by Tiffany Sala
Steven glanced back at me. “Nah, keep that off. I want to watch you while you play for me. I’m going to offer you some encouragement.”
I shivered.
“I suppose you might want to put something under you when you sit on the couch,” Steven added. I’d never before been struck with such conflicting desires: to squeal in disgust like a little kid, and to pump my fist in the air like someone who was really winning at life.
“Are you sure Ashleigh isn’t going to come yell at us for hiding out in here?” After what had just happened, sitting down next to Steven on the couch was actually more awkward than before.
“I’m sure she’ll be too busy entertaining her fans inside. Then she’ll be busy being mad because everyone’s drunk off their face. I don’t know what she expects when she’s inviting pigs to a grand ball.”
I giggled.
Steven put a controller in my hand. “Don’t worry, I’ll talk you through everything. Do a good job… well, I might have something else for you to grab onto.”
I didn’t think I was ever going to be some champion gamer, but Steven was definitely pleased by how hard I tried. I was balanced on his lap, all sorts of parts bumping and rubbing against one another, and I almost felt like this was totally normal.
Then Steven brought the TV back to its main menu, and I shrieked at the time displayed. “Midnight? Is that right?”
Steven shrugged. “Probably?”
I was up and rummaging through my handbag, dropped thoughtlessly in the middle of the floor. “I hope Callie isn’t ready to go home yet.”
“Lucas isn’t going to be ready to go home,” said Steven, as if that was the end of it.
I had a whole bunch of missed calls from Callie, as well as several texts repeating the same request that I call her as soon as I could. Then a text from Aileen that had me really worried: Callie is going nuts. You’d better come back if you can.
I showed Steven my messages and he groaned. “What the fuck is she doing?”
“Well, I’d better go back and find out.” Now I was thinking a bit more clearly, it wasn’t like I could have Steven drop me off at home now, and definitely not in the morning. “Sorry, I know I said—”
Steven put a hand over my mouth. “It’s okay, you’re right. Fucking Callie.”
We dressed and made our way back up to the house. Steven walked behind me, and as we got really close he dropped back even further, so I stepped in through the back door by myself.
The scene inside was about what I would have expected: people everywhere reeling with cups in their hands, and Ashleigh in the middle of it all looking like she would have put her face in her hands if she wasn’t too polite to notice her guests were a mess.
Almost nobody took any notice of me, but Callie was soon staggering towards me, wide-eyed. Terrified, not drunk. “Tamara, where have you been?”
“I’m fine, Callie, what’s all this drama about?”
“I thought that Steven—” She bit her lip and looked around at our audience, who might be mostly wasted but were probably capable of picking up all the popcorn-worthy details we were dropping.
Steven walked in then, took in everyone’s eyes on him, and walked right by me smirking.
“Did you have a good time, Steven?” someone yelled.
“Tamara?” said Callie. “Are you all right?”
Aileen grabbed Callie and me and dragged us both off into a corner, not quite fast enough to escape a round of mocking cackling.
“What is up with you, Calista?” I demanded. “Are you the only one allowed to have gross hook-ups with guys? I thought you knew—” I stopped too, because Aileen probably knew nothing and I wasn’t even sure what it was Callie was supposed to know.
“Sorry.” Callie seemed more embarrassed than genuinely sorry. “He just… he disappeared with you.”
“And I told Aileen I was fine.”
Aileen shifted on her feet too. “We didn’t exactly have an extended dialogue on it. I couldn’t really say for sure everything was totally fine.”
Well, this was probably just what I got for trying to keep what was going on quiet even when it was obvious something was going on.
I wobbled a little, clinging to Callie to keep my balance. I felt sore and sick and desperate to just be alone. Certainly not keen to be sharing my current state with a whole bunch of drunk near-strangers.
Callie held me up. “Let’s just go, okay?”
Aileen recoiled. “Wait… Lucas? Um… that other arsehole?”
“I’m sure Steven can take care of them,” Callie said. Aileen seemed content enough with that answer, and if I had my doubts about whether Steven would be available, I was pretty happy to keep those to myself.
We were serenaded with catcalls and lewd remarks as we hurried out of Ashleigh’s house, which somehow still managed to be utterly exquisite even when full of drunk people. Ashleigh glanced at us as we passed her, but didn’t excuse herself from whoever she was talking with to say goodbye.
When I flopped into the back seat of Callie’s car with Aileen, I hurt again, but I felt more relaxed being away from all of them. Callie roared off in the car in a way she never used to drive before: I guess she never used to have to go to these sorts of parties, either.
“So, um.” Aileen didn’t exactly sound like she was eager to break the silence, but she didn’t have the excuse of driving not to, either. “Do we want to know what happened tonight?”
“The answer to that is definitely no… and you’re about to get a brainful anyway. What do you do if you think there’s a risk of being pregnant?”
Callie groaned. “Oh, Steven, you fucking did not. Your mother is going to lose it, Tamara.”
“Actually I’m sort of hoping not to start out my adult sex life by discussing my sex life with my mother.”
“It might be a bit late to find a pharmacy that’s open right now,” said Aileen, who was apparently going to take the very weird unlike-Aileen step of being very practical about this. “We’ll have to find a way to sneak you to one tomorrow.”
“Assuming you’re okay with that,” Callie added.
“Because… I might actually be secretly religious and have issues on those grounds?” Religion was one thing I didn’t have to worry about holding me back. I’d been too young to remember, but my mother had attended a church for a while after we left my father, had apparently really appreciated their support while she was trying to rebuild her life. Until she thought she figured out that churches were actually pretty keen on keeping women imprisoned in their own ways. Ryan told me once about how she’d staged a dramatic unbaptising ceremony for the two of us to clear the remaining taint from our brush with religion.
But she would still flip out if she got wind I’d needed to resort to emergency contraception.
“I don’t judge these days,” Callie said.
I sighed. “How do you rate my chances of keeping all of this from my mother, anyway?”
“Depressingly low,” said Aileen.
Chapter Twelve: Tamara
Mum wasn’t at all happy to have me crawling in home the following morning. Apparently she’d waited up until three. I had a key.
Mike made the stupid mistake of telling her she should ‘chill out’ and let me live a little. She launched into an epic rant about how he needed to stay out of things when it came to her children, which at least gave Ryan and me cover to slip off to our bedrooms.
I sat on my bed, and instead of giving in to a sudden urge to hug a whole bunch of my dolls at once, I pulled Callie’s dress out of my bag and clung to that instead. I would have fun sneaking that out to wash without my mother noticing.
I pulled my phone out of my bag and stared at it, at the recent stream of messages from Callie and Aileen. Steven and I had never even exchanged numbers so we could flirt by text or calls like other couples probably did. Not that we were a couple… or that I wanted us to be a couple. I wasn’t sure about my feelings or his. Maybe we were alrea
dy finished now, or Steven had a certain number of encounters in mind and then he would cut me off.
Well, if Steven wanted to get in touch with me I was pretty sure he’d be able to get Lucas to get Callie to give him my number or something. But for some reason I didn’t think he’d do that.
It was just so weird. There was no romance whatsoever here, and I was entirely okay with it. Shouldn’t I be exactly the sort of girl who wanted that romance in her love life? I slept in a bedroom that looked like it belonged to a ten-year-old Sleeping Beauty, for goodness sake.
I was quite happy with how things were going. Very happy. And maybe I should feel guilty about that, but I didn’t.
I was glad Ryan dropped me off a short distance from school, because I knew that day was going to be a real mess. That week.
I’d arranged to meet Callie and Aileen at the front of the building so we could all go into class together, but I’d already had two people yell questions about that night at the party by the time I reached them.
Callie’s cheek was twitching. “This is going to be a real clusterfuck of a day. Tamara, I have to tell you…”
“Who’s a dirty girl, Tamara?” bellowed some meathead. I had even less of an idea who he was than I’d had about Steven before our initial confrontation.
“I guess you’d know one when you see one,” Aileen bellowed after him, “because all you have to do to remember is look at a picture of your mum.”
“Aileen, leave it.” I turned on Callie. “You clearly know something about what’s happening here.”
“It’s Ashleigh,” said Callie, which was probably the start of a lot of bad stories. “She’s been telling everyone how you and Steven left the bungalow at the back of her family house in a total mess when you were in there. You know… fluids.”
I felt like I was going to throw up. Ashleigh was fucking lying: we had made extra sure we tidied up after ourselves and didn’t leave any fluids. But the whole thing was so embarrassing I didn’t want to get into arguing that point, not even with my friends.
Callie and Aileen were completely on my side anyway, as expected if the other side was Ashleigh’s.
“The least she could have done is come to you if she had a problem,” said Aileen. “Just spreading this all over the place is such a dick move. Um, excuse the…”
I stopped walking. I was actually moaning a little, very low, and I couldn’t manage to stop it. “I can’t do this. I can’t go in and face them all thinking…”
“So go home,” Callie told me. “Tell your mum you got a really bad period or something.”
I shuddered at the thought of how clingy that would make her. Then I remembered the other problem I had to tackle after school, and my sick feelings intensified. If you got pregnant, could you experience morning sickness that early? I was pretty sure that wasn’t how it worked… but I couldn’t quite convince my terrified mind.
“I’ve got to just get through this day,” I said. “There’s no way around it. I have to face it if I ever want this to die down.”
“Right.” Callie led the way into first period social science. I was really appreciating her new confident attitude… until I remembered that it was her making a gigantic fuss that had drawn everyone’s attention to Steven and I going off together in the first place.
“Really wish you’d just kept your mouth shut that night,” I muttered.
Callie’s back went visibly stiff. “Sorry for caring about you.”
That first period was an overwhelming horror. I almost didn’t notice all the whispering and laughing, what with the furious energy Callie was radiating.
In my second period, I wasn’t with either of them and I missed the distraction. I went alone to my locker at recess and hung around, hoping Callie would come to forgive me (even if it was her fault again) or Steven, who I hadn’t seen all day, but there was no such luck. I decided I was going to head straight to the library at lunch time.
Both Callie and Aileen were in maths with me before lunch, but they were sitting together away from me, and for once I was actually happy about that.
At least until Rowan, who sat behind me, started shifting in his seat… and whenever I heard the sound of him moving, I felt a prodding sensation in my lower back through a gap in my chair… and then, my arse.
I would have turned around and told him to knock it off at any other time—I thought I would have, that was. I didn’t get this sort of treatment that often. At least he was just poking me with a pen or something, probably. Callie and Aileen were in front of me, so I couldn’t signal them to help me figure out what was going on. Maybe they wouldn’t even want to. It seemed like I was going to get punished more harshly for doing something that was no worse than what Callie had done. Better. I’d just wanted to look out for her from the start, and since when could she say the same about me?
I tried to hold back when everyone else was leaving the classroom, so I could make my more subtle way to the library, but when Mrs. Patterson left and the room was still pretty crowded, I realised I’d gone about this in a bad way.
I started hurrying to the door and heard a quick tread behind me, and some laughter.
“Got someone to hurry off to, Tamara?”
I turned, and before I could snap out a response, Rowan’s smirking face was looming over me, and then he smacked my arse and kept on sauntering past as if nothing had happened.
I stared at the two girls who were still left in the room: Mari, and Tina. “Did you see—”
They both just shrugged and made awkward sideways steps around me to leave the room.
I couldn’t even process what had just happened. I wanted to sit down right where I was and cry, but that wasn’t going to help me.
I bolted out of the room, pushing past some of the people who had left before me. I could only think of one person I wanted to reach for right now, who might be able to help.
It wasn’t hard to track down Steven during a lunch hour: I just had to follow the loudest shouts and laughter across the campus. Some part of me was cringing that I was running straight to a man to protect me—a man who was himself violent, at the very least. But when the only other option in my head was a meltdown, surely this couldn’t be such a bad choice.
Chapter Thirteen: Steven
I easily swatted away the ball Tyrell shot in my direction. That fucker thought he was going to get back at me for putting him in his place now that things were coming out about me and Tamara. Well, good for him, but it wasn’t like I gave a shit about that coming out anyway. I had tried to keep things quiet because Tamara clearly didn’t want her family to get to hear about her personal life, and gossip had a way of spreading everywhere in this stupid small town, but for myself, I actually didn’t care. Tamara was hot and pretty much all of the guys at Burgundy would have killed to fuck someone as wild in bed as her. I practically felt like punching myself for having gotten to do that. I doubted she’d given it up to many of the guys I knew. There would have been gossip for sure if she’d gone with any of the sorts of guys I hung out with. They were fucking pigs.
I guess I was a fucking pig too, for wanting to fuck her before I really got to know much about her, but I wasn’t the kind of fucking pig to talk about her to other people. They’d just think I was making half of it up anyway.
I realised I’d zoned out a bit, but it seemed like everyone else had too. Mic and Tyrell and Pat were staring at something behind me.
When I turned, there she was. I felt a smile spreading across my face, but it was pretty obvious once I’d gotten a good look at her that she was upset.
Just like that, I was fired up, ready to do some serious damage to whoever had said or done anything to hurt her.
Tamara skidded to a halt in front of me, red-faced, a little sweaty. She still looked stunning like that as far as I was concerned—maybe even more so because of it.
She was struggling to meet my gaze, hesitating to reach out. But she’d run all this way to me. Even if she was a b
it shy, she had to be hoping I would be happy to see her.
I spoke quietly enough that the others wouldn’t hear. “It’s okay, Tamara, I don’t bite… unless you ask.”
That got a quiver out of her lips, a smile that couldn’t quite take off.
She was a little more relaxed once I got her to come close enough to touch, though we didn’t. She was still barely able to speak, eventually communicating what had happened to her in a weird combination of two-word sentences and pantomime. That fucking creep Rowan had slapped her arse. He was always such a randy shit. Couldn’t stand someone else getting into something he couldn’t have.
“I’ll sort him out,” I promised, even though I wasn’t really sure what I could do about him. Getting into someone I spent time with on the field was one thing, but this wasn’t fucking America where you were a god just because you put on a jersey in high school and ran around on the field. Had to make it to the draft for that. “But I tell you what, Tamara. Next time, you just turn right around fast and put your knee in his junk. It might be a bit hard to find, but if you kick him there it’ll go a long way towards teaching him.”
Tamara’s shoulders went up. That would have been a real turn-on at any other time, but right now it just meant I hadn’t been funny enough to calm her down. “I do not want to ‘put my knee in his junk’, Steven. I don’t want that asshole anywhere near me ever again.”
“Because of his hand on your arse for less than one second? That sounds like a bit of an overreaction to me, sweetheart.”
She just bristled up even more after I said sweetheart. “Do you think this is some joke?”
“Your reaction is a bit of a joke.” She recoiled like I’d actually hit her. “I get it, I really do, nobody wants to have that happen to them, but… it was just a swat on the arse, right? It happened right in front of everyone too, it wasn’t like it was going to go anywhere else. I mean, you’ve had that happen a few times before, both wanted and unwanted, I’m sure.”
