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?”
Chapter Three
