friends from other schools, and that just leaves me sulking in a corner if I don’t have my own people to spend time with.”

  I could feel my face stre
tching into the same sort of incredulous stare I’d sometimes given other girls at our school who had tried to explain the sorts of things that mattered in their world. “Then… he should go, and you can stay home or go out somewhere else? I didn’t think you’d be willing to give up your time to something you don’t care about like this.”

  “I’m not,” Callie said, “but Lucas thinks that’s a character flaw, or something. He says it’d be good for me to try doing things a bit differently… and the thing is, I’m not sure he’s wrong. We seem to have this thing going where each of us knows the other better than they know themselves.”

  I shivered a bit at that. What if you had that sort of relationship with someone, and they still turned out to be bad for you? They’d be able to twist things to get you to do whatever they wanted.

  Callie leaned back on her bed. It was so strange being in her room after so long hardly seeing her. We’d usually gone to my house before, but she hadn’t asked this time. Maybe she remembered how Mum was about men—and women who dated men—sometimes, or she wanted to stay on her own turf. “Steven will be there.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Did he put you up to asking me?”

  There was a really? tilt to her eyebrows that made me feel warm all over for just a second, because it was sort of like a new version of what had existed between us before. The balance had definitely shifted forever—Callie was above me now instead of us both being on the same awkward level.

  “I put myself up to it and it doesn’t mean anything in particular, I just feel like there is something going on there and maybe school is not the right place to explore it, you know?”

  “What do you think of Steven anyway?” I asked, which probably confirmed to her that there was something going on, but she looked thoughtful, not smug.