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

by Tiffany Sala

  Tamara stared at her hands knotted in her lap. “I guess I gave you a lot more than she ever did for a lot less…”

  Her sudden loss of confidence helped to calm me. “It’s your choice to give as much or as little as you want, Tamara. The only rule is you have to fucking give something. Julia made me think she was giving me something—maybe she really believed it, too—but it wasn’t worth shit to me. She told me I was all fucked up when I tried to complain, but she didn’t get it. I never cared if there was nobody around to see us, I was perfectly fucking happy for it to be just the two of us together doing whatever.” The first flash of something that looked like jealousy from her, and somehow it made me blush. “I just… I wanted to feel like I had the right to walk past those other people and shut the door on them, you know? That’s all I wanted, to have that right. I never had it. Her parents would have walked right past me on the street and had no reason to believe I was anything to her. And then…”

  I was startled when Tamara stood up, sliding her hand away from me, and walked over to a shelf by the head of my bed. I thought I had been just sitting there letting my thoughts run around for a while. I stiffened when she reached up to take something off the top of the shelf: a battered teddy bear. She tapped it a few times, the dust streaming off it making it pretty clear how long it had been up there. I’d gotten so used to the old thing from my childhood being around I didn’t even see it now.

  Tamara dumped it into my lap, leftover dust and all. When I just stared down at it, she moved my hands for me, wrapping my fingers around it. From that small bit of contact, I could tell she was shaking. I could still sense a little vibration when she sat back down next to me.

  “I… it helps me sometimes,” she muttered. “Just having something to hold onto.”

  I wanted to say You thought I needed something to hold onto? as a joke, but the real question here was how did you know?

  I squeezed the old bear as I got together the words I needed to continue. What the fuck was his name, again? I hadn’t thought about it in so long I couldn’t remember at all. “So she started saying these… other things, after a while. Just casually dropping them in. Like, with the way I acted there was no chance I’d ever get any other girl to show any interest. Like I was a total creep if I even looked at her in a certain way. But there was no way I could do the right thing so she didn’t say those things… if I tried to give her space, not look at her so much, she’d say I was being cruel, trying to punish her.” Tamara jumped as I tossed the bear to the floor. “There was no way to win, believe me, I tried. I spent so much time trying to figure out what it was she wanted I might as well have not been at school at all. I didn’t get any further into being in a serious relationship with her. I wasn’t even allowed to tell my friends she existed.”

  I stared at my poor bear, balancing on his head with one foot sticking straight up. Fuzzy, that was his name. Fuzzy Bear. The stupidest fucking name in existence, a gift this particular toy had gotten from me back when I was more innocent. “Eventually I called it. I realised I was just never going to be the kind of guy who could be with a girl like her. And I told her, to her face… but that infuriated her. She said I had to stay, and when I said no, I was never going to see her again, she said she’d make life very hard for me if I tried that. She’d say I raped her, if she had to.”

  “She couldn’t,” Tamara protested. “If you never…”

  She was still so fucking innocent. “Don’t you get it? It doesn’t matter what did or didn’t happen. Nobody would ever believe someone like me over someone like her—and that’s even assuming they knew there was something between us. There wouldn’t seem to be any good reason for her to lie. I don’t think her parents had a clue how much she already lied on a regular basis. Maybe she didn’t need to lie to them. I got the impression they weren’t the most around parents. They thought their fucking daughter was a little angel who never went to a party in her life, so…”

  I could feel it coming: the part of this story I would have loved for her to never find out. Maybe the only part she really cared about. “I was just going to give up, stick with her for the moment. I mean, she was totally right: what the fuck kind of guy like me would break up with a girl like her? It was nuts, I was out of my mind saying those things. And then… I realised I wasn’t the only dumb guy she was sneaking around with. All that bullshit about what I could get if I jumped through a series of hoops that wasn’t even physically possible… and it was a fucking game to her the whole time, you know? Just one ball of many she was juggling.”

  The words were coming out on their own now. “I didn’t—my head was a fucking mess, Tamara, I just completely lost it. After school every day I parked a long way from her house and ran over there, lurked around until I figured out which room was hers… and then one night I drove up really quietly, parked around a side of the house with no view onto the road or cameras… I sneaked in and grabbed her, dragged her out, got her in my car and drove right off with her.”

  “Okay,” said Tamara, but there was a certain curl to her quivering lips now.

  “I didn’t hurt her,” I said. “I—well I definitely scared her, that was the point. I thought if I just made her see I couldn’t be pushed into just doing whatever she wanted, she’d… I just wanted her to agree to leave me alone, I thought if I held her away from her family and all the things that made her feel strong long enough… but she just started crying. She wouldn’t stop.” That awful fucking wail that shook me awake in the middle of the night. “I said I was sorry, I let her out of my car and drove home and sort of thought that was it, she’d never want another thing to do with me now… but it was only half the truth. She told the truth she needed to get that restraining order on me. She didn’t want me to go to jail of course: that would mean I was too difficult for her to mess with. All she really wants is for me to stay with her, in a way that suits her. That was the point.”

  I hadn’t meant to say those things, those thoughts on exactly what was going on in Julia’s twisted little mind. I’d never expected to have to say them. Tamara still sitting beside me, her lips puckered in thought, was not an outcome I’d anticipated.

  “Okay, so you did do that bad thing. But if she pushed you to it—”

  “What if she did?” I laughed, sharp and loud, and heard a noise elsewhere in the house. Mum was listening for trouble. “What kind of guy is such a loser he lets a girl fuck with him like that—the kind of guy who snaps so hard he kidnaps a girl eventually, right?”

  “You made a mistake,” Tamara said. She looked fucking terrified but there she was, looking me between the eyes. She stood and stepped over to poor Fuzzy, and didn’t break that gaze until she had to. She knelt in front of him, scooped him up as carefully as if he were a fucking baby, and brought him back to sit on her lap. “I’m not going to try to minimise what you’ve done, Steven… but you’re paying for it right now, aren’t you? You’re paying every day.”

  There were all sorts of things I didn’t want to tell her—didn’t want to say out loud to anyone, ever—but I told her anyway. “Well my footy career is definitely going nowhere, in case you didn’t guess. And Mum doesn’t have any trust for me any more. I mean she had no idea Julia even existed before, so it must have seemed bad when she first learned… but she never once asked me if I could explain, if there was anything more to it… like, I must have been pretty fucking below-average in her eyes before this, to get that sort of response. And I wasn’t fucking kidding when I said Julia just wants to keep me around. She sometimes turns up to parties she can get into, if they’re big enough she can blend in and she thinks I’ll be there. She knows she could put an end to me by making me violate that order. She knows it fucks me up, even if I don’t think she’s actually planning on using it. She just wants to keep fucking me up until I agree to get back in line, get back with her for good and without the dramas, and then she’ll drop it.”

  “You could never get back with her now,” Tamara proteste
d. “Her parents must know about the restraining order… They’ll never let you anywhere near her.”

  “Well that’s just it, sweetheart. By letting her completely blow up my brain the way I did, I’ve made myself into the perfect toy for her. We can never be properly together now. Even if the people around her accepted me, it’d be as that creep who abuses her. But staying away from her is fucking me up too. I’ve got this mark against my name, and no way to clear it.”

  I was surprised when I realised why Tamara was shaking. She was angry—well, why wouldn’t she be? Her own father was as twisted as Julia had ever been. Her mother hadn’t even somewhat escaped.

  Tamara cuddled my bear and chewed her lip and finally she said, “If you get involved in this situation with Jess more, it might be the end of your freedom. If it goes wrong.”

  It was not the comment I’d expected. She was thinking about me, and not the terrible thing I’d done.

  Even if it hadn’t been for Para, there was no way I could have turned away from Tamara now. I owed her this… she deserved it.

  “I’m going to protect your sister,” I told her. “I’m going to protect you.”

  She came forward, Fuzzy squishing between both our knees, and put her lips to mine, her eyes on mine. It was like a request, and at first I tried to push her away by holding her shoulders… then I gripped tighter. I let myself taste her. What the fuck was Julia going to do when we were behind closed doors, away from anyone?

  That burst of confidence didn’t last very long. I reluctantly pushed her back, let Fuzzy tumble to the floor again.

  She looked confused, maybe about to slide into hurt, and I didn’t want her to be hurt. “You don’t owe me anything for this. You don’t have to do anything.”

  That fired her up again, the way I thought it might. “Maybe I want to do something. Maybe I—”

  I stroked a fingertip down her lips to silence her. “You need to think about this more. When everything I’ve said sinks in, you’re going to get the idea that staying away from me is the best plan. And…” It was hard for me even to admit this part out loud with myself in the room. “Maybe it’s better if you have no idea what I’m going to do next. Because I can’t control what’s going to happen after that.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Tamara

  It pissed me off at first, that he wouldn’t tell me what he had planned.

  “I’m part of this too,” I told him. “I have a right to be actually involved.”

  When he just shook his head, I felt my rage mounting. I raised a hand to him, not because I planned to hit him—I just wanted to make myself a little bigger while I tried to stand up to him.

  Steven grabbed me by the wrist and suddenly I was flat in the tangle of his sheets, him over the top of me and slowly pressing down. I brought my eyes nervously up to his face, and it started to come together for me. I was falling for a guy who could do things I couldn’t even imagine—things that were understandable, in the circumstances he’d described, but it still scared me when I was thinking about being close to him now. Just as he’d realised it would all along.

  I needed time to process this before I knew what came next. I needed to let Steven do whatever he needed to do.

  I needed to be with my mother, right now.

  I still put my head up and sneaked a kiss, relishing the surge of fear a little. I was really glad this man was on my side.

  “Thank you for trusting me,” I whispered. “I’m going to trust you too. Please tell me it’s all going to be all right.”

  Steven shook his head. “I can’t do that… the best I can give you is my promise that I will do everything I can.”

  He never lied to me, so I knew just how much that promise was worth. But somehow I felt more protected by that than I had in a long time.

  Mum was on top of me the instant I walked back into the house, of course. She’d been practically hysterical when I got back with Ryan and only stayed long enough to dump my schoolbag before I was off again. Usually, I would have given her time to talk me out of going anywhere.

  I took control of this situation before she could. “Mum, we need to have a private chat.”

  Mike was parked up on their bed reading, but he got up and slunk out when the two of us appeared in the doorway.

  We sat down on Mum’s side of the bed with all her ornaments and standing hangers of outfits almost crowding us out of the room, and I told her I’d been off with Brad and his daughter that day, not at school.

  It took her several seconds for the words to sink in, and then her eyes started looking very bright, her fingers quivering and coming together in a clawing motion. “Mum,” I said, “I really need you to focus right now. I understand why you really didn’t want me to see him. Why you made up that lie to make sure it wouldn’t happen.”

  Mum stiffened. “What did he do to you?”

  “Nothing,” I insisted, “I mean, nothing that went beyond basic creepiness, but it was enough for me to get the hint. He’s…” I didn’t even know what words to use.

  I could tell from Mum’s face she understood, even more than I understood myself. “I didn’t know, for years. I knew he was manipulative, of course. I knew he could say absolutely anything if it would get him what he wanted. I knew that some of what he wanted, in a—” She shook her head. “You don’t need to know that. The point is, our relationship… we had a lot of arguments, it was very stressful, but my parents had a lot of arguments growing up at least until they left me, it seemed normal to me. He wasn’t hitting me, I told myself, and he was a hard worker, lots of potential.”

  I found myself wondering, for some reason, what Steven’s potential would be. He spent all that time around rich bastards like Lucas and it didn’t seem to have increased his motivation to do something with his life now his obvious route upwards was off the table. But he still had this mysterious Julia weighing on him. Maybe, if he could get out from under her shadow…

  But I was thinking about Steven now because I didn’t want to think about what had to be coming next.

  “Then one day, I found him alone with you…” She shook her head.

  “Mum, tell me what you saw.”

  “There’s no point in your knowing the details. It won’t help you.” I didn’t agree, but I could see she wouldn’t budge on that. I had to be happy with as much of the truth as she was willing to give right now. “He came up with an explanation for what I saw, but suddenly I could see through all of it. I realised there was something very wrong with him… and I knew if I stayed, I’d keep finding him doing things like that. Any contact at all was going to leave you messed up.”

  “But you could have reported him. You could have stopped him for good! And you—”

  “I didn’t have a whole lot of proof, Tamara. He’s always been smart. I’m sure you’ve noticed already just meeting him once, the man knows how to make people love him. I was just the woman who stayed at home with his kids and occasionally got caught scowling in the background of photos where he was meeting young female fans with their tits practically hanging out for him.”

  It was really something else to hear my mother talking like this. I was so nervous I wanted to start giggling, but too nervous to do anything that might make her not confide in me the way I needed.

  “Maybe I was stupid, Tamara. No, I am stupid. I let myself get saddled with two kids by a man who made me—and them—totally dependent on him. So, I was afraid maybe nobody would believe me and maybe the two of you would be taken off me entirely… but I was also afraid maybe I’d get what I wanted, and then… where would we be? In the same place really. I knew what some people would be like. I knew what they’d see in me… a woman who knew her man was a cheater, knew he’d gotten another woman pregnant, but pretended to forgive him.”

  This was not a possibility I’d ever considered. My mother was not the sort of woman who would learn there was another woman and just quietly let that go on happening. She wasn’t that sort of woman now, at least. I w
as looking the event that had made her who she was right in the face.

  She seemed to be disappearing back into that old self a little now, though, her eyes shifting around like she could picture the judgement coming in from all sides. “They’d say it was my revenge. They’d blame me when he was tossed in prison, they’d say I lied, saw what I wanted to see, that I coached you. And in a way they’d be right: three-year-olds aren’t supposed to have to talk about things like that, to feel like it matters how—” I actually saw her bite her lip. She’d been about to say something she knew she shouldn’t. “It just didn’t seem right to subject you to that, to make it a part of your history. I think they try to keep these things private when it comes to children, but considering who he was it was never going to stay private. And then the thought of having Ryan involved with that as well…”

  Mum shook her head. “Maybe what I did wasn’t strictly right, but for you two? I’d do it over again, as many times as I had to. I knew the one bit of leverage I had over him was his stupid football career. If he thought he could still have that, he’d be willing to deal with me. So I promised to keep everything quiet, so long as he gave us enough money to leave and then left you and Ryan and me alone forever. He could have his sport, and his other woman: he just had to leave me and my kids alone.”

  “But he didn’t have his sport,” I protested. I could see it was making her angry, my questioning her, but I was desperate to make it all fit. “He said you threatened to expose him if he ever tried to go big leagues.”

  “Bullshit.” It was even harder for me to keep my composure after that. I’d heard my mother swear before, of course, but she was not usually so able to spit it at me. “He had someone else on his back. Or maybe he realised the bleeding obvious: you can’t abuse your baby daughter and then expect to just walk away from that situation and not have it come back to bite you. I knew that when I made the deal; I just let him think what he wanted.”