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

“I keep count of everything, Aileen.” He was pushing something under my knees to better adjust me into the position he wanted, caressing the backs of my legs and my arse, and I was not sure I had escaped anything at all. “Now, I’m going to be very gentle, but if you need to stop, just yell out… patent.”

“You fucking—”

I started and squealed at his first slap. It wasn’t too hard to bear, but it was shocking, embarrassing, to be reminded I really could enjoy something like this.

Axel slapped me again, then leaned over so he could murmur into my ear. “You’re eighteen, aren’t you, Aileen?” I made some collection of sounds that might have been a confirmation. “Let’s try sixteen more, then. That’ll be one for every year you’ve been alive.” He delivered the third. “One… for every year you’ve been on this planet giving men grief.”

“I’m pretty sure I wasn’t giving anyone grief for at least the first—”

Number four was a bit harder. I whimpered and shut my mouth.

Axel leaned closer again. “You okay, baby?”

I was fairly okay. I was starting to get pretty turned on by this sort of handling, and that was very okay… until I realised he hadn’t resumed his procedure, and it was probably because he’d noticed.

“Oh, Aileen.” He inhaled, then chuckled. “You’re supposed to take your punishment seriously, of course… but this is something else.”

I felt his legs brushing against the outside of mine, which made me realise just how much of an idiot I’d been, that he could still take whatever he wanted this way and I’d be less able to resist. That word I did not want to say was a second from being out of my mouth when I felt him move away again. “Remember, Aileen, I’m not that sort of monster. You’ll need to take yourself to the table.”

When I did feel something between my legs, it was just his fingers, conducting a careful exploration. And yes… I wanted it.

He didn’t need to puzzle over things for long to decide what he was going to do. I stiffened at the intrusion into me, a new and startling pain that faded slowly. I was impaled on him, and when he resumed those light, deliberate slaps, the sensation vibrated through me in a new way.

“Count, Aileen.”

“I—what?”

“We’re up to seven. I want you to count for me.”

He slapped me again, and waited until I said eight. One hand was sliding back and forth: smooth, rhythmic, reassuring; the other struck me whenever he felt like it, and then he expected me to be on the ball.

I made it to fifteen before the sensation swelled into something I couldn’t contain. “Axel…”

He slapped me for sixteen. “Count.”

I opened my mouth to obey, but only a moan came out, my body revealing in its clinging to his intruding fingers exactly what had gone wrong. I pushed back against him as he continued to pump in me, gentle, riding me all the way down.

When my body was only quivering he withdrew from me and turned me over, settling me completely on his bed. My dress was falling down at the top and up at the bottom, my knees were parted. He could see just about everything he’d put into that fake photo of me when he sat down alongside me, and he looked like he was happy enough with what was there.

“I should stay the hell away from you, you know,” he informed me the way some guys might remind a girl of some event the next weekend they were planning on taking her to. “You’re a big fucking pile of bad news.”

“This, from someone who has completely upended my life—and not only my life—because of his own issues and goals.”

The creak of a loud footstep elsewhere in the house had both of us scrambling. Axel jumped up and fidgeted with his clothes with his back turned to me like he had something that needed a bit of adjusting. I was pulling bits up and down and searching for my panties, hopping across the room with tremendous dignity while I yanked them up. I felt like I was in a real post-intimacy bubble, and I was barely able to make sense of what I was seeing when I realised the thing Axel had been fiddling with on his desk before wasn’t actually his phone.

An old music player? Had he been trying to create a mood, or something?

Axel turned back towards me and spoke up, “Aileen,” but I’d already pressed a button to wake up the screen.

This thing was old, it didn’t have a lock screen or anything. I saw exactly what it was doing.

“Axel… have you seriously been recording us, this whole time?”

“Aileen, I…”

I stopped the recording and went back through it, just to be sure. I misjudged coming out on a point I thought was going to be relatively safe and got my own voice, sounding almost nothing like I usually sounded, counting twelve, a strange repetitive wet noise in the background making my head feel so hot I thought I might set Axel on fire just looking at him.

I din’t want to look at him, to put this knowledge of what he had been doing between us.