6. Selena
CHAPTER SIX
Selena
You need to cut that shit out right now.
I was smiling. Grinning from ear to ear like an idiot.
Why?
Because I’d flirted with some tourist on the beach. A very, very hot tourist. It had been dark, but even just the faint candlelight had highlighted every single one of his numerous abs and how thick his pecs were, and the line where his hips disappeared into his board shorts…
Cut. It. Out.
He was a tourist. A tourist who’d stumbled onto my private ritual spot, seen me covered in sand and tears like some kind of beach gremlin, and had still grinned at me like he was hungry for a lot more than conversation.
Which either meant he was blind or incredibly desperate, and honestly, in Crescent Cove during peak season, it was probably both.
I wasn’t in my early twenties anymore; I knew better than to mess around with tourists.
They could be fun, but they always left, just like everyone always did. Everyone but me.
The walk home was short. My mother had bought up a ton of houses near the beach in the ’80s, which was made very clear by how heavily glass block was featured in the design.
My dad had fixed them up, and half of them were Airbnbs now, generating a steady stream of tourist income that funded family gatherings and property taxes in equal measure.
The other half were saved for la familia.
I shared a small, updated one with my favorite cousin, Lupe.
The lights were on when I got home. Lupe was doing her own new moon ritual, and that meant the house smelled like heaven, because she was cooking. I opened the front door to a rush of dried chiles and slow-braised beef and the warmth that was the unique feeling of Lupe’s magic at work.
Lupe was at the stove, her dark hair twisted into a knot loosely held together on top of her head, wearing an apron that looked like a sexy man’s body—which we’d acquired as a joke from one of the boardwalk stores—over a tank top and pajama shorts.
Her hands were covered in masa, and I watched her grab another handful and spread it thin on a corn husk before folding in the beef filling from her other pot.
Every tamale she made carried a small enchantment. Not the flashy kind, but the kind that settled into your bones and knit together whatever was frayed—sore muscles, bruised ribs, the low-grade exhaustion that came from existing in our world.
She heard the door, turning to me with her signature warm smile. Then her eyes narrowed.
“You’re smiling,” she said suspiciously.
“It happens occasionally.”
“Not with you it doesn’t.”
Her eyes narrowed further, tracking from my sand-caked feet and legs to my wind-wrecked hair to whatever expression I was apparently still failing to control. Her mouth dropped open.
“No mames! You finally got laid.”
“I did not get laid.”
“Your face says otherwise.”
“That’s just what I look like.”
“You haven’t looked like that since Jason Gutierrez kissed you behind the bleachers junior year.”
She pointed her tongs at me, clicking them aggressively.
“Who is it?”
“Nobody. A tourist. I literally don’t even know his name.”
This was true. I’d been too busy admiring what looked like a tattoo that covered his neck all the way up to his jaw to remember to ask.
Pathetic. Genuinely pathetic.
Pull yourself together. He was just a really hot guy.
“A tourist.” Lupe turned back to her tamales, but I could see the grin spreading. She had the most beautiful smile. “A cute tourist.”
“He was…” I searched for words that weren’t looked like he was born from sea foam and rose out of the ocean on a shell. “Adequate.”
She didn’t buy it for a second.
“Mija, you’re blushing.”
“Am not.”
Zero for two on that accusation. I dropped into one of the kitchen chairs. The grin was still there. I could feel it, stretching muscles in my face that had apparently atrophied from disuse.
“He just—he was funny, okay? Like actually funny. Not ‘I watched a lot of stand-up comedy and now I repeat bits’ funny. Quick. And he had all these shark facts he kept—”
“Shark facts? What is he, your perfect man?”
Lupe was practically vibrating with excitement now.
“Ay, tell me you didn’t start going off about how it’s migration season on him?”
I didn’t answer, which was confirmation enough.
“You did? Mijjjjjja, that means you were trying to flirt.”
“I…engaged in light verbal sparring.”
“Selena.”
“Fine. Yes. I flirted. I flirted hard. I was disgusting about it. Are you happy? He’s a tourist. I know better than that.”
Lupe leaned forward, her dark eyes gleaming with mischief. “Tourist or not, it sounds like he got under your skin. In a good way.”
I shrugged, trying to play it off. “He was…interesting. Different. Not like the usual guys around here.”
“Mm-hmm. And when was the last time you found a guy ‘interesting,’ huh? Face it, chica, you need this.”
“He’s just a guy, Lupe.”
“I’m not saying marry the guy. You just need a little fun, some excitement in your life.”
I rolled my eyes. “I have plenty of excitement, thank you very much. Running a business, organizing community events, dealing with my mother…my life is a never-ending thrill ride.”
Lupe snorted. “Please. I’m talking about the excitement that makes your toes curl and your magic sing.”
My cheeks heated—again.
I knew exactly what kind of excitement she was talking about. The kind I hadn’t participated in for a long, long time. The charge on my rose toy upstairs would confirm that.
“Lupe, I can’t just…he’s a stranger. We talked for like five minutes.”
“So? Sometimes five minutes is all it takes. You felt something, right? A spark?”
I hesitated, then nodded. I had felt something, a literal spark when he had touched my hand. More than I wanted to admit.
Lupe grinned, triumphant. “See? That’s your magic speaking to you. Telling you that you need this.” She waggled her eyebrows. “That you and your magic need some action.”
I groaned. “I talked to a man on a beach for five minutes. We’re not exactly at sex-magic territory.”
But the words snagged in my mind. Sex magic was just as old as ocean magic and, in some ways, even more powerful.
The convergence of two energies, the raw creative force of it—my abuela used to say that the ocean was born from the oldest act of love and that every wave was an echo of that first union.
Even my limited powers seemed to spring to life after a good orgasm, like my magic needed a jump-start and apparently the ignition was located in my clit.
The one time I’d tried to discuss this with my mother, she’d given me a look that could have frozen the Gulf Stream and said, “Hay otras formas de acceder al poder, Selena,” which translated to there are other ways to access power but really meant please never speak of this to me again.
Lupe was giving me a very knowing look. A look that said she was about to make a suggestion I’d pretend to be scandalized by and then think about in the shower for three days.
I changed the subject.
Aggressively.
“So if I went upstairs right now, I wouldn’t hear Antonio snoring like a lawn mower, right?”
Lupe looked away and murmured, “He has his uses.”
La Virgencita, give me strength.
I didn’t like Antonio. That was putting it mildly. He drank too much and smoked too much, and that was coming from a member of the Torres family, where the holiday gatherings could strip a liquor store bare and probably kept the local dispensary in business.
But Antonio’s vices weren’t the festive, communal kind. His were the kind that made him mean at one a.m. and sorry at seven a.m. and absent for the three days in between. And worst of all—worst of all—he had a tendency to neg my cousin.
My beautiful, nurturing cousin who could heal with a bowl of pozole and make you cry with the perfection of her mole. A woman whose magic was so generous, so fundamentally kind, that it literally fed people.
And this pendejo would sit at her table, eat her food, feel her power stitch his hangover back together, and then make a comment about how she “could stand to lay off the tortillas.”
So yeah, he fucking sucked.
But apparently he had a big dick and knew how to use it, so I had to put up with him at breakfast a lot more than I wanted.
“Lupe—”
“Don’t.” She held up a hand, still not looking at me. “I know what you’re going to say.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“You were going to make that face. The one that looks like you’re eating Lucas candy.”
“Again, that’s just my face.”
“Selena.”
She turned to me, and for a second, beneath the jokes and the flour-dusted apron, I saw the tiredness. It lived in the corners of her eyes, in the slight droop of her shoulders.
She knew.
Of course she knew.
Lupe was one of the smartest people I’d ever met.
She knew exactly what Antonio was, and she kept choosing him anyway, and that was the part that made me want to scream—not because I judged her, but because I understood.
Choosing something that hurt you because it was familiar and the alternative was being alone with the silence.
I couldn’t judge that. I’d chosen this town for the same reason.
“Besides,” she said, brightening with that endless well of optimism she seemed to possess, “taste how strong this batch came out.”
She held out a tamale, still warm from the steamer, unwrapped from its corn husk like a gift.
Barbacoa tamales—equal parts fat, protein, carbs, and magical recovery. The perfect post-workout snack, especially if your workout was sitting on a beach crying and then being ambushed by a man with an eight-pack.
I bit into it and the flavor hit first—rich, smoky, the beef so tender it dissolved on my tongue, the masa perfectly soft with just enough structure to hold everything together.
But then the magic hit half a second later, rolling through me like a warm wave. The tension in my shoulders unwound, the ache in my knees from my earlier run faded to nothing, and the low-grade headache I’d been carrying since my mother’s phone call simply…left.
“Jesus, Lupe.”
“Good?”