30. Selena
CHAPTER THIRTY
Selena
“Okay,” Chase said, staring down at the glass jars sitting on Shark Bite’s counter. “What am I looking at?”
“Pick it up.”
He held up the jar, and sand and water from the north beach swirled together inside. In the light, the grains caught and shimmered like tiny crystals beneath the surface.
“RipTide’s biodegradable bottles disappear,” I began, “that much is true. I went looking for intact ones, and most were at least half dissolved after only a day or two.” I took the jar out of his hand and shook it gently, and the shimmer spiraled like a tiny tornado.
“But they don’t biodegrade, Chase. They just degrade, down past what the eye can see, into particles too small to easily detect—or clean up.
The label says marine biodegradable, and the truth is marine soluble, dissolved into microplastics that we can’t get out. ”
He set the jar down very carefully, like he was holding a bomb.
“You can’t see it, but I feel it—every grain from the dunes to the tide line.
It’s always been mine.” I shook my head.
“I should have felt it sooner. I was so focused on…” But that doesn’t matter now.
“Do you know what it’s like now, on the north stretch?
It’s like noise where there should be quiet.
Like a cancer that’s spreading faster than we can fight it.
” My voice cracked. “The hatchlings come up through it tonight or tomorrow. They’ll eat their first meal in water that’s filled with plastic too fine to spit out.
And it’s not just them. It’s every creature on this coast. And I’m the only one who has noticed. ”
“No,” Chase replied quietly. “You’re not.”
I froze.
He was looking at the jar, his lips tight.
“I’ve been telling myself it’s the crowds, the competition noise.
The water’s been…” He searched for the words, the first time I had ever seen him unsure.
“Upset. Out past the break, there’s this interference.
Noise, like you said. I’ve come in from every set feeling like I slept in a room with a TV on.
” He glanced up at me. “It’s worse near the compound runoff. Diego feels it too.”
“Then you know I’m not—”
“I know you’re not wrong.”
It wasn’t exactly encouraging, but I barreled on.
“I had Tempest and the rescue do some magical tests, and she sent a sample to the university up the coast. I didn’t tell her the sample was from our beach, not yet anyway.
But she confirmed it. There’s plastic in the sand, in the water.
I’m sure it’s in the fish. And it wasn’t in this.
” I pointed to a different jar of moonwater I’d collected during last month’s full moon.
I wrapped my hands around the contaminated jar, staring down at the shimmer inside.
“It had to have come from the RipTide bottles. The lab results aren’t back until tonight, but I’m sure they’ll confirm it.”
Chase was so still he almost looked like a mannequin.
“And then what will you do?”
I rapped my fingers on the counter.
“I’ll publish the report, but a lab report and a local rescue versus a beverage giant’s legal team…you know I can’t win that. We can’t win that.”
“We?”
I couldn’t read him at all, and it felt like the ground was opening up between us.
“Ask me for the next part.”
I was shaking.
“Even if somehow we could get this out, the competition is tomorrow. Thousands of people, thousands of bottles dissolving in the water. But…” I’d never felt my chest so tight.
“Saturday the competition’s on a national live broadcast. You’ll do interviews, win or lose.
Thirty seconds. You could tell the truth in their logo, to everyone. They couldn’t walk that back.”
He didn’t move.
“Selena.”
“It’s the same fight we’ve been—”
“It is not the same fight.”
His voice didn’t rise. It was completely flat, and that was worse.
“Messing with some tents and costing RipTide money is a prank. It was deniable. What you’re describing is me detonating their flagship product on their own broadcast, with their patch on my chest. They won’t eat that cost. They’ll end me. That’s an easy breach of contract. They’ll take back—”
He stopped himself.
Don’t run. Please.
“Take back what, Chase?”
Three heartbeats, four…five.
Everything was silent.
“Three years ago…well, you know. Everyone knows. I nearly got my best friend killed because my sister had gotten sick and I didn’t know what to do.
My family wouldn’t listen, and everything was too loud, too damn loud.
Being El Tiburón is the only thing that ever made it stop.
So I did the dangerous thing, and he followed me like he always did.
He nearly died, and his career ended.” He looked up.
“RipTide’s money pays for his care. It pays for my sister’s too.
That’s all that matters. That I…repay that debt. ”
He dragged his hands through his hair.
“I have enough wins, Selena. I’m not out here for me. Every wave I ride pays down what I did. Everything else is noise.”
“Everything else?”
I would not cry.
His face broke, softening.
“Selena…” He shook his head. “You’re asking me to light the bank on fire. To choose between the people I love.”
I wanted to reach out, to hold him in my arms and just sink into that feeling, because in my heart I understood him.
Completely.
I knew what it was like to love your family so completely that you would do anything for them.
You would give up everything—your dreams, your joy—to keep them close, to keep them alive.
To keep paying a generational debt because the alternative was finding out who you were without it.
We were the same kind of broken. I think I’d sensed it that first night on the beach.
Standing there, I could feel exactly what it would cost him, and I believed every word.
And none of it pulled a single particle out of my sand.
“I’m not asking you to abandon them. There are other sponsors, whistleblower protections, lawyers who—”
“There’s no version where the money keeps flowing through the gap. I’ve run it every night for three years, and it doesn’t clear. Mai’s treatment doesn’t pause for my conscience.” He stepped back an inch, but it felt like an ending. “Run it without me. The lab report, a journalist—”
“Gets settled and sealed, and you know it.” My voice was so quiet I barely heard it. “Chase, this is bigger than you and me. This isn’t just about my beach or even Crescent Cove. RipTide is a national brand. These bottles are going out everywhere.”
“I fucking know that, Selena.”
It wasn’t fair, what I was asking him. And as much as it broke my heart, I understood, because once, a lifetime ago, I’d made a similar choice. Staying with what you knew, what you had grown comfortable with, instead of pushing into the unknown.
“Here’s what you’re not saying, so I will.
You’ve felt it. You feel it with the part of you that’s always been tied to the ocean, and you came in from the waves and held the bottle anyway.
That’s not debt talking, Chase. That’s turning on your smile and taking selfies so you don’t have to face what’s real.
It’s how you keep yourself from wanting anything. ”
“Don’t.” The first time he’d ever said it like that to me. “Selena…please.”
I grabbed the edge of the rolling door over the counter and pulled it down because my body needed a task, and I couldn’t look at him.
“I get it,” I said. “I really do. I know I’ve been doing the same thing.”
“Then—”
“But this is bigger than both of us.”
I couldn’t help it. I closed the distance between us and held his face, and the moment we touched everything felt right. My magic hummed and my heart settled, and I let it, knowing it would only make it hurt more when I walked away.
But some things were worth the pain.
“They’re poisoning everything, Chase. First it’s this beach, then it will be the whole coast, then the whole ocean.
And they won’t stop, you know they won’t, even when faced with the facts.
They’ll run the numbers, and what’s right always loses to what sells the most. But I don’t want you to be for sale, Chase Perez. ”
I don’t know what I expected those words to do.
It was just the truth.
“I want to see your real smile again. I want to stay with you, wherever that takes us. I want us to come home, together.”
I stood on my toes and kissed him, and his stillness shattered, his tongue immediately pressing into my mouth, and I met it. I met it as I wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled him close, letting the golden light fill me one last time.
I prayed it wouldn’t be the last time.
“Selena.” Then, quieter, “Baby—”
I let him go and walked away, not looking back.
If I turned around, I’d stay. I’d fall right back into the easy thing, the comfortable thing.
I could fill my life with him, or my family, or even volleyball, and just ignore what was happening around me.
I could say, This is too big, why try and fight it?
Someone else out there will do better, and just let it sink into all the other pain I shut out every day.
But this was my beach. This was my home. If I didn’t protect it, if I didn’t fight for it, no one else would. He said he loved my fight. Well, this was the price.
My magic hummed its objection as the distance between us grew, reaching back for him, but now I couldn’t ignore the darkness laced through it, laced through almost every grain of sand on my beach.
I ran.
I ran because I couldn’t make this choice for him.
I ran as fast as I could, hoping he was the man I thought he was—the one hidden beneath years of smiles and logos. The one who had given up so much to save a sister and take care of a friend, who was smart and funny, and beneath all the teeth, willing to do almost anything to make me laugh.
The one who had held me close and taken every ugly thing I had thrown at him, and just said, “Give me everything you’ve got.”