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

by Tiffany Sala

  Lucas, Mic, and Axel thought it was fucking hilarious. Of course, they also thought I was trying to let Tamara know I was keen to get a leg up on her again.

  Maybe there was something in that too. I mean, I definitely wanted to fuck her again, you didn’t have to think a girl was decent to get into her, but I didn’t see it actually happening. She’d been so pissed off by how I’d reacted to the thing with Rowan.

  Now I’d had time to think about it, I wished I’d just let her see me get mad about it. Honestly the nerve of the guy pissed me off. He was just trying to take advantage while he thought he could. An absolute creep. Yeah, there were lots of guys who would do that shit, but it didn’t make it something I was personally happy about.

  I would have done something to him if I could… but there was the thing, I couldn’t. The day after the condom incident, Ms. Miller pulled me aside on the way to class, made me come into her office with her for a second. I stood there with my eyes on her desk as she lectured me, looking at some other poor bastard’s file left on her desk with one scribbled-over page sticking out. It didn’t take a genius to work out how Tamara had managed to get hold of information about me she should never have had. And now I couldn’t call this bitch on her carelessness without getting Tamara in trouble, which I really didn’t want to do even if she deserved it.

  Honestly, people like Ms. Miller pissed me off. They managed to get just enough power over other people to really fuck up their lives, then they got to act like the ones who were righteous and knew how everyone else should behave.

  Fortunately, Ms. Miller hadn’t actually heard the condom story. Just a lot of whispering and laughing that involved the two of us, and it wasn’t like she could do much because other people were putting our names together. But obviously she wasn’t dumb enough to think there was nothing behind it, so she was letting me know I was really on the edge now.

  As if I didn’t fucking know. I’d been on the edge ever since Julia’s bullshit. Thanks to her, the only exciting thing I had to look forward to in my life was maybe self-destructing. I wasn’t going to be playing footy at a higher level than high school, that was for sure. In a rare heartwarming father-son moment, my dad had pulled me aside after the legal shit was done with and pointed this out to me. Like, hey, son, so you’re feeling really great right now that this fucking mess is going to calm down for a bit, but don’t ever forget that a man who abuses women isn’t welcome anywhere in society.

  Not even if it was just once. Not even if he realised right in the middle of it he’d made the biggest fucking mistake, and apologised, and made sure he never let that shit happen again. Not that he had much of a chance, when the ‘he’ being talked about was me.

  Yeah, Ms. Miller. I was more than fine without the lecture.

  But I got the point. I couldn’t risk doing anything to Rowan, who didn’t have any reason to hold back if I pissed him off. I shouldn’t have even done anything to Tamara, but I needed to keep her in line. She needed to feel like fucking with me was a bad idea.

  And, honestly, I was finding it pretty hard to stay away from her. I didn’t fully understand it myself. I’d had girls I wanted to fuck and not been able to make it work with before, that wasn’t the issue. There was just something about Tamara that provoked me, had ever since that first fight, and it made me react in this really stupid juvenile way where I wanted to pull her hair and trip her in the corridors and all this mental preteen stuff I’d never done with any girl, ever. Not even Julia, and to say she’d gotten my head screwed on upside down was understating it.

  Maybe this was just how I was with any girl I stood a chance of getting into a real relationship with. Maybe all the fucking hell Julia had put me through was for the good of all womankind, after all.

  But why the fuck would I be lumping Tamara in with Julia? We’d spent one night together, and most of it playing fucking Halo. That was the sign you’d found someone who would make a great girl bud, not a girlfriend.

  My head made no fucking sense at the moment. I was sick. I was a total mess. I should be doing everything I could to stay away from her.

  So of course I was slinking around after her and watching her even when there was a good chance she could see me doing it. I got to confirm she took care of that little issue she’d been weirdly weak on, and I saw lots of evidence she wasn’t back to normal.

  And I felt really shit about it actually. Maybe there was actually no way to justify what I was doing to her. But I couldn’t work out how I was going to turn things around, either.

  It just led to more of me watching her. That was the only thing I could think to do. And it didn’t lead me to any genius moments that would fix this whole thing. I didn’t see something that changed my entire perspective on the situation or provoke her enough that she came up and challenged me directly. And I kind of wanted her to challenge me directly, it seemed like it would be hot as.

  By Friday, I was ready to do something else. Something that would get a really good reaction out of her. But the hours rolled by that day and I didn’t actually come up with something I could do that wouldn’t blow up in my face.

  Then at lunch, I hurried to her locker, determined to catch her this time before she disappeared to wherever she went during lunches—I hadn’t spotted her once over the lunch break that week. She had to be doing it on purpose.

  When I nearly collided with her headed away from her locker, I stopped still in the middle of the path at first, trying to make sense of what had just happened.

  Tamara hadn’t even seen me. She was wearing her school backpack, and wherever she was headed, I’d bet it had nothing to do with me or with her education.

  And I was never going to just leave it at that. As soon as I was sure she had no idea I was even around her I was moving back the way I’d just come, trailing her through a side exit between two buildings that would have been a lot more popular as an escape route from the hell of Burgundy if anyone knew it existed. I knew it was there, and I wasn’t at all surprised Tamara did as well. That girl knew a lot about escaping notice.

  Tamara walked down a lane that joined onto a residential street that joined onto a main road… and if she crossed that road, she would be only a short walk away from a small nearby shopping centre. Out of the way, I don’t think it even had a proper name. The sort of place you could go to pick up some milk or beer—yes, even condoms—if you didn’t want to run into anyone you knew.

  I didn’t want to follow Tamara there. It seemed like a very fucking bad sign. But I didn’t want to give up this chase now. Once I was certain I knew where she was headed, I split off down a different road, came in at the opposite end of the mall, and was hiding at the end of the corridor leading down to the cleaners’ cupboards and shopping centre admin when she showed up at the food court. I’d already worked out that since Tamara didn’t have me on her mind at the moment, she was probably thinking about someone else. Someone she was planning to meet here…

  Someone she wouldn’t want anyone else to know she was meeting.

  Tamara scanned the food court seating for a few seconds, then her posture changed completely as she took in a big man sitting along one edge of the space that didn’t get a lot of traffic because the Chinese and Indian food places were there and Tasmanians are fucking racists. I’d noticed the guy already, because he looked completely out of place at that tiny chair and table. No amount of twisting, hunching, or straddling was helping. And he looked a bit shifty too, his head down and his eyes glinting as they moved, like he half-expected to be confronted and asked to move on.

  As Tamara made her decision and started to head towards him, he did look up fully, a grin crossing his face as he took her in.

  That was the moment I realised it: I fucking knew him.

  Not personally or anything; he’d been gone long before I could have ever met him. And he was a lot older now than he’d been in all the pictures I’d seen, though still recognisable with his similar hairstyling. But I’d been an AFL
nut from the age of six, and it was probably the only thing my dad understood about me, so he’d helped me out every way he could think of. He’d given me all his old books and magazines, which made me the coolest kid in my class because they didn’t seem to print so much of that stuff these days.

  And like just about every kid who was obsessed with that sort of thing, I knew a really stupid amount of stuff about a lot of star players and up-and-coming players… most of which had completely left my head, but Brad Chalmers had been interesting enough to stick, apparently.

  Well, he was definitely interesting enough. What else could you say about a guy who was predicted to be the biggest star of the next generation of players… who instead disappeared, never even making the draft?

  But if he was Tamara’s dad, if he was the guy who’d hit her and made her mother run, it all made complete sense now. Like my dad kept telling me, you couldn’t be a big-name sportsman if you hurt women. That had to apply ten times over if you hit a kid.

  I was finding it hard to be okay with this. I wanted to walk right over and get between Tamara and that man whose size made her look like a little doll even now. But I, of all people, had to know there were complicated issues in these sorts of situations. A guy could be pushed to do a lot of bad things, especially when he was pretty young and had a lot of energy to burn.

  Then I realised Tamara was staring across at me. She’d come around the far side of the table to sit down, and I’d been too busy trying to accept this new development to think about keeping out of her sight.

  Of course, she hardly reacted—just like she hadn’t let on when I was fucking her just how new the whole thing was to her. I had to admire that bitch’s ability to keep things under wraps. She just sank into the little plastic food court chair across from Brad Chalmers, looking tiny in it—a fucking comical contrast to him—and managed to angle herself so that she probably looked to him like she was giving him her attention, while she was still watching me.

  I wanted to stay. I felt like I should stay. I’d helped her to bring this guy back into her life, I owed it to her to make sure she was okay at the end of it.

  But I also knew I couldn’t do anything to fuck this up for her, like distracting he when she was trying to work out what to make of him. I had to give her the space she needed to decide what Chalmers could be to her, and I had to trust her to know if she needed to seek help. It wasn’t like I was the guy she’d want help from anyway.

  I had a feeling I needed to remove myself from this situation to figure out what I thought about Tamara possibly being the daughter of Brad Chalmers, too. Because right now there was another part of me that was feeling a strong urge to run over and be a fucking fanboy right in his face. It’s an honour to meet you Mr. Chalmers…

  Fuck that shit.

  Making sure Tamara could still see me, I started to walk forward. I headed straight for a set of sliding doors that led out of the building, and didn’t look back once. Hopefully she would see exactly where I’d gone.

  We were definitely going to talk about this on Monday. But we both needed about that much time to process what had happened that afternoon.

  Chapter Seventeen: Tamara

  I was surprised when Steven just walked out. But at the moment his stalking seemed to be confined to working out what I was up to, and he was probably smart enough to figure out after taking me to get that birth certificate that this big guy was not some secret boyfriend.

  I was relieved to see him gone. Aside from the obvious distraction, it niggled at me to be there in front of Brad Chalmers and to think about how things were with Steven now, when he was such a big part of my getting there at all. I knew, right then, I was going to have to confront him next week. Keeping my distance and hoping things settled down did not seem to be working.

  But for now, I had to focus on my—this—what did I even call him?

  Brad Chalmers grinned. “I think for the moment we’ll stick with you calling me ‘Bradley’ or ‘Brad’, okay?” As if he’d known exactly what I was thinking. “And are you Tamara? Tammie?”

  “Just Tamara.”

  His smile was so like my brother’s it was unsettling. “Well, Just Tamara, should we grab something for lunch?”

  I’d been considering it, but now I was here I knew I wouldn’t be able to eat. “I can’t stay long, I have to get back to school. Maybe just a coffee?”

  “Great, sure.” He jumped up out of his seat, tipping his chair onto the floor with a crash. I hid a smile behind my hands as he picked it up. “I’ll go get something for you, my shout, no need to get the wallet out.” I’d hardly started reaching for my bag. “Just wait there for a moment.”

  He made his way over to the coffee stall in the middle of the food court, constantly glancing back like he thought I might bolt. I had been planning on using the time to collect my thoughts, work out where my head was at, but my brain was filled with nothing but fuzz until he was sitting back down and sliding a very milky-looking cup across the table towards me.

  “Um, I’m sorry, you probably don’t drink your coffee that way any more. It’s a bit of an inside joke… I used to make you a lot of coffees in the morning when you were a kid, decaf of course, and I’d do them like that because obviously no three-year-old really likes coffee, you just wanted one like I was making for your mum.”

  “I don’t remember you making us coffees,” I said. I sucked in a big gulp. No way was I going to make a fuss about how the damn thing was made when I hardly got to drink coffee ever. Mum was so shitty about having coffee in the house. She acted like it was literal poison.

  “Loved doing it,” said Brad. “I got in a load of fucking trouble if I had any myself, so nice to be able to make it for someone at least. I was in training for the AFL draft back in those days, if you can believe it.”

  “I heard.” I was trying hard not to look like I was on the edge of having a coffee orgasm, but weak as this one was I was struggling. Then I started feeling wary. Was Brad trying to build some sort of rapport with me through selected stories from a shared past I didn’t remember?

  I needed to get onto addressing what we were really here for. I pushed the coffee back a little. “Mum said you hit me when I was three years old. That it was the reason she had to leave you.”

  “I know she told you that,” Brad said. “She said she was going to do it. She warned me.”

  “Well if—”

  “It never fucking happened,” said Brad. “I never laid a finger on you in anger. Why would I do that?”

  Surprise made me sassy. “I don’t know, how about you explain to me why she would lie?”

  Brad grimaced. “I’m really going to do this, aren’t I. Explain to my own daughter—Fuck.” Two older ladies at a table near us were shooting us frequent hostile looks. Brad offered them a movie-star grin but I wasn’t sure they were buying, and he quickly seemed to lose interest in them to mutter more curses to himself.

  I didn’t know what to say or do. I just sat as still as I could, waiting for him to get control over himself, and finally he shook his head a little and continued, his eyes looking a little less wild. “Well, you’re going to find out soon enough anyway. No keeping it from you. Your sister, Jess. She turned fourteen this year.”

  I just kept staring at him. I could tell I was supposed to put this information together with some other information, but I was too wired at the moment to do it.

  “Fourteen, Tamara,” said Brad. “Think about how old you are, how old you were when I last saw—”

  Maths had never been my strongest subject. But I thought I was getting the point.

  “Your mum found out about Jess’s mum not long after I found out we were having a kid. I had an ultrasound picture she’d sent me on my phone and… well, I guess I looked at it one too many times and she got wise to something being up. I was so fucking happy to be a dad again, I admit I got careless. I didn’t think about her feelings. I’ve always loved all of my kids, more than anyone can know…
even when things weren’t going so well with their mums.”

  He’d cheated. And I felt like he was trying to tell me he’d done it because he had problems with my mum at the time.

  I had a sister only a few years younger than me. We could probably have been the right age to play dolls together at least for a brief point in time. My mother had known about this all those years, and she’d never said a word. Did Ryan know too? He was so much older, he must have asked questions for longer when his dad disappeared from his life.

  Was I really going to believe what this man I hadn’t seen for fifteen years was saying? That my mother had lied about him hitting me?

  I didn’t know what I was feeling inside, except hurt. The only thing that was clear to me was that I’d ended up being just a piece in the game my parents had been playing with each other, and not even an important piece. They’d done what they wanted with me and then tossed me aside and gone on with their lives.

  I was full of questions, but the one that came out was unexpectedly irrelevant. “How about you and her—and Jess’s mother? Are you…?”

  “We’re all right,” said Brad. “She was always the ‘other woman’ and she knows her promotion was a stroke of dumb luck, so she’s a bit more primed to forgive I think. Sue was the type to fly off the handle at anything, go fully nuclear if she had to.”

  I didn’t say it, but he was describing my mum all right.

  Brad put his spoon in his coffee and stirred it thoughtfully, his face suggesting no actual conscious purpose to what he was doing. “I’m sorry I just dropped out of your life. That I never gave you an opportunity to get close to Jess. She’s a great girl, very determined. Very strong.” I tried not to look like I was making a sour face at that. It was hard not to think that Jess had taken my place in his life and I had been given no say in it.