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

by Tiffany Sala

  Not me. Never fucking me.

  I thought about running. That fucking pretty boy would never be able to catch up with me then. But I ended up just letting him catch up.

  He started out all chill and chatty. “Okay, man, so what’s up? You’ve never struck me as the type to go all in with a girl.”

  Which showed how much he knew about me, really.

  “Look, Steve, you need to make this right with Tamara,” said Lucas. “She’s sort of one of us now, she’s Callie’s friend. And you can’t be doing this sort of thing at school and dragging these other assholes in. You’re going to make trouble for yourself nobody can get you out of.”

  “Should I do it on the quiet, then? Maybe take a couple guys out with me to rough her up after school, get her cornered somewhere?”

  I knew that was fucking provocative obviously, but I wasn’t prepared for Lucas to grab my arm and start shouting something in my face.

  I took a swing at him he barely dodged, and he backed off. Lucas always was a fucking pussy.

  “You are out of control, Steve. You need to get yourself sorted out, and until you do I’d like you to stay away from my girlfriend and her friends.”

  Stay away from him too, though he didn’t bother saying that.

  I stared after him as he left, trying to ignore the stares of everyone who had witnessed everything.

  Then I just started walking in the direction of my car. I was supposed to have a training session that afternoon, but I’d been skipping most of those lately. Nobody had even bothered to ask me why, which hadn’t exactly motivated me to go back. I guess I hadn’t been putting on such a good show in my games that were leading to absolutely nothing I could use in my future. And no fucking point in trying to stick around for classes, right? I didn’t even have anywhere in the school I could hide from the world, like Tamara with her little library trick I’d finally caught her on.

  I’d ruined that safe place for her. She would never be able to go there again and not think of what had happened that afternoon.

  I should feel bad about that. But Tamara was the one who had started this whole mess, poking her nose in where it wasn’t wanted. Forcing me to be rough to protect her.

  But I was the one who had come after her assuming that she would be like Julia, that all the sneaking and shiftiness meant she would try something. And she’d found out my biggest secret without exposing me, without showing any signs that she wanted to expose me. When she was angry with me, she came and took it up with me directly. Honestly.

  Maybe that would change after what had happened today. I wasn’t certain, though. I wasn’t convinced she had any intention of fucking me up. The same girl who had decided to go meet her father and get his side of the story?

  I’d hurt her, and I couldn’t even explain why I’d had to be so brutal about it. But she was still better off that way—better without me, even ignoring the Julia situation.

  I parked around the corner of my house and took a long run to avoid my parents hassling me about getting home early again, then pulled up in front and went straight inside, sweating like a pig, to play with Para. I didn’t even bother showering or changing my clothes, I sort of wanted to feel filthy at the moment.

  I could tell when Para let us get absolutely annihilated by an opposing team who were consistently piss-weak against us, that… well, shit was not good at home.

  Honestly? I had my own problems, I didn’t want to get in on hers at the moment. But I ordered her into a private chat anyway and asked what was up.

  When all she would say was my dad at first, I got pretty riled up. “Of course it’s your fucking dad, Para, when is it anything else in your life?”

  She was quiet for a while after that. I put my hand up to my headset. “I can fucking go, if you don’t want to play properly and you don’t—”

  “No!” She sounded halfway to tears. I was doing a great job with women today. “Dad has another family. Other kids. He told me when I got home today. I don’t think Mum even knows yet. It’s such a fucking mess.”

  Well, it didn’t surprise me that the guy I’d come to know through Para would have a secret double life like that.

  Para took a big sniff. “He wants me to meet this sister of mine, like, she’s four years older than me or something, I guess he thinks we’re near enough in age that we’re going to become super-close or something. Like, has he ever bothered to stop and look at me? I don’t do girlfriends or anything like that, Mum barely wants to spend time with me. And I bet she doesn’t know the first thing about what he’s really like, either. He was going on about how she found him by looking up his old sporting history, he was really pleased about that. He likes to act like he’s some big hero, you know, absolutely fucking God’s gift, when he isn’t—”

  It was too much of a coincidence. All the details lining up like that. “Para, is your dad fucking Brad Chalmers?”

  Para didn’t give me an answer in words at first, but I could tell from the way she breathed.

  “Yeah, I fucking know who he is. I’d even recognise him if I saw him at the shops, trust me, I know.”

  “You—”

  “I watched as he met with your sister the other day, Para. Yeah, I know her. She goes to my fucking school.”

  It might not have come together for me then, except Para started stammering all over the place. Once I was focused on something being wrong, I got it pretty damn quickly.

  “You said four years older. She’s eighteen, same as me… How old are you, Para?”

  I heard a clatter from her end. “If you disconnect on me now Para, you can be assured I will never fucking speak to you again.”

  She sighed, a sob. “I’m fourteen.”

  “So when we first started chatting, you were…” It explained everything. Why she’d never just left home even though her father was a complete shit—her father, Brad Chalmers—and why she’d always seemed so vulnerable to the world to me even when she showed tremendous strength, why I’d felt such a need to get in her corner.

  That fucking baby voice. She’d been a baby when we started talking, she was still a baby.

  “I was too young when we first met,” said Para, as if she could tell what I was thinking. “I’d talked to older guys before, and they either wanted to creep on me, or they treated me differently. They’d think they needed to protect me, and sometimes that meant they wouldn’t talk to me at all, and they’d tell other people without my permission that I was too young to talk to. You were probably the first guy I’d met gaming who didn’t think I needed to be watched, or that it was weird for any girl to be gaming. But I could tell you were the sort of guy who wanted to do the right thing. I didn’t want to have you think you shouldn’t be talking to me at all.”

  Even though I fucking shouldn’t have been. What if Julia had found out about this? It was completely different now I knew I was talking to an underage girl. Having private voice chats with her. I could say it was just about gaming all I liked, that the real danger for Para was inside her own damn family, but who was going to believe that?

  And this was the father Tamara was so excited about finally meeting. Her mother had been right to want to keep her away… but her mother had wimped out on telling her the truth.

  I needed to do something. Stop this. Keep that monster away from her—but there was something else that wanted to come out of me right now, and it was insisting on being first through the gate. That old panic at the wrong move getting me uncovered, because if he’d ever realised we were talking he would definitely have—

  “Para, you fucking little liar, you have no idea what you could have done to me pulling this bullshit. You had no right to just decide what you wanted and fuck with me—”

  She disconnected. I should have fucking known she would just ditch the conversation. Para was scared of confrontation, that plus her age was how he’d found it so easy to keep her in her place, wasn’t it?

  Now I didn’t know when Tamara was supposed to m
eet with Chalmers again. Just that it was going to happen… and he was going to use Para to lure Tamara in, because he knew just as well as I did she wouldn’t tell Tamara the truth about him.

  She was just a kid still. And I’d attacked her like some vicious animal. The same way I’d attacked Tamara—apparently, her sister.

  If they happened to bother comparing notes on me, neither of them would trust me again.

  I had to get in touch with Tamara and warn her not to see Chalmers again. Now. What if she was having dinner with his family tonight or something?

  But how could I find her? I’d never bothered to get her address or number, and I knew after today that Callie would never help me. She might even warn Tamara against me or call the cops.

  I raised my hands to smack my keyboard… and then I thought of one place, at least, where Tamara’s personal details were likely to be stored insecurely.

  I was up and out of my room before I could think about whether it was a good idea. It wasn’t going to stand up well to that sort of challenge.

  Charging too fast through the lounge, I put my hands up to avoid making hard body contact with my mother, who staggered back even faster when she saw me reaching towards her.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m just going out.”

  “Not staying for dinner?” She sounded so fucking hopeful.

  I wasn’t going to be able to make her night this time. “I’ll be back, I might be late though.”

  “Steven.” She stopped me as I was on my way out the door. “Are you getting yourself in any trouble again?”

  She had to slip that again in. “I’m fine, I just have something I need to go and do.”

  “Because if you get mixed up in something new there’s nothing we can—”

  “I said I’ll be late!” I shouted, and slammed the door behind me. She always had to fucking push it.

  I drove carefully back to school. If you were going to do something suss then the last thing you wanted was to start out looking like you were possibly running away from something suss.

  By the time I arrived, it was almost six, and the air around my car seemed to echo as I pulled into a parking space down a side street. There were still a couple of guys kicking a ball around one of the ovals, and I could hear the odd sound in Ms. Miller’s building that told me some staff were back late working. Poor bastards.

  Ms. Miller wasn’t working late, of course. That fucking bitch probably couldn’t wait to get out of the building once her minimum hours were up. You got a feeling about people who really didn’t give a fuck. It didn’t matter how good they were at going through the motions, and Ms. Miller was as fucking weak at that as she was at basic security.

  I got her office with its wobbly door handle open in seconds, and then it only took me a few more to break into her filing cabinet. Tamara’s folder was near the front of the top drawer. I’d always wondered if she had some special sorting for people she considered to be ‘active’ cases—all I’d known before then was that my folder never seemed to be hard for her to locate. I made a note of the address on the first page in the folder, and then put it back where I’d found it and shut the cabinet. There would be all sorts of insight to be gotten out of those pages, but I wasn’t the sort of person who took advantage of information that wasn’t meant to be mine. Not without giving my target an opportunity to defend themselves, at least… and Tamara was going to know before too long that I’d gotten hold of her location.

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Tamara

  Mum glared after Ryan as he slipped away from the table without asking, but she didn’t follow him to his room.

  I sort of wished I’d tried it first, but at the same time I didn’t want to have Mum on my back so much she suspected what I was planning the next day. So I kept my eyes down and pretended, like Mike was, that everything was completely normal.

  Then Mike started shifting like he wanted to make a run for it, but from the way he kept glancing at me I thought he was staying to provide some sort of buffer.

  Something about Mum’s movements warned me she was going to start talking soon. I braced for desperately wanting a distraction.

  A bang on the door made us all jump.

  Mum scowled. “Who would show up at someone’s house at this time?”

  Whoever it was didn’t intend to be ignored. When the knocking increased in volume, Mum muttered something as she threw down her fork, and stalked to the door.

  “Tamara,” Mike spoke up as soon as she was gone, “are you okay?”

  “Not really,” I admitted.

  Mum’s raised voice filtered in… and then I realised I recognised the male voice speaking to her. I stumbled over Ryan’s pulled-out chair as I hurried to join her at the door.

  Steven was leaning against the protruding outside wall of our house like he had nothing more on his mind than the average boyfriend showing up to say hi to a girlfriend at a bad time… except I’d been around him enough to tell there was something very off. He was edgy, his eyes tracking all over the place and his crooked elbow jittering against the doorframe. Even when he was angry, Steven was usually much more deliberate, more given up to graceful instinct. I never got the impression there was a lot going on under the surface. Now, I saw a lot in his eyes and it all scared me.

  “Is he from your school, Tamara?” Mum asked. She made it sound innocent, but I could tell she was on edge about this sudden arrival. I put my eyes down to the ground. She knew the answer already, didn’t she?

  I could still feel Steven staring at me. “Tamara, I need to talk to you now.”

  “No, I’d like you to leave,” I mumbled. The longer he was here at my door, the more likely Mum would hear or figure out something she didn’t like.

  Mum stiffened. “If you’ve come here to bother my daughter, I—”

  “Tamara, just hear me out for one fucking minute, okay? Privately.”

  “No.” I needed to work out how to make him leave without making Mum aware of just how close we’d been. I decided to try keeping things simple. “We’re not friends. We’re not anything to one another. So I want you to go before I have to take any drastic action to get rid of you.”

  “Fine, Tamara.” I relaxed a little, but when I heard him clear his throat I realised I’d messed up completely. “Look, I know you’re planning to meet your dad again. I just needed to tell you not to do it. He’s not a good man, Tamara, no matter what he said to you—”

  Mike peeking in from the dining area and calling, “Everything all right out here?” turned my head. When I turned back, Mum was slamming the door in Steven’s face.

  He started pounding on it again, so hard the entire house seemed to be trembling. “Tamara! You need to fucking listen to me! You need to listen to your mother this once! You can’t—”

  “You don’t know shit about what I intend to do,” I shouted back at him through the door. Trying to scream him down seemed to be the only defense in my panic. “I have absolutely no plans to see him.”

  “You’re lying, Tamara. I know it. You’re a fucking liar.”

  But I knew I had him. The only reason he’d come to my house like this, trying to spill my plans to my mother, was because he didn’t know enough about exactly what I had planned to stop me himself. He was hoping to get Mum on the case so she could stop me, using her the way Mum had used Callie basically.

  I was so sick of it. Why did everyone have to have an agenda?

  “I’m calling the police,” Mum announced. “I’m not going to have this.”

  It was what he deserved. Mike was nodding… but neither of them knew how much trouble Steven would be in if he got tangled up with the police.

  Maybe trouble was exactly what he deserved, too. He’d told me nothing useful about the situation that had led to that restraining order. I didn’t know if he was sorry, if he regretted whatever he’d done to that girl. What he was doing to me right now certainly suggested otherwise.

  Still, I put my hands up. “Wait, I know this g
uy, I don’t want to take things too far too quickly.” I had to raise my voice to be heard over Steven’s yelling and banging.

  When Mum turned her full attention on me, I knew I should have let him fend for himself.

  “Why are you defending this man who is harassing your whole family? I just don’t understand, Tamara. You’re usually so much more sensible than this.” Her eyes lit up. “Is it true, what he’s saying? Are you going to meet with him again?”

  Ryan burst out of his room. “Who is that little fucker who thinks he can bother my sister, I’m going to go out there and smash him.”

  “Leave it, Ryan,” I begged. But Steven had stopped his noise outside already. In the silence, I could hear him jogging away. He knew, of course, he’d done enough.

  “I can still catch him if I start—” Mike put a hand on Ryan’s chest, and on this one blessed occasion my stroppy bitch of a brother actually listened to him.

  Mum didn’t care about Steven at all now he was out of the scene. “Are you, Tamara? Are you going to see him?”

  “I don’t have anything planned,” I said, which I thought I could play as the truth well enough. Technically, it was the truth… Brad had told me he would let me know when and where to meet his car the next day.

  I just had to get there.

  Mum was rubbing my shoulders. “You’re shaking, Tamara… I think you need to stay home from school tomorrow. We can take some time to talk about this properly, I think it’s necessary.”

  This had to be exactly what Steven had planned, what I was dreading. If she got me alone and said enough words, history showed she could get me to do anything. Quit my job, avoid my friends… “Can we do it on the weekend, maybe? I just… I want this week to finish up normally.”

  “This man, though… he goes to your school? He’s in your classes? He’s going to harass you more if you show up tomorrow, isn’t he?”

  “Mum, please calling him ‘this man’, he’s just another kid who goes to my school, yes I know we’re all legally adults here but he is seriously not on a higher level than me. No, he’s not going to bother me at school. I’ve already talked to guidance at school and he knows if he tries any more stuff, he’s going to be in deep trouble.”