Games Boys Play: A Dark High School Romance (Troubled Playthings Book 2) Read online

  Games Boys Play

  Tiffany Sala

  Thanks for picking up Games Boys Play!

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  — Tiffany

  Games Boys Play 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: Tamara

  There she was, at the fringes of his group like a little wet puppy.

  Laughing at something one of the other girls was saying.

  She couldn’t possibly find them funny.

  He remembered she existed, for the first time in the whole recess break. He put an arm around her and dragged her into him, and she went all limp. She was like a doll just waiting to be arranged.

  “Tamara,” said Aileen at my ear. “Can we just go now?”

  “I need to keep an eye on her,” I said.

  “I sort of think it’s called stalking at this point,” said Aileen. “You’ve been doing this for three days and he hasn’t so much as looked at her in an angry way.”

  “Look, are you on my side or hers?”

  “So if she’s on the opposite side to you, how can you say you’re doing this for her?” Aileen protested.

  I didn’t bother giving her an answer. If she was going to be like that, what was the point?

  After a while, I realised Aileen wasn’t next to me any more. Well, good for her if she wanted to ditch me and do her own thing for a while. I was used to that now, wasn’t I?

  Then I heard a footstep behind me. I felt a little bad suddenly, or maybe just a little scared. Aileen was the only person I’d talked to at school in the past three days who hadn’t been forced to talk to me for schoolwork reasons.

  “Look, I promise at lunch time we’ll—”

  There was a grip around the back of my neck from a hand too powerful to be Aileen’s. It hurt. I tried to shout but only managed a little gasp, tried to get my hand up to fight the person off but I was spinning, and then my back was slammed hard against the brick wall I’d been sheltering behind, thrusting what little breath I had left out of me.

  When my vision cleared there was Steven Dillon standing in front of me, his big arms looking even bigger with his hands placed on his hips. I should have been more suspicious when I didn’t see him with the rest of the group. Had Lucas sent Steven after me?

  “Right, you little sneak,” Steven said, “you can do whatever the fuck you want if it’s just once or twice but you’ve been at this three days now. What the fuck are you doing?”

  “I’m just keeping an eye on my friend.” I stared him right between the eyes. He might be a big sexy brute, but that didn’t mean I had to be afraid of him.

  “What, fucking Calista?” Steven glanced over at Callie, still there tucked under Lucas Starling’s arm like a purse. “What do you think we’re going to do, bend her over and take turns?”

  “You were pretty rough with me just now.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “I should report you.”

  “Yeah, you do that,” Steven said. “Tell the playground monitor I tried to stop you harassing your ex-friend and hurt your feelings.”

  That was exactly the sort of fact-rewriting bullshit I expected from someone in Lucas’s group. I’d suspected all along that Callie was getting bamboozled by that arsehole, and here was one of his friends trying to do the exact same thing to me.

  “I’m being here for her for when she needs me,” I told him. “Whenever that is.”

  “Yeah,” Steven said, “that’s what every stalker says. I’m just going to wait until she understands I’m doing this for her. What the fuck are you on, anyway?”

  “She’ll appreciate it later.” Of course it sounded nuts with him mocking everything I said like that. I didn’t know why I was even trying to defend myself to him. As if I was obliged to.

  Steven rolled his eyes. “Yeah, right… what’s your fucking name, anyway?”

  “Tamara. Tamara Hills.” I had no illusions about how much I mattered in the hierarchy at school, but I hated that he’d actually asked. It just made me feel even lower at that moment when I least wanted to feel low.

  “Well, Tamara Hills, I suggest you stay the fuck away from us if you don’t want to make trouble for yourself.” It pissed me off even more that he was apparently including Callie in the group. I didn’t believe for a second that any of them saw her as more than someone Lucas was messing around with they’d better be nice to so long as he said so. “If Callie wanted anything to do with you right now, you’d be over there hanging out with us, and you know it. So don’t be some bitch who causes drama.”

  I’d never been someone who caused drama in my entire life. I really did not understand how Steven was turning the situation around like this, but it made me certain I couldn’t just leave Callie alone to these people. No matter how little she seemed to care about me now.

  “Just you watch yourselves,” I said. I started to edge sideways along the wall, to put some distance between myself and him. “If you do anything to hurt her, I am going to make sure you get what’s coming to you.”

  I couldn’t move any more. Steven had my wrist in a crushing grip, and I didn’t even remember him doing it.

  “And what’s that, huh?” He was looking down at me, but somehow I didn’t feel like he was actually seeing me. It was like I wasn’t important enough for him to see me as an actual person. “Don’t fool yourself into thinking you could do anything to me…” I had a horrible feeling he was reaching for my name and had already forgotten it. He shook his head. “I’ve got better things to do with my life than have trouble with some mouthy little bitch… so, if you’re smart enough to back off and stop making a nuisance of yourself, I’ll forget you even exist soon enough. Like Callie has.”

  He was trying to get rid of me and he still couldn’t resist having a jab at me. I wanted to say something more back to him, but all I could do was stare at his hand that felt like it was holding me like a steel cuff, and remember the way Callie had been looking when she’d found a chance to talk to me lately. I actually felt like I might be in danger if I pushed things too hard with this guy. That ought to be insane. He was just another student at my school, for goodness sake, and the worst he had on me was that he’d caught me watching the girl I thought had been my friend.

  Surely even Callie couldn’t fault me for that.

  I still hadn’t decided whether I dared speak when Steven let go of me, pushing me away as he did it so I staggered and fell hard on my knees on the concrete. He must have heard my cry of pain, but he didn’t even look back as he sauntered back over to the rest of his group.

  Which, I supposed, really did include Callie after all.

  I pulled myself back to my feet with the aid of the wall next to me. My knees throbbed. What kind of arsehole hurt a woman, anyway?

  I probably owed Aileen an apology now, because one way or the other she’d been right. But after what had just happened, I didn’t think I could face anyone just yet. I couldn’t hide that something had happened to me, and it felt like something that shouldn’t be talked about
. Something shameful.

  So I made my way to the school library via the most secluded route I could think of and tucked myself up the back with the fiction books, the old word processing/research computers, and anyone else who had a need to avoid their classmates. I was already thinking over the rest of the day. I doubted anyone would find a reason to talk to me in my final three classes, unless they wanted to bug me about Callie—and I felt pretty good about just ignoring anyone who did that. I could hide out in the library again at lunch.

  It would be a drag of a day, but I would be home soon enough… and then I could make sense of what had just happened to me.

  Chapter Two: Tamara

  My stepdad Mike was the only one home when I got in, and he rarely did more than grunt at me when I came in unless I initiated conversation—which I never bothered with unless Mum was watching, because I figured she liked it when she thought we got along. I mean, he doesn’t hit me, so I suppose we did get along well enough.

  I went straight upstairs and grabbed a doll off my bed and squeezed it until the stuffing nearly popped while I sat on my rug and rocked back and forth lightly, trying to calm myself.

  Maybe that was why I was so worked up about this whole thing: repressed memories. But I’d never really thought I had any. I had been no more than three years old when my biological father hit me—the event that provoked my mother to pack up me and my brother and leave him for good. Ryan remembered him, and all he ever said to me was that I was better off without those memories. I didn’t remember him hitting me, or anything else either. Mum said it hadn’t been hard or anything, just a really solid slap, but he’d hit Ryan a lot before, and it had brought home to her that this was going to be the future for us if she stayed.

  Mum had taught me that the reason abusers got away with what they did was that they made it hard for you to believe it was happening at all. Gaslighting was practically the first three-syllable word I learned. I’d always been confident in my ability to figure out if I was in the company of an abuser. But now I was feeling like Mum hadn’t given me everything she knew after all. This whole situation had spiralled out of my control before I realised there was a situation.

  I’d thought the situation between my best friend Callie and chronic school legend Lucas Starling was cute at first, the same as I’d thought it was cute when he was flirting with her back when they were kids. Then suddenly she was in the midst of his social group and had no time for me, and I couldn’t work out what I’d done. I guess we’d been drifting apart for some time, and I’d wondered now and then if we would even still see one another once we graduated, but this still felt a bit sinister in a way I couldn’t put my finger on.

  I sighed as I stared at my old teddy bear clock hanging up on my wall, struggling to focus on the time amidst a crowd of framed kitten posters and some of my own studio photos from when I was a kid, before I started resisting sitting for photos. Not even five o’clock yet. I’d been relieved at first when I quit my after-school job, because I didn’t have to deal with Mum having a go at me every time I came home, worrying I was going to be too tired for homework, but I was really regretting not having something else to do that day while my mind raced.

  By the time Mum got home from work I had gotten into such a state that when she opened my door to look in on me, she marched straight in, shut the door, and sat on the bed next to me.

  “We don’t have to talk about this now,” I told her. “I’m pretty sure you were really coming in to ask me to help with dinner.”

  “Mike can wait,” Mum said. “Has something happened?”

  “I don’t think I’ve gotten around to telling you this yet,” I said, covering for the fact that I hadn’t felt like telling her. “Callie and Lucas started going out.”

  “Oh, really. He was always keen on her when you were all kids, wasn’t he?”

  She sounded about as bored as anyone could who remembered a trivial detail from her daughter’s best friend’s ancient history. Mum had never liked Callie much and I had never worked out why. It wasn’t open hostility or anything, she’d just never been as friendly towards her as she was whenever Aileen or some other girl visited, which wasn’t often. She probably only remembered because I’d been obsessed with the whole situation at the time—obsessed and jealous, to be completely honest. I could never work out why Lucas had been all over her and not me… not that I had the slightest interest in Lucas for myself, but when a guy picked someone you were that close to, you were going to wonder why it hadn’t been you.

  “Yeah, he was interested even then.” Now I’d gotten this far, I almost wanted to stop. Change the subject, pretend I’d brought it all up for some other reason.

  But Mum was peering at me now, as if I’d given away something that troubled her. And given how sensitive she was to the whole issue, I probably had.

  “Tamara, is there a problem with Callie and this boy?”

  “I honestly don’t know for sure,” I said. “I was worried because it all happened so suddenly, without her really talking to me about it, and you know I’m not really part of their popular crowd. So I was just trying to keep an eye on her during breaks, and then this other guy from their group came up to me and pushed me up against a wall—”

  Mum had gone all stiff and her eyes were wide, the way I saw her whenever we watched a man hitting a woman on TV.

  “Tamara, he assaulted you. You need to report him to the police…” She shook her head at the posters on the back of my door. “They’ll put you through all sorts of torment and then give you nothing to show for it. Report him at school. They’ll have to address your concerns there. Suspend him, expel him. It depends on what’s appropriate for whatever he did to you.” She looked me right between the eyes. “I won’t ask you to go through the details with me. Unless you want to.”

  Well I’d been scared by Steven, but I wouldn’t have called it ‘assault’. I didn’t get the feeling he’d been trying to hurt me. But I also knew better than to tell Mum that, or she was guaranteed to be all in on me saying I was letting myself get gaslighted or I wasn’t taking the situation seriously enough. And that was exactly what I was worrying about with Callie, so maybe Mum had the right idea on this.

  “I just don’t want to overreact, you know?” I said. “I don’t want to make trouble for myself and anybody else involved if I don’t—”

  Mum grabbed my shoulders so hard she was hurting me, but I just bit my lip a little and shifted my eyes around so she wouldn’t see it. “Tamara, you are not the one making trouble here. Never let yourself be tricked into thinking you’re the one at fault. This boy hurt you and it sounds like the whole group of them are abusers, based on what you’re telling me.”

  I wasn’t sure how she could know that from the little I knew to tell her, but she was much more experienced with these things, it made sense she would see it from an angle I hadn’t.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll talk to the counsellor tomorrow. Should I go into the situation with Callie too, or…”

  “I think you need to be careful what you say where Callie is concerned,” Mum said, which was a bit of a surprise to me. “Callie has to be willing to do something for herself in this sort of situation. Maybe if she sees you standing up for yourself, she’ll be able to do the same in her own way.”

  I liked the idea that I might be able to help Callie through helping myself. “Okay, well that settles it for me.”

  Mum glanced back towards the door. “I’m glad to help, and remember I am always here to listen to anything you need to tell me. Now, we should probably make sure Mike gets his dinner before he starts making noises.”

  Ms. Miller sighed a little when she heard the name Steven Dillon. “Let’s hear it, then.”

  It wasn’t an encouraging start, but I told her what I could about Callie’s situation, and then I gave as little detail as possible on how Steven had confronted me for watching their group. It was strange, because I had planned to be quite thorough, but then when I
thought back on it I wanted to keep the details a little closer to my chest. Ms. Miller looked so grim at what I did say I didn’t think I could have coped with facing her having admitted just how rough he’d been with me.

  “You don’t need me to tell you we’re talking about something very serious here, Tamara,” she said. “The question is, how serious do you think it is? Serious to the point where you don’t think you can see him around again?”

  The thought of seeing Steven again after what had happened made my heart pound so much I felt like I might be sick, but there was something about the way she was talking. It reminded me of this one time Mum had to drag me in to an after-school meeting with Ryan’s teacher, when he was being accused of being overly violent and disruptive. I’d tried to do as she asked and mind my own business out in the hall, but I couldn’t help hearing some of what Mum was saying. That overly controlled tone of voice, there’s a lot going on under the surface with Ryan. She hadn’t wanted to talk about our history to the teachers at our schools because she said that made things worse sometimes, but I thought Ryan’s teacher had probably figured it out that time, because she didn’t ask the usual questions about where Ryan’s father was, if there were problems.

  So now I was wondering if maybe Steven had been hurt by his father, if there was some family background Ms. Miller knew about that she couldn’t tell me. Something that was making her hope I wouldn’t force her to land Steven in a whole lot of trouble.

  Mum always used to say a history wasn’t an excuse, but then again she seemed to make an exception for Ryan, like most mothers would for their kid I guess. I wondered how she would feel if Ryan got in an altercation with some girl who didn’t give him the benefit of the doubt.

  “I’m not exactly sure about my feelings to be honest,” I told her. “I’ve been trying to work that out. But I think not being sure isn’t enough of a reason to expel him or anything like that. Especially not when we’re all so close to graduating.”