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

or him? Who wasted a whole bunch of time trying to bring down a girl who posed no legitimate threat instead of working on his own damn ideas? I was just as bad as Aileen’s dad, just as capable of ruining my own chances…

Unless I could get her to give me another chance. When she was around, it seemed like everything could be turned around, the lapses in my judgement filled in by her good human sense.

I scanned through all the pink dresses in the room until I spotted her, sitting between Matt and another girl who had always seemed friendly with his new squad, Amy. She looked a bit wide-eyed alongside the sex sensation of Burgundy’s graduating class, but I could see how she was warming up as Aileen talked to her, falling under her spell it might be said.

I should have let Aileen talk more.

Now I was trapped for the moment, unable to enact any more of my plan while we were all forced to sit and eat the food I neither needed nor wanted. The caterers our school had picked up seemed to be able to produce two different styles of ‘meat and vegetables’ meals, and neither of them were appealing. Tamara and Ash had put in for the vegetarian option, which looked far better than whatever I’d been tossed. I didn’t even know if the meat I’d received was beef or chicken.

Once everyone was settled down at their seats I glanced back over at Aileen’s table. There was an empty seat there between Danny and one of the other girls, a space neither of them seemed interested in leaning over into.

I considered the potential of taking my plate and moving over to her table. My dessert might never find its way to me, but the potential outcomes of this situation were far sweeter anyway.

Steven and Tamara seemed to be getting along nicely now they had food to soothe their tempers, and with Aileen’s relations wth the other girls as they were there didn’t seem to be any way I would get caught out for over-promising and underdelivering, but I still found myself surveying the two of them a little more carefully than the rest of the table, waiting for a moment I could jump in. The only pair of comparable interest were Mic and Sophia, who had by all accounts come together, but it seemed more of an opportunity invite for Mic. He knew Carlene wouldn’t sleep with him no matter how much she enjoyed herself at the after-parties, and she probably wouldn’t keep quiet about it if he tried anything. Mic preferred a girl who could shut up, and Sophia wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth—or wherever else he directed her to put her face.

I told myself it was none of my business and I shouldn’t get into it.

Furthermore… I looked over at Aileen, deep into her meal, occasionally laughing at something Matt was saying to her. It was ridiculous how much she looked the part of some bitch who should have been hanging out with the most popular group throughout her high school years, but somehow she knew better.

I should stay away from her table. If she wanted to have one nice evening out with some people she was comfortable with, I shouldn’t draw everyone’s attention back to her by putting the two of us close together. Yeah, I had this crazy idea of making her feel like the princess she longed to be… but as she’d pointed out to me, I’d already failed at that. I couldn’t go back.

And maybe that meant I wasn’t going to get that second chance I’d hoped for that night. Maybe she would slip away, set up her own life, and it would be impossible for me to get myself in. Well, that was what she wanted me to understand, wasn’t it? I didn’t have any right to her.

As Tamara started snapping at Steven over the way he’d finished eating his main, I stood. “Steve, can we go off for a chat?”

That had everyone at the table staring at me, because it was pretty obvious I only paid attention to Steven because Lucas cared about Steven, and if anyone had heard my offer to Tamara earlier, they would definitely have assumed I was trying to get on her good side with no intention of delivering.

Steven was giving me the weirdest look of all, but he shrugged. “Sure.”

We waddled off to the mostly empty dance floor, edging around the table full of bogans much happier with their lot than Callie had ever been, who had clearly preloaded and were unable to hide it in the quality of their jokes, never of much of a standard to begin with. They might as well be happy tonight, because all the best days of their lives were past them now. That was me being a bitch again of course, but it was the truth.

We took the spot on the floor opposite to the group of girls who were pretending they had so much to gossip about instead of admitting they didn’t want to be eating in front of one another. “Right,” Steven said, “what the fuck.”

I told him I’d promised Tamara to have words with him about his smoking, and he laughed so hard he broke into an actual smoker’s cough.

“I’m not even fucking smoking that much, I just go around the back and light one up every now and then, have a puff and put it out for next time because they’re expensive as fuck and I don’t even like them, but it makes Tamara mad.” He smirked. “And that’s fucking hilarious.”

I had never realised before that moment just how much I didn’t know Steven, even though he was around most of the time. I knew how much of a fuck-up he was, but that was different to knowing what made him tick one-on-one. “You ever thought of getting a girl who doesn’t hate your guts?”

“Nah, man, she loves me for sure.” Steven puffed up all smug, like he probably wouldn’t have been able to do if he’d smoked all of those cigarettes Tamara suspected him of.

“Well, you’re a peculiar pair.”

“We’re all fucking weird in this world, man.”

I thought about Aileen, keen to have a man bend her over and make her arse burn, so long as she didn’t have to accept him telling her what to do. “I think you’re right,” I said.

We headed back to our table, because desserts seemed to be coming around just as everyone was drifting off to dance.

When I got back to the seat where I’d left my jacket, I froze.

My dessert seemed to have arrived early: Aileen, wearing my jacket across her shoulders and folding one leg over the other in that irresistible woman way, in my seat. Callie and Tamara seemed to have fled, but Ashleigh was still there, looking fired-up the way Ashleigh only ever looked when the topic was feminism or the likelihood of her finding her way onto a local council by the time she was thirty-five. Lucas was still there watching them too, which told me even without the other details that this was an interesting interaction.

Aileen stopped what she was saying as soon as I came to a halt in front of the table. Too early for her to have seen or heard me, but somehow she knew I was there.

She looked up at me, and smiled. “I wasn’t expecting to see you around again tonight,” I said, because apparently I still couldn’t resist the urge to get in the last word. What kind of big-mouthed moron was I?

“I was just over here picking Ashleigh’s brains, since I’m going to be taking on a job in a law firm and she’s had a lot longer to get used to working in that world than I have.”