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

Too late to even jump out of the car now. Lucas roared off, and it didn’t take me more than half a minute to see that Lucas was not driving the usual route he would to take us to school. I’d been riding his usual route with him for a week now after all, even my rubbish sense of direction couldn’t be confused.

“Lucas,” I spoke up, “where are we going?”

“You’ll see when we get there,” he told me.

“This is kidnapping,” I tried, “you can’t just—”

“Nah,” Lucas said, “it’s kidnapping if you don’t take someone where they need to go in the end. We’re going to get to school… we’re just taking a bit of a detour.”

I was fairly certain no definition of kidnapping in any dictionary ever created was particularly interested in that distinction, but since when had reasoning wit

h Lucas gotten me anywhere?

As he dragged us out of what I considered my local area, nearly swiping another car on its way in, I had an idea. If I could just keep my panic down long enough to get it out.

“Lucas… I don’t want you to crash my car again, I’d like you to just take it back to your place calmly and we can get your car and both just move on.”

“Oh, it’s your car all of a sudden, is it,” said Lucas, his voice tight like he was holding a lot in. Somehow I’d managed to make him really upset with this whole car thing, not just play-upset.

I started going over all the things I’d said to figure out what might have been the trigger, but the more I tried to concentrate, the more my thoughts—and the world in front of my eyes—started to swim. The sound of the car was very loud in my ears, and I realised I was tensing up, anticipating the crash—

“Callie! Callie!”

I had no idea how long Lucas had been calling me. His handsome face was distorted with worry that looked as genuine as his anger. Were we about to crash? Had it already—

I realised the car was slowing, pulling in by the side of the road. My vision cleared a little, but I still had no idea where we were. Not anywhere near school, that was for sure.

“Shit, Callie.” Lucas’s hand was on my arm, rubbing firmly through the thin material of my school shirt, and even as I hated my brain for doing this to me, I realised that was taking my mind very much off the terror from before. “You’re a mess, aren’t you?”

“I think I’m doing quite well actually, for someone who has been involved in two completely unnecessary car accidents in the last five weeks,” I said.

“You’re a tough little bitch,” Lucas said, “that’s for sure.”

He seemed reluctant to slide his hand away from my arm, although that could have just been my wishful imagination. When he pulled back onto the road, we were travelling much more slowly. Maybe even driving to the limit.

“Are we going to go back to school now?” I asked. I hated how shaky and rough my voice sounded. I wanted to demand a proper apology from Lucas, not this ass-backward compliment bullshit, but I knew there was no way I would get the words out how I wanted.

“Might as well get to where we were going at this point, right?” Lucas said. Well, I knew better than to try arguing. I was just going to have to see where he wanted to take me.

When the car drove through the gates of the local cemetery, I sat up straight. “Lucas—”

“Calm the fuck down,” Lucas said, “I’m not going to murder you and hide the evidence in someone else’s grave. You’ve got to get that paranoid brain of yours under control.”

“You say this like you haven’t crashed your car into mine, tried to molest me in the hospital, then smashed my phone up just because you had some idea I was going to try to—”

“Try to what, Calista?” Lucas’s voice was hard, but he didn’t seem like he was angry any more. I was pretty sure he’d moved on to playing with me. “Are you referring to your little attempt to illegally record me to entrap me into saying something incriminating?”

He really had me at every turn. If only I hadn’t been so stupid as to try to manipulate him like that.

My tension grew as we passed vast fields on either side of the road where graves were lined up in neat rows, stretching on and on into the distance. Most of the headstones were the flat lawn cemetery type with a little plaque and room for a few trinkets, like the one we’d had put on my grandfather’s grave when he died a few years back. But as we drove deeper I could see, standing high on the hills that marked the edge of the cemetery, the heritage section with all the old big carved headstones, ornate crosses and that stereotypical curved shape that was somehow so much worse. I’d gone up there with Tamara’s family a couple times to have picnics in the empty land beyond the back of the graves, and I remembered playing around them with my cousins at least once after what was probably a funeral, but now I was older everything was different. Especially after the past couple of months, I was starting to appreciate just how abruptly someone could be gone, with no turning back.

I shivered. Without looking, Lucas grabbed his school blazer where it was dumped between our seats, and threw it into my lap.

“Thanks,” I muttered. There didn’t seem to be any point in trying to explain myself.

I half expected him to drive us up to the old graves and try to take me on a tour, but the parking area he stopped us in was surrounded by much newer graves. It was complete, no fresh graves or empty space, so not too new, but modern and many with fresh flowers, so they hadn’t been there so long their loved ones had forgotten about them.

Lucas opened the car door properly again to get out, and came around to my side to open my door. He reached in and grasped my hand. “Come on, you can leave your bag, I don’t think there’s much of a trend of robbery around here.”