Chapter Two #3
“Porca miseria.”
Dusty took one respectful step back.
I braced the gate while she lifted the latch.
“Don’t take over,” she said without looking at me.
“I’m holding a gate.”
“You’re holding my gate.”
“You’re possessive.”
She shot me a look over her shoulder. “You have no idea.”
I had too many ideas.
She pulled a flathead screwdriver from a drawer near the back door and pointed it toward the hinge. “Hold it level.”
I held it level.
“Move your hand to the hinge side.”
I moved my hand.
“Now don’t breathe weird.”
“I’ll do my best.”
She tightened the plate and shoved the gate twice to test it. I held when she asked me to hold and moved when she asked me to move.
Dusty watched like we were performing street theater with hardware.
When the latch caught cleanly, he sighed. “That feels emotionally complete.”
“Go home,” Nella said.
He pointed between us. “Are we good here?”
Nella’s face went bright enough that I nearly smiled.
“We’re great,” she said. “We’re closed, locked, and emotionally none of your business.”
“I support that boundary,” Dusty said.
“Out.”
He left through the alley with a lazy salute.
Nella shut the service door and leaned her back against it. For a second, neither of us moved.
The kitchen lights made her look tired now. Tired, flushed, and too tempting for a man with teeth he was hiding.
“You should go,” she said.
“Yes.”
“You’re agreeing with me?”
“I’m capable of growth.”
“Do it somewhere else.”
I stepped toward the back hall, then stopped. “Lock the door behind me.”
“I own a bar in Miami. I know how doors work.”
“Nella.”
Her expression changed at my tone.
I softened it before she could sharpen back. “Please.”
Her mouth tightened around that word, but her fingers closed over the keys.
“I’ll lock it,” she said.
I nodded and left before I did something worse than kiss her.
The boardwalk had mostly emptied. A few late tourists drifted under the palm shadows. Music thumped from two bars down. Behind Bite Me, the service alley smelled like hot pavement, citrus peels, and rain that hadn’t fallen yet.
I should’ve gone to my rented condo.
I went to the water.
Before dawn, the beach belonged to runners, gulls, and delivery trucks coming too early through the service alleys.
I crossed the sand behind Bite Me with my shirt balled in one hand and my phone in the other. The tide whispered low in the gray. The sky over the Atlantic had started to thin from black to blue, and the boardwalk lights still glowed behind me, sleepy and gold through the palms.
Sal wanted a report before sunrise.
He could wait.
My skin felt too tight. My jaw felt tighter. Nella’s taste still sat on my tongue, bright lime and sharper temper, and every time I closed my hand, I remembered the heat of her waist under cotton and the way she’d put me exactly where she wanted me.
I dropped my shirt and phone above the tide line and walked into the water.
Cold took my ankles first, then my thighs, then my hips. I kept going until the water closed over my chest and pulled at the gold chain around my neck. The first wave hit my shoulders, and I dove under it.
The shift came easier under water.
It always did.
The pressure behind my teeth opened. My lungs changed their rhythm. My skin took the current, the depth, the dark. The human shape fell away, swallowed by motion, muscle, hunger, and speed.
The water stripped the job down to movement.
Debt couldn’t follow me past the buoys. Sal’s voice broke apart in the current. The five-day clock lost its hands in the dark.
Nella didn’t.
I cut through the water beyond the swim buoys, turned under the fading moon, and let the shark take the edge off what I couldn’t bring back to shore as a man.
When I came back toward land, the sky had gone pale behind the clouds.
I was still in the shift when the back door of Bite Me opened.
The sound carried through the shallows: metal hinge, latch, keys.
Nella stepped out onto the beach path in the same black tank and cutoffs, with her apron gone and her hair loose around her shoulders.
She carried a ring of keys in one hand and a phone in the other, like she’d come down to check a lock, a delivery, or another piece of the place she refused to let fall apart.
I should’ve stayed under.
She turned toward the ocean before I could sink deeper.
My fin cut the surface, black against the silver water.
The long shape of me rolled under the dawn wash, too close to shore and too large for anything that belonged near swimmers.
I shifted fast beneath the next wave. The current dragged over my skin. My feet hit sand, and I came up human in the shallows with water streaming from my hair, my chest bare, my gold chain cold against my skin, and my teeth still aching.
Nella looked from the water to me.
Her mouth opened. No joke came out.
I stood knee-deep in the wash with my shirt on the sand behind me and the last of the ocean pulling at my legs.
Nella stopped at the edge of the path.
“Nico,” she said, her voice carrying over the thin rush of the tide. “What the hell are you?”