Page 103 of Seven Lost Summers
I didn’t tell Nate what happened this morning. He’ll figure it out. He’s not an idiot. I wasn’t about to say the words out loud. Didn’t want to put a label on something I’ve been trying to pretend doesn’t exist.
Because once you name the truth, you can’t take it back.
Whatever this thing with Quinn is, it’s already too much. A pull drags at me I can’t shake. A wanting that refuses to ease no matter how hard I try to drown the hunger.
I know how this ends.
Getting close always fucks you up.
You let someone in, hand over pieces of yourself you never planned to give. You carve out space for them without even realizing it. And then something fucking happens, and you’re left standing in the rubble, trying to remember how to breathe without them.
I won’t let that happen again.
No way I can risk letting this turn into something I need.
This has to stay in the now. Nothing more. You don’t lose what you never allow yourself to feel.
She flicks to another photo and holds the screen toward me, casual as anything.
I barely have time to process what I’m seeing before I choke on my beer and spit half of it across the table.
“Holy fuck,” I cough, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, eyes locked on the image.
The shot is brutal.
I’m mid-comment, lips caught mid-sentence, probably saying some dumb shit I’ll never remember, while Ace sits across from me, eyes narrowed, jaw clenched, looking one second away from launching over the table and choking the life out of me. The angle is ridiculous. The tension practically leaks off the screen.
If Quinn had waited half a breath longer, she probably would’ve caught me dodging a flying bottle.
I wipe my mouth again with the back of my hand, still wheezing through a laugh. “Can you send me a copy of that one?”
Quinn doesn’t answer right away. She looks up, her mouth twitching as though she’s fighting a grin, but failing hard. “What’s the go with you two?”
I take another sip of my beer. Slower this time. Let the taste linger in my mouth before swallowing and setting the bottle back on the table with a soft clunk.
“I can’t explain,” I say, eyes still on the screen. “Xander and I clicked from day one, you could tell. It was easy.”
Another pause.
Not because I don’t have more to say, but because my mind drifts back to that day.
My eyes flick to the photo again.
Something in the shot cuts deeper than it should. The tension. The rawness. The part no one outside the band would ever understand. People see us as a bunch of guys who got lucky. They don’t notice the weight trailing behind the music. The ghosts that show up every time the room goes quiet.
“Ace had this sadness about him,” I say finally, quieter than before. “And it reminded me of how I grew up.”
Quinn doesn’t move. She just watches me.
“Did he grow up the same way as you?” she asks.
I glance at her, and I remember that night at the party.
Three beers deep, pretending I didn’t care about anything. The music was too loud, the room pressed in too tight, and Nate was off getting his dick sucked in a hallway while I sat in a corner trying to disappear.
That was when I told her where I came from. The kind of house that teaches you how to dodge fists before you can even read.
I remember how her face didn’t change. Quinn didn’t look at me with pity. She understood. Somehow, she fucking understood. No awkward apology, no scrambling for an excuse to get the hell away from me.
