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

He cocked his head up at me in a way that was already worrying me. “What do you mean? This isn’t my sister’s car.”

He opened the door to get out and started walking around to me: another bad sign, though I couldn’t figure out what of.

“Are you going to tell me you just pretended this was your sister’s car for some—” I flinched as Lucas tossed something at me. I realised it was car keys when it clattered to the ground at my feet.

“Hope those aren’t too scratched up for you,” Lucas said, “because it might be a bit harder to get a replacement for them. Although there’s a spare set in the glove box you should probably take out when you get a chance.”

“What are you talking about? Are these for my car? I thought you were going to bring it to me first.”

“This is your car,” said Lucas with an air of exasperated patience. “Have you not been paying attention? You must have noticed this one is far less scratched-up than the one I came in on Friday. Hasn’t had me driving it around for days and all.”

“No,” I said. “You didn’t—”

“You seemed pretty interested in Lucy’s Mustang the first time you saw it,” said Lucas, “so I figured, why not get you your own?”

My own eye-catching pink monstrosity. No fairy hanging above the dash.

“It was actually this horrible orange colour before we got it fixed,” Lucas continued. He scooped the keys off the ground in a move that reminded me as offensively as possible that he had probably become some sporting champion in all the years I hadn’t been paying attention to him. “You know what was really hilarious was, my mother objected to fixing the paint more than any of the rest of it. It was like, okay, get this girl I’ve never met a car? No damn problem. But spending a few hundred extra on a decent paint job, now that was crazy talk.”

“Your mother probably has met me before,” I protested, inane in my horror. “Or at least seen me before. We’ve been going to school together for years.”

“I know,” Lucas said, “that’s what makes it all the more ridiculous.”

I was just encouraging him here. “Lucas, you have to get this exchanged. I can’t—I don’t need a convertible.”

“I’m pretty sure they don’t make them in the first place because they think they’re filling a need,” Lucas said.

“I just can’t accept it.” I had to make him understand this before I ended up doing something stupid like getting behind the wheel. Which meant the clock was ticking. “The phone was bad enough, but this is just too much.”

“I get it,” Lucas said. “For you, this is a lot. But for my family, it’s just not. We have plenty of money and absolutely nothing to do with it but sit and watch it rot—and money doesn’t rot, it ends up growing more money off it like fungus. You’re doing us a favour if you take some of it off our hands.”

Something about the way he said it, so fucking casual like he already knew he just had to explain it to me and I would go along (and he was right, I could already see that) just pissed me off.

“You think that’s so cute, don’t you?” I snapped. “Like you can just talk down to me and of course I’ll fall in with what you say, that’s just what people do for you lot isn’t it? You’re doing us a favour, that’s completely condescending, Lucas.”

“Get in the car, Calista,” Lucas said. “I don’t want to keep having this dumb argument, we’re going to be late for school.”

“You don’t really give a toss about school, do you?” I said.

“Oh, fine,” said Lucas. He stalked off around the car again, jingling the keys, and opened the door on the driver’s side. “Let’s take this one back.”

I was so bewildered I nearly dropped my bag. “Really? Right now?”

“Not right now,” he said. “We’ll sort out what you want to do after school. Come on, I’ll drive so you don’t have to dirty yourself driving this hot little number.”

There was something in his voice that actually had me feeling bad for him, even though as a rational human being I knew I had done absolutely nothing to feel guilty about. It was the complete opposite, right? But there it was.

“It’s not that I don’t like the car, you have to understand that.” I was a lot more comfortable slipping into the passenger seat, at least. “It’s just not right for me. It’s bad enough when I’m riding in that car with you. If I come to school driving one, everyone would never let me hear the end of it.” I didn’t even want to talk about the problems it would cause for me in my neighbourhood. He’d grown up in my lovely hometown of Hobart, Tasmania, so he knew the stereotypes that dogged my suburb, but I’d always tried really hard not to connect myself with that sort of thing even when people were visiting my house. I sort of wanted to convince myself people believed the stereotypes were mostly jokes, even when it was easy to find evidence they weren’t.

“I see,” Lucas said. “It’s because of the opinions of people you probably think are absolute morons that you can’t take this car.”

It wasn’t, not even slightly, but I was too embarrassed to talk about this car possibly causing me problems financially as well. Lucas didn’t have anything to do with welfare payments, that was for sure. “It’s obvious why you wouldn’t understand.” I stared at the glove box just above my knees, where that spare key he’d promised was hiding. “You’ve always been the popular guy. You’ve never had to deal with the pressure that comes from people leaning on you for every little thing you do.”

Lucas tipped his head back against the seat headrest. At first I thought he was going to tell me some dark secret of his bullied past, but after an awkward amount of silence he just said, “I suppose you have a point.”

He started the car with a real jerk, and I knew then that I’d made a big mistake getting in with him in the first place.

Well, that wasn’t true: I’d known all along that getting in the car with him was a big mistake. I’d known since the very first moment I ever got in a car with him that I shouldn’t have done it. But being only human and very flawed, I had done everything in my power to ignore this fact until the situation was just about to kick my ass.