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

It was a pretty pathetic photo editing job, but the bastard had used a slightly different shot so it seemed like this was a follow-on from the first, and I guess in these days of wild sexting it just made perfect sense that it would be real. Maybe it only looked fake to me because I knew it was.

I opened my mouth to tell Callie and Tamara and poor pathetic Steven who had apparently been thirsting over that photo that it was okay, the entire school was not actually staring at and passing around my bits. Then I realised it didn’t even matter.

Just the thought of everyone believing they had seen everything there was to see of me, maybe even making that part of their personal time, was making me want to throw up. At the same time my mind was going into a boiling rage of questions. Had Axel done it himself, or had he bullied someone else into doing it? Maybe he just happened to have another contact who was good enough at photo editing. Maybe he and that other person were both laughing at me right now.

Why was he doing this to me? Because of a stupid patent?

Rage helped to boil away my nausea. “Right, where is Axel?”

“Lucas said he was going to have a word with him,” Callie said.

Probably going to clap him on the back and ask if he’d nabbed any more from the same session. I was not going to let Callie’s dodgy boyfriend handle this situation for me.

I turned on her. “Text him. Let him know I’m going to be crashing the wankfest.”

Chapter Seven: Axel

“What the fuck are you doing, man?” Lucas said.

His eyes were moving all over my face, trying to pick up every detail of my current state while not looking like he was paying much attention at all. Luc alwa

ys wanted to know all of what you were about but give away nothing of himself.

I knew him though, better than he wanted me to for sure. It was all there if you were willing to look: in his face… in the other records he couldn’t help leaving of his activities.

I knew my friends well: Lucas’s unhinged play for Callie’s attention, Mic’s family not being who anyone here would be comfortable with, Steve’s fuck-up with that girl—both the part where he got involved over his head in the first place, and the part where he let her mess him up until he shot what I’m pretty sure was called, in his favourite terminology, an ‘own goal’.

I always do due diligence, even if I don’t have any plan to come after someone or, even, any expectation that I’ll find anything worth looking for. There’s always something to find, no matter who you’re dealing with. And you need that information to have a good relationship with pretty much anyone. Like… when I think about Luc’s group, I know Luc and Steve are close these days, and Steve kicks around with Mic and a whole bunch of other boys. All of them have someone they’re in much tighter with than me. I know none of them are motivated to stick it out for me if it comes to that. So I’ve got to look out for myself.

Lucas was looking out for himself right now, too. Callie would be fuming that I’d dared to engage with her friend, but that wouldn’t have even been his main motivation. He had to be the big guy in the group, the one nobody could quite make sense of. Me running my own game was putting the whole system in jeopardy.

Well, Lucas could afford to stay in the mentality of whatever stage of life he was at currently. He had no ambitions beyond having a good time, so that considered he had it made, so long as he could manage not to actually kill some woman he was beefing with that is. It’s not so easy for the rest of us.

“It’s between Aileen and me,” I told him, which was obviously never going to be the end of the conversation.

“It became my problem the instant you selected one of my girlfriend’s friends to bother. Find another plaything and fix this mess.”

I smiled up at the sky. “Can’t get them to unsee her everything, Luc.”

Of course there were only two people who knew the truth: myself, and Little Miss Stubborn. That wasn’t her body everyone was getting a good eyeful of, it was just the first pair of tits and pussy I’d been able to rustle up that I thought would work with the pictures of Aileen I’d gotten off her phone. And if she didn’t want me adding extra tits to her photos then she shouldn’t be flitting around with a poorly secured phone at parties after trying to give me the shove-off.

At least I’d gone to the trouble of finding her a nice set, not too plastic-looking, and I’d done the editing work myself rather than getting someone in my circle involved. I didn’t do a whole lot of image editing these days, not like back when my friends at my old school liked to make dumb JavaScript games all the time, frequently featuring nice pairs of tits as well. This work was practically a favour.

Lucas had made sure he got a good peek, but somehow he wasn’t amused. “I expect you to move a few mountains.”

“I expected her to not give me shit over something that is absolutely worth more to her if she gives it to me.” I kept her other secrets to myself too, but they were easily brought back into my own mind. Her father didn’t need a patent, he needed money for therapy, for a solid lawyer to thrash out a proper custody arrangement for those younger kids. And Aileen was one hundred percent aware of that, which was what made all of this so aggravating.

Luc looked actually pained. “Find another fucking idea, Axel. They’re cheap.”

Everything was cheap for someone like Lucas. It wasn’t the same deal for the rest of us. We get the same amount of ideas, sure, but ideas need a little something else to push them along. Those shining, golden opportunities where everything lines up perfectly—they don’t come along every day for most of us. We have to be able to grab them and drag them towards us if they won’t play along.

The face I was giving Lucas was a clear statement of no, and I expected him to go all in at me for that, but he just gave me that same smirk he shot at all the girls to make them come. “Hey, if you’ve got better ideas, maybe you can tell her yourself.”

That look wasn’t for me after all, thank fuck. I turned to take in Aileen approaching us at the kind of enraged power-walk that had her real tits wiggling under that thin school shirt.

Before she reached us, I realised two horrible things. It was possible on some level that I had selected the tits I put on Aileen’s picture based on what I thought she was likely to have under that shirt of hers… but also, I really did want to know what her real tits were like now. How they would look uncovered… how they would feel.

This was an inconvenience I didn’t need in my life right now. I needed to be focusing on that patent, not the fucking body of the girl who had the ability to get it for me. Not fucking the—