Para let out a sniff she’d clearly been holding on to. “It’s… not anything big. Just him being a creep like usual.”
“Should I come over and smash his fucking head in?”
Para giggled a little, like she thought it was just me trash-talking to cheer her up, but I was fucking serious. If I’d known exactly where she lived, I don’t think I could have contained myself. It pissed me off that someone like Para’s dad acted like he was such a good guy in public, pillar of his fucking community and all, and then once he closed the front door on the rest of the world he treated his daughter like a doll he could move around and rearrange. I fucking hate two-faced people. At least I can say for myself I’ve never pretended to be a good guy just because the whole world was looking at me. What you see in public is what you get in private.
Honestly I didn’t know why Para stayed at home. She was eighteen now, she could walk any time and there wasn’t a damn thing her dad could do about it. But her life was her business, I couldn’t go thinking I had the right to burst in and tell her what would be better for her. I could think of lots of reasons she might want to stay—not setting her mother up to become the target of her dad’s sliminess a big one—and I just had to hope if she got to a point where she really needed to get out, she would get out. And that she knew I would help her if she needed that, not that there was much I could do in my situation.
If Para knew what had happened with Julia, she probably wouldn’t even want to have me helping her. But that was not something I’d needed to worry about yet, so… I wasn’t worrying about it yet.
“I had a shit day too,” I told her. “Nothing like yours probably, but people having a go at me at school like always, and I’m sick of it honestly. So… how about we do a run together, take out some enemy defenses?”
I could almost hear her grin. “I’m here, aren’t I, Badman? Do you think I’ve showed up to be a spectator?”
“I would never assume you were a spectator in any part of your life,” I told her, not entirely honestly. I felt really fucking bad about it too, even though there was no way she needed to hear me tell her she was helpless in the face of her father’s bullshit. Even I believe that lies are necessary sometimes… but I hate it. “So. We killing some fucking scum tonight?”
“Hell yeah,” said Para, in that soft little-kid voice of hers she’d had since she was fifteen.
It was a good session. Potatoes showed up about an hour later, probably just getting up or some crazy other-side-of-the-world deal, and he must have had a shitty day too, because with our combined energy we boosted our ranking on the server by about fifty spots. At some point after five Dad banged on the door to let me know he was putting some chicken in the oven, and he’d leave a plate outside my door if I didn’t come down. I really appreciated that. Dad really got it, how futile it was us getting together pretending to be some tight family unit when we really just wanted to all do our own thing.
I’d kind of thought a Wild Duty session would cool me off a little. Like, I’d stop feeling so infuriated about what had happened with Tamara and she could go back to being some nobody whose face I saw in between classes now and then.
But when I was finally done for the night and had gone off to bed, I was having trouble getting wound down from the adrenaline, and all I could think about was Tamara. The way she had just interfered like that, and then acted like she was in the right, still had me completely fired up. Callie was no fucking baby; it was bullshit that she needed a friend to hover around looking out for her just because she was female. Nobody had ever done that for me, that was certain.
Her outraged panic when I’d been holding her arm. The way her eyes shuttered over a little, like she was trying to hide whatever she was feeling from me. It itched at me… truth be told, thinking about having hold of her like that got me hard. And I wasn’t going to fucking do anything about it because that was too messed-up even for me, so it took me a long fucking time to even start to feel sleepy.
I’d decided something, by the time I was really properly drowsy. I was going to be keeping a special eye on Tamara Hills from now on. It felt like my sanity depended on being ready for her.
Chapter Four: Tamara
I went to school the next day with a genuine intention to leave Callie and Lucas and Steven alone and focus on my own personal life.
The first problem was that Aileen was shitty with me. She’d found some other occasional-friends to hang out with before Ryan dropped me off at school, and I felt too awkward to approach the group so I lurked in the library again until homeroom started, just pretending I had a reason to be there.
Then, my first class had Callie and Aileen in it… and Steven. I noticed Steven’s presence for the first time, because Steven was making a point of noticing me.
It was hard to describe exactly what he was doing that made me so edgy. He only looked at me after I looked over at him, but every time I felt like I’d missed something he’d been doing just before I turned my head. And everyone else certainly seemed to be noticing. I caught plenty of my classmates staring at me, their eyes sliding away when I looked at them. Then there was a lot of giggling and muttering I didn’t believe for a second was just everyone having an extra good time that day.
Callie and Aileen were probably in on the joke, on some level, but of course neither of them was giving me any time right now. I was completely on my own in figuring this out.
And nobody gave me any help until we were all rising to leave, when the chaos and noise provided the perfect cover for the vaguely familiar male voice that got up in my ear and spoke low and soft, tickling me in a way I didn’t like. “Are you next, then?”
I spun to face Tyrell, who was already moving away like he didn’t expect me to have anything to say to him. Well he would learn the same way Steven had learned: I may be quiet most of the time, but I’m not going to just take that kind of crap.
“Am I next?” I repeated his words back to him, several times louder. “Is that supposed to be some sort of threat?”
“It’s not a fucking threat,” said Tyrell, puffing up so he seemed twice his usual size. A jolt of the scene from yesterday with myself and Steven made me recoil, but I made myself step forward again.
“Well what is it then, huh? What’s got you needing to do that sleazy breathing in my ear?”
To one side of him, in the distance, I could see Steven. He seemed to have paused halfway out the door and was staring, much to the annoyance of everyone trying to get out through the door.
“Just wondering if you’re going to be hooking up with Steven next for clout, since that’s how it seems to go around here.”
The rush of adrenaline his words sent through me nearly knocked me flat. Hooking up with Steven?
Rage was next. “What clout do you think I need that I would do something like that?”
“I have no idea,” said Tyrell, “I literally didn