13. Selena
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Selena
I walked back to my Jeep with sand in places sand should not be, my skin hot everywhere he had touched me, like a sunburn that just wouldn’t go away.
But none of that mattered. My magic wasn’t just humming beneath my skin.
It was buzzing, sparking, and it took everything I had to keep it under control.
The plan had worked. A little too well.
He was good.
I really, really hated that he was good.
I turned the key and sat there for a second with both hands on the wheel, trying to ground myself. My palms were warm. The air around the car was charged, and when I flexed my fingers, a little arc of glowing golden magic jumped between my knuckles.
“Okay,” I said aloud. “Okay.”
My magic never felt like this. Full and crackling, like I had finally connected to a powerful source. The plan had worked, and now I realized the plan hadn’t really extended beyond: fuck a stranger, get magic.
No, not a stranger.
Fucking Chase Perez.
I threw the Jeep in reverse, nearly hitting a wagon full of beach toys as I peeled out of the parking lot.
I walked into the house to find the TV on some terrible reality show, Lupe nowhere to be seen.
I closed the door as quietly as I could, trying to sneak up to my room, when another wave of magic hit me and tossed the ceramic plate we used to catch our keys across the room. It shattered against the wall.
“Selena?”
Lupe popped her head out of the kitchen, took one look at me, and ran at me faster than I had ever seen her move in her life.
“Oh my god.”
“Don’t—”
“You’re glowing, mija.”
“I am not.”
“No, like…you are literally glowing.”
She was right. My hands were still golden, and nothing I did seemed to calm them.
“So you did it? You went through with my plan—”
“Your plan?”
She grabbed my wrist and turned my hand over like a palm reader. “Oh, you are buzzing. He was good, wasn’t he? I love that for you. What was his name?”
“What’s going on out there?” a friendly, masculine voice called from the kitchen.
Elliot.
Just perfect. Another witness to my slutty, magical escapades.
“Nothing!” I replied, with too much desperation for my liking.
Despite that, Elliot walked out, a giant gallon Ziploc bag of tamales in his hand, and I tucked mine behind my back.
“Selena was just telling me the name of a new friend she made.”
Any woman in the room would have known exactly what Lupe meant when she said friend like that. Thank god Elliot was a man and blissfully ignorant.
“It doesn’t matter.” I tried to sidestep.
“It one hundred percent matters. I was the one who—”
“Chase Perez,” I blurted, just to get her to stop.
Lupe’s mouth stopped moving.
“Chase—” Elliot was suddenly locked in. “Like, El Tiburón Chase Perez? Like the—the RipTide Chase Perez who is currently—”
“Yes. That Chase Perez.”
“And you befriended him?”
“Oh, she did a lot more than that—” Lupe started, but I shot her a look that might have even made my mother proud, and she closed her mouth.
Luckily, Elliot was clearly distracted.
“Was he as big an asshole as he seems?”
He watched me expectantly, and Lupe’s eyebrows were practically in her hairline.
I thought about his stupid lip ring, and the pull-up bet, and how he’d asked for a smoothie, and how he’d smiled at me, and how I’d just had the best orgasm of my life.
“Yes. Absolutely an asshole. Worse, even.”
“Knew it.” Elliot shook his head. “Well, now I don’t have to even feel a little guilty fighting their permits for the beach. We have to keep the nest sites safe.”
I nodded while Lupe didn’t buy it for a second.
“All right, well—” Elliot held up the tamales. “I just came to grab these. I’m gonna head out.”
“Perfect. Great. Bye.”
I had the door open before he finished the sentence.
Elliot squinted at me. “You look weird.”
“Probably just overheating. It’s hot out there today.”
“Stay hydrated.”
He grabbed his keys off the counter—or tried to—then noticed the shattered ceramic all over the floor. He looked at the plate. Looked at me. Looked at Lupe.
“Everything okay in here?”
“Completely fine,” Lupe and I said at exactly the same time, in exactly the same tone.
He stood there for a second like he was going to say something else, then apparently decided it wasn’t worth it.
“Okay. See you tomorrow to put up flyers?”
“Yes. See you then. Bye.”
I practically slammed the door in his face.
Lupe waited exactly two seconds.
“Chase Perez—”
“Do not start with me.”
“Selena.” She grabbed both my arms. “Selena, oh my god. That’s—that’s incredible. That’s the best thing that’s ever happened.”
“It is objectively not—”
“You sexed up the enemy.” She was grinning like I’d handed her a gift. “You seduced the guy who’s here to blow up your whole summer—”
“It wasn’t on purpose. I didn’t know who he was until—”
I stopped.
“It doesn’t matter. It’s fine. I got what I needed.” I pulled away from her. “I’m going for a run.”
“Selena—”
I grabbed my sneakers off the rack and sat on the stairs to pull them on. Lupe stood in the doorway with her arms crossed, watching me with a facial expression I knew meant she wasn’t done with me yet.
“So he was good.”
“That’s not important.”
“Your magic says otherwise.”
A pause.
“Are you going to see him again?”
“Bye, Lupe.”
I was out the door before she could respond.
I ran south along the boardwalk where the boards were uneven and you had to watch your feet, which was the point. Every time my brain tried to go somewhere I didn’t want it to go, I hit a bad patch and had to focus or eat it.
I pushed past comfortable. Past where my lungs were happy about things. Kept going until the burn was big enough to drown everything else out, and then I kept going after that.
The magic moved with me the whole time, warm and buzzing, so close to the surface it kept catching me off guard. I’d reach for it reflexively, like how you reach for something that’s usually just out of range, and it would just—be there.
Right there.
I ran faster, the magic dulling the burn. But I wanted it, that pain, to keep the thoughts of his face as I’d left him in that van away.
The thing was, he hadn’t even been surprised. That made it worse. Like he’d known exactly what I was doing and let me do it anyway, which was somehow more unsettling than if he’d been angry.
The problem wasn’t that I’d used him.
The problem was that he didn’t mind, like he was used to it.
I ran faster. My feet took me to Shark Bites without asking me—muscle memory. I finally stopped moving, hands on my knees as I tried to catch my breath, when I heard the commotion happening around back.
The dumpster, the one I hadn’t closed when I’d ended my shift unexpectedly early, was wide open.
And the seagulls had found it. An entire flock of them, absolutely ravaging the thing.
I glanced up to see El Soldado on the roof of the shack, glaring down with a judgmental expression.
“This is kind of your fault, meddler,” I muttered.
He puffed up indignantly.
I looked at the mess, then out at the beach where, in the distance, I could see the beginnings of massive tent structures being erected, a few people working to prop up am enormous banner.
RipTide’s logo, with a big neon green flag underneath that read NEW BIODEGRADABLE BOTTLES.
I glanced back at the seagulls. One of them had gotten a paper bag stuck on its head and was bumping into the others, another had a whole hot dog bun hanging out of its mouth, and all of them were screeching at each other as they fought over scraps.
“Hey!”
The word came out frustrated, magic crackling beneath it like lightning.
“Stop.”
They stopped.
Every single one of them. Mid-flap, mid-screech, mid-bun.
Forty seagulls, perfectly still, looking at me. The silence was genuinely eerie.
El Soldado didn’t move either, but his smug look told me it was voluntary.
My gaze dropped to my hands—still faintly golden—the magic just below the surface, waiting for me to use it.
Like I just had.
I looked back at the RipTide banner. I looked at the seagulls, every single one attentive—waiting.
“Okay,” I said slowly. “Phase two.”