22. Chase
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Chase
“Man, she really thrashed us,” Tanner said.
“And now the whole internet gets to see it,” Diego added.
“She nearly took out my face, dude. My. Face. I need that. It’s the moneymaker.” Tanner pulled his trucker hat down low like he could protect it posthumously.
“Is that why you always need to borrow money from me?” Diego tipped his head back against the cooler and glanced at me. “You’re quiet.”
“Nothing to say.”
“Mmm.” Diego was getting to be a problem.
The swell had been building all afternoon, and it was a big one, sets stacking up gray and heavy past the bar. But the noise it made wasn’t right, laced with unnatural heaviness. I heard it struggling, and underneath that, the static.
“Last light session?” Tanner was already reaching for his board. “That outside set is pumping. Chase. Chase. Last light.”
“I’m good.”
“You’re good?” He stared at me. “It’s firing. It’s literally why we’re here. Your whole comeback is this swell—”
“I said I’m good, Tanner.”
It came out harsh. Diego’s eyes flicked over me, and I looked at the water and didn’t explain.
What was there to explain? That she made me feel for the first time in years, made me want something real, and to her this was just business.
I’d known that. She had told me—very clearly.
But my dumbass had caught feelings for a witch whose real magic tasted like the joy I hadn’t felt since before Marcus’ accident, before my sister got sick.
Then I felt it, Selena’s aura cresting the nearest dune—the wrong magic. She was buzzing, and not like during our match, or even like when we fucked. It was like a swarm of angry bees just looking for someone to cross them wrong so they could attack.
She came over the dune fast, barefoot, board under her arm—her own board, an old shortboard with the wax half gone—and one glance told me the whole story, with her red eyes and her jaw set.
Her match-point current was running too hot with nowhere to go.
Somebody had lit her fuse, and she’d come looking for someone who could survive when she detonated.
“I’m going out,” she said, mostly to the ocean. Then, the dare clear: “Anyone coming?”
“Hell yes.” Tanner’s eyes lit up.
“No.”
She met my gaze. Her face contorted with more pain than that simple answer warranted.
“Why not?”
“Swell’s wrong, and you don’t surf.”
“I grew up on this beach.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“I’ve been surfing since I was twelve.”
“Casually.”
“Are you scared I’m going to beat you again?”
“You’re not going to beat me at surfing, Selena.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
The problem is the last time this happened, it ruined everything. The problem is you’re hurting, and instead of facing it, you’re running into the surf. Trust me, I know that only works for so long.
But I didn’t say any of that. That would require believing she would listen to me.
Tanner laughed and grabbed his leash, clueless and delighted. “Local knowledge, let’s go!” he whooped, and the two of them jogged for the water while my heart twisted in my chest.
Diego watched them paddle out.
“You feel that, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I feel it.”
I told myself I was going to sit on the patio at The Salty Siren and have a drink.
The drink was in my hand, cold condensation dripping down my fingers as I continued not to take a single sip.
All I did was watch her.
The first twenty minutes were fine. The waves were chest-high and clean, and she could surf—not at my level, but she could surf the way someone surfs who grew up on a break and had learned everything about it.
She had good instincts, and I once again saw the athlete she was.
She let the board lead, which she shouldn’t have, but she anticipated where it was going to be and adjusted.
She fell twice on easy waves and came up laughing both times, and I watched her paddle back out, loose curls sticking to her face where they had escaped her braids, some of the sadness gone from her eyes. That was something, at least.
She paddled into position beside Tanner for the next set.
It was bigger than anything she’d caught so far.
Some might have paddled in, called it a day.
But not Selena Torres. Deep in my chest, I felt a faint hum, an echo of what I’d felt during our match, as her brow furrowed and she took the challenge.
She read the first wave, committed—which was exactly what I would’ve done—and the recognition of that drive, the desire to see just how far you could push yourself, lodged in my chest. She paddled furiously, then popped up.
She caught it.
I saw Tanner’s arms go up in celebration as she rode it all the way back to shore. Once there, she grabbed her board to head back out, but for just a moment she turned back. The beach was wide, but our eyes still met, and she was beaming.
There she is.
“You going to mother hen her the entire time she’s out there?” Diego asked, returning from his trip to the bar with a second drink.
“I just like watching her ass when she sits on the board.”
“Uh huh.” Diego was really becoming a problem.
He settled into the rattan chair next to mine and didn’t say anything for a while, which was the dolphin trick. Sharks circled prey—straightforward. Dolphins, as pod animals, were masters of emotional manipulation.
“You know what I noticed today,” he finally said. “At the match? You smiled the whole time and not once for a camera.”
“There were no cameras.”
“That’s my point, idiot.”
I watched her paddle back out, the white of her board flashing between swells, as she caught up to Tanner again.
“Last few years I’ve watched you win,” Diego continued, quieter.
“And every time, you look like someone has pissed in your kiddie pool.” He tipped his bottle toward the water.
“Today you lost twenty-one-eleven, and you looked like…the Chase I knew back when we were groms. So whatever she is to you—”
“She’s not anything. It’s complicated.”
“Because you’re making it complicated, shark brain.” He took a sip. “You found someone who makes you smile. That’s the least complicated thing in the world. The complicated part is you thinking you’re not allowed to have it.”
“What, you go and get your therapist’s license during the off-season?”
He shrugged. “Grew up in a pod. You learn to read others real fast.”
I didn’t answer. Out past the bar, the next set was stacking—bigger, grayer—and the static was no longer background but a deafening cacophony.
“Chase, my guy.” Derek, of course. I grimaced. “There you are. Diego, buddy. Give us the table?”
Diego stood and caught my eye on the way up.
“I’ll be at the bar.” He was gone before Derek finished gesturing.
“Chase, you remember Marina Torres,” Derek said, glowing.
“Hard to forget.”
I didn’t get up or shake her hand, my eyes still trained on the ocean—and her daughter.
“Chase.” Marina sat without being asked, arranged herself, and smiled at me like we were old conspirators. “I was just telling Derek how wonderful it has been having you both in town this summer.”
“Is that what you were telling him?”
“Marina’s been invaluable,” Derek plowed on. “She predicted this. She told me on Thursday, expect big water by the weekend, perfect for the broadcast. And here it is.” He spread his hands at the ocean, nearly knocking over a glass.
“The ocean speaks to those who know how to talk to it. Isn’t that right, Chase?” She winked at me as if we had some sort of inside joke.
“Right.”
“What do you think of the waves?” If I’d been paying attention, I might have noticed the rising irritation in her voice. “You’ll thank me on Saturday, when the cameras love you.”
But I wasn’t paying attention, because out past the bar something was wrong.
The water had changed.
My shark senses—the ones that went dormant on land but never fully shut off—all came online at once. The electromagnetic field in the ocean shifted, and the temperature dropped two degrees in maybe five seconds. The current, which had been a mild southern pull all morning, reversed.
Something was pulling the water out.
My chair clattered to the floor, and I was moving before I’d even had time to think, running across the sand toward the surf.
The ocean sank beneath Selena, and I was too far away. Fuck, I should have been out there. I should have just said yes.
“Selena, paddle in!” I yelled.
She was thirty yards out, sitting on her board, facing the horizon. She hadn’t felt it yet. She didn’t have the senses I did.
“Selena!”
She turned to look at me, and I saw the moment she finally felt it. The water dropping under her board and the horizon line climbing.
When the horizon climbs, it means one thing. It means the ocean is pulling back to throw itself forward.
The set came in from the east, which was wrong, and meant a certain ocean witch was calling water from a direction it didn’t want to come from.
The first wave of the set was eight feet. It came in fast and steep, the face of it too vertical, the lip already throwing before the wave had finished standing up. I’d surfed waves like this. I’d surfed waves bigger than this. I’d built my career on waves like this.
Selena had not.
I watched her try to turn her board. She was good—her instincts were right; she angled for the shoulder where the wave was weakest—but the ocean was just too powerful. She managed to stand.
For a second it was perfect. She was up, riding high on the face, completely focused, and my heart nearly stopped at the beauty of it.
Then the wave did what big waves do.
It closed out, fast, the entire face collapsing at once, and she was in the wrong position, and there was nothing I could do about it.
She went under.
The next few seconds stretched into eternity, and my feet never stopped moving.
The wave broke on top of her, the ugly, churning break of a wave that’d been forced into a shape it didn’t want, all whitewater and no structure. It held her under because there was no channel to push her out. Her board shot up through the foam, leashless.