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

I got my face under control before he got back though, so he wouldn’t guess what I was thinking. If he realised I was on to him, he might go underground. Take Jess with him.

I wasn’t going to let that happen if I could help it. I knew their address. I could get her out if I needed to…

I just needed to figure out how I would convince her to go along with me. How to make her believe I could protect her.

Brad sat down as our food arrived. I stared at the chicken salad on my plate—very light on the chicken and dressing, heavy on red and green things I didn’t know the names of and wasn’t likely to want to eat. The same thing he’d ordered for Jess, while he was tucking into a pulled pork burger that was making me salivate. The arsehole probably didn’t want to risk his girls putting on weight.

Jess wasn’t even peeking at me any more as we settled in to eat, and Brad didn’t seem to notice anything amiss. He just wanted to talk about how incredible it was that those random people still knew his face, after all these years had passed. When he knew he was hardly a spring chicken these days, still worked out but hardly what he was in his youth… groan. How had I been taken in by this bullshit artist? Jess didn’t even have any expression on her face as he talked. It was like being stuck with Mum, except she was mostly just exhausting rather than damaging.

I owed Mum an apology. I just hoped she’d be willing to accept it.

Chapter Twenty-Five: Tamara

r /> Brad was keen to drag the both of us out to dinner, but I insisted he drop me off back at school so I could meet up with Ryan. I tried to glance significantly at Jess a lot, like I was feeling awkward about being around her. She hadn’t said anything directly to me since we’d started eating. There wasn’t much room to talk in between Brad’s contributions, of course.

I let him touch my back as I got back into his car without flinching, though my eyes met Jess’s through the window and I saw her grimace.

“So I’ve been talking to Ryan,” I spoke up on impulse as we got back into town. “He seems to be thinking a lot of things over… I can’t promise anything, but maybe one day he’ll be willing to meet up too.”

“Oh, cool.” Brad tried, but he just couldn’t bring up the same sort of excitement at the prospect of reconnecting with his boy. I resisted shooting any more meaningful looks in Jess’s direction.

I sort of thought he might try to fuck with me by making me late back to the street he’d picked me up from, or driving right up to the school so someone saw me get out of his car, but he stopped just one space down from where he’d been parked that morning at thirty-two minutes past three.

He turned to me and spoke as if Jess wasn’t there at all. As if we were parting at the end of a date, I thought and then regretted. “Thanks for coming out today, Tamara. I know it’s going to be a long road at this point, we’ve lost so much time and you’ve been poisoned against me for so long… but I think we could really have a great relationship still. I hope you won’t let any misunderstandings that might come up along the way ruin things.”

“I won’t,” I promised. Misunderstandings… I could see now that he’d used Jess to lure me in, to convince me to do things I would have been too wary to do otherwise. What would come next? An invitation to his house with Jess present and his wife not? He could just send Jess off into her room and then what could she do?

Maybe he’d realised whatever he was doing to Jess was wrong because the world saw her as his daughter… but he and I were basically strangers. The same rules might not apply in his messed-up head.

It was hard not to recoil when he leaned over to kiss my cheek. It didn’t feel like the sort of kiss a man would offer his daughter, not that I knew anything about that… but I knew a little bit about the sort of kisses that led to a man wanting to put his mouth everywhere else as well.

“I’ll be in touch,” I told him. I had to be. I was going to find a way to get my sister out.

By the time I was walking onto campus grounds almost everyone else was walking out. Steven’s car was not in its usual parking spot. Callie’s wasn’t parked in the main student carpark, either.

It took Callie a while to answer when I called her, and she sounded frazzled. “I’m on the road, Tamara…”

“What, right this minute?”

She groaned. “Don’t you start getting clever with me.” As if I was supposed to know what she might be capable of doing.

“Sorry. Look, I just really wanted to know Steven’s address, and I figured you’d either know it or be able to ask Lucas quickly.”

Callie was silent for a moment. “Do I need to stage an intervention, Tamara?”

“What, I—”

“Look, I was there, I saw what he was doing to you. Lucas still isn’t talking to him really. It bothers me that you want to know where he lives… I can’t imagine any good reason you’d need that information.”

“Are you going to give it to me, or are you going to make me…” I tried to work out the worst possible way I could get the information. “…Are you going to make me break into the school database to get that information?”

“Jeez, woman,” said Callie. There was some muttering I couldn’t quite hear, and then she gave me Steven’s address.

It took me about an hour to get home with Ryan and then back out to Steven’s address. I hoped that wasn’t an hour in which he’d have a chance to see me coming, but I had a feeling Callie wouldn’t be about to tell on me.

I didn’t see his car anywhere when I arrived, so I made a cautious approach to the front door. The woman who opened it after I knocked a few times gaped at me like she was seeing a ghost.

“Sorry to bother you,” I said, “is this Steven’s house?” I didn’t really need to ask, because one look at that woman’s face told me the only way I’d gotten it wrong was if Steven’s parents had thrown him out recently.