Epilogue
SELENA
As I scrunched the soft, warm Southern California sand between my toes, I had only one thought.
This was a fucking amazing idea.
Up in the stands was a face I loved more than any other: Chase Perez. With his bleached-blonde hair, his very sexy neck and arm tattoos, and the ludicrous Selena Torres for Team USA shirt he was wearing, as his fist pumped in the air.
“Focus, Torres!” he yelled down from the stands.
Right, focus. This was the final match of the qualifying tournament, and if Samantha and I won this, we were a shoo-in for the Olympic team. And we weren’t about to lose.
We’d spent the last year becoming the team to watch. She was from Florida, a dolphin shifter who had lost her partner to an injury right before qualifying the year before. A brief introduction from Tanner, and we had been unstoppable ever since.
Samantha played with an intensity that leveled up my own, and we had become the perfect team, reading every set before it left our opponents’ fingers, putting the ball exactly where their bodies weren’t.
The first set of the match we took at a sprint.
The second, they adjusted, clawed back, made us work for it, and that was better, because somewhere in the grind I stopped thinking entirely and just played.
I let my body do the thinking and played feral and grinning, with sand in my hair.
By the third set, the other team knew the writing was on the wall.
Match point came clean off my palm, arcing over two outstretched pairs of hands to land untouched in the back corner.
Samantha screamed. The crowd came up off the bleachers. And I turned to the stands, searching for one face, and Chase was already halfway down the bleachers before I’d even found him, with that ridiculous shirt, the real smile, and his arms outstretched.
He caught me at the bottom of the stands and spun me around just like he had on the beach a year ago, and sand flew everywhere.
“Olympian,” he said into my hair.
“Don’t jinx it.”
“It’s in the bag. I’ve already bought our plane tickets.”
“Chase…”
“No way I’m going without you.”
Because of course he had made the first-ever official Team USA surfing cohort. I’d never ever had any doubt, because this last year had been the greatest season of his career.
He’d come to me about a month after the RipTide fiasco. He and the dolphin boys had stayed in Crescent Cove, surfing casually and pressuring RipTide on social media to pay for a cleanup of the beach. They’d given in because the PR hit was worse than the cost.
Tempest and I had managed a temporary spell to help the baby turtles enter a plastic-free sea, but even with every witch in town, we couldn’t hold it back forever.
Tempest had even confided in me that my mother’s magic had made it worse, churning up the ocean floor so the plastic was buried layers deep.
But we had fought, and as we watched cutting-edge machines clean out the beach sand and filter the ocean on RipTide’s dime, Chase had pulled out his phone, that shy grin in place.
It was a logo I didn’t recognize for a small company that made surfboards out of recycled fishing nets and ocean plastic.
“New sponsor. They came to me, after—” He gestured to the beach.
“Turns out blowing up the biggest greenwasher in the industry on live TV is a decent résumé for sponsors who actually want to do good.”
“Are they the real deal?”
“Oh yeah.” His voice dropped, and his grin softened, and I knew he’d been waiting for the right moment to tell me.
“I did my homework this time, met the founders, the whole thing. Turns out the company’s privately funding clinics up and down the coast.” He met my gaze.
“Like the one my sister is at. This isn’t isolated.
Tons of shifters are popping up with new diseases.
The pollution’s making our people ill, and nobody’s studying it because you can’t exactly bring a half-shifted teenager into a regular hospital.
” A pause. “Mai and Marcus connected me.”
I smiled at him. “You found a sponsor that pays you to surf and secretly funds shifter medicine.”
“I found one who lets me be the real Chase Perez.” He shrugged, but his ears had gone a little red. “Took me twenty-six years and a witch yelling at me, but I figured out what I’m really meant to do.”
“When do you start?”
“Social media, right now. But it’s nearly the off-season, so I guess you and me are just going to have to keep up our training here at home until the spring.”
Home. I loved hearing that word come out of his mouth.
I leaned in and kissed him, the clean Crescent Cove sand beneath us.
We’d spent the last year working our—well, some of our—literal tails off.
Sure, Chase had been keeping my magic fully charged, but the volleyball had always come down to sweat and just a few tears, and my magic mattered less and less.
Hard work had led to this moment: both of us on our way to the summer 2028 Olympics.
“Come on, come on.”
I leaned over the guard railing at Lower Trestles, as Chase waited for the perfect wave.
My bronze medal weighed heavily around my neck, although I had it tucked into my jacket because I wasn’t a complete pendeja.
From a nobody to a bronze medalist is just over two years—to say I was on cloud nine was an understatement.
But I’d had my moment. This was Chase’s. I watched him choose the perfect wave, and Marcus’ fists tightened on the railing beside me.
“Go, Chase!” Mai shouted as he dropped in, and he rode the wave like he was the king of the entire ocean. It wasn’t even a competition, and I knew the gold was his before he even cut back up, leaving a long arc of white across the entire face of the water.
Later, on the podium, after the anthems, he held up his golden prize and winked at the camera. “This one is for the most beautiful girl on the beach. You know who you are.”
At our celebration dinner that night, he’d been insufferable.
“Chaaassse, let me see it. Just for a second,” Mai whined.
“No way. You’ll dent it. It’s solid gold, you know.”
“Yes, I know. You’ve said it about one thousand times,” Mai said as she pawed at the medal, which he held out of her reach.
“Let him live, Mai. You’ve got your own gold anyway,” Tanner quipped from across the table. “Congratulations, by the way.”
Mai beamed as she held out her engagement ring from Marcus for also about the one thousandth time. Like brother, like sister.
“Well played, Marcus. The perfect long-con revenge on the guy who fucked your career, by marrying his sister.” Diego smirked, and before anyone could retort, Mai had launched a mozzarella stick at his face.
“Better him than a dolphin-shifter.” Chase shot back, deadlocking Diego before he could wipe the cheese from his face.
“Hands off, Tibby.” Tanner came to his pod mate’s defense just as the waitress walked up with another round of pizza and beers, and I knew her expression well.
I had never dreamed I’d be on the other side of it, the rowdy customer instead of the forced smile.
But I hadn’t forced a smile in two years, not since I’d finally gotten some employees to run Shark Bites, and I just got to plan the menu and handle logistics.
The teenagers were in charge of the customers now.
As more food flew over the table, Chase squeezed my hand and leaned in for a kiss on the cheek.
“You want a closer look, baby?”
“I have my own, you know.”
“Yeah, but mine’s solid gold. Come on, I know you want to see it.” He dangled it next to his face.
“Pendejo,” I muttered, but I kissed him and then dodged a full slice of pizza which landed face down on the floor, the waitress letting out a long-suffering sigh.
Later, Chase kicked Tanner out of their shared room and pushed me down on to the cardboard bed. He made a show of taking the medal off and putting it in its case, waggling his eyebrows.
“Just get over here,” I groaned, rolling my eyes.
He grinned, snapping the case closed, then practically collapsed on top of me.
I guessed even sharks got tired after a full week of Olympic-level competition, because after just a few kisses, his breath slowed and he passed out.
I rolled him off me and cuddled into his side, gently petting his hair as his eyelids fluttered.
I pressed my ear against his chest, and listened to the rhythmic beating of his heart.
I waited until I was sure he was asleep, then carefully extracted myself from his grip, and crawled out of the flimsy bed. I tiptoed over to his suitcase and popped open the box in the light from the window.
Instead of being met with a solid circle of gold, I was met with something smaller. Still gold. A ring, with what looked like an aqua-blue topaz cut into an oval.
I spun and found Chase already behind me, down on one knee.
“I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist. You never have been.” His stupid, fucking grin. I’d never been so happy to see it.
He reached up and took the ring from the box in my hand. “Selena Torres, you are the best thing that’s ever happened to me. You taught me how to fight for what’s right and how to love again. You’re mine, and I intend to keep you forever. Will you marry—”
“Yes!” I grabbed him so hard we collapsed to the floor as I kissed everywhere I could reach.
“I love you, Chase Perez. Thank you for helping me get everything I ever wanted.”
“You didn’t need me for that, baby. You were always magic.” He was laughing.
“Yeah, but you’re the one I want to share it with.”