23. Selena
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Selena
I opened Shark Bites at five the next morning because I hadn’t slept, and after hours of rolling around in bed, I figured I might as well be productive.
The cut on my leg had a butterfly bandage I’d applied in the dark with shaking hands.
It pulled when I bent to load the cooler, but I welcomed it.
It was proof that the night had happened and not been invented out of exhaustion and near-death adrenaline.
Well, that, and the throbbing bruise I had beneath my uncharacteristically high shirt collar.
I made myself a smoothie I didn’t drink and stood behind the counter, thinking about the shark shifter who had ruined everything.
RipTide was still holding a nationally televised competition during my “little local event” and had encroached on our space again.
Just a few generators and lines, but I knew they would keep pushing.
Then there were all the logistics of actually running the tournament I still had to deal with.
Those were real problems, and I had built my whole adult life on being a person who handled real problems. They kept me too busy to worry about any of the emotional baggage that went with them, and right now, I couldn’t get a single one of them to hold my attention for longer than ten seconds before my mind went back to him.
He had let me see him, the real him.
That was the part I kept returning to. Not the sex, though the sex was its own problem that I was choosing not to examine before seven in the morning while soreness still radiated between my legs and across my shoulder.
It was that he had stayed in between, skin still rough in places, teeth sharp, eyes dark, the most exposed I’d ever seen him, and he had done it on purpose.
He had not put the man back on like his sponsored smile.
He had let me see the part of him that hid behind the cameras and the entire constructed persona called El Tiburón, ironically.
The whole world got El Tiburón, but I got Chase Perez.
When I told him I saw him, all of him, he had looked at me like I’d handed him what he’d been waiting years for.
I knew that look. I’d been wearing the opposite of it my whole life.
I had spent nearly ten years telling everyone, including myself, that I was happy.
That I had chosen Crescent Cove and the shack and the small, good life.
That my mother’s disappointment was her problem and not a fishhook lodged permanently behind my ribs.
I was very good at saying it. I had said it so many times it had the worn-smooth quality of a rock at the beach, surrendering to the tide because it knew resistance was pointless.
I had surrendered to a story I wanted to be true, even if, deep down, it still felt as raw as the day I’d stashed those acceptance letters.
Chase had not asked me if I was happy. He’d asked if I’d played in college…said how good I was.
Because…maybe he saw the real me too.
The truth was simple. I liked him. Not the magic and the convenient mutual using that I’d dressed it up as, because that was simple.
What wasn’t simple was his toothy grin, his confidence, and how he took everything I threw at him and absorbed it, never once flinching.
That he had run across a beach and shifted in full view of the public and his sponsors to save me after I’d been an idiot and surfed in waves bigger than anything I knew how to handle because I’d been… pissed at my mom.
I liked him, and that was a much more dangerous thing than wanting him, because wanting ended, and this didn’t feel like it was going to.
El Soldado landed on the counter.
“No,” I told him.
He cocked his head and looked at me with one black eye.
“I mean it. Don’t.”
He stood on my clean counter, where he was absolutely not allowed to stand, and stared at me. He had watched me lie to myself for years and was no longer going to accept it.
“It’s complicated,” I said.
He clacked his beak once.
“It is. He’s leaving after Saturday. He has a whole life that isn’t here.
He has a comeback with his big sponsors that I’m currently sabotaging.
It’s all fun and games for him now because it’s not permanent.
” I was arguing with a bird. “And I used him. That’s how this started.
I went looking for a quick fix and I found—”
I stopped.
El Soldado waited.
“—and I found exactly who I thought I would.”
El Soldado puffed up in exasperation, then squawked at ear-shattering volume.
“Don’t start with me, or I’m changing your name to Scuttle.”
He grabbed a packet of hot sauce off the condiment tray, flinging it around and getting sauce everywhere. I dove at him.
“Cut that out!”
“Trouble in paradise?” Chase’s voice was laced with amusement from the other side of the counter.
I straightened with a fistful of feathers, hot sauce all over my shirt.
“He started it.”
“Of that, I have no doubt.” Chase leaned on the counter, and El Soldado flapped indignantly up to the rafters to glower at us both. Chase watched him go. “Does he do that a lot?”
“Only when he has opinions.”
“And he has opinions about me?”
“He has opinions about my whole life. You’re not special.” I wiped down the counter, not looking at him, because looking at him meant remembering the cave, and the feel of him, and how it hadn’t been about the magic. Not even a little bit. “What do you want, Perez? We’re not open for another hour.”
“And you won’t make an exception for your best customer?
” There was something off in his voice, and when I glanced up he was turning a straw over in his fingers, which was something I’d never once seen him do.
Chase didn’t fidget; he was a shark, for the goddess’ sake.
“There’s a thing tonight. A full-moon party.
Diego knows a guy up the coast—a real party.
Lights, music, dancing. Half the tour will be there. ”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “You’re inviting me to a party.”
“Yes.”
“And why would I want to go to this party with you?”
“Because I’m incredibly hot and a great dancer?” He gave me a grin, but I recognized it now as the one he saved especially for me, and my heart did a very traitorous thing in my chest. I busied myself cleaning the blender.
“Come on, you need to get out of this town.”
I nearly dropped the glass blender lid as my hand shook, and the blood drained from my face. I saw the smile fall off his face out of the corner of my eye.
“Look…I want you to come, all right? I’ll be on my best behavior, I promise. A perfect gentleman.”
I shook my head.
Get a hold of yourself, Torres.
“I don’t think that’s possible,” I said.
A shadow of his smile returned.
“Oh, I don’t know, I can be pretty charming when I want.”
He reached across the counter and took my hand, which was still shaking.
It stilled in his warm, steady grip, the calluses along his fingers from hundreds of hours on a board circling over my knuckles.
He raised my hand to his lips, leaving a soft, chaste kiss.
He peered up at me with those big, dark eyes, and for one moment I could almost believe him.
“I’ll pick you up at nine. DM me your address.”