Page 39 of Seven Lost Summers (Broken Oasis #3)

Theo

I

’m

sitting

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Quinn on the back patio, watching as she flicks through her camera, scrolling through the shots from today.

Her fingers move fast, pausing only when one of the images grabs her. Every few seconds she tilts the screen toward me, waiting for some kind of reaction.

Kit’s gonna lose her mind over these. I’m honestly surprised she didn’t crash the session with coffee and chaos to hover over Quinn’s shoulder the whole time.

Every frame is sharp. No bullshit in her work. She catches the in-between moments—sweat on a brow, fingers mid-strike, Xander pacing as though the lyrics are chasing him instead of the other way around.

And I’ve got to admit, I’m a little annoyed Xander doesn’t come off rough in any of them. Not even one. The man’s still brooding around in tight jeans and layered necklaces, and somehow every photo makes him appear as though he stepped off a fucking billboard.

“They say the camera adds ten pounds,” I mutter, squinting at a shot of him gripping the mic stand, shirt clinging to his chest. “What, does yours work in reverse?”

Quinn laughs softly, nudging me with her shoulder. “He’s photogenic. That’s not on me.”

“He’s a smug bastard, that’s what he is.”

“You love him,” she says, shifting her attention back to the camera.

“Yeah, I do,” I add, before shooting her a sideways glance. “But if you tell anyone I said something bordering on sincere, that’ll be the end of you, Thomas. I’ll deny the whole thing until the day I die. Hell, I’ll take you down with me.”

Quinn laughs, eyes still on the camera screen. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

“Better be. I’ve got a reputation to uphold. Can’t have people thinking I’ve got feelings and shit.”

“God forbid,” she says, biting back a grin.

She taps through a few more shots, stopping on one of Ace leaning back in his chair, guitar in his lap, mouth parted mid-yawn or perhaps mid-growl. Hard to tell with him.

“That one’s my favorite,” she says, thumb hovering over the screen.

I tilt my head. “Why?”

“He looks real. Not polished. Not perfect. Simply tired. Honest.”

I study the photo again, this time seeing what she means. His jaw’s tight, shadows cling under his eyes, but a trace of vulnerability cuts through.

“You’ve got a good eye,” I tell her.

She glances at me, a flicker of surprise in her expression, before offering a small smile. “Thanks.”

I reach down, adjust the volume on the shitty Bluetooth speaker humming low in the background.

Quinn shifts beside me, pulling her knees up, camera resting in her lap. She doesn’t say anything else, only leans back.

And for a second, everything feels easy. Calm. The way it has always been between us. The kind of quiet that settles deep.

But my head is spinning.

I shouldn’t be sitting this close.

Shouldn’t let the scent of her shampoo slip beneath my skin, or notice the heat radiating off her as though it’s crawling across the space between us, burrowing deep. But I’m here anyway. I breathe her in.

The silence settles. And for a moment, it feels good.

Falling into a rhythm I know better than to trust.

I’ve carried this before. That warmth. That pull.

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.

I swallow hard, reaching for the beer again so I have something solid in my hand.

“I figured you’d see me differently,” I say, voice low. “After I told you that night, I thought you’d pity me or pull away. But you didn’t.”

Quinn shifts, tucking one leg beneath her, camera still in her hands.

“That’s because I’ve seen it,” she says softly. “And I don’t believe in treating people as broken just because someone else fucked them up.”

The words hit harder than I expect. I glance at her again, and she meets my stare without flinching.

“You’re the first person I told outside of Nate’s family,” I admit.

“I figured.”

Silence settles between us, heavier this time.

“Ace was different,” I say, steering the conversation back before it sinks too deep.

“He never told me what he went through, but I saw it. You don’t carry that kind of weight unless you’ve lived through hell.

I recognized it that day—the pressure behind his eyes, the way it sat on him, heavy, like the whole world was pressing down and he couldn’t catch a breath. ”

“Has he ever talked to you about it?” she asks.

“No,” I say. “He doesn’t have to.”

And that’s the truth. Words aren’t what we rely on. The rhythm speaks for us. The silence fills in the rest.

“You and Ace fight a lot,” she says, nudging the conversation somewhere lighter.

“Only when he breathes,” I shoot back, smirking.

She laughs, and the sound slices through the heaviness, pulling me back into the moment, and for a second I forget the weight in my chest.

“I’m serious,” she says, smiling now.

“He’s easy to rile up,” I say, smirking. “And I’m a natural-born instigator. It’s a gift. That’s how we work. We go head-to-head all the time. He pisses me off, I piss him off. It looks intense, but there’s never a moment I don’t trust him with everything.”

My fingers drum against the side of my beer bottle.

“I figure we do it on purpose. The arguing, the shots we take at each other. It’s easier than talking.

Safer than digging into the shit we’ve both worked too hard to bury.

We keep things loud and sarcastic so we never have to say the real stuff.

” I glance at her. “That’s the kind of friendship this is.

One where you don’t have to explain why you are the way you are, you just keep the surface moving so nobody drowns. ”

Quinn turns the camera back on and flips through a few more photos.

I watch her hands, the way her fingers move over the buttons, sure and practiced. Everything she does has that same quiet precision.

A shot of Nate flashes across the screen.

Her thumb pauses over the image.

I lean in, glancing down. “That one’s good.”

Nate steps through the open doors, moving onto the patio with a plate in his hands.

The thing’s piled high with steaks, all marinated and glistening, stacked with the kind of care that screams he’s been working on them all afternoon.

While Quinn and I have been out here knocking back beers, Nate’s been in the kitchen, mixing whatever the fuck’s in those secret marinades, chopping herbs with surgical precision, throwing salads together without breaking a sweat.

The whole scene is domestic as hell, and somehow, he looks completely at ease doing the work. Relaxed in a way most people don’t expect from him.