Boys And Their Toys: A Dark High School Bully Romance (Troubled Playthings 1)

Chapter Five

On Monday morning, a hot pink convertible turned up outside my house, top down.

I poked my nose out through the kitchen curtains. This couldn’t be Lucas: that car would be an embarrassment for a woman to drive, let alone a virile eighteen-year-old. Somebody had to be just parked outside our house for a moment trying to figure out how to get back to the rich side of town. But it was clearly Lucas who stepped around the bulk of the car, a devastating figure in his private school uniform.

Elsewhere in the house, my dad was cackling so loudly he could probably be heard out on the street. Lucas strode right up to our front door without hesitation and rang the bell.

I opened the door for him quickly before my parents could think better of making themselves scarce.

“Hi, Callie,” Lucas said. I made some sort of grunting noise in greeting, staring at his chin the whole time. I couldn’t bring myself to look him in the eyes after our encounter in the hospital, and there weren’t a whole lot of other parts that seemed safe either. Not those hands. Definitely not anything below waist-level.

I did have to look at his face properly when he didn’t seem to be letting me get past to leave the house, and saw he was peering beyond me. “Are your parents about? I felt like I made a less than brilliant impression on them on Friday in the hospital.”

“Oh, I think you made a just fine impression on my mother from all I’ve seen,” I told him. Maybe he was hoping he’d get another chance to work on my dad. No fucking chance. “We’d better get to school.” I adjusted the bag on my shoulder.

“Sure thing.” Lucas turned and led the way down to the convertible. I followed a few steps behind, taking in that confide

nt stride. Half of my mind was running through escape plans: jumping over the hedge along our driveway into the neighbour’s yard and launching into a daring parkour run; clouting Lucas around the head with my schoolbag while he wasn’t looking and then launching into the daring parkour run… and the other half was thinking how weird it was that, once upon a time, this was exactly the scene I would have wanted for myself as a teenager.

Well, I’d been practically a baby then and I didn’t know any better. So I let the parkour-dreaming part of me clout that silly part around the head, and took a moment to check my blazer pocket and confirm my phone was still in there. It was hot to touch because I hadn’t figured out a way to make it record without the screen turned on. Hadn’t there been a thing where phones were catching on fire in people’s pockets? I would have to hope they’d solved that technical issue since then. I was a little surprised Lucas hadn’t commented on my wearing a blazer on such a warm day. Maybe he’d just assumed I wanted to have as many layers between myself and his hands as possible. That was certainly a plus. I had a horrible fear my body was liable to come alive again at a second’s notice if it sensed him within touching distance.

I hadn’t wanted to comment on the car, but when Lucas opened the passenger side door for me without even a flicker in his eye, I was too provoked. “Whose car is this, anyway?”

“My sister’s,” Lucas said, slamming the door on me, walking around to the other side of the car, and climbing over the side to get in, a smooth move none of my fantasy parkour routines could match. “Don’t tell her I did that if you ever see her, by the way.”

“Oh,” I said. Now he mentioned her, I did remember his sister. His twin sister. She’d gone to Sands Primary with us for a couple of years, but disappeared some time after the main climax of my ten-year-old experiences with Lucas. Given his family, I’d always assumed they sent her off to some posh girls’ school. She was probably the smart one of the family: definitely the quieter one from what I remembered, at least. “Isn’t she going to need it?”

Lucas looked like he was about to shine that big smile of his clear in my face, but in the end it was only a tantalising curve at the corner of his mouth. “She likes to have it,” he said. “But she’s not so keen on actually driving it. Gets too much attention, if you can believe that. I think it’s a shame to let it sit in our garage all the time, personally.”

“It’s certainly… something,” I said. There was one of those air freshener cards in the shape of a fairy dangling almost in my face.

“Besides,” Lucas added as he turned the key in the ignition. He’d left the key behind while he went to get me from the house, top down on the car, absolutely anyone able to just step in and steal it. And plenty of people in my neighbourhood likely to take the opportunity. I wondered what his sister would have thought about—well that was stupid of me, wasn’t it? She was probably just as careless with things other people had paid for as her brother. They’d been brought up to it. “Thought this car would make you feel less nervous. If you think I’m going to wriggle over to your side and try something, you can always scream.”

There was an opportunity offered there. “Do you think there’s a reason I might expect you to do something I’ll need to scream about?”

“Might have been a bit cheeky with you the other day,” said Lucas, with a little grin like he was proud of it.

“A bit cheeky? If we’re both thinking about the same thing, I believe the words you’re looking for are seriously crossing the line.” Stupid Callie. Should have said assault while I possibly had him being recorded.

Lucas shrugged. “You don’t want someone to check ’em out, don’t go sticking ’em in my face.”

“How about you don’t go preying on girls who are in hospital, putting—”

He started the engine, which startled me into silence. “You know better than to just grab at anything you see around you,” I added, a valiant attempt to get everything back on track.

“I admit,” said Lucas, “it’s true. When I see other girls who have it all hanging out but they don’t seem to be hot for it, I keep my hands to myself.”

“Are you seriously trying to blame—” I was shouting over the sound of the car and the wind whipping in my face and throwing my hair everywhere as we started rolling. Did people actually like riding around in something like this?

“I’ll make a deal with you,” Lucas said. Somehow his voice still carried just fine with all the noise around us. I made a surreptitious adjustment of my phone in my pocket. I couldn’t decide if it had been a mistake to put it on my right side, nearest to Lucas. It might be less likely to pick up on what he was saying if I had it on my left, but it would probably be easier to keep him from noticing me fiddling with it. “I will not lay a hand on you unless I have your prior agreement.”

I didn’t like the way he’d phrased that. It felt like there was something he was hiding in the wording. But I couldn’t figure out what that might be, so I focused on trying to figure out a casual way I could bring exactly what he had done to me into the conversation.

“Callie,” said Lucas, “what are you doing?”

“I’m sitting in this car with you,” I said, in a way I knew didn’t sound innocent at all.

Lucas pulled the car over with a wrench that sent me reeling towards him. He parked. unclipped his seatbelt, and turned to me.