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

“I was a fucking idiot when I met Julia,” I told her. “I couldn’t get over this really pretty girl being into me and not Lucas. I don’t even know how she was at that party, she was talking a lot about her cousin that night so maybe she tagged along, or maybe she just heard it was going on and walked in. It was just around the corner from her house, but nobody there seemed to know who she was. She was a real mystery, you know? I was sunk right away.”

I couldn’t look at Tamara when I was talking, but I took a peek while I tried to figure out what to say next. I’d wondered if she would be feeling jealous, hearing me talk this way about another girl, but her frown was more curious. It was like she was trying to make sense of all the details—and that put it back in my mind, no matter what terrible shit had happened in her past, she wasn’t the same as the cynical, smug girls in my usual circle of friends, the girls that usually went to those parties. She was nothing like Julia, but she was her own thing entirely.

“I don’t think Luc was too interested in her, he usually likes a girl he thinks he can get one over, so he found another ride home when I went off with her, probably didn’t think too much about it after that. Probably assumed we had a nice time and I never saw her again… but she asked for my number, said she’d call. So long as I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut and not brag to my stupid friends about her—she really said it something like that, no joke. She said she’d know if I did, so I shouldn’t fuck around with her. So I thought even then she was a bit crazy, but… in a good way, you know?”

Tamara exhaled and leaned back a little like she’d just completed some really difficult puzzle.

“It took me a while to figure it out, but suddenly I was in this relationship with a girl who might as well be a ghost as far as everyone else in my life knew. I wasn’t allowed to even mention her name to my parents. She wouldn’t take me to meet hers. Sometimes I’d head over to her house—I figured out where it was, though she wouldn’t tell me—and I’d look through the gates up the driveway. Where she lived, it was a fucking mansion, like you’ve never seen anything like this shit.”

“Like Ashleigh’s house?”

I didn’t want to embarrass her by laughing, but I couldn’t completely hold it in. “Oh, Ashleigh wishes she had a house like this. Julia’s parents were fucking millionaires ten times over, I don’t know what they did and I think I’m happy not knowing because nobody gets a place that nice by playing nice. That’s something I learned from her too. People who have a lot of money, power, stuff… they’re just not good people. No matter what they do or don’t do to get that money.”

She fired up, like I’d mostly expected her to. “It’s funny hearing you say that when your best friend is someone like Lucas Starling… and those other guys? Mic? Axel? They’re not poor either.”

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It was ridiculous, how much I loved her firing up on me like that, calling me out. I loved that we were still having any sort of a conversation… but, of course, then I remembered it was all about to go wrong.

I couldn’t resist explaining myself to her, though. “Yeah, and they’re not good guys. I’m not a hypocrite, Tamara. Lots of other things, sure… but I see shit through. If I believe in something, I believe in it all the way. I know I’m not a ‘good guy’ either… but at least if I’m around people like that, I can get other things that matter. I can start to mean something.”

Tamara grimaced. “I’m not sure that anything that matters in that way is worth having.”

“Maybe not. But when you’re not shit your whole life you start to want…” She might take what I was about to say badly, but was there really much difference between her starting to hate me for offending her, or because she realised I was a genuine menace? “You’re kind of on that end of things too, aren’t you? Don’t you feel it?”

She shook her head. “Callie does.” The least fucking insightful observation ever. “I mean, not to say she and Lucas aren’t real or anything, I think they’ve always had something since way back. But Callie knows Lucas is going places, and that matters to her.”

“Julia is the same, in her own way,” I said. “I mean, she has her own money, piles of it, she doesn’t need any man to step in and throw his card at her problems.” Tamara’s face said she didn’t appreciate my suggesting Callie needed that… well, strange as it was, she might be right about that. It was funny how she’d come all this way from lurking around a corner waiting to jump in where not asked. “But she always had this attitude like she was expecting anyone who was with her to reach certain levels before they could have everything: the public relationship, the—”

I shouldn’t care, and I had no reason to think she really cared, but now it came down to it I didn’t actually want to go into the details with her. “Well, there were a lot of things where she said the situation could be very different if I could just get myself together. Pull myself up to the standard of other men she could attract with all her fucking money.”

Tamara stared at her hands knotted in her lap. “I guess I gave you a lot more than she ever did for a lot less…”

Her sudden loss of confidence helped to calm me. “It’s your choice to give as much or as little as you want, Tamara. The only rule is you have to fucking give something. Julia made me think she was giving me something—maybe she really believed it, too—but it wasn’t worth shit to me. She told me I was all fucked up when I tried to complain, but she didn’t get it. I never cared if there was nobody around to see us, I was perfectly fucking happy for it to be just the two of us together doing whatever.” The first flash of something that looked like jealousy from her, and somehow it made me blush. “I just… I wanted to feel like I had the right to walk past those other people and shut the door on them, you know? That’s all I wanted, to have that right. I never had it. Her parents would have walked right past me on the street and had no reason to believe I was anything to her. And then…”

I was startled when Tamara stood up, sliding her hand away from me, and walked over to a shelf by the head of my bed. I thought I had been just sitting there letting my thoughts run around for a while. I stiffened when she reached up to take something off the top of the shelf: a battered teddy bear. She tapped it a few times, the dust streaming off it making it pretty clear how long it had been up there. I’d gotten so used to the old thing from my childhood being around I didn’t even see it now.

Tamara dumped it into my lap, leftover dust and all. When I just stared down at it, she moved my hands for me, wrapping my fingers around it. From that small bit of contact, I could tell she was shaking. I could still sense a little vibration when she sat back down next to me.

“I… it helps me sometimes,” she muttered. “Just having something to hold onto.”

I wanted to say You thought I needed something to hold onto? as a joke, but the real question here was how did you know?

I squeezed the old bear as I got together the words I needed to continue. What the fuck was his name, again? I hadn’t thought about it in so long I couldn’t remember at all. “So she started saying these… other things, after a while. Just casually dropping them in. Like, with the way I acted there was no chance I’d ever get any other girl to show any interest. Like I was a total creep if I even looked at her in a certain way. But there was no way I could do the right thing so she didn’t say those things… if I tried to give her space, not look at her so much, she’d say I was being cruel, trying to punish her.” Tamara jumped as I tossed the bear to the floor. “There was no way to win, believe me, I tried. I spent so much time trying to figure out what it was she wanted I might as well have not been at school at all. I didn’t get any further into being in a serious relationship with her. I wasn’t even allowed to tell my friends she existed.”

I stared at my poor bear, balancing on his head with one foot sticking straight up. Fuzzy, that was his name. Fuzzy Bear. The stupidest fucking name in existence, a gift this particular toy had gotten from me back when I was more innocent. “Eventually I called it. I realised I was just never going to be the kind of guy who could be with a girl like her. And I told her, to her face… but that infuriated her. She said I had to stay, and when I said no, I was never going to see her again, she said she’d make life very hard for me if I tried that. She’d say I raped her, if she had to.”

“She couldn’t,” Tamara protested. “If you never…”

She was still so fucking innocent. “Don’t you get it? It doesn’t matter what did or didn’t happen. Nobody would ever believe someone like me over someone like her—and that’s even assuming they knew there was something between us. There wouldn’t seem to be any good reason for her to lie. I don’t think her parents had a clue how much she already lied on a regular basis. Maybe she didn’t need to lie to them. I got the impression they weren’t the most around parents. They thought their fucking daughter was a little angel who never went to a party in her life, so…”

I could feel it coming: the part of this story I would have loved for her to never find out. Maybe the only part she really cared about. “I was just going to give up, stick with her for the moment. I mean, she was totally right: what the fuck kind of guy like me would break up with a girl like her? It was nuts, I was out of my mind saying those things. And then… I realised I wasn’t the only dumb guy she was sneaking around with. All that bullshit about what I could get if I jumped through a series of hoops that wasn’t even physically possible… and it was a fucking game to her the whole time, you know? Just one ball of many she was juggling.”

The words were coming out on their own now. “I didn’t—my head was a fucking mess, Tamara, I just completely lost it. After school every day I parked a long way from her house and ran over there, lurked around until I figured out which room was hers… and then one night I drove up really quietly, parked around a side of the house with no view onto the road or cameras… I sneaked in and grabbed her, dragged her out, got her in my car and drove right off with her.”

“Okay,” said Tamara, but there was a certain curl to her quivering lips now.

“I didn’t hurt her,” I said. “I—well I definitely scared her, that was the point. I thought if I just made her see I couldn’t be pushed into just doing whatever she wanted, she’d… I just wanted her to agree to leave me alone, I thought if I held her away from her family and all the things that made her feel strong long enough… but she just started crying. She wouldn’t stop.” That awful fucking wail that shook me awake in the middle of the night. “I said I was sorry, I let her out of my car and drove home and sort of thought that was it, she’d never want another thing to do with me now… but it was only half the truth. She told the truth she needed to get that restraining order on me. She didn’t want me to go to jail of course: that would mean I was too difficult for her to mess with. All she really wants is for me to stay with her, in a way that suits her. That was the point.”