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I elevate a brow at Hunter. “Do you guys spend a lot of time trying to impress new girls?”
“Nope.” Hunter grows serious then. Well, serious for him. “To be completely honest, you’re the first person we’ve ever brought into our group.”
While Katy had mentioned the guys never let anyone into their group, this still surprises me, mostly because I just assumed Katy was being batshit crazy.
My brows pull together. “You’ve never hung out with anyone else? Ever?”
He shakes his head. “Not really. I mean, we go to parties and shit like that, and chat with people, but that’s it.”
“It’s kind of one of our rules.” Jax shoves up the sleeves of his hoodie. “We don’t bring anyone else into our group.”
“We kind of have trust issues,” Hunter tells me without a drop of humor in his tone.
He’s being completely serious, and it makes me wonder why. Why don’t they befriend anyone else?
What I really want to know, though, is why they decided to befriend me. I could ask them, but I think I’ve acted like a weirdo enough for the morning.
“Jesus, look at the line,” Zay remarks as he steers into the parking lot of a drive-thru diner.
It looks old-school with a marquee and neon signs in the windows. These types of places usually have pretty good food, at least from what I can remember from back in the day when my parents were alive and I went out to eat all the time. Zay is right, though; the line of cars to the drive-thru goes almost all the way back into the entrance of the parking lot.
Zay pulls the car up to the end of the line but doesn’t put the car in park yet. “Maybe we should pick someplace else.”
“No way,” Hunter tells him. “This is our first time getting breakfast with pretty Raven, and this is the best place in town.”
“It’s fine if we go someplace else,” I chime in. “I’m not even that hungry.” A total lie. I can’t afford breakfast, but I’m not about to go back to that conversation with them.
Hunter gives me a suspicious look, as if he knows exactly what I’m thinking. “Is that the real reason?”
“Yeah,” I reply without missing a beat.
He sighs then looks at Jax. Jax looks back at him, and they exchange an unreadable look. Then Hunter looks at Zay, who looks at him.
Um … What in the world is happening? Are they talking telepathically or something?
Then Zay subtly nods and puts the car in park while Hunter twists all the way in the seat to look at me.
“We want to make you a deal, okay?” he says. “And I want you to really think about it before you answer. Can you do that for me, pretty Raven?”
That is the second time he’s called me that in one minute, and I want to comment on it, but his question has me sort of weirded out.
I slowly nod, confusion whirling through me. “Okay.”
He smiles softly at me as he rests his arms on the back of the seat. “So, here’s the thing. Clearly, you’re a little low on cash, right?”
I nod.
“And we’re not, so we’re thinking, since you’re going to be helping us gather information on your uncle and aunt, instead of you just doing it as a favor for us, you can let us pay you with cash when you need it and new phones, breakfast, lunch, dinner—whatever you need while you’re working for us, we’ll get it for you. You know, like a job … sort of.” He gives a short pause. “How does that sound?”
Deep down, in the unguarded parts of me, it sounds nice. But in the outside shell of me, I feel unsettled about the idea of relying on someone at all. I have to rely on my aunt and uncle for things I wish I didn’t, and with every single thing they do for me, they make a point to show how big of a deal it is. I hate that feeling—being in debt to someone, of not being able to take care of myself, of being a burden to someone.
“It’s notsort oflike a job.” Zay rotates around in the seat and looks directly at me. “Itisa job. You get money and things in exchange for working for us. And it’s not going to be easy work.”
Jax presses him with a firm look. “Don’t scare her, man.”
Zay doesn’t even so much as glance at him, the corners of his lips kicking up into a slight smirk. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure she doesn’t scare that easily.”
I throw his smirk right back at him. “If you’re referring to your tizzy tantrum of seating arrangements yesterday, then no, I wasn’t scared.”
