Boys And Their Toys: A Dark High School Bully Romance (Troubled Playthings Book 1)

by Tiffany Sala

  Tamara was waiting for us on our front porch. My parents must have called her while they were waiting for me to wake up earlier.

  “Callie!” she shouted as I stepped out of the car, and ran over to hug me. She stepped back immediately and found a nice patch of ground to stare at. Tamara and I spent a good amount of time together at school, but we didn’t really see each other outside of school much these days. We didn’t play netball together any more, we both worked, and we’d fallen into a bit of a trap of feeling tired on weekends when we were free, so we’d just chat half-heartedly on social media or text. It made me sad a lot of the time that I had this one ‘good’ friend and I didn’t even know how we were going to manage to keep in contact once we no longer had school to force us into the same set of buildings for most of the week, but if I couldn’t figure out how to arrange an in-person catch-up I was definitely not up for a D&M about the future of our relationship.

  Maybe the shock of my nearly dying on an actual road this time had shaken Tamara up enough that she was having the right thoughts all by herself. Her fingers were wiggling like she wanted to touch me some more. Well… better get in line, today.

  “Are you really all right? I heard they thought you might have a concussion at one point.”

  “They ruled that out pretty quickly,” I said. Not as quickly as they might have if I’d been able to explain to them exactly what had wigged me out so hard, but they’d done their best.

  “And running into Lucas Starling,” Tamara continued, “of all people.”

  “Come on, come on,” Dad said, “she might not be concussed, but she’s had a nasty shock. Let’s get her inside.”

  “Dad’s a little sensitive about the L-word,” I confided in Tamara as we entered the house.

  “Maybe he should be,” Tamara said. “Wasn’t Lucas the one who had that thing for you when we were younger?”

  “I don’t think he was ever serious about that,” I said. “Just something to do.”

  “I’ve never heard of anyone romantically pursuing someone just for something to do.” Tamara grabbed a chair from the kitchen as we went through and brought it into the living room so she could sit by me when I parked myself up on the couch. “I think you sell yourself way too short.”

  “And I think I’d like to stop talking about this,” I told her.

  I might have been a little bit sharp about it. Tamara didn’t get upset or anything, but she didn’t stay too long, either. So much for being shaken into a new appreciation of me.

  Not that I was really in the right frame of mind to talk, I supposed. I had the problem of what to do about Lucas all over my mind. If I did nothing, I would probably have him on my doorstep come Monday morning.

  Mum hurried off to grab the phone when it rang, and came back into the living room holding it. She handed it over to me without a word of explanation, which told me she had no idea who was calling for me.

  I recognised Ashleigh’s voice from the first tentative, “Calista?”

  “It’s Callie,” I told her. There didn’t seem like much point in hoping she’d figure it out for herself.

  “Oh,” Ashleigh said. “Well, I was just calling to see how you were doing. I heard about… what happened.”

  “I didn’t expect you to call,” I said, which was quite the understatement. “Thank you. I’m all right. No lasting damage as it turns out.”

  There was some strange noise on the other end of the phone then, not quite like breathing and not quite like static. “Ashleigh?”

  “I’m here,” she said. “Look, Calista—Callie—if there’s anything I can do for you, just let me know. Any time.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I assumed Miss Ceiling-Smashing Lawyer was offering me some of her budget professional legal advice. “I’m not injured, and the insurance should take care of the car eventually, so I’m good for the moment.”

  She didn’t seem to have much to say after that, and it was only after I’d hung up that my exhausted brain pointed out to me the idea of her putting herself forward as legal counsel didn’t make any damn sense. I’d heard she was doing some secretarial work at a law office in the city, but she was far from qualified. She hadn’t even given me their number.

  No: she was offering herself as a resource, for…

  Did she know what Lucas had done? It was strange, now I thought of it, that she hadn’t mentioned his name once in that whole conversation we’d had. He must have been the one she heard the news from after all, or else someone who had spoken directly to him. She wasn’t calling because she made a habit of caring about horrible things that had befallen her classmates. I hadn’t gotten so much as a passing glance from her when I’d had my last accident.

  She didn’t even really have to know what he’d done. If she spent any amount of time with him, she had to have an idea of what he was like. She had to feel like maybe she’d unleashed something on me she shouldn’t have.

  Maybe she’d assumed when she accosted me earlier that day that there would be no problem. No chance of Lucas Starling taking any notice of Calista Haas. Right? Except she’d been there eight years ago. Wouldn’t that situation have come straight back to her?

  Ashleigh might be exactly the person I needed to talk to right now, and I’d just blown my chance to do it easily. I couldn’t imagine approaching her at school and trying to hint my way around the situation I was in. I didn’t even know if she was really on my side, or just trying to scope out if I was someone who would make trouble for her friend.

  “Everything all right, Callie?” Mum asked. I must have been making some hard-done-by noises that were interfering with her TV time.

  “Fine,” I said. “Just processing it all, I guess.”

  My mother was not going to be remotely helpful in this situation. My dad, on the flip side, was likely to be a bit too helpful if I gave him enough information. I didn’t want to land him in jail because he felt like he had to go to town on Lucas’s face in my honour.

  As much as I didn’t like it, I was seeing now that I’d stumbled myself into only one possible outcome: letting Lucas come to pick me up on Monday and confronting him again directly, with nobody else to get in the way of whatever either of us might want to say. But I’d be damned if I was going in without some sort of backup.

  Chapter Five

  On Monday morning, a hot pink convertible turned up outside my house, top down.

  I poked my nose out through the kitchen curtains. This couldn’t be Lucas: that car would be an embarrassment for a woman to drive, let alone a virile eighteen-year-old. Somebody had to be just parked outside our house for a moment trying to figure out how to get back to the rich side of town. But it was clearly Lucas who stepped around the bulk of the car, a devastating figure in his private school uniform.

  Elsewhere in the house, my dad was cackling so loudly he could probably be heard out on the street. Lucas strode right up to our front door without hesitation and rang the bell.

  I opened the door for him quickly before my parents could think better of making themselves scarce.

  “Hi, Callie,” Lucas said. I made some sort of grunting noise in greeting, staring at his chin the whole time. I couldn’t bring myself to look him in the eyes after our encounter in the hospital, and there weren’t a whole lot of other parts that seemed safe either. Not those hands. Definitely not anything below waist-level.

  I did have to look at his face properly when he didn’t seem to be letting me get past to leave the house, and saw he was peering beyond me. “Are your parents about? I felt like I made a less than brilliant impression on them on Friday in the hospital.”

  “Oh, I think you made a just fine impression on my mother from all I’ve seen,” I told him. Maybe he was hoping he’d get another chance to work on my dad. No fucking chance. “We’d better get to school.” I adjusted the bag on my shoulder.

  “Sure thing.” Lucas turned and led the way down to the convertible. I followed a few steps behind, taking in that confide
nt stride. Half of my mind was running through escape plans: jumping over the hedge along our driveway into the neighbour’s yard and launching into a daring parkour run; clouting Lucas around the head with my schoolbag while he wasn’t looking and then launching into the daring parkour run… and the other half was thinking how weird it was that, once upon a time, this was exactly the scene I would have wanted for myself as a teenager.

  Well, I’d been practically a baby then and I didn’t know any better. So I let the parkour-dreaming part of me clout that silly part around the head, and took a moment to check my blazer pocket and confirm my phone was still in there. It was hot to touch because I hadn’t figured out a way to make it record without the screen turned on. Hadn’t there been a thing where phones were catching on fire in people’s pockets? I would have to hope they’d solved that technical issue since then. I was a little surprised Lucas hadn’t commented on my wearing a blazer on such a warm day. Maybe he’d just assumed I wanted to have as many layers between myself and his hands as possible. That was certainly a plus. I had a horrible fear my body was liable to come alive again at a second’s notice if it sensed him within touching distance.

  I hadn’t wanted to comment on the car, but when Lucas opened the passenger side door for me without even a flicker in his eye, I was too provoked. “Whose car is this, anyway?”

  “My sister’s,” Lucas said, slamming the door on me, walking around to the other side of the car, and climbing over the side to get in, a smooth move none of my fantasy parkour routines could match. “Don’t tell her I did that if you ever see her, by the way.”

  “Oh,” I said. Now he mentioned her, I did remember his sister. His twin sister. She’d gone to Sands Primary with us for a couple of years, but disappeared some time after the main climax of my ten-year-old experiences with Lucas. Given his family, I’d always assumed they sent her off to some posh girls’ school. She was probably the smart one of the family: definitely the quieter one from what I remembered, at least. “Isn’t she going to need it?”

  Lucas looked like he was about to shine that big smile of his clear in my face, but in the end it was only a tantalising curve at the corner of his mouth. “She likes to have it,” he said. “But she’s not so keen on actually driving it. Gets too much attention, if you can believe that. I think it’s a shame to let it sit in our garage all the time, personally.”

  “It’s certainly… something,” I said. There was one of those air freshener cards in the shape of a fairy dangling almost in my face.

  “Besides,” Lucas added as he turned the key in the ignition. He’d left the key behind while he went to get me from the house, top down on the car, absolutely anyone able to just step in and steal it. And plenty of people in my neighbourhood likely to take the opportunity. I wondered what his sister would have thought about—well that was stupid of me, wasn’t it? She was probably just as careless with things other people had paid for as her brother. They’d been brought up to it. “Thought this car would make you feel less nervous. If you think I’m going to wriggle over to your side and try something, you can always scream.”

  There was an opportunity offered there. “Do you think there’s a reason I might expect you to do something I’ll need to scream about?”

  “Might have been a bit cheeky with you the other day,” said Lucas, with a little grin like he was proud of it.

  “A bit cheeky? If we’re both thinking about the same thing, I believe the words you’re looking for are seriously crossing the line.” Stupid Callie. Should have said assault while I possibly had him being recorded.

  Lucas shrugged. “You don’t want someone to check ’em out, don’t go sticking ’em in my face.”

  “How about you don’t go preying on girls who are in hospital, putting—”

  He started the engine, which startled me into silence. “You know better than to just grab at anything you see around you,” I added, a valiant attempt to get everything back on track.

  “I admit,” said Lucas, “it’s true. When I see other girls who have it all hanging out but they don’t seem to be hot for it, I keep my hands to myself.”

  “Are you seriously trying to blame—” I was shouting over the sound of the car and the wind whipping in my face and throwing my hair everywhere as we started rolling. Did people actually like riding around in something like this?

  “I’ll make a deal with you,” Lucas said. Somehow his voice still carried just fine with all the noise around us. I made a surreptitious adjustment of my phone in my pocket. I couldn’t decide if it had been a mistake to put it on my right side, nearest to Lucas. It might be less likely to pick up on what he was saying if I had it on my left, but it would probably be easier to keep him from noticing me fiddling with it. “I will not lay a hand on you unless I have your prior agreement.”

  I didn’t like the way he’d phrased that. It felt like there was something he was hiding in the wording. But I couldn’t figure out what that might be, so I focused on trying to figure out a casual way I could bring exactly what he had done to me into the conversation.

  “Callie,” said Lucas, “what are you doing?”

  “I’m sitting in this car with you,” I said, in a way I knew didn’t sound innocent at all.

  Lucas pulled the car over with a wrench that sent me reeling towards him. He parked. unclipped his seatbelt, and turned to me.

  “Don’t give me that cutesy nonsense. Why do you keep moving your hand around in your pocket like that? You planning on pulling a knife on me?”

  “It’s just my phone,” I said. “Why would I be carrying a knife with me to school?”

  Lucas shook his head. “The way you’ve been around me since yesterday, it wouldn’t be the most shocking thing. Even before we had the accident, you’ve been acting like you expect me to jump on you at any moment. I know we don’t talk much at school—”

  “Ever,” I corrected.

  “—but that doesn’t mean there’s some nefarious reason I wanted to hang out with you yesterday. I just thought you’d been so nice to me, telling me all about your car repair guy, and maybe I did start to think it was dumb that we’d been going to school together for so many years and we never talk. Maybe it was time to turn that around.”

  The arsehole was just as full of it as he’d been when he was ten years old. Always another explanation for what he wanted to do. And now he’d turned things around so all my recording would capture was him being afraid I would harm him!

  “We both know there’s more to the story than you’re letting on,” I said. “You know perfectly well—”

  And then Lucas leaned in fast and thrust his hand in my pocket, pushing my fingers aside.

  “You bloody idiot,” he said, “this is boiling hot, you’re going to hurt yourself.”

  He yanked the phone out of my pocket and flipped it over the side of the car onto the road. The smack of it hitting the concrete did not sound healthy.

  “Lucas!”

  Lucas had his belt back on and was starting the car.

  “Lucas,” I screamed as my hair was dragged back out of my face and the acceleration of the car yanked my stomach out too, “that is my phone.”

  “You’ve got cloud sync on, right?” Lucas said. “For photos and stuff.”

  “Yeah, I back things up,” I said, letting him assume we had a good enough connection at home for cloud sync, “but I still need my phone—”

  Lucas spun the car around. My backpack at my feet tipped over. “Lucas,” I said, “you—”

  He was driving the car wildly, swinging it back and forth over the centre of a thankfully empty suburban street. Panic was rising up inside of me. He’d been completely careless about his own car with himself inside… why should I expect any better with his sister’s car and me?

  I shrieked as he veered even more to the wrong side of the road to avoid a parked car… and then there was a crunch.

  “My phone! Stop, stop.”

  He actually stopped the car,
right where it was, and I jumped out to run to what was, from a distance, still a phone-shaped object.

  I plucked it up from its facedown position and nearly fumbled it to the ground again as my fingers slid over some unexpected texture. Most of the phone was only a little scratched, but one corner was shattered, the screen bent inward. Lucas must have run over that part.

  I managed to keep my head enough to save my recording, close the app, and turn off my screen. I wanted to run then… but I wasn’t sure if he would turn the car around and come after me next. That seemed like a crazy sort of thing to worry about, but I’d heard of guys sometimes doing crazy things if they liked a girl and she didn’t respond the way they wanted. It had always seemed like the sort of thing that happened on those ‘true crime’ TV shows with the dramatic opening music, not the way anyone I actually knew would behave. And Lucas didn’t like me, I was just someone he’d only just happened to remember existed. But… how much further was running into someone in a car really from running into someone out?

  I turned and walked back over to the car. I had to get my bag back, either way. He was just sitting in the driver’s seat, arm resting on the top of the door, so by the time I arrived any fear I had of him, any panic he’d stirred up in me with more terrifying car antics, had all coalesced into rage.

  “You fucking psycho!” I shouted. “You’ve destroyed my phone!” I held it by a safe corner and brandished it at him.

  “Well, shit,” Lucas said. “Those things are supposed to be indestructible though. I’ve seen videos.”