The Big Boys' League: A Dark High School Bully Romance (Troubled Playthings Book 3)

by Tiffany Sala

  “To be honest,” Matt said, “Axel and I aren’t really friends any more, I think. It’s not a friendship any more once it’s all about what the other person can get out of you.” His grimace was so intense I sort of wanted to pat him on the shoulder, or maybe shoot him a thumbs-up, but it seemed like the sort of pain where you just had to feel it. “I mean he used things I’d told him in confidence against me, threatened to blow up all my hard work if I didn’t do terrible things for him… and he never even fucking had the decency to tell me what any of it was about. And then he just comes up with some bullshit explanation for what I did to you, a glitch in the state system, and it’s no longer got anything to do with me any more?”

  It seemed right that he was more outraged by the fact of Axel’s power than actually having been caught up in it. There was definitely more to Axel’s recent history than Matt knew, though. How did a guy whose family fell into financial hardship have that much influence with anyone still? His dad’s fortunes had improved, at least… but that didn’t really explain everything. “Why did you go along with him? You could have reported him to the police for blackmail, you… I’m sure there were other options. It’s not like you’re completely without social standing yourself, if this is something we care about here after all.”

  Matt shot me a shy grin as he turned into my neighbourhood. “I don’t think we’re friends any more. But I guess I still have some of the same feelings I did when we were friends. Wanting him to do well, to rise above his past mistakes.”

  “Yeah well, sometimes the best way to help someone is to let them make mistakes that really hurt them, Matt.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “But that’s still hard to do. It’s hard to know when you’ve crossed that point beyond which the only thing you can do is let him sink. I’m sorry, Aileen. I did something really awful to you for selfish reasons. If it were me, I’d find that very hard to accept, never mind forgiving.”

  Strangely, I was thinking about Dad at that moment. Was I following the advice I’d just given to Matt when it came to him? I put so much of my mental energy into figuring out how to protect him from upsetting things he had no control over, but it wasn’t making him stronger. If anything, it might be making him more of a mess.

  I wasn’t going to just roll over and let Axel take what my dad had worked hard for once, but maybe I wasn’t doing him any favours by helping him guard it so obsessively. I tried to picture how it might go down if I sat Dad down to tell him about this situation with Axel and I was completely honest about the circumstances. Would he at least feel some shame, that I was fighting for his idea more than he ever had?

  I didn’t think I would ever know, because I didn’t have it in me to do that.

  “I get it,” I told Matt. “Once you attach yourself to someone, it’s hard to stop trying to help them.”

  Matt pulled up alongside my house. I was glad he seemed to be looking at me and not our mangled overgrown lawn or Dad’s half-rebuilt car in the driveway. “Well, I just hope you’re not going to end up needing a lot of help. Because I’m going to fight alongside you on this, you can count on it.”

  “I just wish I could have gotten in a stupid intellectual property fight with someone as reasonable as you,” I said as I opened his car door.

  Chapter Nine

  The house seemed deserted when I walked in, but I just kept on moving and by the time I’d crossed the tile of the kitchen, I could hear Dad calling me from downstairs.

  His workshop contained all the energy he’d sucked out of the rest of the house. There were three coffees on one corner of his workbench, none of them even sipped. As for what he was making… he seemed to be working on at least four projects simultaneously.

  “Dad? What’s up?”

  “Aileen,” I could tell we weren’t going to start out talking about what was really going on, “I’ve had my most creative day in… well, months.” He kept picking up one of his prototypes at random and thrusting it into my face before tossing it back down to the table. “Any one of these could be the thing that pushes me into the big leagues. It’s seriously crazy how exciting this stuff is…”

  “Dad.” He shook my arm off the first time I tried to get a grip on him, but I was successful the second time around. “Did something happen today? You’re really on edge, I can tell…”

  “Is something going on with Marcia, Aileen?” He wouldn’t look at me as he spoke, but I had a pretty good idea of the expression on his face right now. “Did she tell you anything? Maybe we’re both in the dark here after all.”

  “She’s planning to move to the mainland,” I said, staring at my feet.

  Dad’s voice was calm in a way that was unusual for him. “And this was apparently very difficult to tell me about, even though my sons moving away to where I will never see them again is something that seems very important for me to know.”

  “They’re not moving to somewhere you can’t ever see them, Dad, you just need to—”

  “Do you know how I got a clue something was up, Aileen? Mum called me.” I couldn’t stifle my groan. We’d asked the home not to give Grandma so much freedom with the phone, but apparently it was good for her to have the freedom to toddle off and ring us whenever she liked. It wasn’t so good for us. Her conversations were half-baked, and it was hard to convince her to pass the phone over to her minder to ask for a proper explanation. “Turns out Marcia paid her a visit and said all this stuff about how she was really going to miss her… well, you can imagine how that went down. Now she’s convinced she’ll never see the boys again and wouldn’t you know she seems actually capable of remembering that.”

  Marcia had always been a bit soft when it came to Grandma, sometimes beyond common sense. “She’s gotten a new job, Dad. That’s the only reason she’s leaving. It’s not personal, it’s not some attempt to never see any of us again.” But in Grandma’s case, that was probably exactly what would happen. That little bit of reason she had left seemed to be her last connection to life.

  “Marcia should have been the one to tell me. Not my fucking half-senile mother.”

  “She knew you’d react like this Dad, it’s why she was taking her time to make sure she had some more of the answers before she let you in on the situation. It’s hard to deal with you when you get like this. Even I see that; it’s why I agreed I’d keep the news to myself until she was ready to explain it. Marcia’s only mistake was talking to Grandma like that, she should have known it wouldn’t just stay with her.”

  He folded his arms and pouted and flung himself into his swivel chair. “I’m not a child, Aileen. I don’t need my daughter and a woman who has been living to humiliate me since she walked out on me conspiring on this sort of thing.”

  “I’m sorry you feel like that’s what’s going on here, Dad. Marcia and I, we both just care a lot about you and we wanted to take the time needed to figure out how we can best help you through this situation.”

  “There’s nothing either of you can do to help me,” said Dad. “This is fucking bullshit. It shouldn’t be allowed to happen.”

  “It wouldn’t have to happen if you could figure out a way to get more money, Dad,” I started before I thought it through. That old mouth-before-sense thing again. “Marcia said she’d love for us to visit, any time. If we could afford to do that we might even get to see the boys more than we do now.”

  “Get more money, she says.” He was addressing one of his robot abominations, turning it left and right so it seemed to be cocking its jangling head, attached to a rolling tank base by a tubular neck. “It’s almost like that shit grows on trees.”

  “It might be growing in this very room, Dad.” I took the tank giraffe off the desk so the two of them would stop conspiring to mock me. “These things you build, they’re pretty amazing. I don’t know anyone else who has that talent. You could try to set up your own business selling stuff, maybe get another patent—”

  Dad snatched the thing out of my hands, the protruding
end of a screw installed crooked scraping my fingertip, and dashed it straight down on the tabletop. The head flew off in one direction and disassembled further from there; one leg spun away in another. The poor thing: I had known it only a minute or so and I already missed it.

  Then my whole mind was occupied in a duck and cover for survival as Dad hurled the damaged robot body at me at close range. “There’s no fucking money in this shit! Patents… just a lot of paperwork and nothing to show for it. I’m not letting myself get caught up in that scam again. You know what you need to succeed on the basis of your creative work? Capital. And I don’t mean fucking investors. All they’ll do is take more of your fucking ownership than they deserve and use it as justification to work you like a dog, like a fucking employee. The idea that you can make it on the basis of your talent is a scam, and don’t try to tell me otherwise when I’ve already lived it. I practically have a degree in the bullshit they feed you to keep you a nice compliant member of society. Such utter fucking bullshit.”

  I heard him draw a wobbly breath from my hiding place under his table, and then there was a little noise of surprise. “Aileen?”

  I peeked just far enough over the edge to see him. “You done chucking stuff around?”

  “Fuck.” He never went off for long enough to really frighten me, and he was always incredibly apologetic. That was all I could manage to be glad about. “I’m sorry, Aileen. It’s not a word of it a lie, but it’s not a truth I should have subjected you to. A parent is supposed to protect his children from the utter shit of the world. I can’t even protect you and yet I think I’m entitled to have all the access to my boys I want.”

  “Dad…” I had to bite down on my urge to protect him. I felt sad for him, but he’d known for months his arrangement with Marcia was only premised on her being generous and it could fall apart at any time.

  So much for talking about my issues tonight. I trailed him back upstairs, tracking him to his bedroom before I peeled off to go to mine. He was going to be spending the rest of the evening getting high. He might as well already be there: he’d forgotten I was even around to be talked to.

  I had to be grateful he wasn’t into something that made him violent, or was likely to become an escalating problem the more he did it. Weed was just… there. I’d tried it with Tamara and Callie once and it didn’t seem like something I’d want to do by myself. Definitely not as much as Dad was doing it… and he’d gotten a lot better since the early days of Marcia leaving. But he was pretty liable to slip back there now, and if he did even his very flexible and forgiving programming job was not likely to be something he could keep up with. He wouldn’t be supporting himself… and I wouldn’t have any way of leaving to have my own home.

  It was something that played on me a lot these days. Callie was probably going to get to the point of living with Lucas, either at his parents’ existing place or a place no doubt bankrolled by them anyway. Tamara was setting up with her little sister, with what money I hadn’t asked but Steven had to be involved.

  When was I going to be able to leave home? Not by the end of this year and probably not the next. It wasn’t like I could walk out on Dad if he wasn’t really functional. Even if I hated him so much I wanted to do that—which I didn’t—I’d end up hearing about it from Grandma or from Marcia sooner or later. Maybe even Elizabeth. I hadn’t asked for this responsibility, but here it was anyway, and nobody was going to lift it off my shoulders.

  Dad was chuckling in his bedroom as he got his stuff together. I was going to have to cook for myself tonight, even though it was his turn.

  How feasible was it, really, for us to continue like this? Eventually there would be no more money to cover the bills, or we would both be in too much of a state to continue functioning.

  It didn’t have to be like this. I really believed we already had everything we needed to make a fortune… but Dad needed to have the ability to use it.

  I hadn’t really decided where I was going with all of this when I got on my laptop in my bedroom and started looking through the list of names in a group chat.

  The conversation started scrolling frantically on.

  Shit. Aileen?

  Anyway, how’s the weather for sports tomorrow?

  I didn’t have to scroll up very far to confirm they’d been talking about that stupid photo. They’d already seen me come online, obviously, but I quickly switched my status to invisible so they might at least think I had gone offline. I’d never been the sort of person who would think about hiding my online status, I’d never really seen the need for it. But I’d never had everyone in my class speculating about me naked either.

  Good for them. I hoped they were all typing away one-handed while they stared at that terrible job Axel had done of recreating my naughty parts. I had bigger things to worry about, like getting both my hands to type at all when I opened up a DM conversation with Axel’s account. He was one of a number of people at Burgundy I knew pretty well but had not talked privately to online before. I had no idea how he was going to react to my reaching out, if he might have friends with him he would share my messages with… there were all sorts of possibilities for this getting worse.

  Hey, I’ve been thinking. I’m willing to actually negotiate… My fingertip hovered over my Enter key, and then darted away. …so long as you’re willing to deal with me in good faith.

  Well, I’d done it… and now I had to wait for him to respond. I’d sort of hoped once I pulled the pin, I could go do something else for a while and not think about it, but my attention just turned to speculations about what Axel might think when he saw my message. Would he respond right away, or decide to keep me hanging? He was online at the moment apparently, but that didn’t mean he was paying attention or—

  I started at the noise from my computer. What are you offering?

  Not keeping me waiting yet. That suggested he was quite keen. It’s going to be hard with my dad. I’ll ask him if he’ll meet with you, but he might say no.

  Not good enough. His replies were coming through fast. I want a definite yes.

  Fine. I’ll get him to say yes. I hope you know what you’re in for. I didn’t think my dad was likely to be having any of Axel’s charming right now, especially not when it was to do with his inventions.

  I’m in for decomplicating my life, Aileen. But it’s not going to decomplicate yours.

  I should have just slammed the lid down on my laptop right that instant, and gone to do something else. Refused to hear what else he had to say, even if I had to go ask Dad if I could smoke with him to get it out of my head. But I sat there and waited out the notification that Axel was typing, letting him wind me up even before I saw the words.

  I don’t like being screwed around, Aileen. The stakes have changed now. I expect you to hook up that arrangement with your father, but I also want what we were discussing earlier today.

  For a moment I couldn’t even try to type back to him, because I had wrapped my arms around myself in some instinctive attempt at protection. There was no way he could think…

  Honestly, Aileen, I don’t even care about the outcome of that meeting any more. Your dad could throw his fucking beer in my face when I walked in and I’d be down with that. But I’ve just spent a lot of time putting together a really nice piece of artwork based primarily on imagination, and my conclusion after that is that I want to have more than just my imagination. So whatever else happens, you’re going to have to come up with a scenario where I get to see your tits if you want me to leave you alone.

  I couldn’t believe he was willing to just say it like that, somewhere I would have a record. It felt like a trap in itself. My face was getting hot just rereading those words, my heart running ahead of me like the proposed scenario was already happening.

  All I could think in terms of my own next moves was that I didn’t want to be speaking in coherent sentences to him any more. u joking rite

  Talking like a ten-year-old isn’t going to make me think
you are one, Aileen. I’m very aware there is a pair of beautiful, grown-up breasts behind your clothes, and I think I deserve to have that confirmed.

  Axel had a lot of ideas about what he deserved. I would have said that to him if we were talking face to face, stirred him a little, but with the computer between us I had some time to think.

  You know you can’t make me show you anything. I wondered if a bit of taunting might do some good. No matter how much you’d like to.

  Oh Aileen… I felt like I could see the look that would be on his face at that moment, and I hated it. I am aware I can’t make you do anything. But I can certainly incentivise.

  There are some who would have some strong words to say about your brand of incentives. Particularly those in positions of criminal justice authority.

  And I thought you only blabbed to balding hacks who teach touch-typing to those who couldn’t come up with a better elective. I pushed myself backwards away from my laptop. Yes, I know you and Henderson think you’re going to bring me down, but that’s just not how this is going to go. Henderson isn’t motivated by the right reasons: he’s just jealous.

  u wish…

  He wishes. I’m still on track to reach my potential, and he’s stuck in high school for the rest of his life. Don’t delude yourself into thinking he’s going to stick by you no matter what. My dad is going to offer him a sweetener, or maybe something he won’t want if he’s not in the mood for the carrot, and he’ll fall back into line.

  That’s not how the world works these days Axel.

  I was midway through typing something about bringing the situation to a wider audience, but he got in front of me. Maybe not for everyone. But I’m too big to be nobody… and too small to be ‘brought to justice’ as I’m sure you’re thinking about doing. The world is not going to get outraged at the high school deeds of one A. Bennett as if I’m fucking Bill Gates.