Boys And Their Toys: A Dark High School Bully Romance (Troubled Playthings Book 1)

by Tiffany Sala

  Lucas’s hands on my arms twitched. For a moment I thought he was going to start groping me, but either he’d just been trying to startle me or he’d felt the way I’d stiffened, because he got off me and let me step away from the headstone.

  “Let’s get back to the car,” he said. “Still got to pick up mine before we get to school.”

  He didn’t sound at all affected by what had just happened, and I couldn’t bring myself to look at him to see what was happening in his face. I just followed him down the rest of the way back to the car with his scent from his blazer surrounding me and one inane thought foremost in my head: Jillian Montgomery had seen everything from her grave, and I wasn’t so sure that Lucas hadn’t intended that from the start.

  When we reached the car, I went to the driver’s side and stood waiting.

  “Good girl,” said Lucas without really looking at me, and tossed me the keys, which I caught one-handed this time, despite the shaking that seemed to have affected my entire body.

  Chapter Nine

  As I’d known it would, me and Lucas arriving late to school in two new (in my case, new enough) cars set off the rumour mills with even more of a vengeance. And of course Lucas had just muttered a goodbye once I got him back to his place and got straight out of the car, never mind that he’d devoured my face like I was his new favourite food only minutes before or the weird circumstances of where it had happened either.

  I would have just believed the whole thing had happened in my head, except I didn’t think my brain was capable of coming up with anything as incredible as the way Lucas had tasted, or the fact that his stubble rubbing against my skin was actually kind of hot. Just thinking about it had my brain dissolving into a puddle right there in my skull, and I didn’t really think about anything else that morning—especially not class.

  By the time I’d gotten to fourth period with Tamara and Aileen and the haze in my head was starting to die down, the overriding view in the gossip surrounding Lucas and myself was that I was blackmailing him with something I’d gotten on him (if only), and that was why he had taken me to school and home but seemed to be avoiding me as much as possible while he did it, why he’d bought me that expensive car and the phone. And honestly, without all the details only the two of us knew, it really looked like that. Ashleigh was also in that maths class with us, and just based on the looks she kept shooting me, Lucas had succeeded in convincing her that the time he spent with me was all my doing.

  Not that I thought Lucas had gone to much effort to convince anyone of anything. He just didn’t care enough to come up with a story that would make me look better… and it was too much to believe he might actually want to spend time with me, wasn’t it?

  I wouldn’t have believed it myself, if not for that damn kiss. Maybe he thought he had to charm me a little bit after the car accident, in his own way. But I didn’t think I’d given him any reason to believe I expected that to take the form of him planting his mouth on me.

  Even when it came to that detail, the more I thought about it the more I thought he hadn’t ever intended to do it. I’d gotten him mad when I refused to accept the car he’d picked for me, and things had gotten even more out of hand for him when he took me to Jillian Montgomery’s grave.

  Jillian, I was certain, was the key to everything.

  Tamara was sitting across the room from me in maths, but Aileen and I were next to one another. After we were all settled down and working on a page of problems, I nudged her and said, “Hey, do you know anything about a girl called Jillian Montgomery?”

  “Never heard the name before,” Aileen said. “Sounds rich, though. Is she Lucas’s girlfriend?”

  “She’s dead,” I said, “so I hope for his sake she isn’t.”

  “Lucas doesn’t seem like the type to want them when they can’t put up a bit of a fight,” Aileen mused.

  “Could you please get off the topic of Lucas Starling?” I demanded, a bit too loudly. Everyone in the seats around us was now looking.

  “Well that’s what this is all about, isn’t it?” Aileen said.

  “It’s not all about Lucas.”

  “So she has something to do with Lucas,” said Aileen, giving her cheeks a smug twitch in my direction, “and that means it’s basically all about him.”

  “Aileen, Callie,” said Mrs. Patterson. “Could you please save your love lives until after my class?”

  “Sorry,” I muttered, sliding under my desk as much as was possible. Aileen didn’t even bother with that much of an apology, and after that I could hear everyone talking about me and Lucas all around me, and Mrs. Patterson just rolled her eyes wearily and didn’t do anything to try to get them under control.

  After school, I had to hurry to my first day back at work after a few days off, and because I didn’t have to wait around for Lucas, I was able to get out there in record time.

  I was hoping it would be a quiet first day back in which I could catch up with the backlog of paperwork and sneak in a bit of personal research, but everyone saw my new car coming. My boss Dane and two of the contractors who happened to be around made straight for me and started plying me with questions.

  “Become a kept woman, huh, Callie? Got a new man plying you with the good stuff for your favours?” And of course it had to be Bill who was around for it all when he was the biggest arsehole on Dane’s roster. I liked most of the contractors, even though they either treated me like a kid or a secretary—you know the behaviour—but I’d never been able to find a way to like Bill.

  “She’s certainly not paying for that with the money I’m giving her,” Dane cracked. The other thing I didn’t like about Bill was that he tended to have a negative effect on the behaviour of the other guys around him.

  “I told you,” I said with excessive patience, “I had this guy at my school from a rich family run into my old car. He insisted on replacing it, and… well, that’s what he gave me.”

  “Rich and tasteless apparently,” remarked Mez.

  “Yeah, that car is going to get itself stolen,” Dane said. “Are you at least going to put that top up?”

  “I haven’t actually worked out how to put it up yet,” I admitted. I’d never seen Lucas using his sister’s car with the roof up, of course he’d gone and brought mine around to me in open-top mode, and the one thing he hadn’t brought along with the car was a manual. I hadn’t had time between school and getting to work to figure it out. Not that I’d really wanted to be fumbling around the car in front of the school with a few hundred judgemental eyes on me waiting for some evidence that I believed Lucas Starling had sabotaged my new ride.

  “Right,” Dane said, “that’s easy, then. Come on.”

  He marched me outside with the other two enthusiastically in tow as if they didn’t actually have any work to get done that day, and showed me how to pull out the caps on the parts of the roof that folded back into the car, and get the roof over and fixed in place. Once it had a roof like a normal car, the convertible actually looked a little less offensive. It was still over-the-top and probably more expensive than I really wanted to know, but at least I wasn’t going to look quite so much of a spoiled ditz riding around in it.

  “I saw one of these in about this condition going for about thirty thousand a few months back,” Mez commented. Too bad I hadn’t been able to let him in on not wanting to know. “If you plan on riding around in that on your own, keep it secured and keep your wits about you. Honestly, if you were my girl and a boy gave you something like that I’d have his balls for chicken stew. Especially in that colour. He’s gonna make you a target.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I did try to tell him that.”

  “A guy who loved you would not set you up for that kind of shit,” Bill added. The fucker was trying to spin it as just more fatherly advice, but there was something just a little bit too gleeful in the way he was saying it.

  “Trust me,” I said, “I don’t need you to tell me that.” I was not under any misapprehen
sion that any of what Lucas was doing was because he loved me, or because he was anywhere near loving me.

  I did think, however, that maybe he had loved Jillian Montgomery… and maybe he didn’t quite know what to do with those feelings now she was gone.

  I didn’t get a chance to do a bit of sneaky online research on my phone at work, obviously, and then when I got home in my car there was another tense encounter with my parents once they figured out that this one was, apparently, mine.

  Dad was with the guys at work in saying it was a safety issue for me to be out and about in something so conspicuous, especially where I worked. Mum just thought whatever I was selling myself for had to be pretty messed-up if I wasn’t getting a boyfriend out of the mix. I think she was picturing something out of one of those novels she liked to read, where I’d accepted a lavish car in exchange for offering my body for a one-night, no-holds-barred experience. Maybe agreed he could bring his friends along to share in the fun. The only male friend of his I knew of was Steven, and no car was going to convince me to let him anywhere near me. I didn’t think Lucas was likely to go for something like that either. Didn’t you have to be in your thirties at least and have suffered some horrible trauma to be into that sort of thing anyway?

  Well, I supposed if he’d had a girlfriend die, that might be enough to do it.

  It seemed like an eternity had passed since I’d learned the name of Jillian Montgomery by the time I was able to lock myself in my room with the excuse of homework, and start my session with the subject of What’s Up With Lucas Starling.

  Searching for her full name just gave me her obituary, which confirmed she’d been a hockey player (the girls of her former team were mentioned as some of the bereaved) and also told me she’d died after a long illness, though the exact illness wasn’t mentioned. It seemed safe to assume something like cancer.

  The obituary also referred to her a few times as just ‘Jill’, so I tried searching for ‘Jill Montgomery’ and once I narrowed it down with keywords for my state and city, I quickly found reports of her hockey games, which she seemed to have taken part in until about the age of thirteen. There were pictures of her team on the league website and in the newsletters they’d put online. They’d uploaded low-quality, grainy images, but once I spotted her face I could tell she’d been very pretty in real life. Gorgeous, and the star of her team as well. The newsletters were constantly talking about how she’d saved the day with some brilliant unexpected move.

  I checked the photos for the boys’ teams active at the same time as Jillian, but I didn’t see Lucas anywhere there. I didn’t see any Lucy Starling in the girls’ teams, either. None of which meant anything when it came to Lucas knowing her. Hobart is basically a small town, and I’ve noticed that the popular kids from all the different schools seem to know one another. We’d be on a bus to some school sporting event or other special occasion and I’d be hearing all about the same kids I’ve heard about before from some other schools, who were always having much wilder adventures at parties or on the weekend than I’d actually believed possible for kids our age. In the last couple years of school when a lot of kids had moved on to exclusively year eleven and twelve colleges—that was Burgundy for me and my friends—I’d actually met some of those kids I’d heard so much about, and of course they’d immediately fitted themselves into the new popular hierarchy. So there was no question about Lucas knowing this girl if she was as popular as I expected she might have been.

  But I probably wasn’t going to be able to learn much more about her by searching for her name on the Internet. The information that was out there would be in the heads of those other kids who had known her. If I wanted it, I had to be willing to ask someone. Lucas was an obvious choice, but I realised now even though he’d seemed to be telling me a lot about himself when we were there next to Jillian’s grave, he’d actually told me nothing. I didn’t know if asking him a straight question would get me anywhere, and I didn’t entirely want him to know that I was curious.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t exactly have any other ‘contacts’ in the cool kid world who might be able to tell me what I wanted to know… except, maybe, for one person who had reached out to me before I’d ruined it all. I had no idea if she’d be willing to talk to me again.

  I didn’t think I’d saved Ashleigh’s number from when she’d called my house, and I didn’t want to go asking my parents if they had her parents’ number, or they’d be constructing fiction in their heads about how I was friends with her as well now.

  I was able to call Tamara, though.

  “Hey, Tam, please tell me you know something about a dead girl named Jillian Montgomery, or else I’m going to have to talk to Ashleigh Tanner at school tomorrow.”

  “Geez, I’m sorry, Callie,” said Tamara after a long silence. “I’ve got nothing. I honestly wish I could save you from this horrible fate.”

  It was strange walking into school early the next morning, thinking it had been almost a whole day now since I’d seen Lucas.

  I didn’t see him anywhere around the grounds, either, which was exactly what I’d hoped for, because I knew where Ashleigh was usually found before class. When I went over to the shaded seat she seemed to like, she was with her friend Petra, but I figured one other person to drive off was about as good as I was going to get it.

  They just stopped talking when I stepped up to them, and stared at me. “Hey, Ashleigh,” I said, feet together and head down a little. I hated that she made me feel like a stupid little kid fronting up to the teacher. “Could I please talk to you in private for a moment?”

  Petra raised her eyebrows at me.

  “It’s just going to be about Lucas,” Ashleigh told her. “You might as well stay and hear it firsthand.”

  “I’d rather we keep this between us,” I said. I was already blushing. I felt like there had to be some way she would be able to see the evidence of his mouth on me.

  “It’ll be between us,” said Ashleigh, “but I am going to talk about it to Petra, and you might as well accept that if you still want to have this conversation.”

  “I’m not going to tell anyone else, trust me,” Petra said, leaning back against the back of the seat like she was expecting to really enjoy what came next. “I know what it’s like when you’ve got Lucas messing with you, I wouldn’t want that spread all over the place either.”

  “You dated Lucas?” I tried to keep my surprise somewhere it wouldn’t piss her off. Petra wasn’t exactly pretty—well, she had a nice face and a really nice smile, when she showed it, but she wasn’t the sort of pretty I expected someone like Lucas to go for. She was probably about as attractive as me, on the what-boys-like scale. She did have a kind of aura about her I definitely didn’t share, an attitude of everything being perfectly fine regardless of whatever was going on around her.

  “Oh, you know,” Petra said. “We went out, but what does that really mean? He’s not exactly the boyfriend type.”

  “Just so you don’t have to ask,” said Ashleigh, “I’ve never dated him. Neither of us wants to do that. He knows I wouldn’t let him get away with the shit he pulls, and I know I couldn’t keep him under control.”

  I felt like they were enjoying this position of advising me as experts on Lucas Starling a little too much.

  “What I want to ask about is actually a girl named Jillian Montgomery,” I said.

  “Never heard of her,” Ashleigh said. “Do you think Lucas is going out with her?”

  “She’s dead,” I said.

  “Well,” Petra said, “whatever else he is, Lucas isn’t the type to go after dead girls.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “it’s not personal, but I have to say I am so sick of getting that sort of joke when I ask around about this.”

  “Then here’s my advice,” Ashleigh said. “Don’t waste your time trying to figure out what’s up with Lucas, who he’s with, what he wants from you. The only thing you need to know is, he’s a player. If you’re the game he
wants to play at the moment then good for you, but it won’t last. You’ll waste a lot of time trying to figure out the rules of the game and he won’t even be thinking about you at the time.”

  She was right. She had to be right. Did I really believe Lucas was thinking about me right now? But still I wanted to resist the idea.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be his friend?” I said. “It doesn’t seem very nice that you’re here trashing him like this.”

  “I’m his friend, not his publicity agent,” Ashleigh said. “I’m telling it how it is, and yeah, I probably wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t so obvious you need it. I’m trying to save you from a whole lot of trouble you don’t need.”

  I couldn’t help myself. “Is this what you were going to tell me when you called my house the week before last?”

  Ashleigh gave Petra a funny look. “I never called your house,” she said. “Why would I even know your number? You must be getting things confused.”

  She wasn’t a bad actress. If I hadn’t known she called me, I would have been fooled. Petra looked like she was fooled. But Ashleigh definitely had something else to say that she wasn’t willing to talk about in front of Petra, and since I’d blown her off the first time I had no idea if she even wanted to tell me now.

  “Okay, well thanks for talking to me anyway,” I said.

  “I’m serious, Calista,” Ashleigh said. “Don’t waste your time on Lucas. It’s not going to be healthy for you.”

  “Thanks,” I repeated, backing away slowly. I didn’t make any promises, because I wasn’t sure I could lie to Ashleigh. It was probably written all over my face, the same as the fact that something had happened between me and Lucas.

  I knew I wasn’t going to just ‘stop wasting my time’ on him. I didn’t think he was done with me for a start, and then even if he did ignore me and make every aspect of my life hard, the moments when he was paying attention to me were so powerful they managed to erase the bad side of dealing with him.