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

by Tiffany Sala

  Marcia quickly covered up for a face that would have gone nicely with screaming of no don’t come! I would have been hurt—Marcia had given me advice on bra-shopping and making certain uncomfortable doctor’s appointments, for goodness sake—but I understood. It had hurt her, badly, that she’d done everything and still found Dad couldn’t be the man who lived up to it. The idea of getting away from the entire scene had no doubt been wonderful to her… and as much as she always liked me, I was still Dad’s daughter, not hers. I was part of that old pain.

  She was also a professional at managing old pain. “I didn’t realise things were improving for you two that much, I know your dad has this new job he’s working at, but…”

  I couldn’t tell if she was too embarrassed to state the obvious or just didn’t feel she needed to. “We’ve got a few irons in the fire at the moment,” I told her, trying not to think about how much that was a Dad thing to say.

  As if I’d invoked him through my thoughts, Dad strode through the door, one of the boys swinging off each arm like monkeys. Marcia actually turned away for a second. I could have strangled him for reminding her at that moment exactly why she would rather have him far away from her young ones. Marcia had always wanted to raise the boys without unnecessary rough-and-tumble. I didn’t see the harm in it mostly, but whenever there were problems at school, it usually came back to something Dad had showed or done with them.

  “Aileen was just telling me the two of you already have plans to visit next year.” Marcia went all in without hesitation. Dad reeled back a little, the boys dropping off like overripe fruit and bouncing all over the room.

  He recovered fast. “Oh, yeah, we’re onto a good thing at the moment. I’d be expecting to have a bit of money saved up for regular trips.” More like he was counting on me having saved some of the ‘pocket money’ he’d started giving me once it sank in just how much he was receiving. Well as it turned out, I hadn’t spent a bit yet. I didn’t have a problem with Dad accepting money from Axel that Axel was willing to give him, but if anyone was ever going to have to pay for that in the end it would be me, and I wasn’t going to potentially compound that by acting like I was entitled to spend anything he gave me. If he decided to come after us for some reason, I could always offer to pay him some of the damn money back.

  “Well…” Marcia had clearly not expected anything like this conversation. “It might be hard for me to say for sure I’ll have room for you at our house. There’s a spare room, but I’m thinking I may get a live-in nanny to make sure the boys are well cared-for while I’m working.”

  Sandy, who had crept up behind Dad, was rolling her eyes. Marcia zeroed in on that like a woman who had two kids with an equal talent for screwing with her.

  “Maybe that sounds too bourgeois for you, but when I’m in the office feeling guilty because I can’t be with my babies every second of the day and give them the life they deserve as only I can, I’d rather know that someone’s with them who they like and trust, who I trust. When you get older and have more simultaneous demands on your time, you realise just how important trust and responsibility are.”

  Sandy shrugged. “As us young ones say, sure, whatever.”

  This seemed like it could only end up in a fight, but then Dad took a step backwards and slung an arm over Sandy’s shoulders, dragging her sideways and close into him, and Marcia deflated like he’d hit her.

  I hadn’t thought about it before, but there had to be a part of Marcia that still loved Dad, maybe even enough to still be with him if things were different. If he’d still been interested. Dad had always been… Dad, from the start of their relationship. She knew he was an idiot, it was just a few ways in which he’d really let her down, scared her about the future, that had ended things. Now she could manage her own future, maybe she would have been interested in taking him back, taking him with her… but Dad had moved on quickly, like he always did. Always less wounded than the women he left in his wake. He was a good guy, but he was still an arsehole.

  Marcia took a step back. “Well… we’ll discuss the possibilities later, when you have a firmer idea of what you might want to do. I’m already late, so I’d better dash.”

  “As always,” Dad murmured. Marcia ran out the door, calling a goodbye to the boys they didn’t dignify with a response. As soon as she was out of sight, Dad took a sharp sideways step away from Sandy.

  Well, it still felt like a fight was in the air, but maybe not the one I’d expected… and I wanted to stick around for this one even less.

  “I’d better run too, Elizabeth might be waiting for me outside.”

  My mother wouldn’t even go into Dad’s house. I didn’t think it was because she was still in love with him, though. Elizabeth Anderson had much bigger fish to fry in her life as a super-successful lawyer than my dad.

  Yeah, when she’d finally turned her life around after he managed to completely wreck it for a while, she made a comeback in a spectacular fashion. And maybe my lawyer dream wasn’t completely random… but I liked to think it was something I’d thought would be a good match for me all by myself and not just cribbing off a woman I barely knew. There were infinitely more ways in which I didn’t want to emulate Elizabeth than I did.

  I still smiled a little when I saw her convertible, possibly even a more tastefully-coloured edition of Callie’s, waiting at the end of our street. I slipped in, a little shy about having to wave to Marcia as she noticed me while getting in her own car. I couldn’t deal with so many women my dad had hooked up with being in the area at the same time.

  “Your brothers’ mother?” Elizabeth asked as she accelerated the car, narrowly avoiding swiping Marcia’s on the way out.

  “That’s right. Marcia.”

  “I was watching her come out before. She’s pretty,” Elizabeth observed in a way that made me have questions about my own mother I’d never really thought of before, and didn’t intend to seek the answers to. “Well, did you have anything in mind for lunch?”

  I usually said no, I was happy with whatever she picked, and I could tell she was expecting the same this time, the query just a formality before she barrelled on with what she’d already decided.

  So I changed the script a little. I named the place I’d been to with Dad and Marcia just before she moved out for good. It wasn’t my favourite of the places I could have suggested, if I’d been determined to make a suggestion, but I thought the history I had with it would keep me focused.

  “An interesting choice,” said Elizabeth, pivoting to of course she had meant for me to make one.

  “We don’t have to—”

  “No, we should absolutely go where you want to go when we are celebrating your new adulthood.” Elizabeth turned the car in a place I was pretty sure you weren’t supposed to turn, so we were headed in the direction of the restaurant.

  I didn’t think she was trying to psych me out, but I wished she hadn’t said that thing about adulthood. Instead of feeling elated, suddenly I felt adrift, nothing in my life tethering me to this world.

  I started babbling about the one thing that would link me back to my old life again, if only for one night. “So I’ve decided I’m going to skip the formal next week, just stay at home that night and wait for the exam results to come in.”

  Elizabeth shot me a look of annoyance across her central dash. “Is this change to do with a boy?”

  “Who’s been saying what to you?” I demanded.

  “Nobody said anything until you, this instant.” I hated the way Elizabeth was so smug having wrangled something out of me I never intended to give her. “This is just stupid, Aileen. Why wouldn’t you want to go along and show that boy exactly who he messed with?”

  “He’s not the sort of boy you go out of your way to antagonise,” I said. If I really did do what I’d told Axel I would, go to the formal in my sexy dress and dance with Matt and his friends all night, what might Axel do? He could turn me over his knee and spank me in front of our whole class. But wo
uld he really care that much? More to the point, even if he did would he want our whole class to see he was that bothered by it?

  He’d probably bide his time. Find a way to get me where we would have a less invested audience, and let loose.

  Elizabeth shook her head. “Boys—and bigger boys—are designed to be antagonised. They don’t make them that handsome because they have the right to float through life unchallenged by anyone. It’s practically our duty.”

  “I don’t hate that way of looking at it.” Actually, it made me realise I had been looking at this in the complete wrong way. It was just a negotiation, wasn’t it? It was just like what the two of us had been through with that ghastly shop owner, the latter parts at least, where I knew Axel had been saying some things to rile Cowen up, to let him know who was boss. Of course he wasn’t really boss, and sometimes he’d just riled Cowen up to the point where I needed to say something to soften things.

  I couldn’t keep a lid on my sigh. We’d made a good team, before Axel made it obvious I would never be able to trust him.

  “How about you reverse your decision on the formal?” Elizabeth said. “Put on your pretty best and go anyway. I’m willing to spring for whatever dress you want, although it’s getting a bit late in the piece to pick one…”

  “I’m going to be fine with what I already have, thanks,” I told her. “Why do you care so much about this?”

  Elizabeth grimaced. “I never went to my high school formal. Your dad wasn’t so keen on it—he liked to be in a social situation where he could control the room, and I’m sure you can guess he was not the most popular guy in high school. So instead we got takeaway and stayed in, and he told the girl at our drive-through window he was an inventor about to go full-time.”

  “Sounds like all your dreams really did come true that night.” She was so invested in this it seemed like it might be worth my while to put up with that one night, if it put her in a frame of mind where she might agree to my own upcoming request of her.

  When I tried on this possibility for size, it squeezed my chest so much I had to make one more attempt to get out of it entirely. “You realise this is sort of the opposite of your situation, don’t you? This is me not wanting to do what the boy wants to do.” Elizabeth shot me a look. “I can’t believe you buy into this idea that the school formal is the epitome of the eighteen-year-old experience.”

  “You say that like one moment, one evening, can’t change your entire future.”

  “I think that’s only in movies,” I said.

  “To this day,” Elizabeth insisted. “I look back and I wonder how things would have been different if I’d just gone. Who I would have talked to, who I would have danced with… the way all the days after that would have been different.”

  “Your life would have been just the same the day after, and the day after, right to this present day.”

  “I spent the week after the formal drinking myself blind so I didn’t have to think about how disappointed I was that I hadn’t gotten to go.”

  It wasn’t going to do much good to remind Elizabeth that she had been an absolute mess for years, and probably would have found a way to be an absolute mess even if she’d gone to that event.

  “I’ll go,” I said. “If it makes you feel like you’ve done your job.”

  Elizabeth grinned at me like it really did make everything stack up in her head: like the things she hadn’t been able to do in the past were compensated for if she could just push me in the door of that venue.

  “So what’s the trade-off?” Elizabeth asked me during a lull in our conversation over lunch.

  “The… excuse me?”

  “The life I’ve led, Aileen, I do feel sometimes like I’ve lost so many brain cells it’s like I was just born yesterday, but I don’t forget all of the lessons I’ve learned along the way. You never take any advice from me normally, you don’t take anything from me if you can help it. You’re trying to butter me on both sides.”

  “I was sort of hoping you’d be able to give me some help,” I admitted. “Not a handout, or anything, but… I thought maybe you’d know someone who could give me a decent job.”

  I felt uneasy as soon as I saw how big her smile was. “You don’t have to suck up to me for that, Aileen. I’d be happy to put in a word for you at my own office. We’re looking for secretaries at the moment, we’ve had a couple leave this month.”

  I’d had it in my mind that she might endorse me to someone else she knew. The thought of going to the same workplace as my mother every day was daunting, and not for the usual reasons girls didn’t want to be around their mothers so much. I’d already gotten it fixed in my mind that Elizabeth and I were going to have this particular amount of contact, and I was comfortable with that. I knew what to expect, and what not to expect. This would be a complete re-negotiating of our relationship.

  Elizabeth was giving me this shrewd look I was having enough trouble getting used to. When we’d first gotten to know one another, she’d been a lot less sharp. “I know better than to be surprised you haven’t asked me if I could do something for you before now. The question is why you’ve changed your mind?”

  “I need to figure out a way we can get more money,” I told her. “Marcia’s going to move away with the boys, and if Dad and I can’t afford to fly to them and visit… we’ll just be shut out of their lives forever.”

  “You’ve known about this for a few weeks now,” Elizabeth said. “Your dad told me you found out about it before he did. I know it didn’t take you this long to figure out you couldn’t afford to make regular trips across the country on your dad’s salary… and I also know your dad is working a new job, making a lot of money compared to what he was previously pulling. He was pretty pleased with himself, if he can keep up the work with that much enthusiasm you should have no problem making a few visits a year.”

  “You’re supposed to be a lawyer, not a detective.”

  “Same damn thing, sometimes.” She stared me down. “What’s really going on here?”

  “I’m thinking of going to law school,” I admitted. “It’s not because of you, it’s just… something I feel I’d be good at. It was in my head before I knew you’d moved on to that career actually.”

  “Well you couldn’t have me thinking you were doing it on my account,” said Elizabeth. “So you’d like to get some experience and contacts working in an actual law firm.”

  “I feel like that’s the logical next step here. I might be wrong, you can correct me.”

  “It seems sensible,” Elizabeth agreed. “And I would be happy to help, you know that.”

  She kept studying me the way I imagined she studied her clients when they told her they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I had no idea if she chose to believe them or pry their secrets out at that point, not being in the business yet; I was leaning towards the latter when she leaned all the way back in her seat, her expression conspiratorial.

  “University, huh? And years of challenging study, no less.”

  I felt a dig at me somewhere in this. “Am I not university material, then?”

  “Oh, you know what I mean. You’ve never presented yourself as the type. I know you’re entirely capable but you tend to take your brains out of centre stage with jokes. I wouldn’t have thought you would have the ability to stay serious enough, with that character.”

  “Words of encouragement already!”

  “See, there you go.” Elizabeth shook her head at me and stole one of my sweet potato fries from my plate. I wanted to joke that she really didn’t need it, but she was obviously not going to laugh at that any more than she did at most of my jokes. I thought maybe I reminded her of Dad too much when I was like that. “The thing is, you’ve changed a lot lately. You have an entirely different energy these days.”

  “I wonder how that could be,” I muttered. There were only a couple significant events in my recent history that could have changed the way others saw me, and I knew which o
f them was the most likely culprit. But how had it changed me, that I didn’t even realise? I didn’t want to probe Elizabeth for further answers. I didn’t want to know about it at all.

  Elizabeth too seemed surprisingly incurious. But perhaps her life history had taught her that it was better not to go nosing into someone else’s shit.

  “I look forward to helping you take this most unexpected step,” she told me.

  That evening, I let Matt know his capricious date was on again.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I was still nervous as I stepped out to meet Matt’s car on the street. I kept coming up with elaborate scenarios for how Axel was going to humiliate me over the course of the evening. Maybe he could cause my dress to fall down, start rumours on how I’d had reverse breast implants since the photo leak. Maybe figure out a way to have the whole graduating cohort hear about my university plans and laugh at me, treat me like a joke the one time I was actually serious.

  I told myself that was how someone like him worked: he did the absolute minimum and let my own insecurities do the rest. But what you told yourself and how you behaved in reality were two different things, for better or worse as that might be.

  I waved to Matt and then jumped in with Phil in the back. He was eyeing me around boob level, but in that dress at least he was probably thinking about what he saw at present and not something else he might have seen at some point.

  I made a big thing of looking back at him too, which made him blush. I spotted a missing button on the sleeve of his jacket, which he was still wearing in the car like an amateur. “I take it you didn’t buy something new to wear for this event either.”

  Phil shrugged. “We’ve all been to a funeral or something before, right?”

  Matt had his jacket folded neatly on the front passenger seat alongside him. “Now I have it from the arsehole’s mouth himself that Axel will be along tonight. Are you going to want to see him?”