The Big Boys' League: A Dark High School Bully Romance (Troubled Playthings Book 3)

by Tiffany Sala

  Honestly, it made me sick thinking about maybe being the reason for Aileen going that way. It made me sick to think about how she’d helped me to take the first steps into my successful adult life and then I’d been the one to screw her. I should have been reaching out to her, suggesting we become partners in this enterprise.

  Maybe I didn’t have it in me to willingly work with a woman like that. Not when I knew that being close to her professionally would inevitably lead to wanting to be close in other ways. It would be my parents’ relationship in reverse…

  And reverse was exactly the way you’d want it, come to think of it.

  There I was in front of the guys with my mind going, and not a damn thing to say. “What have you done to Aileen?” Callie demanded.

  I didn’t feel like covering up the grimy details at the moment. “I recorded her at a moment when she… didn’t expect to be recorded, let’s just say. She was pissed when she found out.”

  “So how is that worse than spreading her everything all over the damn place already?” demanded Mic, who clearly hadn’t been in on the slow-moving rumours about that picture being fake.

  “It’s pretty dirty if she’s just out with you looking to have a nice time,” Lucas said. He was tense, and Callie could hardly look at him. There was a story there for sure, but for once I didn’t want to uncover it. What the fuck did I think any of them were going to do to me, to need to dig into their secrets?

  “What’s Ax fucking done?” said Steven, strolling up all sweaty from ball time with his other dumb mates.

  “He’s been recording Aileen without permission,” Lucas reported.

  Steven grimaced at me like he’d never gone too far when a girl got his head messed up. “Not cool, man.”

  “Doesn’t fucking matter now,” I said. “She knows, she wasn’t pleased, and she’s never going to forgive me.”

  Callie perked up. “Do you want her to forgive you?”

  “Stay out of this, Callie,” Lucas said.

  “I don’t take orders from you,” replied Callie, in this very casual voice that was really getting Lucas going. I could just imagine how I’d react if Aileen spoke to me like that. It’d really piss me off, I’d want to grab her and—and things she would need to consent to if I didn’t want a fight on my hands.

  Fuck it, I really did want her to forgive me so we could actually move past this. Get to know one another better. I wanted my hands on her again… and I wanted to be by her side double-teaming some unsuspecting schmuck with her in a dress only I would get to remove.

  That was the danger again right there. Fuck her or work with her. Not both.

  Well I knew this game. If you were caught up in a negotiation and you didn’t like either of your options, you’d better be a crafty fucker and come up with a third one. All I had was an absolutely crazy idea that was probably going to get me arrested after skirting the edge of it so long, but when the stakes got higher you had to be willing to get a bit dangerous if you still wanted to play.

  I turned to Callie. “Where the fuck is Aileen today, anyway?”

  “I never know where Aileen is,” she returned. She didn’t need to add that she wouldn’t have told me even if she did.

  My mind had already turned over enough stones to come up with some potential answers, though. She’d clearly run straight to Matt with what I’d told her, which I couldn’t blame her for really. I’d never told her not to because I assumed Matt already knew. I’d been responding to Matt all this time under the assumption that he knew and had just… decided he didn’t feel obliged to be apologetic over how it had all turned out.

  The point was, someone like Aileen probably felt like she had to keep an eye on Matt after giving him a shock like that, look after him. And there seemed to be one place in particular that Aileen and Matt might have come together.

  Aileen and Tamara were surrounded by Matt plus two of the other guys Matt hung out with these days: Phil and Danny. They were giving Aileen this look like an angel had descended into their midst—not some nerd-hating shit on my part either, that was just the effect Aileen had on people. It was so fucking infuriating to see this now, to want to cradle her like a soft sweet flower when I’d already done all that other shit.

  Matt, Phil, and Danny got up and formed a kind of protective guard around the girls. “I’m not planning on ripping her clothes off and beating her in front of you,” I said.

  Mrs. Donal popped out from behind some shelves, pulling the same trick on us I’d pulled on Aileen a while ago. “Tamara,” she snapped, “there isn’t going to be any trouble here, is there.”

  “I don’t think I’m the one to ask, Mrs. Donal,” retorted Tamara. She’d had a clash with Steven in the library recently, and the staff had clearly not yet forgiven her. We had been such terrible news for these girls.

  I didn’t want to get Aileen excluded from a place she might actually need to use during exams, so I extended a hand to her and said, “Would you come outside with me for a moment please, Aileen?”

  I read the same hard refusal to negotiate in her eyes that had gotten us down this path in the first place, but she glanced at Tamara and said, “Sure, let’s go.” She led the way out, flinching away from my hand when I tried to rest it on her back.

  My instinct was to try to get the upper hand as soon as we were out of everyone’s hearing. “Aileen, I’m sure you know your father is.. not conforming to the expectations I set out when I initially gave him a role in my team.”

  Aileen’s smile was sweet but her voice was hard. “Your team… that’s just you, Axel. It was just you.”

  “It could be you too,” I blurted. “If you wanted.”

  She stopped walking, like this was too much for her to take in while she was moving as well.

  “I mean it,” I said, and then I fucking hedged again. “I want to give you a chance to compensate me for his fuck-ups, so you can come to me on a regular basis and I’ll beat your—”

  “Nope,” said Aileen. “Not happening.”

  “Why?” I’d expected her to bargain, to expect me to commit to some ground rules. I was ready to commit to some ground rules. I hadn’t thought after all we’d gone through now that she would refuse immediately.

  “Because I don’t want you touching me again. That has to make sense to you, right?”

  She looked angry that I was even asking her. That could not be it. “You didn’t really want to do it before and still you agreed, what the fuck has changed?”

  Her sudden smile was a little incredulous, and incredibly sad. How had I not noticed until now just how pretty she was? I’d been too busy crushing her face into my bedsheets. I wanted to steal more kisses from her, and this time take my time over it properly. The way a mouth like that deserved to be treated.

  “A lot has changed,” she said, “in case you haven’t noticed, but it’s simple really. Last time I decided I would let you do what you wanted, to see how it went, and I didn’t like the outcome, so this time I’m deciding not to. There doesn’t have to be more to it than that.”

  “You aren’t even going to give me a chance, you—”

  “Axel.” She stilled me, with just my name. “Let’s not get into this again. I don’t have to ‘come to the table’, okay? I’ve done enough of that, I’ve met you more than halfway when I never wanted to engage at all, and now I’m just done. I don’t care what moves you think you have in reserve, if you want anything from me, you will actually have to force me.”

  I knew I could make her come back to me if I wanted. There were all sorts of buttons I hadn’t pressed yet: factors like her stepmother and grandma and little brothers who could come into play. But it wasn’t a satisfying thought when I knew she wasn’t going to do anything to me in return.

  Something completely out of left field escaped my mouth. “Come with me to our formal, Aileen. I’ll take you as my date. Put on a pretty dress and I’ll take you around on my arm so everyone gets to see how much you sparkle.”

>   I had no idea why any of this was relevant until I saw the way Aileen inhaled and stepped back, as if—as if it meant something to her, that invitation. Was that what she wanted, the carrot I could dangle if I could shake myself out of offering the stick? Just to be a princess on my arm?

  Her face had hardened again. “It’s too late for that too, Axel. I’m just going to go and have everyone thinking about how they might have seen me naked already. You’ve got to understand something: you can’t turn back time once something’s already spoiled. You can’t do as you like and think that you’ll have some way of fixing it no matter what. You just have to live with it.”

  It seemed fucking dramatic, but I guess my whole patent deal had sounded dramatic to her at first. Maybe this formal was for her what securing this last possible loophole into someone ruining my future business had been for me. The thing was, there wasn’t a whole lot she could do now to change the way other people saw her.

  “I’d like you to just leave me alone, please.” Again, Aileen was anticipating something I had yet to even say. “I don’t want you to try to fix or change things… just leave it. I’ve had enough.”

  I opened my mouth and she quickly said, “Please,” in such a pitiful little voice I said, “Okay, yeah, fine,” and backed off, letting her scramble away back into the library. I was left alone to try to work out why I’d made that offer in the first place.

  Well it didn’t take a genius to work through that question: I wanted to get to know her in a way that didn’t involve contract negotiations and trying to humiliate her in front of an audience. And this was a way that would make sure everyone knew they’d better not mess with her any more. A golden opportunity, perhaps the last before she was easily able to slip away from me forever.

  But it was going to be harder to get her to go along with the plan than it had been to get my hands on her arse. Maybe too hard.

  I shook my head at myself. What was I doing, losing my confidence all of a sudden? That would just leave her convinced I was exactly the man she’d settled on my being. That Axel who could win her, if only for a night… he wouldn’t let this kind of setback stand in his way.

  Aileen was just another problem at the end of the day. A problem who might drive me mad if I didn’t address it, but all the same, following the basic rules of problems. I would just have to work on her.

  I would need a more delicate approach than ever before, but surely I was up to that too.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I was scared for a few days, tense wherever I was because I expected Axel to loom and insist I come with him, accept the treatment he wanted to lay down. And it was different for me now. The intrigue was lost; I knew what to expect from him and the potential sick pleasure didn’t make up for it.

  He actually left me alone as I’d requested, though. Sometimes even Axel Bennett had a surprise left in him, it seemed.

  Things were still weird between me and most of the people I’d once counted as my friends, but I was so busy I didn’t actually get a chance to dwell on it. Tamara and I had formed a weird temporary group with Matt and his friends, and with exam season descending on us it was nice to fall into a group where everyone was motivated to study. We’d head to Matt’s place or one of the other guys’ places after school and spend a couple hours trying to overlap homework and study until we all ended up watching what was on TV as background noise or someone wanted to get into a game. Sometimes Tamara would call Steven to come over if they were playing something he was into; once it was that Wild Duty thing he was obsessed with, and she brought her little sister Jess as well. It was only the one time that happened though, as the whole point of those afternoons for Tamara seemed to be to get a bit of space from feeling like she was parenting a younger teen… and Jess had gotten really snappy when Matt’s friends were celebrating an apparently decisive victory and got into a fight with Danny, which I hadn’t even thought was possible.

  I, too, had something to hide from back home. I didn’t want to see how badly Dad was fucking up the fake trust Axel had put in him, and I didn’t want to know if Axel was in my house. Dad, to his credit, had stopped telling me what was going on with his ‘job’ once he figured out things with Axel weren’t going so well. He didn’t even ask for the details of our bust-up.

  Sometimes I thought about Callie when Tamara and I were curled up on beanbags at one of those big houses, surrounded by guys. She was probably at Lucas’s place when she wasn’t working, surrounded by… Lucas.

  “Have we thought about inviting her to come along?” I asked Tamara once, and she shot me the most tortured look as if Callie hadn’t been one of the most important people in her life for years and years. I got it, though. She was stuck with her at this point… in the same way Matt was stuck with Axel.

  “You know if we have her along, we’ll have Lucas along too, and then… probably Axel.”

  “A fair point to consider,” I said.

  I was a little nervous going into every one of my exams, the way anyone would be if they’d been disappeared from their academic life entirely once. There were no dramas… but as each exam was ticked off my list until the last one, my maths exam, I felt a growing worry. Anderson and Bennett: we were going to be seated next to one another according to school exam regulations to screw with the usual friendship groups and cheating rings, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity for Bennett to screw around with Anderson with an audience.

  The only thing I could think of to defend myself from trouble was to get myself in and seated early, and try not to lift my head. But when he walked into the room, I turned right around anyway and saw his whole entrance.

  It was a bit of a shock, to see him again after having avoided him so long. I followed every movement of his long striding legs and tried to work out how I’d even known he was coming… then my nostrils twitched and I understood. That fragrance—it had been cropping up in my home, in Dad’s workshop mostly but sometimes in the kitchen and lounge. I’d figured Sandy was using something new, or Dad was trying to cover for some really serious smoking. I’d never thought it was Axel, because he hadn’t smelled like much of anything on all the occasions I’d been close to him, but it seemed just like him to lay a trap for me in my own house.

  I forced myself to stop smirking as his eyes fell on me. There was something soft in his expression that bothered me. I would have expected him to be smug, triumphant at the success of his plan. Perhaps it was just that it was only the start of his plan, and he had many other steps to go through before he was satisfied.

  That had to be it: he would know me well enough by now to expect I would need more convincing to… I didn’t have any idea what his final goal was.

  I knew I wasn’t going to be able to concentrate on the imminent exam until I got some resolution.

  As Axel passed me and slid into the seat next to mine, I leaned over to him. “Trying a new signature fragrance?”

  His eyes sparkled. “You noticed.”

  I checked behind me to make sure our exam supervisors weren’t in supervisor mode yet. “What’s your objective here?”

  I’d made the mistake of leaning over too far, and Axel was very ready to take advantage of it, meeting me a little more than halfway so I could smell his breath as well as his fragrance. A slip, and his mouth would be on mine. “I’m going to charm you into letting me take you to the formal,” he murmured, the words falling warm on my lips the same way his kiss had, the one time I’d allowed it.

  Taking me to the formal? I’d concluded when he asked me about that it was just something he threw out there to discomfit me.

  “You don’t need to worry about the formal,” I told him. “I’ve already decided I’m going, just not with you.”

  “It’s going to be uncomfortable for you if you’re not going with me. You know most people will go on believing those slutty photos were real, that you sent them to me to attract me and it didn’t go so well for you.”

  I shrugged. Anyone who felt lik
e making me uncomfortable there was going to get what they gave, with interest.

  “And speaking of clothes, what are you going to wear anyway? I know for a fact that you haven’t gotten yourself a new dress yet.” The question was, had he scored that gossip from Dad or Lucas via Callie? “It’s going to be hard to get something that fits well and suits your personal style in this time frame. I’m not an expert, I just know the stores are always completely stripped by this point.”

  “I’m going to wear something nice I already have on hand.” A little number I’d worn out to a restaurant with Dad and Marcia during the uncomfortable process of disentangling our lives.

  “Is it going to be as nice as the one you wore to my house that day you were a very bad girl?”

  I failed at not shivering in response to that public reminder of how good he’d managed to make me feel, before he ruined it all. “Nicer. But you should know I intend to dance with Matt and his friends the whole night, not that I need to make my intentions known before the event or that anyone properly dances these days anyway.”

  “I’m Matt’s friend,” Axel pointed out.

  “You’re a terrible friend. Give it a rest, you know damn well you won’t be getting your hands on me any time soon.”

  “Oh, do I—”

  “Anderson, Bennett,” snapped out Mr. Phillips, “we will be starting very soon.”

  I knew my name hadn’t come first just because it was alphabetical. Girls were always blamed when guys were so hot for them they couldn’t behave straight… they were always blamed doubly when they tried to fight back. Was it any wonder we said ‘fuck it’ sometimes and put on dresses that showed too much flesh, that we sometimes peeled the covers back on ourselves entirely for pictures and then sent those pictures to guys we thought might be interested, whether or not they stood a chance of betraying us? Was it right to look down on us for deciding to find something to like about bad boys, even if we’d always been good girls?