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

by Tiffany Sala

  Axel choked on a drink I knew he didn’t have at that time. “I see some real opportunities for me to enact positive change in that space. So many trolls and would-be trolls… someone really needs to come in and sort the lot of them out.”

  Mrs. Hitchens spoke over the top of the strangled noises Axel was making, like they had her nervous. “I see, Aileen… it’s wonderful that you’ve found something that can really… fill you with passion.”

  “Oh, she’s very passionate,” Axel agreed.

  “But Aileen,” Ms. Miller put in, “are you… concerned that if you go into that field, where personal character and reputation counts for a lot, that your… past might catch up with you?”

  She seriously thought I should be worried that my flashing my entire graduating class was going to put me in bad standing with my peers. I’d only been talking to Ashleigh for a few minutes earlier, and she’d told me a ridiculous number of stories that got back to her from relatives in the industry. The things that men had shown at office parties should have had them kicked off the edge of the planet. Of course it really didn’t apply the same way for women… but that was exactly why they needed me.

  “I think I’ll be fine,” I told her. “I’m pretty resilient.”

  As they nervously melted away, Axel grabbed me and dipped his head to kiss me with ferocity that felt like it would strip away all my clothes and probably my skin as well—a display far more obscene than anything I’d just put on, making a complete mockery of the guidelines handed down for intimate behaviour at the event… but nobody stopped us. There are some things too powerful for anyone to want to interfere in, even if they go on for a lot longer than four seconds.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I felt sorry for the three people who had to sit between Axel and I at our graduation ceremony. I’d heard from Callie, who still couldn’t look me right in the eyes, that my little stunt was known across every graduating class now and there might have even been one copycat stunt at a formal event a week after ours. I was more personally legendary for four seconds of totally inappropriate behaviour than I’d been through all those years of being a reasonably nice person to almost everyone I met, or even the past weeks of being the target of someone nobody wanted to point the finger at.

  The same someone who was shooting me rather searing looks every time I turned my head in even almost the right direction.

  We had a busy late afternoon and evening ahead after we got this last ceremony at Burgundy out of the way. There was a package of Axel’s newly-manufactured gizmos waiting at his house for us to evaluate, then box up and send on to Cowen if they lived up to expectations. Then there was a dinner with Axel’s dad at some restaurant I would never have paid attention to previously. My dad had been invited too, but I thought he’d declined. At least, he said a lot of rude things about people with so much money they didn’t have anything better to do with it than go to flashy eateries, and then he told me he had plans even though I hadn’t gotten around to telling him the exact date of the planned event yet. I’d considered asking Matt if he knew anything about Dad’s possible plans, but if it was with Sandy instead of his mum, or even a third party, I didn’t need to add to the drama in my life.

  Even though Dad was behaving worse than he ever had after that brief flicker of improvement, I had a lot more sympathy for him now that I was spending so much time in Axel’s sphere, helping with his product launch. There was so much doing. It was a hundred times more intense than school, where you were at least not reviewing things online and taking calls during lunch breaks. Dad would never have been able to keep up in that world, he just didn’t have the right character for it. It was hard enough for me and I thought my personality was pretty suited to learning new ways of being.

  Maybe I would end up learning that this world was too poisonous for me to successfully inhabit long-term. It felt incredibly likely… but until I’d made that decision, I was going to keep trying and avoid judging what I found too aggressively.

  I copped a light elbow from Elliot Andrews, the lucky occupant of the seat next to me. “Could you keep that mooning down to a minimal level please? I’d like to not lose my lunch.” Then his eyes met mine and he whispered, “Sorry,” and planted them firmly in his lap for the rest of the ceremony… almost including the part where we each had to walk up to the front and accept our certificates. When you were caught up in someone else’s game in this world, those around you became too afraid to touch you… when you were the one acting in ways nobody else could control, they were afraid of you.

  I think Axel was afraid of what he’d unleashed, so I tried not to rub it in too much.

  I had only a dim memory of receiving my certificate, produced on Burgundy’s one colour laser printer and having absolutely no significance in the real world. At least nobody insisted that this ceremony was going to be something I had to remember for the rest of my life. I was pretty sure in the future they would be counselling kids at Burgundy to make sure they didn’t make their formals too memorable. When our formal photos were added to a growing display in the main office they’d conveniently forgotten to put up any photo from that night that I was a part of. I don’t know what they’d expected to have happen from pictures where I still had all my clothes on.

  At least the separation in our surnames was just enough that I was getting settled back in my seat by the time Axel’s name was called. He ate the distance between his seat and that symbolic certificate up in milliseconds, like there was nothing ahead of him but a life of tremendous achievement—like he wasn’t trying to get it together with a girl who was throwing that perfect life into mild disarray. Just watching him move made me shiver, and it definitely wasn’t fear in the usual sense.

  For Elliot’s sanity, I did try to keep my own eyes to myself as we waited through the rest of the certificate-delivering and a really tedious speech by Mrs. Hitchens that seemed to have the general theme that we were going to continue to be just as mean, lazy, and stupid going into our future lives as we’d been at Burgundy. But every so often I would look just a little too far to the left, and most of the time I’d catch Axel failing not to peek at me.

  When Mrs. Hitchens finally let out her last sigh and said, “Okay, you can go,” nobody stood in the way of the two of us rejoining one another. Axel put a careful arm around my waist like he was afraid too much provocation would have me ripping off my clothes in public again.

  Honestly? We hadn’t had much of a chance to be alone in a salacious sense since the formal, and Axel seemed to realise that being pushy was probably not the best approach at that time, but I was feeling a little more comfortable with the idea of certain activities than I had the last time we’d been intimate. There had only been one occasion since the formal of Axel being a bit shifty, when he’d tried to keep me from getting involved in the release of his silly gizmo. I’d called him out on it right away and he’d apologised and told me of course he was going to be eager for my assistance in the final stages of bringing things to market, since I was the one who’d helped him get there in the first place and besides he was still paying my dad some stupid amount of money from his trust fund or whatever so he could stand us up for dinner and go romance whatever woman was top of his list at the moment.

  Well, according to Axel it was pennies in the grand scheme of what he stood to gain, but still. It kind of relieved me that he was capable of making a mistake. That told me he wasn’t being so careful around me at the moment that I couldn’t trust this was really representative of his future behaviour.

  I gave Callie an accidental shoulder-check while we were on our way over to the guest seating. I guess she was trying to find me. “Whoops, sorry Calista, I swear I don’t hate you quite that much yet.”

  She squinted at me like she wasn’t quite sure. “Well, congratulations, Aileen, I just came over to ask if you wanted to come out with us tonight?”

  Axel said we were definitely going to keep in touch with Lucas, obviously, because he was a g
ood guy to know. No beating him when it came to industry contacts. But my relationship with Callie and Tamara had definitely hit a point of no return—or, maybe it hadn’t. It had always been strange that I gravitated towards those two out of everyone in the class, when I was always going to be a third there.

  Maybe not so strange. Like everyone else, I’d always seen that Tamara and Callie were standouts—and in a way the majority of our peers would not consider positive. So of course some of my targeting of them to make a friendship group had always been calculated to make a point, to try to transform them something like the girl from that movie Clueless, who couldn’t imagine anyone getting along as well as she did without her specific advantages.

  Well, I’m prone to trying to make really dramatic points.

  “Luc already let me know,” Axel told Callie, “and we’re going to have to pass on our apologies for this one sadly. Got a family thing.”

  Callie’s smile never even wobbled. “That’s fine, another time. Hope you have fun!”

  It was a bit too cynical to say I’d only gotten close to Callie and Tamara because they were unpopular, actually. There were many ways in which we were able to understand one another quite unlike others seemed to. We were all too quick to push down our distress, even when revealing it was what would set us free. But that was just the start of a close relationship. There had to be more to make the kind of close relationship that endured after you were no longer forced to see one another on a regular basis. I was much closer to having that sort of relationship with Matt, much to Axel’s annoyance. He didn’t believe men and women could be friends under any circumstances. This, of course, was an endorsement of the relationship as far as I was concerned.

  “Did you want to go?” Axel asked. He was watching the way I had been staring after Callie as she left. My thoughts had already moved on from her specifically, but I guess it looked pretty much like mooning. “This is supposed to be our day, not my dad’s. He won’t mind if we decide to go out with them instead.”

  I shook my head. I’d just spotted Dad in the crowd, powering towards us, and Axel’s father wouldn’t be far off. “Like Callie said, another time. I just want to switch off from school stuff for the moment, and that means school people.”

  “I’m a school person,” Axel pointed out.

  “Yes, and all the worst interactions we’ve had involved school. I can’t think of one that wasn’t terrible.”

  Axel leaned over to whisper in my ear. I was still giggling when Dad and Axel’s dad showed up at about the same time.

  Dad got the first word in, of course. “Aileen, great job walking. Would you like me to take your certificate home for you?”

  I handed the thing over in its plastic sleeve. “I don’t think it’s good for anything at all, don’t worry about being too gentle with it.”

  Dad wrestled with it until he was able to fold it in half, put it under his arm, and ruffled my hair under his palm. “I’d better be off now, got a hot date who won’t wait.”

  “Thanks for the mental image,” I called as he made his dash.

  Mr. Bennett was blinking after him for several seconds. “Is he…”

  “Like that all the time, more or less, yes. It’s okay, I’m used to it now.”

  “I was going to ask if he…” Mr. Bennett didn’t seem to be able to finish that thought, either.

  Axel took charge before Dad could derail the whole afternoon without even being there. He was probably pretty used to Dad’s befuddling influence now, which was a strange thought. I’d always wondered how any guy I dated was going to get past that. “To the car, then?”

  “To the car,” Mr. Bennett agreed. “That box you were expecting is waiting for you back home. I’m looking forward to seeing it if you don’t mind showing me at this early stage.”

  Axel ended up carrying one of the damn things along with him to dinner, like he was five and this was his show-and-tell pick. He fidgeted with it in the car all the way there until I was surprised it wasn’t broken by the time we arrived. Spoke to the quality of wherever he’d gotten it manufactured, I supposed. His 3D-printed incarnation was already in tatters.

  Once we were shown to a table at the restaurant that seemed like it ought to attract a special fee, Axel set the toy in the middle of the table and started taking it through its routine like it was a horse at a dressage show, talking his father patiently and with no self-consciousness through the different angles and shapes it could explain—the part of it covered by Dad’s damn patent. Well, he’d paid for it by being trapped as Dad’s boss for who knew how long. Even Axel with all his charm was going to find it inconvenient to break that arrangement.

  It was a little disturbing, thinking about how Axel had ensured he would be tangled up in my life for a long time. I wasn’t sure he’d done it deliberately, or at least he hadn’t thought the ramifications through as well as he could have. Since nothing else about the situation he’d started with me was logical, I was willing to give him a pass on that.

  A server came to us while Axel was demonstrating the thing’s ability to move on its own—a capability that was entirely Axel’s doing, if Dad had come up with it we would probably have killed one another long ago in an escalating war of mischief.

  “Oh, that’s something I don’t see here every day,” the girl remarked, her eyes wide in the direction of the tumbling toy.

  I poked Axel. “He’s an inventor. May I order the strongest alcohol you have in the largest quantity you have it?”

  She didn’t seem to know whether to take me seriously or not. “I’ll handle ordering our drinks,” said Mr. Bennett with a grand air.

  “Just water for me,” I told the server. “I’m even serious this time.”

  Mr. Bennett seemed at a loss for a second, then went on selecting drinks for himself and Axel. Once the server was gone bearing our orders, he turned his attention to me.

  “Are you one of these young women who can’t take a gesture from a man, then?”

  “I wasn’t aware that was a category that could be used to make a point.”

  Mr. Bennett grimaced at me. I was pretty sure he would have added ‘…and talk back to men’ to his category if he thought he could get away with it. “I’ve known a lot of women, Aileen. It’s not as charming an attitude as some of you seem to think. A little gratitude can get you a long way in this world.”

  I didn’t have to look very far to see where Axel had gotten his ideas about the sort of woman he should be with. I didn’t feel too inclined to judge Mr. Bennett, though. It must be hard for him to be out at dinner with the same sort of woman who had cleared off with his money… and maybe he knew I was good friends with the guy whose father his own wife had disappeared with. It had to be a pretty unsettling case of history repeating.

  If I knew two things in life, they were that history had a way of repeating… and that there was no reason it had to be that way.

  “There are two things you should know about me, Mr. Bennett,” I said. “One: I’m not going to accept things from you I didn’t want and then thank you for them. And two: I’m not going to take things from you that you didn’t want me to take. I think those are both fair.”

  Mr. Bennett didn’t say anything to me, he just shot Axel this incredibly resentful squint, like he wished he could have decided to harass a more obliging girl. Well, at one point in my life that would have suited me just fine too, but now I was committed to this path.

  With both my gentleman companions looking a bit sulky now, it seemed to be up to me to get things back on track. I grabbed my copy of the food menu, which we all seemed to be ignoring at present in anticipation of the stars eventually aligning. The starters were weird things I mostly didn’t even know how to pronounce and the only soup I was familiar with, tomato, had a bunch of additions I didn’t think I was likely to enjoy, so I kept on flipping to the mains. Those offerings were also bewildering, but there was one universal favourite I was certain I wanted to try. Even with the addition
of garlic and some varieties of cheese and herbs I’d never tried, it couldn’t possibly be ruined.

  “Spaghetti bolognese!” I blurted out as our server returned. “No question about it.”

  Mr. Bennett grimaced like I’d said I wanted to eat shit with a side of shit. “She might prefer the fettucine with cream pasta, mushrooms and pine—”

  “Ew, no, I hate mushrooms and too much dairy makes me fart.”

  Yeah, I was being deliberately obnoxious. And Bennett Senior deserved it.

  Axel headbutted the rim of the water bottle the server had brought while he was putting his head down, but it just highlighted how his shoulders were shaking.

  The serving girl raised her clipboard just over her mouth in a more practised and discreet move. “Shall I tell them to be light on the cheese, then?”

  “Probably easier than getting a fan in here,” I said.

  Mr. Bennett hardly said anything for the rest of the meal. Axel took us through the paces of his gadget about five more times before our food arrived to fill in the lull, but he invited me to come back to their house as we were walking back out to the car, so I was pretty sure I hadn’t offended him that greatly.

  The spaghetti was pretty good, too. If I ever got a chance to go back to that restaurant, I was going to try some of their more exotic dishes. They’d definitely earned my trust.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Axel was smirking as he brought a tray of herbal tea to my seat in his little private sitting room. That was Axel all over: had to go a step beyond all those guys with their own ensuites when flexing.