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

Lucas stiffened all over and pressed hard into me, his grip on my hair tightening until it really hurt, and suddenly I was choking on something sticky.

After a few attempts, I managed to swallow, and then my mouth was free and Lucas was pushing me up and away from him. He had his junk tucked away in record time too.

“Told you I wouldn’t keep you long,” he said. That bastard could somehow even spin coming really fast as a positive thing.

There I was, my senses a complete mess after everything that had happened in the past few hours, and the only place I had to direct my feelings now was into a whole bunch of regret at how I’d behaved. I kept telling myself I hadn’t really had a choice… but now, I could hardly believe it.

At that moment, if he’d wanted to throw me down on the back seat of this car and have his way with me, I probably would have gone along with it. I could think rationally about that possibility. That didn’t sound like someone who was completely at the mercy of another… did it?

Lucas clipped his seatbelt back on. “Time to get back to my house.”

I didn’t need my feelings or someone as smart as Ashleigh to tell me: he’d already lost interest in me. I was just some additional baggage on his route home now.

And now I was some baggage with some very dark and yet true thoughts swirling around one reality: Lucas Starling was going to take everything I had to offer him, and he wasn’t going to care if he destroyed me in the process. He wouldn’t even notice, so long as he got what he wanted. I didn’t have the strength to drive him off like I had when we were ten, either.

It was clear to me now there was only one safe place, with Lucas. He was capable of loving, and when he did he was relentless about it. I would have bet Lucas would roll right over anyone who posed a threat to someone he loved.

That was where I needed to be. I needed to make him love me, and then I would be safe no matter what he did to me, how deep this relationship went. If I occupied a similar position in his heart to that his sister held, he would never turn away from me when we were being intimate. He wouldn’t do anything that put me at risk of harm.

The question was, how was I supposed to get the love of someone who wasn’t interested in even treating me with the respect due another human?

I didn’t have that answer, or any answers, really. All I knew was that I had to keep trying to come up with something, or I wouldn’t survive this new round of being the object of Lucas Starling’s interest.

Chapter Twelve

I told Tamara about the things I had done with Lucas, though I left out the details of where those encounters had occurred. Fortunately when you tell someone you went down on a guy, their first questions don’t tend to be about the setting.

I think Tamara was a bit distracted by the fact that I was at her house for the first time in months, if not over a year. Usually I would tell her I was too tired after work to do more than a phone call, but the day after the latest Lucas incident I let her invite me for dinner. After we’d eaten with her parents and older brother, we retreated to a bedroom that was decorated in completely different shades to the last time I’d been in there, and I tried to unpack everything that was going on. It was a creative challenge when I didn’t want to tell her most of my thinking. Most of it still didn’t even make sense to me, never mind letting someone else in on it. I could just imagine what Tamara would say if I tried to tell her I had a plan to make Lucas love me. Just imagining her face as I tried to explain the distinction between the idea of falling in love and just being someone he cared about enough.

“Well,” Tamara said, trying to pick through my silences, “it’s okay if you just want to mess around with him, you know? You don’t have to have a relationship with a guy just because you let him in your pants. But I do wonder…”

“Just say it,” I told her.

“It has a bit of an awkward feel to it,” she said, each word coming out very slowly. “Like maybe he thinks he can get away with using you for whatever, because he bought you some things.”

“Would it be so wrong if I did let a guy use me because he bought me things?” The words came out of me before I gave myself time to think about it, and Tamara gave me a disgusted look. “Seriously, though…” I decided I might as well commit to it now that I’d started. “Why do we get so precious about that sort of thing? If everyone’s happy with what they get out of the arrangement, is it really some big deal?”

“I guess not,” Tamara said, grabbing one of the dolls still lined up on her bed and waving its arms back and forth. “Callie, just so we’re on the same page here… this isn’t actually what you’ve done, is it?”

“What?” I felt myself growing hot as I remembered wondering those same things myself. “No, obviously, you know why he bought me all that stuff.”

“Just trying to be extra clear about it.” Tamara squinted at me over her doll’s curly head. “That said, I do think that since you’ve gotten tangled up with Lucas, a lot of things have changed for you, and not in a good way. I do wonder if your… history with Lucas is making it hard for you to make good decisions about how to handle him.”

“Are you suggesting my judgement is off because Lucas flirted with me a little bit back when we were kids?” I demanded.

Tamara shrugged. “It was a while ago now, so I don’t remember the details that well, but I seem to recall it was a bit more to you than just a flirtation.”

“Are you suggesting I’ve been waiting all this time for Lucas to pay me any attention again?”

“I do wonder about the two of you,” Tamara admitted. “Whatever’s going on right now… I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something a bit off about it.”

I felt myself tensing all over at the thought of Tamara figuring out what was really going on with Lucas.

“Oh,” Tamara said, “did you ever figure out who that girl was? The dead one.”

If I had to pick one thing I liked about Tamara, it would be her ability to come very close to uncovering some uncomfortable truth, and then swerving onto a completely different track. A lot of the time, I wanted to keep what was going on in my life inside my head and not have to deal with the contributions of other people. It would have been hard to deal with a friend who was always digging into places I didn’t need anyone interfering.

“Jillian? I asked Lucas in the end.” I told her the basics about the situation, and her expression softened.