Page 20 of Seven Lost Summers
The new girl tilts her head, looks up at Nate, and her face doesn’t move. No fluttering lashes. No nervous smile. Not a single fucking flicker that says she gives a shit who he is. She has a steady calm, watching him like she’s running the numbers, working out if he’s another loudmouth with pretty hair and nothing underneath.
Her gaze moves, locking onto me.
And fuck.
The world jerks sideways.
Time warps.
My lungs forget how to work.
There’s this weight in my chest, like someone jammed their fist straight through and started squeezing. I can’t fucking breathe.
Her gaze pins me. Cold, steady, sharp as glass.
Not judging—just seeing. Not my face alone, not the hoodie pulled low, but what’s underneath. The shit I bury. The cracks I pretend aren’t there. She doesn’t look away. She sees me, as though she already knows what’s hiding behind all the silence.
I fucking hate what’s happening.
Hate how fast that panic claws its way up my throat and strips me bare. That stare—I’ve seen the same expression before. The second the truth creeps out from behind my eyes they always pull back. As though I’m less because I’m broken.
I want to drop my gaze. Disappear into the wall, the floor, anywhere but fucking here. But I don’t. I stay.
Even though every instinct is screaming at me to vanish, I can’t tear my eyes off her. She’s all I can see, and for once, the noise in my head goes quiet.
It’s just her.
She has a pull no one’s ever had over me. Not once. After everything that happened, all the ways the past fucked me sideways, I’ve never craved closeness. Never wanted someone in my space, under my skin.
But her…
Fuck, this isn’t only the urge to touch her, though even that thought sparks through me like a live wire. What I feel goes deeper. Like my body’s wired to her somehow and I can’t figure out how the hell to shut the pull off.
Her lips twitch into a smile. It’s small, fleeting. Maybe she doesn’t mean to. But fucking hell it lands, right in my chest, and its cares the shit out of me.
But as quickly as it comes, she turns away. That smile disappears, gone like it never existed.
Her head drops. She zeroes in on the guitar, fingers wrapping around the neck with the grip that says she’s done this a thousand times in the dark. Her thumb brushes the worn wood, slow and sure, and the moment shifts. Everything pulls tight.
Then she plays.
The first note lands and everything inside me stutters.
It’s not gentle. The next note follows, fluid and sharp, like a secret slipping from her mouth without permission.
She plays as though she was born for the music. Fingers dancing over the strings with a deadly kind of grace, every chord pulled from somewhere buried deep. The sound isn’t practiced. The rhythm isn’t polished. What drives her is instinct—pure, wild instinct. Every move is precise but messy in the best way, all emotion and ache, like she’s pouring pieces of herself into the sound and letting the music destroy her.
And fuck, she’s good. So fucking good the sight hurts to watch.
Her eyes are closed, brows pulled in, lost to the music. She doesn’t even realize we’re watching or she doesn’t fucking care. The rest of the world could burn and she’d still be in that chair with the guitar, still spilling her soul into the strings like the sound is the only thing keeping her upright.
I can’t breathe. What guts me isn’t only her talent—it’s everything I’ve never had the courage to say, everything I’ve never let myself experience, pouring out of her hands like the music was made for me. My chest hurts under the weight of the sound.
I’ve never wanted anything so fucking badly.
Not only the girl. But the feeling. That goddamn freedom.
“Fuck me,” Nate says beside me, voice low and rough, like the words ripped out before he could catch them.
