by Tiffany Sala
The Big Boys’ League
Tiffany Sala
Thanks for picking up The Big Boys’ League!
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The Big Boys’ League is the third and final book in the Troubled Playthings series. The main storyline of each book stands alone, but the three books take place sequentially over a series of weeks.
If you need to catch up on (or remind yourself of) the first or second books in the Troubled Playthings series, you can check them out here.
Book 1: Boys and Their Toys
Book 2: Games Boys Play
— Tiffany
The Big Boys’ League is a dark romance and as such will feature confronting situations and topics not all readers will be comfortable with or able to read about without distress. If you feel dark themes might be too much for you at this point in your life I encourage you to use your own understanding of your comfort zone to protect yourself, even if that means selecting another book to read.
Chapter One
If there was one thing I was clinging to in these strange days that were the end of my time in enforced schooling, it was that I was already used to being a third wheel. So what did it matter that my third-wheel-ness had been expanded so that it was now taking over my entire existence?
This situation needs some context. The thing about me is, I’m not like other young women my age who exist entirely in one particular clique. I don’t mean this in a smug ‘not like other girls’ way; it’s not good or bad specifically. Sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad. ‘Other girls’ have their group of friends and they don’t stray from them, but I tend to move around a bit. I can slot myself into a lot of different groups and I like to do it, though there are some I won’t touch. But even if you’re welcome all over the place you still need a ‘home’ to go to, and that’s where my friends Tamara and Callie come in.
The thing about Tamara and Callie is they’re soulmates. They have boyfriends now who may or may not end up being that sort of significant relationship, but they need one another in a way that’s beyond things like how recently they’ve even spoken. They’re the same sort of person, full of angst so tremendous they can’t even express it. That’s why they have to stay in each other’s lives, even if it’s just leaving their mutual doors open.
And they like having me around because I break up the tension. I keep things funny when they need to laugh, when they don’t want to laugh. But I’m absolutely the third wheel. Neither of them would pick me over the other under any circumstances. Even when Callie was ignoring Tamara for a while because she was so distracted by her own personal dramas, well Tamara spent time with me, but she didn’t suddenly want to cling to me the way she’d clung to Callie since before I switched to the same school as them. And when Tamara slipped down that same rabbit hole of drama that seemed to be the way it went with men, it ended in both of them completely forgetting about me until it was all settled, and the dust cleared with those two soulmates having boyfriends who were two best friends too.
It was like something out of a movie, honestly. Two Girlfriends For Two Arseholes? Now things had settled down and they were awkwardly fumbling around pretending they were all a big happy group who had never been at one another’s throats, and I almost thought everyone was looking at me now thinking maybe I’d hook up with someone in Lucas and Steven’s group and make it a happy sixsome.
Not likely. Let’s see… there was Mic, who seemed to care entirely about his appearance. Callie told me confidentially she’d seen him have a meltdown because one of his cufflinks went missing. Axel, who had been running around with them for years, was always perfectly dressed but more obsessed with money, and all the amazing ways he, in particular, could make more of it. Good-looking, dreamy-sounding voice, but utterly tedious. And then there was Donal who’d been hanging around with that group on and off ever since he switched to Burgundy late in the previous year. He was also good on paper, especially printouts of his bank statement probably, but I’d seen him drink too much at a party recently, and with Axel banging on in my ear about some glorious investment he was soon to see returns on, I’d paid far too much attention to the aftermath. The mind cannot forget what once made the eyes bleed.
So, there was nobody in that group I could see myself getting attached to, and that was a big downer for me.
I’m not like Tamara and Callie in one other critical way: I actually want to be in a romantic relationship. I’m not so twisted up in my feelings about guys that I am going to go on about how I don’t need one and then fall over the first one who seems a bit complicated. I want a nice, simple guy I can have a nice, simple romance with. I want to be attracted to him and to then go on to appreciate his career prospects, and I want a light-hearted romance that ends in him begging me to be with him forever as if I’m the one who could have absolutely anybody. And I’m willing to move on some of those goals, but there’s one non-negotiable detail: he has to be able to prove to me that I am more important than anything else in his life. That he would let go of anything he needed to if it meant he would keep me.
I don’t care about being a third (or fifth, I guess) wheel ninety-nine percent of the time, but I want to go to our school formal with a date, not Callie and Tamara who will be undoubtedly absorbed in their boyfriends the whole time. If that formal ended in a proposal, well that would be all right with me. We’d make it a long engagement, but I’d be engaged.
It had to be right, though. And I was never going to find the right guy hanging around the nastiest group at Burgundy, the ones I never had anything to do with before. But I felt like the girls really needed some support from me, so there I was offering it to them. Stuck at yet another party I never wanted to go to and on my own because Tamara and Callie had already disappeared, probably on the quest for more public boyfriend drama.
Well, it was worse than being on my own, because I seemed to have landed in a little clique Axel was at the heart of. And he was in fine form that night. He’d brought along a little mechanical model to illustrate… whatever the hell he thought he needed to illustrate to a bunch of preloaded people at someone’s house party.
“I got this idea from chatting with Lucas about some of the products his mum is bringing over this summer.” The model looked homemade, a little lopsided. “See, educational toys are really hot at the moment, parents will pay absolutely insane amounts to get their little darling something to keep them off the screens and learning something.”
“Yeah, but what the fuck do you know about educational toys?” called Donal, who was just about drunk again.
Axel put the model in his lap so he could clap his hands together so hard I jumped. “That’s the beauty of it! The parents don’t know a fucking thing about educational toys either. I’m not even sure the standards authorities who put their seals of approval or whatever on the things actually know shit. You just have to come up with something that seems plausible, make a science connection—coding or robots are really trendy right now, but these weird geometric things are absolutely about to be what everyone wants at Christmas, mark my words. And if I can get these off for a production run at an international factory in the next two weeks, I might even be able to capitalise. I can take advantage of that connection with Mrs. Starling, or if she�
��s not able to work with me at the moment I’ll get someone organised myself. There are plenty of options here.”
He was repulsively full of himself. I was going to just get up and walk away from the whole situation, but that comment about geometric things reminded me of something.
And I still knew I should walk away, but I didn’t seem to be packing my usual cool at this party and I couldn’t manage it.
I extended my hands towards the thing in Axel’s lap. “Let me look at that.”
His head went up, and he stared at me like he couldn’t even figure out what I was. It wouldn’t have shocked me if he couldn’t remember my name or that we’d actually been in the same car before on the way to yet another party. Being so absorbed in yourself you forgot that other people even existed seemed to be a side effect of joining Lucas Starling’s little club.
But after a few seconds of hesitation, he handed me the model. “Be careful with that prototype. It’s delicate.”
“Yeah, yeah.” My hands seemed to know just how to manipulate it to make it move into its different positions, making critical pieces form significant angles—and I knew exactly why that was. “You know, my dad designed something really similar to this a few years back. Got a patent on it even. But he’s never done anything with it beyond that.”
Axel squinted at me. “This isn’t the sort of thing someone can just bang together over a weekend.”
I shrugged without losing my grip on the toy. “I guess not. But he used to have a model just like this one hanging around—wooden, not…” I didn’t know exactly how this prototype had been made. I wanted to say ‘plastic’, but Axel wasn’t the sort of guy you wanted to be making a mistake around. If it was something else and he thought I should have known it, he’d be going on about it possibly until the actual end of life as we knew it.
Unfortunately, he could already figure out I didn’t have a clue. “It’s a 3D printed prototype,” he informed me, folding his arms. “That’s everyone’s strategy these days for rapid prototyping. You can completely cut out the annoyance of having to deal with any external prototyping service. What was this about a patent?”
I wished I hadn’t opened my stupid mouth. Hearing about Axel Bennett’s business ideas was one of my least desired activities ever; discussing my dad’s stagnant entrepreneurial career with anyone was number one on that list. The fact that it was Axel just made it worse.
But I was here to support my friends, not to add to their drama, and I was the one who had brought this up. So I pulled out my phone and did the patent lookup for him. “Don’t ask me to explain it, because I really wouldn’t know where to begin. I have managed to stay surprisingly ignorant about all the stuff my dad is into—”
I made an annoyed noise at Axel when he took my phone off me to look at the document by himself. He scrolled up and down the page I’d presented with quick movements like he knew the interface well. Then he grimaced like he was actually having trouble with it and started flicking the screen first one way and then the other with his fingernail.
“Careful,” I said, “I don’t want scratches on that.”
Axel ignored me, obviously. I didn’t think he was trying to be rude. It was just that people like me weren’t of any significance to someone like him when he had a project in front of him.
This project clearly wasn’t making him happy, though. “This is your father’s patent? Jacob Anderson?”
“That’s my dad, yeah.”
“Jacob Anderson,” Axel repeated. He was going to have said my father’s name more times than mine at this rate. “And… he invented this, but he hasn’t done anything with it yet?”
“Well he built the prototypes. There’s about fifty of them cluttering up our garage at home and occasionally providing a nice nest for mice. He’s given a few out to friends as well, and he passed some on to one of those venture capital TV programs he was trying to get onto, but they never picked him. I think that still bothers him, like he’s convinced they’ve just taken his prototype to shop around to potential ‘inventors’ who would be more appealing on TV, or something…”
Axel was making an impatient grunting noise, so I took the hint and shut up. “So lots of people have seen this, is what you’re saying.”
“I guess? Is… that an issue somehow?”
“Maybe,” Axel said. “I guess you don’t know, but this patent depicts a product far too similar to the one I’m presenting here.”
I looked down at his wonky prototype still sitting in my lap. It hadn’t seemed notably like Dad’s to me, but I could see how it might be the same sort of thing when it was pointed out to me. Maybe it would have been more obvious if Axel’s was of the same quality as Dad’s, but this 3D printing was clearly the sort of thing where you got what you were paying for.
“Look, it’s obviously not something where he’s copied off your, um, work,” I said.
Axel glared at me and took his prototype back, cradling it to him like he knew I was thinking his baby was ugly. “I know he didn’t copy me, I can see the damn date on that patent. The question is, has he done anything with this idea except get a bloody patent on it?”
Discussing my dad being an absolute failure with a guy so rich he didn’t need his success, it was the ultimate nightmare. I really wished I’d kept my mouth shut. “He’s had some, um, difficulties the past few years.”
Axel looked at me the way Lucas had looked at me the other day when I said I thought single mothers deserved enough government benefits to not have to worry about working while their kids were young. “This is a problem for me. Now I’ve seen this, I know my product isn’t a unique invention. I’m going to have trouble pushing forward with my plan. I can’t patent the design myself now… I mean I’d go ahead with it anyway, because your father is a blatant patent troll, but if his design is already out in the local community that’s just going to fuck with everything.”
“Who do you think you are anyway, calling my father a troll?” I demanded.
“It’s the accepted term for what he’s doing,” said Axel. “Okay, serious talk now. How much would it take for your father to transfer ownership of this IP to me?”
“What?” It took me a few seconds to put together what he was asking. “No! No, he wouldn’t sell for any reason, trust me. He loves having that patent. It means so much to him.”
“No it doesn’t,” Axel said. “If it meant something, he’d actually do something with it. At the moment it’s just a crutch for him to use to convince himself he’s done something with his life when all he’s really doing is getting in the way of other people who do want to do something.”
My nails were digging into my palms. “You re not entitled to my father’s work, Axel.”
“I see no moral reason why he should be entitled to it either,” Axel retorted. “I want you to set up a meeting between the two of us. I may be able to offer him something agreeable.”
I knew how that was going to work. This handsome beast would swoop down on my dad probably wearing his third-best suit and bamboozle him with all sorts of bullshit until he thought handing over everything was what he wanted to do. “I’m not going to do that. And I don’t want you to try anything funny behind our backs, either. I’m sorry if this is some big inconvenience for you, but you’ll just have to come up with some other genius idea. Surely you’re capable of that.”
Axel gave me this outraged look like he thought I was deliberately having a go at him—well, I thought I was a bit too, but he deserved it. “This isn’t just any idea. And it’s basically criminal to hold onto it like this.”
“Well it’s a pity you don’t get to decide what my dad does with his ideas.”
“That’s what you think,” Axel retorted, and stood.
I flew to my feet too. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He just brushed past me and walked away, cradling that damn prototype like it was the most precious thing in the world… and like I was nothing at all, which was of course exact
ly how he saw things.
I wasn’t the sort of person who burst into tears because someone was mean to me or anything like that, but at that moment I was feeling very teary. Usually when people had been mean to me in the past, they were angry with me, or they were trying to get a reaction or response out of me. All of which was probably true for Axel, but the way he did it, it was so impersonal it made me question whether I was even real for a second.
I really just wanted to leave that fucking party, but I knew Callie wouldn’t be ready yet, and I wasn’t so busted up over this I was going to stagger all the way home in my heels. There was absolutely no chance I’d enjoy anything that was happening from this moment on either, but I didn’t really know anybody who still enjoyed coming to school either, and yet we all managed to show up and have a bit of a laugh. I could get through the next hour or two… or three, if I needed to.
I sauntered away from the scene of that confrontation like I had one of those every other day, looking around for someone drunk enough and familiar enough that I could strike up a conversation.
Chapter Two
Four hours.
That was how long I’d had to wait until Callie was able to take me home. I almost wished I’d taken one of the many offers of free booze floating around and gotten wasted, though I was terrified of the idea of drink-spiking and didn’t like alcohol that much anyway. I still had the hungover feeling blaring out of the eyes of several classmates who’d been at that party, but I’d had none of the fun.
And of course there was a prac test organised for that morning, to be taken under the same conditions as our final exams coming up in a few weeks. I don’t think ‘recently wasted’ was a part of the conditions they were going for, but I’d gone through this last year when I was doing a couple of pre-tertiary level subjects, so I knew they went all out. They got test exams generated for everyone with our state student ID numbers printed on them instead of names and everything.
