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

by Tiffany Sala

  He didn’t say it with anything in his tone that led me to be worried. It just seemed like a generic polite response, a normal parting for the sort of guy who knew all there was to know about how to say the right thing. I walked up to my front door feeling like the next week would be, if not better than the one I’d just endured, at least not worse.

  I should have known better.

  I definitely shouldn’t have texted Tamara to let her know to expect me in my new car the next week.

  Chapter Eight

  My heart sank when I peeked out the front window at half-past seven at the sound of a horn and saw Lucas sitting behind the wheel of that damn pink convertible.

  Well, the car thing must have fallen through for the moment, but that one was on me for being so willing to believe a guy’s brags.

  “I might be late home again tonight,” I yelled into the house before I slammed the door and jogged down to meet the car.

  “Hi, Lucas. Isn’t your sister going to want her car back at some point?” I asked.

  He cocked his head up at me in a way that was already worrying me. “What do you mean? This isn’t my sister’s car.”

  He opened the door to get out and started walking around to me: another bad sign, though I couldn’t figure out what of.

  “Are you going to tell me you just pretended this was your sister’s car for some—” I flinched as Lucas tossed something at me. I realised it was car keys when it clattered to the ground at my feet.

  “Hope those aren’t too scratched up for you,” Lucas said, “because it might be a bit harder to get a replacement for them. Although there’s a spare set in the glove box you should probably take out when you get a chance.”

  “What are you talking about? Are these for my car? I thought you were going to bring it to me first.”

  “This is your car,” said Lucas with an air of exasperated patience. “Have you not been paying attention? You must have noticed this one is far less scratched-up than the one I came in on Friday. Hasn’t had me driving it around for days and all.”

  “No,” I said. “You didn’t—”

  “You seemed pretty interested in Lucy’s Mustang the first time you saw it,” said Lucas, “so I figured, why not get you your own?”

  My own eye-catching pink monstrosity. No fairy hanging above the dash.

  “It was actually this horrible orange colour before we got it fixed,” Lucas continued. He scooped the keys off the ground in a move that reminded me as offensively as possible that he had probably become some sporting champion in all the years I hadn’t been paying attention to him. “You know what was really hilarious was, my mother objected to fixing the paint more than any of the rest of it. It was like, okay, get this girl I’ve never met a car? No damn problem. But spending a few hundred extra on a decent paint job, now that was crazy talk.”

  “Your mother probably has met me before,” I protested, inane in my horror. “Or at least seen me before. We’ve been going to school together for years.”

  “I know,” Lucas said, “that’s what makes it all the more ridiculous.”

  I was just encouraging him here. “Lucas, you have to get this exchanged. I can’t—I don’t need a convertible.”

  “I’m pretty sure they don’t make them in the first place because they think they’re filling a need,” Lucas said.

  “I just can’t accept it.” I had to make him understand this before I ended up doing something stupid like getting behind the wheel. Which meant the clock was ticking. “The phone was bad enough, but this is just too much.”

  “I get it,” Lucas said. “For you, this is a lot. But for my family, it’s just not. We have plenty of money and absolutely nothing to do with it but sit and watch it rot—and money doesn’t rot, it ends up growing more money off it like fungus. You’re doing us a favour if you take some of it off our hands.”

  Something about the way he said it, so fucking casual like he already knew he just had to explain it to me and I would go along (and he was right, I could already see that) just pissed me off.

  “You think that’s so cute, don’t you?” I snapped. “Like you can just talk down to me and of course I’ll fall in with what you say, that’s just what people do for you lot isn’t it? You’re doing us a favour, that’s completely condescending, Lucas.”

  “Get in the car, Calista,” Lucas said. “I don’t want to keep having this dumb argument, we’re going to be late for school.”

  “You don’t really give a toss about school, do you?” I said.

  “Oh, fine,” said Lucas. He stalked off around the car again, jingling the keys, and opened the door on the driver’s side. “Let’s take this one back.”

  I was so bewildered I nearly dropped my bag. “Really? Right now?”

  “Not right now,” he said. “We’ll sort out what you want to do after school. Come on, I’ll drive so you don’t have to dirty yourself driving this hot little number.”

  There was something in his voice that actually had me feeling bad for him, even though as a rational human being I knew I had done absolutely nothing to feel guilty about. It was the complete opposite, right? But there it was.

  “It’s not that I don’t like the car, you have to understand that.” I was a lot more comfortable slipping into the passenger seat, at least. “It’s just not right for me. It’s bad enough when I’m riding in that car with you. If I come to school driving one, everyone would never let me hear the end of it.” I didn’t even want to talk about the problems it would cause for me in my neighbourhood. He’d grown up in my lovely hometown of Hobart, Tasmania, so he knew the stereotypes that dogged my suburb, but I’d always tried really hard not to connect myself with that sort of thing even when people were visiting my house. I sort of wanted to convince myself people believed the stereotypes were mostly jokes, even when it was easy to find evidence they weren’t.

  “I see,” Lucas said. “It’s because of the opinions of people you probably think are absolute morons that you can’t take this car.”

  It wasn’t, not even slightly, but I was too embarrassed to talk about this car possibly causing me problems financially as well. Lucas didn’t have anything to do with welfare payments, that was for sure. “It’s obvious why you wouldn’t understand.” I stared at the glove box just above my knees, where that spare key he’d promised was hiding. “You’ve always been the popular guy. You’ve never had to deal with the pressure that comes from people leaning on you for every little thing you do.”

  Lucas tipped his head back against the seat headrest. At first I thought he was going to tell me some dark secret of his bullied past, but after an awkward amount of silence he just said, “I suppose you have a point.”

  He started the car with a real jerk, and I knew then that I’d made a big mistake getting in with him in the first place.

  Well, that wasn’t true: I’d known all along that getting in the car with him was a big mistake. I’d known since the very first moment I ever got in a car with him that I shouldn’t have done it. But being only human and very flawed, I had done everything in my power to ignore this fact until the situation was just about to kick my ass.

  Too late to even jump out of the car now. Lucas roared off, and it didn’t take me more than half a minute to see that Lucas was not driving the usual route he would to take us to school. I’d been riding his usual route with him for a week now after all, even my rubbish sense of direction couldn’t be confused.

  “Lucas,” I spoke up, “where are we going?”

  “You’ll see when we get there,” he told me.

  “This is kidnapping,” I tried, “you can’t just—”

  “Nah,” Lucas said, “it’s kidnapping if you don’t take someone where they need to go in the end. We’re going to get to school… we’re just taking a bit of a detour.”

  I was fairly certain no definition of kidnapping in any dictionary ever created was particularly interested in that distinction, but since when had reasoning wit
h Lucas gotten me anywhere?

  As he dragged us out of what I considered my local area, nearly swiping another car on its way in, I had an idea. If I could just keep my panic down long enough to get it out.

  “Lucas… I don’t want you to crash my car again, I’d like you to just take it back to your place calmly and we can get your car and both just move on.”

  “Oh, it’s your car all of a sudden, is it,” said Lucas, his voice tight like he was holding a lot in. Somehow I’d managed to make him really upset with this whole car thing, not just play-upset.

  I started going over all the things I’d said to figure out what might have been the trigger, but the more I tried to concentrate, the more my thoughts—and the world in front of my eyes—started to swim. The sound of the car was very loud in my ears, and I realised I was tensing up, anticipating the crash—

  “Callie! Callie!”

  I had no idea how long Lucas had been calling me. His handsome face was distorted with worry that looked as genuine as his anger. Were we about to crash? Had it already—

  I realised the car was slowing, pulling in by the side of the road. My vision cleared a little, but I still had no idea where we were. Not anywhere near school, that was for sure.

  “Shit, Callie.” Lucas’s hand was on my arm, rubbing firmly through the thin material of my school shirt, and even as I hated my brain for doing this to me, I realised that was taking my mind very much off the terror from before. “You’re a mess, aren’t you?”

  “I think I’m doing quite well actually, for someone who has been involved in two completely unnecessary car accidents in the last five weeks,” I said.

  “You’re a tough little bitch,” Lucas said, “that’s for sure.”

  He seemed reluctant to slide his hand away from my arm, although that could have just been my wishful imagination. When he pulled back onto the road, we were travelling much more slowly. Maybe even driving to the limit.

  “Are we going to go back to school now?” I asked. I hated how shaky and rough my voice sounded. I wanted to demand a proper apology from Lucas, not this ass-backward compliment bullshit, but I knew there was no way I would get the words out how I wanted.

  “Might as well get to where we were going at this point, right?” Lucas said. Well, I knew better than to try arguing. I was just going to have to see where he wanted to take me.

  When the car drove through the gates of the local cemetery, I sat up straight. “Lucas—”

  “Calm the fuck down,” Lucas said, “I’m not going to murder you and hide the evidence in someone else’s grave. You’ve got to get that paranoid brain of yours under control.”

  “You say this like you haven’t crashed your car into mine, tried to molest me in the hospital, then smashed my phone up just because you had some idea I was going to try to—”

  “Try to what, Calista?” Lucas’s voice was hard, but he didn’t seem like he was angry any more. I was pretty sure he’d moved on to playing with me. “Are you referring to your little attempt to illegally record me to entrap me into saying something incriminating?”

  He really had me at every turn. If only I hadn’t been so stupid as to try to manipulate him like that.

  My tension grew as we passed vast fields on either side of the road where graves were lined up in neat rows, stretching on and on into the distance. Most of the headstones were the flat lawn cemetery type with a little plaque and room for a few trinkets, like the one we’d had put on my grandfather’s grave when he died a few years back. But as we drove deeper I could see, standing high on the hills that marked the edge of the cemetery, the heritage section with all the old big carved headstones, ornate crosses and that stereotypical curved shape that was somehow so much worse. I’d gone up there with Tamara’s family a couple times to have picnics in the empty land beyond the back of the graves, and I remembered playing around them with my cousins at least once after what was probably a funeral, but now I was older everything was different. Especially after the past couple of months, I was starting to appreciate just how abruptly someone could be gone, with no turning back.

  I shivered. Without looking, Lucas grabbed his school blazer where it was dumped between our seats, and threw it into my lap.

  “Thanks,” I muttered. There didn’t seem to be any point in trying to explain myself.

  I half expected him to drive us up to the old graves and try to take me on a tour, but the parking area he stopped us in was surrounded by much newer graves. It was complete, no fresh graves or empty space, so not too new, but modern and many with fresh flowers, so they hadn’t been there so long their loved ones had forgotten about them.

  Lucas opened the car door properly again to get out, and came around to my side to open my door. He reached in and grasped my hand. “Come on, you can leave your bag, I don’t think there’s much of a trend of robbery around here.”

  I was nervous to be walking away from my phone with him. When he caught his blazer as it slipped off my knees and slung it over my shoulders, I felt even more twitchy. “I’m not really—”

  “Might as well keep it,” he said. “This place has a way of making you feel a bit cold.”

  He kept hold of my hand to lead me onto the grass and in between the graves. It was all adding up to Lucas knowing his way around ‘this place’ very well. I tried not to ask questions or hold him up, because I had a feeling he was about to tell me something very important about himself, and whatever I might think about him at the moment, I was incredibly curious.

  There were a few other people walking around that part of the cemetery and I felt conspicuous with the two of us in our uniforms and Lucas’s too-big blazer draped over me, but nobody else even glanced at us. I supposed I should have expected that.

  The plaque we eventually stopped in front of read Jillian Montgomery. She’d died at the age of fifteen, had left behind the usual selection of devastated family members, and in the free space alongside the text was a simple picture of two crossed hockey sticks and a ball. Jillian Montgomery, a girl who would have been about the same age as the two of us had she lived, must have been a sporting type.

  Well she’d definitely never made it to Burgundy—I tried to remember if any girl by that name had gone to Sands. If there had been a death. But she would have almost certainly been in my class, and the high school was not that big. Surely I would have remembered.

  “Can you imagine that?” Lucas said. He was still holding my hand, squeezing my fingers. “Dead at fifteen, no high school graduation or school formal. No first job. No first car.”

  I didn’t understand how he was tying this to me, but it was clear that was what he was doing.

  “I know your life has been a bit different to mine, Callie,” Lucas said. “You don’t think in the same way, and that’s fine by me. But I’m going to give you some advice and if you’re smart, you’ll listen. The truth is life can be really shit even if you think you’re doing all the right things. And life doesn’t give a fuck about whether what you do is right, or wrong, or if you did or didn’t do something because you thought it was right or because you were just stupid. It’ll fucking take you out just the same, whenever it likes, and then you’ll just be some raised letters on a rock nobody wants to come and visit because it’s too sad.”

  “Lucas…”

  I wanted to ask him if he’d known this girl before she died. Well… he must have known her in some way, to lead me right to her grave. But was she just a friend, or had she been a girlfriend? I didn’t really know Lucas at all to ask something like that.

  “Just take that damn car, Callie,” Lucas said. He dropped my hand and turned away. “Don’t be some fucking precious idiot who won’t accept something that could help you just because you think you’d look better if you do. Nobody is standing around waiting to tell you you’re so much smarter because you insisted on accepting something a little worse than the best offer you got. Nobody gave a fuck about you before and they won’t give a fuck after. You’v
e got to actually fucking do something before people care about you one way or the other. And you won’t have a chance to fucking do anything if you don’t take what’s offered to you. You fucking got it?”

  He stalked off down the hill towards the car—my car, if I accepted it. I just stayed still, stunned for a moment, and then I glanced back at Jillian’s grave, and thoughts of what lay below the surface of that neat little patch of grass in front of the stone made me start moving.

  “Lucas,” I called, and started to stride after him. “Lucas! Wait for—”

  I’d almost caught up with him when he whirled and grabbed me by the shoulders, the pressure of his fingertips dulled by his blazer still covering me. He slammed me against something that was rough on my back, a tree maybe. He held me there, and his eyes dug into me. Strangely beautiful eyes, I caught myself thinking: sparkling with tremendous depth. I was breathing heavily from chasing him, from the shock of his turning on me, and I was very aware of the sides of my breasts brushing against his hands as my chest rose and fell. I was pretty sure from the quick flicker of his gaze that he had noticed as well.

  “Quiet in the cemetery, Callie,” Lucas whispered. I tried to look away from him, to nod, to say something to break the tension, but I was pinned in place.

  Then a wicked smile curled his lips, warning me I was in terrible trouble but too late, as was always the case with him. He tilted his head as he lowered it towards me, and then he was pressing the back of my head into the tree behind me as well, his mouth hard and wet on mine.

  My hands came up without my consciously directing it, my fingers working to get a grip on something, but he was holding my upper arms so that I couldn’t. His tongue parted my lips without finding much resistance, and the feel of that made my eyes roll back in my head… which was when I realised.

  He didn’t have me against a tree at all. It was a big headstone, the only one in the entire area, its carvings softened with age and covered in lichen so there was no way to read whose it was originally. Lucas had me backed up against some long-dead person’s memorial, kissing me hard enough to scorch the lichen off.