Games Boys Play: A Dark High School Romance (Troubled Playthings 2)

Chapter Eight: Steven

“Just go get her, for fuck’s sake,” Lucas said.

Callie’s mouth was occupied in gabbing to Carlene about colours, of all things, like they were in fucking kindergarten or something, so Lucas was entirely focused on me and my problems. Even though my only problem right now was Lucas bugging me to do a whole bunch of things I was never intending on doing.

“What am I supposed to fucking do, go harass her until she decides to open up her pants for me?”

One corner of Lucas’s mouth lifted.

“Don’t even fucking go there.” I didn’t even like it when Lucas joked about shit like that. I guess we all have different tolerances for that sort of thing, but for me it was simple: if I thought Lucas was doing anything with Cal

lie that messed with her so much she lost control over what she was doing, I’d just fucking kill him.

He’d probably laugh at me if I ever told him that, of course. And he’d think it was even funnier if he knew about Julia. Playing by her rules had been good for something, at least.

Carlene said something that made Callie laugh, a sort of half-hysterical noise like she knew she shouldn’t but hadn’t been able to help herself. That was the thing: I didn’t really want to bring Tamara into the group as well, have her hanging around like a proper girlfriend. She wouldn’t fit in nearly as well as Callie to begin with, she was too much like a stirrer… but then I couldn’t risk it, either. Once she was in like that she’d be able to start building connections, telling people sneaky things on the side I couldn’t get ahead of.

I didn’t like how underhand this was all becoming. It put a literal bad taste in my mouth no amount of swallowing would take away. But if it was both of us collaborating on the deal, that had to be more all right.

Lucas refolded his legs. “Trust me. Don’t let a woman start chasing you. She’ll end up turning up wherever she likes, making the whole thing about her.”

I felt my eyebrow nearest to him going up of its own accord. “Is that your advice for me, genius? How about you tell me what Callie’s going to be doing this afternoon? Her car is staying at your parents’ place permanently these days, isn’t it?”

“It’s just because it’s not safe to have it in her neighbourhood,” said Lucas. “Arsehole.”

I punched him.

Tamara found me, as I’d expected, when I was on my way out of a class where I didn’t have any friends to hook up with straight away. I would have expected nothing less from my little stalker.

She looked much more nervous than she had on any of our other encounters, but was also making a point of meeting my eyes, which I thought was really damn cute.

“I need you to understand why I care so much about the thing with Callie.”

I didn’t really, not to get in her pants, but she was trying to open up to me, give me some vulnerability, and that seemed like it might be useful.

“My biological father…” The way her hands had started to shake wasn’t cute. I already knew I wanted to punch this guy. “I haven’t seen him since I was three years old. When he hurt me, my mum knew she had to run. I don’t know much about the situation, whether he tried to see us again or not, but he’s not a part of my life now.”

Well, I’d known plenty of girls who would sell you some hyped-up drama to get you hooked, but Tamara’s story really was a story. What kind of shit would hurt a three-year-old, even once? I doubted it was just once, either.

“You’re fucking lucky to get away from him,” I told her. I started walking, to a tree-lined spot along the edge of the school grounds that was only popular occasionally as a make-out spot—so not the sort of place where anyone would be paying attention to who I was with. “You don’t need that kind of shit in your life.”

She paid very careful attention to her feet. “I sort of want to find him.”

This was a twist I hadn’t expected. She turned her face up to me as if she was expecting me to tell her she was out of her mind, which she was, but I wasn’t going to do something like that. It wasn’t for me to decide what she should do with her life.

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” she said, so simply I thought it had to be true. “I just feel like… there’s something about you. I thought maybe you’d be able to tell me something that would help.”

I certainly wanted to tell her something. There was just something in her aura, or whatever, that seemed to demand it of me. But I didn’t really have anything but more questions.

“I suppose it all depends on what you know about him.”

“Nothing,” said Tamara. “Well… I guess I have his surname. Mine and my brother’s is different to my mum’s, I assume she kept it.”

I shook my head. I was already hooked on this adventure, with just a few words, and yeah I fucking knew that was a terrible idea—the mother who had taken her away from that monster would likely strangle me if she got to hear about it, and that was just one detail—but without realising it, she had me by my weakness. I could never walk away from a problem I hadn’t solved. That was probably why I liked games so much: the ones that weren’t totally open-ended at least. It wasn’t like real life where you had to figure out what the problem was for yourself, where you could get caught up in so many problems before you knew it you were completely tangled up. The challenges were laid out for you, sometimes you got to literally check them off. If you had too many, you could put some of them aside without your whole damn life falling in on you.

“You can’t assume anything,” I told Tamara. “If your mother really wanted to be rid of this guy, she could have changed your names to make it look like you still had his.” My mother had suggested I could change my surname—not because she wanted distance from me, of course, just because it might be easier for me. When I’d kicked up a shit about this, she made out like it was just some stupid thought, no big deal at all. Right. “Have you ever seen your birth certificate?”