by Tiffany Sala
Then all sorts of images started coming up in my head, one on top of the other: things that had happened recently, things Steven had done… things I was only imagining.
I put my hands on his chest to push him away from me, but once we’d broken apart I kept them there.
“Sorry,” Steven muttered. “That was a fuck-up. I knew I shouldn’t… I couldn’t…”
He spread one of his hands on top of mine. “I thought I could do this, but I’m fucking weak, I’m sorry. I know I have no right to ask anything of you, I don’t expect anything right now, but… if you think it’s never going to happen, if there’s no hope, I can’t do it after all. I want it all too much.”
I blinked tears out of the way. I wanted it too, to get back to that place where it was the two of us, the rest of the world shut out. But I had a lot of shit to work through first.
Well… didn’t wanting it mean something, though?
“I don’t know how long it’s going to take me,” I said. “I don’t know anything right now. But I know I feel stronger when I feel like you’re near me.”
The door banged open. I turned my head to stare at Jess, who had gotten a lot better than me at getting that door unlocked without a whole bunch of struggling with the card.
She was staring at the two of us. “Oh…” Her mouth was doing some strange things. “Just… let me know if you contaminate the bed, okay? Because I’m definitely going to take the couch then… unless you decided to use the couch… one or the other, okay?”
Steven rolled his eyes. “Hey, Para, I don’t suppose you brought your Switch along? There’s a game that has a demo out right now I thought Tamara might be better at than Halo.”
“A masterful change of subject I am perfectly delighted by.” Jess pulled the handheld gaming thing she’d been messing with the night before out of her backpack and handed it over to him. While Steven tried to work out how to get it hooked up to the free hotel wifi, Jess pulled out her books and sat down to work. Clearly our presence had a chilling effect on her… although fortunately, she hadn’t worked out that the two of us should still have been in school for another ten minutes at least.
I quickly realised I liked this setup: Jess peeking at us with an occasional little smile as she at least gave the impression of working, Steven holding her gaming machine towards me, “Look, it’s literally impossible to roll this car.” It wasn’t that magical moment Steven and I had experienced before, but it felt a little like the promise that we might be able to get back there, some day.
“Your life is an actual soap opera,” Aileen told me, as if I hadn’t noticed. I hadn’t even told her most of the parts relating to Steven.
Callie looked like she was actually in pain. “Okay, he did a good thing with your sister, but I’m not sure that’s going to be enough to make Lucas forget all the other stuff.”
“Look at you,” said Aileen, “the arbiter of what goes in the popular group.”
Callie punched her in the arm. “I’m not, I’m just saying what I know about how he’s going to react.”
Aileen’s sigh sounded genuine enough… but I thought I knew her better than to completely trust her. “So the two of you are separated until you can get an actually supportive group around you to protect you from the same meatheads Steven is going out to play kick-the-ball with right now. Well, I am certainly going to support you in any way I can, because this is a romance for the ages.”
I was pretty sure I needed to hit her too, but I really did need her on my side.
“It’s just too complicated to for us to be trying to change the order of things at school,” I tried to explain. “You know how it all is.” Callie sighed in a way that seemed pretty genuine. “We can still get together after school, on the weekends.”
“With your little sister hanging around raising the romance quotient,” Aileen added.
“I suppose so,” I said. She’d reminded me to go look out the window. Callie and Aileen followed me over there, taking wary steps like they thought there was something a bit off about me at the moment.
There he was: tall, magnificent, frightening. I’d caught him mid-mark, coming back down to the ground almost in slow motion, an angel descending. An angel who was actually damn good at football, even to my completely inexperienced eyes. No wonder he’d thought he belonged with Lucas and his smug little bunch of friends.
I couldn’t give him back his dreams of a footy career, couldn’t undo any of the dark things he’d done. But if he wanted a better future, I could be by his side. Maybe we could both reach higher than we had thought posssible in recent history.
Still glowing from his glorious leap into the heavens, Steven turned his head… and stared straight at the library window, at me watching with my friends behind me.
There was no way he could see me from that distance because I’d gone out and checked once. But he stood there staring just a little too long for it to be a coincidence. Maybe he could sense when I was watching him, the same way I seemed to have that sense for his presence when we were still fighting over Callie’s inclusion in Lucas’s group of friends.
It all seemed so ridiculous now, so not the point. My mum had been right about one thing: you had to let people decide for themselves, no matter what.
I laughed, loud enough to spark an aggravated noise from whoever was guarding the library desk that day, and stepped away from the window before Steven stopped looking.
“If you two are willing to stand by me, maybe we should just go outside,” I said.
Thank you for reading!
I hope you got something out of Games Boys Play.
If you happened to miss the first book in the Troubled Playthings series, it is available now for Kindle.
Book 1: Boys and Their Toys
The final book in the Troubled Playthings series is currently available for preorder, and will be released a few weeks from now.
Book 3: The Big Boys’ League
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