I ran.
I ran because I couldn’t make this choice for him.
I ran as fast as I could, hoping he was the man I thought he was—the one hidden beneath years of smiles and logos. The one who had given up so much to save a sister and take care of a friend, who was smart and funny, and beneath all the teeth, willing to do almost anything to make me laugh.
The one who had held me close and taken every ugly thing I had thrown at him, and just said, “Give me everything you’ve got.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Chase
She ran awayand didn’t look back, and I let her, because the one thing I had left to give her was not making it harder. Because I wasn’t the man she thought I was. I was El Tiburón, sponsored bad boy, a grin and one dangerous move away from something that would blow up in my face. Because I wasn’t like her.
I didn’t build things.
I destroyed them.
El Tiburón was easy, and he didn’t ask questions. He got paid.
I don’t want you to be for sale.
Nobody had ever said that to me. People wanted El Tiburón. They wanted the grin and the teeth. They wanted the version that was, in every sense, for sale. A commodity to be traded to move product and call it living. And a witch in a small-town snack shack had looked at the merchandise and asked for the part that wasn’t on the menu.
I want to see your real smile again.
I picked up a handful of sand from beneath my feet and felt the static in it. My whole career fit in that static—every dollar, every wave, everything I’d built to make my mistake right had actually just made everything so much worse.
Wasn’t that the story ofmy life?
I’d held the bottle and smiled because they’d never paid me to look any deeper.
I want us to come home.
Home.
What I’d been swimming away from for three years, and I’d never once asked myself what I was swimming toward, because the answer was nothing. I’d decided I didn’t get a home. I got a debt and a logo to pay it off. And then Selena had handed it back to me like it had always been there, and the worst part was that the second she said it, I knew exactly where it was.
It wasn’t a place.
It was the sound she made falling asleep in my arms.
It was my sister’s laugh getting stronger with every call.
It was an old friend who had said hi.
I wanted to be the Chase Perez Selena believed I was.
I wanted to be the man who deserved that word.
Home.
But if you wanted a home, you had to stop swimming. You had to stop running away and actually fix what you broke.
I pulled out my phone.
I scrolled to a name I hadn’t let myself press in far too long and I called Marcus.
It rang twice.
