We’re at Benji’s garage again. I haven’t talked to Christian for days, and it hurts to be so close to him and yet so far away. He won’t even look at me, and honestly, every time I sneak a glance at him, I feel pokey shit lancing through my chest, equal parts anger and regret. And maybe a little bit of pining. Okay, fine, more than a little bit.

There’s a crap ton of longing, and goddammit that’s tinged with some wanting-to-jump-him. Which is awful. No wonder people do such stupid shit for sex; it really fucks you up good. It’s a wonder there hasn’t been some sort of apocalypse set off by a modern-day Helen of Troy or some shit, because it worms into your senses and scrambles everything. Targets reason and destroys it. How did that trait make it all the way through evolution? Probably because it didn’t matter if you got shanked by another caveman or impaled by a wooly mammoth if you’d already fucked and gotten spawn out of the deal. Genes, passed on. Done.

But as things are, I’m lusting after someone who thinks I’m kind of a turd bucket and who I don’t think much better of. Eh, that’s not true. I think Christian is brilliant, and I’ve been itching to get my hands on whatever he’s been working on with that guy. Dylan. Who I hate. Which is ridiculous, because I should be happy that Christian has someone to share this with, since I’m obviously not that guy. And perhaps if I were in my right mind, I’d be able to be rational about this. But having had him for a month and then losing him? It’s almost crueler than never having had these, these feelings at all.

It’s not as though I have any control over this, any say at all. I wish I had something to hold onto, like Christian has his sticks. Something I could control and as long as I’m the bare minimum of responsible for it, it’ll never leave me. No such luck. So I have nothing to fucking fidget and occupy myself with until Benji graces us with his royal goddamn presence. Why is he always the last one here when he has the least distance to travel? Dude literally has to walk across his backyard.

Finally Benji shows up, a big-ass fancy-looking box in his hands. It’s leather or something and looks way too fancy for him to be setting on the wagon-wheel coffee table. And yet, that’s precisely where he puts it—with a grunt no less, like it weighs a hundred pounds.

“This arrived this morning from Tasse. Apparently this is a thing she does. Sends hard copies of select prints from the shoots she does. These are from the thousands that got left on the cutting room floor. I dunno. I feel like they probably could’ve filled at least a whole calendar with us. Seems a shame they only had us for one month. But whatever.”

Nicky is already flipping the lid of the box and dragging out some shots. “Hey, these aren’t all from during the actual shoot. She got some of us before.”

He holds up a picture of Benji and Nick goofing around, Zane and Rowan talking to Benji, some others. And then there are pics from during the shoot that they decided not to go with. Honestly, most of them look like they could’ve been in any glossy magazine spread. We look good.

We go through them, Nicky pointing out goofy shit because that’s what he does, Benji pointing out ones he wants to frame and put on the walls in here. Which would be kinda weird. There are pics of us in here, sure, but none where we’re all naked. He should maybe rethink this. Christian looks at the pictures silently and passes them onto Zane, who’s pretty clearly only interested in the ones where he can catch a glimpse of Rowan.

At the bottom, there are a few envelopes. It’s that really fancy paper that means you got invited to a party you’ll have to dress up to go to, but way bigger. Big enough to fit eight-by-ten pics in. The first one is addressed to Zane, and once he gets it in his hands, he walks away, only opening it when prying eyes won’t be able to get a lock on what exactly is in there.

From the way he smiles as he draws out whatever’s in that envelope, the answer has something to do with Rowan. He gets all googly-eyed in three seconds flat, and then he’s fishing his phone out of his pocket and heading for the door. Probably won’t see him for another hour or so. To be fair, probably wouldn’t want to while he’s so moony. Thank god for Benji and Nicky. I hope they’re single forever, since that’s apparently where I’m going to be.

Bizarrely, Zane isn’t the only one to get a special envelope. Benji hands one to Christian too, and there’s that stupid and increasingly familiar spark of jealousy. Why does Christian get an envelope? Did he get one for the same reason Zane got one? Because there are pictures of him looking all swoony and up to his stupidly perfect eyebrows in love? Is he looking at his phone? Thinking about Dylan?

Shame creeps up on me, and I have to scrub it away on the back of my neck. That’s not fair. Christian said he has no romantic interest in Dylan, that they’ve never even met in person. They work together. And I believe him. I do. It’s just idiot lizard brain who keeps piping up and trying to talk me into stupid shit. I shouldn’t be left unsupervised.

I’m so busy trying to murder the lizard in my head so I can do something more useful with it—like turn it into a pair of shoes or a belt or something—that I startle when Benji drops an envelope in my lap. Now that’s a surprise. Except…a blush roars like wildfire up from my chest, over my cheeks, and all the way up to my hairline. What’s in here?

I snatch the envelope and stalk off, heading for the mixing booth. We don’t actually record studio albums in here because the equipment isn’t of a high enough quality, but we’ve gotten some of our most popular bootlegs from jamming out in the garage. It’s also one of the few places besides the shitter where you can shut a goddamn door. Could’ve been partitioned off—it’s a big enough space for sure—but like the original Parks’ garage back in Texas, it’s mostly an open space.

Weirdly, my hands are shaking as I tear open the packet, and I almost rip some of the photographs. Inside, there are a dozen glossy black-and-white prints, and they’re all of me. Of my face. And they capture…god, they weren’t kidding when they said Tasse was the best of the best. I’ve never seen pictures like this.

The emotions on my face are so raw it’s almost painful. They’re pieces of paper that could so easily be destroyed, but it reminds me of those stories about societies that refuse to have their photos taken because it steals a piece of your soul. That’s what it feels like to look at these pictures, like Tasse has broken off a chunk of my soul and used it to color these images.

But the me in the photos doesn’t look unhappy. No, in some of them I look completely stumped, like, what on god’s green earth is going on here? But it’s confusion distilled, the essence of it so pure that it makes an echo of that crawl through my system. And yeah, that sense of being bewildered, dumbstruck, because it’s…god, I remember what it felt like to see Christian like that for the first time. To finally understand what people had been on about this whole time. They weren’t exaggerating. If anything, they downplayed what a kick in the head being physically attracted to someone is.

That’s the next expression I can identify in the photos, too. A combination of longing and shock and lust, I look downright parched and like whatever or whoever is in my sightline is the only thing that can slake my thirst. I know exactly what, who, I was looking at. I also know that for however much my emotions are splashed all over the page, the reality is that they only capture a tiny fraction of what I was feeling that day.

I’d thought that we’d all get envelopes, but after Teague stalks off to the mixing booth with his, there aren’t any more. Just the bottom of the fancy box.

I hold mine in my hands and stare at it for a minute before there’s a nudge to my shoulder.

“You gonna open that or what?”

I look up at Benji, and he’s smiling a little. “I kinda feel like you should. Maybe there’s a treasure map in there or something.”

His silliness breaks my inertia, and I get up, following Zane and Teague’s leads.

“Aw, man, we never get to see anything!”

“There’s a whole pile of pictures for you to look at.”

“Yeah, but they’re not special.”

Benji sighs, and I hear him land a punch, probably on Nick’s shoulder. “Dude, let’s snag the last of the pizza from the fridge while they’re busy.”

Leaving Nicky’s whining and Benji’s placating behind, I head to my kit at the other end of the garage. The little kitchenette is on the far side of the long space so I won’t be able to hear them, and they’ll be chowing down long enough for me to commune with my drums.

There’s a layer of protection behind the tools of my trade. I think a lot of drummers feel like it distances them from their audience so they have to be extra loud and call attention to themselves just to be seen from back here, but I’ve never felt that way. It’s always been a comfort to be able to hide behind them and not be so…out there. So vulnerable and subject to people’s scrutiny and opinions and… God, Zane and Teague and Nicky get touched by strangers on a regular basis. Shudder.

Safely ensconced behind my drums and perched on my stool, I open the envelope Tasse felt the need to send to me. If she sent this for the same reason she included pictures for Zane’s eyes only, well, then, I know what the object of my affection will be. Because even through boyfriends and lovers and one-night stands, it’s always been the same. He’s always been the same.

Sliding a finger under the luxe paper, I open it carefully because photographs are delicate. I suppose I could ask for another print if I ruined one of these, but that seems like asking the gods for another favor. No, thanks.

There are about half a dozen pictures altogether, and as I go through them, I lay them across my kit. They’re all of me, and they’re all disconcerting. If Tasse could see these things, who else could? But I soothe myself with the idea that no one could because she’s got an eye for these things. No one’s mentioned it before—hopefully because no one’s noticed.

If you were at the shoot, it’d be clear from the angle where my attention was focused when she took these. I would’ve been looking in Teague’s direction, my attention drawn to him by his magnetism. That and his ridiculous and enormous body.

The longing on my face is palpable. The ache runs through me again, because unlike in these photos when my feelings for Teague were—I believed—unrequited, now they have been…requited? And yet being with him is as far away now as it was in these pictures, maybe farther. Because I had him, and it didn’t last. I’ve thrown this thing away because of…

But there’s the rub. It’s not as though I finally got this man that I’d been lusting after for years and he wasn’t what I expected. He was everything I expected and more, and now I’m not with him because we have a fundamental disagreement about art and commerce.

There’s no easy answer, so I’ll sit here and hurt, surrounded by my own naked feelings. Teague had it right—feelings are hard. I’m supposed to be more experienced at handling them, more able to process these things, but in truth I’m not. I probably should’ve told him that it doesn’t get any easier. That feelings fuck you up just as good even if you’ve had years to adjust to them and learn.

And because I can’t even help myself, I look in the envelope, hoping perhaps for more images of my feelings for Teague stripped bare. I’m not a masochist—I’m not—and yet this hurts and instead of shredding these in my fists, I’ll keep these images and look at them time and again to remind myself of feelings that I had once.

There’s nothing else in the envelope, and I hate Tasse a little bit for giving these to me. What’s the point? My eyes are watering, and my stomach hurts. It could be that I haven’t eaten today, haven’t been eating regularly at all since my fight with Teague. Which is stupid, but true. But somehow I don’t think that’s it. It’s the same gnawing hunger, but not for food. I want a different kind of nourishment.

I look at the pictures over and over, trying to decide what to do with them—if anything—my body hurting, my mind restless and craving. They’ll probably find my bones here, my sticks in one hand, the evidence of my love for Teague set out in front of me in photographic form, and they’ll say, “What a lovesick fool he must’ve been.” They’ll be right.

Unless of course… Teague got an envelope, too. Would it be too much to hope that the pictures in his envelope bear any resemblance to the ones in mine? And if they did, that despite our arguing, he might see something in those images that was worth not giving up on, that deserved another chance. That he might—

Someone clears their throat, and not from across the room where there’s been a low murmur of voices. It’s right in front of me, and when I can wrench my gaze away from the photos and look up, it’s Teague. One hand is clenched in a fist, and the other is deliberately not, because it’s holding an envelope. It is, however, shaking like a leaf.

“This,” he says, “this is for you.”