And at that point I couldn’t answer for myself anymore.
“James!” I shouted, my voice cracking with fear.
I felt my tears stop in my throat and my skin get colder. This wasn’t really happening. Up until yesterday, the most exciting thing for me was Taylor Swift’s latest album release, and now, what the hell was happening to me?
James threw caution to the wind and pounced on us without even thinking about it for a second. Austin was forced to push me to the ground to face him.
“See how it easy it is with little kids, Tom? They’re blinded by their hormones. This one would take a knife to get laid.” Ethan grunted angrily, pointing the knife at James’s throat as James looked at him with his head held high, as if he was calling Ethan’s bluff.
“Let her go. Take it up with me,” spat James as Austin came threateningly close to his face.
“Don’t ever try to fuck with me like you did the other morning. Keep doing what you’re doing and quit coming to fuck shit up at my house. We’re never gonna give you that gun back.”
“Why?”
“Because if there ever comes a day when you get the crazy idea of crossing us, we have something that belongs to you.”
“I’m doing everything that you’re asking me,” James burst out begrudgingly.
“You and Dad made an agreement,” interrupted Tom.
“And I’m holding up my end of it.” James spat those words, looking my assailants right in the eye.
“No, Hunter. You’re trying to come to our place to fuck us over.” It was predictable. Austin knew everything about the other day.
James was right; Will and I had been stupid and reckless. So that was how we’d ended up in this mess.
“The gun’s not mine.”
James’s words whipped through the dark, tense air, adding shock to it.
“Are you kidding?”
Austin’s abrupt reaction startled me. He looked like he wanted to put his hands on James from one moment to the next.
“No, I’m not kidding.”
Why was James telling him that now, making the tensions run even higher than they already were?
“You’re a real dick.”
I saw Tom grab his phone to call someone.
“You wanted us to do your dirty work with a gun that wasn’t even yours?”
Dirty work?
“Did you do it or not?” James gazed at Tom, who widened his eyes guiltily.
“Well.”
Ethan elbowed his accomplice, who seemed to have let one word too many slip.
What James had just confessed seemed to be more important than me; as a matter of fact, the two of them weren’t paying attention to me anymore.
“Shit.”
The two guys started chattering intensely and unintelligibly, so James motioned with his head for me to run away from Ethan.
