2. Chase
CHAPTER TWO
Chase
What was this guy’s name again? Jerry? Who cares.
He was still talking. He’d been talking for forty-five minutes, which I knew because I’d been staring at the clock on the wall behind his head for most of them.
It was above one of those motivational office posters, the kind that said SYNERGY underneath it.
The RipTide offices were full of shit like that.
Inspirational quotes on the walls, a surfboard mounted above the reception desk that had clearly never touched water, and a juice bar in the lobby staffed by a girl who looked like she’d rather be literally anywhere else.
Same, juice-bar girl. Same.
“—and that’s why we think this activation is the perfect vehicle for the brand’s pivot toward environmental consciousness,” James said, clicking to a new slide. There was a stock photo of a sea turtle on it. The sea turtle looked about as engaged as I was.
“Listen, my guy.” I shifted in my chair, which was one of those ergonomic mesh things that cost two thousand dollars and still somehow made your ass hurt. “I appreciate you including me in all this…planning…but why are you asking me to choose the location?”
Jacky blinked. He clearly hadn’t accounted for audience participation.
“I’ll be honest with you, Chase.” He leaned forward, doing the thing where he steepled his fingers like he’d probably seen someone do in a TED Talk once. “Your reputation, it isn’t what it used to be. With the scandal three years ago—”
Yeah, like I’d forgotten. I’d only thought about it every single day since then.
One stupid choice that had nearly ruined everything.
Instead, it had only mostly ruined everything.
Three years of smiling through interviews where every reporter found a new way to ask the same question.
Three years of watching old friends cross to the other side of the beach when they saw me coming.
Three years of my agent—sorry, my new agent, because the old one dropped me faster than a bad wave—fielding calls from energy drink companies and wetsuit brands who wanted the clout of my name, but only at a discount.
“—we are seeing this as your comeback tour.” Jimmy was on a roll now, gesturing with the little clicker in his hand.
“Getting you back on the horse, or the board, or whatever the saying is. But we can’t just throw you into the championship.
A small, local event will be good for you, and for RipTide. We’re working a new eco PR angle and—”
I stopped listening to him again.
Don’t get me wrong, I was grateful RipTide had sponsored me after the incident.
Not that they were exactly a top-shelf sponsor—their flagship energy drink tasted like TV static with a hint of mango—but they paid on time, and their health insurance covered dependents, which was the only thing that actually mattered. Everything else was theater.
But they needed me too. In fact, sometimes I thought my scandal had helped RipTide, gotten them a ton of press, and they’d always loved my “bad boy” image.
Before me, their brand ambassador had been a guy named Todd who smiled like a youth pastor and posted workout routines on Instagram.
Todd did not move product. I moved product.
Even disgraced, I moved more product than Todd ever had, because people didn’t buy energy drinks to feel wholesome.
They bought them to feel dangerous. And I was the most dangerous thing RipTide had ever gotten its logo on.
Which was why I was sitting in this Poseidon-forsaken conference room instead of, say, literally anywhere else on earth, letting Jeffrey pitch me on whatever “activation” meant this quarter.
“—and the biodegradable bottle initiative is going to be huge. We’re talking full sustainability rebrand. Chase Perez, face of the ocean-friendly future—”
“You know I’m a shark, right?” I interrupted. “Sharks aren’t exactly the poster child for friendly.”
Dead silence.
Then Jason laughed, a beat too late, like people do when they can’t tell if you’re joking.
I was joking. Mostly. The thing about hiding in plain sight is that the truth is always the safest lie.
Nobody believes the guy who actually is a shark when he says he’s a shark.
They just think you’re leaning into the brand.
“Right, right. El Tiburón.” He pronounced it wrong and made a chomping gesture with his hand that made me want to bite it off. “That’s exactly the energy we want. Apex predator goes green. The people will love it.”
Whatever you say, Johnny.
Plus, I hadn’t shifted in months. Too busy being the human surfer, the brand influencer, which conveniently covered up the fact that I hadn’t wanted to shift ever since…
“Anyway,” he continued, pulling up a new slide—a map of the coast this time.
Finally, something worth looking at. “We’ve narrowed it down to five locations for the exhibition event.
East Coast, smaller markets. Towns where a surf competition is the biggest thing to happen since they got a second gas station. ”
He wasn’t wrong about that. Small towns meant RipTide could roll in like a circus and take over the whole beachfront for weeks—for cheap.
The tourism money alone would have these places rolling out red carpets.
City council approvals in forty-eight hours.
Free permits. The mayor showing up for a photo op in a RipTide visor.
I’d seen it before—we all had. The surf industry had been doing it to coastal towns for years, and the towns always said yes because the alternative was another summer of selling taffy and renting boogie boards to tourists from Ohio.
“We’d like you to choose.” He said it with the air of a man offering a great gift. “It’s your comeback. Your narrative.”
My narrative. Right. Like any of this was actually about me.
I looked at the map. Five pins along the Eastern Seaboard, each with a little pop-up: town name, population, average wave height, nearest airport. Corporate surf planning at its finest—reduce a living, breathing beach to a spreadsheet and a pin.
First was Cape Hatteras. I’d surfed there twice. Decent reef break, but the locals were territorial, which made for bad optics. One of those towns where the surfers had a whole pecking order about who got which wave, and they did not appreciate outsiders. Hard pass.
Buckroe Beach. Never been. The pop-up said emerging surf destination, which in my experience meant “the waves are mediocre, but someone built a boutique hotel and now there’s a marketing budget.”
A notification popped up on my phone—a new Instagram follower. I got a dozen a day, but this one was from juicy_kouture, and the profile picture looked familiar. Juice-bar girl.
I glanced up through the conference room’s glass walls and saw her give me a coy smile and wave. I grinned back, the piercing in my lip pulling tight, but before I could send her a message, Julian coughed at the front of the room.
I groaned, stuffing my phone away and looking back up at the slides, pretending to care when—
Crescent Cove.
My eyes lingered on it.
Why did that sound familiar?
Old memories stirred. I’d been just a pup—seven, maybe eight, still small enough that my tiger shark form was barely longer than a surfboard.
My family had been leading me north along the migration path, the one our family had traced for generations, and we’d passed a stretch of coastline where the water tasted different.
Like the ocean itself had been steeping in power for centuries, and the flavor had seeped into every droplet.
I’d wanted to stop. We hadn’t. Of course we hadn’t; that would have deviated from tradition.
Not for us, they’d said in the method sharks communicated underwater, through pressure changes and electromagnetic pulses. That place belongs to the land-touched. We pass through. We don’t stay.
I’d heard of places like that. Safe havens for witches and shifters, normally near some sort of magical hotspot. Some buddies had once attempted to take me to one up north for a Halloween festival, but it was too landlocked for my taste. Crescent Cove, however…
I’d never forgotten the taste of that water.
“That one.” I pointed at Crescent Cove before my brain had caught up.
Jeremiah looked surprised, then pleased, which was a combination I didn’t trust. People in his position were only pleased when things went according to a plan you didn’t know about.
“Crescent Cove! Great choice, actually.” He clicked, and a new window opened—more spreadsheets. “We were hoping you’d pick that one. Turns out we have a connection there—someone local, well-respected in the community. A bit of an…insider, you could say.”
“An insider,” I repeated flatly.
“Someone who can help us with conditions. Making sure we get the best possible waves for the cameras.” He said it casually, like he was talking about a weather app instead of whatever the hell he actually meant.
“She’s got a reputation for—how did they put it—reading the ocean.
Locals swear by her. They say she can practically call the swells in. ”
I stared at him. “You’re telling me RipTide has a wave psychic.”
“I’m telling you RipTide has a consultant.” He smiled like he was being clever. “The point is, Crescent Cove gives us the best chance of picture-perfect conditions, and picture-perfect conditions give us the best footage, and the best footage gives us—”
“The best comeback narrative. Yeah, I got it.”
I leaned back in my chair and looked at the map again. The little pin over Crescent Cove. Such a small dot for a place that had left such a big taste.
A “consultant” who could read the ocean. In a town whose waters tasted like power.
So, a witch.
Even if Jason had no idea that’s what she was.
Something tightened in my chest—not the human part, the shark part. The part that had evolved over four hundred million years to sense when the current was about to change. The part I had been ignoring.
“Perfect,” Jimmy said, already clicking to his next slide, already moving on. “I’ll have the contracts drawn up by Friday. Now, let’s talk about your social media content calendar—”
I stopped listening to him again.
But this time, it wasn’t from boredom.
Through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the RipTide offices, I could see the Atlantic, bright blue and filled with people under the midday sun. But in my mind, I was already somewhere else. Already tasting water that hummed with magic.
I’d tried to cut the shark out of me these past few years, and it had accepted that fate quietly. But now the ocean was calling me somewhere specific. Of that much, I was sure.
And I’d learned a long time ago—the hard way, like I learned everything—that when the ocean calls, you don’t ask why.
You just swim.