His smile cracks a little wider, and it hurts to see that someone this compassionate has to have such a shitty past.
“Okay, can we all focus on what’s important here? This doesn’t change anything. I’m happy for numbskull here finding himself a girlfriend. Still, it doesn’t change the fact that we’re all screwed because he decided to grow a heart,” Colt interjects, fuming.
“You know what, Colt? You’re a real prick sometimes, you know that?” Easton reprimands, blowing smoke in Colt’s direction.
“Takes one to know one, asshole. It doesn’t change the fact that I’m right. What are we going to do, now that Finn here grew an extra pussy and is bailing on us?” Colt demands, crossing his arms over his puffed-up chest, looking like a fancy peacock on acid.
Lincoln lets out a huff while I try to keep myself in check to avoid hitting my best friend in the mouth.
“We face the consequences,” Linc finally says, stealing the air out of my lungs.
“You have got to be shitting me!” Colt yells out.
In all fairness, I do get where Colt’s coming from since I’m just as stunned as he is by Linc’s statement.
“Listen to me, Colt. We’ve been searching for weeks and haven’t found anything on The Society. Nothing that helped us, anyway. Maybe we’ve come as far as we can. I won’t jeopardize any lives just so we can go unpunished.”
“Unpunished?! Look at you, Lincoln! Look at us! We’ve all been punished one way or another. If we break now, then all of this is for nothing!” Colt belts, bridging the gap between us, going to his haunches to face me head-on. “Finn, our lives are in your hands. You get that, right? I understand you like this girl, or love, or whatever, but this is our freedom we’re talking about. What could they possibly do to her that would be worse than us going to jail? Tell me!”
“That isn’t fair, Colt,” Easton mumbles behind him, but his tone lets me know that he’s not happy with my decision either.
“None of this is fair! None of it! I fucking wish we’d never gone to the house that night. If we hadn’t, none of this shit would be happening to us.”
“But we did, Colt,” Lincoln interrupts patiently. “However, the police don’t have to know you all were involved. It’s my fault anyway, so I’ll hand myself in and end this for good.”
“Are you insane?! No, you won’t!”
“Yes, Colt, I will. This is enough. We are all losing our minds, waiting for the shoe to drop. Let me do this and end our suffering,” Lincoln explains, hinting that he may have been thinking about this shit for a while now.
None of us have the martyr complex, but Lincoln always had a bit of the savior gene in him. He has always been the one to throw himself into the deep end and get us out if we found ourselves in a shitty mess. However, the repercussion of his parents’ murder isn’t quite the same as breaking the neighbor’s window with a football.
“Finn! Finn, look at me!” Colt commands anxiously, grabbing my shoulders and shaking them for all their worth. “You see what will happen, don’t you? Your best friend… You know what? No! Your fucking brother—the one who has been by your side your whole goddamned life—is going to turn himself in for us! For us, Finn! And you won’t even do one measly thing for The Society because you don’t want to make your girlfriend cry? Is that it?! Are you that fucking selfish?!” he shouts from the top of his lungs.
I slump my shoulders, my head bowed to the ground so that I don’t have to face Colt’s disapproving glare. Shame, guilt, and an array of feelings start to drown me, making it hard to keep them all straight in my head.
“You know what? Fuck you, Finn Walker!” Colt yells, straightening up and taking two steps away from me. “If you do this, I’ll never fucking forgive you,” he vows, turning around and walking toward the door. He stops at its threshold, and as his hand reaches the knob, he turns his head over his shoulder to look at his cousin one more time and affirms, “I always looked up to you, Linc. You’ve always had my back. I just wish you trusted us enough to have yours. But I guess with friends like Finn, I can’t blame you for quitting on us.”