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

Maybe the shock of my nearly dying on an actual road this time had shaken Tamara up enough that she was having the right thoughts all by herself. Her fingers were wiggling like she wanted to touch me some more. Well… better get in line, today.

“Are you really all right? I heard they thought you might have a concussion at one point.”

“They ruled that out pretty quickly,” I said. Not as quickly as they might have if I’d been able to explain to them exactly what had wigged me out so hard, but they’d done their best.

“And running into Lucas Starling,” Tamara continued, “of all people.”

“Come on, come on,” Dad said, “she might not be concussed, but she’s had a nasty shock. Let’s get her inside.”

“Dad’s a little sensitive about the L-word,” I confided in Tamara as we entered the house.

“Maybe he should be,” Tamara said. “Wasn’t Lucas the one who had that thing for you when we were younger?”

“I don’t think he was ever serious about that,” I said. “Just something to do.”

“I’ve never heard of anyone romantically pursuing someone just for something to do.” Tamara grabbed a chair from the kitchen as we went through and brought it into the living room so she could sit by me when I parked myself up on the couch. “I think you sell yourself way too short.”

“And I think I’d like to stop talking about this,” I told her.

I might have been a little bit sharp about it. Tamara didn’t get upset or anything, but she didn’t stay too long, either. So much for being shaken into a new appreciation of me.

Not that I was really in the right frame of mind to talk, I supposed. I had the problem of what to do about Lucas all over my mind. If I did nothing, I would probably have him on my doorstep come Monday morning.

Mum hurried off to grab the phone when it rang, and came back into the living room holding it. She handed it over to me without a word of explanation, which told me she had no idea who was calling for me.

I recognised Ashleigh’s voice from the first tentative, “Calista?”

“It’s Callie,” I told her. There didn’t seem like much point in hoping she’d figure it out for herself.

“Oh,” Ashleigh said. “Well, I was just calling to see how you were doing. I heard about… what happened.”

“I didn’t expect you to call,” I said, which was quite the understatement. “Thank you. I’m all right. No lasting damage as it turns out.”

There was some strange noise on the other end of the phone then, not quite like breathing and not quite like static. “Ashleigh?”

“I’m here,” she said. “Look, Calista—Callie—if there’s anything I can do for you, just let me know. Any time.”

“Thanks,” I said. I assumed Miss Ceiling-Smashing Lawyer was offering me some of her budget professional legal advice. “I’m not injured, and the insurance should take care of the car eventually, so I’m good for the moment.”

She didn’t seem to have much to say after that, and it was only after I’d hung up that my exhausted brain pointed out to me the idea of her putting herself forward as legal counsel didn’t make any damn sense. I’d heard she was doing some secretarial work at a law office in the city, but she was far from qualified. She hadn’t even given me their number.

No: she was offering herself as a resource, for…

Did she know what Lucas had done? It was strange, now I thought of it, that she hadn’t mentioned his name once in that whole conversation we’d had. He must have been the one she heard the news from after all, or else someone who had spoken directly to him. She wasn’t calling because she made a habit of caring about horrible things that had befallen her classmates. I hadn’t gotten so much as a passing glance from her when I’d had my last accident.

She didn’t even really have to know what he’d done. If she spent any amount of time with him, she had to have an idea of what he was like. She had to feel like maybe she’d unleashed something on me she shouldn’t have.

Maybe she’d assumed when she accosted me earlier that day that there would be no problem. No chance of Lucas Starling taking any notice of Calista Haas. Right? Except she’d been there eight years ago. Wouldn’t that situation have come straight back to her?

Ashleigh might be exactly the person I needed to talk to right now, and I’d just blown my chance to do it easily. I couldn’t imagine approaching her at school and trying to hint my way around the situation I was in. I didn’t even know if she was really on my side, or just trying to scope out if I was someone who would make trouble for her friend.

“Everything all right, Callie?” Mum asked. I must have been making some hard-done-by noises that were interfering with her TV time.

“Fine,” I said. “Just processing it all, I guess.”

My mother was not going to be remotely helpful in this situation. My dad, on the flip side, was likely to be a bit too helpful if I gave him enough information. I didn’t want to land him in jail because he felt like he had to go to town on Lucas’s face in my honour.

As much as I didn’t like it, I was seeing now that I’d stumbled myself into only one possible outcome: letting Lucas come to pick me up on Monday and confronting him again directly, with nobody else to get in the way of whatever either of us might want to say. But I’d be damned if I was going in without some sort of backup.