15. Selena
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Selena
The seagull situation had been deeply satisfying. Not only had watching those corporate goons run from a flock of birds been hilarious, the thrum of magic in my blood had been nearly as good as what had happened in the van before.
Well, almost.
When I returned home, Lupe jumped into bed with me and pulled out her phone—someone named saint_diego had posted a video, shaky footage of the RipTide tent in full chaos, seagulls absolutely everywhere, a guy in a polo shirt chasing one around with a clipboard.
The caption said, what is happening on crescent cove beach rn??, and it already had four thousand likes.
“You did that,” Lupe said, delighted.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I replied, flopping onto my bed.
She showed me a second video. A seagull walking around the beach with a branded tote bag on its head.
I grimaced.
All press was good press, right?
“None of that was me,” I insisted. “That’s just what seagulls do.”
A noise drew our attention to El Soldado, who was perched on my windowsill cleaning his feathers with an expression that said he had never done anything wrong, in his life, ever.
“Get some rest, chica. You are gonna need it.”
She kissed my forehead and shut my bedroom door behind her.
I rolled face-first into my pillow and didn’t move for a full minute. My whole body felt wrung out like an old towel stuffed at the bottom of a gym bag. It went beyond exhaustion, like every cell in my body was running on empty.
After the tournament every year I was tired in my bones, the good kind of tired, proof of effort. This was rawer—less earned. Or maybe the price was one I wasn’t sure I could keep paying.
I reached for my magic and found only a hollow feeling. Even less than what I normally had, like every usable drop had been squeezed out of me.
I shifted onto my back.
I didn’t think about him…but I did pick up my phone and opened Instagram.
I didn’t type anything into the search bar. I just happened to navigate to the Explore page. Which happened to be surf content—that was the algorithm, completely out of my hands.
I scrolled past a bleached blonde head once.
Twice
Clicked.
His account came up immediately—157k followers, a blue checkmark, and a bio that said:
Chase Perez | El Tiburón | Two World Titles
RipTide Affiliate - use my code “shark” for 10% off
Very on brand for him.
This was for research—know thy enemy and all that. I scrolled further back.
There was a lot of surfing, unsurprisingly. Competitions, training clips, slow-motion footage of him dropping into waves that were genuinely terrifying in size. A few branded posts, him holding a RipTide bottle. He was smiling, but it wasn’t the grin I couldn’t get out of my head.
This one was—
Wait.
Why was I thinking about his stupid grin like I knew him?
His crew showed up in a handful of shots, Tanner’s face obscured in most of them by either motion blur or his own hair. I wiped the smile that had spread across my face away.
I scrolled farther back.
More surfing. Older competition shots. He must have been twenty-one, maybe twenty-two, grinning at the camera with his real smile—unguarded.
I scrolled back to the top and found a new post, from only forty-seven minutes ago.
Him, on my beach at dusk, that specific gold-to-pink hour where everything looked better than it was. He was shirtless—because of course—leaning against a white wall, one arm behind his head, looking at the camera like it had said something mildly amusing.
His lip ring caught the light, and there was a line of muscle along his abdomen that my hands had, as of several hours ago, had direct contact with, which was irrelevant.
And his hair was perfectly mussed, just like after I had run my fingers through it—
Wait.
He was leaning against the van.
He’d gone back to the van, waited for the light, and taken this photo.
The caption said:
good waves, good company
Nothing else.
Good company.
I stared at it for a long time. Long enough that my thumb, operating completely without my permission, twitched. The heart turned red.
I unliked it in under a second, maybe half a second, then threw my phone onto the bed like it had burned me.
He had 157 thousand followers. The post had been up for forty-seven minutes. It had—I checked, hating myself—six thousand likes already.
I was one of six thousand people.
There was absolutely no mechanism by which he would have—
A notification popped up.
el_tiburón sent you a message
I was not going to—
My phone buzzed again.
el_tiburón
see something you like?
I stared at that for a while when the little text saying message read popped up.
Fuck me.
beachbruja
I was doing research
el_tiburón
yeah?
find anything interesting
beachbruja
not really
your last three posts are sponsored content and it shows
el_tiburón
harsh
what about the most recent one?
I looked at the photo again.
His abs and his lip ring.
And oh my god, he had posted this for me, and I’d fallen for it, hook, line, and sinker.
beachbruja
staged
el_tiburón
everything’s staged
you liked it anyway
beachbruja
I like things accidentally all the time
el_tiburón
sure
I have more if you want
I turned my screen off. Turned it on again.
My magic was completely gone, and I was exhausted, and I knew he was in his hotel being insufferably smug, and I should go to sleep.
beachbruja
more what?
Three dots.
Then:
el_tiburón
photos, Torres
what did you think I meant
I threw my phone across the bed and rolled over, disgusted with myself for the grin I just couldn’t get rid of.