“I knew I couldn’t trust you, James.”
“Calm down,” whispered Jackson, grabbing his shoulder. I shrank behind the stuffed animal.
“You say one thing but your eyes say something completely different,” slurred William, throwing a beer bottle on the ground.
The glass shattered on the asphalt.
I instinctively hid behind Jackson’s muscular back. James didn’t answer, but he started smoking and staring into space.
“Will, why don’t we go calm down? Let’s go for a walk, get some air . . .”
Jackson was trying to defuse the situation but Will wasn’t in the mood. He didn’t even seem like himself right then.
“What should I do? Pretend I don’t see how he looks at her?” William pointed at me then at James.
I gulped. He looked like he was outraged, and I didn’t like where this was going.
Jackson tried to hold him back again, but it was no use. Will approached his target.
“You, James, you always want what you can’t have.”
William’s barely slurred words hit like lethal gunshots.
“It’s human nature, isn’t it?” He provoked James.
“This is human nature,” answered Will with glassy eyes, before punching him in the cheekbone.
James stumbled.
“Fuck, how much did you have to drink? All of this over a girl? Really?” yelled Jackson, separating them.
He was really only pulling William back because James held his cheekbone in his hand and gazed at Will.
“What did you do?” asked Jackson, trying to understand. James didn’t answer.
“He slept with her at my house,” said William.
“I didn’t do shit to you.”
“Just because she’d never sleep with anyone like you.”
James’s pride was wounded again, but now he couldn’t take it anymore.
“Oh yeah? Are you sure about that?”
And then, in a split second the teddy bear wasn’t big enough to hide me from their sharp gazes anymore. They turned around. All three of them were staring at me. What should I have said? My indecisiveness didn’t last long because James put the vape pen in his pocket.
“You’re right, Will. But now it’s better if Jackson takes you home,” he spat.
“No.”
“She’s just a girl, Will, what the fuck do you care if I bang her or if Jackson does?” James exploded furiously.
A sharp pain went through my chest like a knife.
“Did you have to sleep with her at my house, like that time when Austin followed her home, and you couldn’t have called me? Did you have to stay there?”
“But she—” James started talking, then stopped before he could tell Will that I was the one who’d asked him.
