Robbers

twenty - six

// twenty - six //

"You're saying the gun is real?"

Ryan shut his eyes tightly and exhaled in frustration, hissing under his breath, "Please keep your voice down. And you heard what I said."

Ella leaned away from the table, her heart feeling as though it was ready to pound through the bones of her ribcage. The bustle of students in the cafeteria around them had seemed to disappear, and she felt as though the only thing she could see was Ryan's expression staring down at her. "You can't be serious," she breathed. "It can't be real, it can't be."

The bell rang then, loud and sharp and distracting Ella. She looked up and remembered where she was, in the middle of a busy cafeteria with people standing up and talking animatedly around her. Ryan was shaking his head and grabbing his backpack from the seat beside him, and Ella quickly did the same and stood from the table.

"We'll talk about it later," he told her a bit stiffly, his tone difficult to read as he came around the side of the table. "I don't want anyone to overhear."

They walked among the flowing crowds of students, spaced slightly farther apart than usual. Under her breath, Ella said bitterly, "I can't believe you lied to me."

Ryan exhaled in a heavy sigh, but they had finally spilled out into the hallway and he chose not to respond. Instead, he started to turn left away from her for his next class, saying over his shoulder, "Meet me by my truck after school."

He hadn't met her gaze when he'd spoken. Ella huffed angrily and headed right, impossibly annoyed and unsure of what to think. She couldn't comprehend that, inside the duffel bag tucked away in her closet, there was a real pistol. A pistol that she had pointed at an innocent man without any idea that it could have actually killed him.

Ella didn't retain a single ounce of information from any of her classes. The rest of the afternoon dragged by on heavy feet, the minute and hour hands of the clock seeming to circle past the numbers in slow motion. By the time the final bell rang, Ella was very nearly ready to explode.
Ryan was waiting for her in the driver's seat. She crossed the length of the busy parking lot with his eyes on her the entire time, watching her with a carefully guarded expression through the glass of the windshield. Ella didn't look at him.

She pulled herself up into the passenger seat, shutting the truck door behind her to escape the cold. She didn't speak as she stuffed her bag into the space at her feet, and she rubbed her hands together to use friction and chase away the chill in her bones. Without turning her head, Ella said bitterly, "Are you ready to talk about it now?"

His quiet groan was unmistakable, but she was too upset to turn and see his expression. "You know we couldn't talk about it with everyone around. Will you at least look at me?"

Ella squared her jaw and finally turned her gaze towards him, glowering slightly as she looked across the truck. She asked coldly, "Why would you lie to me?"

He exhaled, a rush of breath escaping out into the air as though he was trying to expel the anger. Ryan's tone was oddly truthful as he admitted, "I don't know. I didn't want to scare you."

"That's no excuse," Ella retorted. She fixed her gaze on the other students passing through the parking lot before them, trudging through the snow towards their cars or respective buses. The anger was burning a small flame in her belly that was slowly growing in size, starting to scorch her heart and incinerate her ribs. She hated being angry at him, but telling her the gun was fake when it wasn't had been too far. "It wouldn't have scared me that night, I was scared already. You should have just told me the night you pulled it out of the duffel bag."