31. Chase
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Chase
She ran away and didn’t look back, and I let her, because the one thing I had left to give her was not making it harder.
Because I wasn’t the man she thought I was.
I was El Tiburón, sponsored bad boy, a grin and one dangerous move away from something that would blow up in my face. Because I wasn’t like her.
I didn’t build things.
I destroyed them.
El Tiburón was easy, and he didn’t ask questions. He got paid.
I don’t want you to be for sale.
Nobody had ever said that to me. People wanted El Tiburón.
They wanted the grin and the teeth. They wanted the version that was, in every sense, for sale.
A commodity to be traded to move product and call it living.
And a witch in a small-town snack shack had looked at the merchandise and asked for the part that wasn’t on the menu.
I want to see your real smile again.
I picked up a handful of sand from beneath my feet and felt the static in it. My whole career fit in that static—every dollar, every wave, everything I’d built to make my mistake right had actually just made everything so much worse.
Wasn’t that the story of my life?
I’d held the bottle and smiled because they’d never paid me to look any deeper.
I want us to come home.
Home.
What I’d been swimming away from for three years, and I’d never once asked myself what I was swimming toward, because the answer was nothing.
I’d decided I didn’t get a home. I got a debt and a logo to pay it off.
And then Selena had handed it back to me like it had always been there, and the worst part was that the second she said it, I knew exactly where it was.
It wasn’t a place.
It was the sound she made falling asleep in my arms.
It was my sister’s laugh getting stronger with every call.
It was an old friend who had said hi.
I wanted to be the Chase Perez Selena believed I was.
I wanted to be the man who deserved that word.
Home.
But if you wanted a home, you had to stop swimming. You had to stop running away and actually fix what you broke.
I pulled out my phone.
I scrolled to a name I hadn’t let myself press in far too long and I called Marcus.
It rang twice.
Then the screen filled, and there he was—Marcus, older, paler than I remembered, reading glasses pushed up into his hair, and behind him a kitchen, warm and lived-in.
He looked at me for a second.
Three years of silence cramped down into a moment.
“Huh,” he remarked. “Mai. You owe me twenty bucks.”
“What?” came from off-screen.
“I said he’d call before the broadcast. You said never.” He turned the phone, and there she was, folding what appeared to be an enormous burrito. She squinted into the camera, and her whole face opened up.
“Chase!”
She crowded into the frame next to Marcus.
“Oh my god, you look terrible. Doesn’t he look terrible?”
I had no doubt I did, because I felt it. For years I’d been imagining how this call would go. I’d played it in my head over and over, how his face would contort as he weighed my apology against his shoulder, and in every version, I came up wanting.
I had not imagined Mai being there.
“Hey,” I managed. “Hey, Marcus. Hey, Mai.”
“Hey yourself,” Marcus replied, easy. Then—because he’d always read water better than anyone, which was why I wanted him on every wave—his eyes flicked over my face, and he set the easiness down.
“Mai. Give us a—”
“Absolutely not. I’ve been waiting too long for this.” She planted her chin on his shoulder. “Talk, Chase.”
So I talked. Not all of it. There wasn’t a version of tonight long enough.
What came out was smaller and felt worse.
“I think—” The word stuck. “There’s something I need to do. Something that matters. And if I do it, the money stops, and the money is—Marcus, the money is the point of me. It’s the only thing I’ve been good for.”
I took a deep breath.
“I’m calling because I think I can’t do this anymore, and I needed to say that to your face before I decided, because it’s your life I’d be deciding with.”
Silence on the line.
Mai’s eyes had gone shiny.
Marcus looked at me like he used to look at a lineup. He’d always been good because he was patient, willing to wait for the right wave instead of jumping in feet first.
We’d balanced each other like that.
“Chase,” he said quietly. “Did you think you were renting my forgiveness?”
“That’s not—”
“Did you think if a payment bounced, I’d take it back?
” He shook his head slowly. “I forgave you in the hospital, man. Sure, I was pissed at first. My career was trashed. But as I lay in that bed, you know what I was doing? Replaying the wave. Not your call—everything that I had done wrong. I wanted it too. I was twenty-one and thought I was immortal, and I paddled with you because I wanted that wave more than I’d ever wanted anything else.
I wanted the glory. And if we’re all being honest, I wanted out of your shadow, and that made me stupid. ”
He let out a breath. “But I’m older and wiser now. And I would appreciate it if you stopped editing me out of my own decision so you can feel guilty about it.”
“Marcus, I should have never had us out there! Your career—”
“I run a grom program now. Did Mai tell you that?” he interrupted me. “Adaptive surf coaching. I’m good at it. My life didn’t end, Chase. But I kinda feel like the important part of yours did. You used to love surfing, man. Now I see you on TV and…well, you aren’t the same.”
“Could you stop being so patient for once in your goddamn life, please?”
He laughed. “Listen to me. The money helped. I won’t insult you—it helped. And not just me. Mai’s here because of you.”
“Hi.” Mai waved her burrito.
“You think I watch you and feel gratitude? I watch a guy who used to surf like the ocean was his home smile like it’s painful, and I mute it.
” He sighed, scrubbing a hand down his face.
“So whatever it is you need to do, you have my blessing. You’ve always had it.
If you needed to hear it aloud, then I’m sorry it took you three years to call, because I’d have said it three years ago.
You never had to carry this for us. Put it down. ”
“What he said,” Mai echoed.
“Mai, your treatments. I don’t think…I don’t think I’m strong enough to choose this over you.”
Her expression softened. “Real family would never ask you to. Look, I felt guilty after our last call, okay? Teasing you about paying. So Marcus and I have been looking into some options. Turns out there are charities related to all these new shifter diseases popping up. Funded by good people, Chase. People who want to do right. So you should too.”
I couldn’t say anything.
Mai filled the silence like little sisters do.
“I bet it’s a girl. You finally find a nice girl, Chase?”
“Of course he found a girl.” Marcus smirked. “That’s the only reason any guy gets his act together.”
“Speaking from experience?” She winked at him, and a small part of my brain filed that away to be upset about later.
Didn’t have a lot of moral high ground right now.
“Also, if you torch your career on live TV Saturday, fair warning, I will clip it, and I will make it my pinned post,” she added.
“How do you know it’s—”
“Shark instincts.”
Marcus’s mouth twitched. “Call more, you jackass. We have a lot to catch up on.”
“Bye, Chase! And send me a picture of her!” Mai grinned, and then the screen went black.
I slumped against the shack’s wall, my head spinning.
I’d never imagined it like that.
Absolution.
It should have felt better, should have felt like permission to set my career on fire for a girl and a beach and a home.
But the noise didn’t stop. I’d been El Tiburón too long now, and El Tiburón had his perks. He had championships and fame; he got pulled up on stage to DJ and had girls in his DMs; he traveled the world and smiled and always got what he wanted.
Except he had never known what he really wanted. He had never really wanted anything because wanting meant slowing down and letting the hurt catch up. But then a witch who tasted like magic had crashed through all of that.
She had looked at me and seen all the jagged teeth and edges, and she had smiled. She had embraced the part of me I’d been running from the longest. It was time to stop running.
I walked down to the surf and shifted, the world blooming into senses with no human equivalent. I swam straight out, past the break, past the bar, into the deep dark that had been my meditation and my peace since I was a kid. It had been my home, even if I’d tried to run from it.
I finally slowed down and let myself feel it, let it speak to me like before I’d tried to fold up the shark and lock it away.
The static was everywhere.
It wasn’t just a patch near the runoff, but woven through everything, like how magic was woven into the cove. Except this was the inverse, a wrongness threaded through the water.
The water had told me, but I’d blocked it out just like I’d blocked out so much these last few years.
But I’d never been able to block her out.
She called out to me through miles of ocean and never once asked me to be the person the whole world had seen. She had wanted Chase Perez, shark and all, and had called me home.
Hers.
Mine.
The same water, steeped in ancient magic, magic old enough to maybe even turn a corporate frat boy shill into someone who fought for what was right.
I hung in the deep and let the wrongness tick against me until I knew I’d never be able to ignore it again. Then I turned back for the shore.
The noise, for the first time in memory, was gone.
Not outrun.
Gone.
I knew now there was a difference between quiet because you’re moving too fast to hear it and quiet because you finally know what to do.
It was time to be Chase Perez again.
And he was very good at destroying things.